Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Four): Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential

Forward

COVID-19 lockdowns inspired the Civic Paths research group to explore how food is involved in civic imagination, the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions. Although physically isolated, we found ourselves connecting over food—making it, eating it, missing it, and dreaming about it. These everyday experiences allowed us to share, learn, and think of what could be: they fed our civic imagination. By organizing the Forum “Feeding the Civic Imagination” on Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association, we invited others to participate in our exploration of food and civic imagination. Scheduled to be released in early 2024, the Forum brings together both topically and structurally diverse contributions to spark imaginations around various food-related practices, from traditional research articles on collectives around ingredients, cooking, eating, and human waste to practice-focused pieces on anti-racist pedagogy and Mexican and Palestinian recipe exchanges. To celebrate and extend the “Feeding the Civic Imagination” journey, three-part dialogues, “Intercultural Food” (by Elaine Almeida and Lisa Silvestri), “Digital Media and Food” (by Brienna Fleming and Ioana Mischie), and “The Great British Bake Off” (by Lauren Levitt and Elaine Venter), were organized for Pop Junctions. Jana Stöxen’s article, “Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential” is the fourth and final installment of Pop Junctions’ series on Feeding the Civic Imagination. Jana’s case study is a thought-provoking companion to the collected essays in Lateral that complements its aims to inspire imaginative engagements with food.

Foreword by Do Own (Donna) Kim, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on behalf of the Feeding the Civic Imagination co-editors Sangita Shresthova and Paulina Lanz and the editorial team members at the University of Southern California.

Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential

Jewish cuisine.  Certainly a general yet elusive term for a plethora of tastes under one roof. None of the various ideas of this denomination can be identified as wrong if the actors primarily concerned with it – be they religious or rather selectively expressing their belonging – label their cooking and eating as Jewish. From this point of departure, asking for the most authentic dishes or the most Jewish sites, sets irredeemable preconditions.

Jewish cuisine can best be understood[1] as a set of practices and habits of eating and drinking, cooking, and serving, exercised by people considering themselves Jewish.[2] It is at the same time embedded in historical lines of traditions, deriving from religious beliefs and commandments – such as the Kashrut[3] – and influenced by local conditions. This combination makes it at the same time strict and highly reflexive: while the religious prescriptions and the Jewish calendar of festivities often offer a limited space for creativity, the local context and its influence provide for a huge diversity within Judaism worldwide. Merging these two contexts of religion and locality or local heritage – or: the sacral and the profane – constitutes the uniqueness of Jewish cuisine. Jewish communities may all have originated from the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but they have transformed over time and space, moved, merged as well as diverged.  So did their cuisine: Jewish cooking and eating is multifaceted and yet highly capable of dialogue.

Including religious as well as cultural traits, the most common division into three groups[4] of Jews worldwide is predominantly based on geographical belonging and the heritage linked to it. Ashkenazi, (originally) Middle- and Eastern-European Jewry, Sephardi, (originally) Jews from the Iberic Peninsula and Northern Africa, and Mizrahi, the third and smallest group, (originally) coming from Caucasus and the Middle East. They are traceable through their cuisines so that people and practices of cooking and eating as forged by Kashrut and its interpretations as well as by local traditions appearing in the regions of origin, in the diaspora, be it in Central Europe or the Americas, and in Israel, as country of religious reference. These Jewish lines of tradition form specific contexts and customs, literally a system of social semantics. With its triadic connection of food, cuisine, and identity, it provides a basis for orientation in, and beyond time and space[5], creating Jewish spheres of connection and identification. Locally diverse yet bound to certain patterns, e.g., dishes for religious holidays such as the Seder plate for Pesach, Jewish cuisine in the past and present is best understood as a pluralistic, inclusive concept. It largely contributes to identity formation and its performance in Jewish communities – be they real, easily identifiable ones like families, neighbourhoods or synagogal communities, or rather abstract imagined communities, dwelling on the idea of a religiously-constructed unity, imagined by individuals who perceive themselves as Jewish[6]  – and thus form a conceptual group. Anderson uses this concept to analyse nationalism from a political science perspective.  Not only the awareness of nation-building processes though, but also the knowledge about food cultures and the two fields’ analogies can contribute to the understanding of community formation: As exemplified here with Jewish cuisine in all its different facets, the recognition of multilateral embeddedness helps to question and to debunk persistent prejudices. For cultural anthropology, the cooking, eating, and drinking culture is an indicator of superordinate cultural processes and practices, which can be used to grasp social structures with their distinctive features and the ways they are negotiated and performed. Hence, eating is always a cultural act and a “social event”[7]. Therefore, I would like to stress a cultural anthropological point of view, expressed from my non-Jewish, thus outsider position. Yet, exploring the field of Jewish Cuisine (in Europe) in the project FoodGuide “Jewish Cuisine”[8] through participant observation, interviews and of course the tasting of a wide array under the umbrella term “Jewish”, made me an informed outsider with certain experiences in the contexts and customs of e.g., Shabbat meals and the discussions on who eventually invented falafel and hummus. Following this disciplinary positioning, I intend to emphasize the socio-cultural aspects of communities that provide support and exchange of ideas without actually imagining exclusive (national) societies.

