Happy Pride Month! Would you like to push your subversive queer agenda whilst enjoying traditional Jewish foods? Here are a few rainbow colored suggestions, but of course we didn’t include rainbow bagels because those are an abomination!

Rainbow challah is not an abomination (experiments tend to come from within the Jewish community, and not mess with the core concept), and is an increasingly popular Jewish treat, either for pride or not. But do you have any idea how many different pride flags there are? A whole lot, and you can try to make an appropriate challah for any of them. We recently published some pretty detailed instructions on how to make a challah resembling the trans pride flag, for example. And what about flags that have specific shapes or symbols? Consider our instructions on how to make poppy seed stencils (and tweet us your photos, of course!).

Rainbow cookies/cake (same food, different names) is not actually clear in its origins; it seems to be about as Jewish as it is Italian (though of course you can be both), a product of the overlapping immigrant communities in America. Regardless, it’s a kiddush staple, and the perfect treat to pass around as you discuss intersectionality in the Jewish community and how it can be more accommodating to queer folks.

Fruit slices may be a Passover treat, but there’s no reason you can’t eat them in June. Besides, you can be political all year, noshing on this dessert at your next seder as you politely explain that the orange on the seder plate actually originally referred to lesbians and gay men specifically, and not women as a whole.

Heck, it’s not rainbow, but eat an orange. Let’s reclaim it.

Rainbow latkes are another holiday dish good year round— and we have the recipe! Chew on the nuanced historical implications of eating these— a queer meaning juxtaposed with the a fun aesthetic twist on a traditional Chanukah food. But said food only dates back a few hundred years since potatoes are a New World food that through colonization became the central to many Ashkenazi communities’ diets— the original latke was actually fried cheese, and Italian.

Plus, Chanukah is a complicated celebration to begin with since it’s originally a military holiday for an arguably just rebellion that ultimately established a corrupt theocratic monarchy, only to have religious authorities later superimpose an ahistorical theology on it. Then, of course, ultimately to the whole thing was converted into a commercialized Christmas stand-in for American Jews, with all the various problematic aspects of capitalism coming into play.

That’s all a very queer thing to think about.

Finally, a shout out to my Facebook friends, who had some amazing responses to my question of what a “Jewish queer food” is, providing this bonus list:

“Ladies, just put two bagels on the same plate for a yonic delight. Make them Everything bagels to be sure you have pansexual representation.”

“Bacon wrapped shrimp because the best part of being queer is breaking taboos.”

“Kosher wine makes great sangria, which is pretty gay.”

“I feel like anything out of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book would do.”

“Vodka. Just vodka.”

Challah photo by Hannah Simpson. Rainbow cake photo via Wikimedia. Fruit slices photo by Tim Sackton, via Flickr.

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Growing up, I loved kiddush. It was the reason I went to temple—or at least it was my favorite part of going to temple. I knew there was more to services than the mounds of cookies that came after Adon Olam. The junior congregation service, intended for Hebrew school-aged children, was fun. We prayed, and there were activities to keep us engaged. We learned that temple was exciting and meaningful while being introduced to the basics of the service. For me, the fun just happened to continue at kiddush, and Adon Olam was my cue.

The junior congregation kiddush always had Drake’s goodies like Yodels or Devil Dogs. But the adult kiddush, usually sponsored by that week’s bar or bat mitzvah family, was where the real treats could be found. Here were the cookies I longed for—the kosher cookies that somehow made my Saturday special. Even though as a kid I should have liked Drake’s more, there was something about those adult kiddush cookies that did it for me. Perhaps it was in my DNA.

I would start with the yellow cookies with the pink or yellow circle in the middle—you know the ones—soft but with a nice little icing crunch. Then I would move on to rugelech, a cookie that speaks for itself. When I ate the rainbow cookies, I ate around the jelly (if only my childhood self understood the joys of jelly!). After the cookies, I would indulge in a marble slice. What more could a young kiddush lover ask for after a morning of davening?

Then, things changed for this Kiddush lover. No, I didn’t grow up and decide to give up cookies. Who would say no to a cookie at Kiddush? What a shonda. Instead, at 13, I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease. A diagnosis of celiac requires one to go on a gluten-free diet: a diet free of wheat, rye, and barely. The kosher kiddush cookies I once loved and devoured were now off limits. Kiddush was gluten. It was the end of an era.

At that time, I was very accepting of my diagnosis because I understood that my health was dependent on strictly following the new diet. There was no time to long for the gluten goodies I once ate. The kosher kiddush cookies were just cookies, and I could not have them.

I left it at that until I discovered gluten-free kosher cookies from Shabtai Gourmet and rugelech from Katz Gluten-Free. It was a gluten-free miracle. These cookies tasted just like kiddush. These cookies contained, for me, the essence of kiddush. They reminded me of the Saturdays of my childhood. Without realizing it, I had been longing for a gluten-free cookie in the style of a kiddush cookie.

My Judaism is by no means rooted in cookies, but those vivid kiddush memories are part of my relationship with my Judaism—just as being gluten-free is not who I am, but at the same time, it is a very real part of me. The rationale behind my post-diagnosis desire for cookies identical to those of my youth is common for a gluten-free eater. Often those of us on the gluten-free diet look for foods that are exact or very close replications of the gluten foods we once ate. I have found many replacement items that have had been meaningful for my palette, but the gluten-free kosher cookie discovery was monumental. Food is so enmeshed in the cultural fabric of being Jewish, and I was again able to feel like I could fully participate.

These days, my kiddush is no longer sponsored by the bar or bat mitzvah family, instead it’s brought to me by Shabtai Gourmet and Katz’s Gluten-Free. Shabtai Gourmet has the kosher classics, gluten-free: everything from Florentine Lace Cookies to Rainbow Cookies to Mini Black & Whites. Katz Gluten-Free has my chocolate rugelech. Together, these two companies recreated the essence of kiddush for me.

The gluten-free Jewish community can finally have their kiddush cookies, and eat them too.

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