Immigrants gave England their favorite foods. Yet, Brexit?

Way back, a long time ago, when Tony Blair was Britain's Prime Minister, his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, made a comment that was heard around the world.  Cook noted that the chicken tikka masala had become Britain's favorite food that qualified it as the national dish.  He added that it epitomized Britain's involvement with the world and how it adapts to global influences.

The colonial origins of the chicken tikka masala aside, it indeed is remarkable that Britain has been bowled over by curry.  It is a global story to which even the insular Japan is no exception.

The chicken tikka masala displaced fish-and-chips as the national dish.  Was fish and chips truly a "national" dish?

Chips are from potatoes.  Ahem, potatoes did not get to the island, which is becoming increasingly irrelevant, until very recently, well after the white man's not-so-friendly first visits to South America.

So, the chicken tikka masala is recent.  Chips are only a tad older in the English cuisine (yes, an oxymoron!)  How about the fried fish itself?

It turns out that even the fried fish is not particularly English!

Whaaaaat?  Don't tell me that the Pope is not Catholic! ;)

Apparently this fried fish concoction is from the Sephardic cuisine that Jews brought with them after they were expelled from the Iberian peninsula.

As religious violence worsened, many fled Portugal and resettled in England, bringing with them culinary treasures founded in Sephardic cuisine—including fish.
Peshkado frito (in Andalusian dialect, pescaíto frito) was one of them. The dish of white fish, typically cod or haddock, fried in a thin coat of flour, was a favorite particularly among Sephardic Jews, who fried it on Friday nights to prepare for the Sabbath, as the Mosaic laws prohibited cooking. Allegedly, the batter preserved the fish so it could be eaten cold, and without sacrificing too much flavor, the following day.

What a fascinating and complex story about a relatively simple food!

Once it was introduced, well, the rest was history.

It was a hit. Fish prepared “in the Jewish manner” was sold on the streets of London on any given day. And at the end of the week, eating fish on Friday was a part of religious observance for Jews and Catholics alike—as “fish fasting” to avoid consuming warm-blooded animals has been a part of the Catholic tradition for centuries.* Though both groups were religious minorities at the time, fried fish became a popular secular dish, too.

Here's another interesting twist to this globalization story: The writer who provides us the fish-and-chips story is Simon Majumdar.  That last name is a dead give away about the Bengali origin.  Wikipedia offers the details:

Majumdar was brought up in Rotherham near Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England^[3] by his Welsh mother and Indian father, a middle child out of four children.^[4] His father Pratip "Pat" Majumdar was born in Kolkata

Even the guy who explains the globalization story of fish-and-chips literally owes his life to globalization!  Oh, he is now an American citizen!

If only the narrow-minded, racist, xenophobic people around the world paused to think and appreciate it all!

Resistance requires way too much learning!

As the campaign season heated up back in the spring and summer of 2016, I became more and more panicky.  Not merely about the GOP's candidate winning, as much as it was a reason to lose sleep over.  The panic was this, which I told M and two neighbors/friends: trump's rhetoric was so violent that I worried that some nutcase follower of his might try to assassinate Hillary Clinton.

Fortunately, that never happened.

In May 2016, I ended this post with these lines:

It starts with a swastika and 1488 etched on a bench on a bridge over a river :(  Here is to hoping that we will end it all before it even takes hold.

It has taken a firm hold.  A mob of torch-holding thugs marched through a college town chanting "Jews will not replace us."  It was a depressing and terrifying spectacle.  Plenty of violence, triggered by hate, has happened.  The latest was the massacre at Pittsburgh.

Lesson one: I came to know about "Hillel."  I had no idea about this until the tragedy.

We went to the local chapter, which had organized a vigil.  A 69-year old woman cried that she never thought she would have to relive the fears that have always been a part of the Jewish experience in the West.  A young male student broke down talking about his emotions over the attack on Jews in a synagogue.  And more.

What can one do in such situations other than to be there and tell them we are with them!  Empathy--"fancy with the sufferer"--is all we got as humans in these difficult situations.

As M and I opened the door to leave, even as the event continued on, a young woman who was also leaving looked at us and said, "Thank you for coming."

Her words made me teary.

News reports referred to an organization called HIAS.  I had never heard about it.  That was another lesson.  One of the well-known beneficiaries of HIAS's work: Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google. Without HIAS, Brin's family would not have come to the US, and we might never have had Google?

