If you want to make a sports fan happy, give them a deep dive into a goofy pool. To wit: Ben Dowsett going nearly 5,000 words on the jump ball, that contested toss that has started every game of basketball since 1891. Micro-analyzing the tradecraft used by both referees and players, Dowsett crams the piece with GIFs and videos aplenty to illustrate why it takes more than height to win the tip.
Every ref develops their own nuanced style. Crawford had a method of moving his head side to side, ostensibly checking all 10 players, before suddenly tossing the ball up with two hands. Rush would talk to the jumpers, then toss mid-sentence to surprise them; Javie and current NBA ref czar Monty McCutchen would also bounce the ball while talking, randomizing their bounce height and the number of bounces to keep players guessing.
Vaden would wait until both jumpers were set, then rock forward on his feet as if to throw the ball—typically fooling both players and getting them on their toes. “As soon as they both rocked back and got low, I would throw it,” Vaden says. Zach Zarba, one of today’s elite NBA officials, who has called several consecutive Finals, uses a similar extra pause.
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“Does beauty even have a place in a society at war?” For many women in Ukraine, the answer is yes. In this story for Allure, Sophia Panych highlights the beauty salons that have persevered over the last two years—many of which have moved into underground basements that double as shelters—and writes an inspiring piece about courage, community, and resistance in a time of war.
“An air alert is sounded when airplanes with possible weapons take off somewhere in Russia; an air alert doesn’t scare anyone anymore,” explains Borodina. It’s at this point that some Ukrainians who find themselves in public spaces go through a series of calculations, not all of which are based in fact or official protocols, attempting to rationalize the risk. “When a missile launch is recorded, you receive an air-raid alert on your phone, but even then Ukrainians don’t immediately seek shelter,” Borodina continues. “You have to find out where the launches are coming from. If it is the Caspian Sea, we know it will take about 50 minutes to fly to Kyiv. So I have the opportunity to finish this Zoom, finish my manicure, and then, in 30 minutes, if [the missile is] suddenly directed to Kyiv or if it doesn’t get shot down, I move.”
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• A front-row seat to the US immigration crisis
• A thoughtful, warts-and-all profile of a civil rights icon
• A rare look inside a nuclear submarine
• A new way to cope with frightening change
• A conservative fever dream dressed up as summer school
Eli Saslow | The New York Times | February 18, 2024 | 4,159 words
In December, Tucson’s Border Patrol saw nearly 20,000 migrants each week, marking a 300 percent surge from the previous year. Just south, near the US-Mexico border, lies Chilton Ranch: a sprawling expanse of 50,000 cattle-grazing acres in the Arizona desert owned by the same family for four generations and currently managed by Jim and Sue, a couple in their 80s. Five-and-a-half miles of their ranch run along the border wall. Here, footprints in the dirt reveal tales of survival and desperation. Accompanied by Erin Schaff’s emotive photography, Eli Maslow’s dispatch from this family ranch is masterfully reported, showing what its owners and cowboys encounter each day and night: Young children screaming for help, or arriving at their doorstep, their parents dead. Guides paid by the Sinaloa cartel, leading people through one of numerous gaps in the wall. Women who’ve been assaulted, mistaking their home for a Border Patrol station. A pregnant Sudanese woman, possibly in labor, exposed to the cold on a 36-degree night. Migrants, from all over the world, caught on camera footage traversing some of the 150 smuggling trails on the property. As many as 250 people a day wander onto their ranch from remote entry points—a microcosm of a nation facing an immigration crisis and humanitarian disaster—and the Chiltons are in the midst of it all. While Maslow paints a dismal bigger picture, the ordinary individuals in this story show compassion, even in the threat of their own safety and security. Many pieces on immigration feel abstract, impersonal; this is quite the opposite. —CLR
Mitchell S. Jackson | Esquire | February 21, 2024 | 9,471 words
Evolution never happens in a vacuum. At its grandest scale, it’s a response to a complex web of environmental and internal stimuli. At the humbler scale of a single human being over the course of their life, it’s . . . well, it’s pretty much the same. Take Al Sharpton. The child preacher turned activist that many of us first met in the ’80s—he of the tracksuits and the press conferences—seems far different than the Al Sharpton of today, an eminence grise of the civil rights movement. But how much of that is a change in the man himself, and how much is the context that has accumulated around him? Mitchell S. Jackson never comes out and asks that question directly, but his long, fascinating profile of Sharpton teases out an answer nonetheless. Over the course of a summer, Jackson spends untold hours with Sharpton, and unspools those hours in a recursive series of vignettes, each one taking the measure of the man in a new and surprising way. One of Jackson’s many writerly gifts is that he’s always present in a piece, but never overwhelms it; here that makes him crucial to the profile’s warts-and-all approach. Yes, he contends, the Tawana Brawley debacle remains a blemish. Yes, the Sharpton of long ago maybe had a kiss of hucksterism. Also, though: yes, Sharpton changed irrevocably at a certain point. And yes, the affectations that might have arched your eyebrow have stories behind them, and those stories might just change your mind the way they changed Jackson’s. Al Sharpton has given no shortage of time to reporters over the years, and this profile doubtless serves him the way they all have. But in taking stock of the man’s evolution, and how that has ultimately determined his larger impact, it might also be the truest, fullest profile of them all. —PR
Adam Ciralsky | Vanity Fair | February 15, 2024 | 6,598 words
I can’t even imagine the amount of paperwork necessary for Adam Ciralsky and photographer Philip Montgomery to spend time on the USSWyoming, one of the nation’s 14 submarines carrying nuclear weapons. As Ciralsky writes, “The number of civilians who had been given this level of access was roughly the same as that who have walked on the moon.” Our intrinsic voyeurism means weapons of mass destruction hold a morbid fascination, and Ciralsky builds on this with descriptions that imply dark deeds and espionage—boarding the submarine on a stormy night amid high Atlantic seas. It all feels very Cold War. However, the people he then meets break character, coming across as pleasant, even humorous (and in some cases, very young). But a steely resolve is also apparent. Chilling lines in this piece emphasize the dark times we are in. Off the submarine, Ciralsky meets experts such as navy captain Dan Packer, who reminds him, “2027 is the year Xi Jinping said they need to be ready to go to war,” and General Anthony Cotton, the head of US Strategic Command, who alludes to other threats from Russia, North Korea, Iran, and armed groups like the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. These submarines are powerful chess pieces on this tense global stage. In position, ready to move. They are designed as a deterrent, but the chess masters are still poised to play: “If you ever wonder if people would be ready to employ these weapons, the answer is yes,” Ciralsky is told. Perhaps the reason a Vanity Fair reporter was allowed access to the Wyoming—and to literally sleep next to Trident missiles—is just another move in the game. —CW
Heidi Lasher | Orion Magazine | February 13, 2024 | 3,346 words
My favorite uncle was diagnosed with dementia three years ago. His decline has been rapid: he went from someone who joked nonstop to being nearly incapable of speech. When I see him, I witness his ever-narrowing new normal. I remember the man who lived with us at various points in my life, the swimming outings, the movies we watched together, how he made me soup after his overnight shift when I left school sick. In this thoughtful essay at Orion, Heidi Lasher considers the concept of shifting baselines in relation to her father’s dementia. “Shifting baselines is the idea that each successive generation will accept as ‘normal’ an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a healthy ecology looks and feels like,” she writes. In mulling our mutable climate, raising kids, and her parents’ declining health, she urges us to be present and to remember in the face of chaotic and frightening transition: “Social researcher Phoebe Hamilton Jones says the antidote to shifting baselines is found in our ability to pay attention and to call forth what once was.” We are not powerless in the face of change, Lasher reminds us. You can mourn what you had or cherish it—the choice is yours. —KS
Noah Rawlings | The New Inquiry | February 19, 2024 | 6,839 words
If you’re not addicted to media discourse, I envy you. I also realize you might need some background before diving into this pick, so here goes: a couple of years ago, a collection of reactionary academics and journalists, hysterical about the purported “wokeness” of US higher education, decided to start their own university. It’s called the University of Austin, but it’s actually in Dallas, in an office complex owned by Harlan Crow, billionaire BFF and patron of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. UATX’s figurehead is ex-New York Times staffer Bari Weiss, who also runs The Free Press (“For Free People”), an online outlet that spends an inordinate amount of time clutching pearls about gender-affirming care for trans children. Many of UATX’s faculty and fellows have expressed support for Israel’s continuing bombardment of Gaza; at least one has couched the genocide as a matter of good versus evil. So. In this essay, which is as hilarious as it is rage-inducing, Noah Rawlings describes attending UATX’s “Forbidden Courses” summer program, which it launched in advance of actually enrolling students. Better Rawlings than I, because I would have lost my damn mind. Not when founding faculty member Peter Boghossian, who once accused his former employer, Portland State University, of being a “Social Justice factory” (quelle horreur) said he’s so good at jiu-jitsu that he could murder everyone on a bus carrying participants to the program’s commencement dinner. Not when Joe Lonsdale, who helped found Palantir, told students that the rise of AI would let humans do “more natural things” with their lives. Not when Weiss, when asked by a student why there aren’t any left-of-center faculty at a school that supposedly prides itself on illuminating truth through dialogue, suggested the left is just less interested in debate. No, I think I would have lost it when someone (Rawlings doesn’t say who) uttered the following: “If Simone de Beauvoir were alive right now, she would be very popular, like Jordan Peterson.” —SD
Audience Award
What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?
