Yehuda Tomor (Courtesy)

Yehuda Tomor’s fascination with cocktails began at a young age. On Friday nights in his Lakewood, N.J., home, he’d watch his father unwind from the workweek with special “Shabbos drinks” — alcohol blended with ice and Mr. & Mrs. T mixes, or whatever flavorings he could find. They weren’t always the most elaborate cocktails, but to 7-year-old Yehuda, the process was an art.  As he grew, so did his interest in mixing drinks, loving the sophistication and taste, just not always the hassle. “Once I got married, I started making cocktails in my home,” Tomor, now 30, told Jewish Insider’s Tori Bergel in a recent interview, “and it started becoming annoying cleaning up and all that. So the idea was really an RTD cocktail, a ready-to-drink cocktail.” And so was born Cooloo, his Lakewood-based business that manufactures frozen cocktail pops and is part of a fast-growing segment of the liquor industry.

Ahead of the curve: Sales of ready-to-drink (RTD) beverages grew by 40% from 2018 to 2019, and soared 162%  over 17 weeks in the late fall and early summer of 2021, compared to the same period in 2020, according to analytics giant Nielsen. However, while many brands jumped on the RTD trend, Cooloo is not a bandwagon label. The company, which launched in 2019,  was actually conceived by Tomor three years earlier as he began to sense an opportunity in the liquor market. “If you look back in 2016, 2015, when I was looking at this, no one was making those [RTDs],” the Cooloo founder and CEO told JI. “There was no such thing as seltzers, there was no such thing as all that stuff that are currently out there, they didn’t exist.”

Entrepreneurial spirit: As a child, both of Tomor’s parents owned their own businesses, which still exist today — his father opened a locksmith and security shop called Arrow Locksmiths, while his mother founded a retail clothing store, His Place. Tomor worked at the boutique with his older brother, who helped expand the company into wholesaler T.O. Collection. The experience, and watching his brother take the reins of the family company, drew Tomor into the entrepreneurial world, where he sought to build his own legacy.

Business is booming: Public reception of Cooloo has been overwhelmingly positive, and the company is growing. Cooloo sold 300,000- 350,000 frozen cocktails in its first year, according to Tomor, which it surpassed nearly fivefold two years later, selling over 1.5 million pops in 2021. The manufacturing plant itself grew as well, Tomor added, expanding from a small, 2,500-square-foot space to a 10,000-square-foot building, despite operating during a global pandemic.

Kosher cocktails: The Lakewood community was also invaluable to the brand’s success. A largely Orthodox Jewish town of about 100,000 with a thriving business culture, Tomor spent time studying at Beth Medrash Govoha, or BMG, Lakewood’s famous yeshiva — and the largest outside of Israel. Though he now lives in the neighboring town of Jackson, N.J., it was Lakewood where he wanted his business to thrive. “This is my house. This is where I live, you know. I wanted to make sure to be on top of, especially in the beginning stages, be on top of every single aspect [of the company],” he said. The community has also been receptive toward Cooloo, Tomor expressed.  “In the beginning it was exciting,” he said. “Some people didn’t realize that it’s a kosher, it’s a frum Jewish guy owning the product.”

Read the full story here.

Geneviève Zubrzycki

To outside observers, the ongoing revival of Jewish life in Poland, of all places, may seem like a kind of perverse fad, not least because the movement has largely been animated by non-Jewish Poles who are increasingly communing with Jewish history through such acts of philosemitism as visiting klezmer clubs, studying Yiddish, attending Jewish festivals and wearing yarmulkes. “Sometimes, when North Americans or Western Europeans hear about the Jewish revival in Poland, they think it’s all fluff,” Geneviève Zubrzycki, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who has closely observed the phenomenon for years, said in a recent interview with Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel. “I think they are very wrong.” Zubrzycki is the author of the new book, Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival, which was published this week.

Jewish renewal: “In the book, I document the growth and spread of festivals of Jewish culture, and there are over 40 in Poland,” Zubrzycki explained. “Obviously, these are not made solely or even primarily by Jews and for Jews. At one point, I didn’t go to Poland for five years, and when I went back in 2010, the festival of Jewish culture in Krakow that I had been attending for several years in the 1990s was like 10 days long and had 30,000 people. That was a shocking difference. There’s not a day where you open a newspaper or a magazine or something where there’s not a new book about Jewish life in Poland or Jewish culture. I became really interested in what Jewishness and Poland’s Jewish path means for non-Jewish Poles.”

Family secrets: “You hear stories, very, very moving stories, of grandchildren, you know, snooping around and finding, for example, a grandmother’s application to the German government to receive compensation, and the grandchildren had no idea that she was Jewish and no idea that she had been in a camp. You have stories of people learning on their grandparents’ or parents’ deathbeds that “I’m not your birth mother,” for example, or one story of a grandfather who had a stroke and woke up speaking Yiddish. You have stories like that that are just unbelievable. And then you have stories from non-Jews who say, “Well, I heard about that pogrom in Jedwabne.”… There are stories like this, of individuals who are building their life around this difficult reckoning and supporting the revival of Jewish communities in Poland.”

History beyond the Holocaust: “There has been a lot of commemorative activity over that, but also the argument that you cannot just commemorate the murders and the death, and that the Jewish contribution and Jewish life in Poland cannot just be restricted to only the murder of Jews in Europe. That’s why it’s going both ways. Some of the argument is that in order to understand what was lost, we need to understand what was. It’s understanding the music, the literature, the architecture. What’s interesting, too, and I tried to show in the book, is that it’s not just like a cosmopolitan, urban, elite movement. There are organizations that go especially to former Galicia — so, Eastern Poland — and school kids and their teachers prepare programs about their small villages that used to be shtetls. There’s a movement for local education, and recovering [the] Jewish history of a region is part of local education.”

Read the full interview here.

Committee chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) listens during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Sept. 22, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

en. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), a leading voice among progressive Democrats in the Senate, distanced himself and the Democratic Party as a whole from comments by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) last week that support for “Israel’s apartheid government” is incompatible with “progressive values,” Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Both sides: “I think [support for Israel] is bipartisan. I think there are a few outliers in both parties, some on the far right, some on the left,” Brown said during a briefing with Jewish news outlets on Wednesday. “I don’t agree with that. I think that the mainstream Democratic Party — and I include in the mainstream virtually almost all of us, literally — and most Republicans support Israel and will continue to.”

Iran angle: The Ohio senator, who was supportive of the original 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, said that efforts to reenter the accord are currently “not top of mind for Senate Democrats.”  He explained, “I don’t think that the political stars have aligned in a way that we go back in.”

All about timing: On an issue closer to home for the Ohio Democrat, he is a lead Senate sponsor of legislation that would designate a Cleveland-area Holocaust memorial — one of the oldest in the U.S. — as a national monument.  The bill passed the House earlier this month, and Brown said he is talking to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) about scheduling time on the Senate floor to pass it in the upper chamber. “I would feel confident we will do it by the end of the year,” Brown said. “We don’t see opposition. We just see scheduling issues always.”

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