Toward a Kashrut Nation in American Jewish Cookbooks, 1990–2000

Toward a Kashrut Nation in American Jewish Cookbooks, 1990-2000 Laurence Roth Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 28, Number 2, Winter 2010, pp. 65-91 (Article) Published by Purdue University Press DOI: 10.1353/sho.0.0489

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Toward a Kashrut Nation in American Jewish Cookbooks, 1990–2000 Laurence Roth Susquehanna University This essay examines five significant cookbooks published between 1990 and 2000 to determine the relation between the sharp increase in emphasis during the 1990s on kashrut, on the Jewish dietary laws, in the introductions and recipes of commercially published American Jewish cookbooks, and the concomitant “discovery,” during the same period and in many of the same books, of a distinctively Jewish cuisine. I argue that these cookbooks fashioned a symbolic Jewish interpretive community, a kashrut nation, which justified and explained Jewish cuisine and forwarded a collective identity roomy enough for most American Jews. Such a kashrut nation also makes clear how contemporary anxiety about Jewish affiliation and Jewish continuity was assuaged through a renewed interest in cookbooks, and in the end illustrates how U.S. cultural and economic power was drafted in service of selling, and branding, a new Jewish cultural production.

Wander the cookbook aisles in any of the corporate chain-bookstores these days and you will find yourself amidst fantasies as compelling and outlandish as any work of genre fiction. From sci-fi, gadget cookery to the menus of the American old west, from romantic, neo-colonial dishes to the recipes of hardboiled, urban hot spots, visions of good things to eat and of alluring peoples and places shimmer on six-color jacket covers. No doubt, cookbooks are popular and highly profitable narratives of culinary and cultural promise. Though the majority of titles are still pitched toward middle and upper middle-class women, they attract readers of all kinds, including academics intrigued by the storytelling these narratives record, incite, and abet. For like all formula literatures, food tales provide both entertainment and popular recipes for constructing and conveying social and cultural knowledges.1

1 On formula literatures see John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); and Janice Radway, Reading

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This rhetorical aspect of cookbooks—that they argue for various and variously desired standards, ideals, and visions that tempt and vex gendered, middle-class identities—is well noted by scholars.2 Studies of the rhetoric in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish cookbooks and about Jewish food in the early modern and modern eras, as John Cooper, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Jenna Weisman Joselit, Jack Kugelmass, Claudia Roden, and Hasia Diner have shown, suggest that cookbooks and food offer yet another opportunity for modern Jewish self-explanation and self-justification, another opportunity to worry about not only the meanings attending “a range of Jewish religious and cultural expression,” as Ruth Abusch-Magder says, but also the dynamics of Jewish acculturation and identity politics.3 Given the fertile ground these scholars have cleared, there is much incentive now to push these investigations beyond the middle of the last century— beyond issues related to modern interpretations of Jewish theologies of food, or to permutations of Jewish food practices attending Jewish acculturation in

the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). I use the term “formula literatures,” rather than “formula stories” or “popular literature,” as a more accurate designation for the variety of popular narratives that employ or depend upon a recognized formula for their fictional or non-fictional storytelling, but which are not belles lettres or journalism. Cookbooks, comics, and even calendars are better categorized this way given how similar their narrative strategies are to formula stories in general. 2 Cookbooks marshal and disseminate notions about gender roles and social norms; about community and politics; about ethnic selves and ethnic Others; about national cuisine and personal identity; about feminine stereotypes and their feminist refigurings; and about autobiography as fictional leftover and Derridean supplement. See Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Anne L. Bower, ed. Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Glynis Ridley, “The First American Cookbook,” Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1999): 114–123; Steve Siporin, “From Kashrut to Cucina Ebraica: The Recasting of Italian Jewish Foodways,” Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 107, No. 424 (1994): 268–281; Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 30. No. 1 (1988): 3–24; Susan J. Leonardi, “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie,” PMLA, Vol. 104 (1989): 430–447; and Parama Roy, “Reading Communities and Culinary Communities: The Gastropoetics of the South Asian Diaspora,” positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2002): 471–502. 3 Ruth Abusch-Magder, “Cookbooks,” in Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. I A—L (New York, London: Routledge, 1997): 281–287. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

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Europe and America—and to consider the rhetoric of contemporary Jewish cookbooks that have thus far escaped study. Like popular narratives in general, these cookbooks, part of an ever-evolving American formula literature, service readers’ desire for instruction about and solutions to the confusions of social and cultural change. Recent examples will, therefore, raise new questions about something as slippery and shape-shifting as Jewish “expression.” In this essay I examine five cookbooks published between 1990 and 2000 in order to answer the following question: What is the relation between the sharp increase in emphasis during the 1990s on kashrut, on the Jewish dietary laws, in the introductions and recipes of commercially published American Jewish cookbooks, and the concomitant “discovery,” during the same period and in many of the same books, of a distinctively Jewish cuisine? Kashrut has always been invoked or, at the very least, gestured towards in American Jewish cookbooks. But the rhetorical functions it served within the cookbook formula have changed over time. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s analysis of the first commercially published American Jewish cookbook, Mrs. Esther Levy’s Jewish Cookery Book (published in Philadelphia in 1871), makes clear that Levy frames kashrut, as Lady Judith Montefiore did earlier in The Jewish Manual (published in London in 1846), as a “logistical problem” of middle-class taste and social ambition whose solution opens the Jewish table to the gentile world.4 In the same vein, Jenna Weissman Joselit and Hasia Diner argue that during and after the great wave of Jewish immigration between 1880 and 1924 Jewish cookbooks in Yiddish and English tried to stem the decline of kashrut observance by making the Jewish dietary laws compatible with the American table and with the middle-class aspirations of many American Jews.5 After World War II, as the pace of Jewish acculturation increased, and as kashrut observance declined even more precipitously, kashrut

Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “The Kosher Gourmet in the Nineteenth-Century Kitchen: Three Jewish Cookbooks in Historical Perspective,” The Journal of Gastronomy, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1988): 57 and 62. 5 Jenna Weissman Joselit, “Food Fight: The Americanization of Kashrut in Twentieth-Century America,”in Leonard J. Greenspoon, Ronald A. Simkins, and Gerald Shapiro, eds., Food and Judaism, Studies in Jewish Civilization, Volume 15 (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2005), pp. 335–345, and The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 180 and 177; Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, & Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2001). 4

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in American Jewish cookbooks evoked nostalgia and served as a vestment for the display of ethnic pride.6 Take, for example, Jennie Grossinger’s The Art of Jewish Cooking (1958), a celebration of and public relations tool for Grossinger’s resort hotel in the Catskills.7 The introduction by Paul Grossinger is meant to be a loving tribute to his mother, who kept a strictly kosher kitchen, but that tribute has the unwitting effect of cloaking the observance of kashrut within the figure of “Mom.” That is, the figure of the Jewish mother becomes the outward manifestation of the secret ingredient that leavens Jewish identity and helps explain Jewish success in both the domestic and public spheres of American life. Mom, a stand in for kashrut, thus becomes a metonymy for Jewish cooking.8 Such a Jewish mother allays anxiety among Jews and non-Jews about Jewish adaptation of middle-class values and behaviors, especially those revolving around family, food, and commensality. That accounts, in part, for the popularity of cookbooks like The Art of Jewish Cooking, The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook (1955), Sara Kasdan’s Love and Knishes (1956), and Ruth and Bob Grossman’s Chinese-Kosher, Italian-Kosher, and French-Kosher Cookbooks (published in 1963, 1964, and as a collected volume in 1965).9 The Grossmans’ cookbooks, mixing pride with mockery, feature the 82 year-old “Grandma” Slipakoff, “the sensation of Bensonhurst,” a character whose recipes (“Foh Nee Shrimp Puffs,” “Matzo Brei Foo Yong,” and “Spinach Mish Ah Gahs”) and Yiddish inflected sentence structures (“a little oil you should put in the frying pan;” “you’re using maybe chopsticks?”) makes kashrut the butt of a joke il-