Sarah Scoles | Undark | January 22, 2024 | 3,875 words
Ever lost your way in the wilderness? In 2021, nearly 3,400 people got lost in a US national park. In the 2000s, a researcher named Robert Koester gathered and analyzed data on the behaviors of different types of people, from children to experienced hikers, who’ve wandered and gotten lost in the wild. In what direction do they go? How do geographic features and different terrains influence their movements? In this piece for Undark, Sarah Scoles reports on the growing science of “lost person behavior,” which in turn can inform the strategies of search-and-rescue missions. —CLR
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Magazines have been writing about Al Sharpton for damn near 40 years. But the Al Sharpton of now is not the Al Sharpton of then, and Mitchell Jackson’s profile gets its arms around the civil rights activist with such totality that it’s hard to imagine anything short of a book-length biography could match it. It’s not the last word on a complicated man, but it’s perhaps the best.
What if Sharpton’s ultimate legacy is not some omnibus writ that the ill-intentioned—looking at you, SCOTUS—will work lifetimes to dismantle but his indefatigable insistence (he logs a staggering 250,000 to 300,000 air miles per year) on the overtruth that there never has been nor will be a post-racial America, least of all in the city that is its locus of power. It’s not the bright, tangible achievements of his forebears but the difficult, often fallible work of steadying a light that won’t let you look away.
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Change—sometimes good, sometimes frightening—is inevitable, but according to Heidi Lasher, we need not feel powerless in the face of it. The antidote, she suggests, is simply to remember.
SHIFTING BASELINES is the idea that each successive generation will accept as “normal” an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a healthy ecology looks and feels like. Absent any personal or societal accounting of migrating butterflies, winter snowfall, or spawning salmon, future generations will have tolerated so many small losses in population, abundance, and habitat that eventually they won’t know what they’re missing. Worse, they may not even care.
SOCIAL RESEARCHER Phoebe Hamilton Jones says the antidote to shifting baselines is found in our ability to pay attention and to call forth what once was. “Knowing the names of flora and fauna,” she says, “allows us to counter shifting baseline syndrome.” I imagine walking around in my backyard like a schoolteacher taking the daily roll call. Ponderosa pine? Here. Box elder bug? Here. American goldfinch? Here. Calling beings by their names builds familiarity and affinity, helps us notice subtle changes in health, lifestyle, or habitat, that we might wonder aloud about their well-being and mark their absences.
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Twenty-six years ago, Barton McNeil called 911 to report that his three-year-old daughter had died in the night. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to any parent. Then a new nightmare began. Matthew Bremner tells the harrowing story through a personal lens:
On Christmas Eve 2022, my three-year-old tried to pick up his baby brother and accidentally dropped him. On the way to the hospital, our baby was peaceful. His tiny hand locked around my pinky as he peered out the window at the orange blur of the streetlights in the nighttime drizzle. I felt guilty for a thousand things: for not intervening sooner, for not turning around a second earlier. It wasn’t my older son’s fault; it was mine. Normalcy was so fragile—one minute, things were fine, then they weren’t. Harmony and horror seemed divided by nothing more than an instant. I felt I’d failed to protect my baby in that instant.
Over the hacking coughs and squeak of rubber soles in the ER, the doctor told us he probably had a fractured skull. Results of a CAT scan would tell us if he had internal bleeding. I prepared for a tomorrow in which I loathed myself forever.
But somehow, he was fine. I’d narrowly missed what I supposed was the worst thing that can happen to a person. He would need to be monitored for a while, but my relief was immediate. I burst into tears. I’d never cried like that before.
A day later, crammed into a chair beside my son’s hospital bed, amid the click and drip of hospital machinery, the submarine pulses, I remembered a story I’d heard about a father in Illinois who’d spent the last quarter century in prison for the murder of his three-year-old daughter. He claimed he was innocent.
I’d heard it maybe a month before, but the man’s story came back to me now, as my son slept beside me, still wrapped in a tangle of tubes as I contemplated what nearly happened to him, to me.
If what I’d read was true and Barton McNeil was innocent of killing his daughter, then it occurred to me that I’d been wrong the night before. Losing a child was not the worst thing that could happen to a person: Being unjustly locked up for it was.
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Jim and Sue Chilton, a couple in their 80s, own tens of thousands of grazing acres in Arizona along the U.S.-Mexico border—an area three times the size of Manhattan that has become one of the busiest corridors for illegal border crossings. In this well-reported story, Eli Saslow shows what day-to-day life is like for the couple and their cowboys on Chilton Ranch.
The Chiltons had always had some immigrants traveling through the property, but recently Border Patrol agents estimated that as many as 250 people each day were arriving on the remote corners of the ranch after being led across the border by paid guides working on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel.
He turned onto a rugged road that paralleled the border wall and drove for a few more miles, until he saw a campfire burning in the distance. “Nobody should be out here,” he said. He was on the most remote corner of one of the most remote ranches in America, but as he drove closer, he counted more than 45 people sitting near the fire. Children shouted in French. A woman prayed in Arabic.
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Jordan P. Hickey | Longreads | February 22, 2024 | 3,939 words (14 minutes)
In spite of our political circumstances and global dispersion, what ties all Palestinian tables together is more than just good food; it is the notion of “home,” the spirit of generosity, the importance of family, and the value of bringing people together.
Reem Kassis, The Palestinian Table
In a large skillet, heat one tablespoon of olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the diced onion and salt and sauté for two to three minutes. Next, add garlic. Cook for two minutes. Add cumin, smoked paprika, chili flakes, cayenne pepper, and tomato paste, and sauté for two more minutes. Add the remaining tablespoon of olive oil. That’s the start.
These are the steps, the motions, that send flickering lights down a long hallway of memories—the many hands that have made this family dish, the many kitchens where Amanda Arafat has seen shakshuka prepared. The bloom of spices sends the lighter parts of her consciousness to these tender moments of the past, connecting generations in the way that only this combination can.
But it’s different this time.
This time, it’s a class. A brightly lit storefront with floor-to-ceiling windows facing a darkened street. Students in matching aprons. Ingredients pre-measured and sorted on trays. Stapled recipe printouts. Flat-screen televisions mounted on both sides of the long rectangle of a store-slash-teaching kitchen. As Amanda prods the spice mixture through the sizzling oil, a camera pointed at the stovetop broadcasts the image onto the screens, and the students at that night’s Middle Eastern breakfast class all watch, take mental notes, and wait for their chance to do the same.
Amanda effortlessly dices red bell pepper and tomato and adds them to the pan. Cranking up the gas burner, she stirs vigorously. The red mound deepens in color and releases its moisture. This posh setting in Northwest Arkansas feels worlds away from Gaza, from Cairo, from Tennessee, from Utah—places where she has connected with food and family. But these familiar steps and motions stir memories within her. Like how she and her siblings were often roused from their dreams on weekend mornings by the sound of garlic being pummeled in a mortar and pestle, or the whine of chickpeas passing through a meat grinder to become falafel. Or how nestling eggs in the sauce conjures her grandfather chastising his grandchildren “gently enough” for breaking etiquette and eating from the middle of the pan, rather than the sides. Gradually, these other kitchens take shape; the intimacy and warmth of past meals settles over the moment. In tonight’s class, however, there’s no talk about the present, and of all the people Amanda loves who populate her stories.
