“My grandmother, Martha Dinowitz, was an amazing baker,” Genna Mazor Levine told us when she reached out to share her hamantaschen recipe. “I heard stories of her baking — her rugelach, her Slovakian crispies, her chocolate cake — but I never got to try them firsthand.”

Genna was the 15th out of 16 grandchildren, so her grandmother was already elderly when Genna was growing up. She still made Jell-O molds and meatballs when she came over for Shabbat dinner at Genna’s home in North Miami Beach, but her baking days were behind her. “I was left with an innate longing for a grandmother's love transmuted into baked goods,” Genna added.

When Genna was a teenager, she started to get into cooking and baking. It was around the time the internet was catching on, she says, so she would search online, browsing Epicurious, and experimenting in the kitchen, making apple pies and marshmallows from scratch. So, when her mother found an old worksheet from her synagogue preschool with a hamantaschen recipe and diagram for folding the Purim cookie, she gave it to Genna. “It just kind of kicked off this whole obsessive thing with hamantaschen,” she recalled when we spoke with her. 

Genna invited her grandmother over to help her and her sister make them. Martha sat in a chair as the girls folded the cookies into triangles and some less conventional shapes including a hamburger. “My grandmother (not-so) patiently oversaw the operation,” she added, at some point pulling out her signature phrase for when she was frustrated: “Oh, for god’s sake.” 

But, looking back, Genna noted: “Those hamentashen were the only thing my grandmother and I ever baked side by side, and that day is a visceral reminder of the power of food to bring generations together.”

It also started an important personal tradition. The next year, Genna made hamantaschen for mishloach manot or Purim gift packages and gave them out to friends — both Jewish and non — at her public school. By the following year, she was inviting friends over for what would become an annual hamantaschen baking party. 

In college, Genna baked the cookies in her dorm’s communal oven and shipped them to friends and family. “I had no money, and no idea what I was doing,” she said laughing. And when she moved to New York City, she baked them in a friend’s apartment with the “world’s tiniest kitchen.” 

Wherever the party moved, Genna would cram in as many friends as possible. “Not everyone is Jewish, and not everyone is a baker. But no matter. We can still outdo ourselves with over 500 'tashen in a single session,” she explained.

On March 8, 2020, just before COVID locked down the New York area, Genna hosted her last of the parties for a while. This year, she’s hoping to revive the tradition. Since she and her husband are expecting and still getting settled in a new home, she’s planning to host a smaller party for the “grown-ups,” and to make the cookies over a video call with her nieces and nephews. 

Like her grandmother, she has to try to maintain her patience when the youngest bakers make a mess of the cookies, she explained. “It's like my grandmother's spirit is resting within me, just waiting to lovingly swipe a spoon out of a 5 year-old's grubby fingers.”