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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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The Lakers were about to shock the NBA. But Shabbat had to end first.
Luka Dončić was headed to Los Angeles — if the Lakers could keep it quiet for one more Shabbat.
The Feb. 2 trade that brought Dončić, widely touted as one of the two or three best basketball players on the planet, to Los Angeles blindsided the NBA — and Dončić himself. It was the most shocking and controversial swap in the history of the league, if not the history of American sports. The reporter who broke the story had to convince readers he hadn’t been hacked.
Yet a new book reveals a surprising final hangup before the deal went through. In A Hollywood Ending: The Dreams and Drama of the LeBron Lakers (Doubleday), veteran hoops writer Yaron Weitzman reveals that an unsuspecting stakeholder’s Sabbath observance put the trade — and indeed, the future of the NBA — on hold. It’s one of a few fun Jewish details in the deeply-sourced book (whose author is Jewish, in case the name didn’t give it away).
Secrecy was essential to the trade. Dončić, then 25, was beloved in Dallas, where his future with the Mavericks seemed utterly secure. Because mere rumors of a developing trade would irreversibly damage their relationship with Dončić, the Mavs had to negotiate below the radar of the scoop-hungry NBA media. For that reason, Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison only told his Lakers counterpart, Rob Pelinka, that Dončić was on the market. In turn, Pelinka only told his boss, Lakers owner Jeannie Buss.
It took three weeks for the blockbuster deal to come together, with the Lakers’ Anthony Davis — a future Hall-of-Famer in his own right — and a first-round draft pick headed to Dallas in return. By Jan. 31, a Friday night, the terms were in place.
But the Lakers couldn’t pull the trigger — yet. For salary cap reasons, they needed to complete a separate trade with the Utah Jazz — and before the Jazz could accept, they needed to do a trade with the L.A. Clippers that involved another four players, including 16-year veteran Patty Mills. Because Mills was in the last season of his contract, league rules required his agent to certify that no future contract had been agreed to under the table.
There was just one issue, Weitzman reports: Mills’ agent, Steven Heumann, was observing Shabbat and therefore offline. “This meant that all parties had to wait until an hour after sundown on Saturday night,” Weitzman writes. “In the meantime, Pelinka and Harrison [the respective general managers of the Lakers and Mavericks] agreed to keep the details quiet. Neither side wanted to risk anything leaking.”
What if something had leaked? It’s possible and maybe likely that the deal would have fallen apart. Mavericks fans would have rioted — perhaps literally — to stop a trade. Competing offers might have come in from other teams. Or Dončić’s agent might have tried to force him to a different destination. But the gag order held, and the next Laker dynasty began.
Ironically, Heumann (who did not immediately respond to an inquiry), wouldn’t have known that he was holding up The Luka freaking Dončić Trade even after Shabbat, because none of the adjacent teams or players or agents was wise to the NBA earthquake they were facilitating. Instead, his observance inverted an experience many Jews are familiar with — the excruciating wait for Shabbat to end so you can start working — by giving it to non-Jews. (Now let Pelinka try turning off his phone for 25 hours.)
The trade was as consequential as it was surprising. It rejuvenated the league’s most iconic franchise from also-ran to championship contender and doomed the Mavericks — led by Dončić to the NBA Finals the season prior — to irrelevance. Mavericks fans — who might have kept 100 Shabbats in a row if it meant keeping their hero in town — will hold Harrison in contempt for decades. And one man’s Jewish observance will always be a small part of a landscape-altering basketball story.
A Hollywood Ending: The Dreams and Drama of the LeBron Lakers hits shelves Oct. 21. The Lakers season starts Wednesday.
The post The Lakers were about to shock the NBA. But Shabbat had to end first. appeared first on The Forward.
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As Greenpoint’s Jewish community grows, so does this shul’s Hebrew school
(New York Jewish Week) — Greenpoint, Brooklyn is known for many things: its extensive waterfront, a tight-knit Polish community and a vibrant arts scene.
One thing it’s not known for: a thriving Jewish community. But that’s rapidly changing.
The Greenpoint Shul — North Brooklyn’s only non-Haredi, brick-and-mortar synagogue — is today home to some 100 member families. That’s twice as many members as just 16 months ago, according to Rabbi Isaiah Rothstein, who has led the community since August 2024.
