Kosher Salt is Jewcy’s monthly comic about life as a blonde-haired, green-eyed, tattooed Jew.

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I Don’t Eat Pork
On Forgiveness

Elizabeth Simins is a compulsive doodler living in New York. She splits her time between making paintings, being a production designer, and playing pretentious indie video games. She tweets here.

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As we’ve all heard 100 times by now, Hanukkah celebrates the miracle of the oil (and maybe some other things): The eight days we observe with our candle-lighting and dreidel-playing represent the eight days the temple’s menorah stayed lit with only a single day’s supply of oil. To commemorate this, Jews across the world eat fried foods, such as latkes and donuts (to which you might be tempted to ask “How is this night different?”—wrong holiday).

Though every year I plan on staying away from these oily fried foods, I can’t seem to do it—I have too much holiday spirit to renounce the tradition all together (especialy if they’re Indian-spiced)! Instead, I decided to come up with another option for those more health-conscious and more averse to oil stains: Olive Oil Cake.

Olive oil cakes have been around for centuries and are often found in Mediterranean cookbooks (see, it’s really a Jewish tradition). It is lighter and healthier than butter and lends a slightly fruity note to whatever you are baking. Heavier olive oil, the ones tinted with more of a green color, will give a more distinct olive oil taste, so for baking I would go with the lighter oils. Olive Oil contains Vitamin E and good cholesterol, and has little saturated fat. If health wasn’t motivation enough to swap the doughnuts for the olive oil cake, consider this—olive oil is also the oil said to have been used in the temple services and is touted as the best oil to use today in modern Hanukkah rituals. Latkes and donuts are never fried in olive oil (olive oil has too low or a burning point to be any good for deep frying), but rather in vegetable oil or shortening. To be truer to the historical miracle and kinder to your arteries, give this cake a chance.

You won’t be sacrificing anything in the taste department. It is moist and light, with soft citrus and almond notes. It’s a breeze to make (easier than peeling and grating all those potatoes) and will be gone in minutes. The perfect light ending to a holiday meal. Or a holiday snack. Or a holiday breakfast…

The best part: It won’t make your home smell like a deep fryer for hours on end.

Not Your Bubbe’s Almond Olive Oil Cake

Ingredients:

Cake:
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup ground almonds
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp kosher salt
3 large eggs
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 tsp orange zest
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup sliced almonds, toasted and cooled

Glaze:
1 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar
3 tbsp milk, soy milk, or water
¼ tsp fresh lemon juice
¼ tsp almond liquor

Equipment:
9-inch round cake pan

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour the pan and set aside.

2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, almond flour, baking powder, and salt.

3. In a large bowl, crack the eggs and whisk them slightly to break up the yolks. Add the sugar and whisk it in very thoroughly. Add the olive oil and whisk until the mixture is lighter in color and has thickened slightly, about one minute. Whisk in the extract and zest, and the orange juice.

4. Add the dry ingredients to the bowl and whisk until they are thoroughly combined and you are left with a smooth batter.

5. Fold in the cooled toasted almonds.

6. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake the cake for 40 to 45 minutes.

7. The cake is done when it springs back slightly when touched and a cake tester comes out clean. Allow the cake to cool completely before glazing.

8. To make the glaze, pour the confectioners sugar into a owl and whisk slightly to break up any clumps. Add the milk, liquor, and lemon and whisk until completely smooth. Taste the glaze—if it’s too sweet, add a few more drops of lemon juice. Pour the glaze onto he top of the cake and allow it to drip down the sides. Let it set for a couple of minutes, and enjoy.

Also try:

Not Your Bubbe’s Indian Spiced Latkes

Not Your Bubbe’s Southern Chili Cholent

Not Your Bubbe’s Thanksgiving Turkey

The post Not Your Bubbe’s Recipe: Almond Olive Oil Cake appeared first on Jewcy.

