Meanwhile on the International front....

Tell me you know nothing about what Israelis eat without telling me you know nothing about what Israelis eat.

Of course, to be fair, if you haven't spent time there, you'd have no reason to know anything about Israeli cuisine and you'd automatically associate it with what you think of as "Jewish food" based on going to a Jewish deli in the U.S. or Canada.

Anyway, nobody eats kreplach (or shmaltz or matzo brei or whatever else people in the U.S. or Canada think of as "Jewish" food) in Israel. You might find some old family recipes or a niche restaurant here and there (like Eva's in Tel Aviv and the now-extinct Fefferberg's). And some of the Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox may make traditional Eastern European food now that ingredients are more readily available than they were 75 or 100 a years ago, but otherwise that stuff has about as much to do with Israeli food (which is Mediterranean) as Valencian paella has to do with Taco Bell. Oddly, however, schnitzel is the one E. European dish that' s widespread.

Forebears of today's Israelis of Ashkenazic descent may have eaten that stuff in the shtetls (Jewish villages in E. Europe) but when they arrived in Israel, local ingredients and produce (and influence of Jews from North Africa, the Levant, the Balkans and those who were in the land of Israel the whole time, not to mention the desire to shake off the trappings of ghetto life in Eastern Europe) led to a much different cuisine.

 

Israeli food is MENA (Middle East North Africa) food. In other words, it's delicious.

 

In fairness, this is a still from a Daffy Duck cartoon. Sorry to see Fefferberg’s closed. I remember going there as a kid.

 

If our schools are so bad that people can’t recognize the Scarlet Pumpernickel, then I am left with no choice but to vote for Donald Trump.

 

You're despicable

 

An incredible sentence, one I wish I had been able to shoehorn into a response to a strongly-worded letter or email from readers.

 

That's actually fantastic.

Did you order the calves foot jelly? Shit terrifed me.

 

I just remember wanting actual Israeli food on our visit, but my folks kept misfiring by insisting on upscale places. This was in 1988. Fefferberg’s stood out from the fancy, though underwhelming, hotel restaurants. I remember liking it but recall next to nothing about the food.

 

free link

The Bitter Fight Over the Meaning of ‘Genocide’

 

You realize the dictionary and the UN and the Holocaust museum ends the definition before the word because, right?

 

Maybe this is a better fit for the journalism page. I get that the possibility is there, perhaps it’s likely, but I'm so tired of news headlines, and similar tone in stories too, that read like this:

AP:
Israel and Hezbollah trade heavy fire before pulling back, jolting a region braced for war

AP isn't alone. Reuters, The Guardian and many others trade in the same kind of words. The headline writers, and very often the journalists too, are walking (and tripping over, in my opinion) a very fine line between idle speculation, or worse, provocative words used to draw attention. You see similar verbiage in ledes, especially. Sometimes contradicted by the facts in the story itself.

Yes, it's entirely possible that a full-scale war will break out, but it's also possible it will not. Headlines and stories like it with the same tone have been running since the Hamas attack last October. Prior to that, every little thing that happened in the Middle East had a similar tone.

I get that every war has a fuse that needs to be lit, but not every event is the match to light it. News organizations should always be mindful of that.

There's a way to write about the worst-case (and best-case) scenario possibilities without doing it the way some news organizations do. I doubt it's intended this way, but some of the sensationalism comes off almost as cheering for the worst-case scenario.

Just report the news as it is. Save the speculative asides.

Edit: The AP has since removed that suffix to their headline in their latest version.