Day: September 12, 2023

This year, like many other Jews, I’m planning a Rosh Hashanah spread that will feature fish — a symbol of fertility, and a talisman against the evil eye.

The only difference: Mine will be sweet and made of rice flour, and shaped in a hand-carved, wooden mold, following a Chinese tradition repurposed for the High Holidays.

In Chinese culture, as in Judaism, fish symbolize fortune. And, just as many Jews serve a fish head for the “head of the year” on Rosh Hashanah, on Chinese New Year, fish is a must, with many families presenting a fish head to the eldest guest as a sign of respect.

I came across these adorable fish-shaped date-paste cookies while searching for a way to represent my heritage. I’m Chinese and Jewish, and as a food writer and home cook, I’m always looking for Jewish ways to highlight Chinese cuisine — and any cuisine outside of the Ashkenazi-American canon. At a recent Shabbat dinner, I replaced the salt in which challah is typically dipped with a salty ginger-scallion sauce. My guests mopped it up happily, rushing back for seconds and thirds.

For Rosh Hashanah, I wanted to find a Chinese dessert to usher in a sweet new year. I chose dates as my starting point, because they are one of the seven simanim, or good omens, that many Jews — especially Sephardi Jews — eat on the holiday. Many scholars believe that in the Book of Exodus, when God promises Jews “a land of milk and honey,” “honey” refers to a sweet paste made of mashed dates that is still ubiquitous in the Middle East today.

So I scoured the internet for recipes for Chinese sweets made with dates, and came across a recipe for “Chinese Rice Flour Cookies With Date Filling” in The Hong Kong Cookery, a blog maintained by an architect and home cook based in Hong Kong. 

Part of the fun of these cookies: The delicate details the carved wooden fish mold bestows on the final product. Photo by Sam Lin-Sommer

I was pleased to learn that in China, too, this was the right season to eat these desserts. The cookies are a traditional dessert baked for the Mid-Autumn Festival, a major Chinese holiday focused on family, thanksgiving and the moon that takes place around the same time as the High Holidays. 

When I showed the fish cookie recipe to my colleague, Forverts editor and Yiddish cooking maven Rukhl Schaechter, she excitedly told me that she was in the middle working on a Yiddish video about roasting fish (the once-living kind) for Rosh Hashanah. She also gave me a crucial piece of baking advice for making the dish pareve: replace the butter with Fleischmann’s unsalted Kosher shortening.

I found both the shortening and a wooden fish mold on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a historic stomping ground for both Chinese people and Jews in New York. At a Chinese kitchen supply store, a kind, chatty lady from Guangdong, China presented me with a wooden paddle that had a four inch-long koi fish delicately carved into its blade. “When I was a child, we would use molds to make treats for the Mid-Autumn Festival, too,” she told me in Mandarin, “but ours were shaped like little Buddhas.” As I walked from Chinatown through the Lower East Side, where a cluster of Kosher vendors sell rugelach and chicken thighs, I saw Chinese signage give way to building facades that still bear the marks of the area’s Jewish community, with stars of David and Hebrew letters etched into their walls.

I hauled my bounty to my Brooklyn apartment, where I started by making the “date” paste to stuff into the cookies. I opened up the packet of deep red, oval dried jujubes, or Chinese red dates, and was bowled over by their aroma of molasses and apples. (It’s important to note here that Chinese red dates are not related to western dates, but they earn their name for their striking similarity in taste, appearance, and spirit. I wager that you could replace the jujube paste here with a medjool date paste for a delicious, Levantine take on these cookies.)

A quick boil and pulse in a food processor turned the jujubes into a fruity, caramelly paste; I’m looking forward to eating the leftovers over buttered toast in the coming week.

This recipe calls for jujubes, also known as Chinese red dates, but you can easily substitute medjool dates. Photo by Sam Lin-Sommer

Then came the dough, made of only four ingredients: rice flour, crushed almonds, confectioner’s sugar and shortening. I packed the simple combination into the wooden mold along with a dab of date paste; it emerged as a snapshot of a koi fish mid-jump. After a short, low-heat bake in the oven, my little fish emerged light and crumbly, with a jammy filling.