This is a story about what food can and can’t do; what it says and leaves unsaid. It’s also a story about the people who make it—who pour themselves into whatever dish, platter, tureen, or well-loved copper pot on the table before them. If you were to describe Amanda Arafat, it could be a simple sketch to start: she is a 29-year-old cottage baker, chef, educator, and community organizer living in Northwest Arkansas, whose one-woman business, Amanda Makes, has increasingly come to focus on Palestinian baked goods. Oftentimes, these are traditional items—flaky baklava, spongy basbousa, elongated ovals of ka’ak al-Quds—though she also experiments, transforming baklava into pistachio-topped cookies and marshmallows. She is also the co-founder of The Big Gay Market, started in June 2021 in response to anti-transgender legislation in Arkansas. Amanda is one of six children, three girls and three boys, born to a Palestinian father and a white American mother. Her father’s family has run a bakery in Palestine for over a century: Helwyat Arafat, which translates to Arafat Sweets.
Naturally, there are more details, many of them food-related, like how two-thirds of her six cats have food-inspired names—Miso, Tofu, Dumpling, Kewpie—and that an apricot tattoo just below her right elbow, next to a kitchen knife, is a memorial for another. Or that she knew, early on, that as a woman she’d never be able to work in her family’s bakery. Or that it took a long time before she felt comfortable embracing the baked goods from her home country—and by extension, her identity as a Palestinian. Together, these details come together to form the semblance of a portrait, one that feels like a stubbornly incomplete recipe.
By their nature, farmers’ markets are good places for stories. Who better to tell the story of a slightly lopsided head of lettuce, a jar of pickled jalapeños, or the light char on a sourdough loaf than the person who created it? At the Bentonville Farmers Market, on any given Saturday from April through October, there are 100-odd such vendors selling granola, biscuits, jams, jellies, gourmet dog treats, denim harnesses, Slavic heritage sourdough, apples, rag quilts, hand-dipped candles, and handmade fusilli. But none of them have stories quite like Amanda.
One morning last fall, a young white couple approached Amanda’s table, which was covered with a purple tablecloth rippling in the wind. Amanda, dressed in a large puffer jacket, welcomed them.
“So, how did you come to this?” they asked, gesturing to the za’atar focaccia, the baklava marshmallows, and the basbousa cake topped with simple syrup and almonds.
The wind threatened to scatter the white clamshell to-go containers on the table. Amanda told them her story as well as anyone else who asked.
“Just consuming it as part of my daily life,” Amanda replied. “My family actually owns a bakery in Palestine.”
In most tellings, the high points of the narrative were mostly unchanged. How she’d been born in Gaza City and lived there until she was 3; spent some of her childhood in Utah, where her mother is from; and then moved to Egypt just before she turned 9, where she then lived until she was 20. How everything she made was either directly lifted from the Palestinian culinary tradition or adapted with her own spin. If you were listening close enough, you’d realize what she told people wasn’t always the same. Children got a slightly abridged story about the bakery that her dad’s family had operated in the Palestinian city of Nablus since her great-grandfather, Ahmed, opened it in 1912. A woman, recently relocated to Northwest Arkansas from Massachusetts but whose family has roots in Syria, heard a more in-depth account; the women exchanged notes on their grandmothers’ marathon cooking sessions and the finer points of kibbeh. Another white couple, who asked what Amanda would recommend for an “an adventurous mother-in-law,” just heard the basics.
This is a story about what food can and can’t do; what it says and leaves unsaid.
But regardless of the version, she didn’t talk about what had been happening in Palestine. Maybe market-goers hadn’t been watching the news and it didn’t come up in conversation, or they sensed that the market wasn’t the best setting to talk global geopolitics.
Consequently, there was some information that she didn’t volunteer.
She didn’t tell her customers that, the day before, when she was cutting parsley for an herb and cheese focaccia, she had to pause to stop tears from falling into the parsley. How the half-cut stems and greens transported her to a kitchen in Gaza City’s al-Rimal neighborhood, nearly 10 years before, when her grandmother showed her how to make rice and parsley soup.
She didn’t say she wasn’t sure if that kitchen still existed, because for the past week, since October 7, everything had been rendered uncertain. That multi-story building, the family’s longtime apartment complex, had been targeted for airstrikes by Israeli forces twice within a few days. Much of her extended family, along with her younger brother, Ahmed, and his wife and two young children, had all fled that building.
As she spoke to people who stopped by her booth, sharing some things but not everything, a little boy dressed as Spider-Man approached. Leaning over the spread, he asked Amanda a series of questions: Why did she make the basbousa? Why did she use yogurt in it? Why did her dad use yogurt? Why did he bake? Why did she?
“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” she told him.
There were more to her words than what she said.
When Amanda was 8, she noticed that her friends’ families had a different approach to food. Other kids, she came to learn, did not wake up on Saturday mornings to the aroma of spent oil slowly perfuming the house. Their families did not favor the grocery store over the cinema; they did not structure family vacations around visits to local markets. And none of her friends’ fathers or uncles had lost bits of fingers to industrial mixers at the family bakery. It was like everyone in her family had food as a hobby—but they didn’t call it that. It was simply a part of who they were.
Amanda came to understand a greater significance to the meals than what appeared on her plate. They existed because she existed, and because her family existed. In every peaceful morning disrupted by the meat grinder and every lost bit of finger, there was dedication to tradition. A commitment, a precision she’s carried on as an adult—like coaxing recipe details from her dad’s memory, often via drawn-out text exchanges about how much salt, exactly, is in a “spoon.” That tradition is why she’s able to stand before a group of students and explain that there’s more on the plate than what meets the eye.
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It took longer for her to understand what it means to be Palestinian. Those lessons, too, had gone unspoken. There were no books on Palestine in Amanda’s house. Her parents never sat her down and told her, “In 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were violently forced off their land. This was called the Nakba, and this is what it meant to our family, and this is what it means now.” They never said, “We tried to move to Gaza, but the violence on the border has taken a turn for the worse, so we’re going to live in Cairo now.” Instead, these moments often arrived with brutal, concussive force, like when she was 9, not long after the family had moved to Egypt. Her family was at a friend’s home for a meal, and her dad had gone to the neighborhood mosque for the midday prayer. When he came back, he seemed shaken. His brother, he told the family, had been killed. While coming home from Friday prayer, his bus had been struck by an Israeli missile.
There were times growing up, she says, when she made a point of not sharing much about her Palestinian roots. She says of her family, “We’ve definitely all had experiences where we almost wish someone didn’t find out we were Palestinian. Like we almost wish they never knew.” She was never a “self-loathing Arab,” but she was careful when and with whom she shared her heritage, fearing that it might be “the wrong can of worms for a person” and would make them think about her differently. Because being Palestinian was about so much more than the stories dominating their feeds.
As her students try their hand at shakshuka, Amanda smiles and moves from station to station, complimenting and making gentle corrections, though she was unsure about teaching a class to two dozen students. Although she’d planned the Middle Eastern breakfast menu months in advance, she couldn’t have imagined that it’d be under the pall of the past 10 days. She wondered if she’d be able to force the words out, or whether they’d come too fast and unfiltered—a frustrated outburst landing heavy on the ears of students who came to learn how to make dishes that were likely foreign to them.
But as class goes on, she finds her flow; she’s grateful to be in this space. Unlike other times, like in her Asian seafood fusion class where she makes sure to add the right amount of this or that, here it feels natural. Like she’s back in her family’s kitchen in Gaza, cooking with her grandmother.
Perhaps by being here, by teaching her students how to nestle eggs into the tomato mixture, she’ll inspire them to look beyond the pan to the broader significance of garlic and spices sizzling on the flame. Perhaps they’ll realize she is from that distant place appearing in the news and they’ll remember that this food is Palestinian, not Israeli, and that someday they will be receptive to other stories that may not be as easy to hear as the endearing ones from her childhood.
