Toward a kashrut nation in American Jewish cookbooks, 1990-2000. (2024)

This essay examines Eve significant cookbooks published between1990 and 2000 to determine the relation between the sharp increase inemphasis during the 1990s on kashrut, on the Jewish dietary laws, in theintroductions and recipes of commercially published American Jewishcookbooks, and the concomitant "discovery," during the sameperiod and in many of the same books, of a distinctively Jewish cuisine.I argue that these cookbooks fashioned a symbolic Jewish interpretivecommunity, a kashrut nation, which justified and explained Jewishcuisine and forwarded a collective identity roomy enough for mostAmerican Jews. Such a kashrut nation also makes clear how contemporaryanxiety about Jewish affiliation and Jewish continuity was assuagedthrough a renewed interest in cookbooks, and in the end illustrates howU.S. cultural and economic power was drafted in service of selling, andbranding, a new Jewish cultural production.

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Wander the cookbook aisles in any of the corporate chain-bookstoresthese days and you will find yourself amidst fantasies as compelling andoutlandish as any work of genre fiction. From sci-fi, gadget cookery tothe menus of the American old west, from romantic, neo-colonial dishesto the recipes of hard-boiled, urban hot spots, visions of good thingsto eat and of alluring peoples and places shimmer on six-color jacketcovers. No doubt, cookbooks are popular and highly profitable narrativesof culinary and cultural promise. Though the majority of titles arestill pitched toward middle and upper middle-class women, they attractreaders of all kinds, including academics intrigued by the storytellingthese narratives record, incite, and abet. For like all formulaliteratures, food tales provide both entertainment and popular recipesfor constructing and conveying social and cultural knowledges. (1)

This rhetorical aspect of cookbooks--that they argue for variousand variously desired standards, ideals, and visions that tempt and vexgendered, middle-class identities--is well noted by scholars. (2)Studies of the rhetoric in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryJewish cookbooks and about Jewish food in the early modern and moderneras, as John Cooper, Barbara Kirschen-blatt-Gimblett, Jenna WeismanJoselit, Jack Kugelmass, Claudia Roden, and Hasia Diner have shown,suggest that cookbooks and food offer yet another opportunity for modernJewish self-explanation and self-justification, another opportunity toworry about not only the meanings attending "a range of Jewishreligious and cultural expression," as Ruth Abusch-Magder says, butalso the dynamics of Jewish acculturation and identity politics. (3)

Given the fertile ground these scholars have cleared, there is muchincentive now to push these investigations beyond the middle of the lastcentury--beyond issues related to modern interpretations of Jewishtheologies of food, or to permutations of Jewish food practicesattending Jewish acculturation in Europe and America--and to considerthe rhetoric of contemporary Jewish cookbooks that have thus far escapedstudy. Like popular narratives in general, these cookbooks, part of anever-evolving American formula literature, service readers' desirefor instruction about and solutions to the confusions of social andcultural change. Recent examples will, therefore, raise new questionsabout something as slippery and shape-shifting as Jewish"expression." In this essay I examine five cookbooks publishedbetween 1990 and 2000 in order to answer the following question: What isthe relation between the sharp increase in emphasis during the 1990s onkashrut, on the Jewish dietary laws, in the introductions and recipes ofcommercially published American Jewish cookbooks, and the concomitant"discovery," during the same period and in many of the samebooks, of a distinctively Jewish cuisine?

Kashrut has always been invoked or, at the very least, gesturedtowards in American Jewish cookbooks. But the rhetorical functions itserved within the cookbook formula have changed over time. BarbaraKirschenblatt-Gimblett's analysis of the first commerciallypublished American Jewish cookbook, Mrs. Esther Levy's JewishCookery Book (published in Philadelphia in 1871), makes clear that Levyframes kashrut, as Lady Judith Montefiore did earlier in The JewishManual (published in London in 1846), as a "logisticalproblem" of middle-class taste and social ambition whose solutionopens the Jewish table to the gentile world. (4) In the same vein, JennaWeissman Joselit and Hasia Diner argue that during and after the greatwave of Jewish immigration between 1880 and 1924 Jewish cookbooks inYiddish and English tried to stem the decline of kashrut observance bymaking the Jewish dietary laws compatible with the American table andwith the middle-class aspirations of many American Jews. (5) After WorldWar II, as the pace of Jewish acculturation increased, and as kashrutobservance declined even more precipitously, kashrut in American Jewishcookbooks evoked nostalgia and served as a vestment for the display ofethnic pride. (6)

