Welcome to the third issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
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Before we get to our artwork of the week, a few things to share:
In food-adjacent news, I published this piece yesterday on the awesome glass cups artist Jordan Fine is making in Cleveland. The cups have exuberant pops of color and they’re perfect for your next mini-cocktail.
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Now let’s dig in!
This Week’s Special
Emily Jacir
Where We Come From (Abdulhadi), 2001-03
Chromogenic print and laser print mounted on board
Collection of SFMOMA
I’ve been to Israel once, a little over a decade ago. I went, despite my misgivings, on a Birthright trip with my sister. We went on a trip specifically for American Jews over 21, in the hope that it would be less of a party scene and more of a mature educational experience. It also promised to be politically progressive, with opportunities to openly discuss Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine.
Despite all of that, the trip turned out to be mostly Zionist propaganda, which I found deeply disappointing and frustrating. Most of the other twentysomethings on the trip had virtually zero understanding of Middle East history and not much interest in learning more, or doing anything besides smoking hookah with our baby-faced IDF escorts and floating in the Dead Sea. Much to my sister’s chagrin, I quickly became that person, insisting on discussing issues of substance even when no one else (save for a sympathetic trip leader) wanted to. (I probably could have used a lighter touch when I asked about a massacre on an outing to a kibbutz… but I had just written a grad school paper on Ari Folman’s devastating film Waltz with Bashir and I really couldn’t stop myself.)
I had anticipated one-sidedness and gaslighting, though, and had already planned to stay in Israel for a week after Birthright. It wasn’t much time, but it would give me a chance to see more of the region—Israel and Palestine—for myself. On the recommendation of a professor, I booked a day trip to the West Bank with Green Olive Tours, a company owned by a warm, friendly guy named Fred Schlomka. A few days after the conclusion of Birthright, I met up with Fred and two young Americans who were traveling through the Middle East. Over tea, Fred showed us maps of changing borders, the bounds of Palestine shrinking and fragmenting as Israel claimed ever more land over the course of the 20th century. We talked through the shifting political landscape as well, laying out some of the many reasons that a two-state solution had not yet come to pass.
With a better sense of where we were about to go, we drove to a checkpoint, where Fred handed us off to his Palestinian counterpart, an equally affable man named Zach. The four of us went north to Nablus, the largest city in the West Bank, with Zach pointing out empty fields that had once been full of thriving olive trees, burned down by settlers. In Nablus, we visited one of the few remaining factories producing olive oil-based Nabulsi soap, stacked in impossibly high towers to dry, and then made our way down a narrow street to Al-Aqsa Sweets, where I had my first taste of the Palestinian dessert knafeh.
Knafeh—which has as many transliterated spellings as it does variations in texture and flavor—is typically made with a layer of semi-firm Nabulsi cheese, which resembles low-moisture mozzarella, topped with kataifi (shredded phyllo dough) or semolina. The dessert is cooked on both sides to allow the kataifi or semolina to turn golden and crisp, and to melt the cheese evenly. Once it’s done, the knafeh is drizzled with sugar syrup gently flavored with orange blossom, optionally sprinkled with finely chopped pistachios, and then cut into slices to be eaten warm.
I had zero expectations when I took my first bite of the knafeh at Al-Aqsa—it was like nothing I’d seen before. It had a treacly quality that reminded me of baklava and gulab jamun, but the sweetness was balanced by the savoriness of mildly salty cheese, making it an incredibly addictive dessert.
As violence was raging in Israel and Palestine last week, my mind went back to the knafeh I had eaten in Nablus, and to everything else I had seen that day in various parts of the West Bank—the bustle of city life, archaeological and religious sites, a refugee camp in Jenin, Zionist settlements far more elaborate and permanent than I had imagined. The ongoing trauma of occupation was everywhere, in the decimated olive groves; in dusty, unpaved streets; in the sight of IDF soldiers moving through an area where they weren’t supposed to be; in Zach’s Israeli-issued permit for travel into Jerusalem (where he worked with Rabbis for Human Rights), which had to be renewed frequently and could be denied without cause.
The restrictions of movement that define daily life for Palestinians are at the heart of a project carried out by artist Emily Jacir between 2001 and 2003—a project, titled Where We Come From, that also happens to feature knafeh.
Born in Bethlehem, Jacir had, by 2001, spent a number of years studying and working in the United States, and had an American passport. The passport entitled her to move freely in and out of Gaza and the West Bank, and to perform favors for Palestinians living in the occupied territories and in the diaspora. She put out a call: “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?”