But tonight, she doesn’t tell those stories.
A few weeks later, Amanda posts a video to Instagram of two children in a refugee camp, making shakshuka over an open flame as they kneel in the dirt.
“[A] few weeks ago,” she writes in the post, “i taught shakshuka to a well-lit, air conditioned room of well-groomed people who got to go home and enjoy their leftovers, folks who will never face this kind of reality in their whole lives. and here’s a boy in a refugee camp on the very same land i was born in making that same dish over a cinder block stove in open air. i can’t not think of the dichotomy. i can’t not stare at it. i hope you can also face it if you’ve taken any of my classes.”
Because Amanda’s family is a food family, you must imagine them around a table. If everyone in her extended family sat down for dinner, the table would circle around corners and slink down stairs. But there is no table, though in this digital age, her family’s text thread is a decent proxy. Through this channel, they communicate with one another, and it’s common for them to share pictures of elaborate dishes and full spreads spanning a dining table, lit and photographed from multiple angles. Messages come in a rush of many voices, languages mixed seamlessly, Arabic spelled out phonetically.
But all that changed last October. Of the 47 people on the text thread, scattered from Japan to Belgium to Arkansas, almost a quarter of the family remains in Gaza at the time of this writing. In this channel, family members write when they can, if they can, when the connection holds long enough to send a brief missive: this is how we are, this is how we are doing. In this digital vestibule, the rest of the family waits with bated breath, because they know that if there’s news—any update at all—they’ll hear it here first. It is a space they hoped would never be a place for last words, but the words are chosen as if they could be. They write that they never meant any harm they may have caused; they tell their family that they love them.
And while these aren’t the most complex dishes to grace the text thread, they are the most remarkable, the most joyful, because they are the most improbable.
There is still food, but these days, its presence is less about abundance and more about survival. There is a stark difference between who sends photos and who does not. Family members outside Gaza, presumably eating well and able to walk to the grocery store whenever the notion enters their mind, aren’t sharing photos. The food posted to the text thread isn’t elaborate, dressed up, or spread across a table. It’s food cooked in an improvised oven made of mud, decorated with seashells. Bread made from 50-kilo bags of flour discovered at the family bakery. Fried fish. Pizza. And while these aren’t the most complex dishes to grace the text thread, they are the most remarkable, the most joyful, because they are the most improbable. They’re celebrated not because they’re beautiful, but because it means the family ate well that day—because they made something out of nothing.
If everything you know is passed through word of mouth and from generation to generation—if the land and olive trees are gone, and the places that birthed recipes and stories are gone—stories are all that’s left. Maybe that’s the reason why, on a morning in early November, Amanda walks to the front of a crowd on the campus of the University of Arkansas and says everything she needs to say. She tells them about her uncle, Amjad, who was killed; her uncle’s youngest daughter, Hala, 5 years old, who was killed the following year; how the IDF raided her parents’ home when her mother was pregnant with her; and how her brother is still there, unable to provide his children with food, water, and medication. She tells the near-silent crowd everything that her family has suffered simply because they are Palestinians. She leaves nothing unsaid.
Amanda’s brother, Ahmed, escapes from Gaza. He and his wife and children are in Egypt, safe for now. One day in late November, they are able to speak. It’d been nearly two months since she’d seen her brother’s face. For much of that period, she’d only gotten snippets in the family text thread about how he and his family were faring. On a video call, he tells their story; they talk for five hours.
Before getting on the call, she texted him to ask whether he felt relief to be out of Gaza, but he said it’s not like that. That in leaving Gaza, he’d left everything—their family, his job, the life that he and his wife worked so hard to build. He’d also left the bakery. But when they’re face to face, looking at each other on-screen, they don’t just talk about this. They also talk about pistachios. She tells him that she’s grinding pistachios for baklava cookies that she’ll sell at a market tomorrow. He tells her that she ought to grind them to 80 percent, not 100. She says that, well, they’re her cookies. He tells her that the bakery gets pistachios in such great quantities from their suppliers that they’ve got to be careful about broken shells. She tells him that she’s not on that level of production. He tells her about the work that he’s been doing with halawet el jibn, a Syrian dessert made of sweet cheese you don’t often see in Middle Eastern bakeries these days.
If everything you know is passed through word of mouth and from generation to generation—if the land and olive trees are gone, and the places that birthed recipes and stories are gone—stories are all that’s left.
She remembers a younger version of her brother: A co-conspirator and confidant in pilfering ice cream and leftover bamieh, a tomatoey okra stew, from the family’s refrigerator. A little boy whose misadventures in the kitchen left a trail of scorched pots and pans rendered nearly unusable. How remarkable, she thinks, that the boy who once couldn’t cook a thing has become this young man, this “MVP” as she calls him, at the family bakery. She looks into his eyes and sees someone who has come into his own in so many different ways. Maybe, one day, hopefully, they’ll be able to work in the bakery together—established gender roles be damned—because she knows that she wants this knowledge. Who knows how much more Palestinian culture there will be for her to absorb in her lifetime?
It’s November 25. The Big Holigay Market is in full swing. Amanda stands behind her table. The day feels ordinary, but it’s not.
Amanda smiles at people walking by. But there’s a chasm between this moment and what’s happening on the other side of the world. As she chats with people about her baklava cookies and ka’ak al-Quds, or Jerusalem bagels, she can’t stop thinking about her brother, who is racing to secure emergency passports for his wife and children, to find an immigration lawyer for his wife, and to track down diapers and other necessities. Egypt offers no reprieve; there’s a good chance that they may never be able to return home, that they may never see their families again.
It’s hard to put on a smile sometimes. There are days when she makes traditional Palestinian meals, and there are days at home when everything seems to come out of a to-go container. There are days when she reads everything, feelseverything, and then there are days when all she wants to read are books like Eat Your Heart Out, a YA thriller about zombies, the horrors of which are a welcome distraction from her own.
What’s made it easier, however, are the people around her.
This very market, created by Amanda and a friend, Grayce Wylder, started off in 2021 as a backyard baked goods and art sale for LGBTQ vendors, but quickly flourished into something that Amanda says she hadn’t set out to make: a community that has embraced not just her queerness, or her Arab-ness, but her whole self. In this space, she can say what she wants to say, she can bake what she wants to bake. She can be herself without feeling like she needs to prove anything to anyone. And she can connect to her identity through food.
It took a long time before she felt comfortable embracing the baked goods from her home country—and by extension, her identity as a Palestinian.
“I have a right to be proud of it,” Amanda says. “When I sit down and critically think about my experiences in the Middle East, and all of the beauty of it, I’m angry at myself for denying that to myself for a few years.”
Later that day, a middle-aged white woman approaches the table. “I recognize you from my classes!” Amanda exclaims. The woman, Rebecca, had taken Amanda’s Asian seafood fusion class, and her twin daughters also attended the Middle Eastern breakfast class. They chat about the classes, about the market. About Amanda’s miso chocolate chip cookies and ka’ak al-Quds. About za’atar: “I actually got it from Nablus,” Amanda tells her. ”The quality is incredible when you get it from the source.”
Rebecca tells Amanda that she had started to follow her on Instagram. She reads Amanda’s posts on Palestine, her family’s trauma, the marches, demonstrations, and speeches. Even if she doesn’t always comment, Rebecca tells Amanda that she supports and sends love to her and her family.
Amid the bustle of the market, they embrace for a long time.
It’s a new year, and another class is making Middle Eastern breakfast. Outfitted in matching aprons and sipping adult beverages, Amanda’s students watch a screen while her hands chop a jalapeño on the cutting board for ful medames, or Egyptian fava beans. As she finishes with the pepper, Amanda turns her attention to the garlic.
After acknowledging that there’s a good bit of garlic in the dish, “as it should be in Middle Eastern cooking,” she says, Amanda then slips a handful of cloves into a silicone garlic peeler. As the cloves slip their skins, the garlic in the air invokes the past.
“I remember growing up anytime I tried to cook,” she says, her eyes on the cutting board, “the main feedback I would get from my dad—a very quiet, a very silent, strong man—would be: ‘not enough garlic.’”
