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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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What the private equity takeover means for the bagel industry
The bagel’s stock is, apparently, rising — literally.
Private equity investors have decided, apparently en masse, that bagels are the new frontier for expansion.
A fund called Stripe invested $8 million into PopUp Bagels shortly after the trendy bagel shop, which hawks “rip and dip” bagels, first opened in 2023. A year later, they added $24 million to their contribution and became the majority owner. Now, PopUp Bagels boasts 30 locations.
Invus, an asset management fund, is now the majority owner of Call Your Mother, which began in D.C. but has expanded to 15 locations across the D.C. metro area and, for some reason, Denver. And Manhattan Funds, a large private equity firm, has a specific Bagel Equity Fund devoted to taking over bagelries. The industry is, they write on their site, “under-optimized at the national level.”
Even H&H Bagels, the iconic New York City institution — famed for its cameos in shows like Seinfeld and Sex in the City — has gotten shoveled onto private equity’s giant bagel baking tray. Though Wall Street investor Jay Rushin bought the brand over a decade ago, H&H, too, is beginning its boom era, opening dozens franchises outside of the city.
It’s time, these investment firms all contend, to scale bagels. But can the art of the perfect New York bagel be scaled?
Making the New York bagel in bulk is famously hard. The rings are finicky to roll out, they require boiling, and — perhaps most importantly — the long mythos to the New York bagel has at its core the premise that New York bagels cannot be made without New York water.
Many connoisseurs believe there is an alchemical process to the sought-after chew and crust only achievable with the particular water flowing in the city’s pipes, cascading down from the Catskill reservoirs almost unadulterated. Food science has somewhat debunked that concept, but the legend remains so strong that H&H is promising to par-boil its bagels in NYC water before shipping them to its new franchise locations to be finished in the oven. Even if it’s only marketing, that marketing is powerful.
This is far from the first time that companies have attempted to scale the bagel. In fact, it has worked, in a way: “bagels” can be found, at mass scale, in every major grocery store in the country, offered in plastic sleeves of a half-dozen.
The problem is that those bagels are gross. They’re made by machine, and steamed instead of boiled, which gives a glossy surface, yes, but none of the chew of a true boiled crust. The grocery store bagels are convenient and shelf-stable, sure, but they’re the Wonder Bread of the form: mushy and milquetoast. They have none of the hallmarks of a true bagel.
It’s possible that the private equity masterminds have landed on a secret to scaling the bagel without eventually reducing it to a wan grocery store offering. The results of the Wall Street takeover of the form are still emerging, and the business model could be dependent — at least at first — on devising the perfect product, and not just a passable one.
It just seems unlikely. The investment firms are built around, well, investors, not consumers. Their goal is producing equity and capital for their investors, not making the perfect bagel.
The term “enshittification,” coined by writer Cory Doctorow, has been around for a few years. It describes exactly what it sounds like — the phenomenon of everything growing, uh, worse. Specifically, it describes the way that large companies, often funded by venture capital and private investors, make their products worse over time in the process of wringing money out of the business to serve their CEOs and investors.
Doctorow, in his book on the subject, Enshittification, focuses largely on tech platforms as he examines the term. There’s Amazon: Long gone are the days of a well-priced product you could find more easily online than in a store. Now, search results are polluted by whatever someone has paid to boost to the top of the page, and it’s not even that cheap anymore. Or Twitter, which once bought by Elon Musk, fired its content moderation team to cut costs and turned its user verification, which was once limited to public figures, into a pay-to-play feature. As a result, the platform may have more income streams, but any regular user can attest that their feed is now full of neo-Nazis who shelled out for an algorithmic boost.
But it’s not just platforms — culture and aesthetics are targets for cash extraction now, too, with bad results. Netflix now churns out a constant stream of shows that are, instead of cultural touchstones, basically interchangeable, a far cry from their acclaimed early efforts like Orange is the New Black. Clothing brands like Reformation and even high-end designers like Escala, once symbols of luxury, taste and quality, are turning to lower quality materials and production in an attempt to churn out more designs, faster, and make more money. I’m trying to buy a couch right now, and have found through my research that age-old companies once lauded for their design and durability have been bought by private equity and changed their frames from hardwoods to particle board. (That information took a lot of research because you know what else has fallen prey to enshittification? Review sites.)
That means, regardless of whether these bought-out businesses have suffered yet, bagels are likely to fare poorly in the private equity boom eventually because of the need to extract increasing amounts of cash out of the project; the product itself is ultimately secondary. The Bagel Equity Fund is running trials on steaming their bagels instead of boiling them in its projected 400 shops it runs, the exact strategy that led to the mushy grocery store bagel. And a Washington Post review for the hyped new H&H location in D.C. was brutal, calling the bagels “generally unappealing” and “flavorless.”
