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Panettone, the Christmas cake, is having a moment — and a Jewish chef has carved off a big slice
(JTA) – Panettone, the fluffy, fruit-speckled archetypal Christmas cake, is this holiday season’s “it” dessert — and the creator of perhaps the most coveted version in the United States is an Israeli-American Jew.
The New York Times this week credited baker Roy Shvartzapel with spearheading “the American panettone revolution” through his business From Roy.
Shvartzapel has dedicated the bulk of his career to the airy Italian cakes, training under Iginio Massari, the undisputed master baker in Italy, and obsessing over each ingredient and step in the 40-hour production cycle. After a flurry of coverage in his company’s early days in 2016, and especially since being endorsed by Oprah Winfrey in 2018, Shvartzapel’s business has grown dramatically. Last year, he said he expected to sell nearly 300,000, at $75 a piece, both in stores and via mail order. This year, the price is $85, and preorders sold out by — without, Shvartzapel said on a podcast last year, any spending on marketing.
While Shvartzapel’s goal of turning panettone into a year-round treat means he has several non-traditional flavors in his repertoire, From Roy only offers a few at a time — and the company plans to keep it that way.
“There’s lots of pastry items that I love that I will never be making for my business,” Shvartzapel said on the podcast, with the chef Chris Cosentino. “I’m a big believer that less is more, generally speaking, in most things.”
Shvartzapel declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this month, explaining through a publicist that he was too busy before Christmas to speak. But in public comments and social media posts made before this year’s panettone “gold rush,” as the New York Times put it, he has offered details about the intersection of his Jewish identity and his Christmas baking.
From Roy’s cherry, white chocolate and pistachio panettone with almond glaze and pearl sugar as seen in the company’s California kitchen, Oct. 20, 2016. (Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Born in Karmiel, Israel, where a statue modeled on his mother holding him as an infant stands in a park, Shvartzapel was raised in Houston and now lives in California’s Bay Area with his children and Israeli-born wife, who also helped launch From Roy. A devoted athlete as a teenager, he played collegiate basketball and spent time on Karmiel’s Maccabi team but realized he would never make the NBA.
“Like every good Jewish boy,” Shvartzapel told David Chang, the Momofuku chef, on a 2019 podcast interview, he considered becoming a lawyer before realizing that cooking played to his passions and strengths.
After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 2004, Shvartzapel began looking for work in New York City. It was a cookbook by the Jewish baker Dorie Greenspan that indirectly led to his first job: He spotted a lemon tart in a new cafe that looked like one she had photographed by the master French chef Pierre Hermé, then talked his way into a job working there, at Bouley Bakery, under Hermé’s former executive chef. Ultimately, that led to him working in Paris, where he had the panettone that changed his life.
“The texture, the aroma, the chew,” he said in 2018. ”I tasted it and it was like one of those meditative lights-off moments. The crazy love affair began.”
Shvartzapel has spoken extensively about his intense work ethic, his struggles with depression and, of course, what sets his panettone apart from low-cost supermarket varieties. He has said less publicly about himself as a Jew. But last year, on Facebook, he wished his friends a happy Passover with a picture of a cheesy omelet and a side of chopped liver — both prepared with attention to the holiday’s prohibitions on leavened bread (such as panettone) but, together, not a kosher meal.
“Modern jew … I mean, gotta combine the dairy and the meat to make it particularly kosher for Passover,” he wrote, adding laughing emojis.
Although panettone is often mentioned in the same breath as its Jewish enriched-dough cousin, babka, its history is rooted in the Catholic Church. Legend has it that it was created by accident on a 15th-century Christmas Eve, and was served to Catholic students and even the pope by the 1500s, according to records from the time.
Still, it makes sense that America’s most prominent panettone maker is Jewish, according to Debbie Prinz, a food historian and author of the forthcoming book “On The Bread Trail,” which grew out of her exploration of Jewish celebration cakes.
“It’s not surprising that there’s this interchange, especially today, since the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews are even fewer than they used to be,” Prinz said.
But while Shvartzapel’s panettone path may be modern, historic patterns of cultural collision have often cut the other way, sending traditionally Jewish foods onto the Christmas table.