6 This ethnic display follows general trends in postwar American cookbooks. As Jessamyn Neuhaus notes, the cookbook market expanded rapidly after the war, and the concomitant explosion of specialized and niche cookbooks (including ethnic cookbooks) pushed all but the most well known general cookbooks out of demand (Neuhaus, Manly Meals, p. 166). 7 Jennie Grossinger, The Art of Jewish Cooking (New York: Random House, 1958). 8 As Grossinger proudly writes, “French cuisine may be famous for its Escoffier. Italian for its Alfredo. But Jewish cooking—well, for generations and generations, way back to Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel, the master chef has always been the mistress of the particular tent: Mom” (p. viii). 9 Gertrude Berg and Myra Waldo, The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook (reprint, New Hope, PA: Ivyland Books, 1999); Sara Kasdan, Love and Knishes: An Irrepressible Guide to Jewish Cooking, rev. ed. (Alexander, NC: Alexander Books, 1997); Ruth and Bob Grossman, The Kosher-Cookbook Trilogy: The Chinese-Kosher Cookbook, The Italian-Kosher Cookbook, and The French-Kosher Cookbook (New York: Paul S. Eriksson, Inc., 1965).

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lustrating that American Jews are open to cultural novelty and are capable of mocking their own cultural and culinary parochialism. The meaning of kashrut changed again with the publication of Edda Machlin’s The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews (1981).10 Machlin yoked kashrut to the burgeoning middle-class American “foodie” culture of the eighties with its hedonistic interest in food scholarship and the recovery of “authentic” international cuisines and modes of preparation.11 In her introduction, Machlin explains the laws of kashrut in light of the Italian Jews’ culinary differences from Ashkenazi Jews, and then notes that “‘Kosher kitchen’ meant to us—besides the observance of basic kosher laws—using first quality food and being extremely fussy about the preparation of our meals.”12 Machlin’s yoking of kosher and “first quality” appealed to middle-class American Jewish readers because it allied Italian-Jewish cuisine with gourmet cuisine in general. By the end of the nineteen-eighties kashrut had receded so far into the culinary background of Jewish cookbooks that Barbara Bloch (writing in Ireland for U.K. and U.S. publishers) could declare in A Little Jewish Cookbook (1989), “Jewish cooking is not necessarily kosher food cooked according to ancient religious dietary laws.”13 A year later, however, Spice and Spirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cookbook (1990)14 signaled the beginning of a new phase in the rhetorical function of kashrut in commercially published American Jewish cookbooks. That phase is related to the resurgence, during the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, of traditional Jewish religious observance in the U.S. and the drafting of Jewish history and memory as a bulwark against American Jew’s putative cultural and demographic decline. Spice and Spirit is therefore the first of the five cookbooks I use to marshal an answer to my question above. I cannot, of course, survey all the Jewish cookbooks published in the last decade of the twentieth-century. My choice of texts is predicated, first, on the clarity with which they exemplify certain aspects of and historical developments in the rhetorical function of kashrut in American cookbooks, and, second, on their authors’ reputations as experts in

10 Edda Servi Machlin, The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews: Traditional Recipes and Menus and a Memoir of a Vanished Way of Life (New York: Everest House Publishers, 1981). 11 Neuhaus, Manly Meals, p. 263. 12 Machlin, The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, p. 14. 13 Barbara Bloch, A Little Jewish Cookbook (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989), p. 1. 14 Esther Blau, Tzirrel Deitsch, and Cherna Light, Spice and Spirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cookbook (Brooklyn, NY: Lubavitch Women’s Cookbook Publications, 1990). Hereafter cited in the text as SS.

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Jewish cooking and foods. Each of these cookbooks—Spice and Spirit, Copeland Marks’s Sephardic Cooking (1992), Gil Marks’sThe World of Jewish Cooking (1996), Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food (1996), and Faye Levy’s 1,000 Jewish Recipes (2000)—argue for the existence of a Jewish cuisine equal to, and as distinctive as, the cuisines of other nationalities, but they employ this apparently “national” cuisine to illustrate the transnational character of Jewish practices and identities.15 And each of these cookbooks harnesses the narrative strategies and cultural power of an American formula literature to construct within that literature a symbolic Jewish interpretive community, a kashrut nation, one grounded in the customs and recipes associated with the Jewish dietary laws.16 Like any interpretive community, whether a focus

15 I find that the way “transnational” is employed and/or described by Paik Nak-chung (who cites Goethe and Marx) and Michael Berube (who cites Andrew Hoberek and Paul Jay), is most useful for describing the knowledges present in American Jewish cookbooks. For Nak-chung, “transnational,” as in “a transnational movement for world literature,” refers to a kind of creative and intellectual networking by writers and literary intellectuals around the globe achieved “through reading of one another’s work and shared knowledge of the important journals as well as through personal contact” (Paik Nak-chung, “Nations and Literatures in the Age of Globalization,” in Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization, [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998], p. 223). For Berube, “transnational,” as in “a transnational perspective on English” (which he more specifically, and more consistently, terms the “globalization of English”), is the recognition that American writers and literary intellectuals have available to them, and ought to avail themselves of, a wide range and mix of world literatures and traditions, which are accessible courtesy of modern technologies and global information flows (Michael Berube, “Introduction: Worldly English,” Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 [2002]: 4–5 and 8). Both these usages help to frame my drafting of “transnational” to denote a process of literary and cultural communication and to connote the flow of Jewish cultural capital and American Jewish literary longing across national lines. 16 Calling the object of my analysis “a symbolic Jewish interpretive community” underlines my interest in this essay in exploring a particular rhetorical design within five American Jewish cookbooks and the way that design, and these texts, construct a community of readers. Calling such a community symbolic acknowledges that I am not surveying a group of actual readers and that my own interpretive biases are implicated here, that what I have noticed is “what has been made noticeable, not by a clear and undistorting glass, but by an interpretive strategy,” as Stanley Fish points out in “Interpreting the Variorum,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, general ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 2084. The question of how readers used these cookbooks, and whether they adopted their interpretive strategies, lies outside the scope of this essay. I do not offer a sociological or anthropological study here. A symbolic Jewish interpretive community is therefore my portmanteau term for a representation of Jewish readers and of a certain kind of reading, both of which are made in and by the text. James L.

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imaginarius or a specific group of people, the kashrut nation I posit in these cookbooks justifies and explains—in this case that there is a Jewish cuisine, one that forwards a collective identity roomy enough for most American Jews. Such a kashrut nation thus helps explain how anxiety about Jewish affiliation and Jewish continuity among American Jews during the nineteen-nineties was assuaged through that decade’s renewed interest in cookbooks, and in the end illustrates how U.S. cultural and economic power was drafted in service of selling, and branding, a new Jewish cultural production. From the Jewish Dietary Laws to a Kashrut Nation

That the Jewish dietary laws were integral to the arguments that constructed a national transnational cuisine ought to be little surprise. Kashrut, after all, refers to the religious practice that is the ostensible foundation of all Jewish culinary practices (separating meat and milk, ritual slaughter, etc.). But that word’s root, “kasher,” belies the particular rhetorical usefulness of kashrut. Kasher means “fit,” “proper,” or “legitimate,” and, as Mary Douglas and others who have theorized the meaning of the Jewish dietary laws argue, in the context of the laws in Deuteronomy “fitness” rhetorically elaborates the idea of holiness as separation, restriction, and wholeness—what is “fit” is that which is religiously and culturally “set apart.”17 In that light, kashrut is both a set of

