My husband is Jewish, my stepchildren are Jewish, even my son is Jewish. And yet, I, myself, am merely Jew-ish, which is to say that I go to temple with my family, participate in our Jewish life, but have yet to officially convert. Why? I don’t know exactly. I believe that it’s either in your heart or it isn’t, and it is in mine, and no amount of mikvehs will make it more so.
My first seder was easily a decade ago. I slaved (no pun intended), I sweated, I researched. I even figured out how to get a lamb shank bone for my seder plate. And for dinner, I made a fine lamb roast. We invited my husband’s best friend since high school, and his family. Turns out, they don’t eat lamb. That was awkward. But it had nothing to do with Passover. (I had no idea that there were people who felt funny about lamb. Now I ask, every single time, and there’s only been one other occasion where someone categorically turned their back on it.)
If you ask my Jewish husband, he’ll tell you that, until I married him, I “didn’t know from Jewish food.” And he’s right. As a girl who was raised a Southern Baptist in Texas, my experience with Jewish cuisine was limited to toasting a bagel.
, and I realized chopped chicken liver was just a version of French pate, something that even this shiksa could understand.
Italian Jewish culinary culture is fascinating. Not Ashkenazi, not sephardi it’s its own mashup of flavors and dishes. So it isn’t surprising that Italian Jews actually figured out a way to enjoy pasta during Passover. Like pretty much everything Italians do, their matzo is prettier than ours, often round and punched out to look like a lacy doily. However our square shaped giant crackers are perfect for constructing a “lasagna” or as my staff started calling it “mazzagna” (matzo+lasagne). I’ve heard these “pies” layered with matzo called Tortino, Mina or Scacchi. You might think that this idea is a poor substitute for the real thing, but actually it’s pretty great. The matzos which are soaked prior to layering, absorb the tomato sauce and become light and fluffy.
Decades ago, as a fledging (broke) New York stage actress, I had the good fortune to be befriended by the film producer Robert Chartoff (“Raging Bull,” “The Right Stuff,” “Rocky’s I—VI”). We met on the basis of our identical surnames, but traced our ancestry back to different origins. It seemed our names were accidentally namesake bastardizations of different, multi-syllabic and multi-Slavic monikers of yore, carelessly abbreviated by uncreative Ellis Island officiates.