Take, for example, Jennie Grossinger's The Art of JewishCooking (1958), a celebration of and public relations tool forGrossinger's resort hotel in the Catskills. (7) The introduction byPaul Grossinger is meant to be a loving tribute to his mother, who kepta strictly kosher kitchen, but that tribute has the unwitting effect ofcloaking the observance of kashrut within the figure of "Mom."That is, the figure of the Jewish mother becomes the outwardmanifestation of the secret ingredient that leavens Jewish identity andhelps explain Jewish success in both the domestic and public spheres ofAmerican life. Mom, a stand in for kashrut, thus becomes a metonymy forJewish cookings Such a Jewish mother allays anxiety among Jews andnon-Jews about Jewish adaptation of middle-class values and behaviors,especially those revolving around family, food, and commensality. Thataccounts, in part, for the popularity of cookbooks like The Art ofJewish Cooking, The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook (1955), SaraKasdan's Love and Knishes (1956), and Ruth and Bob Grossman'sChinese-Kosher, Italian-Kosher, and French-Kosher Cookbooks (publishedin 1963, 1964, and as a collected volume in 1965). (9) TheGrossmans' cookbooks, mixing pride with mockery, feature the 82year-old "Grandma" Slipakoff, "the sensation ofBensonhurst," a character whose recipes ("Foh Nee ShrimpPuffs," "Matzo Brei Foo Yong," and "Spinach Mish AhGahs") and Yiddish inflected sentence structures ("a littleoil you should put in the frying pan;" "you're usingmaybe chopsticks?") makes kashrut the butt of a joke illustratingchat American Jews are open to cultural novelty and are capable ofmocking their own cultural and culinary parochialism.

The meaning of kashrut changed again with the publication of EddaMachlin'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 interestin food scholarship and the recovery of "authentic"international cuisines and modes of preparation. (11) In herintroduction, Machlin explains the laws of kashrut in light of theItalian Jews' culinary differences from Ashkenazi Jews, and thennotes that '"Kosher kitchen' meant to us--besides theobservance of basic kosher laws--using first quality food and beingextremely fussy about the preparation of our meals." (12)Machlin's yoking of kosher and "first quality" appealedto middle-class American Jewish readers because it allied Italian-Jewishcuisine with gourmet cuisine in general.

By the end of the nineteen-eighties kashrut had receded so far intothe culinary background of Jewish cookbooks that Barbara Bloch (writingin Ireland for U.K. and U.S. publishers) could declare in A LittleJewish Cookbook (1989), "Jewish cooking is not necessarily kosherfood cooked according to ancient religious dietary laws." (13) Ayear later, however, Spice and Spirit: The Complete Kosher JewishCookbook (1990) (14) signaled the beginning of a new phase in therhetorical function of kashrut in commercially published American Jewishcookbooks. That phase is related to the resurgence, during the latenineteen-eighties and early nineties, of traditional Jewish religiousobservance in the U.S. and the drafting of Jewish history and memory asa bulwark against American Jew's putative cultural and demographicdecline.

Spice and Spirit is Therefore the first of the five cookbooks I useto marshal an answer to my question above. I cannot, of course, surveyall the Jewish cookbooks published in the last decade of thetwentieth-century My choice of texts is predicated, first, on theclarity with which they exemplify certain aspects of and historicaldevelopments in the rhetorical function of kashrut in Americancookbooks, and, second, on their authors' reputations as experts inJewish cooking and foods. Each of these cookbooks--Spice and Spirit,Copeland Marks's Sephardic Cooking (1992), Gil Marks's TheWorld of Jewish Cooking (1996), Claudia Roden's The Book of JewishFood (1996), and Faye Levy's 1,000 Jewish Recipes (2000)--argue forthe existence of a Jewish cuisine equal to, and as distinctive as, thecuisines of other nationalities, but they employ this apparently"national" cuisine to illustrate the transnational characterof Jewish practices and identities. (15) And each of these cookbooksharnesses the narrative strategies and cultural power of an Americanformula literature to construct within that literature a symbolic Jewishinterpretive community, a kashrut nation, one grounded in the customsand recipes associated with the Jewish dietary laws. (16) Like anyinterpretive community, whether a focus imaginarius or a specific groupof people, the kashrut nation I posit in these cookbooks justifies andexplains--in this case that there is a Jewish cuisine, one that forwardsa collective identity roomy enough for most American Jews. Such akashrut nation thus helps explain how anxiety about Jewish affiliationand Jewish continuity among American Jews during the nineteen-ninetieswas assuaged through that decade's renewed interest in cookbooks,and in the end illustrates how U.S. cultural and economic power wasdrafted in service of selling, and branding, a new Jewish culturalproduction.

