How Shabbat Cholent Became a Secular Hungarian Favorite

Cholent is just one variation of the one-pot dish Jews all over the world consume on the weekly holiday of Sabbath. Hence, it is considered a culinary signifier of Ashkenazi Jewish identity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, cholent became incorporated into Hungarian cuisine; in the eyes of Christian Hungarians, it ceased to be a Jewish dish. This chapter highlights that in modern Hungary, shared ingredients and cooking techniques shaped the cuisines of the Jewish minority and the Christian majority equally. Subsequently, a shared culinary repertoire evolved, exemplified by cholent. The culinary dynamic that produced the “Hungarian cholent” mirrors the broader process of Jewish integration in modern Hungary.

The Search for Religious Authenticity and the Case of Passover Peanut Oil

This chapter uses the rise and fall of a popular Passover cooking ingredient to explore the role of competing European folkways to determine the religious course of American Orthodox Judaism. In the first half of the twentieth century, traditional-leaning Jews happily used peanut oil in place of chicken fat, relying on the Lithuanian position that peanuts were not considered a “legume,” a category of foods that Ashkenazic Jewry traditionally withheld from during the Passover holiday, in addition to leaven breads. However, late-arriving Hungarian and Israeli folkways fought and triumphed over the Lithuanian foodway by the final decades of the 1900s. This is emblematic of a broader religious confrontation with American Judaism. The use of a variety of sources––responsa, economic, archival, and periodical literature––underscores the importance of “lived religion” and the usefulness of folkways and foodways to gain a fuller appreciation of religious history.

Jewish Ethics, the Kosher Industry, and the Fall of Agriprocessors

Where kosher goods and services were once a local business, kosher food is now a multibillion-dollar industry with a massive international infrastructure. The process of kashrut’s industrialization over the course of the twentieth century has created new ethical challenges that invite us to ask again about the meaning of long-held Jewish values. This chapter considers how the mitzvah (commandment) of loving the neighbor might be expressed and how it failed to be enacted in the high-profile scandals at Agriprocessors kosher slaughter plant in Postville, Iowa, the largest glatt kosher slaughter facility in North America. Going beyond describing the problem, this chapter argues for an extension of traditional Jewish understandings of loving the neighbor and asks what the kosher industry might be like if it followed the lead of ethical business leaders like Aaron Feuerstein instead of taking the destructive path that Agriprocessors followed ultimately to its bankruptcy.

A Brief History of Jews and Garlic

This chapter investigates the historical association between Jews and garlic. In the process, it explores how garlic functions both internally (by Jews) and externally (by non-Jews) as a symbol that represents Self and Other; or, in the terminology favored in anthropology and food studies, how garlic operates as a metonym for Jews. In doing so, it references a wide variety of sources, including biblical and rabbinic texts, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, vampire lore, and 1960s rock music.

Introduction

On the one hand, this book about Jewish traditions and food functions as the focal point for examining different forms of Judaism. On the other hand, this book is also a study of what we might call the religious dimensions of food and the case of Judaism serves as an exemplum. The introduction considers the advantages of understanding a religion through the detour of food and asks what counts as “Jewish food.” It argues that food in general provides a wieldy symbolic field that is called upon to construct sex and gender, social status, and race and to distinguish humans from other animals. Religion and food are always intermixed, and examining this intermixture in Judaism can provide some insights into a more-or-less universal human process of making meaning. Insights from Jewish scholars of food or food studies, including Warren Belasco, Noah Yuval Harari, Sidney Mintz, and Marion Nestle, are engaged.

Afterword

I became a vegetarian when I was nine years old. A babysitter persuaded me that it is wrong to hurt animals unnecessarily, and that meat production hurts animals. I saw no way to refute that logic and no reason not to change my life in response—save for my love of hot dogs at ball games with my dad, sushi with my mother on Wisconsin Avenue, burgers at barbecues with friends, chicken and carrots at my grandmother’s house on Shabbat, brisket at Passover, lox at Yom Kippur breakfast, and fried chicken whenever and wherever it was served....

The Virtues of Keeping Kosher

Contemporary commentators have attempted to give kosher practices deeper meanings and purposes beyond arbitrary “divine command.” The left links kosher practices to ethical concerns like the environment and animal protection, while the right foregrounds them as markers of Jewish distinctiveness, reproducing a seemingly unbridgeable gap between ethics and ritual. Navigating between these extremes, this chapter explores the revitalized ethical project of the mussar movement and its use of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to see how the language of virtue, and the pursuit of character development, illuminates a way of understanding the rituals of postbiblical dietary laws as ethical disciplines.

Jewish Ethics and Morality in the Garden

This chapter introduces a method for identifying and analyzing ethical questions by exploring the meanings and uses of a synagogue food garden. A midwestern American synagogue community experienced tensions regarding the demolition and renovation of its historic building. Utilitarian considerations clashed with other community values. To help repair tensions, some congregation members turned to Jewish ethical concerns with the environment and community and created a food garden on synagogue property. The food garden created a new context in which members could come together and live out Jewish values of feeding the hungry, beautifying mitzvot (commandments), and making good use of natural resources.

Introduction to Part 3

The seven chapters of the ethics part show us examples of different ways that Jewish ethics and food have been and could be intertwined. These chapters are not an attempt to achieve a comprehensive approach to Jewish food ethics but an attempt to stimulate our appetite for engaging ethically with Jewish traditions about food....

Food in the Modern Era

This chapter focuses on how the six modern Jewish global migrations influenced Jewish cuisines in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. It explains the effect of political modernization on Jewish religious life and surveys how this affected the creation of religious denominations and the different role of the dietary laws in each denomination. The construction of modern kosher certification and Jewish food activism—“Jewish food ethics”—are described as a consequence of industrialized and globalized food production.