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This kosher-for-Passover apple vodka lets New Yorkers drink local this holiday
(New York Jewish Week) — When it comes to alcoholic beverages and Passover, the most common association is wine — consuming four cups of wine, after all, is an essential element of the Passover seder. But at Ilya Mavlyanov’s home in Forest Hills, Queens, there will be cocktails on offer, too.
That’s because Mavlyanov, 31, is the founder of Upstate Vodka — a vodka that is both certified kosher and certified kosher for Passover. Unlike most popular vodkas in the United States, which are made from grain, Upstate Vodka is made from New York apples.
“New York is the Big Apple and New York is the second largest apple growing state in the country,” Mavlyanov told the New York Jewish Week when asked how he landed on creating vodka from apples.
Just because a food or beverage uses kosher ingredients, however, doesn’t automatically mean it’s certified kosher. For Mavlyanov, who moved from Moscow to New York as a teen, the decision to seek kosher certification was integral to Upstate Vodka’s launch in June 2022. “I am Bukharian Jewish — kosher blood runs in my veins,” he said. “The first market I looked at was the kosher market. I started selling mostly to kosher liquor stores.”
Most vodkas on the market today are made from the fermentation of cereal grains like wheat or rye — ingredients considered “chametz” and not kosher for Passover. That is why some popular vodka brands, like Absolut or Smirnoff, may be certified kosher but not kosher for Passover. Kosher-for-Passover vodka can be made from potatoes, sugar or fruits, like an apple, a key ingredient in Ashkenazi recipes for that seder plate staple, haroset.
Each 750 ml bottle of Upstate Vodka is made from the fruit of 75 apples. The variety depends on the year but can include Spy Gold, Cortlands, Liberty or Kingston Black apples. “Each year we evaluate the juice so it might be a different blend,” said Upstate Vodka marketing director Susan Mooney. “Our distilling team has learned a lot about how to work with apples with different sugar content.”
“The owner is Jewish and he feels like the kosher products that were available were made from sugar or beets and were not of a high enough quality,” said Mooney, describing Mavlyanov’s decision to make a kosher-for-Passover vodka, in particular. “He felt he wanted to make a really good kosher for Passover vodka for the kosher and Jewish population.”
This year, the company will turn out 5,000 bottles of kosher for Passover Upstate Vodka. Sold in stores all over New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut, with shipping available to 30 states, Upstate Vodka’s kosher for Passover batch has a light gray label — in contrast to the black label used on the product for the rest of the year — and it clearly states that it is kosher for Passover on the front of the bottle.
Aside from the label, however, there is no difference between the Passover apple vodka and the year-round drink, said master distiller Ken Wortz. “From the first pressing of the juice from the apples, to fermentation, distillation and bottling — all are done under the supervision of a rabbi from OK Kosher,” he said, noting the rabbi even has his own room at the distillery.
Upstate Vodka is currently the only product produced by Sauvage Distillery, which is located in Charlotteville, New York, just north of the Catskill Mountains. And while Mavlyanov lives with his family in Queens, he is “very into farm products and farmers markets,” he told the New York Jewish Week. “I was always impressed with the quality of products, and wanted to contribute to what upstate has to offer.”
Mavlyanov’s efforts seem to be paying off. New York City-based mixologist Will Hadjigeorgalis, who is now a brand ambassador for the line, said he normally doesn’t get excited about vodka — until he tasted this product. “It is supposed to be flavorless, but this has a hint of apple,” he said. “It has a wonderful, creamy mouth feel.”
Food influencer and cookbook author Jake Cohen is a fan, too. “I come from a family that loves a diversified l’chaim portfolio, from weed to wine and plenty of vodka drinkers, so I always want to be stocked on the best kosher for Passover variety,” he wrote in an email to the New York Jewish Week, using the Hebrew word for the toast said over spirits. “Upstate Vodka stands up to every other bottle on my top shelf.”
There’s more to come from those upstate apples — in addition to vodka, the company is also making a local version of apple liqueur a la calvados. “We already have apple brandy in the barrels,” said master distiller Wortz. “It will also be kosher.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The post UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
The post Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’ appeared first on The Forward.