But the bagel itself is only part of the mystique of the food. Which brings me to the more spiritual offerings of a good bagel: an ephemeral cultural cachet. That may be at even greater risk.
Having a favorite bagel shop or loudly defending your bagel order as the only possible correct way to eat a bagel — untoasted, scallion schmear, with capers, red onion and lox, and anything else is heresy, thank you for asking — makes you a real New Yorker. Or, if you don’t live in New York, it’s the mark of a devout cultural (and maybe religious) Jew.
Other, earlier attempts to innovate on the theme, and make it trendier and more lucrative, were all one-and-done fads that eventually crashed and burned, becoming a kind of scarlet letter of cringe. (Remember the vanilla-flavored rainbow bagels that were all over social media in the 2010s? They came with funfetti cream cheese. Disgusting, and also deeply uncool.)
Bagel shops are not just places that produce chewy bread with a hole in the center. They have a cultural value. Each is often unique, with its own set of delightful quirks — the place selling Lactaid loosies behind the counter, the brusque man who nevertheless remembers your order. They’re a symbol of uniqueness and authenticity — which, of course, is definitionally impossible to buy. The more constructed something is, the less authentic.
Yet that’s really what the private equity investors are trying to monetize: the idea of a bagel. If it didn’t have that symbolic power, it wouldn’t be a particularly interesting business, given how difficult the baking is to scale well.
The Bagel Equity Fund describes its target market as “fragmented, inconsistent, and devoid of a dominant brand.” But isn’t that the charm of your local bagel place? Not to those investors, which promise to rebrand every store they take over as “Go Bagels,” likely alienating the exact “strong customer bases and community presence” at the stores they aim to acquire.
Bagels have long been a metonym both for New York and for Jewishness. See: the phrase “pizza bagel,” describing people of mixed Italian and Jewish heritage. Good bagels inspire poetic food reviews — and literal poetry — but also lengthy cultural takes. There are dissertations on its history — and I don’t mean that as a kind of humorous exaggeration, I mean actual papers filed to receive a doctorate.
They were also core to unionization of American workers. The Beigel Bakers Local, which conducted its meetings in Yiddish, led strikes over pay and conditions, and standardized the bagel’s form into the icon we all know. That union was so powerful that its members put the city, during strikes, into what is memorialized as a “bagel famine” — a near-emergency for the city’s devoted consumers. The bagel and its attendant culture is a product of the blood, sweat and tears of New York City’s Jewish workers.
The union was ultimately undone by the mechanized mass production of grocery store bagels — an inferior product, yes, but one accessible at a mass scale, exactly what private equity is attempting to reproduce. The fact that a paltry imitation of a bagel still had enough financial power to destroy a once-powerful union is also worrying. People in cities other than New York — cities, that is to say, with a poor selection of bagels — will probably eat the sub-par private equity bagels, because there’s no other option, a key element of enshittification, as Doctorow observes.
But once the big conglomerates have the power, will they be so strong that the bagels they produce take over even on the bagel’s home turf? Will they exterminate the original New York bagel, and with it, its cultural history?
I don’t want to overstate the symbolic power of private equity buying the bagel brand. But at a time when antisemitism is rising, and Jews are increasingly being accused of, once again, greed, malicious control and undue influence, it certainly can’t help. If the bagel represents Jews, and the bagel has sold out, well, that’s a bad look.
But the real deal can still shine through the enshittification haze. “I just stayed in Brooklyn for the first time and felt so alive surrounded by all those bagel shops!” wrote one user on Reddit. They were there to complain — about Denver’s newest private equity bagel. Clearly, the New York bagel’s brand remains strong, even to outsiders.
The post What the private equity takeover means for the bagel industry appeared first on The Forward.
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Suspicious Explosive Package Targeting Jewish Leader Heightens Antisemitism Fears in Argentina
People hold up pictures of the victims of the AMIA Jewish center bombing during a ceremony to mark the 22nd anniversary of the 1994 attack in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2016. Photo: REUTERS/Enrique Marcarian
Argentina’s authorities are investigating yet another suspected antisemitic incident after a suspicious package addressed to a local branch president of the country’s main Jewish umbrella organization was intercepted, further heightening alarms among community leaders amid a recent surge in attacks.
On Wednesday, the Pilares del Rosario medical center received a package containing explosive material addressed to Gabriel Dobkin, who serves as both the institution’s director and president of the local branch of the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA) in Rosario, a major city in the central-eastern Santa Fe province.
According to local media, clinic staff received a package containing a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes wrapped in transparent tape, which the facility’s manager said felt unusually heavy and immediately aroused suspicion.
Because the package had arrived unrequested via a delivery service, the clinic’s manager quickly raised concerns and called in the police explosives unit.
