The Schencken at Edith’s, a Jewish deli in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, gleam with sugary glaze or drip with buttery icing, depending on the day. Sometimes the coiled pastries, named after the German word for snail, ooze globs of blueberry-sumac jam or shed honey-walnut crumbles. Once, ube (a purple yam from the Philippines) was added to the batter; the schnecken emerged from the oven with vivid lilac streaks. After Elyssa Heller, the 33-year-old owner of Edith’s, announces each new flavor on Instagram, “they sell out in, like, 15 minutes,” she says. But two years ago, when she opened her restaurant, Heller hesitated to put the word “schnecken” on her menu, thinking the name’s unfamiliarity might scare off customers. Should they instead be called sticky buns? Sweet rolls? Ultimately, she chose to call the schnecken schnecken. Preserving the culinary language that her Ashkenazi ancestors have employed for generations “is important when using food as a vehicle for storytelling,” she says. “People will come in and say, ‘Why is it called that?’ And then we can start a conversation.”
That conversation — about Jewish cuisine as an expression of pride, an edible historical record and a means of questioning and defining identity — is becoming more and more common as younger people determine how to connect with their Judaism in the absence of Shabbat services (only about one in 10 American Jews attend synagogue regularly) and dietary laws (83 percent don’t keep a kosher home). At the same time, according to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the United States reached an all-time high earlier this decade, in 2021 (the last year for which data is available), and so the desire to express ethnic solidarity has become not just fashionable (see: Nike’s recent Montreal Bagel Dunks, with their sesame seed-printed leather) but urgent. That’s motivating restaurateurs like Heller, who established and named Edith’s in honor of a great-aunt who also owned a Brooklyn deli, with the goal of introducing a rising generation of Jewish eaters to their “great-great-grandmother’s food.”
Yet the offerings at Edith’s are in no way kosher, or even pretending to be: The most popular dish is a bagel — hand-twisted the old-fashioned way — topped with bacon, cheese and eggs. The question of what makes a person Jewish has been debated for eons: Is it their culture? Their religion? Their blood? In creating menus that combine Polish shtetl staples with Middle Eastern spices and popular American ingredients, chefs are asking the same about Jewish food. Most of their answers are, essentially, fusion food, a label that perhaps applies to all contemporary Jewish cuisine, as much of what’s available today can be traced back to a repeatedly displaced community that traveled across borders and over oceans, borrowing and repurposing ingredients and techniques along the way.