Zibby speaks with cookbook author June Hersh about ICONIC NEW YORK JEWISH FOOD (a culinary journey through New York’s most crave-worthy foods through the lens of the Jewish immigrant experience) and FOOD, HOPE & RESILIENCE (a vital collection of over 100 Holocaust survival stories and the recipes they shared). June describes the connections between food, history, memory, philanthropy, and Jewish heritage in her books, highlighting how food acts as an unbreakable bond between the past and the present. She also describes her research visits to iconic Jewish delis, shares her love of pastrami sandwiches and knishes, and emphasizes how food tells stories and connects generations.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, June. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

I really appreciate it. 

June: It's a pleasure to be here. I, I love nothing more than talking about good food, women, and all the, uh, the wonderful things that we can accomplish when we combine our like mindedness and, uh, and the power of books. 

Zibby: I totally agree. And it's so fitting for those listening, June is sitting in this beautiful kitchen and I feel like this is what we're doing.

We're just like sitting in her kitchen together, catching up, you know, forget the zoom screen, but yes. 

June: Correct. If I could really have a pot of sauce brewing in the background or a batch of soup, that would really complete the picture. It really would. Next time. Next time. 

Zibby: I want to talk first about your book Food, Hope and Resilience, and then you also of course have iconic New York Jewish food, but you, and even before then, you had another book where you're taking Holocaust survivors and you're finding their stories and you're getting their recipes and you're, you're bringing them back, really preserving memory. You even have an Instagram account where you had photos of survivors and there was one picture you had up there with two sisters whose numbers on their arms were consecutive that, oh my gosh, of all the things I've seen over the years, I've never seen that before. And, oh my gosh.

And the stories that you include are so poignant. And of course, food is just one way to tell a story. So how did you, you know, get into this. Tell listeners a little bit more about that particular book, Food, Hope and Resilience. And you're just, yeah, take it from there. 

June: It actually started when we sold our family business.

And I quote my sister all the time. My sister, Andrea said to me, we did well, now let's do good. And I was trying to find what my good would be. And I was not, your age. I was considerably older at the time and I was looking for a way to express philanthropy, but also do something that I found really exciting and interesting.

So I went to the Museum of Jewish Heritage and I said to them, I want to write a cookbook and I want to feature the stories of your members and I want to recreate their recipes. And, um, I want to donate all the proceeds to the museum. Well, this was pretty much a no brainer for them. And it took about one full year of doing nothing other than interviewing survivors and testing recipes.

And I did that really with about 110 survivors or so. My husband laughed that after a year of testing recipes, he said for one year we had been eating like 85 year old Polish peasants. And I laughed and I said, you know what? That's a really good thing. These foods were organic before anybody knew what organic foods were.

And they were nurturing and nourishing. And I always say that without the story, a recipe is just ingredients. And so now you had these remarkable stories of resilience and hope and, and people who turned tragedy into triumph. And you could celebrate them, because they survived, they thrived, they built beautiful lives, and the thread that ran through their lives from their childhood until the time that I spoke to them, and many of them were in their 70s, 80s, and 90s at the time, Holocaust was 80 years ago, the thread was food.

And it's what connected them to their childhood and happier times. And it's what brought them forward into the lives that they were living today. And so it became that idea to me that food was this unbreakable bond between the past and the future that really drove me to the next set of books that I began writing, which focused very much on food and food history story that food can tell.

And that was really the basis of Food, Hope, and Resilience. It was called Recipes Remembered when it first came out, and the new iteration of it is Food, Hope, and Resilience, but nothing really has changed. Its mission is to preserve food memory and to honor the legacy of Holocaust survivors through the foods they've remembered and prepared.

So it's been quite a 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. So from talking to the survivors, and especially all these first person interviews, I mean, you've probably talked to more survivors than most people. 

June: Mm-Hmm. 

Zibby: Tell me some of the themes. Tell me some of the, like, what, what did you take away that you can share with us? 

June: Sure.

Well, and I think it, it's never more important now. 

Zibby: Mm-Hmm. 

June: Some of the things that they stressed and I'll make the note that it's not just Jewish themes, because I find that Holocaust survivors look at the world in a very broad way, and that comes from their experience of understanding what happens when intolerance and indifference is experienced take over for kindness and compassion. And that's so relevant today for so many different groups of people and especially for young people who are maybe struggling to find their identity or with social media finding it a challenge and being bullied or harassed and anonymously. Very much the way the Jewish people felt at that time.

