Drawing the line at chopped liver

For most young American Jews, eating bubbe’s food on Jewish holidays is like mom and apple pie.

But what if matzah ball soup and kugel weren’t your familiar ethnic comfort foods? If you were to step out of your Ashkenazi skin for a minute, you might realize that items like gefilte fish and chopped liver could look and taste very foreign (not to mention pretty revolting) to the uninitiated.

Buzzfeed has made a fun, viral video testing out—and proving—this premise. To sum it up, just consider that if chopped liver looks like poop to you, then chances are it looks even poopier to a non-Jew.

The video has a group of average young American adults tasting some of the staples one would find on a Rosh Hashanah (or other Jewish holiday) table. It seems the producers forgot the brisket, but other mainstays like gefilte fish, kugel, matzo ball soup, chopped liver, rugeglach and Manischewitz Concord Grape wine make appearances during the taste testing.

Not surprisingly, the rugelach are well-received across the board. The matzo ball soup is also rather palatable to most of the tasters. A guy in a hoodie calls it “the gateway drug to Jewish food” and declares: “I would eat this all day. I would have sex with it.” That’s quite an endorsement.

The kugel causes quite a bit of confusion. The same guy who lavishes hyperbolic praise on the matzah ball soup suggests the kugel has an identity crisis. “I feel like it wants to be macaroni and cheese, and it also wants to be a cake, and it just doesn’t know which one it is yet,” he says.

As would be expected, the gefilte fish and chopped liver are the hardest for the tasters to stomach. In fact, some of them can’t even bring themselves to ingest the chopped liver. They just poke at it with celery sticks and compare its appearance to that of cat food.

While most Jews start off a holiday meal by using the Manischewitz to make kiddush, this crowd drinks it as a digestif. They may not all enjoy the different foods, but they unanimously give the very sweet wine the thumbs-up.

Saving the kiddush wine for the end seems like a smart move. At least this way, these young Americans will finish their Jewish holiday meal with a good taste in their mouth, and maybe even remember the gustatory experience fondly. That is, if they remember it at all.

“I could get wasted off this at a nice Passover or bar mitzvah or Rosh Hashanah or something,” a hipster with oversized glasses says of the Manischewitz.