Off-Season Hamantashn

It’s time we reclaim and de-commodify our symbols, even if they are just cookies.

You walk into a deli and there they are, staring at you. They are not menacing, oh no no, but they are confusing if you recognize them. They are harmless, but alien and your instinct is to treat them as strangers. Nuzzled up against the old cash register, they are hamantashn, the jam-filled cookies eaten in celebration of the Jewish Purim festival. They are hamantashn, you are a Jewish cookie lover, and it is August. It’s awkward. The Hebrew month of Adar never falls around August. What are these cookies doing here, in this Mexican-staffed, Korean-owned Deli in Midtown Manhattan? Did Sholom Aleichem write a Twilight zone spec-script?

If you are Bneiy (Jewish) like me, you look forward to Purim not simply for the celebration of avoiding decimation at the hands of the genocidal Persian maniac Haman, but for the pastries eaten to spite him as well, which after canonization in European Yidnland, came to be known as hamantashn. They are the final nail in the villain’s coffin, the great insult being that we eat his tashn (pockets) — often confused as hats — to symbolize how we persevered despite his dastardly, egotistical efforts and the money used to buy the Persian court’s favour to carry out his wicked, xenophobic desires. Sounds like a certain…