Aldea Mulhern pictures this openness of the symbolic community aspect in the “eating Jewishly” foodway – an in-between attempt to harmonize the different spheres – as departing “from standard narratives about Jewish food practice as either eating kosher, or eating traditional Jewish foods [, opening] opens a space for a Jewish food practice that includes both of those modes alongside others, such as food ethics.”[9] This inclusive approach sparks potential for a vivid civic imagination[10] alongside the variety of Jewish cuisine: Making use of civic imagination as “the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions”[11] opens the discussion beyond the question of what a Jewish cuisine tastes like to the more revealing one on what the concept itself and its practice have to offer – besides flavourful dishes. Bridging gaps of ignorance and ideology through literally sitting at another table, tasting the neighbour’s dish can lead into civic arenas, where discussion is understood as cooperative exchange rather than competition.

A first step in this direction can be to sharpen and to loosen the technical terms at the same time: to emphasize Jewish cuisines’ diversity and to recognize the general fluidity of culture as subject to transformation. Settings of Jewish food culture – and Jewishly food and eating, in Mulhern’s terms – can be found throughout the world but with very different facets and frequencies. Mobility and the need to adapt to their surroundings form a common trait among them. For instance, the “multilingual and poly-cultural regions of Central [and Eastern] Europe”[12] have once been the cradle of Ashkenazi culture. These days they pose a tragic yet excellent example of how Ashkenazim have been subject to boundary shifts and other moments of often brutal hegemony: Smothered by nationalization efforts and close to being erased from the map by the Shoah, Jewish life in the region is nowadays an absolute minority project sometimes occupied by touristic expectations towards an entertaining commemoration.[13] Many Jewish survivors of the Shoah emigrated to the Americas or Israel[14] after 1945, taking their heritage and memories with them. Jewish life in Central Europe is thus largely dominated by a small number of long-established families and – since the 1990’s – a much larger amount of people with Jewish roots, originating from the former Soviet Union[15], who in turn brought their own every day and festive customs. Their search for identity is specifically demanding and was further challenged by a diversifying society: in the second half of the 20th century the appreciation of (seemingly) foreign livelihoods[16] – expressed through every-day culture – brought about by increasing mobility; globalization also became relevant in the field of interest in food culture. Mobility through trade and (forced) migration was historically provoked, but this factor of movement is also key to the popularisation of Jewish cuisine in more recent times.

