The sense of the world closing in on Jews, but particularly the concept of our homeland, has at times felt overwhelming since October 7, especially for those of us who spend too much time on social media. And yet there are wormholes in the antizionist firmament that is the internet, in which it is Zionist Jews who are beloved, successful and adored the world over.
The example I know best is food Instagram, where there is a startling efflorescence of Jewish Zionist cooks banking many millions of followers in total, standing up for Jewish and Israeli identity and disseminating the heritage and history with bold pride and joy. Food is the perfect vehicle for this.
Such “creators” include the very kosher Brooklyn-born and based cook Chanie Apfelbaum (“Busy in Brooklyn”), and Mushka Haskelevich (‘mushkainthemarket’), a Brooklyn-based private chef born into a Hasidic community in Crown Heights who spent a decade living and cooking within Jerusalem’s Mehane Yehuda market.
Then there’s the high-key Zionist British cook Josh Halmer (handle “Falmer.uk”) who wears an apron reading “Dumb Bitch”, cooks historic foods eaten by Jews, including Theodor Herzl’s favourite “Altneuland cake” of orange, almond and olive oil, and has recently announced that he will be making Aliyah. He crams in history and just the right amount of Zionist defiance around sumptuous recipes like “medovik”, a Rosh Hoshana honey layered cake, to chicken schug pasta, to what he simply calls “stress-free Jewish mother approved recipe”, a traybake of spiced chicken and rice. In the three months since I began to follow him, his Instagram audience has increased by 30,000 to 119,000. Dozens of non-Jewish fellow food vloggers adore his recipes. This is one of the most unapologetic of the food Zionists out there, and it’s working for, not against, him.
In the US, Canada, and Israel, there’s another tenacious cohort of growing clout on the global food scene, which includes Adeena Sussman, whose most recent Tel Aviv-inspired cookbook, Zariz, was an instant bestseller, the Sephardic-Canadian cooks Arielle Nir Mamiye and Giulia Sandroussi (‘Tasty and Hasty’). Sandroussi’s claim to fame is insanely ambitious Shabbat cooking videos (she has four children but looks preternaturally young, pretty and fresh) and her Passover chocolate-chip cookies briefly broke the internet. An Israeli flag adorns her profile.
I have also loved watching a global audience discovering the Israeli “Noshka”, who mostly does clever things with vegetables, tofu and nonpareils, but whose filmic artistry is possibly the most beguiling on the whole internet. I once personally begged Yehudit Aviv, a tough-looking middle-aged Israeli cook (320k followers), to translate her recipes into English because they look so good, but she said she didn’t have time (where is AI when you need it, eh?).
But the huge cheeses are the American-Israeli grand dames Sivan Kobi of Sivan’s Kitchen, Ruhama Shitrit of Ruhama’s Food, and, in a slightly different way, the eponymous Melissa Ben-Ishay of Baked By Melissa, a super-successful mini cupcake business, whose Israeli husband Adi makes regular appearances in her videos. And while he doesn’t talk politics, Ben Siman Tov’s (“BenGigi”) strong Hebrew accent and Israeli recipes rather give the game away; but at 575,000 followers it can hardly be said to be holding him back.
Sivan and Ruhama are the queen bees of them all, both mums of four in their 50s. They are also the most strident in their love and support of their homeland: they have honoured fallen IDF soldiers in Gaza, referred repeatedly to the hostages, and always go to town on the holidays, Sivan especially, with her dedicated line of table decorations and dishes.
I interviewed both Ruhama, Sivan as well as Adeena Sussman for an article in the JC last spring: I was intrigued at how they squared their public Zionism with the poisonous bile invited by such Zionism, or indeed simply being Israeli. They did so by being firm about who they were. They each said they would, indeed could not, hide this, and people could either take it or leave it. I also found their attitude to the abuse and trolling very inspiring (I’d been horrified at some of what Sivan attracted): they waved all that aside as bots, nobodies, nothing, completely and easily below all notice and even contempt.
At any rate, their defiance – which is authenticity sustained by moral courage – is working. When I began following Sivan a couple of years ago she had 600,000 followers. She now has two million, and I watched with interest the speed with which she doubled her followers from one million to her current count.
Ruhama, whose own following (1.2 million), is rooted in her entirely unapologetic Hebrew accent, her tagline “Wow”, and her wholesome salads and single-casserole dinners oozing with onion and spices, always paying homage to her Iraqi-Yemenite roots and the favourite dishes of her father Kaduri Aharon, a beloved mayor of Tirat Carmel, just south of Haifa. Sivan’s kitchen is mostly Sephardic too. Her own mother was Iraqi, and her husband, who was her high school sweetheart and thus a bigger-than-usual influence on her, is Syrian.
In the end, their success, and those of the diverse crew coming up on Jewish-Zionist food-gram and food-Tok and food-Tube is, I think, down to two main things.
One: the charm of people who know themselves, and are prepared to fully be themselves, is immense, even if it’s politically grain-busting or contentious
And second, and perhaps this is the most important, the sheer appeal of the food. Jews produce the best, don’t we? There’s a reason that Israel is a food paradise, that the hottest restaurants in London were for years Israeli, that there is an undying fascination, even among goyim, with the food of the shtetl, that Claudia Roden and Yotam Ottonlenghi changed the entire food paradigm in the West, as much as Julia Child or Elizabeth David ever did.
So whenever I feel pinioned in place by the oppressive lies about Jews emanating from antizionist fervour, I grab my phone and start scrolling, instantly soothed by Ruhama’s heavy Hebrew drawl or the sight of Sivan’s Israel-shaped pendant as much as by knowing that to try making for dinner that night.
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.