Turns out that HIAS was founded in 1881 to aid Jews fleeing the pogroms.  One of the many that HIAS helped were jared kushner's grandparents:

During the first week of the Trump Administration, Mark Hetfield, the president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), sent the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a copy of a file. It documented Kushner’s grandparents’ immigration to the United States. Like many Jews who fled the pogroms in the Russian Empire, the Kushners were what’s known as “resettled” by HIAS. Resettling meant more or less the same thing then that it does now: processing visas, finding a community that would welcome new immigrants, arranging transportation, insuring that a family has a place to live and access to basic services, and insuring the continuity of those services until new arrivals are, well, resettled.

Of course, HIAS never heard back from kushner.  And not since the shooting either.

Because of this shooting, many people, including me, now know HIAS as the wonderful organization that does phenomenal work, and we now know what it stands for: "for welcoming refugees, and welcoming refugees as Jews."

But, we ought to live a life that does not involve knowing HIAS, or Hillel, or who my DA is.  These are the kinds of people and institutions that work mostly in the background, and we find out who they are only if we need them.  Otherwise, we go about our lives, worrying only about what we might have for dinner.

However, the past three years has been hectic, with the candidate and then the President creating chaos out of everything that he can think about, exhausting us.

Tired we get; resist we will!  And, we shall overcome!

There is no room in our society for gun violence and especially not in a place of worship. Elected officials must stop fanning the flames of hatred, bitterness, and division. We must condemn these terrible acts in the strongest possible terms and work to heal these deep wounds.

— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) October 27, 2018

"A bad hair day" in Pittsburgh!

Way back in May 2016, in writing about the looming dark clouds, I worried:

It starts with a swastika and 1488 etched on a bench on a bridge over a river :(  Here is to hoping that we will end it all before it even takes hold.

It has taken a firm hold!

A mere two weeks ago that I wrote in this post:

When the President says all the horrible things that he says on a daily hourly basis, it reflects an utter lack of an ability to "fancy with the sufferer"--a complete and total lack of empathy. 
It is not any surprise when he makes even tragic situations only about himself. Or, talks about the most nonsensical things like how a boat ended up in some guy's yard.  A lack of empathy means that the asshole-in-chief can never behave like the comforter-in-chief that Presidents are expected to be in the face of tragedies. 

Through his incendiary rhetoric, this President created the monsters who marched around shouting "Jews will not replace us" and shooting at the faithful who had assembled for Shabbat prayers.

True to his personality, which he never hid from the 63 million who voted for him,he could not be bothered with being presidential:

Now, after a week of fear, with pipe bombs being sent to a list of people whom President Trump has said horrible things about, and to CNN, which he consistently targets, 11 Jewish citizens were slaughtered in their place of worship on the Sabbath. Trump’s response? He joked that he almost canceled an event because, after having to speak to reporters about the shooting in the rain, he was having “a bad hair day.”

I agree with the author:

This president will never offer comfort, compassion or empathy to a grieving nation. It’s not in him. When questioned after a tragedy, he will always be glib and inappropriate. So I have a wild suggestion: Let’s stop asking him. His words are only salt in our wounds.

Instead, "Let’s instead remember that the people in our daily lives are hurting too."

Shabbat Shalom.

In the 48 hours since the Pittsburgh attack, POTUS tweets:

- RTing D'Souza interviewed by the NRA
- going after Tom Steyer
- the press is the Enemy of the People
- calling Andrew Gillum a thief
- the caravan https://t.co/GSzqmDUjj6

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 29, 2018

How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

Back in high school, my friend and classmate, Chandru, had a record player, in which he played for a couple of us who had gone over to his home an LP of a music group called ABBA.  And soon after that, I came to know the music of another group, Boney M.

Those were the days when nobody was ashamed of disco music and were actually joyously singing along.  Among the many Boney M songs was one that began with "By the rivers of Babylon ..."



What I did not know until yesterday--yes, literally yesterday--was that this Boney M song, the opening lines that I was so familiar with, is from "a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137."

It is amazing how ignorant and ill-informed I am.  Every single day, this blog serves me well as a confession booth!

That tidbit is merely the starting point for my ignorance.  The essay begins thus:

On the anniversary of America’s independence, the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass made a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137 – best known for its opening line, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” a centerpiece of his most famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.
Douglass told the audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, that for a free black like himself, being expected to celebrate American independence was akin to the Judean captives being mockingly coerced to perform songs in praise of Jerusalem.
Not only did it inspire the famous abolitionist; this 2,500-year-old Hebrew psalm has long served as an uplifting historical analogy for a variety of oppressed and subjugated groups, including African Americans.

Wait, what?