It’s the Foreign, the Other that fascinates and scares people at the same time.[17] But especially in settings of migration, this otherness can constitute more than differences and separation, especially through the soft power of food[18]: Over time, it’s the “’old world’ foods of Greeks, Jews and Italians in New York”[19] that fundamentally changed eating habits in the ‘new world’; these dishes were transformed from often rather modest all-day or festive, rather scarcely consumed foods to signature dishes. Cream cheese bagels with lox, and pastrami sandwiches are just two examples: “The normalizing absorption of difference in mass culture thereby implies an ongoing appropriation and a becoming at home, i.e. a nostrification of the foreign that - as not only foreign, which […]  can lead to the complete de-exoticization of the formerly unknown.”[20] Many of those foods nowadays showcased as ‘typical’ dishes in New York and elsewhere derive from places and people of fairly different backgrounds, contributing to a bigger, post-migrant image of empirical and narrated belonging[21]. Although “the advent of a cosmopolitan and lively urban food culture is not an inevitable outcome of economic globalization”[22], the appreciation of the harmless Other contributed to a diversified society, focused on the singular and unique, as opposed to the standardized products of the 20th and 21st century.[23] In terms of food culture, this valorization of particularities creates a certain dilemma: On the one hand, national or religiously determined cuisines – such as the Jewish – are points of reference to determine similarities and differences. On the other hand, this methodological standardization, the subsummation as solely “Jewish” without negotiating its broad character, neglects the diversity behind these terms and the inherent transnational and -cultural intersections. Leaving questionable evaluation criteria such as the degree of authenticity behind, culinary systems can be regarded as an amalgamation of different prerequisites: Jewish cuisine as a non-national but religiously reasoned umbrella term contains everything from lived and subtle traditions to much younger developments and trends. Jewish cuisine largely varies. Focusing on the self-identification of individuals, leaves room for a set of Jewish dietary rules – the Kashrut –, their varying interpretations in relation to several ways of practicing religion and for locally diverse cuisines that have a Jewish side to them, such as the Jewish-Israeli (or Israeli-Jewish) cuisine of the Mediterranean Levante region or the hearty Polish-Jewish (or Jewish-Polish) cuisine, an ideal type of Ashkenazi food styles, and innumerable others. However, the tension between local and global is also evident here: In times of global food and health trends, borders cannot be sustained any longer as clear-cut concepts. Instead, the sometimes eclectic fusion cuisine[24], an interactive, mostly urban trend, crosses culinary systems, when two or more forces are joined to create new dishes and eating habits. They combine various cuisines to add some spice to the culinary currents “between community, memory and identity”[25]. Kosher Sushi or the Ashkenazi chicken soup Golden Joich, aromatized with lemongrass emerge from this dynamic trend “of combining foods from more than one culture in the same dish”[26]. The line between solely and exclusively “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” food thus becomes blurred, if it ever existed at all. Mobility and exchange prove to be as crucial for Jewish history and religious (self-)understanding as for its cuisine.

Established in 2017, the “Jewish Food Society”[27] approaches the branches of Jewish cuisine by following up on passed down family recipes and their origins. It also dwells on the emotions connected to them, testified by family members. The digital archive “works to preserve, celebrate and revitalize Jewish culinary heritage from around the world” through storytelling. Recipe books, cooking tools or certain dishes as well as non-tangible memories of cooking and eating can be understood as family heirlooms, “associated with Jewish cultural heritage that have been passed down through a family over several generations […] important for the formation of collective memories”[28]. Even though it is to question, if traditions, such as recipes, can in fact be passed on over more than three generations, or, which degree of consistency and stability in looks and taste must be present in the dishes that continuity is assumed, the emotions connected to this practice of creating heritage are the actual transmitter. Shared heritage is therefore vital for the creation of affectionate, intergenerational bonds. With people migrating, these bonds have become inter- and transnational. The platform can thus be a vehicle to imagine what can be created, when open-mindedly building up on the passed down: It fosters on the one hand side a community of shared memories, and, on the other hand side, contributes to a valorization, yet not a frantic clinging to these memories and recipes as heritage. Consequently, in an online archive, the aspect of contributing is the key to this process of sharing inspiration.

The homepage of the Jewish Food Society, a “a non-profit organization that works to preserve, celebrate, and revitalize Jewish culinary heritage from around the world in order to provide a deeper connection to Jewish life.” (https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/about).[29]

The families presenting their recipes, mediated by the team of the open-access platform, are these days often located in the US, Israel, or Western European countries such as France or Great Britain. But their ancestry is much more diverse: Old-worldly Ashkenazi and Sephardi livelihoods are the background for the culinary family heritage. Migration stories from the 19th and 20th century up to today – often but not necessarily related to Shoah[30] – form the path of intergenerational, transnational, often also multiethnic and -religious relations through food practices. The recipes’ “roots and routes”[31] describe the ways of immigrant integration[32] – and, vice versa, the incorporation from the immigrants’ side –, a gradual process in which definitions of belonging, of out- and in-side are challenged over and over again. When the family of Becca Gallick-Mitchell[33] celebrates Thanksgiving, a genuine North American family feast, centring around a shared table, they already have a leftover recycling method in mind, “tempted to carve the turkey poorly, leaving more meat on the bones”[34]. The leftover meat is then used to stuff Kreplach, a traditional Ashkenazi dumpling, filled with meat, potatoes, or what is at hand. Their beloved five-generation old recipe, originating from Poland, preserved through the Lodz Ghetto and emigration to the US by their grandmother Mala, serves as a follow-up on the feast they accustomed to in their adult life, mixing local and Jewish customs to create family traditions. Cherishing memories and reliable practices, such as extensively tried and tested recipes, delivers a basis to intergenerational communication. Since the experiences of first- or second-generation immigrants differs significantly from those their children and grandchildren make in a substantially multifaceted environment with loosened bonds to their family’s region of origin, generational gaps do appear e.g., in the mode, quantity, and frequency in which dishes are prepared[35]. Their situation within “a variety of different and often competing generational, ideological and moral points of reference, including those of their parents, their grandparents and their own real and imagined perspectives about their multiple homelands”[36] further complicates the creation of a common identity.