Jacir received many requests in response, ranging from the heartbreaking (visiting someone’s mother, paying respects to a gravesite) to the mundane (paying a bill, taking a walk). She documented her efforts to fulfill them, eventually creating an installation of text panels and photographs exhibited side-by-side, first shown at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
One such request came from a man named Abdulhadi, then living in London with a Jordanian passport. He asked Jacir to visit Jafar Sweets in Jerusalem for a slice of kinafa, writing, “Whenever I apply for an Israeli visa they reject me. I have been trying to enter for two years now. I feel insulted as a Palestinian for even having to apply for a visa to visit a place where my family has lived for centuries.”
The photograph serves as evidence that Jacir did in fact make it to Jafar Sweets, eating a bittersweet serving of knafeh in Abdulhadi’s stead. Like most of the photographs in the larger series, this one is matter-of-fact, perfunctory. We don’t get a selfie of Jacir eating the knafeh, but instead a tightly cropped view of the knafeh itself, as if Abdulhadi himself could have taken it.
Where We Come From is predicated on vicarious wish-fulfillment, but, as T.J. Demos writes in a recent essay, the project is ultimately about the impossibility of the requests made of Jacir. “Viewers face a project that is first of all divided between text panels and photographs. But how to get from one to the other?,” Demos asks. “The visual transition from language to image seems simple enough. A mere shift of the eyes will do. And the descriptions involve things we often take for granted: visiting one’s mother, eating food in a restaurant, playing soccer. Yet it is just this translation, written out in clear language and then realized photographically, that for many is insurmountable. Getting from written description to photographic actualization can be easy enough for some, like Jacir, who have American passports. But for other unfortunates caught up in the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has been raging since 1948, when so many were exiled from their land, the terrain between text and photograph, description and realization, represents an unbridgeable chasm, an impossibility on which a complex of desire is built.”
In Demos’s reading, Where We Come From is not just about the yearning of Palestinian exiles, but about Jacir’s desire too: “to somehow provide connections through an artistic mediation that would draw together a diasporic community, that would shed light on the absurdity of displacement, that would show the privations exiles suffer over things that most of us take for granted.“
Two decades after Jacir started Where We Come From, those privations continue—and have worsened, in some cases. Jacir’s efforts to draw attention to the Palestinian struggle also persist. In 2014, Jacir and her sister Annemarie established an art center and residency program, called Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, at their 19th-century family home in Bethlehem. Two weeks ago, the IDF raided and damaged Dar Jacir, ransacking the center’s offices and burning down its farm. The photos of razed land circulating in the art media reminded me of the torched olive groves I had seen long ago in the West Bank, and confirmed just how little has changed.
For Further Eating
Writing this week’s newsletter sent me on a search for Arab markets and bakeries in Cleveland, for fresh and frozen knafeh, and for ingredients to make it myself. Next week, when I discuss a knafeh-based artwork by Sigalit Landau, I’ll share a recipe you can make at home; this week I’ve got highlights from my shopping and eating extravaganza. Hopefully this run-down is tantalizing enough that you’ll track down some knafeh wherever you are.
My first stop was at one of the largest Arab markets in Cleveland, Holyland International Import Supermarket, where they had a few trays of fresh knafeh (with a bit too much red food coloring for my taste) and lots of options in the freezer aisle.
The first examples I saw were these impressively boxed versions from a company based in Jordan. Daunted by the size and the price tag, I bookmarked these to try the next time we have guests (and ample freezer space).
Behind the next door: So many—too many—choices! Knafeh in all sorts of sizes, made in Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, and elsewhere. I settled on a smaller version of the Zalatimo Sweets “shredded” (coarse) kunafa, imported from Jordan, and vowed to return for the qatayef, which nearly distracted me from my mission.
The Zalatimo Sweets kunafa came two to a package, and cooked up super crispy:
The sugar syrup and chopped pistachios are packaged separately, so you can finish your petite knafeh however you like. Whatever you do, I recommend eating it quickly, otherwise the gooey factor diminishes significantly and it’s just not as satisfying, IMO. (You can savor it in memory.)
After making quick work of the Zalatimo treats, I wanted to track down freshly made knafeh, so I googled some more, stalked a few places via images on Google Reviews, and found, just a few blocks from Holyland, a smaller market called Assad’s Bakery that looked promising.
Right when I walked in: Bingo! Generous portions of coarse and soft knafeh, waiting under the glow of heat lamps alongside meat pies, flatbreads, and fresh pita.
I grabbed a slice of coarse knafeh and brought it home for a golden hour glamour shot, followed by a blast in a 375-degree oven. Once hot and bubbly, it was measurably better than the freezer version—gooier, crunchier, and more cheese forward. It was maybe a touch sweet after a few bites… but not so cloying that I stopped eating. I can’t wait to go back for the soft knafeh, which I expect will really bring me back to the morning I spent in Nablus.
Thank you for reading! If you have any tips on where to find knafeh in your city, please do share them by clicking the button below:
See you next week!