Y'all, do not buy discounted manischewitz chanukah candles for $1.90 from the Vietnamese Deli-Bodega last minute. Get some proper BDS-compliant candles from Narrow Bridge or somewhere these shmucks do not want to stay lit and burn out in less than an hour I swear.
I used to insist that proper latkes be made by hand grating an onion. I would say that my bubbe said that the crying you do making latkes represents the tears of our ancestors or something like that as a joke. I always thought food processors were cheating and just not traditional enough. I always split up latke making tasks at my party. Peeling, chopping, grating potatoes, grating onions, mixing, frying, etc. everyone gets involved and it's a part of what makes making latkes so fun. I had an annual tradition, before the pandemic, of having an arm wrestling competition during the chanukah party. Whoever won was given the "honor" squeezing all the water out of the potatoes.
When I started grad school for my library science degree, I was working full-time while also doing grad school part-time, I started driving everywhere instead of walking and taking the bus, and I started developing all sorts of health problems. For Chanukah 2018, I used a recipe I found on the Chabad website that called for dicing and sautéing the onions instead of grating them and mixing them into the batter that way. The latkes were much easier to make and also tasted better because sautéed onions are delicious. After I moved to Philly, everyone around me used a food processor for latkes. The latkes weren't just easier to make—for serving the huge crowds at these big philly chanukah parties where you weren't really "involving everyone" by involving 8 people—but also, I had to admit, the latkes came out a lot better when made with a food processor.
Since 2020, I've not been able to host big chanukah parties, and usually end up having a small gathering with Jess where we make her low-FODMAP latkes with a food processor and no onions what-so-ever. We use carrots instead. These latkes come out crispier and tastier than any of the more traditional latkes I made in Boston and Northampton for years and years. They not only do not have a hand-grated onion, they don't contain any onion. Carrying the "tears of our ancestors" with us all the time didn't really actually do anything for the latkes. You could barely taste the onion anyway. We were just making it really hard on ourselves because we were taught that it was that hard for our parents and grandparents so we gotta go through all that pain too. It's important to remember, again, that potatoes are an indigenous American food. Our ancient ancestors were not making latkes until a couple centuries ago, maybe a few.
I have this noodle kugel recipe I make and remake a lot. It started as my bubbe's kugel recipe. The original recipe called for absolutely insane quantities of sugar and dairy. Like, for one normal sized casserole dish, it was calling for butter, cottage cheese, sour cream, and sugar by the pound. When my mother passed this recipe down to me, she had annotated it to reduce all the quantities of sugar and fat. In her words: "This recipe is from before we knew food could be bad for you." I've never had my bubbe's version where the noodles are drowning in oil. I've only had my mother's healthier version, which I enjoyed quite a lot as a kid. But as an adult I lost the ability to digest dairy, so I modified the recipe. Cottage cheese was replaced by Tofutti Cream Cheese. Sour Cream became replaced with Tofutti Sour Cream. Butter was replaced with canola oil. It still tasted really good so I kept making it this way. Then I met Jess, who at the time couldn't eat any gluten. So I modified the recipe to make it gluten-free, which involved adjusting some ingredient ratios to account for differences in starch, egginess, etc. and so this became my famous dairy-free gluten-free kugel recipe. And then Jess's dietary needs evolved so I adjusted the recipe more. Tofutti contains gums, which she can't eat, so now I make it with oat yoghurt and vegan feta cheese, both of which are more sour and less sweet, so I re-upped the sugar content from where my mom had it, which made it drier, so I added more wet, and so forth.
At this point the kugel recipe really doesn't have a single part of it that hasn't been changed from how my bubbe did it. But everyone loves this kugel. This kugel was born from being willing to change things so that they aren't harmful to loved ones. To my mother, that meant making it less likely to clog your arteries. To me, it meant removing ingredients that make me sick, and then ingredients that make loved ones sick. I found ways to make it work to still be kugel, still be delicious, but also safe to eat.