Police bomb squad dogs later detected explosive material inside the cigarette pack. According to the ongoing investigation, the package also contained a strange substance, though authorities have not yet released further details.
After digging a pit in the facility’s backyard, police experts carried out a controlled detonation of the material.
Even though the package did not include an automatic triggering mechanism, it reportedly contained a number of coins intended to serve as shrapnel in the event of an explosion.
Local law enforcement is treating the incident as a targeted antisemitic attack, describing it as either an attempted act of violence or, at the very least, an act of intimidation.
As the investigation continues, detectives are still analyzing the substance found inside the package but have not yet determined its composition or origin. Surveillance footage from the area is being reviewed, and staff from the clinic are also expected to be interviewed.
DAIA Rosario strongly condemned the attack, describing it as a troubling escalation of threats against Jewish institutions, reflecting a wider atmosphere of hostility toward the community.
“This is an expression of hatred that not only targets the Jewish community, but also undermines the fundamental values of coexistence, respect, and democracy. Such acts must be condemned unequivocally and confronted with resolve. Simply denouncing them is not enough — decisive action is essential,” the organization said in a statement.
“Impunity cannot be an option. Every act of antisemitism that goes unpunished sends a message of tolerance toward hatred,” it continued. “Every firm response from the state is a clear signal that society will not back down. To prevent these acts from recurring, determination, action, and justice are essential.”
This latest incident comes amid heightened security concerns within Argentina’s Jewish community after unknown individuals threw a homemade firebomb at the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish Community Center in La Plata, a city in southeastern Buenos Aires Province, last Sunday.
The Buenos Aires Security Ministry and Police Counterterrorism Division have opened an investigation into the incident, examining possible links to another attack last week that appears to share a similar modus operandi.
The Israelite Literary Center and Max Nordau Library in La Plata were also targeted last Thursday when unidentified individuals threw a homemade Molotov-type device at the building’s entrance.
Although the device failed to ignite, it shattered the building’s windows and caused some material damage. Fortunately, no fires broke out and no injuries were reported.
In response to these latest attacks, Jewish institutions across the country have strengthened preventive protocols and reinforced internal security and surveillance measures.
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US, Israel Cripple Iran’s Nuclear Weaponization Work, New Report Shows
Symbolic mock-ups of Iranian missiles are displayed on a street, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 22, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
More than two months into the war, Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons has suffered a major setback as US and Israeli strikes have ravaged critical facilities, crippled essential infrastructure, and killed personnel central to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, according to a new analysis
On Friday, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington, DC–based think tank, released a new assessment of the impact of Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, concluding that the attacks significantly damaged Tehran’s ability to advance nuclear weapons development, particularly by disrupting its weaponization activities.
A nuclear program generally begins with uranium enrichment, the process of producing material that can power civilian reactors or, at higher levels of purity, be used in a nuclear weapon. Much of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure was destroyed during last year’s 12-day war.
The second element is weaponization, which involves the design, testing, and production of the components needed to assemble a functioning nuclear device — a central focus of the more recent Israeli and US military campaign.
According to ISIS’s newly released report, at least six confirmed nuclear-related sites were destroyed so far, with three additional locations possibly connected to the program also struck, bringing the total number of targeted facilities linked to nuclear weapons development to between nine and 12.
Since the start of the war earlier this year, Israel and the United States have struck a wide range of military-industrial facilities involved in missile, drone, and conventional weapons production.
However, the report indicates that some previously undisclosed sites may also have had connections to Iran’s nuclear activities, potentially raising the true scale of the damage.
By analyzing satellite imagery, the report concludes that Iran’s ability to successfully complete a nuclear weapon has been significantly degraded, with the strikes greatly extending the timeline required to produce a bomb while sharply increasing the likelihood of technical failure.
Before the June 2025 war, intelligence assessments estimated Iran could likely produce a nuclear weapon in less than six months with a high probability of success.
Now, the regime’s chances of successfully completing the weaponization process are considered technically low even over a one- to two-year period, largely because the strikes destroyed not only facilities, but also critical equipment and personnel involved in the final stages of bomb development.
ISIS’s latest findings contradict earlier US intelligence assessments, which reportedly concluded that Iran’s nuclear timeline had not been significantly delayed, arguing that such data is inconsistent with extensive visible destruction across key nuclear sites.
The report also argues that there are no signs Iran has resumed uranium enrichment activities, as facilities repeatedly targeted by Israeli and American airstrikes remain heavily damaged with no detectable reconstruction efforts underway.
Despite extensive damage to the regime’s infrastructure, the report cautions that Iran’s nuclear threat has not been fully eliminated.
ISIS has identified tunnel complexes near Esfahan and Natanz in central Iran that were not directly targeted and are believed to contain most of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, including roughly 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent — far above civilian requirements and much closer to weapons-grade material.