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On the one hand, this book about Jewish traditions and food functions as the focal point for examining different forms of Judaism. On the other hand, this book is also a study of what we might call the religious dimensions of food and the case of Judaism serves as an exemplum. The introduction considers the advantages of understanding a religion through the detour of food and asks what counts as “Jewish food.” It argues that food in general provides a wieldy symbolic field that is called upon to construct sex and gender, social status, and race and to distinguish humans from other animals. Religion and food are always intermixed, and examining this intermixture in Judaism can provide some insights into a more-or-less universal human process of making meaning. Insights from Jewish scholars of food or food studies, including Warren Belasco, Noah Yuval Harari, Sidney Mintz, and Marion Nestle, are engaged.

Why should one eat—or avoid—Jewish food? What makes food “Jewish” in the first place? These questions feature prominently not only in rabbinic and other Jewish texts but also in the classical sources of Christianity and Islam. The authors of these influential works disagree over what food to eat and, more fundamentally, over what Jewishness is, but they all agree that the difference between Jews and non-Jews matters. This chapter traces the evolving relationship between Jewish identity and Jewish norms about the food of non-Jews from the Bible through the Middle Ages. It also examines premodern Catholic, Sunni, and Shiʿi norms about Jewish food, demonstrating that ideas about Jewishness play important roles in the construction of Christian and Islamic identity.

This chapter focuses on the Jewish delicatessen, a recognizable symbol of American Jewish culture. Today, the deli has become so identified with Jews that it has become a symbol for Jewish life in general. Jews and delis are inextricably linked in the American popular imagination. Moreover, Jewish food lies at the heart of contemporary ‘secular’ Jewish identity. Drawing on historical research, images, and representations of the deli in pop culture, as well as postmodern theory, the chapter demonstrates the functional relations between the deli as a central ritual space of secular Jewishness and the ways in which deli food is both commodified and nostalgicized to make the deli a Jewish cultural signpost. Indeed, this symbolic role is increasing as actual delis close, at least in the New York area, where they once were a central feature of the urban landscape and a crucial repository of Jewish culture.

This chapter discusses the Jewish food movement in North America. The movement comprises a loosely organized group of food, social justice, agricultural, and environmental organizations, initiatives, and educational and farming programs that engage hundreds of thousands of Jews. These organizations host annual multi-day Jewish food conferences and practice high-level advocacy by developing print and on-line educational resources to support Jewish farm projects, farmer training centres, internship programs, and community gardens. Having an impact on the practice of contemporary Judaism, the chapter concludes that the movement may result in a new kind of North American Judaism in the 21st century.

This chapter describes how Jewish food types illustrate two opposing characters of Jews—their adaptability and their resistance to change. Food historians have argued that there is a paradox with Jewish food choices, and this paradox can be seen in other cultures. Their food customs together have created an immovable source of continuity and strength that they now cling to as a living source of memory and meaning, holding together their families and communities. However, at other times, their food customs change can change very suddenly, and old dietary traditions are dropped and forgotten overnight. These changes are brought about during periods of great stability, in which food habits, tastes, and beliefs are altered very quickly, as new staple foods, modes of eating, and spices replaced old ones.

Authentic and healthy, traditional plus tasty, these are phrases that are used over and over to describe today's Jewish foods. This chapter presents examples of dishes, both Ashkenazic-based and Sephardic-inspired, meeting those criteria. These recipes of Jewish foods shared by Etheldoris Grais and Joseph Israel use Midwestern ingredients; they are also versatile, and grounded in Jewish food traditions, insofar as “Jewish foods” are often simply foods Jews eat wherever they live. These include Etheldoris' “Clear Wild Rice Soup,” Cold “Raspberry Cream Soup,” “Chinese Style Steamed Fish” and Joseph' “Zucchini Soup.”

This chapter first describes the central place of bread in Jewish life. Breads of every shape and variety are made and served for the Sabbath, holidays, and daily consumption: rye breads in Eastern Europe and Russia; rice-flour breads where some of the Sephardi lived; wheat breads elsewhere. In ages past, bread-making was an essential skill passed down from mother to daughter. It has been called both a science and an art. The chapter also presents interviews with people at Kaufman's Bakery and Delicatessen, Pratzel's Bakery, Jake's Deli, Eli's Cheesecake Factory, Ella's Deli and Ice Cream Parlor, the Mustard Museum, and Morgan's Grill and Fish Market. Each one expressed incredible pride in what he or she does. And what they do goes beyond slavishly preserving Jewish food traditions, to innovating taste treats by adapting recipes, and, in many instances, adding new, exciting, items and experiences to their product lines. Not only that, but we discovered they really enjoy making quality foodstuffs for their customers, who, now more than ever before, include almost everyone.

To explore Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, this chapter utilizes research in Jewish immigrant history and migration patterns in the United States, Jewish-American foods and foodways, period-relevant Jewish-American cookbooks, food manufacturing in the first half of the twentieth century, and roadside/programmatic architecture. This research reveals the rich cultural background of Sendak’s story as both quintessentially Jewish and deeply American. Mickey’s night kitchen holds a complex variety of legible social codes. Food embeds such codes, and its “messages . . . will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed” (Mary Douglas). Sendak’s experiences in a marginalized subculture mirror those of children. As a marginalized group, children are deeply aware of social hierarchies and their place within them: they understand their lack of power. Mickey fulfills children’s dreams for power within a context they can understand: the food they consume in their daily lives.