After that essay, I read the New Yorker and David Remnick also refers to Frederick Douglass, this Psalm, and Douglass' speech.  Seriously, am I the only one who is always stumped by own ignorance?

I decided to read Douglass' speech. Or, at least most of it.

It is powerful. It is moving. It is a must-read.  I imagine that if a James Earl Jones delivered this text, tears will flow down our cheeks listening to the words.

It will be a gross injustice to excerpt even a single sentence from that speech.  With all the apologies, and my ignorance as an excuse, I will wrap up this post with the following lines from Frederick Douglass:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. 

The "New Jews" of Academia

Towards the end of the doctoral study, I applied for the World Bank's Young Professional Program.  (That was a a couple of decades ago; am not sure if the Bank has it even now.)  After four rounds of filtering of the applications from all over the world, it was down to eighty candidates for interviews at Washington, DC.  From this eighty, a half would be offered entry into a career with the Bank.

I was excited to be in this group of eighty. More than anything, it was an affirmation, an external validation of sorts.  My dissertation adviser, Harry Richardson, who was a veteran consultant to the Bank, was equally happy for me.  For one, he had cautioned me early in the process that I would not even get to the final round. Not because he doubted my abilities--at least openly with me--but because there was one negative in me: I was from India.

"The Bank already has too many people from India" Harry said.  He added that quite a few applicants too would be with Indian roots, which meant that I had to be exceptionally good to become one of the final forty hires.  "It will be easier if you were from, say, even neighboring Nepal."

Well, I am no Nepali.  And it turned out that exceptionally good I was not!

To have an accidental birth characteristic held against me was not entirely new to me, however.  India had made that clear to me even before I got to high school.  My sister's dreams of joining medical school were shattered, despite her academic achievements, because of quotas that limited the intake of Brahmin students in the state's colleges.  I suppose it was one of the many early lessons on how the world isn't fair.

Being an Indian applicant at the World Bank was perhaps like being a global Brahmin, and there were quotas restricting their numbers.

Expand that to one more level and now it is "Asian."

The notion of overachieving Asians apparently triggers similar restrictive quotas.  The only difference is in the nomenclature: instead of "Brahmins" it is "Jews":

The parallels between the Jewish and Asian experiences are striking. As with the Jews who applied to the nation’s top colleges with fake names, Asian-American students applying to many colleges are encouraged to stress “non-Asian” attributes like student government, not playing the violin. Those that are half-Asian, half-white are encouraged by college counselors to list themselves as white, while the Princeton Review Student Advantage Guide warns Asian-American not to check that race box at all or send a photo. “After 10 years of [college counseling] and 4 years in Dartmouth admissions, I don’t think it’s intentional, but I think there is discrimination,” admits former admissions officer Michele Hernandez.

Why this strange discrimination?  Because, you simply cannot have too many Asian students at the prestigious colleges, can you at ?

In every state where racial preferences in college admissions have been eliminated—California, Texas, Florida—Asian-American enrollment has increased. Caltech, which refuses to consider race, is one-third Asian, while the University of California-Berkeley, barred by law from considering race, is more than 40 percent Asian. There’s little doubt (and much worry) that if the informal quotas were dropped at the nation’s top private universities and colleges, Asian-American enrollment would swell there, too.

Back in India, the argument was that the Brahmins had to, in a way, pay for the centuries of caste system that kept pushing the lowest castes and the untouchables lower and lower into the utter darkness.  There is simply no denying that the caste system was atrocious (and it is depressing that it continues to be practiced even now.)  But, through reverse discrimination, do two wrongs make a right?

At least, there was that caste-abuse explanation in India.  Here, it is not even that Asian-Americans abused their power and privilege in order to gain at the expense of others.  Nor did the Jews back then.

Oh well.  Whoever said the world is far, eh!

Personally, I am thankful that I didn't get into the World Bank--I am sure I would have had a tough time marching to my own drumbeat that is almost always at rhythms very, very different from the Bank's.  Maybe it was a good thing I was from India, and not Nepal!

Fiddler on the Roof

I heard on NPR earlier this evening that the composer of "Fiddler on the Roof" died.
One of my favorite musicals ever.

The blessing for the tsar is one funny, and poignant joke. An intense subtext of sadness throughout all the humor. And just wonderful tunes.
Perhaps I was all the more attracted to this musical because of my background--music as a serious family hobby and the Indian movies pretty much as musicals too, and the brahmin background so much similar to the Jewish traditions ...
So, hey, thank you Mr. Jerry Bock

A new MIA: Muslims in America, that is

I didn't know this about Feisal Rauf--the man behind the Park51 project, which has become one insane controversy:

When a memorial service was held for murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, Rauf declared: "I am a Jew." When the scandal of Abu Ghraib broke, Rauf was among those asked to appear in an apology advert that was broadcast on Arabic television.

