In call-in to SF Jewish Film Festival, Trump announces matzo trade policy

AROUND THE BLOCK

News with a Twist

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival screens “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream”

Surprise guest at Q&A following film

(Note: This is a return to the normal “News with a Twist” so read it in that vein.)

A special treat at this years 36th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is the film “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream” which documents the struggle of the almost 100-year old Streit’s matzo company whose family, descendants of founder Aron Streit, try to maintain production in their original bakery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the face of gentrification and cheaper, foreign competition.

The film is an entertaining and thought provoking combination of nostalgia and current events.

Nostalgic, particularly for someone who grew up in New York and whose family always bought Streit’s matzo rather than its historic competition – Manischewitz, Goodman’s, and Horowitz Margareten – but timely as well, as it depicted the effect globalization was having on the business.

Globalization? Who would have thought globalization would affect a business as simple and basic as matzo baking?

Well, someone has.

In the Q&A following one special screening of the film, Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate for president of the United States, called in on a special Skype link.

Trump, aware that he was talking to an audience at a Jewish Film Festival, reverted,  for the first time in months, to his adopted second language, Yiddish.  (See here  http://tedblocksblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/trump-hillary-got-schlonged.html and here  http://tedblocksblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/around-block-news-with-twist.html for previous Around the Block posts regarding Trump and Yiddish)

“Oy gevalt, this is pure mishegas. I am verklmpt that a company like Streit’s is suffering the consequences of the mashugana Obama’s bad trade deals, deals that have sent millions of our jobs overseas. It is a shanda that cheap foreign matzo is flooding our shores made by pishers working for bupkes in factories owned by gonifs. One of my first acts as president will be to establish matzo tariffs so companies like Streit’s will no longer have to compete with fakakte Chinese matzo.”

When an audience member responded that in fact, the cheap foreign matzo was coming from Israel, not China, a man looking vaguely like casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, appeared to whisper something into Trump’s ear before the Skype feed went dead.