Padma Lakshmi is a well-known food personality. Hosting 15 seasons of a show as popular as Top Chef allows a person to do many things, and one of her more recent ventures is a food docuseries for Hulu called Taste the Nation.
In the show, she seeks to find what exactly American food is and the history surrounding it. Who brought it here, when they brought it here, how it developed, where in the country it sprouted forth from, and why it made it this far, are all questions for which she wants answers.
Her second season was recently released and the topic of the four episodes was holidays. First up: Hanukkah.
When I first saw this I thought what some of you are likely thinking right now. “Great. Another non-jew who thinks that Hanukkah is the most important Jewish holiday.”
Well, I was happy to be proven wrong. She leads off the episode with Jews making jokes about how Chanukah is not that high up on our lists, how it isn’t “the Jewish Christmas,” and how Jesus celebrated Hanukkah (he actually did).
From here she starts a tour of different spots that all bring out different aspects of the Jewish American experience, Hanukkah, and (obviously) some great exposure for Jewish food.
First up is Russ and Daughters on the Lower East Side. Lakshmi meets with the current owners (great grand-children of Joel Russ) and talks to them about all the store has to offer. We get some great shots of pastrami-crusted lox, dill cream cheese, and bagels. (Russ and Daughters operates a kosher location at The Jewish Museum.)
Next step is making latkes from scratch. If your Hanukkah latke cravings haven’t yet begun, watching this episode will do it. While eating the latkes, Lakshmi drops perhaps one of the most Jewish lines of the episode, “You share your culture through the vehicle of food.”
From there she goes to The Tenement Museum and gets some insight into how the Jewish journey in America really got going. Along the way, Dr. Annie Polland makes an interesting point about Hanukkah and the development of some of the traditions.
“It was more of a home celebration as opposed to a synagogue celebration,” she astutely observes. “And so, I think that does give room for some kind of invention.”
While I never quite thought of it that way, this is an interesting assertion. Unlike the holidays with observant days of yom tov where we have to be in shul, or even Purim with megillah to attend, Hanukkah is basically a homebound holiday. Perhaps that is one of the reasons it has evolved over time.
Lakshmi next goes to visit The Pickle Guys. Here she speaks to the owners about taking something so Jewish from a century ago and bringing it into the present day. (The Pickle Guys are hechshered under Rabbi Shmuel Fishelis.)
After that, she meets with the founders of The Gefiltertia. Their company does basically the opposite of The Pickle Guys. They inject the present day (modern ingredients and flavor profiles) into the past (gefilte fish). She works with them to make a stuffed cabbage dish that made me (not really a stuffed cabbage kind of guy) want to reach through the screen and grab some. (The Gefilteria’s products are certified OU-P all year round.)
For the religious perspective on the holiday, she pays a visit to New York’s Central Synagogue. This is where she gets the backstory of the holiday from a rabbi. As an orthodox Jew, I was paying close attention to how the reform rabbi would describe Hanukkah to a celebrity on a television show. Rabbi Ari Lorge did a very admirable job. This episode was shattering my expectations at every turn.
The next segment seemed like an interesting choice because it actually strayed entirely away from food. Lakshmi visited with Ruth Zimbler, a holocaust survivor.
Zimbler spoke of Kristallnacht and her early years in America. She specifically remembered a time when she was on the subway with her father as he read The Forward, a yiddish newspaper of the time. When she told him he should put the paper away while they were in public, he said, “I can have a yiddish paper to read in front of everyone because I’m in America.”
Lakshmi’s last stop is with Deb Perelman. She talks about how her family continued eating Jewish food, but stopped performing a lot of the actual religious things upon arriving in America. She also tries to bring the past into the present by making a fairly classic Jewish brisket… but then making brisket tacos out of it. I like brisket tacos and she also featured sufganiyot, so I’ll allow it.
It may not be the most religious episode of TV, but it’s a very Jewish episode of TV. When they feature the ingredients on the screen, they list all of the names in yiddish as well. That’s a nice nod back to the old country.
But for me, the most crucial thing in the episode is actually a point that Lakshmi made in her conversation with the rabbi in the shul. As they discussed immigrant Jews coming to America to escape persecution around the world and the story of Hanukkah being about Jews fighting for freedom to practice Judaism, she said the following:
“So, in a way, it’s kind of perfect that Hanukkah, which commemorates this event, is exalted in America because so many communities have come here so that they wouldn’t be victims of religious persecution and so that they could worship in peace.”
Is Chanukah at the top of our lists? Not really. It’s not Rosh HaShana or Yom Kippur in terms of davening, and it’s not like it’s bigger than any of the shalosh regalim and everything we do for those holidays in practice.
But Lakshmi is right. If you had to pick the most American of the Jewish holidays, it’s probably Hanukkah because the basis is freedom of religion and that’s why this country really began hundreds of years ago.
Sometimes you can learn something about your own holiday from a shiksa on reality television.
Season 2 of Taste the Nation, subtitled “Holiday Edition,” is streaming now on Hulu. The first episode, “Happy Challah Days” is the episode discussed above.
Nati Burnside 