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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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US House Committee Announces K-12 Antisemitism Investigations in Democrat Strongholds
People take part in anti-Israel protest in Fairfax County, Virginia, US, Nov. 24, 2023. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect
The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Monday disclosed a triad of K-12 antisemitism investigations at school districts in California, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Among the cases, Virginia’s stands out for being based in the heavily progressive stronghold of Fairfax County, which former US Vice President Kamala Harris (D) carried by 35 points in 2024 and Abigail Spanberger, the Commonwealth’s new Democratic governor-elect, won by a similar margin in this year’s gubernatorial race. According to the House committee’s chairman, the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) district spills over with antisemitic incidents.
“FCPS experienced significant antisemitic incidents even prior to the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks against Israel. Jewish students allegedly faced repeated antisemitic bullying, including other students making the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute and throwing coins at them,” US Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a letter to the district. “Another school for years allegedly refused to remove a hallway display that included painted tiles, 40 percent of which featured swastikas and Nazi flags.”
He added, “Just prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, one high school’s Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) hosted a speaker who had made grotesque antisemitic statements. For example, he had tweeted, ‘I’m not racist I love everyone. Except the yahood [Jews],’ and ‘Never met a Jew who didn’t have a huge nose.’”
Across the country, in California, which has not allotted its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, the Berkeley Unified School District, an array of alleged antisemitic incidents included students chanting “Kill the Jews” to protest Israel and a teacher displaying an image of the Star of David being pummeled by a fist in the classroom.
“In another concerning incident, at Malcolm X Elementary School, a second-grade teacher told her students to write ‘messages of anti-hate’ for display,” Walberg continued in another missive to BUSD’s superintendent. “Several students followed the teacher’s lead and wrote ‘stop bombing babies.’ However, rather than displaying the message in the hall outside of her classroom, the teacher allegedly placed them outside of the classroom of the school’s sole Jewish teacher.”
The School District of Philadelphia (SDP), based in a city which has awarded the Democratic Party no less than 77 percent of its voters in presidential contests since 1996, is also seeing troubling trends, according to Walberg, a Republican.
“Today, SDP employs numerous educators who allegedly promote antisemitic content in their classrooms,” the chairman explained in his letter to the district. “One such teacher has allegedly threatened Jewish parents and students alone. She and other Philadelphia educators also allegedly use lessons from an effort called Teaching Palestine, whose class materials rationalize terrorist violence and advocate for the destruction of Israel.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
The problem has led to civil rights complaints and lawsuits.
In September 2023, for example, some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.
One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
As The Algemeiner has reported previously, the North American Values Institute (NAVI) also raised alarms about rising antisemitism when the Wissahickon School District (WSD) in Ambler, Pennsylvania presented as fact an anti-Zionist account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its K-12 students by using it as the basis for courses taken by honors students.
The material, provided by virtual learning platform Edgenuity, implied that Israel is a settler-colonial state — a false assertion promoted by neo-Nazis and jihadist terror groups — while referring to the founding of Israel as the “nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists. Based on documents shared with The Algemeiner, the material does not seemingly detail the varied reasons for Palestinian Arabs leaving the nascent State of Israel at the time, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. Nor does it appear to explain that some 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, especially in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
“College campus antisemitism has gotten a lot of attention because we see the effects, the protests, the barricades, and encampments,” Gerard Filitti, senior counsel of End Jew Hatred and The Lawfare Project, told The Algemeiner in September during an interview. “In K-12, it’s not as flagrant. It’s educational material that’s talked about in the classroom and which parents may not be aware of unless they talk with their children about what’s happening in school. So, this has essentially been a secret issue because the American people are not aware of what children are learning in schools or how schools have been handling antisemitism in school.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Miss Universe Israel’s Team Reveals National Costume Was Stolen Before Debut at 2025 Pageant in Bangkok
Melanie Shiraz of Israel takes part in the National Costume show during the 74th Miss Universe pageant in Bangkok, Thailand, Nov. 19, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha
Miss Israel Melanie Shiraz had her national costume stolen shortly before she was set to debut the look in the Miss Universe 2025 pageant, her team revealed on Tuesday.
The Miss Universe competition concluded in Bangkok, Thailand, on Nov. 21 with Fátima Bosch from Mexico being crowned Miss Universe from a group of contestants representing more than 130 nations around the world. The first runner-up was Thailand’s Praveenar Singh followed by Venezuela’s Stephany Abasali as second runner-up.
Shiraz, 27, had designed the outfit she was set to wear for the national costume segment of the Miss Universe competition. Edgar Saakyan, national director of Miss Universe Israel, said in a released statement on Tuesday that a day and a half before Shiraz was set to take the stage in the national costume portion of the competition, the Miss Israel team was “misled by the costume constructor’s team, and the national costume was stolen.”
“A representative of the costume constructor arrived at the Bangkok airport under the pretext of ‘clarifying details,’ approached a member of our team, took the costume, and then stopped all communication – effectively stealing it and placing us in an extremely difficult position,” Saakyan explained. “We regard this as a deliberate act of harm, including damage to our intellectual property and reputation … This matter has been transferred to our legal team.”
Saakyan added that ultimately, a team of Thai costume makers made Shiraz a new look, based on her original concept, with only 10 hours left before the national costume segment of the Miss Universe contest. The costume was completed with “incredible support” from the Miss Universe and Miss Grand International teams, he said.
