Keshet had the privilege of sitting down for an interview with Rossi — writer, chef, and punk-rock queen. We discussed her newest book, The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews: A Memoir, a queer coming-of-age story of her escape from a stifling world and journey to a new life.

From the official book blurb: Rossi was taught only to aspire to marry a nice Jewish boy and to be a good kosher Jewish girl. At sixteen she flowers into a rebellious punk-rock rule-breaker who runs away to seek adventure. Her freedom is cut short when her parents kidnap her and dump her with a Chasidic rabbi — a “cult buster” known for “reforming” wayward Jewish girls — in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Rossi spends the next couple of years in a repressive, misogynistic culture straight out of the nineteenth century, forced to trade in her pink hair and Sex Pistols T-shirt for maxi skirts and long-sleeved blouses and endure not only bone-crunching boredom but also outright abuse and violence.

You seem pretty busy given that you’re a professional chef! Why did you decide to write this memoir on top of everything else?

I certainly didn’t have the time. I’ve decided that nobody can write or publish a book unless they have to write that book, because it’s so hard. With my first book, The Raging Skillet, it was 14 years from the time I started writing it to the time it was published. With Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews, I started writing it eight years before it was published. So it just takes a long time. It has to be deep in you that you have to do it.

This book is the story that I never told, that I always wanted to tell. But I had all of these things holding me back. My parents were in my head for years and years and years, saying, “Don’t do it if it’s bad for the Jews. Don’t write it if it’s bad for the Jews. Don’t say it if it’s bad for the Jews.” 

Some really terrible things happened to me when I was forced to live with Chasidim in Crown Heights. And if I wrote it just exactly as it happened, like as a journalist reporting the news, I think people might have read it and it would have driven them toward antisemitism. So over a period of many years, I had to find so much love in my heart, love for being Jewish, love for the people that I met in the community that I really did have wonderful relationships with, people who helped me. So people who read it would say “Well, she did meet some terrible people while she was there, but she also met some wonderful people. She clearly cares about being Jewish and many Jews are wonderful.”

What message do you hope people take from the book?

I really wished there was a book like mine out when I was a teenager or in my early twenties. I wish there was something like this that I could have read about someone who it seemed like the whole world was trying to squash the gay out of, and squash the rebel out of, and squash the feminism out of. And yet she just somehow pushed through with her humanity intact. I think something like that would have given me so much more courage to feel less alone when I was a younger woman and would hope and pray for something different. I would hope that if there are young adults and old adults, any age who are gay, who are feeling shunned and bullied, they can get courage and inspiration from reading my book.

How do queerness and Jewishness intersect for you?

It wasn’t until a friend introduced me to Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York. I went to Rosh Hashanah services and I looked around, and there were women holding hands with women, and the Rabbi was a woman, and there were men holding hands with men. There were White people and Black people and Asian people, people of every color, and there were people there who weren’t even Jewish and none of it mattered. It was such a beautiful experience and it really brought me back to Judaism. And now I would say I’m more Jewish than I ever have been before, even growing up Orthodox. I certainly don’t identify that way now, but I feel more Jewish because I’ve found my own Jewish — where women are every bit as powerful as men, where love is love.

I’ve gotten old enough and smart enough to know that you can daven (pray) every day, you can go to shul (synagogue) every day, you can keep kosher, you can be highly observant. And yet, if you’re doing cruel things and you’re not kind to people, if you’re not generous or you’re a thief or a liar, then you’re a bad Jew. That’s all there is to it.

If you have a ham and cheese sandwich on rye and you never set foot in the synagogue, but you know you feel Jewish in your soul and are a good, kind, decent person — you give to charity, you help people, you’re loving — then you’re a good Jew. That’s all there is to it.

If The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews were a recipe of yours, what recipe would it be?

It would be a little bit white trash. And it would be a lot Jewish. And a lot rebellious. I do a lot of white trash recipes and a lot of Jewish recipes. It would have to be a combination of the two. The recipe would probably be like white trash mac and cheese on a latke.

To purchase The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews and The Raging Skillet, visit Amazon or ask about it at your local book store.