This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank has been sponsored anonymously.
* * *
In June of 2026—when New York City lit up with hope and pride in a basketball team that, for the first time in 53 years, was positioned to win the finals—a 23-year-old Queens native screamed into a camera his verbless jubilation:
My mayor Muslim.
My bagels Jewish.
My Christian Dior.
Knicks in four!
MD Ahnaf Hossain, this overnight sensation and erstwhile poet laureate of social media, soon adjusted for new stats:
My mayor is still Muslim.
My bagel’s still Jewish.
The Pope on our side.
Knicks in five!
As of this writing, Hossain’s literary output appears limited to approximately one poem—a modest repertoire for a celebrated wordsmith. Most likely Hossain has a rich life outside of these short viral videos, yet I find myself unsettled by his summary of the Abrahamic faiths in the United States’ most populous city.
Hossain’s Christian neighbors camouflaged as high fashion (“My Christian Dior”), but, by the next victory, Catholicism became Hossain’s ally (“The Pope on our side”). Zohran Mamdani, the iconoclastic mayor of New York City, uplifted the visibility of American Muslims—opening up a world where a culturally Muslim name like Hossain’s could enjoy brief fame.
As for Hossain’s Jews? There will always be bagels.
In moments of heightened antisemitism, we have reason to feel cautious when Jews become associated—or merged—with food.
On Tish’ah Be’Av, Jews across the world read the Book of Lamentations, which bemoans the destruction of the Temple in 587 B.C.E. and sits disquietly with flashbacks from a national gastronomic nightmare. According to Lamentations, the Israelites—once excessive in their feasting—had grown bestially incapable of feeding their young (4:3–5). To acquire food, the Israelites traded their luxuries (1:11), and the people fused silver with water to drink (5:4). Desperation ran deep. Israel asked their former enemy Assyria to provide God’s people with bread (5:6) as young men carried away grindstones (5:13) and starvation increased. Priests and elders begged for food (1:19), younglings sought bread and wine (2:12 and 2:19), and mothers were tempted to cannibalize their children (2:20 and 4:10). The skin of our hungry ancestors scalded like ovens (5:10).
As Lamentation tells it, the Israelites were not only downtrodden; God literally trod upon our spiritual forebears like they were grapes in a winepress (1:15). Psalm 145:16 praises God’s open hands that lovingly feed all creatures, but, in Lamentations 2:21, God feeds Israel nothing but worms (3:15). God slaughters the Israelites like a butcher (2:21), swallows them and their luxuriant buildings (2:5), and manifests as a fire consuming everything (2:3), including Zion (4:11), devouring without restraint (2:8).
But was our greatest threat God—or enemy nations? Lamentations claims that it was better to die by sword than famine (4:9), yet the poetry remembers the biting violence of the enemies who opened their mouths (3:47), gnashed their teeth, and proclaimed that they had swallowed God’s people (2:16). The conqueror grew drunk on enmity (4:21).
What was an Israelite to do? Lamentations 3:29–30 tells optimists to dig their mouths into earth and seek satiety in shame. Feeling abandoned by God, by neighbors, and by each other—Lamentations urges us—we are the only ones who can make our own bread (5:9).
Are we a food, to be ingested or rejected—or are we a people with agency?
Near the end of the 15th century, the Spanish priest Andrés Bernáldez chronicled why the Inquisition felt compelled to investigate ‘new Christians’ of Jewish ancestry. What distinguished these ‘converso’ families from the ‘old Christians?’ In his words:
They never stopped the Jewish customs of eating little dishes and stews cooked… with coals, little dishes of onions and garlic fried with oil, and meat cooked with oil… The oil with the meat and… other things… they stewed smelled very bad… Thus they… had the smell of… Jews. (Lu Ann Homza, The Spanish Inquisition 1474–1614, p. 4.)
If Jews are but dishes, then we know how it feels to be discarded from history’s kitchen.
When Jews are equated with food, we no longer live, breathe, or act. If we are not scrapped, we may be digested, but then we are gone either way. Nonetheless, Jews have survived destructions of Temples, exiles, pogroms, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and countless other tragedies. We, fashioned in God’s image, strive to be an eternal people, fueled by values and practices that sustain us beyond every generation when Jewish security has felt uncertain.
If we can model holiness, we can outlast the bagels.
* * *