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When it comes to a classic Jewish cookie, New York bakeries go beyond black and white
(New York Jewish Week) – As far as New York Jewish desserts go, perhaps the most ubiquitous is the black and white cookie, that soft, sweet, frosted treat found at bakeries and bagel stores throughout the city.
Black and white cookies, sometimes called half-moon cookies, are understood by most to be a Jewish dessert. “Seinfeld” once dedicated an episode to singing their praises. “You see, Elaine, the key to eating a black and white cookie is that you wanna get some black and some white in each bite,” Jerry says. “Nothing mixes better than vanilla and chocolate. And yet still somehow racial harmony eludes us. If people would only look to the cookie, all our problems would be solved.”
But now, in a testament to New Yorkers’ innovation — or possibly the old adage, “everything old is new again” — bakeries across the city are riffing upon this tried-and-true classic. These days, black and white cookies are available in a myriad of colors and flavors: yellow and blue to support Ukraine, red to celebrate Valentine’s Day, brown and yellow to mark the merger of banana, chocolate and hazelnut.
The banana walnut flavored black and white cookie. (Zaro’s Family Bakery)
The latter is one of six new flavor combinations at Zaro’s Family Bakery, where brothers and fourth-generation owners Brian, Michael and Scott Zaro have wholeheartedly embraced new versions of the two-tone classic. Earlier this month, the bakery unveiled its new black and white cookie color and flavor combinations, which include orange and white (cream cheese frosted carrot cake), green and black (mint chip), as well as an M&M-topped cookie, a sprinkle-filled birthday cake flavor and a cookies and cream flavor.
“We’ve been making the black and white cookie for 95 years,” Brian Zaro, who has been working full time for his family’s business since 2006, told the New York Jewish Week. “My brother, Scott, had a vision to make an iconic item that meets innovation.”
A carrot cake flavored cookie is topped with orange and white cream cheese frosting. (Zaro’s Family Bakery)
The black and white is one of the signature offerings at Zaro’s, which is known for setting up shop in New York’s biggest transit hubs, including Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station and LaGuardia airport. The bakery’s website boasts that it sells over 90,000 black and white cookies annually, and this season’s new flavors join Zaro’s chocolate chip black and whites, which they have been offering for several years, Brian said. (Black and white on the outside, with chocolate chips baked into the dough.)
Of course, these creative interpretations prompt an obvious question: How far can a bakery stray from chocolate and vanilla before a black and white is no longer a black and white?
“It’s a valid point,” Brian Zaro admits. “But right now, yes, it’s a black and white. That could change; we always try to be as open-minded as possible.”
Shannon Sarna, author of “Modern Jewish Baker” and editor at our partner site The Nosher, agrees. “I’m not a purist,” she said. “I don’t think they have to be black and white to be a real black and white cookie.”
For Sarna, what are most important to the integrity of a black and white are the flavors and technique. “A good black and white cookie is going to have a little taste of vanilla or orange or lemon zest that might be in the dough,” she said. “It’s got to have a good quality icing. It’s not going to just taste like sugar. It’s going to have a little chocolate flavor and it’s going to have a little bit of the white, more vanilla-y taste.”
For some, the doughy cookie with its signature bi-color frosting is only as good as the sense of nostalgia it offers. As the New York Times wrote back in 1998, “Today’s black-and-whites cannot compare with the black-and-whites of yesteryear, of course, just as no mayor will ever be as good at LaGuardia and no team as beloved as the Dodgers.” Sarna, who grew up in New York, calls black and whites “the cookies of my childhood.”
The black and whites as we know them were said to have been popularized by the Upper East Side’s Glaser’s Bake Shop, which was founded in 1902 by John Herbert Glaser. Glaser reportedly brought the black and white recipe with him when he immigrated to the United States from Bavaria.
Third-generation owner Herb Glaser, who ran the bakery with his brother until it closed for good in 2018, is not able to confirm this — but, at 70, he says that they were a feature of the bakery since he was a young boy.
Though he now lives “in the country,” Glaser is well aware of the new black and white trends. “Some of the businesses are making them a little too outrageous,” he said. “They’re not really black and whites anymore.”
Still, Glaser said that his bakery did occasionally make the cookies in different colors — for graduation parties, schools and, most notably, in orange and blue when the Mets were in the World Series in 1986. “I’m a traditionalist but I understand,” Glaser added. “It’s a marketing thing and that’s fine. It’s a way to stay in business.”
“I think there’s a sort of New York pride associated with it as ‘the New York cookie,’ and it just so happens to be a really good cookie,” said Noah Aris, the baker and proprietor of The Cardamom Man, which sells its baked goods online and at street markets. Aris bakes black and whites with blue and gold frosting as a fundraiser for humanitarian relief in Ukraine. In addition to lemon zest in the dough, Aris has added lavender, leaving the dough flecked with dots of purple.