The congregation is looking to future generations, too: This school year, the Orthodox congregation officially added a Hebrew school serving some 30 children in grades kindergarten through 8. The school provides Jewish families an alternative to the only other option in the area, the Hebrew school that’s run by Chabad of North Brooklyn in nearby Williamsburg.
“I know the power and importance of having a youth department and it being a core pillar of building a thriving and growing community,” said Rothstein, who was previously the youth director at Young Israel of Stamford, Connecticut before assuming the helm of the Greenpoint Shul.
The Hebrew school was initially founded in 2019 by Yoni Kretzmer and his wife, artist Avital Burg, who are members of the synagogue and the parents of three children ages 8, 4 and 2. For five years, the school operated independently but borrowed the space inside the synagogue. As of this academic year, the school was officially “adopted” by the shul, which did not have a Hebrew school of its own.
“We saw that there’s nothing happening in North Brooklyn,” Yoni Kretzmer, who moved to Greenpoint from Israel with his wife in 2015, said of the local Jewish education scene. “So that was basically it — we started because we thought it was possible.”
Six years later, Kretzmer is now employed by the Greenpoint Shul, where one benefit he has seen so far is getting to exchange ideas with the rabbinic leadership team. He no longer has to independently collect tuition from parents, and he can provide students with supplies and snacks directly purchased from the synagogue budget.
“The way that we can present it now is as part of a much larger structure,” Kretzmer said. “When people [are] joining, they’re not only feeling that we’re using the shul, but that they’re part of a community center in the fullest meaning of the word.”
He added, “Now I can really be a teacher and the organizer, but I don’t have to be the accountant.”
With a focus on Torah and art, the school opened with about a dozen students — split into two groups, with Kretzmer teaching the older students, and Burg teaching the younger students — and grew via word of mouth. “It was mainly parents who brought other parents,” Kretzmer said. “So the connections were kind of within the neighborhood, of people who knew each other.”
The new school bucks multiple trends. Across the country, supplementary Jewish school enrollment is down by nearly half over the last two decades, a recent study found, and many of those that remain have reduced the number of days they operate. The Greenpoint Shul’s school holds classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though different children attend each day.
While enrollment declined early in the pandemic, “once it was deemed safe to return, then it really started growing,” said Kretzmer, who is now the youth director at Greenpoint Shul.
One recent arrival is Andrew Altfest, who moved to nearby Williamsburg in 2014 and enrolled his 5-year-old son, Alden, last year.
“We really like the values that are being taught,” said Altfest, a financial advisor who grew up Reform. “Those values, they range from everything: learning Torah stories, Jewish culture, ethics. And we value the diversity of the families of the kids that are there.”
Like so many parts of Brooklyn, Greenpoint has seen a wave of gentrification and development in recent decades. In Greenpoint, this change was spurred, in part, by a massive rezoning along the neighborhood’s once-derelict waterfront in 2005. While there is no reliable data on the neighborhood’s Jewish population — studies often lump Greenpoint with Williamsburg, which is home to a sizable Hasidic community — locals believe the number of Jews in Greenpoint has grown in recent years.
“Greenpoint is not a famously Jewish neighborhood in New York City,” said Greenpoint Shul president Daphne Lasky. “I think there are other things other than Jewish community that sometimes draw people to Greenpoint: the waterfront location, the scale of the buildings. There’s so much creative energy in the neighborhood. But then you end up with Jewish families who have those interests and they also want to come together around their Jewish life as well.”
As such, other Jewish institutions have grown to meet the needs of the area’s Jewish community. The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life, a Jewish cultural and events hub funded by UJA-Federartion of New York, was founded in 2022 expressly to serve Jews in both central and northern Brooklyn.
“We feel there’s a really significant demand,” said Neighborhood director Rebecca Guber. “Part of it, which is kind of hard to wrap your head around, is that in North Brooklyn, the only Jewish infrastructure is Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, and that’s just not serving all members of the community.”
For now, at least, The Neighborhood does not have a physical space.