One notable example appears to be lebkuchen, a fruit-studded spice cookie popular in Germany. While the origins of the treat are not clear, one theory is that lebkuchen entered German cuisine through lekach, a honey cake eaten by Italian Jewish traders passing through during the Middle Ages, according to researchers at the Leo Baeck Institute, a German Jewish institution. (German Jews fleeing the Nazis imported contemporary lebkuchen recipes and, in several cases, became successful lebkuchen purveyors in New York.)
Meanwhile, in panettone’s home country of Italy, traditional Christmas menus include a host of dishes that are likely to have originated in Jewish kitchens: pezzetti fritti or mixed fried vegetables; bigoli, or buckwheat noodles, with onion and anchovies; spongata, a cake imported from Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition; and nociata, or nut bars.
Legendary panettone maker Iginio Massari poses in his bakery Pasticceria Veneto in Brescia, Italy, in June 2019. (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
Many of those foods were historically Jewish because they made use of ingredients such as eggplant that were considered distasteful by non-Jewish Italians, or of ingredients such as anchovies that Jews used because they were not permitted to access higher-quality fish.
“There are a number of recipes that we call Jewish that came out of the fact that the Italians were really nasty to Jews,” said Benedetta Jasmine Guetta, author of “Cooking all Guidia: A Celebration of the Jewish Food of Italy.”
“Most of the time, actually I’m going to say 100% of the time, people don’t know” that the dishes were originally Jewish, Guetta added. “This is a common problem and the reason why I wrote my book.”
But while Guetta’s focus is on the Jewish foods of Italy, in December, she often turns to that famous domed Christmas cake.
“I have definitely grown up eating a great deal of panettone. My parents checked the ingredients to make sure it didn’t contain pork fat,” she said. “It’s a yummy seasonal treat.”
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In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’
(JTA) — The IDF on Thursday issued its first detailed response to “NAZA” after viewing the full documentary alleging Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in the Gaza war, accusing the filmmakers of making fundamental errors about how civilian-casualty estimates, strike approvals and intelligence tools were used.
“The film’s narrative is based on substantial factual errors stemming from a misrepresented and manipulative depiction of reality,” the IDF said in a statement accompanying its findings. The film “presents a distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF’s target planning and striking process,” the military said, arguing that it conflates preliminary intelligence work with the later operational and legal process used to decide whether and how a target can be struck.
The filmmakers, who are Israeli, have previously defended the film’s reporting, saying the identities of its anonymous sources and the cases they described were verified and that editors at the Guardian, which produced the film, had access to the underlying material.
The 10-page response came after an IDF representative attended a screening of “NAZA,” directed by filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in Bologna, Italy, allowing the military to assess the full film for the first time. The army had previously rejected the documentary’s allegations based on excerpts and publicly available material, saying at the time that the filmmakers had not provided it with a copy despite a request to do so.
The film is based on interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers, most of them intelligence personnel, who describe their roles in surveillance, target selection and strikes in Gaza. NAZA is the Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The film, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last month, argues that the military accepted high civilian casualty estimates, relied heavily on AI tools to generate targets and weakened safeguards governing strikes.
The IDF in its response Thursday rejected one of the documentary’s most prominent claims, that a strike had been approved despite an estimated civilian death toll of about 500. The military said it had “never planned, approved or carried out” a strike in which 500 civilians, or “anything close to that number,” were expected to be killed.
The IDF also rejected the film’s claim that junior Hamas operatives could be approved for targeting with up to 20 expected civilian casualties, and that senior commanders could be targered with as many as 200. It said the film had confused thresholds requiring approval from more senior commanders, who could then reject the operation, with permission to kill a fixed number of civilians. The military said that no 200-casualty approval threshold had ever existed and that actual thresholds were “much lower,” without specifying what the thresholds were.
The IDF did acknowledge that several incidents involving civilian deaths near humanitarian aid distribution sites prompted operational reviews, changes to instructions and other measures in those areas. However, it disputed testimony that soldiers fired indiscriminately at civilians near the sites and said troops were permitted to fire only at militants or people posing an immediate threat.
Abraham has accused Israeli media of failing to seriously investigate civilian casualties and rules of engagement in Gaza during the war.
The IDF also rejected the film’s suggestion that civilians who remained in evacuation zones could then be treated as legitimate targets. It said evacuation orders did not change a civilian’s status and that every strike still required identification of a military target and a separate proportionality assessment.