Machor, in a very helpful footnote in his article “The Object of Interpretation and Interpretive Change,” MLN, Vol. 113, No. 5 (1998): 1126–1150, notes that Fish has defined an interpretive community both as a group of individuals who share reading strategies and as a more abstract idea, “a point of view or way of organizing experiences,” and that for him Tony Bennet’s term “reading formation” better suits the latter definition (p. 1145). While I acknowledge the practicality of Machor’s distinction, “interpretive community” better conveys a sense of collectivity, that feeling of belonging for which the five cookbooks I discuss stoke great desire. 17 Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Poluution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), famously interprets the Jewish dietary laws as extensions of the ancient Israelite conception of holiness as separateness and wholeness: “To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual and of the kind. The dietary rules merely develop the metaphor of holiness on the same lines” (p. 55). Reading the negative rules of kashrut through this lens, Douglas concludes, “If the proposed interpretation of the forbidden animals is correct, the dietary laws would have been like signs which at every turn inspired meditation on the oneness purity and completeness of God. By rules of avoidance holiness was given a physical expression in every encounter with the animal kingdom and at every meal” (p. 58). Jean Soler, in “The Semiotics of Food in the Bible,” in Carol Counihan and Penny Van Estrick, eds., Food and Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), takes a related perspective on Vol. 28, No. 2

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rules, which may or may not be adhered to in the cookbooks themselves, and a kind of floating signifier, an indeterminable word whose connotations and associations mobilize Jewish difference, solidarity, and legitimacy. This is evident even in an Orthodox cookbook such as Spice and Spirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cookbook, which delimits and rationalizes the meaning of kashrut as a system of easily applicable laws for the Jewish kitchen. A publication of the Lubavitch Hasidim, it was originally published in 1980 as a community cookbook and guide to Jewish holiday cooking. The 1990 commercial edition was retooled to appeal to both long-time Crown Heights residents and the new influx of ba’alei t’shuva, returnees to the faith, from the U.S. and South America (the Lubavitch, noted for outreach programs that aim to bring non-observant Jews closer to Judaism, vigorously expanded those programs during the nineteen-nineties).18 Spice and Spirit not only emphasizes the close relation of kosher to Jewish, but, as the opening pages testify, of both those terms to memory—memory of Orthodox people, observance, and domestic arrangements. Spice and Spirit is dedicated to the memory of Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson, the wife of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the late Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. The epigraph for the Rebbetzin’s biographical sketch is taken from Ecclesiastes 7:2: “And the living should take it to heart. . . .” Such memorializing is meant to figure the rebbetzin as an exemplar of a proper Jewish woman’s behavior. Taking her memory to heart will presumably lead ba’alei t’shuva and even non-observant Jewish women to a more stringent observance of Jewish law. Yet the cookbook seems quite aware that memory alone, culinary or otherwise, cannot move readers to a more observant Judaism, especially if there is uncertainty about how collective that memory is. As the editors admit, “our culinary horizons have broadened. We have become, as a society, more sophisticated and knowledgeable about food, with more people taking an interest in gourmet cooking, in healthful eating, and in new cuisine styles” (SS 13). In order to manage such diversity every recipe in the cookbook is accompanied by a

the metaphor of holiness, arguing that the laws of kashrut are “a matter of upholding the separation between two classes or two types of relationships. . . . Everyone belongs to one species only, one people, one sex, one category” (p. 64). Unfortunately, at the end of his essay Soler applies his reading to a critique of “Hebrew civilization,” its abhorrence of hybridity, and thus to Israeli xenophobia and political intransigence. For an overview of such structuralist approaches to the dietary laws, as well as other approaches, see also John Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food (Northvale, New Jersey; London: Jason Aronson Inc., 1993). 18 Diner, The Jews of the United States, p. 313 Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

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logo identifying its relevant horizon: ”Quick and Easy,” “Advance Preparation,” “Traditional,” “Natural,” “International,” and “Gourmet.” More importantly, the editors also take care to explain that “spice,” the multifarious kosher dishes in the cookbook, is “inseparably intertwined” with “spirit,” the laws of kashrut and the customs that derive from it. So while the cookbook opens by referencing the power and symbolism of Jewish memory, just to be on the safe side (and in order to assign a provenance and content to that memory) it then proceeds to nineteen pages of detailed explanation and instruction for the observance of kashrut, kashrut supervision, and the various blessings on food and after eating. Kashrut in Spice and Spirit is therefore not just a set of laws, but a safety net with which to catch Jews in danger of falling out of Jewish memory. Fitting kashrut to such a purpose reflects not only the editors’ awareness of ba’alei t’shuva among their audience, but also of discussions and arguments in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties about intermarriage and the role of Jewish women as guardians of the home front and of the Jewish kitchen, “the workshop for both the Jewish body and soul” (SS 16), as the cookbook puts it. This “crisis” of intermarriage and of the domestic sphere was reflected as well in the controversial 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. The rhetorical function of kashrut in Spice and Spirit, published the same year, points to the gendered anxiety and outright fear about American Jewish biological assimilation that the NJPS both mirrored and provoked through still challenged and debated statistics such as: “Of 5.6 million Jews, 2 million American Jews live in households identified as non-Jewish;” “Since 1985, 52% of Jews who married have done so outside the faith;” “1 million, or 54% of all American Jewish children under the age of 18 are being raised as non-Jews or with no religion;” “Of the population that consists of people who were born Jewish and are Jewish by choice, only 11% attend synagogue weekly.” 19 Spice and Spirit represented one Lubavitch response to the generally low levels of religious literacy among American Jews. It was praised for its “detailed instructions” and “definitions of what makes food kosher,”20 and for being “a culinary kosher food encyclopedia.”21 But it also offered a culturally conservative response to a larger issue behind the NJPS findings and its alarms over intermarriage: a contentious and growing struggle over American Jewish reli-

Cited in “J2K Problem……,” National Jewish Outreach Program website, http://www. whymarryjewish.com/j2k.html (accessed 9/14/04). 20 Florence Fabricant, “Food Notes,” New York Times, December 12, 1990, p. C9. 21 Myra Chanin, review of Spice and Spirit, Jewish Exponent, Philadelphia, February 7, 1992, 191.6, p. 7X. 19

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gious and cultural diversity. The beginning of the nineteen-nineties witnessed a deepening of religious tensions among American Jews and a growing division over Israel—over the power and influence of the Orthodox in Israeli society and over the government’s response to the first Palestinian Intifada (1987). Jewish feminism and liberal Judaism challenged traditional modes of Jewish worship and community. And, as the Orthodox renaissance (part of the general cultural swing toward religious conservatism and evangelism in America) made itself increasingly felt and heard in American Jewish politics and culture, the question “who is a Jew?” sparked heated debates in America about Jewish identity. As Spice and Spirit exemplifies, answers to that question and to the new challenges of Jewish diversity, across the denominational and political spectrum, often employed traditional sources for evidence and support.22 Indeed, Spice and Spirit in particular bears out Haym Soloveitchik’s famous observation about contemporary Orthodoxy’s “shift of authority to texts and their enshrinement as the sole source of authenticity,” and thereby transforming into “a religiosity rooted in texts.”23 This had far-reaching consequences for all denominations of Judaism and, in this case, for Jewish cookbooks and the creation of a distinctively Jewish cuisine. Spice and Spirit is important not only because it referenced traditional texts, but also because it flaunted its status as a religiously informed and sanctioned text, its status as an authoritative Jewish culinary text. Aside from the opening chapter on kashrut, “Kashrut: Spiritual Nutrition,” the cookbook also includes chapters at volume’s end on the laws of the Sabbath, “Shabbat: Light, Blessing and Peace,” and on the Jewish calendar, “The Jewish Year: Sanctification of Time.” Spice and Spirit’s foregrounding of

22 For an example related to the challenge of feminism at the turn of the decade, see the chapter relating the learned dispute within the Library Minyan of Temple Beth Am, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, over incorporating the Imahot into the Amidah in Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Also evocative is the contemporaneous commercial success of Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991), and the University of California Press’ advertising slogan promoting Lynn Davidman’s book, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism—“Back to Basics.” Under that slogan were blurbs by Judith Plaskow and Beverly W. Harrison; the ad itself appeared in a number of publications, including Commentary, Vol. 93, No. 3 (March 1992): 61. 23 Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” in Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Chaim I. Waxman, eds., Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1999), p. 339.

