Jewish Food and Foodways

Studying American Judaism through the lens of foodways challenges conventional divides between Judaism, the religion , and Jewishness, the culture, and points to fruitful avenues for studying lived religion and material culture in the United States more broadly. This essay examines how studies of American Jewish foodways draw attention to individuals and organizations who would otherwise not receive scholarly attention. They highlight the ways that ordinary people have enacted Judaism in their daily lives, on holidays , and on other ritual occasions. Studies of American Jewish foodways shift where scholars look for religious practice and who they recognize as religious authorities-from clergy to cookbook authors; from the synagogue to the home kitchen, restaurant, or corporation; and, in many cases, from men to women.

Drawing on two distinct bodies of Sephardi food writing-Anglophone cookbooks and the long-running recipe column in the Judeo-Spanish periodical Aki Yerushalayim-this paper explores the role of cuisine as a primary affiliative structure in contemporary Sephardi culture. I argue that these two divergent literary traditions, in their general ignorance of one another, constitute a framework for an archive of Sephardi cooking. In spite of these texts' common conception of cooking as a female practice of memory and identification as well as their shared interest in the intersection of the culinary and the linguistic, they are at odds with one another as to whether Sephardi culture exists only in the past, or may also be found in the present. Side-by-side consideration of both corpuses requires an understanding of Sephardi culture attentive to persistent continuities in spite of major historical ruptures.

On the sanctification of East European foods served at the Chasidic Rebbe's Tish, or Shabbes table. Stranger than fiction, but this is not a Haskalah satire. The sources are all authentic Hasidic sources, including those explaining how the Tsadik (Rebbe) = Yesod (the Divine phallus, as represented among the 10 Kabbalistic Sefirot = KUGEL, so do not eat it with your hands !!! Gives entirely new meaning to Pey-Tsadik…..,

Classic Jewish Kabbalah tends to view the interactions and exchanges between the divine and human worlds as a sort of "cosmic re-cycling," particularly in its transformation of the traditional language of the Biblical sacrificial system. Kabbalistic meal rituals evoke these metaphors to heighten the intensity of the experience of the physical activity of eating. They cast the eater as a crucial player in the mythic drama of cosmic re-cycling. The spiritual experience of the fusion of body and soul advocated by Jewish religious mystics in speech-cued, mindful acts of eating is not so far from the experience of the sustainable banquet Michael Pollan prepared for his friends, the celebratory "thanksgiving" or "secular seder" which he describes at the end of his book the Omnivore's Dilemma. 1 Both channel the "psychosomatic" experience of mindful eating (to use Joel Hecker's term) 2 into a predisposition for environmentally conscious moral action, by way of mythic stories and metaphors of connectedness between people, and between people and nature.

Shulhan Shel Arba [" Four"], a short yet encyclopedic ethical manual by the popular thirteenth century Spanish Jewish Biblical exegete and kabbalist Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher, is as important a starting point for "the Jewish view" of eating as pseudo-Nahmanides' Iggeret Ha-Kodesh ["The Holy Letter"] is for "the Jewish view" of sex. In Shulhan Shel Arba, R. Bahya articulates a "torah of eating" which exemplifies a distinctively Jewish mode of spirituality -one that integrates ritual performance, textual study, and imaginative "midrashic" re-interpretations of ancient traditions in new cultural situations. 1 R. Bahya advocates a sort of ritual "performance" of scriptural verses at meals. Speaking and thinking about certain metaphorical verses from the Torah while dining is intended to fuse ostensibly opposed bodily and psychic capacities into a single experience, a ritualized union of opposites. The hanhagot (rules of conduct) in R.

Over the last thirty years, Jewish studies scholars have turned increasing attention to food and meals in Jewish culture. These studies fall more or less into two different camps: (1) text-centered studies that focus on the authors’ idealized, often prescriptive construction of the meaning of food and Jewish meals, such as biblical and postbiblical dietary rules, the Passover Seder, or food in Jewish mysticism—“bread from heaven”—and (2) studies of the “performance” of Jewish meals, particularly in the modern period, which often focus on regional variations, acculturation, and assimilation—“bread from the earth.”1 This breakdown represents a more general methodological split that often divides Jewish studies departments into two camps, the text scholars and the sociologists. However, there is a growing effort to bridge that gap, particularly in the most recent studies of Jewish food and meals.2 The major insight of all of these studies is the persistent connection between eating and...

"I Recognized the Holidays According to the Food" - Tradition and Memory Among the Jewish Community of Argentina

The article focuses on the place of Jewish women in shaping the collective memory of the Jewish community in Argentina based on their affinity to the traditional eating system. The corpus of study revealed layers of interpretation that indicate that the place of women is central to the collective memory building associated with Jewish tradition and identity.
The Jewish community of Argentina is the largest in Latin America. Its origins trace back to the great waves of immigration from Eastern Europe to the New World that took place from the end of the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th century. Eastern European cuisine symbolizes what's Jewish "lo Judio" in Argentina for most of the community and for the non-Jewish majority. Research on eating habits among the Jews of Argentina is scarce, however, by reviewing material that document women's domestic activity and listening to their personal stories, it may be assumed that the lack of research literature is related to a patriarchal perception, which excludes all praxis related to women.  Nevertheless, a close look suggests that the domestic praxis, perceived as feminine, nourishes the public praxis perceived masculine in this culture, thus allowing it to exist and grow.
In the interpretation of symbols and their cultural significance, some paradoxes do emerge, attesting to the complexity of the interrelationship between the domestic and the public, and between the community and the "other". Throughout the article a longitudinal axis is presented that links women to the traditional eating system and shows how it is intended to strengthen and preserve Jewish identity. Simultaneously, a horizontal axis is presented in which the traditional and daily Argentine eating culture takes place. This axis is portrayed as strengthening the Argentine identity of members of the community. The contrast and the encounter between the axes is examined through two central symbols, the "Gefilte-fish", which is portrayed as a feminine dish and the "Asado" or roasting of meat, perceived as masculine.  Thus, an examination of the dialogue that a minority group maintains with Jewish traditional eating habits and the eating habits of the majority culture, tells the story of the group in a unique way.

