Thursday, Augusts, 1990 — TH^ BULLETIN — 5
Isra^llc^ and taste feast
By ROSE KLEINER
A love of Israel, good food and superb photography combine to make Taste of Israel, A.Mediterranean Feast into a book of singular appeal. It is also a good update on the great progress Israel has made in the gastronomic field during the past decade.
Its unique, almost sensual photographs have ah esthetic dimension that goes beyond the kitchen. Yet most recipes are basically simple enough to inspire the most reticent of cooks. Mainly, the book captures the culinary feel of Israel, with its special regional and ethnic foods, in a way that delights the eye. Keep this volume onjhe coffee table in the living room, when it*s not used in the kitchen!
Unlike most cookbooks on the market these days, this book was written by two men, rather than by women. Ron Maiberg is a journalist and filmmaker, with a passion for things gastronomical. Avi Ganor, one of Israel's leading photographers, sees every item of food as a work of art. The authors used Zachi Buk-
shester as general food consultant.' " ■ .
Owner and chef of one of Tel Aviv's most fashionable restaurants. The Pink Ladle, Bukshester also writes about food in Israel's most popular daily newspaper, Yediot Ach-ronot.
The book contains chapters on traditional, dairy, fish, vegetable and barbecued foods. One of the most intriguing chapters is on *Street Food'.
You may not necessarily want to go into the kitchen to duplicate the tasty, and tempting, fast food sat Israel's ubiquitous kiosks. But, like this writer, you may enjoy learning what goes into these foods, and how they are prepared. At last the ingredients of the Fried Kibbeh, the Boreka, or the Mixed Grill, will no longer be a mystery.
Each chapter has two parts. The first section consists of a lively, well written and informative short introduction: These fine sections say as much about Israeli culture as about the food under discussion.
TASTE OF ISRAEL A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST
Text: Ron Maiberg
Photos: Avi Ganor McClelland & Stewart, 240 Pages
AVI GANOR'S baby geese, delightful photo used to explain that Israelis'' raise geese for their livers.
The second part of the chapter gives individual recipes, beautifully illustrated.
Even the chapter on New Israeli Chefs follows this format. First comes a delightful short discussion of what it's like to be a creative and imaginative chef in a country such as Israel. There are the special kashrut laws and other limitations, along with some advantages — such as the rich culinary variety of a people gathered from all corners of the earth.
Then comes the recipe part of the chapter where several new Israeli chefs share cookr ing secrets. Among easy recipes in this chapter is Uri Guttman's Avocado Soup (page 223). Israel Aharoni's Mediterranean Tart (page 229) is another dish that's simple to prepare, and as attractively gourmet as any French pissaladiere can be.
Easy, simple recipes in other chapters include the traditional kugel made with thin vermicelli (page 119), Chilled Cucumber and Yogurt Soup (page 51), and veal and lamb Shish Kebabs. All have a short list of ingredients, a delicate combination of season-ings.
The cliapter on Wine and Spirits gives readers, even those indifferent to drinking, an absorbing look at one area
where incredible progress has been made in the past decade.
In this chapter the authors first discuss why Israelis are not drinkers, giving a variety of explanations. A gourmet wine culture and wine appreciation in Israel, they say, is really a phenomenon of the 108()s. Prior to that decade most wines were too sweet* and the population so accustomed to this taste that a proper table wine just did not sell. Also, the cuisine was not yet up to par.
Starting with the early 1980s a revolution occurred in the wine sector of Israel. In only a decade one of Israel's newer wine makers has succeeded in earning a chestful of medals and citations from international wine shows.
This success coincided with the country's gastronomic revolution, which saw literally hundreds of restaurants opening in the span of a short period of time.
Today, instead of the three home grown wineries which Israel has nurtured'since the start of the century, diners can choose from among the products of 25 wineries. There are now in the country wine societies and wine newsletters. The competition ambng^thexon^^ panics has kept prices reasonable, making Israel a place where, in the 1990s, good local wine will be very much an accessible reality.
Rose Kleiner Is a Canadian writer based In Toronto.
■ , ■ ■ ■ . •
Media silent as rocks maim israeii cliild
By BERTRAM KORN, Jr.
Middle Eastern violence claimed another victim this summer: a six-month-old child was severely injured, another young innocent trapped helplessly between opposing forces in a brutal and seemingly endless conflict. In a grotesque climax to the tragic episode, the victim's father also became the victim of a violent assault while enroute to hospital lOAosiThisxhildr" ~ -~
If the child had been an Arab, the incident probably would ' have merited worldwide media attention, and Save the Children might be busy collecting details of the incident for its next report about alleged Israeli brutality towards children. However, the child was Jewish, and once again the world's newspapers were silent.
^ Bertram Kom, Jr. Is executive director of tlie Phlladelpfila office of GAINER A. the Committee for Accuracy In Middle East Reporting In
America. .
The victim was six-month-old Ahikam Simantov, who fought for his life in the emergency ward at Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. Little Ahikam was a passenger in his mother's car as they were^raveiling from lerusalem to their home in the town of Ofra. When they passed the Shuafat refugee camp, just north of the capital, "two masked Arabs began throwing rocks at us," Mrs. Simantov later told reporters. A fe5¥ minutes later, as she passed a school in the Arab village of'Ain Baroud: Arabs threw rocks at us again." _
Theviplence reached itsJiorrifying climax just before the Simantovs reached Ofra, as a third group of Arabs began showering chunks of concrete on their car. A huge concrete block crashed through the front windshield and hit little Ahikam, who was strapped into a baby seat in the back seat of the car. Doctors characterized his condition as ^'serious," which in Israeli medical parlance means life-threatening.
