Because the laws of kashrut forbid consuming meat and dairy at the same meal, a lunch of a hamburger, for instance, cannot be followed by a dessert of ice cream. In the early 1980s, David Mintz solved this problem by selling a soy-based ice cream called Tofutti, the first such product to appear on the American market—paving the way for today’s abundance of faux-dairy foods. Mintz died last week at the age of eighty-nine. Hugh Merwin tells his story:

Mintz was born June 8, 1931, the son of a Williamsburg bread baker, and grew up in the neighborhood’s Orthodox Jewish community. After a brief stint selling mink stoles, he opened shops that sold prepared foods. One ingenious ploy involved Mintz’s promotion of the Jewish grandmothers he’d recruited in place of line cooks to prepare the most comforting foods: stuffed cabbage, fat knishes, perfectly rolled rugelach. The babushka strategy attracted long lines, Orthodox and not. “Finally I had to hire one grandma, a grandma foreman, to manage all the other grandmas,” Mintz told the New York Times.

David Mintz’s life changed in 1972, in a basement kitchen in Chinatown, where cooks transformed fresh soy milk into soft tofu for neighborhood dim sum parlors. . . . It took Mintz a decade to reverse engineer the taste and mouthfeel of various dairy ingredients that are forbidden, by Jewish law, to be served together with meat. He eventually learned that tofu could emulate the sour cream he felt should be dolloped on beef stroganoff, for example. Tofu emulsified with vegetable oil and alfalfa honey took on a butter-fatty texture and became the parve key to an ice-cream alternative that could triumphantly close out a fleyshik [meat] meal.

The market for Tofutti may have started with observant Jews—Mintz even sought guidance from Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the venerated Orthodox Jewish leader—but it soon expanded to include the lactose intolerant, fad dieters, suburban vegetarians, and parents anxious to get their kids to eat plants on the sly. Early Tofutti flavors like carrot-raisin-apple, a riff on the Rosh Hashanah side dish tzimmes, also gave way to more serviceable chocolate and vanilla flavors, plus wildberry and banana-pecan.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”