The different colors “help start a conversation for me to talk about what I’m about as a bakery and raising money for Ukraine,” he said. “Then you hear [the customers’] story about their experiences with black and whites. It’s fun.”
Breads Bakery started baking black and whites with their signature laminated dough when they opened their Upper East Side location last year. “I operate under the simple thesis that when you give people something great they’ll appreciate it regardless of what their expectation may have been.” Peleg said. (Ashley Solter)
At some bakeries, innovation starts in the dough. Last holiday season, Breads Bakery rolled out black and whites made with a laminated, croissant-like base instead of the classic doughy, cakey consistency .
“The first time I took a bite of it, it became very clear to me that we’ve elevated this cookie to a new level and given it the treatment that it deserves,” Breads owner Gadi Peleg said. “I think we have done enough to wink at the nostalgic nature of the cookie — there’s enough there to sort of connect you to the memories that you may have associated with a black and white cookie. But it’s just different enough to bring it into a more modern New York, the New York of today.”
At Kossar’s Bagels & Bialys — which now has three locations across the city and one more on the way — customers will find traditional black and whites sitting alongside all-chocolate or all-vanilla frosted versions, as well as multi-color and M&M-topped versions.
“Some people like only the chocolate, some people like only the vanilla. So we use that as our inspiration to move forward,” said general manager Sharon Bain. “People do love the fact that we’re doing something with the black and white. We’re catering to everyone.”
Kossar’s will frost the cookies with green for St. Patrick’s Day or red for Valentine’s Day, but the reboot is only skin deep. According to Bain, the “black and white refers to the chocolate and vanilla flavors of the frosting, and not the color.”
For Brian Zaro, too, the flavor and color innovations are all about customer satisfaction, and this year the new black and white varieties are also available at the Zaro’s outpost at the Bryant Park Winter Village. “It’s new for us,” Zaro said. “But so far so good.”
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The post When it comes to a classic Jewish cookie, New York bakeries go beyond black and white appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Australian Police Arrest Teens for Antisemitic Harassment of Jewish Schoolboys
Illustrative: Government workers cleaning antisemitic graffiti in Sydney, Australia in February 2025. Photo: AAPIMAGE via Reuters Connect
Australian police have arrested two teenagers suspected of chasing Jewish schoolboys in a stolen car while shouting Nazi slogans in Melbourne last week.
The suspects, one of whom already has a criminal history at age 16, were taking a joyride in the vehicle in the St. Kilda East section of the city when they spotted the Jewish boys walking home, according to Australian media. After initially passing by them, the driver reportedly executed a U-turn and gave chase, nearly striking one of the fleeing boys as he tried to escape what appeared to be an imminent threat to his life.
“Parents said the boys were badly shaken and reluctant to return to school, struggling to understand why they had been targeted,” the outlet J-Wire reported. “One father said the use of Nazi gestures was particularly distressing for families in a community where many are descendants of Holocaust survivors.”
Police confirmed on Friday night that they arrested the 16-year-old boy, who has been charged with aggravated burglary, theft of a motor vehicle, and numerous driving offences.
The announcement from law enforcement came after a 15-year-old was arrested for the incident and charged with theft of a motor vehicle.
The younger boy has been bailed ahead of his court appearance next month, Australian media reported. However, the 16-year-old has been remanded in custody and is set to appear in court on Tuesday.
Australian lawmakers have sought to confront antisemitism in recent weeks with new legislation, following a historic surge in antisemitic incidents across the country.
The wave of antisemitism culminated last month at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, where gunmen, allegedly inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group, opened fire on a Jewish gathering celebrating the start of Hanukkah, killing 15 people and wounding dozens of others.
On Tuesday, the Australian Federal Parliament passed the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate, and Extremism Act, increasing penalties imposed on hate crime perpetrators and creating new ones against “preachers and leaders” who promote hatred. Other provisions of the law, passed as separate acts, impose new gun restrictions and strengthen and aim to strengthen the immigrations system’s threat detection capabilities.
These measures passed as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese apologized for his government not doing enough to combat antisemitism.
A year before the incident, the Executive Council on Australian Jewry (EJAC) reported a 316 percent increase in antisemitic incidents between 2023 and 2024, a figure which included a surge in physical assaults and “graffiti calling to kill Jews as a direct imperative.”
“In the past such deal calls were in the form of the ‘Death to the Jews’ — expressing a sentiment rather than an act,” the group said in its 2025 report. “The same theme has also occurred in hate emails, phone calls, and other messages — calling for the mass death of Jews. The expression of such sentiments has become much more common, adding to the sense of social license for acts of severe physical violence against Australian Jews.”