When I told people that I planned to spend the 2012-13 academic year in Ukraine, their most common response was: “Why?” (Followed closely by: “Is that safe?”) It seemed to me, at the time, that the most frequently asked questions are often also the hardest to answer. Although I came up with several canned responses—a craving for gritty post-Soviet adventures; a desire to get to know the country my grandparents came from better; to study Jewish history; because I lucked into a Fulbright scholarship to go there—I couldn’t help but feel that none of them sufficed, at least not alone. It could only be some combination of all of them that came together to make a kind of electric unease, a pull eastward that kept me sleepless before I boarded the plane to Kiev.

It’s been two months since I got here, and though I’m thrilled to see the Dnieper River through my window each morning, Ukraine is the kind of place that raises more questions than it answers. Though Ukraine’s contemporary Jewish community is thriving in Dniepropetrovsk, Odessa, and elsewhere, it’s far from the world my grandparents inhabited, changed by a century of Soviet atheism and mass emigration. Studying the culture of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe can sometimes feel like studying Ancient Rome; although only half a century has passed, the combative, complex, multilingual civilization that overran Kiev’s Podolia neighborhood and Odessa’s wharfs, the squares of Chernivtsi and Muncaksy and Lviv, is gone, its residents with it.

Part of that world lives on in the many novels and poems it inspired. Part of it lives on in my own Jewish upbringing and that of people like me—cold borscht and potatoes with sour cream on Pesach, Yiddish leaving its unmistakable footprints all over my English speech. And some things remain, even here in Ukraine. But you have to look for those signs, scour the streets, find the people who can still tell you about the past, though there are fewer every day. Being here for a year, through all the Jewish holidays—from Rosh Hashanah to Hanukkah to Pesach—I’ve been teaching myself to look and to listen, although it can be exhausting. But sometimes the past shows itself in unexpected, unlooked-for ways, and, for a wayward moment, a lost world of unimaginable richness comes alive again.

A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Lviv, a city once home to a world-famous Jewish community. Lviv is beautiful, in a delicate, markedly Western-European way that differs from other Ukrainian cities. My friends I went for a walk one late autumn afternoon, watching yellow sunlight fade over pastel houses. When we reached Federova Street, where the sellers of books and antiquities gather, we stopped to peruse their wares—cheap novels, schoolbooks, Soviet hatpins. And then I saw it: on the low table beside a vendor in his mid-30s—who glowered at us, crossing his arms—was a menorah.

Wrapped in brown paper, the menorah lay on its side on the table. The metal was oxidized green with age, but beneath the patina, the Hebrew words lehadlik ner Hanukkah could be made out—to light the Hanukkah candles, the blessing you make before lighting the candles. A lion—symbol of the city of Lviv—reared on spindly legs in its center, holding up the shamash, and a row of oil wells held the remains of charred, degraded wicks. The vendor set his jaw and prepared for a long haggle. I opened my wallet, but to my dismay, I only had a few bedraggled hryvnia (the Ukrainian currency) with me. I had to leave without the menorah—and by the time I managed to find an ATM, the market was closed, the tables packed away. I hadn’t even caught the vendor’s name.

I left the city that weekend feeling like I’d left a friend in captivity. Weeks after my return to Kiev, the menorah still haunted me. Who was it taken from? Who last lit it, and when? The spindly lion, the bent shamash, returned to me again and again. So when I returned to Lviv on a rainy weekend, I knew I had to try my hardest to find it. Hanukkah, after all, was less than a month away.

Federova Square is a sad sight in the rain—the book market is driven away in inclement weather, and it has a typically Ukrainian lack of backup plan. But my train was leaving the next day, and I couldn’t go back to Kiev empty-handed. So I set out on an unlikely quest. After asking a few passersby about the book market, I was directed to an antikvariat (antiques) store not far away. The street the shop was on was little better than a pit, and my shoes were soon covered in mud. I ducked into the shop—Lviv is full of antiques stores, because armies and vanished populations have left wave after wave of historical junk here—and asked whether they had any Jewish objects.

No dice in shop No. 1; he sent me further down the street to yet another antiques store. In shop No. 2, there was a Vilna-printed copy of Vayikra (Leviticus)—nestled next to a copy of Mein Kampf. In the third antiques store were only icons, flat-faced saints that stared at me from behind glass cabinets.