There are a lot of traditions we pass down generation to generation that just aren't necessary, but we do them because we think we have to, just because it's what we had to go through ourselves, or what our parents went through, or our grandparents. The Conservative movement thought it was important to pass down Pure Jewish Genes, so our kids would all keep looking the same and stay nice and inbred and full of genetic disorders. This had the consequence of alienating more and more families away from Judaism, until eventually they realized they had to modify this tradition to let people love who they love and accept kids who look and act different from our not-as-old-as-we-think idea of how Jews should look and act.
There is this stereotype of the Jewish Mother and all the ways that she is. Overbearing, hypercritical, nosy, invasive, pushy, unloving. It's sort of miserable to be raised by someone like this, but we write it off as cultural. This is just how Jewish mothers are! This is how our mothers were raised, and our mother's mothers, and our mother's mother's mother. We justify it by saying it's because they only want the best for us, because they want us to survive above all else, etc. etc. but it makes people anxious and miserable. We don't need to keep hand-grating the onion. In America, most Jewish children are not in such a precarious position that they need their suburban Jewish mothers pushing them to be perfect successful doctors and lawyers (or to marry a successful doctor or lawyer) in order to make sure they don't die alone in poverty. This isn't the shtetl in the Russian empire in 1848. We have food processors now. We can make latkes easier and tastier without all the tears. When we discover a way to get the water out of the potatoes without squeezing them by hand, I will embrace the potato squeezing machine.
I read a post in /r/relationships today on Reddit by a goyishe woman whose fiance and boyfriend of six years suddenly wants her to convert to Orthodox Judaism before they get married in order to have Jewish Children who are entitled to the Law of Return to Israel. Apparently he was never particularly practicing of Judaism for six years. Never hosted or attended shabbos dinners. Never went to shul. But ever since 10/7 he's become very observant and concerned about the continuation of the Jewish Lineage. So he's given her an ultimatum to convert. I, and many other jews, commented to tell her that Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal movements all accept patrilineal Jews as Jewish so long as they participate in shul/hebrew school and identify as Jewish. The Conservative Movement has a quick and easy way to convert a patrilineal baby to full Jewish. She does not need to do an Orthodox Conversion to have Jewish Children. If her fiance is giving her an ultimatum, the answer should be no. Cut your losses girl and dump him or tell him to cool down and disengage from the news for a while and think this through. The strict fixation on Jewish Blood is an old tradition that just doesn't serve us anymore. Her fiance had some generational trauma triggered by the attacks, by the propaganda saying that it was the most Jews killed since the holocaust. But she shouldn't capitulate to that trauma response. She shouldn't let it determine the course of her life and the life of her children and neither should he.
My bubbe had a lot of trauma from the holocaust. She lived in Maine during the holocaust, but there was distant family who were killed in Lithuania and Minsk. Her boyfriend, my zeyde, enlisted to fight in world war II. She was a teenager, and she was terrified of losing everyone she knew. No matter how many decades passed in America without any signs of there being anything even approaching a holocaust, she always lived in fear of it. She warned me which politicians she thought would be the next Hitler. She told me all about the terror of the Czar and the pogroms her father went through. She had once been an active member of Hadassah, the Zionist women's movement. Her support of Israel was based entirely out of fear. She wanted to believe there could be a single place in the world where Jews would be safe. But she never talked about Israel to me. I think she realized that Israel was not any safer than anywhere else. The world is not safe. My bubbe thought it was wonderful that, due to my Irish side, I "don't look Jewish." She said it would make my life so much easier. That she didn't have to worry about me as much. In her mind, it was still the 1930s. It would always be the 1930s. She died of dementia last year, often asking questions that implied she believed she was a teenager again. That it was the holocaust. That zeyde was off fighting in the war. She could never leave behind the trauma of the 1930s and 40s.
My mother inherited her mother's anxiety. She was terrified of things that made no sense to be terrified of. She never spoke of antisemitism as one of her concerns, but she was afraid of pretty much everything else. She was that hyper-critical overly concerned overbearing Jewish mother that her own mother had been to her. When my dad criticized her for this behavior, she would justify it by saying it's how her own mother was. And clearly, she turned out great.