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Jewish law, its deployment of kashrut as both a safety net and an interpretive strategy for understanding non-traditional and international variations on Jewish culinary practices, manifests one of the first appearances in cookbooks of a symbolic Jewish interpretive community rooted in texts and at peace with its own diversity—a kashrut nation. Exotica, Gender, and the Construction of Nationhood

My calling that community a “nation” not only acknowledges Spice and Spirit’s traditional understanding of a Jewish collective as Am Yisrael, the spiritual nation of Israel, but also Arjun Appadurai’s hypothesis about the ways that cookbooks construct a national cuisine. Appadurai analyzes how cookbooks in India formulated a postindustrial, national cuisine at a relatively late date in comparison with European nation states, a cuisine influenced by both indigenous and diasporic social situations and cultural practices. He suggests that the yoking together of the parochial with the cosmopolitan—that is, joining stories about regional or ethnic culinary practices and actors to categories of taste and table produced by transnational culture industries—heralds the emergence of a national cuisine.24 For Appadurai, “nation” and “nationhood” refer not just to a particular geography, but also to the literary construction of social and cultural bonds across times, places, and languages through the rehearsal in cookbooks of distinct (albeit in many cases reified and inflated) memories and specific cultural practices. Some of these are familiar and others exotic, but together they advertise, and provide a warrant for, a social and cultural collective.25 Nationhood, in this sense, is an appetite for belonging. Cookbooks, by telling stories about all the strange, manifold dishes eaten in the past, some of which can never be recreated or recaptured, and by invoking and retelling those stories within new historical contexts, become a vehicle for organizing and describing such a nationhood. Certainly the nineteen-nineties offered new historical contexts, especially in relation to what a Jewish collectivity, a Jewish “nationhood” outside of the Israeli nation state, connoted to contemporary American Jews. Kashrut in these cookbooks, as in Spice and Spirit, makes available an apparently authentic ground for a multifarious Jewish identity and collectivity during a period that brought into contention various ideologies stoking a desire among Jews to belong—to affiliate with Judaism or some type of Jewishness. 24

Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine,” p. 15.

25

Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine,” pp. 18–21. Vol. 28, No. 2

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A prime example of this is Copeland Marks’s Sephardic Cooking: 600 Recipes Created in Exotic Sephardic Kitchens from Morocco to India (1992).26 Marks’ cookbook is a display of Jewish culinary memory fashioned as a form of Jewish exoticism. His cookbook, published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of Jews from Spain, was certainly not the first to feature Sephardic dishes and recipes. It is, nevertheless, unique in that he combines the cookbook formula with a travelogue, he identifies kashrut as the “common factor in these exotic cuisines” (SC viii), and he idealizes the Sephardic world as the very model of a resilient Jewish collective. Though Marks does not discuss kashrut in detail, its rhetorical function as the “common factor” in the exotic is clarified if we first examine his understanding of “Sephardic” and “exotic.” In his introduction, “Exotic Sephardic Kitchens,” Marks acknowledges that writing his book was both an act of tourism and a personal pilgrimage, a mode of “cooking, nibbling, tasting, writing, while collecting recipes of Sephardic communities,” most of which no longer exist. These communities offer both lessons in Jewish adaptability and important resources for modern Jewish identities: What is the passionate need to record the Jewish culinary environments in little known places? In my opinion, the preservation of ethnicity, something from the past that endures through the oral tradition, is my raison d’être for recording what is quite obviously disappearing. Judaic cooking became particularly fragile as individuals or groups fled, pursued out of ancient homelands by the bigotry of man. Only the strong Jewish capacity for adaptation and endurance in periods of both extravagance and denial saves culinary traditions from oblivion. (SC vii)

The connecting of ethnicity with tradition, of tradition with ancient homelands outside Israel, and those homelands with histories of abundance and security as well as lack and persecution is telling. Marks’ narrative employs an American Jewish perspective on identity as a form of ethnic memory deserving of preservation and primarily evident through the productions and performances of material culture.27 It also reflects a contemporaneous attraction to the Sephardic world as a model for a Jewish collective adaptable not only to periods of persecution, but also to periods when Jews are welcomed

26 Copeland Marks, Sephardic Cooking: 600 Recipes Created in Exotic Sephardic Kitchens from Morocco to India (New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1992). Hereafter cited in the text as SC. 27 See Stephen Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1999) and Jack Kugelmass, “Keys and Canons,” in Jack Kugelmass, ed., Key Texts in American Jewish Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

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and successful within the host country—a projection of a particularly American Jewish anxiety about acculturation.28 The recipes themselves, as Marks admits, derive both from countries firmly associated with Sepharad and those utterly remote from it. His rationale for including the Jews of Yemen, Ethiopia, Soviet Georgia, Bukhara, and India is that their “inclusion in this book is based upon their connection with the ritual of Talmudic Baghdad and by extension, therefore, of Spain” (SC viii). Since the Babylonian Talmud is the fountainhead for the rituals of all post-Rabbinic Jewish communities, this rationale makes less sense than the sentence following it, which admits that the recipes are included simply because “they are not of the Ashkenazi of Europe” (SC viii)—“Sephardic” is just a term for exotic Jewish Others. Thus the recipes in Marks’s cookbook are really souvenirs of the exotic. They are culinary tchotchkes that Marks shleps back to readers via narratives that provide a new culinary and cultural network for American Jews to explore. Little wonder, then, that the travelogue formula works so well within the confines of Marks’s cookbook. Each country is introduced by a photo of some relevant food professional, food site, foodstuff, or food ritual supposedly common to Jews in that country, as well as an introduction that provides, first, a brief history of Jews in that country, second, the style of cooking that distinguishes them, and, third, a personal experience or reflection by Marks based on his travels there. The net effect of these introductions, however, is paradoxical. On the one hand, each community is unique: the Kurdish Jews were farmers; the Iraqi Jews were traders; the Georgian Jews may be descendents of

That attraction is evident in both the academy and in the general journalism of the time. On the one hand, see Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19 (Summer 1993): 693–725, and the discussion of it in James Clifford “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 9, No. 3 (August 1994): 302–338. The Boyarins argue for an eclectic, synthetic ethnocentrism whose ideal manifestation—whose home—was Muslim Spain during the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, see the reviews of Marks’ cookbook and the sidebar articles that explained the Jewish dietary laws and defined for general audiences terms like “diaspora”: “Diaspora—dispersion, scattering—is the word used for the movement of the Spanish Jews after the expulsion. They moved slowly but surely, fanning out across the globe” (Ann Burckhardt, “The Cuisine of Spanish Jewry Sepharad,” Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], Taste; Pg. 1T). See also Bev Bennet, “Exploring the Routes of Sephardic Cuisine; Variety at Heart of Sephardic Cuisine,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 9, 1992, Food; p. 1; NC; Sheryl Julian, “The Sephardic Connection: From Morocco to India,” The Boston Globe, June 14, 1992, Magazine; p. 25; and Leslye Michlin Borden, “Savor a Sephardic Sampling for Passover,” St. Petersburg Times (Florida), April 16, 1992, Food; p. 1D. 28

