In the before-times, a personal essay in a century-old women’s magazine about home-baked challah, in which the writer discusses how this ritual connects them to their Jewish roots, would be a cozy moment of communal pride at best (representation, and in Nova Scotia at that!)—or, at worst, of interest solely to the friends and family of the author.
And, at another moment, the presence on the author’s shirt of a large red inverted triangle might suggest, if anything, an unusual enthusiasm for the branding of Canadian Tire.
We are, however, living in our times. Jennifer E. Crawford, the 2019 winner of MasterChef Canada, wrote a piece headlined “Challah Is For Lovers,” for Chatelaine, the legacy Canadian women’s magazine. It rolled off the presses with the rest of the glossy issue, and was sent to stores and subscribers.
But these two pages went conspicuously missing from the digital copy distributed through platforms like PressReader and Apple News.
I asked Chatelaine’s editor-in-chief Maureen Halushak what had happened there, and learned via email that it was the red triangle whodunnit: “After the issue went to print, a reader noted the symbol on the writer’s shirt could be seen as pro-Hamas, which we were unaware of. So we pulled the memoir from our digital platforms to update the image.” I also confirmed with Halushak that the article itself will return online, just not with the same image. (A different page of the same Winter 2024 holiday issue, spotlighting fashionable menorahs for Hanukkah, has survived intact.)
But let me back up, first to explain the deal with this specific article, and then once more to get at what’s up with long-established women’s magazines these days generally, and finally—because why not have grandiose aims for this column—what it all means in terms of the gender divide in politics these days.
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“Challah Is For Lovers” is a personal essay of a certain kind. You are the audience for it or you’re not. This is an article containing the sentence, “As global capitalism does what it is designed to do—concentrate wealth for the elite and subjugate the rest of us—we are all going to need one another’s love to survive.” Is overthrowing capitalism something Chatelaine readers are into? I’m getting to that, but need to first explain the piece in question.
Crawford is not a newcomer to Jewish baking, nor to personal essay writing on this theme.
The gist of this first-person piece is that Crawford bakes challah to connect with their (in the nonbinary sense) Jewishness, and also seeks to free Palestine because this is what their values demand. Crawford recalls planning “a COVID-cautious ‘Challah for Ceasefire’ workshop in support of a local fundraiser,” which took place in January in Windsor, N.S.
They also make the point—a relatable one I think, in the broad strokes—that cooking can make you think of people in the world who don’t have enough food. “If I am to make food with love, how can I touch flour without raging against the war machine’s denial of this basic ingredient to Palestinians?”
But to call Crawford’s essay merely pro-Palestinian would be to speak in overly vague terms. They write about feeling a Jewish responsibility to tikkun olam or “world repair,” set forth by… well, seemingly by Israel’s response to that which is not named. “For more than a year, I have clenched my phone tight as I’ve watched on social media the ongoing violence the state of Israel has visited upon Palestinians in the name of purported safety for Jews.”
Horror at the devastation of Gaza is appropriate. There does however seem to be a piece missing. Red triangle or not, one is left with an article that makes no mention of Oct. 7, therefore giving the impression that Israel spontaneously went out and killed all these people for the heck of it. This is quite a different matter than saying that Israel ought to have responded differently to a horrific attack and mass-hostage-taking. If you’re going to be offended by this article, it is in fact the article you’d be mad at, not Carolina Andrade’s photograph of Crawford proudly holding two challahs while wearing a denim shirt (so Canadiana!) with a not-that-little red kerchief (?) triangle saying hello from one of the pockets. The image perfectly illustrates the article.
Crawford—a prolific writer as well as television personality; I don’t know them personally—comes across as well-meaning, but yes as someone of the omnicause left, and who anticipates a reader equally on board with the omnicause. They were also written up in a June 2020 New York Times Style section piece (subsection: “Self-Care”), in a piece that should be put in a time capsule for anyone in the future who wants to know what June 2020 was like. It’s about Crawford using their $100,000 winnings from MasterChef Canada to buy “a 7,000-square-foot 1866 farmhouse” in Nova Scotia, which is framed as a kind of leftist revolutionary act, unlike I suppose when the cishets renovate enormous country estates. A section heading reads, “Cooking and Renovating as Therapy,” because, again, June 2020. Crawford has, we learn, baked “a pink cake with blue frosting that said ‘Defund The Police.’”
