“In every one of my family cookbooks, all handwritten in German, there are loads of kuchen recipes: apple kuchen, buttery putterkuchen, gesundheitskuchen (a lemony cake made when people were ill), and apricot kuchen, a treat for the late spring or summer,” the venerable Jewish chef Joan Nathan writes.

My great-grandmother, who I imagine took great pride in her baking skills, served these traditional German cakes in the late morning when she received guests for a coffee klatsch. Every German Jewish housewife had her special recipe—not just my great-grandmother, but also my grandmother and aunts who lived in Augsburg in southern Germany until WWII. They, like other lucky ones, were able to bring their recipes to the United States. . . .

When the recipes crossed the Atlantic Ocean, ingredients often switched from butter to Crisco, vegetable oil, or margarine, and such ingredients as chocolate chips and even processed puddings were added.

Almost 20 years ago, my husband, Allan, and I gave Julia Child and her relatives a small dinner for her 90th birthday at my home, where I served this kuchen for dessert. Making this cake with fresh apricots topped with schlag (whipped cream) brings back happy memories.

A video and recipe accompany Nathan’s reminiscence.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”