This chapter describes the early Jewish settlers in the Midwest. The first one was a German-Jew from Berlin named Ezekiel Solomon who landed at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula in 1761. A simple marker, erected by the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, in Michilimackinac State Park, Mackinaw City, says that he survived an Ojibwa massacre at Fort Michilimackinac in 1763, was a fur trader who ran a general store provisioning the British Army, and was one of the founders of Canada's first (Sephardic rite) synagogue, Montreal's Shearith Israel. The chapter also details how during the 1800s and even as late as the 1910s, Jews who kept kosher often had a difficult time during their overland journeys to or through the Midwest. They either had to carry food with them hoping their supplies would last until they reached their destination; subsist on purchased or bartered eggs, milk, nuts, and/or fruits, if they could find them; or eat at “kosher” hotels or boarding houses of which there were woefully few.

This chapter focuses on the Sephardic Jews who settled in the Midwest. Wherever the Sephardi settled in the Heartland, the local press often noted their presence and customs, because they were distinct enough from the more familiar Ashkenazi to warrant comment. They were multinational and multilingual by culture and practice. Instead of speaking German or Yiddish, as did most of the Ashkenazi of Europe, many Sephardic Jews spoke, wrote, and prayed in Ladino. Sephardic interpretations of halakhah (Jewish Law), dating to the sixteenth century, were also distinct from those of the Ashkenazic. The major difference relates to the holiday of Passover that celebrates the Israelites' liberation from Egyptian slavery. During the eight days of Passover, no Jew is supposed to consume hametz (leavened) grain products that have come into contact with moisture for more than eighteen minutes or that have been made with yeast. While also abstaining from leavened breads, Sephardim do not include rice-based cakes, fritters, or other baked goods in the category of proscribed hametz because the main component cannot rise even with the addition of yeast. Sephardic rules also permit the consumption of legumes during this holiday. As a case in point, delicacies, such as Frittada de Pressa (fried leek pancakes) and nutty-flavored Sodra/Sorda (fava bean soup), are consumed with gusto at Sephardic ritual Passover meals.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the state, shape, change, and evolution of Midwestern Jewish cuisine through time. It tracks geographically based culinary recipes and changes made to them through time by presenting and analyzing ones from Midwestern Jewish sources, both kosher and non-kosher. It documents the availability of fruits, vegetables, and other comestibles throughout the Midwest that impacted how and what Jews cooked; and considers the effect of improved preservation and transportation on rural and urban Jewish foodways. Then, it examines the impact on Jewish foodways—the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food—of large-scale immigration, relocation, and Americanization efforts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, paying special attention to the attempts of social and culinary reformers to modify traditional Jewish food preparation and ingredients.

This chapter reviews the book Imagining Jewish Authenticity: Vision and Text in American Jewish Thought (2015), by Ken Koltun-Fromm. Imagining Jewish Authenticity examines the ways in which texts and images interact in American Jewish culture to promote a vision of Jewish “authenticity,” while also highlighting the deep anxieties harbored by Jews with respect to their own identities. Koltun-Fromm argues that claims of authenticity are most perceptible in both the conscious and unconscious interface between text and image, which provides authors and artists with an outlet to make the contradictory claims at the root of neurotic conflict. He identifies three hotbeds of social and political tensions that have sat at the center of Jewish anxieties in the modern era: Jewish space, the Sabbath, and Jewish food. The book also explores “how Jews deploy language in texts to materialize authenticity in Jewish, gendered, and racial bodies.”

This chapter presents several recipes along with anecdotes about them. These include legendary cook, Etheldoris Grais' recipe for “Gefilte Fish ‘Minnesota Style’” and her version of a Sephardic Passover dish called “Persian Charoset”; Judy Dworkin' matzo pop-overs recipe, which she said she typically served with stuffed veal breast; and Ruth Dunie's recipes for matzo-balls and lemon-flavored cake. All these recipes represent the mosaic that is the Midwest Jewish community. They are distinctly and firmly grounded in cultural and religious traditions, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, yet show a great deal of creativity and individuality. They also demonstrate how adaptable the cuisine really is to local conditions, available produce, and resources.

This chapter presents the author's account of their search for the author of a handwritten cookbook that they purchased on eBay. It was a standard composition notebook filled with more than one hundred recipes, sprinkled with a few comments, along with some mathematical figures scribbled in open spots. They discovered that the cookbook author was one Ruth Ginsburg of St. Louis. On September 21, 1913, she married Isadore F. Dunie who, at the time, had been residing in the rich mining town of Leadwood, Missouri. After the birth of two children, the Dunie family moved to Hillsboro, Illinois. Additional research into census, birth, death, cemetery records, and the Missouri History Museum stacks, produced both concrete and tangential information about Ruth. Born around 1893, she emigrated from Lithuania in 1903 with her mother, Jennie, and six siblings, at the time when Eastern European Jewish migration was at its height.