This book explores the history of Jewish eating and Jewish identity, from the Bible to the present. The lessons of this book rest squarely on the much-quoted insight: 'you are what you eat.' But this book goes beyond that simple truism to recognise that you are not only what you eat, but also how, when, where and with whom you eat. This book begins at the beginning – with the Torah – and then follows the history of Jewish eating until the modern age and even into our own day. Along the way, it travels from Jewish homes in the Holy Land and Babylonia (Iraq) to France and Spain and Italy, then to Germany and Poland and finally to the United States of America. It looks at significant developments in Jewish eating in all ages: in the ancient Near East and Persia, in the Classical age, throughout the Middle Ages and into Modernity. It pays careful attention to Jewish eating laws (halakha) in each time and place, but it does not stop there: it also looks for Jews who bend and break the law, who eat like Romans or Christians regardless of the law and who develop their own hybrid customs according to their own 'laws', whatever Jewish tradition might tell them. In this colourful history of Jewish eating, we get more than a taste of how expressive and crucial eating choices have always been.

This book explores the history of Jewish eating and Jewish identity, from the Bible to the present. The lessons of this book rest squarely on the much-quoted insight: 'you are what you eat.' But this book goes beyond that simple truism to recognise that you are not only what you eat, but also how, when, where and with whom you eat. This book begins at the beginning – with the Torah – and then follows the history of Jewish eating until the modern age and even into our own day. Along the way, it travels from Jewish homes in the Holy Land and Babylonia (Iraq) to France and Spain and Italy, then to Germany and Poland and finally to the United States of America. It looks at significant developments in Jewish eating in all ages: in the ancient Near East and Persia, in the Classical age, throughout the Middle Ages and into Modernity. It pays careful attention to Jewish eating laws (halakha) in each time and place, but it does not stop there: it also looks for Jews who bend and break the law, who eat like Romans or Christians regardless of the law and who develop their own hybrid customs according to their own 'laws', whatever Jewish tradition might tell them. In this colourful history of Jewish eating, we get more than a taste of how expressive and crucial eating choices have always been.

Food often defines societies and even civilizations. Through particular commensality restrictions, groups form distinct identities. This identity is enacted daily, turning the biological need to eat into a culturally significant activity. In this book, Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how food regulations and practices helped to construct the identity of early rabbinic Judaism. Bringing together the scholarship of rabbinics with that of food studies, this volume first examines the historical reality of food production and consumption in Roman-era Palestine. It then explores how early rabbinic food regulations created a distinct Jewish, male, and rabbinic identity.

“Twitty makes the case that Blackness and Judaism coexist in beautiful harmony, and this is manifested in the foods and traditions from both cultures that Black Jews incorporate into their daily lives…Twitty wishes to start a conversation where people celebrate their differences and embrace commonalities. By drawing on personal narratives, his own and others’, and exploring different cultures, Twitty’s book offers important insight into the journeys of Black Jews.”—Library Journal “A fascinating, cross-cultural smorgasbord grounded in the deep emotional role food plays in two influential American communities.”—Booklist The James Beard award-winning author of the acclaimed The Cooking Gene explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisine and issues of memory, identity, and food. In Koshersoul, Michael W. Twitty considers the marriage of two of the most distinctive culinary cultures in the world today: the foods and traditions of the African Atlantic and the global Jewish diaspora. To Twitty, the creation of African-Jewish cooking is a conversation of migrations and a dialogue of diasporas offering a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them. The question that most intrigues him is not just who makes the food, but how the food makes the people. Jews of Color are not outliers, Twitty contends, but significant and meaningful cultural creators in both Black and Jewish civilizations. Koshersoul also explores how food has shaped the journeys of numerous cooks, including Twitty’s own passage to and within Judaism. As intimate, thought-provoking, and profound as The Cooking Gene, this remarkable book teases the senses as it offers sustenance for the soul. Koshersoul includes 48-50 recipes.

"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are," wrote the 18th Century French politician and musician Jean Brillat-Savarin, giving expression to long held assumptions about the role of food, taste, and eating in the construction of cultural identities. Foodways—the cultural, religious, social, economic, and political practices related to food consumption and production—unpack and reveal the meaning of what we eat, our tastes. They explain not just our flavor profiles, but our senses of refinement and judgment. They also reveal quite a bit about the history and culture of how food operates and performs in society. More specifically, Jewish food practices and products expose and explain how different groups within American society think about what it means to be Jewish and the values (as well as the prejudices) people have about what "Jewish" means. Food—what one eats, how one eats it, when one eats it—is a fascinating entryway into identity; for Jews, it is at once a source of great nostalgia and pride, and the central means by which acculturation and adaptation takes place. In chapters that trace the importance and influence of the triad of bagels, lox, and cream cheese, southern kosher hot barbecue, Jewish vegetarianism, American recipes in Jewish advice columns, the draw of eating treyf (nonkosher), and the geography of Jewish food identities, this volume explores American Jewish foodways, predilections, desires, and presumptions.