They’re a delicate and beautiful dessert, perfect for a celebration like Rosh Hashanah or the Mid-Autumn Festival — or both. And in my mind, the way in which these cookies make perfect desserts for two contemporaneous holidays — one rooted in the Levant, and one based in China — speaks to a deeper connection between the two areas. The ingredients they share are a reminder that Chinese and Jewish cuisines were intertwined long before my Ashkenazi father and Chinese mother first broke bread.

The Silk Road connected Asia to the Middle East for more than 1500 years, enough time for each region to indelibly shape the other. Archaeologists have found the remains of 2,000-year-old baked cereal cakes in Northwest China that lend evidence to the idea that Chinese cooks, who primarily tend to lean on steaming and frying as cooking techniques, learned to bake from migrants on the Silk Road. Wooden baking molds were invented by ancient Egyptians before finding a presence in China. And the rice that was pulverized into the flour that gives these cookies their delicate crumb originated in China, before becoming a staple in the diets of many Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. 

Plus, the Silk Road is likely what brought China’s oldest Jewish community, the Kaifeng Jews of Central China, to the country some 1,000 years ago. 

For my Chinese-Jewish Rosh Hashanah this year, these rice flour cookies will share space with my mom’s honey cake. I’m hoping that by being a little more generous with the shortening, I’ll struggle a little less with the fish mold when I’m baking for the big day next weekend. On my first attempt at pressing the cookie dough into the mold, the dough was too dry, and when I tapped the wooden paddle against my dining table, only the head of the fish popped out.

Its two bulging eyes stared at me, unembarrassed. My ancestors, Chinese and Jewish alike, would have known exactly what to call that disembodied head: a good omen.

The following recipe is adapted with permission from The Hong Kong Cookery.

The post For a Chinese-Jewish Rosh Hashanah, date cookies that recall the cultural blend of the Silk Road appeared first on The Forward.

Up to $135 billion of jobless benefits paid out by U.S. states during the coronavirus pandemic may have arisen from fraudulent claims, Washington’s top government watchdog said on Tuesday in a report suggesting the problem is much bigger than previously estimated.

Waves of fraudulent claims for unemployment insurance benefits have episodically inflated the volumes of new filings reported each week to the Labor Department by all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, often confounding economists tracking the data for a read on the health of the job market.

But a new General Accountability Office report estimates the problem is much bigger: Between $100 billion and $135 billion of the roughly $900 billion in jobless benefits payouts from April 2020 through May 2023 may have been fraudulent. At the high end, that would equal about $1 of every $7 paid in aid over that time.

The GAO’s fraud estimate is around two times or more higher than the nearly $56 billion it said states themselves have estimated paying in either fraudulent payments or nonfraudulent overpayments between March 2020 and March 2023.

“The full extent of UI fraud during the pandemic will likely never be known with certainty,” the GAO report summary said.

The Labor Department disputed the magnitude of the GAO finding, saying it was based on a small sample of questionable claims under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.

The PUA was established under the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act as U.S. unemployment benefits rolls surged from fewer than 2 million recipients to more than 23 million in a matter of weeks in the spring of 2020 due to lockdowns early in the pandemic. After several extensions, the PUA – which provided benefits to jobless individuals who would not typically have been eligible for them – expired in September 2021.

“For this reason, the Department believes that the GAO’s report overestimates the level of fraud and that this report can best be understood as an estimate of UI fraud risk rather than a fraud estimate,” Brent Parton, the department’s principal deputy assistant secretary, wrote to the GAO investigators.

Fraudulent claims activity has periodically distorted the data reported weekly by the Labor Department, befuddling economists who count on the data for gauging the wherewithal of the job market.

In early May a surge in new benefits claims to the highest level since October 2021 briefly led economists to conclude a long-awaited softening in the labor market was taking hold. The increase soon afterward was attributed almost entirely to a wave of fraudulent claims in Massachusetts, and the initial estimate of claims for that period was later revised down by 32,000, or more than 12%.

Another short-lived increase in new claims in August was seen by some economists as related to an increase in fraudulent claims activity in Ohio.

A Virginia Democrat on Monday slammed national media outlets for reporting that she and her husband performed sex acts for money on a pornographic website.

Susanna Gibson, whose fate in November’s elections could determine which party controls the Virginia House of Delegates, moonlighted as an adult performer on Chaturbate.com, the Washington Post and the Associated Press reported Monday. Gibson and her husband performed under the username HotWifeExperience since at least May 2022, soliciting payments on publicly live-streamed videos so that users could “watch me pee” or engage in anal sex.