On this evening, she gives this food a second life.
After Amanda finishes the demonstration, the room hums with focused, low-key chatter as her students begin cutting, boiling, and stirring their dishes. She walks from station to station, listening to others talk about their own families and why they connect with these dishes, her microphone broadcasting snippets of conversations as she compliments and suggests. On this evening, she gives this food a second life. Because even if these people have no direct ties to Palestine, when they try to recreate the recipes in their own homes—when they seek out the ingredients from the few Middle Eastern grocery stores that the region has to offer—the culinary tradition is given a new future.
Eventually, the evening comes to a close. The students pack up their leftovers, the dirty pots and pans are magicked away by a trio of helpful assistants, and the lights go out. Time passes, events blur and resolve over the next several weeks. Amanda’s brother and his family find their way to Memphis, where they stay with Amanda’s parents. She also meets her niece and nephew for the first time. There will be happy, bittersweet stories like these, but they will be few and far between as the world turns away, and Palestine crumbles, reduced to an idea consumed by fire.
But for that evening, the table as Amanda knows it—as her family knows it—grows just a little bigger.
Jordan P. Hickey is a Northwest Arkansas-based freelance journalist whose writing appears in The Washington Post, Garden & Gun, Arkansas Advocate, among others. The former editor of Arkansas Life magazine (RIP), he’s been named writer of the year by the Arkansas Society of Professional Journalists, the International Regional Magazine Association, and the Great Plains Journalism Awards.
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Stephen Mimh meets the dedicated team devoted to locating and recovering the remains of Americans—and their planes—that were lost during the Second World War. Following the meticulous process of finding, and then recovering a plane, Mimh shows the resources it takes to finally give these lost pilots a military funeral.
One afternoon a week later, toward day’s end, a large crane reels up the first recovery basket of the mission, steering it to a soft landing on the back of the barge. The team members swarm around it, peering intently at the contents: large, twisted pieces of metal, some scorched and warped by fire, and several mysterious sections of black rubber.
One by one, the artifacts come out, gently cradled and placed on a tarp. The black rubber turns out to be swaths of the fuel bladder, its white stenciled serial numbers still bright and legible. Then comes a piece of the bomb bay door, its hydraulics still attached; skeins of electrical wires; and a handful of indignant crabs, which are promptly returned to the sea.
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Artists and curators in St. Louis, working under the name New Red Order, are negotiating the return of a sacred Indigenous site. Can art world resources be leveraged for more than symbolic statements? A thought-provoking feature interrogates this question:
NRO’s increasing notoriety is due to several expansive projects in sites far outside the museum, with collaborators far beyond the art world. For their largest work to date, a 2023 Creative Time commission, they flipped the classic colonial World’s Fair model and built The World’s UnFair in an empty lot in Long Island City. In the center of the weedy lot, a goofy, disconcerting animatronic tree spoke with a goofy, disconcerting animatronic beaver about the history of private property (Dexter and Sinister, 2023); a five-channel video installation broadcast Jim Fletcher’s exhortations (Give It Back, 2023); and a stage hosted revolving conversations and performances. NRO’s projects often seem deceptively ad hoc or casual, when they are the result of intensive research, organizing, and recruiting. Asked about this playful approach, the Khalils refer to the “trickster element” of the Ojibwe cultural tradition.
When Adam Khalil—holding a red Solo cup and wearing his signature NRO-branded wide-brim cap—first mentioned the Sugarloaf project to me in fall 2022, I was not surprised by the scale of ambition. NRO has long insisted that art-world resources can be leveraged for material change rather than symbolic statements. At one point, they approached curators at the Whitney and asked whether the museum would consider handing over its Met Breuer building to an Indigenous collective. (In 2023 the Whitney sold it to Sotheby’s instead.) But I was surprised that Mellon had offered money for a Land Back cause—major funders can be skittish about involvement with such initiatives because of their sensitive nature—and impressed that NRO had made such a leap across the provocation-action divide. It’s one thing to run a tongue-in-cheek “Give It Back” campaign. It’s another to secure hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it back.
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The “pretendian” phenomenon in Canada refers to people who claim to be Indigenous, but aren’t. These imposters range from academics to judges and even musical icons. Sarah Treleaven’s latest tale of fraud and grift centers around three women: a mother and her twin daughters. After the mother, Karima Manji, falsely claimed that her daughters Amira and Nadya were Inuit, the trio benefitted from their “pretenduit” identity for years.
For years, Manji had been over-ordering anything and everything—Christmas turkeys, supplies from hardware stores, refrigerators—so she could return the extras and keep the cash. The organization also discovered she’d been bullying tenants to pay for repairs and other necessities that the organization was supposed to cover, and then keeping the money intended to pay those bills. Over the years, she’d bilked the organization not for $25,000, as originally estimated, but for $800,000.
There are two kinds of fraudsters, according to Teillet: fabricators who invent Indigenous identities whole cloth and embellishers who exaggerate some perceived connection. Some embellishers bolster their claims using the results of DNA tests showing small percentages of Indigenous heritage. Others exploit unverified family stories about a distant Indigenous relative. Whatever kind of identity fraud they’re engaging in, they generally lie to get ahead professionally.
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A writer attended the Forbidden Courses program, or what he describes as “a sort of anti-woke summer camp,” at the recently created University of Austin. Here, he shares what he learned, which includes the fact that UATX isn’t terribly interested in learning at all. Thank you for your service, Noah Rawlings:
Peter [Boghossian, UATX founder] springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”
What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.
He turns his back to the audience, hunches slightly and strides, stroking his chin. He is Rodin’s thinker set in manic motion; he is a relentless logician in his study at midnight; he is a frantically philosophical gremlin … —BAM! He wheels around and stalks forward and slings his index finger out toward a student, demands of him whether climate change is real?! and how certain is he?! and why?!—BOP! He points at another student, asks whether gender is a social construct, whether trans women are women?! He cites Socrates and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He staggers and weaves: as a boxer dances, so Peter lectures. He is the professor you never had; he is a squall of raw intellect; he is Robin Williams in the Dead Poets Society, but ripped. He is putting a gun to the head of your most precious assumptions.
And then it is over. That, we have learned, is Street Epistemology. It is asking the hard questions of another, and not refuting them when you disagree, but continuing to ask “why?” and “how certain are you?” until the temple of their convictions crumbles, and you can help them build a newer, sounder one.
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The rural villages along Brazil’s Purus River have historically been Catholic, such as the settlement of São Miguel. But the grip of the Catholic Church is weakening in the country as a whole, and the residents of these rainforest communities have been converting to more “expressive forms of evangelical Christianity.” In his opening line, Terrence McCoy transports us deep into the Amazon, where this story takes place; we find ourselves on a boat next to a Catholic priest, Father Moisés, who is on his annual trip to the villages in the region. But more and more families have renounced their Catholic faith and begun to follow the new evangelical preacher who lives on the bluff above São Miguel—a man named Pastor Leudo who had been showing them “God in a new way.”
Father Moisés hadn’t met the pastor, nor heard him preach, but his charisma was no secret. Evangelicals said they’d never heard anyone speak of God as he did. Thin and tanned, hands calloused from years of wielding a chain saw, the pastor looked no different from thousands of others struggling to survive along the Purus. But followers said he’d been touched by divine providence. He was rumored to have banished malevolent spirits and cured illnesses. He claimed to be illiterate but somehow read the Bible with fluency. Wherever he went, Catholics renounced their church and followed him.
The unique challenges posed by the rainforest — immense size, wide dispersion of villages, few roads — had exacerbated the church’s shortage of priests. Some communities were going a full year without seeing a member of the clergy. The bishops urged radical change: Grant priestly powers to married men, breaking with the bedrock tenet of clerical celibacy, and increase the reach of the cloth. “We have to change,” pleaded one Amazon bishop, Wilmar Santin.
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Cholent is not a pretty food. A mushy medley of beiges and browns, bulging with bones and dotted through with dull maroon, it scores very few aesthetic points—even among the stews (a homely family, let us admit). Frankly, it kind of looks like a thing thrown up. Mostly this is the fault of the disintegrating barley, humblest of grains, though the beans (kidney) don’t help.
