This week in Jewish news, from fun to awful.
Turns out knishes are stuffed—with history. The humble origins of the potato pie are elevated to Joycean proportions in A Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food, a literary odyssey by writer and knish-consumer Laura Silver. “Proust had his Madeleine, Jewish New Yorkers had their knishes,” writes Silver, who tracks down the iconic Jewish dumpling across three continents. Get the book when it comes out on May 6, while it’s still hot.
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“More Jews than a Chinese restaurant on Christmas,” reads a newly-erected billboard in New York’s Times Square. “Shiksappeal is overrated,” reads another. Welcome to #GetChosen, JDate’s somewhat-hilarious-yet-also-potentially-offensive new marketing campaign featuring taglines for the Jewish dating site. Some are cute, some are racy, but all of them focus on the Jews-for-Jews aspect of the popular online matchmaker. Users are tweeting their own taglines to #GetChosen to win a free year membership. “Girl meets oy,” anyone?
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NPR reports on a hidden, intricately-painted synagogue mural recently uncovered in an apartment building in western Vermont. Most like it were destroyed in the Holocaust. Now, conservators are clearing this one of grime to reveal a portrait of Jewish life. “This is a document of a Jewish civilization, a Jewish culture, a Jewish tradition in art that was vibrant and widespread and accomplished, but today has almost entirely vanished,” says Samuel Gruber, an architectural historian at Syracuse University. “We have to give it a new life.”
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Monday marked Yom Ha’Shoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. The annual holiday falls a week after Passover, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In Israel, sirens sound to signal two minutes of silence for the 6 million victims of the Holocaust; survivors share their memories, and many attend memorials and vigils. Back in the U.S., President Obama paid his tributes on the White House website. “Let us recommit ourselves to the task of remembrance, and to always oppose anti-Semitism wherever it takes root,” he wrote. “Together, we must give enduring meaning to the words ‘Never Again.'”
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Our friends at The Jewish Daily Forward did some digging into Donald Sterling’s unlikely Jewish past this week, after the poster boy for racism was caught with his pants down. (Specifically, Deadspin.com released a tape of Sterling criticizing his ex-girlfriend for being seen with black people on Saturday, among other things. For his racism, he was fined $2.5 million and thrown out of the NBA for life.) Turns out Sterling was actually born Donald Tokowitz, the son of Jewish immigrants in Chicago who fled persecution in Eastern Europe. Can’t make this stuff up, folks.
My Boba made knishes with a heart and kidneys of a calf. Much later I leaned of the ingredients she used to make her fabulous Knishes. And much later I learned of this and my heart skipped a beat knowing I had eaten dozens . However My Boba did share her recipe for the dough that I fortunately use to this day, but not with her secret ingredients. Thank you for the wonderful History of the “Knishes”
Ms. Revenn Edelstein