Monthly Archives: August 2025

August 25, 2025 · 7:30 am

Persecution or Paranoia? The Mysterious Case of the Missing Cheese Blintzes

By Marcie Geffner (Ventura, California)

My neighbor told me about the cheese blintzes.

I live in a small town, about sixty miles northwest of Los Angeles, closer to the San Fernando Valley than the Westside. There’s no New York-style deli here. Cheese blintzes weren’t exactly for sale around the corner.

But they were for sale down the street. Less than two miles away at . . . wait for it, Trader Joe’s. In the frozen foods’ aisle.

They came in a thin, rectangular blue box. On the front, below the yellow script saying, “Cheese Blintzes,” was a mouth-watering photo of two blintzes stacked and cut to show the filling. Chunks of peaches nestled at their sides. A dollop of sour cream rested on top. Eight in a box, each a small, convenient bundle of warm, familiar comfort food.

And, oh, they were delicious! Creamy. Not too sweet. Perfect with a tiny scoop of Costco’s strawberry preserves. The best blintzes, maybe, I’d ever tasted. Certainly, the best frozen variety. And, according to the package, they were surprisingly low-calorie, relatively speaking.

They quickly became my favorite go-to late-night snack.

And then, they went missing. In vain, I searched through the Trader Joe’s frozen foods’ aisle. Ice cream. Broccoli. Spanakopita. Pasta. Pizza. Waffles. Pancakes. French fries.

I approached a guy in a red shirt.

“Blintzes?”

He gave me a blank look.

I explained.

“I’ll check in the back.”

“I’ll wait here.”

I waited. And waited.

“They’ve been discontinued.”

Do I need to tell you how heartbroken I was? Bereft. Grieving. I’m not a foodie, but I am a picky eater. When I find something I like, I become fond of it, attached even.

What’s more, I’d felt seen because of those blintzes, as if someone at Trader Joe’s knew where I lived and knew I liked their cheese blintzes.

Now I’d reverted to being invisible. Melted into the pot instead of a crouton in the salad. 

This mystery of the missing blintzes became my go-to conversation starter for more than a week.

“Did you know?” I’d ask. “Yes, I went to the website.”

I complained. Requested. Begged. “Please, please, PLEASE bring back the cheese blintzes!”

I’d expected my neighbor who’d told me about the blintzes to share my concern. But he was oddly blasé. Not disappointed. Not distressed. Not even a little. Not at all.

“Costco has them,” he informed me.

Need I say: massive relief?

Total excitement!

Can you guess what happened next?

Off I went. Costco’s frozen foods’ aisles are longer, wider, taller, and more numerous than Trader Joe’s’.

I searched. No blintzes.

“We no longer have them. Discontinued.”

No!

Was it a conspiracy? A supply chain snafu? A manufacturer gone out of business? Were cheese blintzes not profitable enough at any price to earn their shelf space? I had no idea.

That might’ve been the end of this story had not one of my cousins invited me to lunch with some of our other cousins at a well-known deli in Los Angeles a few weeks later.

I’d been thinking of ordering a veggie sandwich until . . . you guessed it . . . someone ordered cheese blintzes.

Cheese blintzes?!

I perked up.

They were not, I’m sorry to report, as awesome as Trader Joe’s’. Good, yes, but not great. More doughy than creamy and too sweet. A lesser-quality brand of frozen, I imagined. Or just not to my taste. I’d been spoiled by the best.

I turned to one of my cousins. “Trader Joe’s discontinued these,” I told her.

“It’s antisemitic,” she said.

“What?” I didn’t think so.

“It’s true,” she insisted.

“Then, why are they still selling the frozen potato latkes?”

She didn’t know. We discussed this at some length. We didn’t agree.

Later, I wondered: Was she right? Was there actually a products manager in a small, dark office somewhere at Trader Joe’s going through lists and canceling anything that seemed Jewish? And was there another manager in another small, dark office somewhere at Costco doing the same thing? And had both of these managers targeted my cheese blintzes?

I couldn’t imagine it. But my cousin had sounded so sure. An Israeli brand of hummus had been discontinued as well, she’d said.

I don’t know which thought was more troubling to me: that the discontinuation of the blintzes was antisemitic or that whether it was or wasn’t antisemitic didn’t matter as much as the fact that reasonable people, such as my cousin, believed it was and, though I wasn’t convinced, I couldn’t prove them wrong.

Was I hopelessly naïve, so far outside of the bubble of Jewish life or just not Jewish enough to realize that the discontinuation of cheese blintzes was obviously antisemitic? Was I being persecuted, albeit in a way that seemed small and unprofitable?

The idea struck me as ludicrous. But I have to admit: I had doubts and I had  credible reasons to be on guard, cynical, even suspicious.

Boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses and Israeli-made products have a long history.

In Austria, such actions dated back to at least the 1890s and continued until 1938, when the Nazis annexed the country and forced out the Jewish owners, leaving no one for them to target with future boycotts.

The Nazis had already organized a similar boycott in Germany five years earlier, in 1933. It lasted only one day and was ignored by many, but marked the beginning of a nationwide campaign against the Jewish population.

In the U.S., activists have targeted Trader Joe’s products imported from Israel since at least 2009, when protestors removed Israeli products from shelves and distributed anti-Israel leaflets at two stores in Northern California. Just last year, some 15,000 people signed a petition.

Lists of boycott targets that I found online didn’t mention Trader Joe’s or Costco. But some included Quaker Oats and Doritos, both of which are sold at Costco. Also on the target list: Whole Foods Market. Did they sell cheese blintzes?

