lives

THREE

PROFILES

In this issue we visit three individuals reshaping and redefining Jewish culture and contemporary life.

by BATYA UNGAR-SARGON

“You have the extra baggage with Jewish mothers of basically a whole genre of anti-Semitic and misogynistic stereotypes that you don’t realize that you’ve internalized.”

MARJORIE INGALL

Shattering a Stereotype

If the first thing you think of when you hear the phrase “Jewish mother” is “guilt,” you’re not alone, but you are wrong. Marjorie Ingall’s book Mamaleh Knows Best (Harmony, 2016) aims to upend that stereotype of the Jewish mother. As opposed to the cultural image we have of a narcissistic, clingy, demanding woman who lives to make her children feel guilty, Ingall argues that Jewish mothers throughout history have been the secret to the outsized success of Jews (170 of the 850 Nobel Prize winners, etc.). “Jewish motherhood is not self-negating or martyring,” Ingall writes in the introduction. “It values women’s intellectual and emotional lives, which benefits the culture as a whole. And it leads to hardworking, creative, independent kids.”

Ingall carries this paradox in her body, in her very mien. Nurturing yet edgy, warm but also unsettling, Ingall embodies the kind of femininity she excavates in her book. It’s both new and old, kind of like Ingall’s tattoos, which depict her daughters’ initials in Hebrew.

Ingall is from Rhode Island, where she went to an Orthodox day school. Her mother was a fervent feminist who got her PhD in moral education in her 50s. Ingall’s father was a psychiatrist with no filter, interested only in the profoundly mentally ill.

After surviving a heart attack at 39, Ingall’s father wrote an ethical will for his two children. “Be what you choose,” he wrote. “Help other people feel good about themselves.” Also, “Belch loudly at the dinner table.”

But it was Ingall’s mother who did the heavy lifting of the parenting in her home. She believed in finding out what your children are interested in, and nurturing those interests. Ingall was into magic, so her mother enrolled her in a magic course at the library. She indulged Ingall’s love of theater, and never restricted her reading materials. Ingall’s mother was herself a huge reader. The life of the mind was incredibly important to her.

Unlike the rest of us, forever vowing to do everything differently than our parents did, Ingall has done her best to stay solidly in her mother’s lane. “My mom was an excellent, excellent, excellent parent,” Ingall tells me.

Still, the transition from being someone’s child to being someone’s parent was a strange one, Ingall says. “Suddenly I’m the authority figure and that’s weird,” she recalled. “And you have the extra baggage with Jewish mothers of basically a whole genre of anti-Semitic and misogynistic stereotypes that you don’t realize that you’ve internalized.”

Mamaleh Knows Best is the antidote to that harmful genre. It’s full of anecdotes about “badass, funny, super cultured Jewish mothers throughout history,” as Ingall thinks of them; “accomplished, working, creative people who didn’t fit the stereotype of this unworldly home-bunny who only lived to cause guilt.” But the book also makes an argument: “In my house as in most houses, the mother was the one who did the lion’s share of childrearing and all of the moral lessons, so Jewish mothers have been doing something very right,” Ingall says.

In between being the product of good Jewish mothering and becoming its scribe, Ingall went to Harvard, where she majored in English and American Literature and Folklore and Mythology. After college, Ingall wrote for women’s magazines, eventually ending up at Sassy, a sexually progressive, cheeky magazine that focused on culture and politics. Ingall met her husband, and spent some time in San Francisco, before returning to New York and having two daughters. They are now 15 and 12, and Ingall is a columnist for Tablet Magazine.

“Nobody needs another parenting book,” Ingall says. She herself hates the ones that try to convince you that you’re doing everything wrong. “I wanted to write one that was as much a Jewish history book as a parenting book and one that wasn’t trying to make you feel bad,” she explains. It has to do with surviving women’s magazines, with all their negative messaging.

Ingall prefers a message from another quarter. “Dr. Spock a million years ago had it right when he said, ‘Trust your instincts. You know more than you think you do,’” she says. “And that is the best parenting advice.”


It is Efron’s deeply held belief that people with radically different identities can look one another in the eye and recognize each other in a deeper way (than people who share the culture of liberalism, for example), that reduces us to that which is common to us all.

NOAH EFRON

Radical Radio Compassion

E very week, Noah Efron’s distinctive voice rings out over the airwaves of Tel Aviv and the digital ones of my iPhone. Impossibly witty and unfathomably sharp, Efron is the host of The Promised Podcast, an hour-long radio show about Israeli politics. The show is instructive not only about Israeli affairs; it is also a moral education.

Efron achieves this effect with his utter refusal to write anyone off. On the show, which he co-hosts with Allison Kaplan Sommer and Don Futterman, Efron embodies what I’ve come to think of as radical compassion. It’s almost as though empathy and kindness are an essential part of the life of the mind for Efron. For example, while Efron identifies with the Israeli left, he refuses to write off the right, arguing repeatedly on the podcast that the left has failed to find a language with which to address the security fears of more right-leaning Israelis.

“One of the keys to politics is coming to understand what is at the heart of other people’s world views and their fears and their political commitments, and trying to really talk to them,” Efron tells me when we meet. So well do I know Efron’s voice from my weekly appointment with The Promised Podcast that meeting him in person, and trying to connect his voice with his face, is at first jarring.