“This display of professionalism, grace under pressure, and human solidarity allowed us not only to take the stage – but to do so with honor, pride, and respect for the flag,” Saakyan noted. “We are grateful beyond words.”
Shiraz ended up wearing in the national costume segment a yellow floor length gown that also featured a yellow ribbon in honor of the murdered hostages still held in captivity and the former hostages who have returned home after being abducted by Hamas-led terrorists during their deadly rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. A crystal Star of David was displayed on her dress, and its train was adorned with red anemones, which is Israel’s national flower and also commonly found in southern Israel where the Oct. 7 attack took place. Shiraz paired the dress with a shawl and head covering. The costume was titled “The Light of Hope.”
“While many national costumes are joyful and celebratory, this year’s theme of peace, combined with all that our people have endured over the past two years, called for a more somber presence on stage,” Shiraz said in an Instagram post. “One that carries both remembrance and the hope for a more peaceful future. I designed this piece to honor our story, our grief, and the light we continue to hold onto. I couldn’t be more proud [sic] to wear it.”
Saakyan announced in his statement on Tuesday that next year, Shiraz will be the official national costume designer for Miss Israel. “We are confined this partnership will deliver not just visual beauty, but a meaningful cultural message to the world,” he said.
Miss Palestine Nadine Ayoub sparked controversy when she took the stage during the national costume segment of the Miss Universe competition wearing a robe that depicted the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, alongside olive branches. Earlier in the competition, Ayoub uploaded a series of posts on social media that included lies about the Israel-Hamas war, such as one that inflated the number of Palestinian casualties and another that described Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the Israeli children murdered in Hamas captivity, as Palestinian victims of the war instead of victims of Hamas terrorism. Ayoub was the first-ever “Miss Palestine” contestant in the Miss Universe pageant.
After the New York Post revealed that Ayoub was married to the son of notorious Fatah terrorist Marwan Barghouti and even named a child after him, Shiraz called on Miss Universe organizers to strip Miss Palestine of her place in the top 30. “Miss Universe should not condone fraud, violations of its code of conduct and especially terror. I expect them to take corrective action,” Shiraz told the Post on Saturday. “I don’t need to act as the moral CEO of Miss Universe – they should be able to do that themselves.”
“It makes my skin crawl thinking we were in the same room so many times,” added Shiraz. “It’s shocking that we all shared a stage with someone with serious terror ties.”
Following the Miss Universe 2025 competition, Brigitta Schaback renounced her title of Miss Universe Estonia and Olivia Yacé, the pageant’s fourth runner-up, renounced her title as Miss Universe Africa and Oceania.
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New York City Mayor Adams Announces New $3 Million Holocaust Memorial
New York City Mayor Eric Adams meeting with Israelis during a reception in Jerusalem that was organized by the Combat Antisemitism Movement. Photo: Combat Antisemitism Movement’s X account
New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced on Tuesday the planned creation of a $3 million Holocaust memorial to commemorate the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in World War II as well as the survivors who rebuilt their lives in New York City.
The “Queens Holocaust Memorial” will be located on the grounds of the Queens Borough Hall and include artwork as well as a commemorative garden. The process of selecting an artist for the memorial will be led by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs’ “Percent for Art“ program in discussion with artists, historians, and Holocaust survivors.
The Queens Jewish Community Council, in partnership with local civic and faith leaders, originally proposed the idea for the memorial. The city and Office of Queens Borough President Donovan Richard Jr. allocated $3 million to support the development of the project, but the Queens Jewish Community Council will help raise additional funds to support the memorial’s design and construction.
A total of 14,700 Holocaust survivors live in New York, which is 50 percent of all survivors in the US, according to the UJA Federation New York. The new memorial will be the first major tribute to the Holocaust in the borough of Queens, which is where many Holocaust survivors settled when they moved to New York after World War II. The site will serve as a hosting ground for Holocaust remembrance ceremonies, educational programs for students, and community gatherings to promote solidarity across communities.
“It is not enough to say, ‘Never again’ — we have to live it with our actions too,” Adams said in a released statement. “By preserving the stories of both victims and survivors, by creating a permanent space for remembrance and reflection, by promoting understanding and solidarity across generations, this memorial will live out the meaning of ‘never again.’ As our city and our country confront the rising tide of antisemitism, our administration will not remain silent. We will use our office to call out hate wherever we find it, encourage compassion wherever we need it, and create a city where everyone can live side by side in harmony.”
Adams announced the creation of the memorial alongside Richard Jr. The latter said the Queens Holocaust Memorial “will not only pay a touching tribute to the six million innocent Jews murdered by the Nazis and the survivors who settled in our borough afterward, but it will also serve as daily inspiration for our fight to forge a future free of antisemitism.”
“No matter how much time passes since the evils of the Holocaust, New York City’s commitment to the pledge of ‘Never Again’ must never waver,” he added. “That is why, in the face of rising tides of heinous antisemitism and Holocaust denial across our society, I could not be prouder to lead this effort alongside the administration and the Queens’ Jewish community in creating this critically important memorial here at Queens Borough Hall.”
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who was elected earlier this month, will take office and replace Adams in January. Adams recently expressed concern for the safety of Jewish communities in New York under Mamdani’s leadership.
Leading members of the Jewish community in New York have also raised alarm bells about Mamdani’s victory in the mayoral election.
During his four years in office, Adams created the first mayor’s office dedicated to combating antisemitism; signed an executive order adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism; created the city’s first Jewish Advisory Council; and launched the New York City-Israel Economic Council.