Kinga Király conducted interviews with ten North Transylvanian survivors who represent the last witnesses of a generation that is about to disappear and leave us with the question of what to remember and how. On reading the testimonies catalogued in the volume Király produced from those interviews, I realized that I felt compelled to make further connections with my own research on foodways, war trauma and the ecologies of survival witnessing. In a section on the mass genocide of Transylvanian Jewry, I provide a brief historical sketch to help the understanding of the historical complexity and tragedy of the lives of pre- and postwar Transylvanian Jewry. I then contrast the stories of some of Király's subjects with the postwar memoirs of other Transylvanian survivors who emigrated either right after the war or under the Ceausescu dictatorship. I discuss prewar Transylvanian Jewish food culture, and subsequently locate Király's collection as a continuation of the tradition of the memorial or yizkor [‘remembrance’] books. Finally, I discuss Jewish cemeteries and the virtual social death of Jewish tradition in Transylvania, to ask: what is it that remains today from the shattered culture of Transylvanian Jewry?

What does Crisco have to do with Jewish history? What is ecokashrut? And why do so many Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas? This course explores Jewish life through the diverse history of Jewish foods. From New York deli to matzah ball gumbo, we will dig into a rich stew of diverse Jewish practices, regions, genders, ethics, and rituals.

Over the last few years on Thursday evenings, the main streets of Bnei Brak, one of Israel’s largest haredi (ultra-Orthodox) cities, becomes a culinary meeting place. The Eastern European Jewish cuisine sustained by the haredi kitchen attracts non-haredi visitors to a society that tends to keep to itself. This article presents an ethnographic investigation of a new culinary scene that brings together local haredim and secular visitors. I draw upon the concept of “eating the other” to argue how the “haredi other” represents a complex kind of “otherness,” whose encounters with secular visitors simultaneously mark boundaries and cross them. These encounters demonstrate how culinary tradition can provide a link to collective memory and help build individual and group identities.

Abstract: This paper analyzes the stories of movement
and displacement told through iconic Chinese and Jewish
“ethnic” immigrant foods that have become part of
American cuisine. Jewish and Chinese immigrant groups
exemplify the American “model minority” myth. The ways
in which some immigrant foods have been embraced or
adapted into Anglo-dominant American culture reflects
complex histories of their creators’ migration and
assimilation. Immigrant foods complicate efforts to define
a common American cuisine. When, if ever, do “ethnic”
foods become “American”? Yet trying to identify
“American cuisine” smacks of “American exceptionalism”—
the superiority-tinged idea that the United States differs
from all other nations and is intrinsic to how we have
defined our national cuisine and differentiated it from its
global influences. There is an inherent dissonance
celebrating hyphenated American foods without
acknowledging America’s history of Asian exclusion,
Native American removal, colonial conquest and exploitation,
and the transatlantic slave trade. Though we share a
national identity and the cultural facets that come with
that, ethnic-inflected American foods and tastes remind us
of the diverse histories of people becoming American.
We, the Jewish-American authors of this paper, find
affinities between our food stories and those of Chinese
Americans, which embody the displacement, nostalgia,
and loss that come with our so-called “model minority”
status. To illustrate the complexity of histories and identities
in creative American ethnic fusion foods, we focus on a
couple of foods from Chinese American and Jewish American
immigrant cuisines: sweet-and-sour batter-fried dishes like
slippery shrimp, and chocolate babka and rugelach.

Our insights into the neurological basis of synesthesia could help explain some of the creativity of painters, poets and novelists. According to one study, the condition is much more common in creative people than in the general population...Depending on where and how widely in the brain the trait was expressed, it could lead to both synesthesia and a propensity toward linking seemingly unrelated concepts and ideas – in short, creativity. This would explain why the apparently useless synesthesia gene has survived in the population.

Despite the absence of a systematic presentation of Josephus’s views of the Jewish food laws, some of his views can be reconstructed through his retelling of the story of Daniel in A.J. 10.190–94. David Satran notes lexical connections between this episode and Greco-Roman descriptions of the Orphic-Pythagorean lifestyle, leading Satran to conclude that the Josephan Daniel embraces this lifestyle. Yet, this presentation argues that Josephus’s re-telling of the biblical account is meant not to describe an idiosyncratic personal choice of diet but rather Daniel’s adherence to a specifically Jewish way of life. At the same time, Satran rightly recognizes the deep philosophical resonances in Josephus’s narrative of Daniel. Josephus thus understood the Jewish food laws to be philosophically defensible.

Josephus wrote while in Rome, and as such his work takes part in the moralistic discourse of his day. Such discourse developed two common views on eating and drinking. First, youth are especially prone to over consumption. Second, immoderate consumption is associated with the East. The Josephan Daniel, who as a youth travels into the very heart of the luxurious East, faces a grave moral choice. By refusing to conform, he proves the strength of Jewish food laws in training people in moderation. Josephus’s story of Daniel thus not only depicts the Jewish food laws as philosophically defensible but also as efficacious.

This presentation proceeds in three parts. First, it surveys Greco-Roman discourse about food. Second, it turns to Josephus’s narrative of Daniel at the Babylonian court, arguing that Daniel is meant to reflect a specifically Jewish way of life. The third part then contends that Josephus understands Daniel’s overcoming of significant obstacles (i.e., his youth and the enticements of eastern luxury) to be evidence that the Jewish laws train in virtue.