But listen: done well, there are few foods on this Earth more satisfying. Warm, rich, salty, and deeply filling in a way I’ve not encountered elsewhere, a good cholent is ambrosial. What I might call divine.
Schalet, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium!
Also klänge Schiller’s Hochlied,
Hätt’ er Schalet je gekostet.
“Cholent, ray of light immortal!
Cholent, daughter of Elysium!”
So had Schiller’s song resounded,
Had he ever tasted Cholent.1
1 This stanza, and those to follow, are excerpted from Heinrich Heine’s “Prinzessin Sabbat” (1851).
2 Though there are, it should be noted, plenty of Jews who make and seemingly enjoy cholent all year round. In fact, I once had one at a kiddish (kind of like a lunch buffet, only much more Jewish, and often featuring very good alcohol) on a humid, 90-degree day. Wisely, I limited myself to a small sample, really just to be polite to the host; at ambient temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, cholent has a way of solidifying in the gut, like a bad omen before a big event, or concrete.
A cold-season staple in observant Ashkenazi households,2 cholent is the cornerstone of the second Shabbos meal. In fact, once my older siblings moved out and I was the only child at home, a winter’s lunch at my dad’s would often consist just of challah, cholent, and a little salad for good measure. My dad being my dad and, well, Jewish, he’d make a full crock pot every week even though it was just the two of us; the leftovers he’d freeze and add to the next cholent. Our perpetual stew.
In the morning, before heading off to shul—this back when we both still regularly attended services—he and I would sidle up to the pot and lift the lid, anointing ourselves with the heady, aromatic steam. We called this weekly practice the cholent facial.
3 Our religion can be exacting, you see, and our God is a jealous one. We are a practical people, though—we’ve had to be to survive—and have learned to negotiate the stringencies of law. This is one reason you see so many Jewish attorneys.
Typically Jewish, it began as a loophole.3 Cholent (chulent, tsholnt, sholet, schalet) is a Sabbath stew, customarily prepared for the traditional Saturday lunch; and yet, Jewish Law prohibits cooking on the Sabbath, for it is a day of rest. And cooking, it bears emphasizing, is work. Hence the contradiction.
Ironically, I know of few other foods that can compete with cholent’s effort-to-result ratio. There are no special techniques required, no specific order of operations, no precise measurements (if you are using a measuring cup, you are doing it wrong). Even the usual rules of smart cooking—sear your meat! soak your beans! toast your grains!—flake away like so much stale dogma, leaving the barest slip of a recipe. Watch how easy:
Step one: cut the meat into chunks.
Step two: roughly chop the onions and potatoes (peeled, unpeeled, whatever).
4 Believe it or not, there was a time when the average Jewish household did not own a crock pot. I know, I know—it seems implausible. But there it is. In fact, even the home oven as we know it today is a relatively modern phenomenon. It used to be that only the bakery had the necessary hardware, and so cholent was cooked communally. On Friday afternoons, after the village baker removed the last of the week’s loaves from the oven and swept it clean, Jews would gather with their pots and place them in the heated chamber, which would then be sealed until the following morning to make the most of the residual heat. These days, though, most Jewish cooks I know who prepare cholent even semi-regularly make good use of a slow cooker. Appropriately, the inventor, one Irving Naxon (born Irving Nachumsohn), was inspired by stories his mother told him of her home back in Lithuania, where his grandmother used to make this Sabbath stew called…you guessed it.
Step three: throw the above together with the dry ingredients into a slow cooker, salt generously, cover with water, bring to a simmer on high, then cook on the lowest setting—or, if doing it the old-fashioned way, transfer the pot to a 200-degree oven4—for at least another 12 hours, i.e., overnight. (Longer is better, though, and around 18 to 20 hours seems to be the sweet spot as the flavors continue to develop in relationship.)
That’s it. You don’t even have to stir. In fact, according to Orthodox interpretations of the Law, you’re not even allowed to.
5 Any action so prohibited is known as a melakhah, or melakhot (Yiddish: melachos) in the plural. And boy, are they plural. For though the Bible itself does not much trouble itself with all the specifics, the Talmud—which contains an entire eponymous tractate devoted to elucidating the obligations and restrictions of Shabbat, featuring the usual Talmudic flair for the digressive and the exhaustive—lists 39 categories of labor that are forbidden. These are called, inventively, the 39 Melakhot, and even a cursory examination of them is way beyond the scope of this piece (you’re welcome).
The shalt nots of the Sabbath derive from a very particular understanding of what constitutes work. To wit: any kind of action performed as part of the construction and service of the Mishkan, or Biblical Tabernacle, is forbidden on the Sabbath.5 And since kindling a fire and baking the ritual showbreads was part of that service, we’re to refrain from doing so on our day of rest.
“Ahh,” you may now be wondering (though really it’s more of an uuhh, from the bottom of the throat rather than the roof of your mouth), “but that’s baking. What about roasting, or boiling, or poaching, or braising? And what if it’s not bread we want to cook, but, say, a stew?”
In which case I say to you, “Yes, yes, very good! That’s exactly the right idea!” But, no. None of it’s allowed.
6 I’ve noticed a disturbing phenomenon among today’s wealthier Jews of using steak in their cholent. I assume they think the more expensive cuts will yield a better result, though I suspect it’s also another of those status symbol things. Regardless, it’s misguided. Tender steaks turn dry and stringy; the long cooking time of cholent is best suited to tougher cuts with more connective tissue. Flanken, or cross-cut short ribs, is traditional for a reason (also, historically it was cheaper).
I’ve been eating cholent my whole life, probably since before I could quite handle solid food, and I have tried, at this point in my life, dozens of different iterations. Without much exaggeration, maybe even a hundred. Most of them are underwhelming—more often than not there’s not enough salt, and folks frequently spring for the wrong cut of beef.6 Some people skimp on the barley or else add too much, many leave out the marrow, and a few forego the meat entirely. (Bless all vegan hearts, but cholent sings of flesh and bone.) I’ve even witnessed otherwise sensible people use beans from a can.
The worst, though, are the Embellishers, the culinary miscreants who add ketchup, or barbecue sauce, or, god forbid, frankfurters. Verily I say unto you: thou shalt not put hot dogs into thy Sabbath stew. Or, as my dad likes to advise, “KISS.” Keep it simple, stupid.
I’ve noticed cholent to be a frequent favorite among Jewish dads. Or a particular subset of them, I should more closely observe, as the predilection seems to predominate on the religious side of the spectrum, especially—though by no means exclusively—among the Orthodox. Mine own Tati, for one.
My dad loves cholent so much that, back when I was living at home and alternating weekends between my parents, he used to go on (and on) about this idea he had for a “cholent spray,” something like a savory Febreze for Jews who may have grown up eating it regularly but, after their observance of the Sabbath lapsed and its trappings vanished from their lives, now missed the reassuring warmth of its magical aroma.
We both thought this was brilliant, of course. Also, maybe, a little bit depressing. How tragic, to have known the glory of cholent and lost it.
Traditional Judaism’s strength, I think, lies in its intergenerational vigor. Or, as my Zeide would say, its commitment to maintaining the integrity of the Chain. Even, when it comes to it (as it has, time and again), on pain of death.
This commitment is especially salient among the Orthodox branches, which, for all their issues, have seen their numbers grow even as the Conservative and Reform congregations have declined. Yes, says the thinking in which I was raised, of course it is tempting to pick and choose—but look how slippery the slope. Following the wisdom of our ancestors has kept us true to who we are, has kept us alive as a people for 2,500 years while our enemies, far larger and stronger, are relegated to the history books. In the face of this history, who are we to think we know what’s best? Or, as my favorite rabbi repeatedly told me in high school (sensing, perhaps, where I was headed): “DuBow, you’re not nearly as smart as you think you are.”
Individual autonomy is not the highest value, this way of thinking cautions. Personal choice, so devoutly worshiped in our society, may not be the final locus of freedom after all. Tradition keeps our lives grounded, keeps us balanced in an otherwise shaky world. Hence the famous Fiddler song.
