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By: Itamar Kremer What would you say is the most Jewish food? Well, this is a tough one. For some, there is nothing on earth like grandma Genia’s Gefilte Fish, for others, it’s grandpa Ezra’s Kibbeh, yet others will swear by aunt Margalit’s Kubaneh, whereas if you ask Israeli young kids, they will probably rule that Bamba rules. However, for members of the second-largest Jewish community in the world – the Jewry of the United States – there is no argument that bagel was, is, and shall ever be the most Jewish food. How did it win the title? Well,[�]

Itamar Kremer On February 11, 1954, IDF spokesman released a brief laconic message: “21 years old private Nathan Elbaz sacrificed his life in order to prevent a catastrophic loss of lives of his friends, while a grenade exploded. The deceased soldier has no address, and no relatives to announce his death to”. However, Nathan Elbaz (born on October 17, 1932 – 87 years ago), did have an address. When he came to Israel from Sefrou, near Fez in Morocco, he left behind his parents, who eventually received the letter with the sad news of their son’s heroic death, along with[�]

It happened in November 1919, almost one whole century ago. World War I was over, the Versailles treaty was signed in Europe, and the Russian civil war was raging, between the reds and the whites – supporters of the old Czarist regime. Jewish refugees from all across Europe, including those deported from Palestine by the Turks, gathered in Odessa, on the shores of the Black Sea. The leadership of the Odessa Committee, formerly Chibat Zion, applied for refugee status papers on behalf of the Eretz Israeli refugees, in which the applicants were required to prove their knowledge about their homeland.[�]

Growing up as a religious boy in Haifa during the 1990s, I used to argue with a secular boy my age, a sharp clever kid called Baruch, named so by his father, a Math Professor in the Technion, who was an enthusiastic fan of the greatest Jewish heretic ever – Baruch Spinoza. I can still remember the passionate theological arguments between Baruch and me. Our budding intellectual Eros; the strong motivation to refute one another’s case, and how each time it ended with the neighbors shouting at us to keep it down, and the two us abandoning the loud debate[�]