Efron was born in New Jersey and made aliyah after college. He served in the IDF, and later became a professor at Bar Ilan University, where he teaches in the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and two children, one of whom is finishing high school and one who is serving in the army. He has also served on the City Council of Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

But Efron traces his Weltanschauung back to his childhood. “It helped that early on my very beloved sister turned out to be a lesbian,” he explains. She is five years older than Efron, and when she came home from her first semester in college, she dropped a stack of classic feminist texts on his bed: Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Shulamith Firestone. “I’ll be back for Christmas — read these,” she instructed Efron. And, he remembers, “I spent that month of my life reading these feminist classics. I read every word. It was the most meaningful time of my life.” Efron teared up speaking about his sister. It’s from her that he says he learned that you never give up on people.

Efron views this radical compassion as part of his Jewish identity, even his Zionist identity. “I think there’s a way for people to be deeply what they are, but have that be a basis of empathy and understanding for other people being deeply who they are,” he explained. “That identity is the source of a lot of the power and the pathos and the empathy and the connectivity and the pure animal attraction that I feel for other people, not just people who are like me,” he went on.

It is in fact precisely as a Jew that Efron says he is able to appreciate the profound intimacy of otherness. “The beauty and the intricacy, the complexity of other people’s lives that are different from mine that I don’t understand, become a focus for me because I know what those things are like.”

It is Efron’s deeply held belief that people with radically different identities can look one another in the eye and recognize each other in a deeper way (than people who share the culture of liberalism, for example), that reduces us to that which is common to us all. This is Zionism for Efron: the belief that a shared history can be infused with decency, moral weight, and moral value. As he put it, “The stuff that we produce when we’re particular is beautiful stuff.”

If anyone could convince me of that, it would be Noah Efron. Experts say that baby gorillas will explore new toys and new friends much more willingly if they are holding on to their mother’s hand while doing so. That is what The Promised Podcast is. In the safety of Efron’s moral clarity and graciousness, I feel secure enough to release my tenacious grip on my own views and consider, if just for an hour a week, someone else’s. 

Much of what we take to be Jewish food was canonized relatively recently, says Yoskowitz. “There are multiple ways to connect with one’s culture and to cook one’s food, and you could extrapolate, there are multiple ways to be Jewish,” he says.

JEFFREY YOSKOWITZ

Cuisine and Culture

Ashkenazi cuisine has a bad rap. With its kugels, its brisket, its tzimmis, and its gefilte fish, the culinary history of European Jewry is more commonly the butt of jokes than the source of adulation. It’s directly into this sticky vat of cholent that Jeffrey Yoskowitz has waded.

Yoskowitz is the co-proprietor of the Gefilteria and co-author of the cookbook The Gefilte Manifesto (Flatiron Books, 2016). He’s made it his life’s mission to revitalize — and rebrand — Ashkenazi food. “I’d love to see people proud of Jewish food, and not just of kosher food,” Yoskowitz tells me. “I’d love to see the Orthodox community embrace heimish food again, not just sushi at bar mitzvahs. I’d love to see the downfall of the kosher sushi bar.”

Yoskowitz is from New Jersey, where he went to Jewish day school. While his family ate the Jewish dishes during the holidays, more often they were eating like your average American family — mac and cheese and lasagna instead of noodle kugel. Still, food was a topic of conversation. His father was rebelling against an erstwhile vegetarian mother and his mother had health issues that she would treat with healthy food. “The tension between tradition and nutrition was a big part of our conversation,” Yoskowitz says.

As a senior in college, Yoskowitz wrote his thesis on the industrialization of the kosher food industry, from post-War War II to the mid 1960s. He explored how kosher food became big business and evolved into manufacturing. From college, he did a three-month farm fellowship with Adamah at Isabella Friedman, where he learned to farm organically and how to make pickles. It was what he called his “back to the land” moment.

From there he spent some time in Israel researching the food industry, and then worked on a farm in Connecticut, where he got deeper into pickling and preserving and started a business. Then he moved back to New York, working as a writer and with farmers’ markets around the City.

Around that time, a friend wrote a book about the death of the Jewish deli. It made Yoskowitz aware of what was at stake, and what might be lost. This coincided with the recession, a time when people were being laid off from jobs and starting food businesses, he says. And then he met his business partner, Liz Alpern.

“We were tired of being embarrassed and ashamed of our food tradition as it was represented in the supermarket aisle,” Yoskowitz says. “The way we remembered it in our family homes, it was made with love, made with care.”

The two wanted to push away from the shlock and the kitsch of Jewish food, and find the true substance. They started cooking together and ultimately decided that they would revolutionize gefilte fish. The little grey balls in a jar symbolized how bad things had gotten for Ashkenazi food.

Together with Alpern, Yoskowitz opened the Gefilteria. One New York Times story later, and they sold out.

Yoskowitz now lives in Brooklyn with his partner. As it was in his parents’ home, food for Yoskowitz is a symbol as much as it is a source of sustenance. “It was always a way of accessing my Ashkenazi cultural identity,” he says. “While I’m firmly in the food world, food is a proxy for something else: a way of talking about a lost piece of my culture, something that’s lacking in the community that I came from, something that got buried and ignored.”

Much of what we take to be Jewish food was canonized relatively recently, says Yoskowitz. “There are multiple ways to connect with one’s culture and to cook one’s food, and you could extrapolate, there are multiple ways to be Jewish,” he says.

Yoskowitz hopes to impact the way Jewish Ashkenazi food is seen more generally. He wants people to value Jewish food the way they would Japanese or Italian food. “I want to see people getting in the kitchen, getting excited about making kreplach,” he says. “I would like people to think of these foods as a cuisine, not just a series of foods. There’s always this joke around it; ‘Jews, oh we didn’t die, so let’s eat!’ Jews love food and we laugh about it but we don’t treat it seriously. We treat it in a joking way. I want people to think about Jewish food as something serious and something beautiful.”


Batya Ungar-Sargon is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.