Sunday July 20, 2025 Leading LSJS tour of the V&A, discussing the cast of Michelangelo’s Moses.
Or jump straight to read about Frenchy the Dog, Savta’s Fish (a story & recipe), and this week’s Friday night menu.
I know that the Victoria and Albert Museum is so much more than a museum of stuff, but in fact, if you look at it objectively, it’s just people’s stuff – yes, the stuff is beautiful, it is ornate, in some cases it’s the best representation of that particular thing, in others it is one of its kind. Some of it is in fact art and the highest form of it, and in others it is modest and small, and you probably have one in your home.
Consider that you can see a kiddush cup and the statue of David all in the same place. A fully articulated Cartier diamond snake (until Nov 16, 2025) and a hairbrush. All in all, the V&A is my kind of museum. I think I am in tune with its mission because of my Jewish values.
Established in 1852 as the Museum of Manufacturing, it was meant to be a classroom to the British public at large where you could find the best representations of art and design. Its purpose was and remains to educate. Though I think it’s also to amaze – what better way to educate than to amaze your students, to keep them in awe and to keep them guessing.
I have, through LSJS, led several Jewish tours of the V&A. It’s obviously not a Jewish museum and its curators were not out to curate a Jewish collection – so what is there to see on a Jewish tour of the V&A? To answer that we need to first answer: is there such a thing as Jewish art? And in the case of the V&A, Jewish stuff? I have chosen to define Jewish art in three ways: art about Jews, art for Jews and art by Jews (replace the word stuff with art if you don’t think it’s too iconoclastic). Using this definition of Jewish art, all of a sudden you can find Jewish art all over the V&A.
From the plaster casts of Moses and David in the Cast Court (art about Jews), to the tiny but valuable collection of Jewish artefacts in the Sacred Silver Room (art for Jews), to Lucie Rie’s ceramics workshop—relocated in its entirety from her Bayswater home, just down the road from mine in Marble Arch—into the V&A (art by Jews), the V&A has it all.
It had me reflecting, as I do every time I go into the V&A, on the Jewish relationship with art – the ideal one, the one I think our sages would have approved of. Here is the question I often start my tours with. “In terms of Jewish law, can one make kiddush using a plastic cup, and I mean one of those super flimsy disposable ones?” The answer is yes. And then I ask my participants, “If that is the case, how many of you have silver kiddush cups at home that you use to make kiddush?” Everyone’s hands go up. Art, the ideal art for a Jew, starts from the point of view of purpose: what is the purpose of this item? And then it goes to beauty. To quote Rabbi Sacks, “The Greeks, and many in the Western world who inherited their tradition, believed in the holiness of beauty. Jews believed in the opposite: hadrat kodesh, the beauty of holiness.” We sanctify the holy by adorning it and beautifying it, because it gives us pleasure to see our mitzvot and our homes beautified in order to elevate the mitzvah and our lives. On the other hand, our lives and the mitzvot come first.
Why do we survive? Why are there still Jews while many of the previous civilisations are stuff of museums? Because of the over two million artefacts found in the V&A, the Jewish section fills just three small cabinets, and all of our artefacts are small and portable. Because the genius of Lucie Rie is that she introduced to the UK, when escaping the Nazis from her home in Vienna in 1938, the idea of an electric kiln. Pottery that had always been made out in the country, whole villages dedicated to pottery making, Lucie Rie brought into her tiny urban house in the West End of London. And the pottery she created, just like her, was super thin and yet super strong. It was beautiful, but all of its design and lines served a purpose and function. Her pottery was to be used.
We are the people of the book, not because we don’t value art but because we know that we can take the book with us and we can recreate the art. The book is our tradition handed down the generations. The kiddush that we still make 3000 years later on any cup we can find. The beauty is that when we find a home and we find peace, we will beautify the mitzvah, contribute to the society in which we live. Some of the earliest donors and funders of the V&A were Jews. But if we have to move on, like Lucie Rie, we will pack up our kiln and our traditions and find a safe haven and another place to build up our stuff once more.
Frenchy the Dog:
Last night I dreamt of Frenchy the dog. I hated that dog. I have to say, I like dogs, and find them cute and comforting, and if I was a different person and lived a different kind of life, I would love to have a dog in our home. But I hated Frenchy.
Frenchy (no prize for guessing that he was a French poodle) was my grandmother’s upstairs neighbour’s dog. Gavriel and Frenchy were a team. They went everywhere together. Gavriel, who was my grandmother’s tenant, was also an artist. With his beat-up red jalopy, he would drive Savta wherever she needed to go, and thus Gavriel was ever present at all family events. Gavriel was a good guy, not Frenchy.
