jewish food hot takes

The Most Controversial Jewish Food Hot Takes

Turns out Jews have a lot of feelings about food.

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On a slow July afternoon, we tweeted what we thought would spark some conversation: What’s your most controversial Jewish food hot take?

While we knew people have many feelings about Jewish food, we didn’t expect the sheer amount of opinions we got — everything from bagels are overrated to brisket is the worst to the widest range of feelings on gefilte fish and matzah balls. Even Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman weighed in about how her sister’s family makes Milky Way challah (which, yes please).

We decided to round up some of these strong Jewish food hot takes, grouped by food below. The saying “two Jews, three opinions” is even more true on Twitter. So many Jews, so many opinions:

1. Kugel

The kugel tweets are either anti-kugel…

…or a statement on which kugel is definitively the best kugel.

2. Cholent

People seem to truly despise cholent, the traditional Jewish Sabbath stew.

3. Gefilte Fish

This is the food that stirred up the most opinions, which fell firmly into two camps.

You either love it:

Or hate it:

4. Bagels

We did not expect bagels to make this list: Who could hate bagels? Turns out, there are people out there who can hate anything.

Then, of course, feelings on cream cheese and how to actually eat a bagel ensued:

5. Matzah (and other Passover foods)

A few people argued for the consumption of matzah, matzeh brei, and haroset year-round:

Others had strong feelings on the density of matzah balls:

6. Latkes

And pivoting to Hanukkah, are gluten-free latkes really as good as regular ones?

Others don’t even like them at all:

And some eat them with ketchup (gasp)!

7. Ptcha

Someone argued for the renaissance of ptcha, AKA calves’ foot jelly. (Why yes, it did make our ranking of the grossest Jewish foods.)

8. Hamantaschen

Like everything else on this list, people are very particular about their hamantaschen!

9. Dairy

This astute observation was the best:

And I’ll leave you with mine: I don’t like pickles.

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