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the Ten Lost Tribes; the Bukharan Jews were court musicians; the Ethiopian Jews may derive from a Jewish colony founded by a son of King Solomon; the Jews of India comprise three distinct groups, one of which arrived by shipwreck in 175 B.C.E. and one of which has skin so dark its members are called “Black Jews;” and the Moroccan, Tunisian, and Libyan Jews suffered but also, remarkably, flourished under the Arabs. On the other hand, each community’s cooking style and taste preferences are exactly similar to those of the peoples among whom they lived: Turkish Jews, like Turks, are fond of sweets; Greek Jews, like Greeks, use a lot of vegetables; Iranian Jews, like Iranians, prefer rice and favor onions; Georgian Jews, like Georgians, prefer bread and favor walnut-based sauces; Egyptian Jews, like Egyptians, use pepper and allspice as their primary seasonings. But this paradox is precisely what underscores the rhetorical function of kashrut in Sephardic Cooking. These introductions provide any number of communal and culinary correlatives bolstering the argument that to be a Jew means being the same as, yet different from, the peoples among whom Jews live. In fact, Marks’s travelogues specialize in stories about finding similarity amidst difference. So, for example, whether in India or Ethiopia, Greece or Libya, the Sephardic kitchen is the always-diverse expression of the Jewish capacity to do the same thing again and again: adapt and succeed. Of course the foremost difference that belies similarity, and which necessitates culinary adaptability in the first place, is kashrut. Kashrut, in other words, is the common factor in the exotic because it makes the exotic—kashrut as culinary and cultural difference—familiar, and makes the familiar—that kashrut is the same everywhere—seem exotic. Throughout the cookbook, Marks takes care to ground his adaptable Jewish collective within the recipes and customs associated with the laws of kashrut. Whatever the cooking style, Sephardic cooking is kosher cooking, and, as the diligent reader soon learns, kosher cooking not only refers to recipes that follow kashrut. It also refers to the diverse recipes for the one constant dish in virtually every country—the Sabbath stew. Sephardic Cooking is a cornucopia of t’finas, scheenas, hameens, harissim, and various versions of heuvos haminados (long cooked eggs). The Sabbath stew becomes the most resonant, and redolent, manifestation of the laws of kashrut, one that ties all the different recipes together, and not just to the exotic kitchens they emanate from. For Marks is quick to point out that a hameen is really just a Sephardic cholent, the Ashkenazi Sabbath stew that is familiar to most American Jews who trace their forebears to Eastern and Central Europe. As this example makes clear, the rhetorical function of kashrut in Marks’s cookbook is one predicated on a kind of rhetorical traveling between the faShofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

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miliar and the exotic, self and Other. This is brought home visually in the one photograph of Marks included in the book. Amidst all the photos of strange peoples and places, the photo for the section on the Jews of Calcutta features Marks and two unidentified men standing in front of the aron kodesh, the Torah ark, in Calcutta’s Maghen David Synagogue holding three “antique torah scrolls” (SC 326), a picture that would hardly look out of place if readers came across it in an American synagogue newsletter. See, the photo seems to say, I have entered the exotic and it is just like home. And so Marks himself becomes, like kashrut, part of his food story about differences that reveal similarity: the author as familiar for the exotic.29 Sephardic Cooking thus presented Jewish readers in the early nineteennineties with a story about an idealized Sephardic world that functioned in many ways as an argument for a kashrut nation that transcended time and place and offered access to and responsibility for Jewish “tradition.” Given the communal and religious conflicts of the time, the attraction of Marks’s story to those readers is precisely that it proffered such historical, geographical, and denominational transcendence. By doing so Marks’s kashrut nation stabilized and expanded both Jewish cuisine and Jewish identity in a way that flattered American Jews, who are predominantly Ashkenazi. For, as with the photo of Marks, the cookbook mirrored a familiar Ashkenazi culture dressed up in the exotic garb of Sepharad and thereby stoked pride in, and helped assuage anxiety about, Jewish antiquity, Jewish particularity, and especially Jewish continuity. Hence one comforting lesson of Marks’s story is that differences among Jews always disguise their essential similarity, and indeed are evidence of it. Another is that Jewish identity is not only exotic (and therefore as complex and intriguing as any other immigrant and post-immigrant ethnic identity in America), but also dependent simply on a desire to be part of Jewish tradition—a desire, in other words, for the resources and pleasures of a Jewish collective, one delimited by kashrut but easily available to non-observant readers who can sate their hunger to belong to such a symbolic Jewish interpretive community by making and eating the dishes preserved in Sephardic Cooking. Marks’s success inaugurated a host of cookbooks that explored Sephardic cooking and the newly emerging transnational national Jewish cuisine, books

This seems appropriate for Marks, whose culinary authority was predicated on travel; he worked in the Foreign Service and his family business was importing exotic foods and textiles. See Eleanor Charles, “Westchester Guide,” New York Times, June 19, 1994, p. A8; and Eric Asimov, “Copeland Marks, 78, Author of Books on Exotic Cuisine,” New York Times, January 2, 2000, Obituaries, p. 35. 29

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that continued to recover the Jewish religious food practices and the culinary and cultural diversity that testified to the existence of a Jewish cuisine, and thus to the stability of Jewish identity. For the most part books like Joan Nathan’s Jewish Cooking in America (1994) and The Jewish Holiday Kitchen (1998), Ethel Hofman’s Everyday Cooking for the Jewish Home (1997), Joyce Goldstein’s Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen (1998), and David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson’s A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Secret Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews (1999)30 sidestep the resurgence of Orthodox religiosity and focus instead on the flatteries of Jewish history and exotica that made Sephardic Cooking so appealing to all denominations and types of American Jews. Such blandishments also helped ease anxiety about other social conflicts as well, in particular, as might be expected, about the role and contributions of women to Jewish religiosity and cultural practice. Gil Marks’s The World of Jewish Cooking (1996)31 reveals how, and illustrates that citizenship even in such a flattering and universalized kashrut nation entails adopting, wittingly or unwittingly, social and cultural perspectives sanctioned by men. The World of Jewish Cooking predicates Jewish cuisine both on the transnational influences of the Diaspora and on the “fathers” that are cited in the opening pages of the cookbook who sanction a Jewish cuisine: the rabbis of Tractate Hullin (the Talmudic tractate on the laws of kashrut), the first page of which is reproduced opposite the book’s title page; Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who provides the epigraph for the introduction (“The destiny of nations depends upon what and how they eat”); and the author’s father, whose joke and punch line at the start of the introduction supplies a trope for Jewish foods and recipes—“Funny, you don’t look Jewish.” But given how kashrut is rhetorically figured in Marks’ introduction, Jewish food does look male. The book jacket copy describes Marks as “a rabbi, gourmet chef, and authority on Jewish food history,” and the order of his credentials is important to keep in mind.32 Marks may not translate the Talmudic tractate, or, indeed, provide any

30 Joan Nathan, Jewish Cooking in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Joan Nathan, The Jewish Holiday Kitchen (New York: Schocken Books, 1998); Ethel Hofman, Everyday Cooking for the Jewish Home (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Joyce Goldstein, Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998); David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Secret Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews (New York: St, Martin’s Griffin, 1999). 31 Gil Marks, The World of Jewish Cooking (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Hereafter cited in the text as WJC. 32 This troika of culinary qualifications is Marks’s public persona—see, for example, Macy’s display ad “Herald Square Weekly,” New York Times, December 7, 1997, p. 11: “Not

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exposition of the Jewish dietary laws, yet he does clearly situate Jewish cuisine in halakha, Jewish law: “Following Halakah [sic] ( Jewish law) meant that Jews could not simply adopt all of the dishes of their new homelands. Since the dietary laws exclude such foods as pork, lard, and shellfish, and the mixing of milk and meat, Jews found substitutes for these items. In addition, the Jewish lifestyle—shaped by Sabbath prohibitions, holiday traditions, Torah precepts, and life-cycle events—produced uniquely Jewish dishes that, although based on local foods, often manifested similarities to Jewish dishes from other locales” (WJC 3). Marks forwards a rabbi’s perspective on Jewish cuisine, and in conjunction with his narrative’s opening moves and his book’s design, one cannot help but perceive that his is a kashrut nation supervised by men, even more overtly than in Spice and Spirit, which was dedicated to the memory of a rebbetzin. That supervision is curiously mimicked throughout the book by the backshadowing of all the chapter titles with the Hebrew word for the recipe groupings, so that Hebrew becomes a ghost of Jewish male authority peering over the shoulder of all the English titles: “Meat/basar;” “Vegetables and Legumes/ yerakot v’kitniyot;” “Breads/dvarei lekhem;” etc. Not surprisingly, Jewish food, according to Marks, is food that “evokes” and “conjures” community, religious rituals, and the “nature, history, and customs” that were lost as a result of the Holocaust, assimilation, anti-Zionism, and other forces of modernity (WJC 4). Marks’s recuperative project returns a culinary past that haunts “our collective selves” (WJC 4). Yet who prepared those communal foods, enacted those collective rituals, or improvised on them is left unstated in the introduction. While the relation of Jewish food and cooking to women and the domestic sphere may seem to lay readers so obvious as to not be worth mentioning, the various representations of Jewish women in the book throw such conventional wisdom into unsettling relief. The first image of a Jewish woman in the book is a 1593 engraving of a woman lighting Sabbath candles, which introduces the section on “Appetizers.” The accompanying caption quotes Tractate Shabbat on the metaphysical rewards that accrue to one “if the lamp is burning, the table set, and the couch covered” (WJC 9). Appetizers are themselves described as a Roman-German invention that in its Jewish form is served in “the synagogue following morning services on the Sabbath and holidays” (WJC 9). The focus on Jewish law and religious practice as the common denominator of Jewish cuisine here figures the Jewish woman as domestic practitioner of