The history of the Jewish people has been a history of migration. Although Jews invariably brought with them their traditional ideas about food during these migrations, just as invariably they engaged with the foods they encountered in their new environments. Their culinary habits changed as a result of both these migrations and the new political and social realities they encountered. The stories in this volume examine the sometimes bewildering kaleidoscope of food experiences generated by new social contacts, trade, political revolutions, wars, and migrations, both voluntary and compelled. This panoramic history of Jewish food highlights its breadth and depth on a global scale from Renaissance Italy to the post-World War II era in Israel, Argentina, and the United States and critically examines the impact of food on Jewish lives and on the complex set of laws, practices, and procedures that constitutes the Jewish dietary system and regulates what can be eaten, when, how, and with whom. Global Jewish Foodways offers a fresh perspective on how historical changes through migration, settlement, and accommodation transformed Jewish food and customs.

This collection of essays was inspired by the desire to create a suitable tribute to Dr. Irving Greenberg. Dr. Greenberg has been one of the truly major figures in the American Jewish community for the past forty years. A community activist and a theologian of distinction, he has influenced not only the practical direction of Jewish life, especially through his work with the leadership of Jewish Federations throughout the country, but also the shape of contemporary Jewish thought through his writings on the Holocaust, the State of Israel, and traditional Jewish themes. The outstanding list of authors who have contributed to this volume, writing on central issues in traditional and modern Jewish thought and history, are a testimony to Dr. Greenberg's repercussive presence and theological contribution. Those interested in the contemporary American Jewish community and the nature and shape of modern Jewish thought at the beginning of the new millennium will find this a valuable, thought-provoking addition to their libraries.

This book is about what makes food Jewish, or better, who and how one makes food Jewish. Making food Jewish is to negotiate between the local, regional, and now global foods available to eat and the portable Jewish taste preferences Jews have inherited from their sacred texts and calendars. What makes Jewish food “Jewish,” and what makes Jewish eating practices continually viable and meaningful are not fixed dietary rules and norms, but rather culinary interpretations and adaptations of them to new times and places – culinary midrash. Jewish cuisine is a fusion of interactions, a reflection of displacement, and intentional positioning and re-positioning vis a vis sacred texts, old and new lands, Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors, old and new “family” combinations, re-imaginings of our personal ethnic, gender, and other identities. Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus questions Jewish identity in particular, and identity generally as something fixed, stable, and singular, and unintentional. Jewish food choices are situational, often temporary, expressions of Jewish identity. It addresses the tension between what Jewish “authoritative” textual sources and their proponents say is Jewish food and Jewish eating, and what Jews actually eat. So while discussing connections between ancient religious texts and modern Jewish food preferences, this book does not stop there. Using examples from his experience, Brumberg-Kraus describes the improvisational characteristics of gastronomic Judaism as the interplay of texts, tastes, artifacts, and everyday practices: not only in the classic sacred texts, but also in Jewish cookbooks and internet blogs on Jewish home cooking; seasonal intensification of “Jewish” food choices (e.g., latkes at Chanukah or keeping kosher for Passover); “safe treif;” the fusion/cultural appropriation of diasporic, “Biblical”, and Palestinian foods in new Israeli cuisine; and the impact of the environmentalist “New Jewish Food movement” on contemporary Jewish food choices and identity.

What did ancient Jews, Christians, Greeks, and Romans think about how and why Jews ate the way they did? Jordan D. Rosenblum examines this question.

The vibrant interest in food studies among both academics and amateurs has made food history an exciting field of investigation. Taking stock of three decades of groundbreaking multidisciplinary research, the book examines two broad questions: What has history contributed to the development of food studies? How have other disciplines - sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, science, art history - influenced writing on food history in terms of approach, methodology, controversies, and knowledge of past foodways? Essays by twelve prominent scholars provide a compendium of global and multicultural answers to these questions. The contributors critically assess food history writing in the United States, Africa, Mexico and the Spanish Diaspora, India, the Ottoman Empire, the Far East - China, Japan and Korea - Europe, Jewish communities and the Middle East. Several historical eras are covered: the Ancient World, the Middle Ages, Early Modern Europe and the Modern day. The book is a unique addition to the growing literature on food history. It is required reading for anyone seeking a detailed discussion of food history research in diverse times and places.