The first time I remember really noticing Melinda Strauss, she was posting pictures of a durian.
If you don’t know what a durian is, count yourself lucky. It’s a spiky fruit famous for smelling like a gym bag left in the sun. Melinda’s husband had brought one home on a whim, and Melinda, being Melinda, decided the only reasonable response was to cook it, photograph it on her kitchen counter with the toaster still in the shot, and post the whole glorious disaster online. The cake she made from it was, by her own cheerful admission, a catastrophe.
That was the beginning. Not of a durian dynasty, but of a career.
This was almost twenty years ago, in the wild-west early days of the kosher food world, back when “influencer” wasn’t a word and a Facebook page felt like a genuinely wild experiment. A handful of us were all out there at the same time, not knowing each other yet, figuring it out in real time. Melinda was posting her kitchen experiments. I was building a kosher food media company and slowly realizing that the recipes weren’t the point. The person behind them was.
For years, the place we all connected IRL was Kosher Fest, that gloriously chaotic trade show where you’d walk the floor for two days straight tasting everything while standing up (dairy at the start, meat at the end, an unspoken law). I always called it the world’s largest, and longest, kiddush. Melinda threw the first Kosher Food Bloggers Conference, and asked me to give the keynote. I talked about the one thing I was already sure of: that your real selling point is you, your voice, your story, the thing nobody else can copy. I remember standing up there thinking, wait, am I an expert now? When did that happen? Those early years had real sleepovers-and-late-nights energy. We built a whole little world.
And then, like all good eras, it ran its course. The conferences wound down. The industry changed. And both of us, separately, started to pivot.
Here’s the part that still makes me laugh. Two women who met over a rotten fruit and a rainbow cake somehow both ended up in Jewish education.
Melinda’s turn came during COVID, when she wandered onto TikTok mostly to see what would happen (her words: “what’s the worst that could happen?”). She started mentioning, offhand, that she was turning her phone off for Shabbat, or that a food she was eating was kosher, and the questions came flooding in from people who had genuinely never heard of either. What’s Shabbat? What’s kosher? She started answering. Then the answers led to more questions, and more, and before long she was one of the original voices of what we all started calling Jewish TikTok, with an audience of millions who trust her precisely because she’s real, not preachy, never pretending to have it all figured out. My own road led me to Aish. Same starting line, wildly different routes, same finish: showing, in our own imperfect ways, that Jewish life is something worth falling in love with.
So when Melinda finally came on The Jamie Geller Show, I figured we’d spend the whole time reminiscing. We did some of that. But mostly we talked about the thing we’ve both spent years thinking about from opposite corners of the internet: how to make Jewish life feel like a door, not a test (one you pass or fail).
Melinda told me that people come up to her constantly, a little embarrassed, and confess the same thing: “I’m a bad Jew.” I don’t keep kosher the right way. I haven’t been to synagogue in ages. I’m doing it wrong. People say it to me too. My answer is always the same: I’m not a priest, and this isn’t confession. There’s no such thing as a bad Jew. (We went deep on that one, deep enough that it deserves its own conversation, so I’ll let you hear the rest of it from us in the episode.)
What I loved is how completely that philosophy runs through the way Melinda actually lives. She doesn’t do everything perfectly, and she’ll tell you so, on camera, cheerfully. She talks about being “a work in progress” the way other people talk about the weather. And it’s made her one of the most reassuring people to learn from, because she’s never once looking down at you.
Then, because it was us, we had way too much fun. We played a round of “Jewish or Not Jewish” (I’m proud to say I won). We argued, with real conviction, about which famous people we’d actually want at our Shabbat table, and it was right there, deciding our dream Shabbos guests, that I landed on an answer about the Royal Family that I find myself repeating to my kids all the time, about what it really means to be the children of royalty.
That’s the thing about talking to an old friend who took the long way around to the same place you did. You start with a durian and almost twenty years of history, and somehow you end up saying the truest things you know.
I could try to summarize the whole conversation for you, but honestly, it’s better watched than described. Melinda is the kind of person you feel like you already know five minutes in. Pour yourself a coffee, get comfortable, and come hang out with two friends who never in a million years saw this coming.
Watch my full conversation with Melinda Strauss on The Jamie Geller Show.
Leave a Reply