The Greenpoint Shul, meanwhile, has a long history in the neighborhood. Founded at the turn of the last century by German-Jewish immigrants as Congregation Ahavas Israel, the synagogue is in a landmarked Romanesque Revival building at 108 Noble Street whose cornerstone was laid in 1903. Today’s Greenpoint Shul is the result of multiple mergers between two neighboring Reform congregations and one Orthodox synagogue. Its prayer service is Orthodox; women sit upstairs in the balcony while men sit downstairs for prayer services. But the community is multicultural, multiracial and welcoming of all backgrounds, including many members who have recently converted to Judaism. While Orthodox families are likely to send their children to day schools and yeshivas, the Hebrew school is geared toward “children of all ages and backgrounds,” according to its web site.
“The congregation has gone through a lot of changes and growth — and shrinking and growing again — over the last 140 years,” Lasky said. “In particular, in the last 25 years or so, as Greenpoint has had its own renaissance as a neighborhood, there’s been more and more families moving into the neighborhood that need Jewish education for their children and Jewish connection for their children.”
Because of the new, formal relationship between the school and the shul, Rothstein said he’s already seen interest from prospective parents who would like to enroll their kids in the program next year. But the growth of a community isn’t just measured in sheer numbers — Rothstein added that, as a result of the Hebrew school, youth attendance at recent Sukkot and holiday events increased this year.
“We’ve seen, already, crossover, where it’s a pipeline to deeper engagement,” Rothstein said.
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UN Nuclear Watchdog Believes Iran’s Enriched Uranium Survived War With Israel as Tehran Rebuffs Trump
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, confirmed that most of Iran’s enriched uranium survived the 12-day war with Israel in June and remains stored in damaged nuclear facilities, contradicting earlier reports of the strikes’ impact.
In an interview last week with the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said the agency’s new findings indicate that “the majority” of Iran’s enriched uranium “remains in the nuclear facilities in Isfahan and Fordow, and some in Natanz.”
Earlier this year, Israel, with support from the United States, carried out a large-scale military strike against the Islamist regime in Tehran, targeting three critical nuclear enrichment sites, including the heavily fortified Fordow facility.
According to Grossi, the three facilities were “massively damaged” in the strikes, restricting the IAEA’s access to them — and the enriched uranium inside — without “Iran’s full cooperation.”
“This will only happen if Iran sees it as a national interest,” he told NZZ.
However, Grossi’s latest assessment appears to somewhat contradict earlier reports from the White House, which claimed Iran’s nuclear facilities were “totally obliterated” and its nuclear program set back by years. US and Israeli intelligence reports have indicated the Iranian program could be set back anywhere from one or two to “several” years.
After the 12-day war with Israel, Iran halted its cooperation with the IAEA, accusing the agency of failing to firmly condemn the Israeli and US strikes.
On Monday, Tehran confirmed it ended the cooperation deal signed with the IAEA in September — which had allowed the agency to resume inspections of its nuclear sites — after Western powers reinstated UN sanctions last month.
This past weekend, Iranian officials also announced that the country is no longer party to the 2015 nuclear deal, under which economic sanctions were lifted in exchange for limits on Tehran’s nuclear program, following the deal’s expiration on Saturday.
According to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, “all provisions [of the 2015 nuclear deal], including the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program and the related mechanisms, are now considered terminated.”
Still, the regime emphasized that the country “firmly expresses its commitment to diplomacy.”
After several rounds of nuclear talks failed to yield any results, Britain, Germany, and France activated the so-called “snapback” mechanism, leading to the reimposition of UN sanctions.
However, the three European powers — all parties to the 2015 nuclear deal — announced last week that they would still pursue efforts to restart talks aimed at finding a “comprehensive, durable, and verifiable agreement.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rejected such efforts, saying that Tehran did “not see any reason to negotiate” with Western powers once sanctions were reimposed
Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei mocked US President Donald Trump for claiming that he had destroyed the country’s nuclear facilities with his airstrike campaign in June.
“The US president proudly says they bombed and destroyed Iran’s nuclear industry. Very well, keep dreaming!” the Iranian leader said on Monday.
Khamenei also dismissed Trump’s proposal to resume nuclear negotiations, insisting that Iran had no interest in engaging under such conditions.
“Trump says he is a dealmaker, but if a deal is accompanied by coercion and its outcome is predetermined, it is not a deal but rather an imposition and bullying,” Khamenei said.
“What does it have to do with America whether Iran has nuclear facilities or not? These interventions are inappropriate, wrong, and coercive,” he continued.
Despite Iran’s claims that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes rather than weapons development, Western powers have said there is no “credible civilian justification” for the country’s nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”