Frenchy was small and squeaky and didn’t like being petted. He was, in fact, a snob of a dog. Dog food was not good enough for him. Savta would pick out the choicest bits of chicken flesh, separated from the bone, and lay it as if she were the hand of God placing manna in the dog bowl, all for Frenchy’s pleasure.
The dog, aside from not liking to be petted, would set off my allergies the moment he walked into the house. He was a micro dog, but not in the Instagram-worthy way, but rather unnaturally thin, not cute. His fur was crisp, not silky, and he was just plain old annoying — especially his incessant barking when my grandmother didn’t give him the choicest bits of chicken or meat. Consider the Israelites complaining that the manna wasn’t good enough, and you have an accurate picture of Frenchy.
I’m not sure why I have started dreaming of Frenchy, but he is as annoying in my dreams as he was in real life.
It’s probably because I have started writing again and I am doing my best to recall my Savta, her food and her light, and there is no way of transplanting myself back to my Savta’s home without all the colour and life and noise that surged around it. And that includes Gavriel and Frenchy.
Both my Savta and Gavriel have passed. I don’t know what happened to Frenchy, but I do hope he is up in doggie heaven, having chicken and living the good afterlife.
Savta’s Fish:
The Purim I was eleven, on our way to an evening party, we stopped by Savta’s house to show off my costume. Savta asked me who I was dressed up as. I quickly pulled out a much-thumbed copy of Teen Beat magazine from my knapsack and showed Savta the cover page of Madonna.
Savta’s reaction?
“I know her. I fed her my fish.”
Savta’s fish was the most universally known and loved of Savta’s recipes. People knew of it far and wide. It was the stuff of legends. It wasn’t crispy at all, but it was savoury to the umpteenth degree, and crave-worthy. But come on, Madonna? Seriously?
Looking at my sceptical face, Savta led me up to Gavriel’s apartment on the second story of her house. In his apartment, cluttered with paintings and all his artist paraphernalia, with Frenchy barking at my feet, doing his best to push me out the door (he disliked me as much as I disliked him), there in the centre of the wall, between two windows looking out onto 63rd Street, was a full nude of the unmistakable Madonna.
Gavriel, an artist, had had Madonna as a model for his nude paintings. Firstly, no eleven-year-old should have to look at a nude painting of Madonna. That said, it did prove two of my Savta’s points: she had met Madonna, and Madonna was very, very skinny. Much like Frenchy, her thinness looked painful.
Savta, concerned about how thin this woman was, brought her down the stairs after her modelling session and fed her fish, in a valiant effort to fatten her up.
I can’t share the nude painting of Madonna – for all I know, it’s up in heaven with Frenchy the dog – but I can share Savta’s legendary fish recipe.
It was amazing having Odelle and Jacob home for Shabbat and cooking some of their favourite foods. This coming Shabbat, and for many Shabbatot going forwards, Daniel and I will be on our own, as we start thinking about packing up our home and our kitchen for the move ahead. But this Shabbat, and the height of summer, means I can experiment with fresh flavours and easy dishes that can fit well into all the different parameters that go into Shabbat food.
As ever, I usually concentrate all my cooking efforts on one of the Shabbat meals, and the other is leftovers if it’s Shabbat lunch. And if I’m cooking lunch and it’s just us for Friday night dinner, I make it super simple (and hopefully delicious). So you will usually only get one Menu for one of the Shabbat meals from me.
You will always see chicken soup on my menu. As my cousin Mimi’s husband David Schuldenfrei once said: “What do you call Friday night without chicken soup? Yom Kippur!” (Sorry to explain the joke, but basically, the only time you wouldn’t have chicken soup – according to David – on a Friday night is if it’s a fast, and the only fast we have that can be on a Friday night is Yom Kippur.)
(The menu is largely experimental but hopefully of some help in planning your menu!)
- Wine and Challah (my Mom recently started making challah – more on this next week, but for now she had an in-depth look at my recipe and has suggested some tweaks to the writing that make it even more fool proof then ever)
- Chicken Soup (see note above about chicken soup in summer)
- Lemon Garlic Chicken breast
- Zucchini Carpaccio
- Potatoes – looking far and wide for a make ahead potato recipe – please help me out!
- Nectarine, tomato and Avocado Salad
- Grilled Corn Salad
- Plum crisp
- S’mores brownies (because its that time of year and I’m feeling nostalgic for camp)