And remember, as I said, these people are now in their 80s and 90s. So they were children. They were five, they were 10, they were 20. Very few that I spoke to were older than that. They wouldn't be on this planet anymore. And so their message has always been to recognize when somebody is being treated unfairly, to be an upstander, not a bystander, to speak up for your neighbor, your friend.

a stranger to fight for the rights of Jewish people to have a homeland, because Israel, to so many of these survivors, and to so many, and it's never been more prominent than it is right now in the news, is crucial to this demographic. They feel it was always their lifeline. And that it was always there for them.

They are deeply American patriotic. They feel this country gave them a new life, a new footing, and allowed them to build roots. But Israel is there in case they need it. And they just talk about how important it is to be resilient, to be optimistic, to live your best life. So many of them said to me that the best revenge they have on what they endured was living a good life. But that's how you take revenge, is you show the next guy, I can succeed, I can do good things. And that's really the overriding theme to so many of my survivors. And yes, they are my survivors, because I, I speak to them all the time. Eastern European accents fill my voicemail, and nothing makes me happier than to hear a wonderful story from a survivor.

One is coming to New York, he's 95, he's 95. He's coming to New York in about two weeks to celebrate a commemoration of the Shoah. And you just look at this and you say, this is a 95 year old man. He could just be sitting comfortably in his home, relaxing, enjoying his later years in life. But instead, he's speaking to children.

He's educating people about the dangers of intolerance. That's the message of Holocaust survivors. 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. What a beautiful takeaway. How a beautiful research effort that you've done. I mean, it's just unbelievable and amazing. 

June: Thank you. I truly consider myself honored, lucky, blessed, all of those things to have had these interactions.

It's life changing. Speak to a Holocaust survivor if you want to gain some perspective. 

Zibby: Yes. I can't stop thinking about the, the one story of the sisters who were hiding and eventually got found, but left their little brother in a kitchen cabinet. I mean, I'm looking at your beautiful kitchen and just thinking, you know, uh, Like how quickly things can change and that's correct, you know, in an instant. 

June: Their lives were truly turned from comfort to chaos in an instant.

I have one survivor, this lovely woman from Belgium. She, her mother served her a plate of endives for lunch, as was common in her household, Belgian endives. She so didn't want to eat them that day that she threw a hissy fit and she ran out of the house with a non Jewish friend of hers to attend a dance class that of course she was no longer allowed to attend because she was Jewish.

When she came back to the house, her family had been rounded up, taken away. She never saw any of them again, in a moment. And had she not made that decision in a teenage little bit of a temper tantrum, she wouldn't be here today. That can be the difference between survival and being a victim. And it's, it's amazing when you hear their stories and you realize how precious every moment really is.

And how you have to be vigilant and you have to use your instincts. And so many of them credited luck. They were lucky. They also seemed to have some kind of, um, a resilience or a fortitude that allowed them to either speak up, run into the woods, join a partisan group, get false papers, find a hiding place.

It wasn't always luck. It was very often their ingenuity. And, um, and you can still see that in them today, even as, you know, nonagenarians, they are still in that place in life where they, they rely on their instincts. 

Zibby: You also had, not to only talk about this, but you also had the, the photo of, of the shoes and how one family, they've had their daughter wear higher heels so that she would seem older.

And so she went to one line and survived. I mean, it's just these. 

June: That's correct. And her aunt went to the other line. She took off her high heeled shoes. And she put them on this child. And she saved her life. People made such selfless decisions. And there were so many who, uh, Yad Vashem terms, righteous among the nations.

So many non Jewish people, not enough, but so many. Like the village of Shambon, where 5, 000 people saved 5, 000 lives. because they felt it was the right thing to do. And we don't talk about those stories enough. I'm in a new book that I'm working on with Chef Alanna Shia. We are highlighting stories from not just the Holocaust, but from World War II through the lens of food.

And we have uncovered so many stories. stories where people have just done incredible things that you don't hear about. And those are the stories that we need to be talking about more because we need to be inspiring people to just simply do the right thing. It's that easy. 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Well, on the heels of all of this, you know, soul stirring work, you have also parlayed your love of food and knowledge into iconic New York Jewish food, and you take us, it doesn't exclude this, and you tell a lot about it.

