The Art Of Cooking – Chicken Schnitzel Recipe


The Schnitzel has been brought by the European Jews to Israel, and currently everyone enjoys it!

I visited many households in Israel, and at any time of the day or night one can enjoys a Chicken Schnitzel. The Israeli version of Schnitzel is recognizable because of the white sesame seeds which cover the meat.
True, it might not be the most exciting or unique dish out there, and yet, it is definitely a staple in Israel when compared to the hummus.

Ingredients:
2 to 4 chicken breasts depending on how much you want to make (one can substitute the chicken breasts with chicken thighs for a more juicy fatty version)
flour
2 or 3 eggs
breadcrumbs (panko breadcrumbs are nice for a pleasant crisp)
salt & pepper
paprika powder
sesame seeds
cayenne pepper (if you want it a bit more spicy)
lemon wedges

Preparing the chicken:
First, you should cut the chicken into thin flat slices; you can use a butterfly cutting technique to make them bigger and flatter.
When the flat pieces of chicken are ready, place them in between two sheets of plastic and with a mallet or a hammer give them a good pounding until they are even and flat – you should focus mainly on the thicker parts.
Next, you should prepare three bowls, fill the first bowl with flour, and in the second bowl place two eggs or three eggs and beat them.
As to the third bowl, you should fill it with bread crumbs, add sesame seeds, salt, pepper, and paprika – optionally, you can use cayenne pepper – mix all the ingredients together.

Now, season lightly the chicken with salt and pepper, dredge chicken in flour until the surface is completely covered and shake off the excess flour.
Next, dip the chicken in beaten eggs mixture and then roll it through the breadcrumbs to coat, and make sure the chicken is completely covered and then lightly shake off the excess breadcrumbs.

Repeat the process until all the chicken pieces are done.

Cook the chicken:
Add a healthy layer of cooking oil to a hot skillet, make sure it is not too hot, after all, you do not want the oil to be smoking.
Softly place the pieces of chicken into the hot oil.
Fry the schnitzels for 2 or 3 minutes on each side, until golden brown.
After frying the schnitzel, let it rest on paper towels for a couple of seconds.

Chicken Schnitzel is a perfect dish for lunches, or in the evening!
Very enjoyable with a simple Israeli salad, and some pita bread with Hummus.
Serve with lemon wedges – remember, the squeeze lemon adds so much flavor to the schnitzel.

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Tal Nitzan ~ I remember Etty Hillesum & The third child


Tal Nitzan. Ills.: Joseph Sassoon Semah

I remember Etty Hillesum

Did she still whisper
“Why anticipate trouble” 
when transported from Westerbork
to Auschwitz in Wagon Number 12,
“They should be exterminated like fleas,
those petty fears of the future”
as her future rushed towards her
to exterminate her?
Maybe I should pause, retreat
or at least recite
“Why anticipate joy”
as I hurry past the yellow squares of life
that once were far and sealed
and tonight open towards me
to let me in and out as I wish
while a silly hope for happiness
sways like a jug, too large,
on my head

“An interrupted life”, the diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
Translation: Tal Nitzan & Vivian Eden

The third child

I’m your unknown child.
I’m the negative
between your two blue-eyed children
who radiate against my darkness.
I’m your forgotten, your vanished, I’m your
kicked away.
I kneel – while they close their eyes

and reach out their hands for the gift –
as if begging for the blow
that will not come.
I feed on the cocoa trail they leave,
on the rustle of wrappings.
I shrink at night into the corner
of their beds, where tiny stuffed animals
encircle them
like shelter against evil,
lurking for the nocturnal ritual,
when you step on my toes unseeing,
and bend to smoothe their plump blankets.
When you close your eyes
(green like mine!)
I’ll creep under your eyelids and murmur:
“Mommy”.
If you try to banish the nightmare of my face
you’ll find out, shamefully,
you don’t even know my name.

Translation: Tal Nitzan & Vivian Eden

Tal Nitzan was born in Jaffa, Israel, and has lived in Argentinia, Colombia, and U.S.A. (NY). She currently lives in Tel Aviv.
She is an awardwinning poet, writer, translator of Hispanic literature and editor.
Tal Nitzan published numerous poetry books.

https://www.facebook.com/IsraelinNY/

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Current Sufism In Israel. The Way Of Abraham – A Bridge Between Religions


Shelley Elkayam – Ills.: Joseph Sassoon Semah

Current Sufism in Israel El Tarika El Ibrahimiyyah – The Way of Abraham – A Bridge between Middle East Religions

Introduction
I wish to thank the University of Goettingen for inviting me to lecture at the Intercultural Theology program on the Current Sufism in Israel and on Sephardic Ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel.
I will begin by introducing my subject with some historical background. Then, I would like to make a reference to the specific audience sitting here right now because it is a very special audience. On the one hand, it  is German; on the other, it is an international audience. So we have to consider how do we speak to such a local yet global group.
At that point, I will present the thesis of this lecture.

