Hey Alma Teaches Us the Difference Between Sephardim and Ashkenazim: The White Jewish Supremacy Binary in Action!
David Shasha
Food Keeps Me Connected to My Iraqi-Jewish Heritage
By: Ashley Abed
Ever since I can remember, my Iraqi-Israeli family has gathered on Saturday mornings to eat sabich. While the idea of eating the same meal once a week for virtually my entire life might sound crazy to most, those who’ve tasted the Middle Eastern sandwich know it’s irresistible. To me, the fusion of flavors from the hard-boiled brown eggs, bitter eggplant, citrus-splashed Israeli salad, and zingy amba all packed into a warm pita never gets old. More importantly, it nourishes and reminds me of where I come from, who I am — and where I belong.
I can still smell the memories.
As soon as my parents parked their forest green ‘90s minivan on the side of the street, it was a race between my siblings and me to see who could slide their door fastest and bolt out of the car. Running up the grassy green hill in San Diego, we charged to the finish line of Saba and Safta’s house. The scent of homemade burekas baking in the oven led us straight to the open door, where my grandparents waited for our arrival.
Embraced with arms wide open, we squirmed as the anticipation of taking a bite of the freshly baked burekas could wait no longer. Our little hands reached out at the kitchen table for the crunchy dough pockets filled with warm feta cheese and spinach, or sometimes potato, and shoved them into our mouths. Crumbs of sesame seeds and za’atar inevitably sprinkled like confetti down our shirts with each bite.
Our aunts and uncles soon arrived after us, and as I got older and our family grew, little cousins came along in tow for the main event. Our tribe of almost 20 people gathered outside in the intimate backyard, walking around a table lined with hatzilim (eggplant); beitzim choomim (brown eggs); salat (Israeli salad); hummus; and last, but most importantly amba, the sour and savory flavor bomb made of fermented mangos that to this day I can’t live without. We stuffed our pitas to the brim, indulging in the Iraqi Jewish classic. After, we hung around for hours enjoying each other’s company and the warmth of the sun. Saturday sabich became our family ritual thanks to the cultural traditions Saba and Safta carried along with them from Iraq.
Born in Baghdad, my grandparents lived colorful lives in their home until the environment turned hostile towards its Jewish population. After the State of Israel declared its independence in 1948, antisemitic violence escalated in Iraq, resulting in the prosecution and harassment of Jewish people. Stripped of their rights and opportunities, Jewish businesses were boycotted and Jews were no longer allowed to hold key jobs. Eventually, Saba left for Israel. Soon after, in 1952, once the Iraqi government permitted a mass exodus, Safta followed with the one suitcase she was allowed to carry with her, leaving everything else they owned behind.
They were able to build a new life in Israel, settling into the Ramat Gan neighborhood where my dad was born and raised. It was an area where the beloved cultural traditions of Iraqi Jews could be restored and revived, blossoming into a vibrant community. Customs included gathering for sabich and cooking tbeet (or chashwa as my family calls it): a rice dish stuffed with chicken that is typically prepared overnight for Shabbat. Hoping for better opportunities, Saba and Safta eventually immigrated to the U.S.
Growing up, I was lucky to have them close by for frequent chashwa lunch visits and drop-ins for tea paired with ba’ba ‘btamur — a sweet and savory biscuit filled with gooey dates.
While Saba and Safta’s small yard on a grassy hill was no synagogue, it’s the closest to my Judaism I’ve ever felt. So, when I found out they were moving out, I was devastated. That house held so many of our family’s memories. Would we be able to keep the magic of what we had built there?
Yes, we could — and we did.
Sabich, like me, has evolved over time. In recent years, we’ve gathered at my aunt and uncle’s house on Sunday afternoons, welcoming an addition of friends and new partners excited to share in our special community ritual. While over the years we have faced ebbs and flows of celebrations, like b’nei mitzvahs and immense grief of losing our dear Saba, the essence of the gift of gathering around this meal carries us forward.