Um, how Jewish immigrants got here and how they ended up on the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, you know, where the foods came from, including lists of food and places to go and all of that. So what was that like doing a, a New York deep dive into, into food and what were some of your favorites to taste?

June: Well, that was such a fun foray in adventure. Because here I went from. writing about the Holocaust, which stirs my soul. And in between, I did one or two other books that didn't have my heart and soul the same way. I mean, I wrote a book about the global history of yogurt. 

Zibby: I saw that. 

June: And yet I found it fascinating because I love knowing the why to what.

Why do we eat what we eat? And so I found that actually interesting. It's been translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic at this point, but I'll be honest, not sure how many people have read it in English, but it, for me, that was fun. But then getting back to my roots and writing Iconic New York Jewish Food, oh my god, it was just, you could go into a food coma just walking down, uh, this one street on the Lower East Side where we had lunch at Katz's and had these fabulous hand cut pastrami sandwiches.

And if you go to Katz's, do not lose that little chip that they give you. If you do, you actually pay a 50 fine for losing your receipt. It's been their policy forever. And from there, we walked into Russ Daughters and watched them hand slice the most perfect smoked salmon and learning the history of how that store started in the very early 1900s, and that their father was a herring salesman, and he used to reach his arm deep into a bin of herring, and now his family, they have built it into this empire of appetizing.

And, and then you move on to the next door and you're now at Yonah Schimmel and you're eating these amazing knishes. I mean, he was a rabbi. He started the knish business industry in New York City. He only had one person who legitimately challenged him. And those are some of the fun stories in the book.

Nobody ever heard of Gussie Schwebel, but I know all about her, and she was the queen of knishes, and she reached out to Eleanor Roosevelt to say, why isn't our government buying knishes to feed the troops overseas during World War II? They're inexpensive and they're nourishing, and she engaged the First Lady of the United States in a discussion of knishes.

I mean, you can't make this stuff up. And then you look at, you know, hot dogs and, and we all know Nathan's, but we don't really know the man, Charles Speltman, who innovated the hot dog roll and started on Coney Island from a push cart, an industry that, We still see Joey Chestnut on, on July 4th downing 80 some odd hot dogs.

It all got started by Jewish immigrants in Coney Island in the early 1900s. And learning those stories, to me, makes the egg cream taste sweeter, and makes the halibut a little less chalky, and adds just so much flavor to that chopped liver that you might schmear on your sandwich. It's what gives food its flavor.

Flavor is knowing its provenance and its stories, and that's what Iconic New York Jewish Food does. It tells all these great stories. You don't have to be Jewish. You don't have to be a New Yorker. Who doesn't love a good pastrami sandwich? 

Zibby: What are your, what are some of your favorite things to cook? 

June: So I, I come from a mixed marriage.

My mother was Ashkenazi. My father is Sephardic. And so we are two ends of the Jewish spectrum. And I enjoy making a lot of the Sephardic dishes because they're a little more unusual. They're less familiar to most people. They give us a little more leeway at the holiday, like it Passover, we were always allowed to eat rice and beans and legumes because that was part of the Sephardic diet and they were never restricted to Passover.

So at Passover, we were especially Sephardic. My mother made sinkers for her matzo balls. I like floaters a little bit, but I, I don't. honor her Ashkenazi roots with that, uh, but I would say there are some of the recipes, especially from Food, Hope and Resilience that I love making. There is a lentil soup that is, it's so easy and it takes 30 minutes to make and it is so delicious.

And the, the key to it Is to add a little balsamic vinegar to the bowl of soup. After you put it in the bottom of the bowl, you ladle the lentil soup in that's made rich with tomato paste. 'cause the rest of it is really just water and lentils and a little bit of vegetables. And the balsamic comes up the rim of the bowl and it adds this zest, this spark with every spoonful.

I sometimes kid that, uh, when I was writing the chapters on Polish cooking, my kitchen was very beige. Potatoes, noodles, farmer's cheese, matzo meal, cabbage, it was very beige. And then I moved into my Sphardic foods and my kitchen became very verdant and I had dill and parsley and lemon and olive oil and garlic.

And so What's fun about the book is it presents all aspects of Jewish food because it represents the food from the Dominican Republic where Jews found refuge during the war. It represents foods from Shanghai who took in, you know, homeless Jewish people from mainly from Germany and Austria and developed Austrian and Viennese cafes in the heart of Shanghai.