So, let us now discuss the issue of the Sephardic Jews. Who are they?
The reason why one knows so little about the Sephardic or Oriental Jews is also a matter of scientific concern for those of us who study Intercultural Theology. Thus, let us have a quick look at a long and serious matter such as The Stage of History.

Yes, stage as in Stage Theater, with the very writers who write the script and the very actors who play the protagonists and the very hegemonic audience who wish to see themselves on stage, or else the very far exotic other. Then we shall move forward to have an idea about the intellectual assets of the ISRAEL Sufi way and perhaps if time allows, we shall read during our workshop some of the devotional texts studied by the Israel Sufi Way, such as El-Ghazali. So hopefully you should have some taste regarding the intercultural Theology that is bridging between religions in the Middle East today, and we shall conclude with that today.

Background
In the Jewish State of Israel, Sufi activity had been almost eliminated by the disruption of the War in 1948, partly revived after the renewal of contacts between Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza “in the wake of 1967 Arab Israeli War” and suppressed in the Second Intifada, also known as the Oslo War and the Al- Aqsa Intifada (2000 to 2005). This Intifada raged between the 20th and the 21st century.

In this lecture I focus on Sufism in Israel as manifested by The Israeli Sufi Way. The Israeli Sufi Way is known as The Sufi Way of Abraham. In Hebrew – One of Israel’s two national languages, it sounds Derekh Avraham (אברהם דרך). In Arabic, the other national language, it sounds Al-Tariqah Ibrahimiyyah or Ibrahimiyyah-Al (א-טַּרִיקַה אל-אִבְּרַאהִימִיַּה) / الإبراهميّة  الطّريقة ).

The members of the Israeli Sufi Way come from various circles: Academy, conservative and orthodox Rabbinic institutes and leadership of other Sufi brotherhoods of Israel: Qadiriyyah, Shadhiliyyah-Yashrutiyyah and Naqshbandiyyah.

Ibrahimiyyah defines itself (2014) publicly as an inter-religious movement encouraging dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims. This inter-religious character is a “post-Sufi” strategy as well as a spiritual response to the particular modern European challenges of the State of Israel, tackling the Israeli East-West debate.
The Sufi leadership of the 3 Muslim brotherhoods responded to the challenge of the peculiar circumstances in which they live in the Middle East, by joining the Ibrahimiyyah and establishing it as the Israeli Sufi Way of Abraham.

This Israeli Sufi brotherhood was created during the 1990s right at the end of the twentieth century. Public activity gathered momentum during the first decade of the twenty first century, with a double mission of both peace between Jews and Muslims, and spiritual search for Medieval Jewish Sufi roots. Special attention is given to 16th century Safed (in the Land of Israel) and of Egypt and North Africa and since the Sufi festival in 2010 also to Indian Jewish Sufism of perhaps 12 century.

Read more

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Ammiel Alcalay – After Jews And Arabs. Remaking Levantine Culture


Ammiel Alcalay – Ills.: Joseph Sassoon Semah

Abstract
By exposing the rich and diverse textual and cultural legacy of this time and space, Alcalay reassesses the exclusion of Semitic culture in Europe from the perspective of contemporary Arabic culture and opposing images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  This book will compel a revision of Jewish studies by placing contemporary Israeli culture within its Middle Eastern context and the terms of colonial, postcolonial, and multicultural discourse.

Introduction
The modern myth of the Jew as pariah, outsider and wanderer has, iron- ically enough, been translated into the postmodern myth of the Jew as “other,” an other that collapses into the equation: writing = Jew = Book. By what sleight of hand? Metaphor? Metaphysics? Such an exclusive ad- dress (whether it is an open or a closed book) ultimately obscures the necessity of mapping out a space in which the Jew was native, not a stranger but an absolute inhabitant of time and place. The urgency of reiterating not only the memory but the possibility of such a world can be felt most acutely now, upon the present scene, where the political context of “the people of the Book” has undergone a radical transformation while the terms used to record and interpret their history and culture have not only remained static but even regressed into a kind of fixed, iconic solidity.

Writing and reading—interpretation—no matter where, have a lot to do with the unearthing, the grasp, the mastery of and giving over to both presences and absences: reading as recovery and relapse; the ink of writing as lifeblood, animator, nourishment—the book as fertile ground nurtured by ink. But the “furrow,” the “fold” that may be both “history” and the “Jew,” runs the risk of diffusion, dispersion, and, finally, inertia. Like anything that looms large in a people’s memory, this field can become muddy, and these furrows turn to drainage ditches that empty out into a stillborn swamp, final resting place for what is allowed to go un- questioned, uninterpreted, and unrelated to social fact or present circum- stance. Paradoxically, the movement of memory too often reappears in the form of inert, unyielding images: resilient and indelible, their clarity is blinding. In his Commentary on the Mishnah, also known as The Eight Chapters, Maimonides wrote:

One action may resemble another action, so that the two actions are thought to be identical even though they are not. For example, consider three dark places: the sun shines upon one of them, and it is illumined; the moon rises over the second place, and it is illumined; a lamp is lit in the third place, and it is illumined. Light is found in each one of them, but the reason for the first light and its cause is the sun, the cause of the second is the moon, and the cause of the third is fire. . . . There is no notion common to all of them except through equivocation. Grasp this notion, for it is extraordinarily marvelous.