"Not surprisingly, there is nary a word of this^in the foreign piress," a Jerusalem Post editorial commented. "UnUke the widely distributed, doctored photograph of an injured child in Beirut, which induced Secretary Schultz to re-think American policy, the picture of the unconscious six-mOnth-old infant
connected to life-supporting devices and struggling for his survival did not get into the international media."
Heart-rending photographs of Ahikam in the hospital ward appeared on the front pages of Israel's leading newspapers. No such photos appeared in Time or Newsweeky in the New York Times or the Washington Post, on the CBS Nightly News or the MacNeil-Lehrer Report.
Nor did the American mediaTeponimthexrueHAvis^ending^ to the Simantov incident. While driving to Jerusalem to visit Ahikam in the hospital, the child's father, Meir Simantov, was attacked by Arab rock-throwers. The windows of his car were smashed, although he miraculously escaped serious injury.
America's newspapers and television networks seem to have little time for Jewish victims of Arab violence. They regard Arab stone-throwing more as childish mischief than as terrorism, despite the fact that at least three Israelis have been killed by Arab rock-throwers in recent years: Esther Ghana, a young woman who was murdered by rock-throwers near the town of Dahariya in 1983; Benny Meisner, who was killed when he was struck in the head by a chunk of concrete in Nablus last year; and Chaim Sharabani, who was hit by rocks in the Gaza Strip last August^nd later died ofhis wounds. The names of Ghana, Meisner and Sharabani never made headlines. Now we can add Ahikam Simantov to the tragic list of Jews wholiave been killed or maimed by Arab terrorists, and. ignored by American journalists. _
The only time U.S. newspaper editors seem to take rock-JhroMng serious occurs in their own backyards.
When a woman driver was severely injured in a rock-throwing attack on Washington. D.C.'s Capital Beltway last Memorial Day weekend, the Washington Post published an angry editorial demanding that the police "take.aU the steps necessary" to quash the rock-throwers (although the^Post has lambasted the Israeii authorities for doing just that). The editorial-asked. "What's the difference between assault with a deadly weapon — a shooting — and assault with rocks that hit cars at potentially lethal speeds?" .
That's a good question, one that newsmen should be asking when they report on events in the Midclle East as well.
AVI GANOR'S photographs, works of art, make this cookbook unique. Above: Baklava, layered pastries with nuts and syrjjp come In different shapes and flavors.
Myth or fact— —^
is France anti-Semitic?
By BEN KAYFETZ
Henry Weinberg teaches in the French department of Erindale college at the University of Toronto. His new book The Myth of the Jew in France 1967-1982 examines the status of the Jews in prance and proceeds to dem-^fisliiTwhat hen^toiders^^^ mythology that has surrounded the Jews of that country ever since the Revolution of 1789. This mythology says that since the Jews of France were the first to be emancipated they are, therefore, the most free and the most liberated, living in the most hospitable environment
could advance as an individual in any field provided he gave up his national identity — i.e. provided he assimilated.
And this is what many did, saturating themselves in French culture, French art, the French way of life, retaining only a tenuous "confes-"^Sional—link With-Judaism, iT even that. But this was not enough for Drumont or his modern^ay counterparts.
Weinberg suggests it was Leon Blum's Jewishness that made him give up the premiership in the 1930s and that the same happened to Mendesr. France in the 1950s.
The most recent escapade
THE MYTH OF THE JEW IN FRANCE By Henry Weinberg Mosaic Press
of La Belle France.
Weinberg's conclusions are that, quite to the contrary, France's Jews have been the subject of concerted, deliberate attack from the days of Drumont in the 1880s to the present: that De Gaulee's for-eign policy volte-face Sifter set-thng the Algerian war impelled him into a cynical courtship of the Arab states, which still goes on despite Mitterrand; that French diplomkcy turned against^ Israel in the most crass manner^ releasing known terrorists and shutting its eyes to crimes on its own turf.
Le Monde, a newspaper that corresponds to The Times of London (and The Times of New York), the truly establishment daily of France, has been carrying on a con-sLsient^olicy of hostility^ to Israel and polite suspicion of disloyalty directed at France's Jews.
The original "deal" for Jewish emancipation, as inter-preted by Napoleon and accepted by those who followed as rulers of the country, was contained in the formula: "Everything to the Jew as an individual — nothing to the Jews as a nation".
In other words the Jew
— the obscenity of the disinterment at Carpentras is, of course, outside the time range of the book and took place after its appearance. But Prof. Weinberg would undoubtedly claim — and has with some justification — that it is of a piece and Totally~congrueiit—
with his thesis. Rue Copernic, Goldenberg's restaurant and now Carpentras — surely a record that confirms Weinberg's discouraging analysis.
And yet, there^re-thosc-who disagree. Another Toronto Jewish professor, Michael Marrus, takes an opposing position. And Marrus is not one to take anti-Semites lightly. In his book on the Dreyfus affair. The Politics of Assimilation, he reveals the blindness of French Jewish leadership-at the Time and in his book, Vichy France and the Jews, he exposed the prevalence of anti-Semitism in pre-war and Vichy-period France right across the political spectrum, whether pro or anti-Nazi.
Did all this end in 1944? Not if we credit Henry Weinberg.
Ben Kayfetz, regular JMfB reviewer, writes as a "stringer" for JTA and tlie London Jewish Chronicle.