only is Gil Marks a noted chef, author of ‘The World of Jewish Cooking’ and a 1996 James Beard Cookbook Award nominee, but he’s a Rabbi in his spare time!” Vol. 28, No. 2

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Judaism rather than as an arbiter or architect of family and communal recipes. Kashrut and the religious authority of texts—the pages and citations from the Talmud and, by extension, the cookbook in which they appear—displace and supplant the domestic authority of Jewish women.33 This is not to say that women are not mentioned or pictured in Marks’s narrative as cooks or provisioners. They certainly are. But the major visual topoi for Jewish women in this well-illustrated book is either as such domestic practitioners or as embodiments of exotic, transnational Jewish ethnicity: “Colorful” Georgian Jewish women pose with textiles (WJC 21); a German Jewish woman in a Moritz Oppenheim engraving serves soup in a sukkah (WJC 52); a family of Bene Israel Jews in Bombay, India pose with wives, daughters and children prominently displayed in the foreground (WJC 138); a photograph of a Kurdish Jewish family in Jerusalem also features the wife and daughters in the foreground (WJC 196); a young Jewish woman from California poses in a sukkah, the focal point of a 1908 snapshot (WJC 200); a Beta Israel mother from Ethiopia, squatting in front of a reed hut, cooks flatbread (WJC 273); a Moroccan Jewish woman in Arabic dress serves tea from an elaborate Levantine tea set (304); and a Baghdadi Jewish woman’s wedding portrait introduces the section on confections (WJC 356). The World of Jewish Cooking shows how potentially divisive issues of gender and Jewish religiosity were subsumed beneath celebratory cookery stories that testified to the diversity and resilience of a burgeoning kashrut nation. As American Jewish institutions and individuals in the nineteen-nineties argued over the legitimacy of non-Orthodox conversions, the ordination of female rabbis, and the place of gay and lesbian Jews within congregations and on the pulpit, both The World of Jewish Cooking and Sephardic Cooking placated Jewish readers, and intrigued non-Jewish ones, with a happy public display of Jewish unity—of Jews always at home in their dispersal, of exotic Jewish differences always dressed up and domesticated in recognizably traditional attire. In their nostalgia for the social, cultural, and gender stability represented by an exotic Jewish past these cookbooks offer what now seems both an ironic

33 For insight into the ways that German-speaking Jewish women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries actually negotiated such rabbinic authority over the Jewish food chain, and how they influenced the practice and observance of kashrut within the domestic sphere, see Ruth Ann Abusch-Magder, “Kashrut: The Possibility and Limits of Women’s Domestic Power,” in Greenspoon, Simkins, and Shapiro, eds., Food and Judaism, p. 169–192. I am not aware of any comparable study on contemporary American Jewish women.

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and yet fitting resolution for the various crises roiling American Jewish communities: asserting that Jewish social, cultural, and gender differences, as mediated and interpreted through the uniform Jewish dietary laws (which is to say through a rabbinic Judaism supervised by men), are precisely what prove that Jews have been and continue to be the same as they ever were—both exceptional and normative, shaped by conflict and conformity, a transnational nation that is the same as, yet different from, other nations possessing unique, national cuisines. This ostensibly old but really quite contemporary kashrut nation is therefore best understood not as another incarnation of a Jewish sensibility injected into the popular literature of the U.S. body politic—and so producing a certain pathology, behavior, or taste. Rather, that symbolic collective is a literary construction that, in its attempt to manage the social anxieties of the time among American Jews and within the U.S., in fact reflected the culturally diverse, economically expanding, and politically fractious nature of both in the last decade of the twentieth-century. The Jewish Import/Export Work of a U.S. Literary Product

To understand the dynamics and implications of that shared affiliation, consider Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York (1996) and Faye Levy’s 1,000 Jewish Recipes (2000).34 Roden’s introduction, “A Celebration of Roots: Of Generations Past, Vanished Worlds, and Identity,” opens with a brilliantly condensed explanation of the relation between food and storytelling that also helps explain the kashrut nation described here: “Every cuisine tells a story. Jewish food tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanished worlds. It lives in people’s minds and has been kept alive because of what it evokes and represents. My own world disappeared forty years ago, but it has remained powerful in my imagination. When you are cut off from your past, that past takes a stronger hold on your emotions” (BJF 3). Roden’s Jewish world was that of Cairo, Egypt during the nineteen thirties, forties, and fifties, a “mosaic” of different cultures and identities from Egypt, the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Yemen, North Africa, and Eastern Europe (BJF 4), its language a “polyglot” of the local French vernacular, Arabic jargon, Italian nouns, and expressive body

34 Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Faye Levy, 1,000 Jewish Recipes (New York, Cleveland, and Indianapolis: Hungry Minds, Inc., 2000). Both books are hereafter cited in the text as BJF and TJR, respectively.

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language (BJF 5). Roden’s colorful memories of her exotic community and family, not surprisingly, set up the criteria for how she will answer the question, “Is there such a thing as Jewish food?” For Roden Jewish cooking is indeed “distinctive and recognizable” (BJF 10) because of the Jewish dietary laws, because it “has always revolved around the Sabbath and religious festivals,” because it betokens a culinary “cosmopolitanism which broke even through ghetto walls,” and because Jewish cuisine was shaped by Jewish “mobility,” Jews’ “propensity to move from one place to another” (BJF 10–11). Kashrut is here rhetorically linked to communal memory and to a mobile cosmopolitanism, connections reiterated in the explanatory chapter “The Jewish Dietary Laws of Kashrut” wherein Roden explains that the Ashkenazim “have been much stricter in their practice of kashrut,” while the Sephardim “usually managed a synthesis between religious consciousness and the world around them” (BJF 21). Roden’s reasons for the distinctiveness of Jewish cooking make overt the contemporary transformation in thinking about Jewish cuisine that I have been tracing: the transnational diversity of Jewish culture is the warrant for a unique Jewish cuisine and kashrut is the difference upon which such a cuisine, and a concomitant sense of Jewish belonging, was built (BJF 10–11). By placing her own diaspora story at the beginning of her narrative about Jewish food, Roden makes her situation as a Sephardic Jew (born and raised in Cairo, educated in Paris, residing in London, published in the U.K. and the U.S.) and the polyglot, cosmopolitan nature of her childhood community the models for that cuisine. Indeed, a version of her community and its religious practices, geographically enlarged and smartly historicized, is replicated in her cookbook through the section headnotes, culinary sidebars, and recipes. The throng of recipes readers encounter over the course of six hundred plus pages—Tarte aux Oignons d’Alsace, Petchah, Bishak, Lobio Tkemali, Frittata di Carciofi, Palacsinken Torte, and hyphenated, multilingual dishes like Friteches-SfereetBeignets de Pâques—mimics a polyglot crowd settled comfortably within the deterritorialized “home” of the book’s English language narrative and format. Less overt is the fact that Roden’s cookbook and the memory work it reflects participates in the contemporaneous, popular turn in American mass culture toward multicultural and ethnic exoticism, and to real and imaginary “heritage trips” abroad in order to explore cultural and ethnic “homes.”35 In that light, the mainstreaming of Jewish cuisine during the nineteen-nineties is evident not only through its validation by Roden and others as a national