This reminds me of an anecdote I once heard,7 a sort-of joke that hits a bit too close to home, as Jewish-flavored jokes tend to do. It goes like this: Daniel Bell, a 20th-century sociologist and Harvard professor, was a teenage Marxist living in poverty on the Lower East Side. He was standing atop a fruit crate and handing out pamphlets one Friday afternoon when the community rabbi passed by and recognized him.
7 From Professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University, who recounted this story in what I guess, judging from the present attempt, was for me a seminal seminar on Michel de Montaigne’s brilliant Essays, back in the spring of 2018. The word “essay,” it bears repeating, comes from the Middle French root: “to try.”
“Doniyel,” the rabbi said, “what are you doing here? It’s late, you’ve got to go get ready for Shabbos.” Daniel leaned down and, full of conviction, responded: “Rabbi, I have to be honest with you. I don’t believe in God.”
“Feh,” the rabbi said, waving his hand dismissively (here I imagine my Surie Bube’s signature gesture). “Listen, Doineleh. You believe in God, you don’t believe in God, that’s your business. But Shabbos? That’s God’s business!”
8 Perhaps I should add that the stakes here are high. Theoretically a matter of life and death, in fact. As it is written in the immediately preceding verse: “On six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a sabbath of complete rest, holy to יהוה; whoever does any work on it shall be put to death.” (Exodus 35:2). If you don’t yet see the irony, you will.
9 Essentially, by “cooking,” the Talmud means the beneficial manipulation of food via the application of heat, as opposed to, say, the use of citrus to “cook” fish for a ceviche, or chopping vegetables for a salad. And in case you were worried that we were getting lax, don’t fret: non-enthalpic transformations have their own associated issues. Squeezing citrus fruits for their juice, for instance, is problematic under a different, unrelated melakhah (דש), and we all know how easily chopping can edge into grinding (טוחן).
So, here’s the problem: we are supposed to rejoice in our rest and celebrate the Sabbath day, and cold leftovers and raw vegetables are not exactly festive fare. Cue the hermeneutic brilliance of cholent. For, while the Torah specifically prohibits burning a fire on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:3),8 the particular binyan (verb form) of the operative word—תְבַעֲר֣וּ, which comes from the root ב.ע.ר or “burn”—is understood in this instance to be causative/intensive rather than stative. I.e., it is the act of kindling a fire which is prohibited; a fire already burning is fine, so long as it is not stoked. So, says the Talmud, if the fire was started before Shabbat began, one can continue to derive benefit from it even once the Sabbath commences. Though, regardless of the fire’s provenance, there is still the separate issue of cooking on the Sabbath. Which, predictably, is its own ontological rigamarole.9
10 More common in Yeshivish circles (at least in my experience), this tradition mainly just involves gathering late Thursday night to learn Torah and eat cholent.
Yes, I’ve eaten my fair share of the stew. Cholent for Shabbos lunch at home or at a friend, cholent at some event-inspired, pre-lunch kiddush in shul; hell, I’ve even known from the rarer Thursday night mishmar cholent.10 And I’ve made plenty of my own, too. It was an easy thing to help with at home and, in college, proved a sure crowd-pleaser at our vibrant community’s raucous, dorm-hosted Shabbat meals. Everybody loves cholent, even those who don’t, and a slow-cooker-full could easily feed 12 hungry undergrads without breaking the bank. Plus, it comes together in a flash, perfect for those hectic winter Fridays when darkness falls at four and us all tipsy with Pre-Shabbat Ruach by midafternoon.11
11 Or PSR, for those in the know. Ruach literally translates to “wind” though is also understood to mean “spirit.” As in “the Spirit of Elohim hovered on the surface of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). Now think, again, of that cholent-charged steam.
You’re supposed to put the stew up earlier in the day, by the way, so that by the time Shabbos comes around it’s technically edible (this a part of the loopholing). But Fridays fly, and I must admit that I rarely remember to get it going more than an hour or so in advance. In fact, during my senior year, I once commenced preparation five minutes before sundown and finished right at the proverbial buzzer. Mea culpa.
12 Broadly speaking, Jews divide the holy texts into two main categories. The תורה שבכתב, or Written Torah, consists most centrally of the Five Books of Moses or the Pentateuch (what we generally mean when referring to the “Torah” colloquially), but also refers to the entire 24-book corpus of the Tanach, or Hebrew Bible. The collection of conversations, anecdotes, commentaries, and teachings emerging from interpretation of the Torah that are recorded in the Talmud and elsewhere comprise the second category: the תורה שבעל פה, or Oral Torah (so called because, prior to the Destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, these teachings were transmitted orally). Rabbinic Judaism, supposedly descended from the Pharisee sect, holds that the Oral Torah has been passed down from generation to generation from the earliest days of our peoplehood and is, as such, sacred and authoritative (to varying extents); Orthodox tradition goes one step further, and maintains that these teachings were literally given from God to Moses in Mount Sinai. Hence the next stanza in Old Heinrich’s poem.
13 The other being the much maligned gefilte fish, for reasons related to pesky fishbones and the separate melakhah of בורר, or “sorting.” To be fair, the description of this venerable delicacy—a poached loaf of fish forcemeat—is not particularly appetizing. And, I must admit, I had my own phobia of it, too, at least until I was nine or 10, when my dad told me that eating gefilte fish is “character building.” I’ve been eating it with relish (or, rather, prepared horseradish) ever since.
The characteristically Talmudic reading of the law that permits our Sabbath stew is, I might note, rather contentious. Or it was, rather, about 2,000 years ago, when the Pharisees were going at it with their aristocratic rivals, the Sadducees, over the authority of the Oral Torah.12
I have thus heard it said—from my sister, who heard it from Rebbetzin Auman of Brooklyn, NY—that cholent is not just a culturally Jewish food, but one of two “halakhically Jewish” foods.13 That is to say, it emerges directly from an interpretation of Jewish Law, rather than mere custom. In this understanding of cholent’s etiology, the Pharisees began to make their Sabbath stews davka as a tangible manifestation of their politico-religious stance, a gastronomic avatar of their ideology, a culinary “Oh, yeah? Just watch me!”
Schalet ist die Himmelspeise,
Die der liebe Herrgott selber
Einst den Moses kochen lehrte
Auf dem Berge Sinai,
For this cholent is the very
Food of heaven, which, on Sinai,
God Himself instructed Moses
In the secret of preparing,
Suffice it to say, the Pharisees won out. Or survived, which is effectively the same thing.14
14 While the Sadducees vanished soon after the Temple was destroyed, and modern Jewry is dominated by the Rabbinic tradition (itself a tapestry of various movements and a multitude of ethno-cultural branches), I should acknowledge that there are still groups of Jews who, to this day, do not recognize the authority of the Oral Torah, most notably the Karaites and the Haymanot.
15 I should note that my mother, upon reading an early draft of this essay, remarked that Dad actually got the recipe from her. Which, fraught as that feels with the inevitable fallout of divorce, I will not touch, only acknowledge.
My dad’s is still the best I’ve had, and I say that for reasons beyond filial allegiance.15 Case in point: back when my older brother was studying in Israel for his gap year, he used Dad’s recipe to take the first-place trophy in the Great Jerusalem Cholent Cook-Off (yes, there’s an actual trophy somewhere at home). And since, as we’ve discussed, there are no special tricks in technique, it all comes back to the ingredients.
16 As opposed to, e.g., Hungarian style (sholet, sólet). The Pale is shorthand for the Pale of Settlement, an area of Eastern Europe which was, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, the only place Jews could live legally in the Russian Empire (though this didn’t prevent frequent pogroms). Most of my family comes from this region. Prior to Brooklyn, that is.
Ours is a common variation on the style of cholent that hails from the Pale.16 In addition to the standard potatoes, onions, pearled barley, and beans, we use flanken, always—ideally the thicker cut that distinguishes Jewish-style short ribs from their Korean counterparts. We are firm believers in the gospel of marrow bones. Three to five of these, readily available in chunky yet manageable 1–2” cross-sections from your local kosher butcher, lend an inimitable depth of flavor to the stew (to say nothing of the religious experience that grace those who carefully extract the wobbly morsel of marrow within). We add copious amounts of kosher salt, somewhere between a pinch and a palm with each component ceremoniously tossed in.
And, of course, our secret ingredient. No family recipe is complete without a secret ingredient.