(Post-)Thanksgiving Kreplach -  a mean for intergenerational communication and memory (https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/stories/a-fifth-generation-thanksgiving-kreplach-tradition).

Nevertheless, “food as a bastion of […] religious, spiritual and cultural identity”[37], is a soft though powerful approach to resilient relations, when regarded with a certain openness for its combinability. The descendants of Marie Immerman[38], a first-generation American of Ukrainian origin, are still fond of her sixth generation Coleslaw recipe, likewise a Thanksgiving staple – “simple but trusty.”[39] At the same time, they are adding their personal twists to it: When Jo Betty Sorensen’s mother came to visit “it was interesting because she would grate onion,” while Jo herself would use onion powder.[40] Jo Betty summarizes this observation according to the changing environments the dish has been prepared in and the respective technologies and food trends: “With recipes, people make it their own.”[41]People in specific local, sociocultural contexts inherit their family recipes and adjust them to their needs. Cooking and revising the inherited recipes can thus be a field of intergenerational interaction, including multiple ties not to change but to subtly adapt a dish to make it a lasting, contemporary product. Same applies to Claude and Anna Polonsky’s family[42]: Their Ashkenazi apple strudel – itself a dish with Habsburgian heritage – evolved over time and became an “updated” Ashkenazi-French strudel aux pommes, prepared close to the famous French Tarte Tatin recipe.[43] By re-creating recipes, they are adding up  more and more layers to their shared family history, breaking culinary and national borders but are still staying within the frontiers of the well-known.

Combining religious, national and family holidays to create a personal “culinary canon” (https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/collections/thanksgiving-recipes).

 As Cañás Bottos and Plasil point out for the Levantine and Mizrahi migration to Argentina, four mechanisms – packaging, grinding, mixing and blending[44] – are responsible for the inclusion of migrants and their cuisines in the settling country – and vice versa: People and food are packaged (or labelled) under graspable terms (here: Arab). Especially the following generations are grinded in by language acquisition and schooling. Local circumstances and resources are (partly) mixed with known ones and can even replace those; they blend. The creation of new combinations, such as the post-Thanksgiving-Kreplach, the use of onion powder instead of freshly grated onions, and the preparation of an apple strudel according to French culinary concepts are examples of a process, where cooks and eaters alike are creating a form of “translocal consumer product”[45] with a transgenerational side to it, characterized by various transfers.

This renders the notion of traditional or authentic cuisines highly questionable. Is not almost every dish – especially the nationalized ones – a migratory product, be it the Italian(-American) Pizza with its tomatoes, deriving from Columbian Exchange, or the (stereotypical) German lust for potatoes, stemming from the same place, South America? Yet disputable enough from this radical point of view, one must admit that cuisines are – like the communities they are created in – at least partly imagined, yet highly effective supporters of identity.[46] Collectivity is created through assumptions of standardized belonging, expressed in shared names, dishes and practices, neglecting specificities and other possible dissensions within that frame: same but different. Community cuisines have become more than just necessities – they are cultured, ritualized, traditionalized eating habits. That valuable heritage, passed down and followed up, is kept in their respective families and – see Jewish Food Society – distributed through digitally mediated, yet emotional storytelling, closely relating them to sharing foodstuffs and memories themselves. Preserving recipes for your grandmother’s or -father’s stew is one step in keeping history and its stories alive – but they need to be stirred well from time to time. The act of preserving the old and known might sound like a conservative claim to keep it that way. Still, it can certainly be used in a more productive, proactive way: it can pave the way to a general openness based on recipes as orientation tools and resilient transmitters of emotional bonds. Sharing, trying, and adapting them to today’s needs and beyond offers a glimpse into organic practices of how age-old, non-trivial approaches to e.g., food and nature, food and work, or food and family are intertwined with recent perspectives and challenges. Especially the interconnection of food and migration proves eating culture to be at the same time an artefact of and a glimpse into diversifying, often parallel running patterns of belonging – as here, under the same umbrella of the Jewish cuisine. Therefore, the understanding of these cooking traditions and its transmission is to be read from a resourceful, layered perspective: Jewish Cuisine goes beyond the standard-distinction between Ashkenazi : Sephardi : Mizrahi. It has its feast and its fasting, its seasons and styles, its taboos, and sweet treats – and is spelled out best as pluralistic Jewish Cuisine(s): religious in different intensities and secular, regional and global, fusional, traditional, and re-invented. Everything can be Jewish – and, if not, possibly Jew-ish[47]. In the kitchen, on the plate and beyond, no “either-or”, but a promising “as well as” is crucial for sparking inclusive imagination, for mixing and blending to create dishes not yet tasted. Imagining culinary possibilities is therefore imagining participation, connection, and cooperation.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the team of FoodGuide “Jüdische Küche”, particularly my colleague Antonia Reck, for their support and input in the development of this text - herzlichen Dank!