On a recent Sunday, after months of physical isolation from my extended family, the aching for sabich was too hard to ignore, so I set out to make it myself. Taking on making Safta’s special bureka recipe was nerve-wracking. Would I be able to do it just like her? But throughout the process of making the dough, rolling it out, smoothing over a lather of butter, repeating the pattern of folding each piece like a letter to create those flaky layers, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful and filled with pride.
As the shapes started forming into pillowy squares, I dusted them with za’atar and sesame seeds knowing they would come out golden. I continued by boiling the eggs, slicing up an eggplant, chopping up cucumbers and tomatoes to swim in a bath of lemon juice, zipping up spicy zhug, setting out my prized jar of liquid-gold amba, and finally, heating up fluffy pita bread.
After taking those first bites, I felt an energy run through my whole body, propelling me to do a happy dance in my kitchen to Eyal Golan’s Mizrahi classic, “Yafa Sheli.” It was a beautiful and empowering moment. Listening to my boyfriend (who is not Jewish but does happen to be a mensch) talk about the meal we just enjoyed — casually referencing za’atar and amba as if they have been words in his vocabulary all his life — made my heart swell. I locked eyes with my sister who smiled back at me, acknowledging how special it is to feel seen through this unique connection to who I am. I’m excited to keep exploring Jewish traditions with him, and eager to see how we will incorporate these cherished rituals into our own family one day.
Connecting to my Jewish identity has always been through food. It’s at the heart of my family table. Now, I have taken these beloved recipes that have shaped me into my own hands, in my own kitchen. Whether it’s making sabich, Ashkenazi pierogis, or Moroccan fish, I hope you find inspiration to explore your connection one bite at a time.
Ashley Abed (she/her) is a California-based creative storyteller with a deep love for exploring culture, food, travel, and music. She holds a degree in Mass Communication, with a career spanning work as a publicist for prominent culinary, wine and spirits brands, and Managing Director for a local nonprofit. She spends her time reading, singing show tunes while cooking, and connecting with family in community.
From Hey Alma, February 23, 2021
My Grandmother's Memoirs Reveal a Jewish New York I Still Recognize
By: Nabil Ayers
I was fortunate to know my grandmother well into my adult life, but I spent the most time with her as a child in the ‘70s, when my mother often brought me from New York City to visit my grandparents in Levittown, Long Island. To my mother, the journey was a schlep. But I loved everything about it: the bustle of Penn Station, where blurs of adults dodged one another as if by complete luck in a chaotic dance to make their train; the Long Island Railroad’s plush seats, which had more room and privacy than the subway rides I knew.
When we arrived at my grandparents’ house, my grandmother looked at me like I was a gift she couldn’t believe had actually appeared. Her eyes lit up and she extended both arms, exposing a different colorful neckerchief each time. Her black bob of hair waved gently as jazz played in the background. She’d greet me with a warm kiss on the cheek that felt like time froze for two full seconds. Then she’d launch into a story.
“You know, Grandpa Joe…” I sat in awe, waiting for another story about my great-grandfather. “When he wanted to go to a nice restaurant he’d just call up the manager and say, ‘I’m planning a big party and I’d like to come try your restaurant.’ Or he’d say, ‘I’m a restaurant critic and I’d like to come try your restaurant.’” Grandma beamed as I giggled. She was proud of her father’s hustles and more proud that her only grandchild found her stories so entertaining.
When she died in 2009, she took those stories with her. But recently, my mother discovered a stack of Grandma’s written stories. They’ve opened a new window into her life — and highlighted similarities between us I’d never understood before.
One story delves into Grandma’s childhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn — a short walk from where I live now, full of street names I know well. She describes her upbringing as “very lower middle-class, very Jewish.” Her crash course in Yiddish and Jewish culture runs from the most familiar — mosol means luck, tante means aunt — to lesser-known traditions like the naming of children after a deceased loved one, a tradition held so strictly in her mother’s family that she had 16 cousins with the same first name.