When it came to the film’s portrayal of “Lavender” as an AI-powered list of targets approved for attack, the military said the production had misunderstood what the program was: a database used to cross-reference intelligence on members of militant groups which did not make someone in the database a target.
“Artificial intelligence does not determine whether an object or a person is designated as a target, nor whether a target is struck,” the IDF said, adding that those decisions are made by human analysts and commanders.
The IDF also argued that many of the anonymous soldiers featured in “NAZA” were describing only “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process. “Such testimonies therefore cannot be treated as a complete account of the policies at hand, the decisions made and what ultimately happened,” the military said.
A Guardian News & Media spokesperson, in a statement sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the Guardian “stands fully behind the film,” which it said was based on three years of reporting by the outlet and its partners and interviews with more than 100 sources familiar with IDF systems used in Gaza, including senior commanders involved in authorizing strikes.
The Guardian also rejected what it described as the IDF’s attempt to portray the film’s interviewees as “junior-ranking officers involved only in the early stages of the targeting process.”
“They include officers and soldiers who were involved in multiple stages of the targeting process in Gaza, including intelligence, operations and the final authorization process,” the statement said.
The military did not describe all 24 participants as junior personnel and said only that the testimony of the soldiers interviewed in the film “generally” focused on “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process.
The Guardian said the “process of assessing the credibility of the testimonies was rigorous” and included “leaked classified documents, detailed verification of specific strikes and corroboration via a wider pool of confidential journalistic sources who did not appear on camera in the film.”
The Guardian also said the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press had “confirmed the IDF’s use of AI-driven systems in the Gaza offensive and the loosening of safeguards to protect civilians.”
The IDF disputed the film’s suggestion that it did not examine civilian casualties after attacks. Several units tracked strike outcomes and civilian-casualty reports and hundreds of incidents had been reviewed during the war, the military said, arguing that intelligence personnel interviewed in “NAZA” do not appear to belong to those units and “are not positioned to testify on this matter.”
The IDF rejected the film’s criticism that its collateral-damage estimates did not distinguish between adults and children. It said international law treats all civilians as protected regardless of age, adding that when commanders knew children were present, that information “led commanders to cancel, postpone or replan strikes.”
It also pushed back on an interviewee’s claim that the IDF believed there were “no uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” saying that may have reflected the soldier’s personal views but did not represent military policy or orders. It also rejected the film’s genocide allegations, saying the interviewees were not in positions to establish genocidal intent by senior commanders or political leaders.
The IDF also criticized the filmmakers’ reporting methods, saying they provided no dates, locations or other identifying details for alleged strikes and did not put their specific allegations to the military before the film’s release. “The filmmakers could have identified and avoided the substantial errors apparent in the film had they conducted adequate verification and corroboration in good faith. The end result shows they did not,” the military said.
The Guardian statement did not say whether the filmmakers solicited detailed responses from the IDF, and why if they did not..
The military said “NAZA” also gave insufficient weight to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the group’s use of civilian areas for military activity and measures Israel says it took to reduce civilian casualties, including warnings, changes to strike plans and the cancellation of attacks.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Zara removes Halloween costume likened to concentration camp uniform
(JTA) — Spanish fashion retailer Zara removed a children’s Halloween costume from its website on Wednesday after social media users noted that the gray-and-blue striped outfit resembled prison garb worn by inmates in Nazi concentration camps.
Zara described the ensemble as “Kids costume featuring vertical stripes with decorative topstitching, a lapel flower and a distressed effect. Includes a cardigan and shorts. Gray / Blue.”
The post was visible via a Google search that continued to display an indexed version of the Zara product page after the listing itself had been removed.
The costume resembles the suit worn by Michael Keaton’s title character in the 1988 horror-comedy “Beetlejuice” and its 2024 sequel, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Even so, social media users said the vertical stripes and shiny crisscrosses, which some media outlets described as “fake stitched scars,” resembled concentration camp uniforms and the barbed wire visible in many World War II photos.
Priced at $59.90 in the U.S., according to another indexed version of the listing, the costume drew criticism online in Europe on Tuesday. It gained wider attention Wednesday after Israeli journalist Dov Gil-Har, activist Hen Mazzig and others shared images of it on X.