Author Bio

Jana Stöxen is a doctoral candidate in Comparative European Ethnology at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and holds a scholarship of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation (FES). She is currently working ethnographically on transnational migration and diasporic practices between the Republic of Moldova and Germany. Prior to this, she has been a research associate in the project FoodGuide “Jüdische Küche” on Jewish food and cuisine in Europe. Her research interests lie at the intersection of transformation and migration, and within the spectrum of food and home-making, particularly in post-socialist and transnational contexts.

Contact:
jana.stoexen@gmx.de
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jana-Stoexen

Notes

[1] See: Paulette Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma. Jewish Mexicans in Israel as a transnational community,” Religion and Food, Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 26 (2015): 281–302, 285. doi:10.30674/scripta.67458.

[2] Gunther Hirschfelder, Antonia Reck, and Jana Stöxen, „Jüdische Esskultur: Traditionen und Trends,“ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland 44-45 (2021): 35-41, 35. [original in German; translation by the author]

[3] “Kashrut” is a set of Jewish religious laws, concerning rituals and dietary prescriptions. The term most commonly associated here is “kosher” – the (ritual) “suitability” of certain, e.g. alimentary “pure” products, as pointed out by the Kashrut.

[4] These “groups” share common traits but are within themselves highly heterogenous. Still counting them, based on the combination of religion and ethnicity or heritage, as “groups” is thus a rather pragmatic approach to conceptualize Jewish people and their traditions. However, “groupism” is to be criticized if it goes beyond the methodological sorting and negates intersectional identities and/or personal characteristics.

Also see: Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity without groups,” Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Minority Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50–77, doi:10.1017/cbo9780511489235.004.

[5] See: Gunther Hirschfelder, „Pelmeni, Pizza, Pirogge. Determinanten kultureller Identität im Kontext europäischer Küchensysteme,“ in Russische Küche und kulturelle Identität, ed. Norbert Franz (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2013), 31-50, 32 ff. [original in German; translation by the author]

[6] See: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1991), 6 f.

[7] Johanna Mäkelä, “Defining a Meal,” in Palatable Worlds. Sociocultural Food Studies, ed.  Elisabeth Fürst, Ritva Prättäla, Marianne Ekström et al. (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1991), 87–95, 92.

[8] Gunther Hirschfelder, Jana Stöxen, Markus Schreckhaas, and Antonia Reck. Foodguide Jüdische Küche: Geschichten I Menschen I Orte I Trends (Leipzig: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2022).

[9] Aldea Mulhern, “What does it mean to ‘eat Jewishly’? Authorizing discourse in the Jewish food movement in Toronto, Canada,” Religion and Food, Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 26 (2015): 326-348, 327, doi:10.30674/scripta.67460.

[10] Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peter-Lazaro, and Sangita Shrestova, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

[11] Ibid. 5.

[12] See: Tomasz Kamusella, “Central European Castles in the Air?,” Kakanien revisited, 17.01.2011, accessed May 19, 2021, http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/essay/TKamusella1.pdf, 14 ff.

[13] See: Ibid. 22.

[14] See: Ibid. 21.

[15] See: Alina Gromova, Generation „koscher light“. Urbane Räume und Praxen junger russisch-sprachiger Juden in Berlin (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013).

[16] See: Maren Möhring, “Staging and Consuming the Italian Lifestyle. The Gelateria and the Pizzeria-Ristorante in Post-War Germany,” Food & History 7, no. 2 (2009): 181-202, doi:10.1484/j.food.1.100655.

