Latest update January 22nd, 2020 10:43 PM
Dec 13, 2018 Amnon Peery Art and Culture 0
Dozens of Arab and Jewish chefs took part in A-Sham Arab Food Festival in Haifa this year, to prepare Turkish and Ottoman-inspired dishes at tens of restaurants in the city.
Salah Kordi’s lahmacun transported me to Istanbul’s Besiktas neighborhood and the restaurant below the apartment where I would buy Turkish meat pizzas to go. But while the spices and crisp flatbread were familiar, Kordi substituted ground beef with amberjackcaught off the coast of his hometown of Jaffa.
Kordi, a chef at Al-Ashi restaurant in Jaffa, was one of dozens of Arab and Jewish chefs who descended Dec. 6-7 on Haifa’s downtown for the fourth annual A-Sham Arab Food Festival. This year’s festival featured Turkish and Ottoman-inspired dishes at 32 different restaurants and venues in the revitalized area around the city’s port.
“Listen, the Ottomans were here 400 years,” Kordi told Al-Monitor. “My grandmother cooked this food: stuffed vegetables, stuffed grape leaves, shishbarak, kishek, lahma ba’ajin, kubbeh” — all traditional Palestinian dishes with influences from around the former Ottoman Empire.
Lahma ba’ajin is the Arabic cognate of the Turkish lahmacun, a flatbread topped with ground meat, herbs and spices. Kordi’s dish pays homage to the popular Turkish street food but gives it a Palestinian twist by incorporating onions and sumac and paper-thin Druze pita instead of thicker dough.
The A-Sham Arab Food Festival is part of a broader, monthlong celebration known as Holiday of Holidays held annually in Haifa in December to mark the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah and Christmas (and Muslim holidays when they intersect with the solar calendar). This year’s events include concerts, performances, pop-up shops, street fairs, art exhibits, lectures, parades and of course food.
Haifa, Israel’s northern port and third-largest city, is approximately 11% Arab and is celebrated for its Jewish-Arab coexistence.
“Our dream was to use food to convey messages to people around Israel and outside Israel, and we thought that this is the basic thing that is shared between people all around the world,” Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, founder of the A-Sham Arab Food Festival, told Al-Monitor.
Atamna-Ismaeel, a microbiologist by profession, said her love affair with cooking began when she was four years old and would cook with her grandmother. She went on to become the first Arab winner of TV show “MasterChef Israel” in 2014. Later that year, she launched the A-Sham festival to bring Israeli and Arab chefs together, pairing them in the kitchen to foster Jewish-Arab coexistence. But now, she said, “It’s happening so we’re not talking about it anymore. I think we have bigger things to talk about.”
This year, the Haifa foodscape featured “the sultans’ feasts of the imperial Ottoman palaces brought to life.” Atamna-Ismaeel said the reason for shifting from Arab to Turkish cuisine is to demonstrate that while Israeli-Turkish relations may be strained, cultural ties between the peoples are steadfast.
Relations between Israel and Turkey have witnessed a downturn in the years since the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, in which Israeli troops boarded a Turkish-flagged ship attempting to break the blockade by Israel and Egypt on the Gaza Strip. Nine activists, many of them Turks, died in the incident, and 10 Israeli soldiers were wounded. Turkey and Israel restored full diplomatic relations in 2016, but Ankara withdrew its ambassador and ordered Israel’s ambassador to leave after deadly clashes on the Israel-Gaza border in May.
“I thought it would be nice to show that we really want them to go back to normal. We want true peace,” Atamna-Ismaeel said.
In addition to the Turkish food, the festival included lectures about Ottoman cuisine, tours of Ottoman architecture in Haifa, Turkish singers, pop-up shops selling Turkish ceramics, lamps and sweets, and two visiting Turkish chefs preparing their dishes at local restaurants.
Maksut Askar of Istanbul’s Neolokal and Kemal Demirasal of Alancha in Alacati, a popular holiday resort near Izmir, brought a taste of the modern Turkish culinary scene to Haifa for the festival. Askar told Al-Monitor, “There’s no such thing as Ottoman cuisine. There’s no such thing as Turkish cuisine either, because the cuisine is all about what geography gives you.”
Askar said there were many similarities between some varieties of Turkish food and the Levantine cuisine endemic to Israel. Levantine cuisine “is not very different so far from where I am from,” said Askar, who hails from the southern Turkish city of Antakya. “It’s the same lens, it’s the same people.”
Nonetheless, he came to Israel with 36 kilograms (79 pounds) of ingredients to prepare 12 dishes with great exactitude to those found in his Istanbul restaurant. One of his signature dishes, called Hummus and Anatolian Landscapes, was made with local hummus, however.
Demirasal drew from his Aegean coastal cuisine and prepared cacik — his own twist on the Turkish variation of Greek tzatziki — with seafood orzo (similar to pilau, lamb and baklava) at Hanamal 24 restaurant in Haifa.
