Global Jewish Foodways

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.

"Global Jewish Foodways is a significant contribution to the field of Jewish food studies. It offers a uniformly sophisticated and incisive collection of analyses of Jewish food in a broad range of modern global contexts by many well-known and up-and-coming scholars in Jewish food studies. It is informed by the most up-to-date critical discussions of 'identity' and food preferences and discourses about food as expressions of it."--Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus, professor of religion at Wheaton College --Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus (9/19/2017 12:00:00 AM)
"Finally we have a book on Jewish food that excavates the culinary history of the world's oldest diasporic people. Global Jewish Foodways is a path-breaking collection, the first to track the extraordinarily diverse practices of a minority for whom food serves as a center of their identity. It will immediately become a classic in Jewish studies courses, open up food studies to Jewish perspectives, and excite general readers who want to better understand what constitutes Jewish food."--Roger Horowitz, director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library
--Roger Horowitz (9/19/2017 12:00:00 AM)
"While kosher foods are widely known for marking the Jewish people's distinctiveness, this outstanding volume shows that food also has been a historical source of connection between diasporic Jews and their gentile neighbors around the world. An unrivaled mosaic of the rich, global diversity of Jewish cuisines."--Jeffrey M. Pilcher, University of Toronto Scarborough Research Excellence Faculty Scholar

--Jeffrey M. Pilcher (9/19/2017 12:00:00 AM)
"Global Jewish Foodways is an essay collection that explores how food has helped maintain boundaries for Jews and how those boundaries and their culinary markers have shifted across time and geography. . . . Global Jewish Foodways is also an engaging look at little known chapters in Jewish history, including the millennia-old communities of Iraq, whose existence was cut short after 1948."--David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express--David Luhrssen "Shepherd Express" (9/11/2018 12:00:00 AM)
"An excellent resource for courses on food and foodways, Jewish studies, anthropology, and history courses about areas throughout the world with diasporic populations."--E. Pappas, Choice--E. Pappas "Choice"