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It is here that we must remember what came of the ‘lifestyle’ realm in the late 2010s or thereabouts.
‘Woke capitalism’ was flourishing. No one was questioning whether social justice was really going to flow from brands—or, for that matter, from Ivy League universities with mega-rich students—or rather, lots of people were questioning this, but were told off for being conservative and out-of-touch and (worse) problematic for bringing this up. Sure, there were tensions—Black Lives Matter disrupting a Pride parade, perennial complaints about greenwashing, but social justice sanctimony became the fabric of legacy institutions.
Much like health food went from lefty fringe to Whole Foods, becoming of a piece with poshness itself, radical politics (gestured-at, at least) took on a comfortable role as elite signifier. High-end retailers omnicause-washed their endeavours, promising not just a more ethical alternative to the cheap mass-produced crap favoured by the plebs (who can’t afford alternatives) but also window signage attesting to awareness of all the causes.
A women’s magazine was once the place to go to learn how to be thin, look young, get a man, keep a man, what to wear this season and by the way, by absolute coincidence, the ad on the page opposite that feature is for the very same brand. There were higher- and lower-end varieties—socialite galas for me, casserole recipes for thee, sort of thing. Target demographics differed by age and more. But the gist was definitely not disrupting the status quo. Yes, legacy women’s media has a noble history of publishing great women writers, ones who otherwise had trouble getting in print. But it was always a bit of a deal with the devil, feminism-wise. Here, Sylvia Plath, there, encouragement down the notoriously futile road of ridding oneself of cellulite.
Women’s magazines became ‘woke’—a frustrating term that different people use differently, but I’d say something like anti-capitalist gesturing and a certain tone used to describe self care would count. This shift cannot be attributed solely to the 2020 racial reckoning, or else why were Kat Rosenfield and I podcasting about it in October 2019? It’s more a post-first-Trump-win phenomenon.
Then fashion and style influencers and entrepreneurs found themselves at the forefront of the slightly later phenomenon of girlbosses apologizing for insufficient intersectionality. It suddenly seemed like hypocrisy for any entity promising empowerment (“For more than 95 years, Chatelaine has empowered Canadian women…”) not to extend that to all women, and maybe not just women.
Lifestyle pages rebranded. Instead of the purview of (generally straight) women and a sprinkling of gay men, they were now all-but-cis-male spaces. But still, demographically, mainly women. A shift with symbolic importance but still largely discursive. The upscale product for sale became, in a sense, wokeness.
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In the wake of Donald Trump’s second election victory, American writer—and the Harper’s Letter co-organizer—Thomas Chatterton Williams ruffled some feathers with a post about wokeness being done.
What I’d say happened is more of an ongoing realignment. Everything’s shaking up more along gender lines than it had been. Not just United States presidential politics—spoiler, the boys won—or other left-right splits globally but also all the Israel-Palestine stuff. A perhaps under-discussed aspect of the campus Free Palestine protest movement is how female it has been. Meanwhile the counterprotest is, what, some frat guys cheering on the exiled Columbia University professor Shai Davidai? Male-coded, at any rate.
It makes perfect sense that women’s magazines would be the natural home of pro-Palestine rather than pro-Israel content, and also, given what the magazines have become, that they wouldn’t simply sit this one out. But a vague adherence to DEI-speak is not the same as wanting the intifada globalized. There are, in Canada today, women—not just Jewish women!—who want the style without the politics.
Palestine’s uneasy incorporation into the omnicause is particularly visible in the ladymag realm. Thus a story not unlike the Crawford-Chatelaine one, from back in September, wherein pro-Palestinian Ontario MPP Sarah Jama was part of a printed list of eight Canadian woman “trailblazers” at Elle Canada, only to have her inclusion deleted from the website version. It’s chic to be for Palestine, but no, not like that.
One could point to both of these unpublishing incidents as evidence of the stifling of pro-Palestine speech. One could also—and these are not mutually exclusive—look at them as evidence of the sorts of things women’s magazines today assume belong in their pages. You need both pieces to understand what’s going on.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