So the foods really represent. So many aspects of what a diaspora can do to your plate. And it represents foods from so many different regions, which is why I love that Jewish food especially, it doesn't represent, you can't throw a dart, you know? It doesn't have a zip code. You can't say, boom, I'm throwing a dart on a map.

That's where Jewish food comes from. And I think that's the fun of it. So when I cook, I love making representations of a fabulous bolognese that was made in the Jewish ghettos in Italy. And it, it has those flavors. And I don't think it has to be kosher to be Jewish. I know that's going to cause a lot of uproar, but I'm not kosher.

Um, my books are, uh, they've out of respect to the people that I represent. But to me, Jewish food represents Jewish traditions. Foods that people associate with their family gatherings, no different than a Christmas dinner does for an Italian family, or a New Year's celebration might for an Asian family.

And I just think when you bring those foods together, those become your culture. And that to me is what Jewish food represents. It represents my family's traditions. So I feel, let the food that you eat represent your family's traditions, however you want to interpret it. 

Zibby: I love that. My gosh. Yeah, there's nothing that makes me think of my grandmother more than when we make her noodle kugel.

And it's just like bringing, it brings people back. There's this one, there's a cake she used to make that we haven't been able to really recreate this, like, shred, it's like a shredded chocolate sponge cake with this very thick frosting, which is amazing. Where was she from? She's from Philadelphia. I think she found it in, we found a recipe, and then at one point, my late mother in law Mother in law and grandmother in law figured out a way to like, tweak the recipe and once they made a cake that tasted like that and they've since passed away.

So now I can't get the cake back, but there was that one, a lot of people have tried and failed to make the cake. 

June: I will. Challenge accepted. 

Zibby: Okay. I'll send you the recipe. I'll send it to you. 

June: This is why I implore everyone when you're cooking with a family member. Whether you're a grandparent teaching a grandchild, an aunt cooking with a nephew, whoever is cooking together in the kitchen, write it down.

And I know that, you know, everyone wants to cook from a handful of this and a handful of that, and that's lovely, but that's hard to replicate. And, That's the challenge of most families recipes. Write it down. 

Zibby: I should just send you. I have all her recipes. I have the whole, um, what do you call it, you know, that little note card recipe book.

June: Right? 

Zibby: With like all the 

June: Oh my goodness. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

June: Oh, I would love to share that with you. That's wonderful. 

Zibby: All the scrappings and all of that. The scraps from newspapers and 

June: Maybe one day we, we get into the kitchen together and we cook one of those and we uh, we share it. 

Zibby: That would be nice. 

June: I would love that.

Zibby: Oh, so lovely. I actually also learned something in your book about my own family, which is I had German relatives in the 1800s who came over, and in your book I sort of like jumped back when it mentioned that a lot of German immigrants had gone to Cincinnati, which is actually where my parents were, great grandparents went. Um, and I didn't realize that was a whole thing. That it was a thing. I always wondered why on earth did my family end up in Ohio? I, I just never knew. But anyway. 

June: Yeah, it was a thing. And they, they really are credited with starting the, mainly the Reform Jewish movement. And they brought a lot of their foodways there.

It's funny, there's um, a drink. It's like it's, I think it's called chocolate phosphate. And it's a drink that's very similar to an egg cream, but it's in the Midwest. Mainly like Chicago, but I'm sure in Cincinnati as well. And it's very much like what New York Jewish families would drink as an egg cream.

And the derivation of that again is, you know, it's, It was a loose translation from the word et creme, which, uh, came from a Jewish, a Yiddish actor and he drank a drink like that in France. He came back and he said, I think it was et creme and it was interpreted as egg cream, but it has neither eggs nor cream in it, but it might have originally when he had it over in Europe.

So again, stories and derivations like that. I, I just think it's, it's cool to understand the origins of your food for every culture, find out why, why you eat what you eat and, and why you have the traditions in your family. that you have because it just adds such richness to everything that you're preparing when you, when you understand the history behind it.

Zibby: I love that. Well, June, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. I loved digging into all of your work and it just has so much resonance and meaning, particularly now. So thank you so much. 

June: No, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity and I hope our paths continue to cross. And tell your listeners, if they want to reach out to me with any questions or anything about preparing for the upcoming holidays, I'm reachable.

Find me on Instagram or send me an email. I'll answer you. 

Zibby: Okay. All right. Thanks so much. 

June: Thank you. 

Zibby: Okay. Bye.