I was exhausted, and chilled to the bone. But the rain had abated and I wasn’t about to give up my search yet. There was one more place to check—the Vernisazh, Lviv’s bustling outdoor souvenir market. I passed piles of wet woolen mittens, wood rosaries, matrioshka dolls; the vendors were on the verge of packing up their things. I paused at the flap of a dim tent, my well-rehearsed query—Do you have any Jewish objects?—on the tip of my tongue, when I saw it. Nestled between a Soviet aviator cap and a pair of spectacles, there it was—the twin of my menorah, down to the green oxide speckling the base of the shamash. The lion grinned at me with bared teeth, his thin paw braced against the frame, and there were the Hebrew letters instructing me “to light the Hanukkah candles.”

When I indicated that I wanted it—and I was ready to pay his inflated price—the vendor dug a yellowed envelope out from under his riot of objects.

“This was sold to me by the same man,” he said, pressing a photograph into my hand. “I don’t know who they are—but they’re Jews, and this photo is from Lviv, before the war.”

In the photo, its image still crisp in black and white, a young boy in the familiar Eastern European keppele (cap) stood next to a bearded man in a broad-brimmed black hat. The two of them held hand-rolled cigarettes, and smoke curled out of their open mouths—the camera had caught them in the middle of a bout of laughter. There was no date on the photograph, no name, and the menorah’s creator hadn’t signed his handiwork. But the menorah was heavy and solid in my hand, the photograph was clear and whole; I could imagine the same hands that held those cigarettes lighting the wicks in the menorah’s wells, the same smoke curling up around the high-cheekboned faces, the blessing escaping from beneath the bushy beard.

I kept the menorah and the photograph in my lap all through the train ride back to Kiev. And as the days grow shorter, as snow begins to accumulate on the statues’ shoulders, I’m waiting for the day when I get to light these candles. I’ll look out over the little houses crowding Dnieper’s banks, over the dancing flames, and know that this is why I came—even if only for an hour, even if only in the privacy of my own room, being here has given me the chance to light up a piece of the past once more, and let it shine anew on the weary streets of this city.

The post Hanukkah in Ukraine: A Menorah’s Tale appeared first on Jewcy.

And on the third day, there were robots.

Here’s Technion Israel’s souped-up menorah lighting—as Adam Chandler writes over at the Scroll, “Prepare to feel inadequate.”

How the Technion Does A Menorah Lighting [The Scroll]

The post Watch This Israeli Robot Light a Hanukkah Menorah appeared first on Jewcy.

Jay-Z is serious about this whole Jewish street cred thing. After telling Rolling Stone he was the most powerful Jew in the music industry now that Lyor Cohen (you know, of Dior Homme) left the Warner Music Group, Hov took it a step (or eight) further for his much talked-about concert series at the Barclays Center.

Over at Fuse, Amit Wehle—who lives at 560 State Street—tells the absurdly amazing story of how he ended up providing the menorah that Jay-Z and Co. lit each of the eight nights of concerts. Get it?!

Wehle writes:

Let me pause to explain what a menorah is for those who may not know: It’s a nine-branched candelabrum lit each night during the Jewish holiday, Hanukkah. It commemorates the re-dedication of the Holy Temple some 2,200 years ago in Jerusalem. Now Jay-Z and his team wanted to light one candle for each night of their eight-concert run, held in their own Holy Temple. So, already feeling a kinship with Hova from my chance living at his old residence, I jumped at the idea.

So yeah, that happened. Dome of the ROC, anyone?

Previous: Is Jay-Z the Most Powerful Jew in the Music Industry?

(Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images)

The post Jay-Z Lit A Menorah Backstage All Eight Nights of His NYC Concert Series appeared first on Jewcy.

• Ed Hardy tequila and the rapidly expanding world of kosher foods.

• Huffington Post looks for the best potato pancakes.  We call them latkes.

• Bill Maher compares Glenn Beck to L. Ron Hubbard.

• A menorah made out of soda boxes.

• WikiLeaks won’t trend on Twitter.  Censoring?  Probably.

• Natalie Portman’s boyfriend is flexible.  Dudes are jealous.

The post Daily Jewce: Certifying Kosher Tequila For Douchebags, Good Latkes, Natalie Portman’s Boyfriend And More appeared first on Jewcy.