See Clifford, “Diasporas,” pp. 310–313, and David Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999). 35

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cuisine without borders, but also, as Roden’s cookbook exemplifies, by that cuisine’s newly secured place and stature within a history-obsessed mass culture and commercial publishing industry. This lent Roden’s cookbook tangible cultural and economic capital. The multinational nature of U.S. corporate publishers (Knopf is a subsidiary of Random House, Inc., which is a division of Bertelsmann AG) meant that Roden’s arguments and her answer to whether there is such a thing as a uniquely Jewish cuisine circulated back to the very places where some of her recipes started out; like the bounce of a sonar wave the cookbook thus proved there was a cuisine hiding under their surfaces.36 This is evident from reviews in The Observer (U.K.) and The Jerusalem Post, which reveal how the book’s argument sparked local discussions about Jewish cooking and Jewish identity. For Jay Rayner in The Observer, Roden’s cookbook and its focus on kashrut as a distinctive feature of Jewish food provided a “scripture” with which to justify declaring himself “a Jew by food I worship at my mother’s fridge. . . . Bernard Levin once referred to my lot as Pantry Jews. Well, I like the term; it certainly defines a large part of me.”37 Phyllis Glazer in the Jerusalem Post, reviewing the American edition in 1998, ends her review, and her interview with Roden, with this question: “Does Roden see any real change in Israeli cuisine in the 24 years since she first visited here?”38 The answer is yes, and though one might presume that a quarter century would invariably produce “real change” in a Western-oriented country like Israel, it is Roden and her cookbook who provide the seal of approval. The Book of Jewish Food is thus an intriguing example of what Michael Berube calls “worldly English,” literatures in English that facilitate global lines of communication.39 Here, an American publication and formula literature provide a frame for articulating and managing the ties binding together a kashrut nation. In Roden’s cookbook these ties are rhetorically predicated on

Roden’s cookbook circulated in two editions, one from the U.S. and the other from the U.K. Interestingly, Viking (originally an American press but now a subsidiary of the Penguin Group with divisions in the U.K. and the U.S.) omitted “New York” from the subtitle when they published the U.K. edition a year later in 1997. But the new subtitle, “An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day,” which advertised the cookbook as a journey through time rather than to America, simply underlined both publishers’ strategy to market the book as a history with an international destination, impact, and profitability. 37 Jay Rayner, review of The Book of Jewish Food, The Observer, August 17, 1997, p. 15. 38 Phyllis Glazer, “Culinary Queen,” The Jerusalem Post, May 29, 1998, Features section, p. 20. 39 Berube, “Introduction: Worldly English,” p. 1–5. 36

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the Jewish dietary laws and modeled on the cosmopolitanism and the multilingualism of her childhood community. But from a materialist perspective these ties are manifested through the physical production and distribution of her book to English-language readers around the world; the international circulation of Roden’s cookbook, indebted to U.S. cultural and corporate power, plays an important role in justifying her argument about a transnational national Jewish cuisine worthy of mainstream appreciation. The cultural influence and economic dominance of U.S. publishers also help a cookbook like Faye Levy’s 1,000 Jewish Recipes to direct traffic in a vocabulary of Jewish cuisine in and out of the U.S. Like Roden, Levy also argues that “Jewish cooking is multicultural” (TJR xv), and that the laws of kashrut as well as the Jewish holiday calendar tie the varieties of Jewish cultural difference together. Levy, too, has lived and cooked in a number of locales—the U.S. (Washington, D.C., Los Angeles), France, and Israel. And like The Book of Jewish Food, 1,000 Jewish Recipes builds on the author’s previous cookbooks; in many ways it resembles Levy’s International Jewish Cookbook (1991), albeit in a rhetorically and structurally more developed form. Unlike Roden and that earlier cookbook, however, Levy’s focus on transnational Jewish diversity is always filtered through the rules and customs pertaining not only to kosher food, but also to the running of a kosher kitchen throughout the Jewish year. 1,000 Jewish Recipes promotes kashrut as a tangible way of maintaining a connection to the Jewish past and to the Jewish communities around the world, most no longer extant, whose dishes make up Levy’s cookbook. Whereas for Roden the nexus of that connection remains mobile, for Levy it is located in Israel, where she now lives. As in her International Jewish Cookbook, where Levy asserts that “thanks to the Jewish State, the Mediterranean birthplace of Judaic culture serves once again as an inspiration for Jewish cooking everywhere,” 1,000 Jewish Recipes makes a point of lauding Israel as “a center for the renaissance of Jewish cooking” (TJR xvi), and so combines an emphasis on kashrut and culinary diversity with a promotion of the Israeli table as the very model of a Jewish cuisine. Making culinary and literary space for Israeli foods and recipes within her kashrut nation, Levy’s rhetorical use of kashrut links Jewish cooking with a kind of translation work. Throughout the cookbook, but especially in her headnotes explaining the foods associated with the Jewish holidays and the cooking customs dictated by kashrut, Levy invariably notes Israeli practices and customs, conveying to readers “the Hebrew names for leeks,” or how “Israeli home cooks” improvise a recipe, or what Jews who attend Israeli synagogues or communal celebrations do and eat. Clearly, Levy means to educate both Jews and non-Jews about the centrality of Israel to a transnational kashrut nation. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

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The culinary vocabulary of Levy’s kashrut nation becomes a bridge not only between the Jewish past and the present, but also between Israel and the U.S. What I am trying to show here in brief is how a cookbook like Levy’s helps to translate not only words, but also those words’ contexts and implications into the U.S. via cookbook literature. One of the most obvious ways in which American Jewish cookbooks like The Book of Jewish Food and 1,000 Jewish Recipes exemplify a worldly English is through their importation and translation of Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, French, German, Italian, and Spanish words that help phrase Jewish dishes and Jewish concepts. This is commonly the function of cookbook glossaries, and in that regard Levy’s three-page glossary is not unique.40 Words like “challah,” “matzah,” “pareve,” “latke,” “Sephardic,” “Ashkenazi,” “felafel,” and “seder,” and even “kashrut” itself, have found their way into American usage in part through Jewish cookbooks. And words like “soofganiyot,” and “oznei haman,” as well as culturally marked terms such as “alla Giudia” and “Israeli salad,” have found their way into American Jewish usage in part through those same cookbooks. As examples of worldly English, then, Roden’s and Levy’s cookbooks, as well as the other cookbooks examined thus far, evince a complex importexport business. They carry different kinds of literary, intellectual, cultural, and economic information, which taken together or in part offer readers both the excitements of cultural hybridity and the solace of community, another privilege courtesy of U.S. corporate and cultural hegemony. Diaspora and homeland; during a decade in which American Jews worried and reworked the relation between themselves and Israel, as well as between various modes of Jewish identity and religiosity, these cookbooks offer an interpretation of Jewish collectivity that allow readers to have it both ways. Each stokes the desire of American Jews to have a cuisine of their own, an open-ended cuisine of endless reconfigurations and renegotiations—a never-ending Diaspora story. And each fulfills that desire. In doing so they award American Jews all the rights and responsibilities of such a culinary homecoming: to learn the laws of kashrut, to fix menus, to standardize recipes, and to settle questions of provenance and definition.41

40 Most of the cookbooks in this essay include glossaries, and Patti Shosteck’s A Lexicon of Jewish Cooking: A Collection of Folklore, Foodlore, History, Customs, and Recipes (Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc., 1981) is in essence an expanded, annotated glossary. 41 Another way, then, to understand the kashrut nation being constructed in American Jewish cookbooks is to see it as an example of what Sidra Ezrahi calls the dialectic between exile and homecoming in modern Jewish literatures, “an ongoing dialectic between the temporal and the spatial, between the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘real,’ the mimetic and the original,