Askar and Demirasal told Al-Monitor that neither of them faced pressure to boycott the Israeli festival for political reasons, and were proud to attend.
“We are here to prove that people can connect each other through food. It doesn’t matter who they are or where they belong. That’s what we do,” said Askar, before serving his dishes to a fully booked Rola Levantine Kitchen in Haifa.
Jan 22, 2020 0
Jan 21, 2020 0
Dec 29, 2019 1
Dec 29, 2019 0
Sep 08, 2019 0
Aug 17, 2019 0
Apr 29, 2019 0
Apr 15, 2019 0
Menachem Begin in December 1942 wearing the Polish Army uniform of Gen. Anders’ forces with his wife Aliza and David Yutan; (back row) Moshe Stein and Israel Epstein
(photo credit: JABOTINSKY ARCHIVES)
During the inauguration of a memorial to the victims of the Siege of Leningrad in Jerusalem’s Sacher Park on January 24, 2020, before the climax of Holocaust remembrance events at which Russian President Vladimir Putin was given a central platform, we were stunned to hear a rendition of The Blue Kerchief (Siniy
Giant figures are seen during the 87th carnival parade of Aalst February 15, 2015
The annual carnival in Aalst, Belgium, is expected to take place on Sunday with even more antisemitic elements than in previous years.
Aalst’s organizers have sold hundreds of “rabbi kits” for revelers to dress as hassidic Jews in the carnival’s parade. The kit includes oversized noses, sidelocks (peyot) and black hats. The organizers plan to bring back floats similar to the one displayed in 2019 featuring oversized dolls of Jews, with rats on their shoulders, holding banknotes.
Pope Francis waves as he arrives at the Basilica of Saint Nicholas in the southern Italian coastal city of Bari, Italy February 23, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli.
Pope Francis on Sunday warned against “inequitable solutions” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying they would only be a prelude to new crises, in an apparent reference to US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace proposal.
Francis made his comments in the southern Italian port city of Bari, where he traveled to conclude a meeting of bishops from all countries in the Mediterranean basin.
Palestinians walk past a shop selling fruits in Ramallah, Feb. 20, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Mohamad Torokman.
Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have reached an agreement to end a five-month long trade dispute, officials said on Thursday.
The dispute, which opened a new front in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, began in September when the PA announced a boycott of Israel calves. The PA exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank under interim peace deals.
Antisemitic caricatures on display at the annual carnival in Aalst, Belgium. Photo: Raphael Ahren via Twitter.
Disturbing images emerged on Sunday of the annual carnival at Aalst, Belgium, showing an astounding number of antisemitic themes, costumes, displays and statements.
Israeli journalist Raphael Ahren documented people dressed as caricatures of Orthodox Jews, a fake “wailing wall” attacking critics of the parade, blatantly antisemitic characters and puppets wearing traditional Jewish clothes and sporting huge noses.
The stench of anti-Semitism always hovers over Switzerland’s Lake Geneva when the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is meeting there. The foul emanations reached a new nadir last week with UNHRC’s publication of a “database” of companies doing business in the disputed territories in Israel.
Following the publication of the list, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, deputy director for advocacy of NGO Human Rights Watch, stated, “The long-awaited release of the U.N. settlement business database should put all companies on notice: To do business with illegal settlements [sic] is to aid in the commission of war crimes.”
One of the many things that annoys me about politicians is how sure they are of themselves. Everything is black and white. Every idea is good or bad. Take globalism, for example. You either love it or hate it. It works or it doesn’t.
Another thing that annoys me is how so much of a politician’s life revolves around power: Do everything you can to get it, and everything you can to keep it.
Why am I ranting? Because, while our politicians have been consumed with power and the media with the fights over power, a threat to our nation has been virtually ignored.
Blue and White Party leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid are establishing their diplomatic credentials in the immediate run-up to Israel’s March 2 election with an insult to a U.S. administration that has arguably provided Israel with more diplomatic gains than any previous administration.
The Times of Israel reported that at a campaign stop in front of English-speaking Israelis, Gantz accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “of neglecting bipartisan ties in favor of exclusive support from U.S. President Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” under the headline “Gantz pledges to mend ties with U.S. Democrats if elected.”
Bipartisanship was in short supply at the State of the Union address earlier this month—with one notable exception.
Nancy Pelosi had been looking dyspeptic, shuffling the papers she would later rip to shreds, when President Donald Trump reminded his audience that “the United States is leading a 59-nation diplomatic coalition against the socialist dictator of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.”
Suddenly, the House Speaker applauded. Trump then introduced “the true and legitimate president of Venezuela: Juan Guaidó.”
The law professor Alan Dershowitz has thrown a legal hand-grenade into America’s political civil war by claiming to have evidence that former President Barack Obama “personally asked” the FBI to investigate someone “on behalf” of Obama’s “close ally,” billionaire financier George Soros.
He made his cryptic remark in an interview defending U.S. President Donald Trump against claims he interfered in the prosecution of his former adviser, Roger Stone.