History, with its rigid paradigms of order, comes to shore up the insecure ramparts of a failing memory. Untangling the strands of the past—or submitting to their confusing but exhilarating intricacy— cannot simply be an act of recognition, of fitting events into fixed patterns, ofjust seeing the light. It must begin, rather, by apprehending the sources of light and the present objects they shade or illuminate, and follow with an active, incessant engagement in the process of naming and renaming, covering and uncovering, consuming and producing new relations, investigating hierarchies of power and effect: distilling light into sun, moon, and fire. Just as maps interpret and redefine terrain in the im- age of their makers, readings can yield both past and prospective orders: in the Crimean port of Theodosia, not far (in mind) “from Smyrna and Baghdad,” Osip Mandelstam wrote of a “bookish earth” and dreamt of a place that, within the inherited wisdom of its people, embodied an allegiance to words. Sentenced to internal exile, Mandelstam placed the form of his vision and the memory of his biblical ancestry in a Mediterranean world in which Spain and, even more specifically, Andalusia was central: sowing dormant seeds, he unearthed his own genealogy.
[…]

Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 1992. ISBN 978-0-8166-2155-2

The complete book (PDF): https://muse.jhu.edu/book/31473

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Ella Shohat – Dislocated Identities: Reflections Of An Arab-Jew


Ella Shohat – Ills.: Joseph Sassoon Semah

When issues of racial and colonial discourse are discussed in the United States, people of Middle Eastern and North African origin are often excluded. This piece is written with the intent of opening up the multicultural debate, going beyond the U.S. census’s simplistic categorization of Middle Eastern peoples as “whites.” Provoked by the Gulf War, my personal narrative questions the Eurocentric opposition of Arab and Jew, particularly the denial of Arab-Jewish (Sephardic) voices both in the Middle Eastern and American contexts.

I am an Arab-Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the United States. Most members of my family were both and raised in Baghdad, and now live in Iraq, Israel, the United States, England, and Holland. When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the ‘50s, she was convinced that the people who looked and ate so differently—the European-Jews—were actually European-Christians. Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness. My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of “us” as Jews and “them” as Arabs. For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction has always been “Muslim,” “Jew” and “Christian,” not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that “Arabness” referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences.

The complete essay:
https://www.academia.edu/Dislocated_Identities_Reflections_of_an_Arab_Jew

Originally published in Movement Research 5 (Fall 1991/Winter 1992), p. 8

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The Art Of Cooking – T’beet – Iraqi Slow-Cooked Chicken And Rice


This seemingly simple dish is a classic staple of the Iraqi Shabbat lunch! Normally prepared a day in advance and left in the oven overnight.

In this recipe, I will like to stay true to the original flavor of the dish and make sure that your kitchen will smell like an Iraqi Saturday morning.

The flavors are soft and comforting, which together with the juicy chicken and sticky rice –  is a dish that cannot fail!
Trust me, this is the dish that I always ate on the day of my arrival at the home of my grandmother in Israel; I would eat this dish next to all the other colorful and more exciting dishes, and yet even though it does not stand out, it connects all the other dishes together.

Ingredients:
1 whole chicken
Minced beef for the stuffing, make sure it has some fat in it!
Rice
1 large onion
1 can of tomatoes
Oil
Chicken stock
Salt
Cardamon
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Cloves

Stuffing the chicken:
First mix in a bowl the minced meat in a 50/50 ratio with washed rice.
Add into it the following spices, 1 teaspoon Kardemon, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon nutmeg, half a teaspoon cloves, 1 teaspoon salt.
Do not over mix it, and make sure that the minced meat and the rice are loose, then place the mixture inside the chicken cavity, and tie the legs in front of the opening to block it.

Cooking the T’beet:
Cut the onion into small pieces and put them into a big non-stick pot, (The non-stick pot is very important, because we would like the bottom of the pot to caramelize), then add some oil and fry on a low heat until translucent. When the onion is ready add the canned tomatoes and make sure they are softened up.
At this point, if you wish you can add some dried bay leaves or dried chili pepper, to give a bit more depth to the flavor, but this extra addition is optional.
Now add the whole chicken into the pot and fry it on all sides until the entire skin of the chicken is golden brown.
When the skin is brown and crispy add a liter of chicken stock and let it simmer on very low heat for 1 to 2 hours with the lid on.

The longer one simmers the chicken, one should remember to check if there is enough liquid in the pot, add water accordingly.

So, 15 minutes before you are ready to eat, add into the pot the 1 and a half cup of washed rice and make sure the rice is covered by the stock and put the lid back on.
Then, when the rice has absorbed all the liquid, the dish is done – there will be some crispy dark parts at the bottom, this is supposed to be the best part of the rice!
It is a very comforting dish and it works well as a lunch or dinner!
It is nice to eat it with some salad or some other Iraqi dishes, for example, Kubbah!
Remember to eat the T’beet surrounded by your family, and friends! Beteavon.

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