None of this explained whether the disappearance of my beloved blintzes was a trivial matter or a serious issue or maybe even a precursor to something worse. Would a ban against Jewish grocery shoppers be next?

Paranoia or persection: what do you think?

I wish this story had a happy ending.

A week later, the cheese blintzes were back!

Alas, no.

Now I can only wander, forlorn, up and down the frozen foods’ aisles, searching for the blue boxes, hoping for them to reappear, and wondering why, exactly, they went missing.

See you there?

Marcie Geffner is a journalist, writer, editor, and book critic. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, Professional Builder, Urban Land, Entrepreneur, Publishers Weekly, and the Washington Independent Review of Books, among other publications. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English at UCLA and a master’s degree in business administration (MBA) at Pepperdine University. Originally from Los Angeles, she currently lives in Ventura, California. She’s an active member of the National Book Critics Circle. Website: www.marciegeffner.com

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August 18, 2025 · 7:30 am

August in Galilee

by David Allard (London, UK)

 We went stone-gathering at dawn,

Thinking ourselves young pioneers

Redeeming the land,

Ungainly in old boots,

Still sticky-eyed and dry-mouthed,

To gather the rocky crop

Risen like dragons’ teeth

From the newly ploughed earth.

My heart awoke first, and

I forgot to breathe for a moment

When I saw you – once more

As if it was for the first time.

Your long black hair curtained your face

As you stooped to gather jagged chunks,

Then slid back when you rose, 

Loose-limbed and lambent, 

To cast your harvest, 

Clanging, echoing,

Into the rusting, dented tractor-drawn trailer.

“ He’s dreaming again,”

 You said to Bernice,

“ Hey you, wake up.”

You might have smiled, 

A muse then and now, 

Unknowingly holding

My fragile heart.

Why wake? Soon enough, 

The red sun risen from the distant ridge

Will turn a fierce yellow-white

And these last floating moments

Bathed in the night’s warmth

Of a faraway summer 

Will be gone, 

But never lost.

David Allard, now retired, lives in London, UK. He lived in Israel through the seventies. He writes poems and short stories, and has been published in the USA, UK and Israel. A detective novel, The Last Resort, set in a sleepy seaside town, has been published under the pseudonym David Strauss and is available on Amazon.

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August 10, 2025 · 7:16 am

In His Hands

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

My grandfather once held my grandmother’s hands in his. I never knew her. He held the keys of his wooden register in his hands. Canned goods. Fresh produce. Milk bottles for the 1915 free milk campaign as announced in the Newark Evening Star. He held my infant father in his hands, an American-born baby of a Litvak and a Galitzianer. He held his aging mother’s hands and when I was born, and my mother asked him for a name, he gave me the name of his mother, Bryna, and his eldest sister. Doba, who died in the 1918 flu pandemic. He once held shoelaces that he dipped in leather in his first job at a Newark tannery. He once held pencils and rulers in his work as a joiner in Russia. He once held the parcels of his Russian life as he steamed across the Atlantic at age 19 on the SS Rotterdam in 1899 to join his brother in Newark. He held the fringes of his tallis and the leather straps of his phylacteries that I now keep in a special treasures drawer. My grandfather once held the remote to his Amana television to watch The Lawrence Welk Show and used it to change the channel to The Wonderful World of Disney for me. He once held the lever to vote for Al Smith for American president after he became a US citizen. He once held the keys to a corner lot house after decades of living behind the general store he and my grandmother owned and operated. As he aged, he held the iron-wrought banister of the outdoor stairs to my father’s car. He held my father’s hands for support. He held onto life itself to the age of 93.

But with all that my grandfather held, I don’t think he ever once held me.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) from Gratz College, where she teaches in the HGS graduate programs. The author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse, her work has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, Tiferet, Minyan, Jewishfiction.net, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Director, Mercer County (NJ) Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center.

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August 4, 2025 · 7:30 am

A Cultural Jew

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

I am a cultural Jew, a result of my upbringing.

I am not religious in terms of doctrine, attending

synagogue or following the rules of Sabbath or

the strictly kosher culture. Still, I’ve never thought

of myself as anything but Jewish. 

The religion has a magnetic hold on me. 

I felt this way most potently when I was dating 

the woman who became my girlfriend, my wife, 

and, finally, my much more than significant other. 

She came from a kosher life, a family that celebrated 

holy days and attended synagogue … if you’ll excuse 

the play on words …  religiously. 

I was not a smooth fit, not the final piece of a sacred

jigsaw puzzle. It took much flexibility and patience 

for them to welcome me into the fold, a little like a 

shepherd embracing the prodigal lost sheep … but 

in time it happened, and there was a wedding which was

instructive to this somewhat ill-fitting member of

the congregation.

I recall with fondness seeing so many happy faces,

standing under a chuppah for the first and only time,

breaking the glass. At that time, to me, a rabbi was a

rabbi. But I later learned that the rabbi who said magical

words that united me and my ever-after wife was special. 

He’d helped liberate Buchenwald and had supervised 

the start of new lives for Elie Wiesel and a thousand other 

orphans … and this night he was leading me and my bride 

to our own new life.

I am now in my eighties and remain a cultural Jew,

but I say with pride that I am as Jewish as I can be.

I show all Jews respect, love learning, try to harm no one.

I stand as tall as my fellow Jews. I look upon all Jews

as children of HaShem. I know my place in the scheme

of Judaism and am sincere in my love of all the tribes.

And when the time arrives, I will sit among my ancestors 

and I will be quite comfortable and proud of the life I led.

Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

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