Susanna Gibson, Democratic candidate for Virginia House

Although the majority of Gibson’s sex shows were public, the 40-year-old nurse practitioner claims that outlets sharing her X-rated recordings are committing “a sex crime.” In a statement to the New York Times, Gibson’s lawyer stated that he and his client are “working closely with the F.B.I. and local prosecutors to bring the wrongdoers to justice.” Gibson indicated that she will continue campaigning for the seat, telling the Times that the revelation of her pornographic past “won’t intimidate me and it won’t silence me.”

Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House of Delegates. Gibson’s district, which includes parts of Richmond and its suburbs, is represented by a Democrat. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R.) has raised more than $12 million for state Republican candidates in the race thus far.

The provenance of the opposition research document that contains screenshots of Gibson’s performances, as well as links to recordings on third-party websites, is unknown. The Washington Free Beacon received the document from an individual with no connection to Virginia politics or any official affiliate of the Republican Party.

Gibson continued performing on Chaturbate—a portmanteau of “chat” and “masturbate,” according to the website—through at least September of last year, one month after she announced her campaign for the Virginia House of Delegates. It is unclear how much money Gibson, who in May received the “Family Friendly Seal of Approval” from the left-wing Family Friendly Virginia, earned as an adult performer.

Susanna Gibson, Democratic candidate for Virginia House

To solicit more “tips” from viewers, Gibson would cite on several occasions the “good cause” for which she was raising money. Chaturbate users may “tip” performers with “tokens,” which cost $.10 to purchase. Half of all token proceeds are given to the performer.

Gibson’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about whether any money she raised on Chaturbate was used for her campaign.

Chaturbate users may tip performers to see them perform specific sexual acts. During one session on Sept. 4, 2022, Gibson said she would let her husband “fuck me in the ass doggy style in a private room if someone wants to pay.”

“Yeah, you can watch me pee. Let me block a few people and then y’all can watch me pee if you tip me and some tokens again I’m raising money for a good cause,” she said during another Chaturbate session the following day.

Susanna Gibson, Democratic candidate for Virginia House

In another Chaturbate session, Gibson said she and her husband are “ethically non monogamous.” On the evening of Sept. 5, 2022, she said she already had sex with two other men.

“I would just say I love men and I love sex and he comes in here so I fucked the guy that I had been fucking and we are still friends,” Gibson said. “He is ethically non monogamous and married. And then I have a friend who I would say he is a friend. He would like to be more. He is sexy as fuck.”

Susanna Gibson, Democratic candidate for Virginia House

Gibson is the latest female Democrat to garner attention for her sexual exploits. Former California Rep. Katie Hill (D.) resigned from Congress in 2019 after sexually explicit photos surfaced that confirmed Hill and her ex-husband had been engaged in a “throuple” with one of Hill’s female staffers. Pennsylvania Democrat Alexandra Hunt during an unsuccessful congressional bid in 2022 spoke openly about her time working as a stripper and presence on OnlyFans.

The post Cocksure Virginia Democrat Slams Media for Reporting Her Public Pornographic Performances appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

A whistleblower from the CIA testified to Congress that the agency conspired to undermine its own investigative team’s assessment that the COVID-19 virus likely came from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

The unnamed source, a senior-level CIA officer, told House committee leaders that the CIA offered financial incentives in an effort to convince six analysts on its COVID Discovery Team who endorsed the lab leak theory to change their position.

“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” Reps. Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) and Mike Turner (R., Ohio), chairmen of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, respectively, said in a letter to the agency. The lawmakers demanded the CIA hand over documents and communications regarding the COVID Discovery Team.

According to the Republicans, the whistleblower said the six analysts were given a “significant monetary incentive” to change their conclusion.

Several federal agencies, including the Energy Department and FBI, have concluded with some degree of confidence that the virus emerged from a Chinese lab.

The Biden administration in July decided to pull funding from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as Republicans investigate the lab leak theory.

The post CIA Whistleblower Says Agency Worked To Bury COVID Lab Leak Theory appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Republican lawmakers are spearheading an effort to ban Iran’s president from entering the United States to attend the United Nations annual gathering next week.

