Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Four): Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential
/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. It is a marker of religious and cultural belonging, its historical and contemporary features and possesses a commendable diversity, deriving from the various patterns that form belonging to a broader Jewish sphere. Exploring the “Jewish Food Society” with its storytelling around passed down family recipes, I focus on the combination of tradition and adaption. Through a focus on the practices of cooking and eating in a Jewish context, their change overtime, for instance, concerning valorisation and trendsetting, can be traced, and tracked. This adds up to the formation of Jewish cuisine as a term with interconnections between prescribed dietary laws – the Kashrut – and local as well as global conditions, ultimately leading to a pluralistic approach to “Jewish Cuisine”. Sparking civic imagination, this can serve as a soft though powerful approach to resilient relations of inclusivity, when pictured with a certain openness for its combinability.
Read More