From the Jewish Dietary Laws to a Kashrut Nation

That the Jewish dietary laws were integral to the arguments thatconstructed a national transnational cuisine ought to be littlesurprise. Kashrut, after all, refers to the religious practice that isthe ostensible foundation of all Jewish culinary practices (separatingmeat and milk, ritual slaughter, etc.). But that word's root,"kasher," belies the particular rhetorical usefulness ofkashrut, Kasher means "fit," "proper," or"legitimate," and, as Mary Douglas and others who havetheorized the meaning of the Jewish dietary laws argue, in the contextof the laws in Deuteronomy "fitness" rhetorically elaboratesthe idea of holiness as separation, restriction, and wholeness--what is"fit" is that which is religiously and culturally "setapart." (17) In that light, kashrut is both a set of rules, whichmay or may not be adhered to in the cookbooks themselves, and a kind offloating signifies an indeterminable word whose connotations andassociations mobilize Jewish difference, solidarity, and legitimacy.

This is evident even in an Orthodox cookbook such as Spice andSpirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cookbook, which delimits andrationalizes the meaning of kashrut as a system of easily applicablelaws for the Jewish kitchen. A publication of the Lubavitch Hasidim, itwas originally published in 1980 as a community cookbook and guide toJewish holiday cooking. The 1990 commercial edition was retooled toappeal to both long-time Crown Heights residents and the new influx ofba'alei t'shuva, returnees co the faith, from the U.S. andSouth America (the Lubavitch, noted for outreach programs that aim tobring non-observant Jews closer to Judaism, vigorously expanded thoseprograms during the nineteen-nineties). (18) Spice and Spirit not onlyemphasizes the close relation of kosher to Jewish, but, as the openingpages testify, of both those terms to memory--memory of Orthodox people,observance, and domestic arrangements. Spice and Spirit is dedicated tothe memory of Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson, the wife of theLubavitcher Rebbe, the late Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. The epigraphfor the Rebbetzin's biographical sketch is taken from Ecclesiastes7:2: "And the living should take it to heart. ..." Suchmemorializing is meant to figure the rebbetzin as an exemplar of aproper Jewish woman's behavior. Taking her memory to heart willpresumably lead ba'alei t'shuva and even non-observant Jewishwomen to a more stringent observance of Jewish law.

Yet the cookbook seems quite aware that memory alone, culinary orotherwise, cannot move readers to a more observant Judaism, especiallyif there is uncertainty about how collective that memory is. As theeditors admit, "our culinary horizons have broadened. We havebecome, as a society, more sophisticated and knowledgeable about food,with more people taking an interest in gourmet cooking, in healthfuleating, and in new cuisine styles" (SS 13). In order to manage suchdiversity every recipe in the cookbook is accompanied by a logoidentifying 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 ofkashrut and the customs that derive from it. So while the cookbook opensby referencing the power and symbolism of Jewish memory, just to be onthe safe side (and in order to assign a provenance and content to thatmemory) it then proceeds to nineteen pages of detailed explanation andinstruction for the observance of kashrut, kashrut supervision, and thevarious 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 ofJewish memory. Fitting kashrut to such a purpose reflects not only theeditors' awareness of ba'alei t'shuva among theiraudience, but also of discussions and arguments in the latenineteen-eighties and early nineties about intermarriage and the role ofJewish women as guardians of the home front and of the Jewish kitchen,"the workshop for both the Jewish body and soul" (SS 16), asthe cookbook puts it. This "crisis" of intermarriage and ofthe domestic sphere was reflected as well in the controversial 1990National Jewish Population Survey. The rhetorical function of kashrut inSpice and Spirit, published the same year, points to the genderedanxiety and outright fear about American Jewish biological assimilationthat the NJPS both mirrored and provoked through still challenged anddebated statistics such as: "Of 5,6 million Jews, 2 millionAmerican Jews live in households identified as non-Jewish;""Since 1985, 52% of Jews who married have done so outside thefaith;" "1 million, or 54% of all American Jewish childrenunder the age of 18 are being raised as non-Jews or with noreligion;" "Of the population that consists of people who wereborn Jewish and are Jewish by choice, only 11% attend synagogueweekly." (19)

