Global Jewish Foodways: A History ed. by Hasia R. Diner and Simone Cinotto (review)

In 2014, Hasia R. Diner and Simone Cinotto organized a conference called "The Global History of Jewish Food" in Pollenzo, Italy, with funding from the Goldstein-Goren Foundation. Better organizers would be hard to imagine. Diner is author of a key book in our understanding of foodways and the United States immigrant experience, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (1991), among many other works. Cinotto, also prolific, is similarly well-versed on food in the immigrant experience as the author of The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (2013). Global Jewish Foodways is an outgrowth of their conference, with a dream roster of historians of Jews, food, and culture.

The book's introduction explains that "the essays in Global Jewish Foodways especially address the amazing diversity of political, economic, and cultural changes implicating 'Jewish food' across the varied settings to which Jews migrated and then lived as part of their diaspora" (9). After a brief foreword by Slow Food founder and food studies' biggest celebrity, Carlo Petrini, Cinotto and Diner provide an engaging and readable introduction that begins with a history of food studies—including its purported origin story in anthropologists Mary Douglas and Marvin Harris addressing the origins of kashrut. They then consider major themes in Jewish foodways, providing a road map to the scholarship that follows. The remainder of the book consists of twelve chapters across four parts. Part I, "Crossing and Bridging Culinary Boundaries: Resistance, Resilience, and Adaptations of Jewish Food in the Encounter with the Non-Jewish Other," focuses on Jewish minority communities and their relationship with the majority culture, such as Christians in Renaissance Italy (Flora Cassen); late nineteenth-century peddlers, primarily in Europe (Diner); and Jews among Muslims in Egypt in Iraq (Nancy E. Berg). Part II, "The Politics of Jewish Food: Culinary Articulations of Power, Identity, and State," focuses on food and national identity in the creation of Israeli Cuisine (Ari Ariel); the complex and meaning-laden views of traditionally Jewish food in the Soviet Union (Gennady Estraich); and Sephardic North African Jews in France (Joelle Bahloul). The third part, "The Kosherization of Jewish Food: Playing Out Religion, Taste, and Health in the Marketplace and Popular Culture," illustrates multiple examples of the discourse around food—including modern nutritional science in Eastern Europe (Rakefet Zalashik); cookbooks in Argentina (Adriana Brodsky); and art in Israel (Yael Raviv)—that formed "the definition of 'Jewish food,' and its palatability under different political, cultural, and marketplace conditions" (18).

As one might expect in a book on the food of the Jewish diaspora, the chapters focusing on the Americas come at the end. Part IV, "The Food of the Diaspora: The Global Identity, Memory, and History of Jewish Food," along with Brodsky's chapter in Part III and Diner's chapter in Part I, together could be a reader on American Jewish food history. Opening Part IV is Marion Kaplan considering the permutations of German Jewish foodways from their diasporic home in Germany to their further displacement in Portugal en route to settlements in the Dominican Republic and United States. Annie Polland delves into a particularly American document, Hinde Amchanitski's cookbook, Lehr-bukh vi azoy tsu kukhen und bakhen (1901), published for the Jewish immigrant community of turn-of-the-century New York City and defining what it means to be Jewish in immigrant New York. Concluding the book is Marcie Cohen Ferris's "Dining in the Dixie Diaspora: Jewish Foodways in the American South," a new contribution on a nuanced subject well known to fans of her influential Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (2005).

The result is a rich portrait of the foodways of the Jewish world. As Diner and Cinotto write, "within this metahistorical experience of impermanence and mobility, everyday meals and eating rituals become vital, distinctive markers of identity for Jews in the different places...