Grandma generously assumes the reader won’t know her vernacular, suggesting that her stories were intended for a wider audience. She explains the “Rag Jungle,” the dress industry on Seventh Avenue where her relatives proudly worked among what was “possibly the largest population of Jews anywhere in the world.” Grandma describes in gut-busting detail Mrs. Gold and “the problems accompanying the selection of proper husbands” for her five marriageable daughters.
Another story describes the “hoods, kooks, savory and unsavory characters” who moved into her family’s home in the late 1930s, when, out of financial necessity, they took in boarders. Grandma writes of her mother, my great-grandmother: “Long before Martin Luther King was even born or Gandhi taken seriously in this country, she (and others of her breed) had discovered the value of non-violence, passive resistance, and above all else, love in overcoming opposition and convincing others of her point of view.” I’d known little about my great-grandmother, but I now wish that I could have met her
My grandmother never published her writing and I’m not aware of anyone outside our immediate family who’s been lucky enough to read it. My mother only found nine stories and I’m dying to know if there are more. Each is written with a confidence and an elegance that suggests she’d been writing for years. I want to sit with my grandmother and hear in her voice what Crown Heights was like 100 years ago, and to contemplate how different it must have been… and also how similar. Today, though cars and cell phones denote an obvious shift in time, the grand throughfare of Eastern Parkway appears strikingly similar to how it looked when my grandmother walked its picturesque treelined paths.
The most powerful scene my grandmother describes is the 90-minute trolley trek over the Williamsburg Bridge back to Crown Heights after visiting a relative on the Lower East Side nearly a century ago:
Crossing the bridge, viewing the distant skyline with a mist or fog swirling about it, or watching a sleet storm whirl down the East River from the window of an antique old trolley wheezing across the bridge. If you have “made that scene” as I had, dozens of times, half of them after midnight on cold nights just to keep your mother company while she visited an ancient relative, then you have paid your dues. Your mother knew the true depth of your love.
The last trolley crossed the Williamsburg Bridge decades before I was born, but I’ve crossed it on foot dozens of times, sometimes imagining what the view was like before powerful yachts and jet skis dotted the East River, before people considered protecting their heads with bike helmets, before pedestrians tuned out with headphones and earbuds.
Grandma’s stories reflect a happy person who was always paying attention — hyper aware of the people and the things that surrounded her, obsessed with the tumultuous and often hilarious environment in which she existed, and steadfastly rooted in the influence of her Jewish family and friends. My grandmother was the first person in her family to attend college, graduating from Brooklyn College and then marrying my grandfather in 1947 when she was 24 — the same year she earned her Master’s degree from Boston University. Two years later she had my mother, my uncle two years after that. Then she got sick with multiple sclerosis. I can’t help but wonder if her illness was the reason she stopped writing — if she stopped writing
These days, I receive a few emails from my mother each week describing an observation at the grocery store, or ruminating on a short conversation with a stranger on the subway. Now, after reading my grandmother’s stories, I know where my mother got it — her ability to see a story in every interaction. There’s a line that runs from my grandmother to my mother to me, a connectivity that spans generations: the appreciation of an unusual moment, the desire to connect, if only for an instant, and the need to capture it on a page.
“Are you old enough to be one of the Real People?” my grandmother asserts on one neatly-typed page. “The People with Memories? I don’t mean by that the people who have almost total recall, but the people who have Things Worth Recalling.
When I read Grandma’s stories now, I can hear her sturdy voice as she recounts in vivid detail her memories of New York in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s — in some ways, very like the New York I still inhabit and love. The capitalization of certain words and phrases is artistic and full of bluster. She wrote because her life was full of Things Worth Recalling.
Nabil Ayers (he/him) is a Brooklyn-based writer who has been published in the New York Times, NPR, Pitchfork and is currently working on his memoir for Viking Books. He is also the US Head of the record label 4AD.
From Hey Alma, February 23, 2021