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Know Your Nosh: Food, Jewishness, & Identity

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Monday, November 14, 2022

There鈥檚 an old joke about Jewish holidays 鈥� they tried to kill us, we survived, let鈥檚 eat! While there鈥檚 some truth to this description of Jewish holidays, this joke also reveals a connection between Jewish food, Jewish politics, Jewish identity, Jewish culture, and even Jewish survival that has taken many forms. Food has been used to create, maintain, and reimagine boundaries in Jewish communities. The borrowing and appropriation of foods from other cultures have helped shape new Jewish identities.听Different groups of Jews have navigated diverse majority cultures, using food both to solidify ethnic identities and to challenge鈥攐r reinforce鈥攏arratives of tolerance and inclusion.听Jewish farmers are growing food with ecologically sensitive methods and educating their communities in response to the climate crisis.听

This symposium brings together scholars working on the significance of food for Jewish religious, cultural, national, and political identities, focusing on the United States and Israel/Palestine. In our conversations, we will explore how food, so often seen as simply bringing people together, can be, in the end, far more complicated.

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Ari Ariel听is an Associate Professor of Instruction in History and International Studies, and the director of the International Studies Program, at the University of Iowa. Born in New York City to a Yemeni father and Ashkenazi mother, most of his academic work is semi-autobiographical:听he focuses on Middle Eastern Jewish communities, particularly Yemeni Jews, and writes about migration, identity, and changes in cultural practice, especially foodways.听听

Ariel's publications in this field have included work on: the transformation of Middle Eastern Jewish foodways in Israel under the pressure of the Ashkenazi melting pot, and later the creation of New Israeli Cuisine; the 鈥渆thnicization鈥� of Yemeni food and identity in Israel, a process through which various pre-migration local practices were reimagined as parts of a single Yemeni ethnic culture; and the 鈥淗ummus Wars,鈥� a conflict over the national ownership of hummus, 鈥渇ought鈥� primary between Lebanon and Israel.

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Adrienne听Krone听is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability and Religious Studies at Allegheny College. She has a Ph.D. in American Religion from Duke University, and her research focuses on religious food justice movements in North America.听Her current research project is an ethnographic and historical study of the Jewish community farming movement.

Krone researches the contemporary Jewish Community Farming movement, which began with the founding of Adamah in 2004 and now consists of about twenty innovative and pluralistic organizations spread throughout the United States and Canada. The Jewish Community Farming movement organizations are joined by their shared values which include sustainability, stewardship, food justice, and building community. These organizations run programs that vary widely for individuals and groups of all ages and last anywhere from a couple hours to months long fellowships and apprenticeships. Through these programs Jews get their hands dirty planting, weeding, harvesting, and eating food while learning about Jewish environmental values, traditions, and laws. Across these organizations, hundreds of farmers, educators, administrators, and program participants have discovered, built, and/or deepened their Jewish identities by reconnecting to their local environment and foodways through their engagement in this movement.

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Ronald Ranta听is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Kingston University London and a former chef. His research focuses on the intersection of food, identity, security, and politics. He is the co-editor of the Palgrave book series听Food and Identity in a Globalised World, and the co-editor of the recently published volume听Going Native?: Settler Colonialism and Food听(Palgrave 2022).

In the context of Israel/Palestine, Ranta uses food as a prism to听bridge the gap between how Israeli, and to a lesser extent Palestinian, nationalism and national identity have been and are produced and experienced in daily life, and the historical, political and social developments that brought about and maintain the Israeli nation-state. He is particularly interested in understanding the听relationship between Israeli and Palestinian identities and food cultures; the ways in which the latter impacts the former; and the meaning of decolonization in the context of food.

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Nora Rubel听is the Jane and Alan Batkin Professor in Jewish Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. Rubel teaches and writes on a wide variety of topics related to gender, race and ethnicity in American religion, particularly in relation to food and popular culture. She is the author of听Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination听(Columbia University Press 2009), co-editor of听Religion, Food and Eating in North America听(CUP 2014) and the in-progress听Transparent: Queering the Jewish Family on TV. She听is also completing a monograph entitled听Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of听The Settlement Cook Book.

Rubel teaches and writes on religion and foodways. At the University of Rochester, she teaches 鈥淜itchen Judaism: Jewish Food Beyond the Bagel and the Bible鈥� and 鈥淐ulinary Conversions: Religion, Food, and Eating in America.鈥� In her scholarship, Rubel takes cookbooks as an entry point to her study of religious identities. She has written about the ways that cookbooks both reflect and reinforce religious and cultural practices. Her current book project,听Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of听The Settlement Cook Book,听is a cultural biography of a book that while originally meant as a way to Americanize new Jewish immigrants, in successive acculturated generations became a nostalgic means of connecting to a traditional Jewish past. Rubel examines the cookbook as an influential example of Jewish鈥攂ut not necessarily Judaic鈥攎aterial culture and discusses twentieth century Jewish Americanization through a lens of culinary pluralism.

This symposium is part of our ongoing听Embodied Judaism听and听Israel-Palestine Studies听series, and is supported by the听David Shneer Fund for Community Programming, Public Scholarship, and the Arts.听