Rep. Claudia Tenney (R., N.Y.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) introduced legislation on Tuesday that will make it illegal for Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi and his delegation to attend the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, according to a copy of the legislation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The U.N.’s annual conference brings leaders from across the globe together for a week of meetings, and is often used by dictators and anti-U.S. figures as a platform to disseminate propaganda. Last year, Raisi delivered a speech that assailed the United States for withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear accord and claimed his country is a beacon of justice, comments that came as Tehran’s hardline police forces murdered pro-democracy protesters in the streets.

Republicans like Tenney and Cruz maintain that Raisi has no right to be hosted in New York City as his government fosters terrorism across the globe and launches attacks against U.S. forces and allies in the Middle East. While the legislation stands little chance of passing prior to Raisi’s arrival next week, the lawmakers say it is important to show that “terrorists are not welcome in the U.S.”

“It is imperative we stop Raisi and his associates from setting foot on American soil,” Tenney told the Free Beacon. “Raisi, whose nickname is ‘the Butcher of Tehran,’ has a record of grave human rights abuses and orchestrating terrorist activities worldwide.” Raisi helped organize the execution of around 5,000 dissidents in the 1980s, and has defended the regime’s murders.

The legislation, dubbed the SEVER Act, will “show the international community that terrorists are not welcome in the U.S.,” Tenney said.

The bill builds upon sanctions issued by former president Donald Trump and could serve as a model for future Republican administrations to ban Iranian officials and other terror-designated regimes from attending the U.N.

There has long been an appetite among Republicans in the House and Senate to stop Iranian officials and other anti-American leaders—such as Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas—from using the U.N. as a vehicle to attack Western values and foment hatred, particularly against Israel.

Tenney and Cruz also introduced the SEVER Act last year, but it did not pass.

Iran’s Raisi is scheduled to land in America next week on the heels of a hostage deal with the Biden administration that freed up $6 billion in revenue for the hardline government.

Raisi’s appearance at the U.N. also comes on the one-year anniversary of popular uprisings in Iran over the death of a young woman who was killed by the country’s morality police. The protest movement is still percolating in the country.

U.S.-based Iranian dissidents are expected to organize a series of protests in New York around Raisi’s visit.

The post Republicans Move to Ban Iranian President from Entering US appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

What’s happening: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has once again made a mockery of his party’s so-called commitment to racial diversity by supporting a white candidate over a black rival in a Democratic primary.

• The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), which Schumer oversees, and other Democratic-aligned groups are lining up behind Gloria Johnson, the state representative who recently announced her candidacy for U.S. Senate in Tennessee. Johnson, who is white, recently used the DSCC email list to raise money for her campaign.

• Marquita Bradshaw, a black climate activist, is also running. She has a track record of overcoming the Democratic Party’s toxic white supremacy. In 2020, Bradshaw won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Tennessee by defeating James Mackler, a white man backed by Schumer and the party establishment.

• Johnson was nearly expelled from the Tennessee House of Representatives earlier this year for participating in an insurrection attempt at the state capitol building.

Why it’s racist: Schumer’s clear preference for white candidates in Democratic primaries suggests a deeply troubling animosity toward black people and a total lack of confidence in the ability of black candidates to win statewide elections.

White power party: The Tennessee primary is the third U.S. Senate contest of the 2024 election in which Schumer and the Democratic Party are supporting white candidates at the expense of their black challengers.

• The Democratic establishment is backing two white candidates—Reps. Katie Porter and Adam Schiff—in the 2024 U.S. Senate primary in California. Rep. Barbara Lee, a black woman who is also running, has complained about her party’s racist approach to the contest.

• Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.), a white woman with ties to the CIA, is the “consensus candidate” among national Democrats in the race for U.S. Senate in Michigan, despite the fact that two black women, a black man (actor Hill Harper), and an Arab-American businessman are also seeking the nomination.

Legacy of shame: Schumer and the Democratic Party did the same thing in 2020, spending more than $50 million in support of white candidates running against black challengers in key U.S. Senate primaries.

• “Sen. Schumer, for whatever reason, did not want an African American running for Senate in North Carolina,” said Erica Smith, a black woman who lost the Democratic primary to establishment choice Cal Cunningham, a white man.

• In Texas, national Democrats backed M.J. Hegar in the primary over Royce West, a black state senator who accused party leaders of “trying to lock African Americans out of the process.”

• President Joe Biden’s approval rating among black voters has declined significantly since he took office in 2021.

Crucial context: The Democratic Party is best known for supporting slavery and racial segregation.