A Jewish reporter dies after crazy militant Islamist radicals slit his throat and even air a video of that, which is why Rauf's declaration in the tradition of JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" is immensely admirable, and echoing Pearl's own last words, "I am Jewish." He said:

"Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one."

What a contrast to this is the opposition to the Park51 project from Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League!

Media Matters notes that Feisal Rauf "has a long history of condemning terrorism, promoting pluralism, and arguing that the true meaning of Islam involves democracy, religious freedom and women's rights" and thanks that information-rich page I now know that, among other things,:

Bush administration sent Rauf on State Department trip in 2007. In an August 10 press briefing, Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley addressed the State Department travel program in which Rauf is participating, noting that its purpose is to promote "religious tolerance" and provide Muslim countries with a "moderate perspective" of being "Muslim in the United States." Crowley noted:

For Imam Feisal, this will be his third trip under this program. In 2007, he visited Bahrain, Morocco, the UAE and Qatar. And earlier this year in January, he also visited Egypt. So we have a long-term relationship with him. His work on tolerance and religious diversity is well-known and he brings a moderate perspective to foreign audiences on what it's like to be a practicing Muslim in the United States. And our discussions with him about taking this trip preceded the current debate in New York over the center.

Rauf's wife has an Indian connection--Daisy Khan was born in Kashmir, and immigrated to the US when she was 15.  I can't track down how she got her first name of "Daisy" ... Am not sure if that was the name her parents gave her at birth, or whether she adopted it to Americanize her name ...

In one of Khan's bio-sketches, there is a quote from Rumi, the great Persian Sufi poet:

"I looked for God. I went to a temple, and I didn't find him there. Then I went to a church, and I didn't find him there. And then I went to a mosque, and I didn't find him there. And then finally I looked in my heart, and there he was."

I have had wonderful friends who were/are Muslims--one was even briefly a roommate back in graduate school. The talented plumber, Samad, who was a jack of all trades, is a Muslim and was my parents' trusted assistant.  The only music performance that I ever attended in the fabled Music Academy in Madras Chennai, before leaving for the US decades ago, was to listen to Amjad Ali Khan playing the sarod.  Creating the fantastic mats in the village of Pattamadai, where my dad grew up, is almost exclusively by Muslims.  These are a few of the personal connections to Muslims and Islam.  It simply jars me when the Park51 critics lump all these people with the insanely radical Islamists.  Crap!

Update:
Glenn Greenwald writes:

One of the most under-reported political stories is the increasingly vehement, nationwide movement -- far from Ground Zero -- to oppose new mosques and Islamic community centers.  These ugly campaigns are found across the country, in every region, and extend far beyond the warped extremists who are doing things such as sponsoring "Burn a Quran Day."  And now, from CBS News last night, we have this:

Fire at Tenn. Mosque Building Site Ruled Arson
Federal officials are investigating a fire that started overnight at the site of a new Islamic center in a Nashville suburb.
Ben Goodwin of the Rutherford County Sheriff's Department confirmed to CBS Affiliate WTVF that the fire, which burned construction equipment at the future site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, is being ruled as arson. . . .

• Continue reading

It is the same Tennessee town that Aasif Mandvi reported about:

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Without our traditions ....

... our lives will be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof ...

mazel tov!

Ok, here is one reason why I support Elena Kagan

Because I want Pat Buchanan to get mighty pissed off.

Media Matters reports this from Pat Buchanan's May 14 syndicated column (emphasis added in the original Media Matter's post):

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.
If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.
Is this the Democrats' idea of diversity?
But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.
Not in living memory has a Democratic president nominated an Irish, Italian or Polish Catholic, though these ethnic communities once gave the party its greatest victories in the cities and states of the North.
What happened to the party of the Daleys, Rizzos and Rostenkowskis?
And not in nearly half a century has a Democratic president nominated a white Protestant or white Catholic man or woman.
[...]
If Kagan is confirmed, the Court will consist of three Jews and six Catholics (who represent not quite a fourth of the country), but not a single Protestant, though Protestants remain half the nation and our founding faith.

Buchanan ought to be happy and relieved that he lives in the US of A where we protect the freedom of people to say such loony and offensive things ... What is wrong with these people?