Spice and Spirit represented one Lubavitch response to thegenerally low levels of religious literacy among American Jews. It waspraised for its "detailed instructions" and "definitionsof what makes food kosher," (20) and for being "a culinarykosher food encyclopedia." (21) But it also offered a culturallyconservative response to a larger issue behind the NJPS findings and itsalarms over intermarriage: a contentious and growing struggle overAmerican Jewish religious and cultural diversity. The beginning of thenineteen-nineties witnessed a deepening of religious tensions amongAmerican Jews and a growing division over Israel--over the power andinfluence of the Orthodox in Israeli society and over thegovernment's response to the first Palestinian Intifada (1987).Jewish feminism and liberal Judaism challenged traditional modes ofJewish worship and community. And, as the Orthodox renaissance (part ofthe general cultural swing toward religious conservatism and evangelismin America) made itself increasingly felt and heard in American Jewishpolitics and culture, the question "who is a Jew?" sparkedheated debates in America about Jewish identity.

As Spice and Spirit exemplifies, answers to that question and tothe new challenges of Jewish diversity, across the denominational andpolitical spectrum, often employed traditional sources for evidence andsupport. (22) Indeed, Spice and Spirit in particular bears out HaymSoloveitchik's famous observation about contemporaryOrthodoxy's "shift of authority to texts and theirenshrinement as the sole source of authenticity," and therebytransforming into "a religiosity rooted in texts." (23) Thishad far-reaching consequences for all denominations of Judaism and, inthis case, for Jewish cookbooks and the creation of a distinctivelyJewish cuisine. Spice and Spirit is important not only because itreferenced traditional texts, but also because it flaunted its status asa religiously informed and sanctioned text, Its status as anauthoritative Jewish culinary text. Aside from the opening chapter onkashrut, "Kashrut: Spiritual Nutrition," the cookbook alsoincludes chapters at volume's end on the laws of the Sabbath,"Shabbat: Light, Blessing and Peace," and on the Jewishcalendar, "The jewish Year; Sanctification of Time." Spice andSpirit's foregrounding of Jewish law, its deployment of kashrut asboth a safety net and an interpretive strategy for understandingnon-traditional and international variations on Jewish culinarypractices, manifests one of the first appearances in cookbooks of asymbolic Jewish interpretive community rooted in texts and at peace withits own diversity--a kashrut nation.

Exotica, Gender, and the Construction of Nationhood

My calling that community a "nation" not onlyacknowledges Spice and Spirit's traditional understanding of aJewish collective as Am Yisrael, the spiritual nation of Israel, butalso Arjun Appadurai's hypothesis about the ways that cookbooksconstruct a national cuisine. Appadurai analyzes how cookbooks in Indiaformulated a postindustrial, national cuisine at a relatively late datein comparison with European nation states, a cuisine influenced by bothindigenous and diasporic social situations and cultural practices. Hesuggests that the yoking together of the parochial with thecosmopolitan--that is, joining stories about regional or ethnic culinarypractices and actors to categories of taste and table produced bytransnational culture industries--heralds the emergence of a nationalcuisine. (24) For Appadurai, "nation" and"nationhood" refer not just to a particular geography, butalso to the literary construction of social and cultural bonds acrosstimes, places, and languages through the rehearsal in cookbooks ofdistinct (albeit in many cases reified and inflated) memories andspecific cultural practices. Some of these are familiar and othersexotic, but together they advertise, and provide a warrant for, a socialand cultural collective. (25)

Nationhood, in this sense, is an appetite for belonging. Cookbooks,by telling stories about all the strange, manifold dishes eaten in thepast, some of which can never be recreated or recaptured, and byinvoking 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 tocontemporary American Jews. Kashrut in these cookbooks, as in Spice andSpirit, makes available an apparently authentic ground for amultifarious Jewish identity and collectivity during a period thatbrought into contention various ideologies stoking a desire among Jewsto belong--to affiliate with Judaism or some type of Jewishness.

