You may have noticed that we at the NAW are not fans of Ben & Jerry’s. That has little to do with the taste of their ice cream, although it is much too sweet and much too expensive, and everything to do with the company’s political line. B&J is Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in ice form: a club that spews hatred for Israel while at the same time turning a blind eye to abuses elsewhere in the world, which could distract from the real problems: Western “imperialist colonialism” and Zionism in particular. Because B&J is more than an ice cream brand, it’s a pretentious club of racists. And we’re not going to lick that.
What makes it even worse is that the two founders are Jewish themselves: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield made their first ice cream in 1977 in the American hippie state of Vermont. And while the duo has little to do with the ins and outs of their company—their combined assets run into the hundreds of millions—they support policies that vehemently oppose (and boycott) the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, but remains conspicuously silent about Russian crimes in Ukraine. In short, time to look for an alternative to this treife ice cream brand.
Then you quickly end up with competitor Haägen-Dazs. And guess what? That brand was also founded by Jews. To be precise, by the couple Reuben and Rose Mattus. Both descendants of Polish Jews, Reuben being born in that country itself (he emigrated with his family to New York at the age of nine) and Rose in Manchester, England. The two met at school in Brooklyn and married in 1936. Reuben had been making ice cream since he was ten, his family selling chocolate ice cream from a horse cart in The Bronx as early as the late 1920s.
Only three flavours
In the late 1950s, Reuben and Rose started a new ice cream brand for the high end of the market. They chose a name that sounded Danish to them: Haagen-Dazs. The fact that Danish does not know the umlaut is only a nuisance. The couple wanted to honor the country for the role it played during the Shoa, the first jars of Haägen-Dazs even had a map of Denmark as decoration. Reuben and Rose were true partners: he made the ice cream, she handled the business side of the business. Rose dressed smartly and visited restaurants and cafes to give the owners a taste.
Reuben Mattus was a fierce defender of the Jewish state, if not a little too much
Haagen-Dazs started with just three flavours: vanilla, chocolate and coffee. It was not until 1966 that a fourth was added: strawberry. It took perfectionist Reuben six years before the ice cream was good enough for his discerning taste buds. In 1976 the couple opened the first store in New York and six years later sold Haägen-Dazs for $ 70 million to cake giant Pillsbury, a household name in the United States. Today, the ice cream company is part of the Swiss Nestlé, the largest food group in the world (competitor Ben & Jerry’s is owned by the Anglo-Dutch Unilever).
What about, you may now ask, the political views of Reuben and Rose? If they’re as influenced by the BDS movement as B&J’s anti-Israel activists, what good are you with Haagen-Dazs as an alternative? To begin with, the Mattus couple has been dead for some time: Reuben died in 1994, Rose in 2006. But when they were alive, they were fierce defenders of the Jewish state. Maybe even a little the. Here’s the thing: Rose was on the board of the Zionist Organization of America, nothing wrong with that. But Reuben was a supporter and donor of Meir Kahane, and that rabbi was convicted of terrorism in the US in 1971. His party Kach was banned from participating in the Israeli elections in 1988 because of racism. You see: it is not so easy to eat a politically defensible ice cream.
2023-08-27 04:03:14
#Reuben #Rose #Mattus #ice #cream #makers #NAV