In other incidents, someone graffitied the home of Lesli Berger, former president of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies; a Jewish man was assaulted by an anti-Israel mob because he took down an advertisement of a pro-Palestinian rally; and, in one notorious episode in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, hundreds of pro-Hamas protesters gathered outside the Sydney Opera House chanting “gas the Jews,” “f—k the Jews,” and other epithets.
Anti-Israel sentiment in Australia has also led to vandalism. In June 2024, the US consulate in Sydney was vandalized and defaced by a man carrying a sledgehammer who smashed the windows and graffitied inverted red triangles on the building. The inverted red triangle has become a common symbol at pro-Hamas rallies. The Palestinian terrorist group, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, has used inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “the red triangle is now used to represent Hamas itself and glorify its use of violence.”
“We are now at a stage where anti-Jewish racism has left the fringes of society, where it is normalized and allowed to fester and spread, gaining ground at universities, in arts and culture spaces, in the health sector, in the workplace and elsewhere,” EJAC president Daniel Aghion said in a statement on the day the group released its 2025 report. “In such an environment, Jews have legitimate concerns for their physical safety and social well-being in Australia. Together, we must do all we can to combat this scourge.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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What an antisemitic conspiracy theory and the Alex Pretti killing have in common
The night after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, as federal officials continued to spread lies about what happened, a friend asked me for advice on another disturbing instance of misinformation. What she should say, she asked, to a colleague who is posting antisemitic conspiracy theories about last month’s wildfires in Argentina.
That conundrum was related to the horror of our government trying to blame an innocent man for his own murder, I told her. And democracy, our very society, depends on figuring what to do about both.
In both cases, there’s a stubborn refusal to admit reality. Blinded by hate, suspicion or party loyalty, and locked in hermetically sealed media silos, people blame phantoms — in the case of Argentina — or the actual victims — as in Minneapolis — for the ills of our world.
And with each rejection, each accusation, society bends a bit more toward breaking.
In Argentina, after fires ravaged some 3,000 acres earlier this month, retired military general César Milani and others blamed the blazes on Israel.
My friend’s colleague was one of the many thousands of social media posters who spread those accusations, convinced that Israelis in Patagonia deliberately started the fires in order to clear the way for Zionist settlement.
Nothing my friend could say — that authorities had not determined the cause, that the Argentine government itself said the “Zionist fire” accusations were baseless — could convince her colleague otherwise.
“She would just tell me, ‘That’s what they want you to believe,’” my friend said. “What could I say to that?”
I wish I knew. Because all weekend I despaired seeing the same dynamic at work in the United States, in even more tragic circumstances.
Video footage, eyewitnesses and expert analysis show that Border Police shot Pretti multiple times, after they threw him to the ground and removed a holstered firearm he was legally carrying. Videos show that Pretti, who had been using his iPhone to film Border Police and ICE agents, had run to help a woman whom the federal agents had shoved down.
Anyone who takes the time to look and listen to the evidence can agree on what happened. Or so you would think.
Yet many federal officials, including President Donald Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, suggested that the real victims were the agents who killed Pretti.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior aide, called Pretti “a domestic terrorist.” Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of Border Patrol operations, said Pretti sought to “massacre law enforcement.” (Federal officials used very similar language to describe Renée Good, an unarmed mother whom ICE agents shot and killed earlier this month, after her death.)
Pretti “allegedly tried to pull out a firearm,” reported the resolutely pro-Trump OneAmerica News — ignoring the fact, clear in videos of the incident, that it was agents who removed his firearm from his holster, and agents who shot him after.
As with the Argentine fires, these were the accusations that ricocheted across social media, where posters accused Pretti — with zero evidence — of being an agitator paid for by Jewish Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros.
“Pretti was unalived” — online slang for “killed” — “by federal law enforcement officers who were defending themselves from being murdered by a deranged, Soros-paid terrorist,” was one of the typical, depressing posts to pop up in my feed this weekend.
At least in Argentina the government issued a statement debunking the Zionist arson claim, after an investigation found it was baseless.
In the U.S., a full, fair inquiry into Pretti’s death may shed more light on why the killing occurred. But despite some Republican lawmaker’s calls for a joint federal and state investigation, the federal government is so far doing what it did after the Good’s killing: shutting state authorities out and focusing on the actions of the victims, not the shooter. Three days ago an FBI agent assigned to investigate Good’s death resigned after the Department of Justice pressured her to drop her investigation into the agent behind the shooting.
And so a senseless death that could provide a moment of national reckoning, even reconciliation, will be mourned by many Americans in justifiable outrage. But for others, nothing will penetrate their conviction that Alex Pretti was guilty of provoking his own murder.