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 memoryfashioned as a form of Jewish exoticism. His cookbook, published tocoincide with the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of Jews from Spain,was certainly not the first to feature Sephardic dishes and recipes. Itis, nevertheless, unique in that he combines the cookbook formula with atravelogue, he identifies kashrut as the "common factor in theseexotic cuisines" (SC viii), and he idealizes the Sephardic world asthe very model of a resilient Jewish collective.

Though Marks does not discuss kashrut in detail, its rhetoricalfunction as the "common factor" in the exotic is clarified ifwe first examine his understanding of" Sephardic" and"exotic." In his introduction, "Exotic SephardicKitchens," Marks acknowledges that writing his book was both an actof tourism and a personal pilgrimage, a mode of "cooking, nibbling,tasting, writing, while collecting recipes of Sephardiccommunities," most of which no longer exist. These communitiesoffer both lessons in Jewish adaptability and important resources formodern 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'etre 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 withancient homelands outside Israel, and those homelands with histories ofabundance and security as well as lack and persecution is telling.Marks' narrative employs an American Jewish perspective on identityas a form of ethnic memory deserving of preservation and primarilyevident through the productions and performances of material culture.(27) It also reflects a contemporaneous attraction to the Sephardicworld as a model for a Jewish collective adaptable not only to periodsof persecution, but also to periods when Jews are welcomed andsuccessful within the host country--a projection of a particularlyAmerican Jewish anxiety about acculturation. (28)

The recipes themselves, as Marks admits, derive both from countriesfirmly associated with Sepharad and those utterly remote from it. Hisrationale for including the Jews of Yemen, Ethiopia, Soviet Georgia,Bukhara, and India is that their "inclusion in this book is basedupon their connection with the ritual of Talmudic Baghdad and byextension, therefore, of Spain" (SC viii). Since the BabylonianTalmud is the fountainhead for the rituals of all post-Rabbinic Jewishcommunities, this rationale makes less sense than the sentence followingit, which admits that the recipes are included simply because "theyare not of the Ashkenazi of Europe" (SCviii)--"Sephardic" is just a term for exotic Jewish Others.Thus the recipes in Marks's cookbook are really souvenirs of theexotic. They are culinary tchotchkes that Marks shleps back to readersvia narratives that provide a new culinary and cultural network forAmerican Jews to explore.

Little wonder, then, that the travelogue formula works so wellwithin the confines of Marks s cookbook. Each country is introduced by aphoto of some relevant food professional, food site, foodstuff, or foodritual supposedly common to Jews in that country, as well as anintroduction chat provides, first, a brief history of Jews in thatcountry, second, the style of cooking that distinguishes them, and,third, a personal experience or reflection by Marks based on his travelsthere. The net effect of these introductions, however, is paradoxical.On the one hand, each community is unique: the Kurdish Jews werefarmers; the Iraqi Jews were traders; the Georgian Jews may bedescendents of the Ten Lost Tribes; the Bukharan Jews were courtmusicians; the Ethiopian Jews may derive from a Jewish colony founded bya 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 hasskin so dark its members are called "Black Jews;" and theMoroccan, Tunisian, and Libyan Jews suffered but also, remarkably,nourished under the Arabs. On the other hand, each community'scooking style and taste preferences are exactly similar to those of thepeoples among whom they lived: Turkish Jews, like Turks, are fond ofsweets; Greek Jews, like Greeks, use a lot of vegetables; Iranian Jews,like Iranians, prefer rice and favor onions; Georgian Jews, likeGeorgians, 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 rhetoricalfunction of kashrut in Sephardic Cooking. These introductions provideany number of communal and culinary correlatives bolstering the argumentthat to be a Jew means being the same as, yet different from, thepeoples among whom Jews live. In fact, Marks's traveloguesspecialize in stories about finding similarity amidst difference. So,for example, whether in India or Ethiopia, Greece or Libya, theSephardic kitchen is the always-diverse expression of the Jewishcapacity to do the same thing again and again: adapt and succeed.