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Kashrut as Interpretive Code, Cookbooks as Secular Bibles

But kashrut, of course, is more than just a token of citizenship in such a symbolic Jewish interpretive community. It functions as the interpretive code for religious as well as cultural border-making. Therefore, in answer to the question asked at the beginning of this essay, examining the rhetorical function of kashrut in these five American Jewish cookbooks reveals just how essential that function was to the “discovery” of a distinctively Jewish cuisine during the nineteen-nineties. Kashrut as a safety net, as a common factor in the exotic, as a totem of Jewish male authority, as a ground of Jewish difference and hybridity, and as a bridge for culinary and cultural translation—in each instance kashrut distinguishes, provides a boundary for, or authorizes a Jewish cuisine whose transnational diversity threatens to undo the very category it means to describe. No doubt many would argue that this reflects a “common sense” understanding that the Jewish dietary laws are intrinsic to anything calling itself Jewish cooking or Jewish foods. My reply to that is twofold. First, how those laws are discursively understood and deployed is, as other scholars note too, historically contingent, though it bears repeating given the current prestige of common sense outside the academy. Kashrut promises standardization, but is itself subject to the vagaries of ideology and interpretation—not so much in terms of what is and is not forbidden to eat or mix (arguments about sturgeon and natural and artificial flavoring notwithstanding), but in terms of its use as a stamp of approval, of acceptance, of right reading. Kashrut makes kosher in an ideological and interpretive sense as much as in a ritual sense. Removed from material practice and placed in a rhetorical practice, kashrut is a powerful tool with which to allay anxiety about biological or cultural continuity and to forge connections between readers with similar interests and tastes, readers who may live at both far and close distances from each other. The rhetorical function of kashrut in cookbooks of the nineteen-nineties specifically reflects that decade’s obsessions about history and memory as well as its social and cultural landscape: conflicts about diasporic and homeland identities and about Jewish continuity and authenticity; the resurgence in America of a conservative religiosity and of a desire among American Jews to reconnect with “traditional” Jewish practices; and the proliferation of gastronomically diverse as well as international cookery stories within the American cookbook genre. Second, kashrut is undeniably the engine driving the cultural power of contemporary American Jewish cookbooks. This aspect of its rhetorical funcdesire and fulfillment” (Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], p. 3). Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

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tion, overlooked by scholars and critics, unwittingly helps justify “pantry” or “gastronomic” Jews. As Jay Rayner’s review of The Book of Jewish Food illustrates, the mass circulation of cookbook histories of Jewish food, and their rationales for the relation between food and identity, delivers to individuals knowledge that legitimates what in other contexts might well be thought of as “mix-and-match” Jewishness. The five cookbooks examined in this essay quite clearly teach one how to read food Jewishly, and they do so by making the basic grammar of that reading the Jewish dietary laws and the ritual observances associated with them. In most of the cookbooks that grammar is made to seem timeless; in all of them that grammar enables readers to understand their own subjective tastes as historically grounded, culturally unique, serious, multicultural (as opposed to simply eclectic), and a source of pride. Kashrut, in other words, lends cultural legitimacy and social prestige to Jewish identity—and so these cookbooks become secular bibles. As in Sephardic Cooking, where the observant and non-observant find room in Marks’s kashrut nation, the actual practice of kashrut is beside the point. If readers do cook up the recipes in these cookbooks, they might do so for the practical, observant purposes that Faye Levy’s cookbooks presume. But they can also do so as an act of personal worship, like Rayner, or as an act of cultural tourism, as with Copeland Marks, and in kitchens far removed from the kosher ideal literally illustrated on page fifteen of Spice and Spirit. Policing the kashrut nation described by these cookbooks is, in the end, a self-regulated matter. That Jewish law can be used to sanction subjective notions of identity is hardly a new phenomenon, yet as an irony within American Jewish cookbooks it is both an aspect of American Jewish culture of the nineteen-nineties and of the ever more complicated branding of identity in America. The varied searches by American Jews over the course of that decade—for authenticity, for a useable Jewish past, and for meaningful Jewish affiliations—helped create a cultural and social environment ripe not only for a new-old Jewish cuisine, but also for new communal initiatives and organizations (the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, the Joshua Venture fellowship program, Makor at the 92nd St. Y), and for new cultural productions and publications (the Too Jewish? exhibition, the klezmer revival, Storahtelling, Plotz: the Zine for the Vaclempt, etc.). The kashrut nation in American Jewish cookbooks exemplifies one of the many new cultural interpretations that offered ready material for the culture industry markets to distribute to a mass audience. The ideologies of those interpretations proved no impediment to their commercial uses—they were, in fact, quite helpful. Elsewhere I have written about the burgeoning American Jewish culture of opposition during the same Vol. 28, No. 2

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decade and its relation to the “new Jew” brand at the turn of the millennium.42 The exponents of “radical Jewish culture” (a phrase borrowed from John Zorn and his circle of klezmer experimentalists) aimed to subvert or recontextualize the tired narratives, stale images, and fey sounds dogging American Jewish culture and religiosity. Intuiting the mass appeal of such alt-Jewishness—and of the self-described “new Jews” populating New York’s downtown arts scene—product designers, Jewish outreach professionals, arts programmers, and the editors of magazines like Heeb rushed to introduce it, and the philanthropies and advertisers who hoped to profit from it, to American and American Jewish consumers. The success of the “new Jew” brand that Heeb, Jewcy Hebrew Couture, the webzine GenerationJ.com, and VH-1’s documentary “So Jewtastic” helped formulate in the first years of the 21st century was in large part attributable to the “do-it-yourself ” ethos and Jewish humor those enterprises appropriated from oppositional Jewish cultural productions of the nineteen-nineties. Similarly, the kashrut nation formulated in commercially published American Jewish cookbooks of the nineteen-nineties is becoming an analogous kind of brand this decade. The purchase of what one reviewer, in the April 2006 issue of Moment magazine, calls “history-heavy cookbooks”—his term for the recent crop of cookbooks made possible or influenced by Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food (and, I would argue, by the cookbooks included in this essay)—allow consumers to buy, and to buy into, a symbolic Jewish interpretive community that offers “a practical and entirely traditional means of claiming, of salvaging, what was good from a past that would otherwise urge us to damn the world rather than bless it.”43 This culinary recovery of a Jewish transnational past is the key to marketing “The Serious Side of Jewish Cookbooks,” as the review was titled; indeed, the serious and conservative nature of a kashrut nation, and the appearance of this review in a middlebrow publication like Moment clarify the market niche for such a brand. Whereas the “new Jew” brand appeals to buyers interested in cultural subversion, the solaces of individualism, and the flatteries of contemporary fashion, a kashrut nation, as both an interpretive community and a brand, appeals to buyers interested in cultural conservation, the solaces of history, and the flatteries of collective

42 Laurence Roth, “Oppositional Culture and the ‘New Jew’ Brand: From Plotz to Heeb to Lost Tribe,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer 2007): 99–123. 43 Abe Opincar, “The Serious Side of Jewish Cookbooks,” Moment, April 2006/Nisan 5766, p. 86.

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memory. They are, in fact, flip sides of the same coin—the contemporary, commercial marketing of eminently consumable Jewish identities to the American middle-class. That is an awkward pun, but it does underline why the Jewish dietary laws provide a helpful brand name for one such identity. It also reminds us that in America’s current food-obsessed mood the notion that “we are what we eat” is so hackneyed that it too has become unchallenged common sense. Perhaps, then, the most compelling fantasy retailed in American Jewish cookbooks today is not that there is a Jewish cuisine, but that such a profitable idea was ever in doubt.44

44 My thanks to Shari Jacobson, Susan Bowers, Deborah Starr, Alan Rosen, and Mary Bannon for their invaluable comments and suggestions as I drafted this essay. I am especially grateful to Alan Mintz for sharing his insights into Jewish foods with me over a sushi lunch. An early version of this essay was presented at the 11th Annual Gruss Colloquium in Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 2005.

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