Millie and Bubbe Have Beef this Passover

Yiddish cookery champion Feed Me Bubbe has run into a formidable challenger in the form of Millie Garfield of Millie’s Yiddish Class. Both serve up videos of Yiddish vocabulary lessons for English-speaking audiences along with delicious food.

Little did the crowd at VON know when Bubbe’s producer Avrom Honig and Millie’s producer Steve Garfield exchanged pleasantries at the San Jose Convention Center last month that bubbling under the surface of the chicken stock was a potentially explosive rivalry.

Bubbe was dismissive of the upstart. “She is concentrating on Yiddish words which is wonderful, however it would be nice if she would mention other Yiddish words that are not food.” She implied Millie wasn’t ready for the big leagues, suggesting she should be “going to the farm and naming the animals.” Millie, a year older at 81, impugned Bubbe’s youthful arrogance. “Young cooks like Bubbe think they know all the tricks, but you must respect the wisdom that comes with age.”

“Bubbe thinks she can throw out a Yiddish word here and there in the middle of a cooking show and teach Yiddish,” Millie continued. Through her producer Honig, Bubbe countered that the Bostonian’s distance from America’s Yiddish heartland in New York may be throwing off her pronunciation. “[P]eople that don’t know Yiddish will be confused.” Millie could only scoff. “Do I try to teach cooking in the middle of a Yiddish lesson?”

Honig had the chutzpah to throw down the gauntlet, inviting Millie to a face off. “I’d love to see the two of them in a room together discussing pronunciation.” It’s NewTeeVee’s hope that this doesn’t turn violent, as in the East Coast-West Coast rap feuds of the nineties. But however it happens, I’d pay to see them settle the question of who’s kneydlach will reign supreme.