[17] See: Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[18] See: James Farrer, “Eating the West and Beating the Rest: Culinary Occidentalism and Urban Soft Power in Asia’s Global Food Cities,” in Globalization, Food and Social Identities in the Asia Pacific Region, ed. James Farrer (Tokyo: Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture, 2010), 128-149, 146.

[19] Krishnendu Ray, “A Taste for Ethnic Difference: American Gustatory Imagination in a Globalizing World,” in Globalization, Food and Social Identities in the Asia Pacific Region, ed. James Farrer (Tokyo: Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture, 2010), 97-113, 101.

[20] Maren Möhring, Fremdes Essen. Die Geschichte der ausländischen Gastronomie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (München: Oldenbourg, 2012), 461. [original in German; translation by the author]

[21] See: Naika Fouroutan, “Post-Migrant Society,” in: Unity in Diversity: Integration in a Post-Migrant Society, ed. Naika Foroutan (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2015), accessed January 17, 2022 https://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/migration/kurzdossiers/205295/post-migrant-society.

[22] Farrer, “Eating the West and Beating the Rest,” 146.

[23] See: Andreas Reckwitz, Society of Singularities (Hoboken: Polity, 2020).

[24] See: Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma,” 287.

[25] Hirschfelder, Reck, and Stöxen, „Jüdische Esskultur,“ 39.

[26] Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma,” 287.

[27] Jewish Food Society, 2017, accessed January 7, 2022, https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/.

[28] Jakub Bronec, “Identity in Post-War Jewish Generations through War Souvenirs,” Heritage 2, no. 3 (2019): 1785-1798, 1786, doi:10.3390/heritage2030109.

[29] This screenshot has been taken before the relaunch of the website’s layout. It is now showcasing pictures of the people behind the recipes and particularly the  stories rather than these of the dishes chosen in this initial version

[30] “Shoah” and “Holocaust” are often used as synonyms for the genocide by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. While “Shoah” is the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” or “doom” and is especially used to name the murder of Jews in Europe, “Holocaust” is Greek for “sacrifice by fire” and refers to all people killed. 

[31] Peggy Levitt, “Roots and Routes: Understanding the Lives of the Second Generation Transnationally,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, no. 7 (2009), 1225-1242, doi:10.1080/13691830903006309.

[32] See:  Laura Limonic, Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019).

[33] Becca Gallick-Mitchell provided the story of her family to the online-archive of “Jewish Food Society”. She is an American with Ashkenazi heritage, sharing her families dumpling recipe.

Jewish Food Society, “A Fifth Generation Thanksgiving Kreplach Tradition,” 10.10.2021, accessed January 8, 2022, https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/posts/a-fifth-generation-thanksgiving-kreplach-tradition.

[34] Ibid.

[35] See: Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma,” 298.

[36] Levitt, “Roots and Routes,” 1238.

[37] Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma,” 282.

[38] Marie Immerman was born to Ashkenazi parents from Ukraine in 1895 in New York. Her granddaughter Jo Betty Sorensen presents her recipe for coleslaw on the platform “Jewish Food Society”.

Jewish Food Society. “Six Generations of Coleslaw Makers,” 02.06.2017, accessed on January 8, 2022,

https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/posts/2017/6/2/six-generations-of-coleslaw-makers.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Anna is the daughter of Claude Polonsky, whose parents and grandparents fled the pogroms in Ukraine in 1905 to France. They are sharing there family’s stories and recipes – among them fusions of Ashkenazi and French cuisine – on “Jewish Food Society”.

Jewish Food Society. “Keeping Ashkenazi Recipes Alive in Paris,” 15.01.2020, accessed on January 11, 2022, https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/posts/2020/1/13/keeping-ashkenazi-recipes-alive-in-paris.

[43] Ibid.

[44] See: Lorenzo Cañás Bottos, and Tanja Plasil, “From Grandmother’s Kitchen to Festivals and Professional Chef: The Standardization and Ritualization of Arab Food in Argentina,” in: Objectification and Standardization: On the Limits and Effects of Ritually Fixing and Measuring Life, ed.s Tord Larsen, Michael Blim, Theodore M Porter, Kalpala Ram, and Nigel Rapport (Durham: Ritual Studies Monograph Series, 2021), 151-171, 152 ff.

[45] Möhring, Fremdes Essen, 422.

[46] See: Cañás Bottos and Plasil, “From Grandmother’s Kitchen,” 161 ff.

[47] James Cohen, Jew-ish: A Cookbook: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).