The post Chuck Schumer Shuns Another Black Candidate in Democratic Senate Primary appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

For months, Ukraine has been asking the United States to supply long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). In early September, a flurry of media reports emerged suggesting that the Biden Administration may now be about to give the green light for the long-range missiles. If confirmed, this would be the latest in a series of sagas related to military aid for Ukraine that have been marked by extended delays and fierce debate followed by eventual delivery.

ATACMS missiles are launched from the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) platform. With an official range of 300 km, an ATACMS strike would be able to hit virtually any target in Russian-occupied Ukraine. As the crow flies, the current distance from the front line to the Sea of Azov is less than 100 km, while the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s main naval base in Russian-occupied Crimea is around 245 km from Ukraine’s current forward positions.

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US missiles have already had a significant impact on the course of the war. In the summer of 2022, the US provided Ukraine with Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) rockets, which are also launched from HIMARS and have a range of around 70 km. Ukraine used GMLRS missiles to conduct strikes on Russian logistics targets that were previously outside the range of artillery fire. As a result, Russia was forced to move ammunition depots and other major hubs beyond the range of GMLRS.

This disruption hindered the Russian military and helped pave the way for the liberation of Kharkiv Oblast and Kherson in the final months of 2022. The delivery of ATACMS missiles now has the potential to force the same kind of shift in Russian logistics planning and cause major disruption to the Russian war effort. Additionally, the considerably more powerful warhead that ATACMS missiles carry would be capable of striking larger targets than their shorter-range counterparts and causing even greater damage to Russian logistics networks as a result.

Calls for the United States to supply Ukraine with ATACMS have been growing since the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Bipartisan legislation was introduced to that effect in the House of Representatives and passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. As Washington has agreed to Kyiv’s other requests, such as the delivery of tanks and Patriot air defense systems or allowing the transfer of F-16 fighter jets, these calls have only intensified.

To bolster their case, proponents have pointed to the battlefield impact of GMLRS deliveries in 2022. In response to these arguments, the Biden Administration has blamed low stockpiles, but the fact that newly produced ATACMS are slated only for foreign sales would appear to undermine such claims.

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Some observers say the Biden Administration’s apparent hesitation to supply Ukraine with long-range missiles reflects fears over Russia’s possible reaction. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Russia has repeatedly claimed that supplying Ukraine with various categories of weapons would constitute a red line and precipitate a major response. However, the West has crossed each of Russia’s supposed “red lines” without provoking any meaningful escalation from the Kremlin.

When it comes to ATACMS and Russia’s red lines, the US’s NATO allies have already set a precedent. The United Kingdom became the first country to supply long-range missiles to Ukraine, announcing the delivery of air-launched Storm Shadow cruise missiles, jointly developed by the UK and France, in May 2023. France announced deliveries of its variant of the Storm Shadow, SCALP, two months later. Both missile types are now in service and are being used effectively by Ukrainian forces.

By following the lead of the UK and France on long-range missiles, the Biden Administration might see the chance to demonstrate alliance unity. As a ground-launched system, ATACMS missiles would work in tandem with the SCALP and Storm Shadow missiles provided by the UK and France, which are launched from Ukraine’s Su-24 fighter jets. In a war zone where Ukraine is unable to secure total air superiority even at the local level, the ability to launch long-range missiles from the ground brings obvious advantages.

ATACMS missiles are not a wonder weapon capable of winning the war single-handed, of course. It also remains to be seen what rules of engagement the US would impose on their use. But Ukraine’s ability to use ATACMS in order to strike high-value targets throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine and seriously disrupt Russia’s logistics network would have a quantitative effect on the battlefield. The decision to provide Ukraine with this new category of weapon would also serve as a major morale boost for Ukraine’s military and the entire country.

Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive has shown that Russian forces are far more entrenched, and their logistics more sustainable, than in 2022. Despite these challenges, Ukraine has made some progress and continues to advance. ATACMS missiles would greatly increase Ukraine’s ability to strike the logistical networks supporting the invasion and would make it increasingly difficult for Putin’s army to operate inside Ukraine. This would bring Ukraine significantly closer to military victory, while sending a message to Moscow that any hopes of outlasting the West in Ukraine are futile.

Benton Coblentz is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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The post US expected to decide soon on long-range missiles for Ukraine appeared first on Atlantic Council.