Of course the foremost difference that belies similarity, and whichnecessitates culinary adaptability in the first place, is kashrut.Kashrut, in other words, is the common factor in the exotic because itmakes the exotic--kashrut as culinary and cultural difference--familiar,and makes the familiar--that kashrut is the same everywhere--seemexotic. Throughout the cookbook, Marks takes care to ground hisadaptable Jewish collective within the recipes and customs associatedwith the laws of kashrut. Whatever the cooking style, Sephardic cookingis kosher cooking, and, as the diligent reader soon learns, koshercooking not only refers to recipes that follow kashrut. It also refersto the diverse recipes for the one constant dish in virtually everycountry--the Sabbath stew. Sephardic Cooking is a cornucopia oft'finas, scheenas, hameens, barissim, and various versions ofheuvos haminados (long cooked eggs). The Sabbath stew becomes the mostresonant, and redolent, manifestation of the laws of kashrut, one thatties all the different recipes together, and not just to the exotickitchens they emanate from, For Marks is quick to point out that ahameen is really just a Sephardic cholent, the Ashkenazi Sabbath stewthat is familiar to most American Jews who trace their forebears toEastern and Central Europe.

As this example makes clear, the rhetorical function of kashrut inMarks's cookbook is one predicated on a kind of rhetoricaltraveling between the familiar and the exotic, self and Other. This isbrought home visually in the one photograph of Marks included in thebook. Amidst all the photos of strange peoples and places, the photo forthe section on the Jews of Calcutta features Marks and two unidentifiedmen standing in front of the aron kodesh, the Torah ark, inCalcutta's Maghen David Synagogue holding three "antique torahscrolls" (SC 326), a picture that would hardly look out of place ifreaders came across it in an American synagogue newsletter. See, thephoto 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 aboutdifferences that reveal similarity: the author as familiar for theexotic. (29)

Sephardic Cooking thus presented Jewish readers in the earlynineteen-nineties with a story about an idealized Sephardic world thatfunctioned in many ways as an argument for a kashrut nation thattranscended time and place and offered access to and responsibility forJewish "tradition." Given the communal and religious conflictsof the time, the attraction of Marks's story to those readers isprecisely that it proffered such historical, geographical, anddenominational transcendence. By doing so Marks's kashrut nationstabilized and expanded both Jewish cuisine and Jewish identity in a waythat flattered American Jews, who are predominantly Ashkenazi. For, aswith the photo of Marks, the cookbook mirrored a familiar Ashkenaziculture dressed up in the exotic garb of Sepharad and thereby stokedpride in, and helped assuage anxiety about, Jewish antiquity Jewishparticularity, and especially Jewish continuity. Hence one comfortinglesson of Marks's story is that differences among Jews alwaysdisguise their essential similarity, and indeed are evidence of it.Another is that Jewish identity is not only exotic (and therefore ascomplex and intriguing as any other immigrant and post-immigrant ethnicidentity in America), but also dependent simply on a desire to be partof Jewish tradition--a desire, in other words, for the resources andpleasures of a Jewish collective, one delimited by kashrut but easilyavailable to non-observant readers who can sate their hunger to belongto such a symbolic Jewish interpretive community by making and eatingthe dishes preserved in Sephardic Cooking.

Marks's success inaugurated a host of cookbooks that exploredSephardic cooking and the newly emerging transnational national Jewishcuisine, books that continued to recover the Jewish religious foodpractices and the culinary and cultural diversity that testified to theexistence of a Jewish cuisine, and thus to the stability of Jewishidentity. For the most part books like Joan Nathan's Jewish Cookingin America (1994) and The Jewish Holiday Kitchen (1998), EthelHofman's Everyday Cooking for the Jewish Home (1997), JoyceGoldstein's Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen(1998), and David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson's A Drizzle ofHoney: The Lives and Secret Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews (1999)(30) sidestep the resurgence of Orthodox religiosity and focus insteadon the flatteries of Jewish history and exotica that made SephardicCooking so appealing to all denominations and types of American Jews.Such blandishments also helped ease anxiety about other social conflictsas well, in particular, as might be expected, about the role andcontributions of women to Jewish religiosity and cultural practice. GilMarks's The World of Jewish Cooking (1996) (31) reveals how, andillustrates that citizenship even in such a flattering and universalizedkashrut nation entails adopting, wittingly or unwittingly, social andcultural perspectives sanctioned by men.