The listing was no longer accessible by Wednesday afternoon. It was unclear exactly when Zara removed it. No reason was given for its removal, and Zara has not made any public statements regarding the controversy, nor has it responded to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment.
One Instagram commenter wrote “@zara how many levels of approval did this go though (sic)? Who is working for you?” A Facebook user said “It’s supposed to be a groom costume. It does somewhat resemble a (sic) Auschwitz uniform. With all the anti-semitism on the rise I am not surprised.” Another Instagram user asked, “What were they claiming it was meant to be?”
Zara has in the past faced similar controversies over clothing that evoked Nazi or Holocaust imagery. In 2007, it withdrew a handbag from its stores after a customer discovered a swastika embroidered on it; Inditex, Zara’s parent company, said the symbol had not appeared on the design Zara had approved.
In 2014 Zara apologized for selling a blue-and-white-striped shirt with six-pointed yellow-star badges on the chest. The Zara Israel website identified it as a “striped sheriff t-shirt” and the word sheriff was cut out in small letters on the star. The likeness to concentration camp uniforms and the yellow Star of David badges Jews were forced to wear under Nazi rule led Zara to stop selling the shirts and destroy the remaining inventory.
When reached for comment, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which represents Holocaust survivors in compensation negotiations, said the repeated incidents underscore the need for Holocaust education.
“This is not the first time this has happened and it once again makes abundantly clear: The glaring absence of Holocaust knowledge is pervasive,” Gideon Taylor, Claims Conference president, wrote in an email to JTA. “It shouldn’t take the risk of a Shoah survivor opening their door and seeing children that look like they are in concentration camp uniforms for us to see where we have to do better. This should serve as a message to us all of why Holocaust education is so important.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Zara removes Halloween costume likened to concentration camp uniform appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish groups hail California law making it the first state to list ‘Jewish’ as an ethnicity
(JTA) — California is now the first state in the nation to deem “Jewish” an ethnic and racial identity, rather than just a religious affiliation.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed SB 1387, a bill that expands California’s legal definition of ethnicity “to include Jewish identity” in demographic data collection. As of Jan. 1, 2029, forms distributed by public entities like schools and prisons will need to include a “Jewish” category when asking for voluntary disclosures of ethnicity or race.
David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, a group that lobbies on behalf of a number of Jewish organizations in the state, described the signing in a statement as “a historic step for the Jewish community.”
“Under the shadow of Nazi race theory, American Jewish leaders asked the government to count us only as a religion,” he said, noting that this approach “didn’t work” and led to exclusion from data that shapes policy.
“Now hate crime, health, poverty, and education data will reflect who Jewish Californians actually are so we can ensure the best support for our community,” Bocarsly added. “Most importantly, it allows us to be seen as the diverse, complex people we are.”
The legislation was a priority among many Jewish groups across the Gold Rush state, who believe that Jewish peoplehood should be connected to more than just religion — and that the law should reflect this relationship.
Newsom, however, expressed some reservations in signing the bill into law.
“I strongly support this bill’s goal: accurate data leads to better understanding to inform policy,” Newsom, who is considering a presidential run in 2028, wrote in a signing statement. But he said he was concerned that the bill’s strictures would make it hard for state agencies to comply with the new law and with federal laws, and recommended revisiting the bill.
In addition to signing SB 1387 on Wednesday — the final day on which he could approve or veto bills in this year’s legislative session — Newsom also authorized AB 395, which will prohibit public meetings and graduations from being scheduled on major cultural and religious holidays.
“Californians of all faiths and backgrounds should be able to fully participate in public life,” the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, said in a statement.
“For too long members of our religious communities have been forced to choose between observing their faith and participating in important public events and academic milestones,” added Gabriel, who chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
Also on Wednesday, Newsom approved AB 1763, which will include religious holiday observance as a type of excused absence in schools without requiring a written request from a parent or guardian.
Newsom signed other bills relevant to the Jewish community in the past few days, including AB 2664, which will establish 100-foot protective zones around entrances to houses of worship.
Another new law is AB 1836, which will close a gap in California’s nonprofit security grant structure by extending funds to off-site religious events like Hanukkah menorah lightings. The governor also approved AB 1853, enacting a ban on including misleading or threatening information, like hate speech, in California voter guides.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish groups hail California law making it the first state to list ‘Jewish’ as an ethnicity appeared first on The Forward.