Islamophobia, and Eurabia

A British Minister walks out of a Muslim constituent’s wedding protesting against segregation of male and female guests; a prominent moderate Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, is hounded out of not one but two separate jobs for hosting a show on an Iranian television channel; aggressive right-wing campaigners in Switzerland demand removal of minarets from all mosques; and French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls for a ban on wearing burqa in public.

These incidents, occurring within days of each other in recent weeks in different parts of Europe, have coincided with a rash of new books portraying European Muslims in the darkest possible colour. Their alarmist tone has reminded many of the sort of things once written about European Jews.

Are these simply isolated events? Or is Europe in the grip of a new wave of Islamophobia?

A well-thought out essay by Hasan Suroor, who alerts readers about the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe, and in North America. It is not looking good.
Suroor concludes that:

It would be foolish to conflate incidents which may be no more than just local difficulties and blow them up into an anti-Muslim conspiracy. Yet to dismiss them as an aberration would be to deny the prejudice that Muslims face across Europe.

If only sex hadn't distracted him!

I was sure that he would be the first Jewish president of the US. In fact, if everything had been going well, I think he would have made a fine deputy to Obama--a much better choice than Joe "foot in the mouth" Biden. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a mortal, after all.

No, I am not referring to John "I had an affair while my wife was battling cancer" Edwards.

It is Eliot Spitzer I am referring to. He, too, will be rehabilitated in the public sphere, but in a much lesser capacity. His tough-guy approach, with white collar criminals, and his sharp thinking comes across clearly in his latest column in Slate, where he looks at the role of the NY Fed. Spitzer writes:

The composition of the New York Fed's board, which supervises the organization and current Chairman Friedman, is equally troubling. The board consists of nine individuals, three chosen by the N.Y. Fed member banks as their own representatives, three chosen by the member banks to represent the public, and three chosen by the national Fed Board of Governors to represent the public. In theory this sounds great: Six board members are "public" representatives.

So whom have the banks chosen to be the public representatives on the board during the past decade, as the crisis developed and unfolded? Dick Fuld, the former chairman of Lehman; Jeff Immelt, the chairman of GE; Gene McGrath, the chairman of Con Edison; Ronay Menschel, the chairwoman of Phipps Houses and also, not insignificantly, the wife of Richard Menschel, a former senior partner at Goldman. Whom did the Board of Governors choose as its public representatives? Steve Friedman, the former chairman of Goldman; Pete Peterson; Jerry Speyer, CEO of real estate giant Tishman Speyer; and Jerry Levin, the former chairman of Time Warner. These were the people who were supposedly representing our interests!

It is almost like it was Ralph Nader who authored this piece. The downfall triggered by yielding to the flesh--Spitzer was not the first, nor will be the last!
Spitzer then adds:

So is it any wonder that the N.Y. Fed has been complicit in the single greatest bailout of poorly managed banks in history? Any wonder that it has given—with virtually no strings attached—practically the entire contents of the Treasury to the very banks whose inability to manage risk has brought our economy to its knees? Any wonder that not a single CEO or senior executive of a major bank has been removed as a condition of hundreds of billions of direct cash and guarantees? Any wonder that, despite its fundamental responsibility to preserve the integrity of the banking system, it sat quietly on the sidelines as the leverage beneath the banks exploded and the capital underlying their investments shrank?

I do not mean to suggest that any of these board members intentionally discharged their duties with the specific goal of benefitting themselves. Rather, what we have seen is disastrous groupthink, a way of looking at the world from the perspective of Wall Street and Wall Street alone.

The Last Jews of Kerala

A relative of ours lived in Mattancheri, in Kerala. Yes, we tamils had relatives scattered all over India! Well, for the longest time the small town where my grandmothers hailed from, Sengottai, was in the Travancore Kingdom, which for the most part is modern day Kerala.
The strangest thing is that until the I came to the US, I had no idea that the oldest synagog was right in Mattancheri; the provincial lives we lead!

The Economist has a review of a new book on the Kerala Jews. Excerpt:

YAHEH HALLEGUA is the last Jewish woman of child-bearing age in Mattancheri. Her cousins Keith and Len are the last eligible bachelors. But she is not keen on either of them. So within a few decades the extinction of the 400-year-old Jewish community in the port-village in India’s southern state of Kerala is assured.

Mattancheri is Indian Jewry’s most famous settlement. Its pretty streets of pastel-coloured houses, connected by first-floor passages and home to the last 12 sari- and sarong-wearing, white-skinned Indian Jews, are visited by thousands of tourists each year. Its synagogue, built in 1568, with a floor of blue-and-white Chinese tiles, a carpet given by Haile Selassie and the frosty Yaheh selling tickets at the door, stands as an image of religious tolerance.