After a tough year, Jewish cookbook author Jessica Seinfeld finds sweetness — without sugar

Award-winning cookbook author Jessica Seinfeld stays busy.

She’s been married to her husband, Jewish comedy icon Jerry Seinfeld, since 1999, and, in addition to raising their three children — Sascha, 24, Julian, 21, and Shepherd, 19 — she’s written six cookbooks, including “Not Too Sweet: 100 Dessert Recipes for Those Who Want More with Just a Little Less,” which is out Tuesday. She also recently produced a documentary, “Daughters,” released in August, that shines a light on how incarceration impacts prisoners and their children.

Over the last year, she’s added some new activities: publicly supporting Israel and privately studying Torah.

Seinfeld, 53, traveled with her husband to Israel last December, meeting with survivors of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and touring the ruins of Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the Gaza border communities hardest hit that day. Both before and after the trip, she said she “got louder on social media” to rebut false information and antisemitism that has proliferated online.

“In my Jewish upbringing, victimhood was frowned upon,” she said. “Being in Israel just after Oct. 7, and seeing the way Israelis pulled together, was so moving and inspiring. It taught me a lot about community and how important it is historically to Jews and will certainly be to ensure the future.”

Seinfeld also said in an interview that since June, she has regularly learned with a rabbanit, a term used by some Orthodox women who have undergone rabbinical training and ordination.

“Every week I connect with our history, our spirituality and our ancient wisdom,” she said. “That gives me a gift and energy to keep going and to put as much as I can into everything I do.”

As much of most things — but not refined sugar. Seinfeld’s new cookbook features 100 dessert recipes, from chocolate layer cake to roasted strawberry toaster pastries — “Our family knows a thing or two about Pop-Tarts,” she writes, in a reference to the recent Netflix film directed by her husband, “Unfrosted” — all tweaked to be just a little bit healthier than their “regular” counterparts. Most of the treats are sweetened with sugar alternatives, such as maple syrup, honey and date syrup, or fresh, dried or frozen fruits.

“I’m at this age where sugar gives me a hangover more than alcohol does, and it makes me feel terrible,” Seinfeld said. “Why not reexamine my favorite dessert recipes and come up with a way to make them less sweet and with more natural sugars? Let’s keep dessert on the table but make it a little bit better for you.”

For Jerry’s last birthday — his 70th — Seinfeld said she prepared a chocolate cake made with pureed chickpeas, almond flour and maple syrup. She said it is one of her husband’s favorite recipes in the book, along with the oat clusters made with maple syrup, coconut sugar and salted peanuts; apple tart sweetened with pureed raisins, maple syrup and apricot fruit spread, and sweet potato caramel corn, a healthier version of sweetened popped corn.

Seinfeld will celebrate the publication of “Not Too Sweet” at Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Center on Wednesday, in a conversation with comedian Ali Wentworth, where she’ll “share stories about life at the kitchen table of the dessert-obsessed Seinfeld family.”

To mark the cookbook’s publication, Seinfeld posted a video of her husband kvelling over her homemade pop-tart. Another of the family’s culinary traditions came from Seinfeld’s parents: a Sunday morning bagels-and-lox routine. “I think for my entire life I have been having bagels and lox every Sunday,” she told the New York Jewish Week in a previous interview. “When I got married to Jerry we continued that tradition and my kids rely on that tradition every Sunday.”

Jerry Seinfeld, too, has stepped further into pro-Israel advocacy over the last year. In a May interview with GQ, “10 Things Jerry Seinfeld Can’t Live Without,” the comedian named his David necklace: “I wear a Star of David necklace because it makes me feel closer to the people of Israel,” he said. That same month, he faced a protest from students at Duke University, which all of their children have attended, when he spoke there during graduation.

Jessica Seinfeld says she sees Judaism as essential to everything she does.

“One of my favorite parts about myself and my family is that we are Jewish. I love being married to a Jewish man who is equally as proud,” she said. She added, “There is a Jewish thread that runs through those of us who feel we want to make the world a better place every day.”

For Seinfeld, those efforts include a panoply of causes, from chairing the board of the poverty-fighting non-profit Good+ Foundation to advocating for decreasing cell phone usage among children to help their mental health.

But while Seinfeld’s public service and bagel traditions have their roots in her childhood — her mother worked as a counselor in prisons — her interest in dessert is all hers.

Growing up, first on Long Island and then in Vermont, there were no desserts in her home. She writes that both of her parents worked, and while her mom insisted on giving her family a home-cooked dinner, desserts were not her “thing.”

“It’s funny when we return to what our parents tried to teach us,” she writes. “I am clearly following in my mother’s footsteps in writing a book that basically offers people fruit for dessert.”