I inherited my mother's anxiety. I've realized as I've gotten older how often I am a codependent, overbearing, anxious person who struggles to watch other people make minor mistakes without trying to correct them and give them unsolicited advice or even to just do it for them because they clearly can't do it themselves. I fear that people in my life will end up on the street because of some 8-step chain reaction that starts with not wearing proper winter clothing, or not pursuing a stable career path. I fear that my own life will fall apart, which while it is a somewhat precarious life, it is not as precarious as I often think. I optimize everything I do as if a matter of minutes is what will determine everything falling apart.
I have sometimes thought that I want to raise children, but that I shouldn't, because I don't want to become my mother, to become what bubbe was to her, to become what my bubbe's mother was to her. I don't think this is really true though. I don't think it's inevitable that I become a stereotypical Jewish Mother. I don't think we are doomed to pass on generational trauma like a second family heirloom cherished even more than the menorah you see in these pictures.
I think the problem is that too often we have used the family recipe when raising children. We think we have to hand-grate an onion. We think that the tears of our ancestors are, for some reason, an important thing for our children to experience. Why? Why is it important for our children to cry during chanukah. Why is it important for them to risk cutting themselves on the grater and experiencing the sting of getting onion juice in a fresh cut. Why do we think it's important to criticize them for not being careful enough when their blood gets in the onion so we have to start over?
We have food processors now. We don't need to do this. We can change the recipe. We can want what's best for our children without putting them through the same miserable parenting styles we had to experience. We can pass down our heritage and the importance of our history without passing down the traumatic stress of living through that history.
I see so much generational trauma in what drives people to fall for Israeli propaganda. They're terrified. They think about how when nobody would take holocaust refugees, Israel was there to take them in. But holocaust survivors in Israel are living in poverty, and many of those countries turned away refugees intentionally as part of an agreement to get them to move to Israel instead. Germany profited off of basically selling Jews to Israel prior to the Holocaust. Israeli didn't pay for the Jews though, the money came from the refugees themselves. It was this elaborate arrangement where the assets of refugees was seized, used to purchase construction supplies from Germany, and then upon arrival in Israel the remainder would be returned to them, and Israel would receive the construction supplies for building more settlements. Israel has treated holocaust survivors terribly, blaming them for their victimhood, and it never distributed German reparations payments among the survivors, who are among the poorest in Israel. Most Jewish refugees taken in by Israel since the holocaust were as part of population exchange programs (considered a crime against humanity under the UN declaration of human rights) or due to anti-semitism that only arose in response to the Nakba.
Is the existence of Israel really protecting us from another Tree of Life shooting? Support for Israel has become a wedge issue that isolates us from other communities who would stand up for us in solidarity here in the US. It divides more than it unites. And regardless, do you see any pogroms these days? What anti-semitic attacks do happen in the US are small and rare. Culture has by and large moved on from persecuting us. Jews are prospering in the Western World. We do not need an Israel as some sort of blood-soaked comfort blanket to soothe away our fears of another holocaust. If history ever does repeat, if there is recidivism and prominent antisemitism that would truly lead to Jews fleeing countries as refugees, it is not the existence of Israel that would help in that situation. It is internationalist solidarity, solidarity with other communities, that would create safe places for us to be sheltered, that would create allies to defend us. Having the biggest gun only brings more war. Israel is using an old recipe inherited from the British Empire, with a grated onion as an added ingredient. A recipe that made Apartheid South Africa, Jim Crow laws, Nuremberg laws, and casteist India. It's a shit recipe. It results in blood and tears and misery and it doesn't even taste good. American Jews have started treating support for Israel like another family heirloom, and it's just not worth it. We do not need to pass down that which was passed down to us. L'dor v'dor applies to shabbat, not to trauma, not to fear, not to fervent nationalism.
I don't know where I'd store it, but eventually I'm going to get a food processor with a grating attachment. So I can make better, easier, tastier latkes. Grating the onion was a thing we used to do that sucked and isn't necessary anymore—if it ever was. We don't need to keep being afraid all the time. We don't need our ancestral anxiety disorder. We can start a new tradition: healing.
Further reading: I really liked this article from Jewish Currents I read last year called Beyond Grievance that I think is really good.