17 Once again, I owe much of this geo-historical charting to the luminous Rabbi Gil Marks z”l and his brilliant magnum opus, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (HMH, 2010).
The original recipe of the Pharisees was nothing like the stew I know. It couldn’t be, as Jews would encounter neither potatoes nor common beans until the Columbian Exchange over a millennium and a half later. Rather, the predecessor to my cholent probably resembled something more like harisa (alt: harees—not to be confused with harissa, the beloved Maghrebi chili paste), an ancient, porridge-like preparation of cracked wheat simmered at length with spices and fats and sometimes meat that is still widely enjoyed in various forms throughout the Arab world.17
I have not tried harisa. I am sure it is delicious, but it is not cholent.
Okay, okay, I’ll tell you the last ingredient. Are you ready? Here it is: a packet of Goodman’s Onion Soup Mix. (N.B. This does not count as Embellishing.)
In my family’s culinary arsenal, Goodman’s is the nuclear option. It can be a totalizing force if used improperly, transforming delicate flavors into an undifferentiated wasteland of onion powder and MSG. But when handled carefully, sprinkled into cholent or rubbed onto a holiday brisket … my god. It tastes of tradition, of family coming together to celebrate. So much so that my sister and I affectionately refer to it as “essence of yuntif.”
Shabbos might not be yuntif, true. But trust me. It just works.
I’ve even made cholent while camping. Twice, in fact. I used one of those cast-iron Dutch ovens, which my friend and I originally purchased for just this purpose. To be honest, it was not my best work. Too dry, especially the first one, and it’s more difficult than you’d think to find marrow bones and flanken in the general stores of the Grand Tetons (the Goodman’s I brought with me). But I did employ the old Sephardic method of burying the pot beneath the embers, which was fun, especially since we weren’t afraid of the Inquisition stirring up ashes to hunt for us unrepentant, stew-eating Jews.
Sometime in the mid-post-classical period (800–1200 CE), the Sephardic Jews of al-Andalus took a bold step—nay, a giant leap—by adding legumes (chickpeas or fava beans) and more water, steering the dish from porridge toward stew. This technique likely owed its provenance to the culinary knowhow of the Moors, who took control of the Iberian Peninsula from the Visigoths at the beginning of the eighth century and held it, under a series of regimes and to varying extents, until the end of the 15th. The dish came to be known as hamindi trigo, a composite term that combines the Ibero-Romance word for wheat with the Mishnaic חמין, meaning “warm thing.” The Jews of Spain continued to tweak their recipes—e.g., the inspired choice, born of a meat shortage, of including whole eggs in the overnight braise, creating the legendary huevos haminados—through the Reconquista years and up until the Alhambra Decree of 1492. Afterward, those Jews who were forcibly converted took to burying their hamin beneath the coals and ashes (giving the stew yet another name: adafina) to hide it from the Inquisition. The Sabbath stew, you see, was prime evidence of heresy, punishable by death.
I’ve had several kinds of hamin, all of them delicious in their own ways. But hamin is not cholent.
Thankfully, our stew had already escaped the confines of the peninsula long before the Expulsion. Sephardic traders had brought their culinary wizardry north on their journeys, introducing their modified version of the dish to the Ashkenazim of Provence as early as the late 12th century. The French Jews, knowing a culinary scoop when they smelled one (French Jews are still French), quickly took to the dish, renaming it in their native tongue.
Shall we have a quick Old French lesson? chald (antecedent of chaud, warm); lent (from the Latin lentus, slow).
In my three years living in Iowa, though, I only made cholent once. Before you shout, know there was a good reason for this: while I regularly hosted Shabbat dinners for my friends, I almost never did the whole Shabbos lunch thing. Saturdays in grad school were, by necessity, prime R&R time—doubly so in winter, when temperatures frequently swing deeply negative and folks are understandably reluctant to leave the warm safety of their homes. Of course, I could’ve easily put it up early on Friday mornings to serve that same night, but cholent at dinner doesn’t sit right.
Still, I recognize this as a missed opportunity. Cholent would’ve been ideal medicine for the harsh Iowa winters, and how nice it would’ve been, how cozy, to have such impetus to gather in the soft, snowy hush of day. “Come, friends!” I might have said, “I have a pot full of cholent waiting for y’all.”
From Provence, the stew spread to the rest of France then deeper into Europe, migrating east as Jews sought to escape successive waves of persecution. Antisemitism has, alas, followed my people wherever we’ve gone. But at least we still have cholent.
18 See, for example, this essay. The footnotes.
My dad is no longer observant, and though there’s nothing stopping him, he rarely makes cholent anymore. I wonder if he wishes he had that spray. And I wonder, too, about my own future relationship with the stew. Once weekly fare, I now have cholent only a few times a year; I, too, am no longer observant. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Which to say that, while I stand by the choices I’ve made and the life I am choosing to live—different from how I was raised, but no less Jewish18—part of me is scared.
I do not want to lose cholent. I do not want to lose the sense of security and belonging it gives me, the warmth of home.
The one time I did make it in Ames was for Kalie and Brian, my sister’s friends become my own, who provided the warm welcome that made my mid-pandemic move to Iowa less isolating. Though they’re both Jewish, they’d never had cholent before. This was a shock to me, sheltered coastal Jew that I am, and I insisted we remedy that.
Most of the components were easy to procure. Beans, potatoes, barley, onions—every store worth its salt has these basics. Marrow bones, surprisingly, were readily available as well, and the kid at the butcher counter was happy to cut my short ribs to spec (I think he just liked using the band saw). The only cholent thing for which I had to flex was the Goodman’s. Luckily, my sister had included a stash of the stuff in a care package she’d sent me a few weeks earlier, because Esther gets it.
They loved it, of course. Impossible not to.
Schalet ist des wahren Gottes
Koscheres Ambrosia,
Wonnebrod des Paradieses,
Yes, this cholent’s pure ambrosia
Of the true and only God:
Paradisal bread of rapture;
A few years ago now, I was talking to my mom and asked her, apropos of some non-traditional position or another I was extolling with the grand and naïve conviction to which I am sometimes prone, if I was the black sheep of the family. “Oh honey,” she said without missing a beat, smiling and serious all at once, “you’re more like the gray sheep.”
I think about this moment all the time. The casual insight of my mother’s observation. How we laughed, without a trace of the bitterness that could so easily have crept in to fill the vacancies of my religious observance. I think about the way she managed so warmly to close the distance and I am filled with gratitude. My grandmother is a lovely woman, you see, but I do not think my dad ever had that kind of reassurance from his mother. And there is a profound loneliness in leaving the fold that is not lessened by conviction.
Perhaps this helps explain the contentment in Dad’s sigh when, the other weekend, I made cholent for us (his recipe, Mom’s, who knows?) for the first time in what must have been years. Cholent, you see, does not care about one’s level of religious observance, because it is a stew.
The slowly bubbling cauldron gradually perfumes the air through the night, spreading through the sleeping house like an open secret. Come morning, the scent is potent, yet also somehow gentle—kind of like a hug, if hugs were made of air and anticipation and the solid assurance of satiety.
This comforting aroma has a temporal quality too, I’ve noticed. In much the same way that, say, fresh brewed coffee signals morning, the scent of cholent marks for me the Sabbath day. This sounds mundane, an accident of association—we happen to drink coffee in the morning, so eventually we come to equate the two. But what I am trying to get across is deeper than that, something that has to do with origins and migrations and the myriad contingent forces that shape a people’s destiny. It has to do, I think, with devotion in the face of precarity and a need, precious and vital, to celebrate how we are. It has to do with the long chain of accumulated memory we call tradition. The smell of cholent wafting through my home may well be an accidental thing, the result of a capricious history guided by random encounters. But it’s also, somehow, essential. Is it a stretch to claim that there is something vital, something holy about this scent?
And, of course, there is the feeling. The way it settles in the stomach, warming the body from within. Taking up space like the Divine Presence herself.
Benjamin DuBow is a writer, chef, and all-around nerd (food, nature, history, science, etc.) from New York. He currently lives in Oaxaca City, Mexico, where he’s cooking at a restaurant and (still) working on his first novel. You can find him on Instagram @the_tale_of_benji.
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