The historical record provides little hope that people so locked into a point of view shaped by misinformation can ever change their minds.
I always assumed that the public understanding of the Kent State University shootings, on May 4, 1970, was a matter of settled history: Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on peaceful protesting college students, killing four, and we all knew it was an unjustifiable massacre.
But revisiting that history in the wake of Pretti’s death, I discovered that was far from the truth.
“There was still that sentiment out there that they should have shot more students,” Dean Kahler, a former Kent State protester permanently paralyzed after a National Guardsman’s bullet severed his lower spine, told NPR in 2020, “that they should’ve killed more people.”
And long before Kent State, there was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer accused of treason in 1894 and later fully exonerated, in a case that divided France to the brink of civil war.
Ever since, a succession of right-wing elements in France have stuck to their belief in Dreyfus’ guilt. In 2021, the French lawyer Germain Latour said French antisemites suffered from an “epidemic of mental cholera” that prevented them from accepting the truth.
I wish I hadn’t had to tell my friend that it’s hard, if not impossible, to crack open every closed mind. But I did. My friend’s colleague will likely never stop believing Israel burned Argentina. Pretti’s killers will continue to have millions of defenders who will never see what to most of us is obvious.
Both stories follow the same script: reality conflicts with ideology, so reality gets discarded.
What matters more is that the people who care about finding and defending the facts push their institutions — courts, media, academia, clergy — to do the same. It is, to borrow a recent movie title, one battle after another. But for Alex Pretti’s sake, we cannot quit.
The post What an antisemitic conspiracy theory and the Alex Pretti killing have in common appeared first on The Forward.
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Guinness World Records Starts Accepting Israeli Submissions Again Following Legal Pressure
People stand next to flags on the day the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages, Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, are handed over under the terms of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Guinness World Records (GWR) is once again accepting submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories, following pressure from an association of British lawyers that claimed the policy was discriminatory and threatened the validity of Guiness’s registered trademarks.
GWR confirmed to UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) via email that it ended its temporary pause on submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories that was implemented in November 2023, shortly after the start of the war in the Gaza Strip following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terrorist attack across southern Israel.
The exclusionary policy drew widespread condemnation in early December after Guinness World Records refused to accept a submission from the Israeli NGO Matnat Chaim, which was hoping to set a world record with an event in Jerusalem where 2,000 Israeli kidney donors will gather in one place.
GWR told Matnat Chaim at the time it was “not generally processing” record applications from Israel or the Palestinian territories “with the exception of those done in cooperation with a UN humanitarian aid relief agency.” Guinness denied claims that its policy against submissions from Israel or the Palestinian territories unlawfully excluded and discriminated against Israelis and Palestinians because the policy was based on location, not nationality or ethnicity.
In late December, UKLFI wrote to Guinness and warned that the company could face legal risks because of the policy and that it amounted to indirect discrimination. UKLFI noted that marketing publications under the title “Guinness World Records” while excluding records from in Israel or the Palestinian territories could be considered unfair commercial practice under consumer protection law. The policy could also risk the validity of Guinness’s registered trademarks, according to UKLFI.
Starting Jan. 15, GWR resumed its “routine acceptance” of applications, it told UKLFI in an email shared with The Algemeiner.
“We have continued to monitor the situation in the region carefully, reviewing the policy monthly,” GWR wrote. “The recent ceasefire and the return to a more stable environment have been key factors in these reviews. With these factors in mind … we recommenced our routine acceptance of applications for world records from Israel and the Palestinian Territories, including the application made by the Matnam Chaim charity.”
The company added that the decision to resume processing applications from the region was not an admission that its temporary pause had been unlawful or that its trademarks had been used improperly. Guinness also shared that several records set in Israel had in fact been recognized during the temporary pause. They included records for the fastest robot to solve a rotating puzzle clock, most backward somersault burpees in 30 seconds done by a male, oldest female person to perform a headstand, most sequences completed in a game of “Simon,” and tallest drag performer.
“Guinness World Records’ decision to resume accepting submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories is welcome,” said UKLFI chief executive Jonathan Turner. “Excluding particular countries carries serious legal and commercial risks. Global organizations cannot present themselves as neutral and inclusive while applying exceptional policies to certain countries, particularly where this misleads consumers and disadvantages entire populations.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar also commented on GWR’s change in policy, celebrating that the massive gathering of kidney donors in Jerusalem will be recognized.
“Two thousand Israeli kidney donors are making the largest donation ever, in a selfless act of solidarity and humanity,” Sa’ar posted on the social media platform X on Monday. “Good to see it finally receive the celebration it deserves by the Guinness World Records, which revoked their original distorted decision to deny Israeli kidney donors their rightful recognition.”