West Elm, for the uninitiated, is a home goods chain store whichever notch or notches above IKEA on the classiness spectrum. It’s found in Canada but based in the U.S. and related to Williams-Sonoma through channels I lack the business brain to articulate. Someone is someone else’s parent company? Doesn’t matter for our purposes.

Anyway, I had not known that West Elm sold Judaica. But it does. It could be your source for Brutalist menorahs; candles to put in them; and a handful of other items for one’s Jewish holiday needs, should those needs include “Star of David Napkin Ring Sets.” It’s all very ‘elevated’ Judaica, if not quite at the level of Jonathan Adler’s “Reform” line of furnishings, which I learned about from Jesse of Bagel Emoji and still can’t quite believe is a real thing.

The distinguishing items from West Elm’s Jewish corner, however, are the “Deli Favourites,” dishware sets in “sweet” and “savory,” along with soup bowls. An unnamed designer (Jewish? Gentile? AI?) created watercolour-looking images of various food items—bagel and lox, matzah ball soup, etc.—in approximately life-size proportions, on the surface, where the food goes. It looks fine, I guess. Kind of like a mall-ified version of Fishs Eddy, a New York City dishware shop known for themed dishes and artists’ designs. In another lifetime, I bought my mother something there that had the late U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg on it. West Elm seems to be going for the Fishs Eddy look, but with, let us say, less specificity. (A search suggests the two stores have collaborated in the past, but this is not that.)

The writer Lux Alptraum, whose posts on Bluesky alerted me to the existence of these plates and bowls, correctly flags the strangeness of West Elm “calling this ‘Deli Favorites’ and not ‘Ashkenazi Food.’” Indeed, challah and hamentashen would not be served at a delicatessen. That said, a more expansive understanding of deli, wherein a Jewish food shop sells all the items in question (I’m picturing Zabar’s; if there’s something like this in Toronto and no one has told me…), then maybe it’s fine.

Now, whether many would refer to the food in question as “deli” or “Ashkenazi” is its own question. In my experience, this would be called Jewish food by the people who know it, without the hand-wringing about “

© Canadian Jewish News