The World of Jewish Cooking predicates Jewish cuisine both on thetransnational influences of the Diaspora and on the "fathers"that are cited in the opening pages of the cookbook who sanction aJewish cuisine: the rabbis of Tractate Hullin (the Talmudic tractate onthe laws of kashrut), the first page of which is reproduced opposite thebook's title page; Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who provides theepigraph for the introduction ("The destiny of nations depends uponwhat and how they eat"); and the author's father, whose jokeand punch line at the start of the introduction supplies a trope forJewish 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 describesMarks as "a rabbi, gourmet chef, and authority on Jewish foodhistory," and the order of his credentials is important to keep inmind. (32) Marks may not translate the Talmudic tractate, or, indeed,provide any exposition of the Jewish dietary laws, yet he does clearlysituate Jewish cuisine in halakha, Jewish law: "Following Halakah[sic] (Jewish law) meant that Jews could not simply adopt all of thedishes of their new homelands. Since the dietary laws exclude such foodsas pork, lard, and shellfish, and the mixing of milk and meat, Jewsfound substitutes for these items. In addition, the Jewishlifestyle--shaped, by Sabbath prohibitions, holiday traditions, Torahprecepts, and life-cycle events--produced uniquely Jewish dishes that,although based on local foods, often manifested similarities to Jewishdishes from other locales" (WJC 3). Marks forwards a rabbi'sperspective on Jewish cuisine, and in conjunction with hisnarrative's opening moves and his book's design, one cannothelp bur perceive that his is a kashrut nation supervised by men, evenmore overtly than in Spice and Spirit, which was dedicated to the memoryof a rebbetzin.

That supervision is curiously mimicked throughout the book by theback-shadowing of all the chapter titles with the Hebrew word for therecipe groupings, so that Hebrew becomes a ghost of Jewish maleauthority peering over the shoulder of all the English titles:"Meat/basar;" "Vegetables and Legumes/yerakotv'kitniyot;" "Breads/dvarei lekhem;" etc. Notsurprisingly, Jewish food, according to Marks, is food that"evokes" and "conjures" community, religiousrituals, and the "nature, history, and customs" that were lostas a result of the Holocaust, assimilation, anti-Zionism, and otherforces of modernity (WJC 4). Marks's recuperative project returns aculinary past that haunts "our collective selves" (WJC 4). Yetwho prepared those communal foods, enacted those collective rituals, orimprovised on them is left unstated in the introduction.

While the relation of Jewish food and cooking to women and thedomestic sphere may seem to lay readers so obvious as to not be worthmentioning, the various representations of Jewish women in the bookthrow such conventional wisdom into unsettling relief. The first imageof a Jewish woman in the book is a 1593 engraving of a woman lightingSabbath candles, which introduces the section on "Appetizers."The accompanying caption quotes Tractate Shabbat on the metaphysicalrewards that accrue to one "if the lamp is burning, the table set,and the couch covered" (WJC 9). Appetizers are themselves describedas a Roman-German invention that in its Jewish form is served in"the synagogue following morning services on the Sabbath andholidays" (WJC 9). The focus on Jewish law and religious practiceas the common denominator of Jewish cuisine here figures the Jewishwoman as domestic practitioner of Judaism rather than as an arbiter orarchitect of family and communal recipes. Kashrut and the religiousauthority of texts--the pages and citations from the Talmud and, byextension, the cookbook in which they appear--displace and supplant thedomestic authority of Jewish women. (33)

This is not to say that women are not mentioned or pictured inMarks's narrative as cooks or provisioned. They certainly are. Butthe major visual topoi for Jewish women in this well-illustrated book iseither as such domestic practitioners or as embodiments of exotic,transnational Jewish ethnicity: "Colorful" Georgian Jewishwomen pose with textiles (WJC 21); a German Jewish woman in a MoritzOppenheim engraving serves soup in a sukkah (WJC 52); a family of BetaIsrael Jews in Bombay, India pose with wives, daughters and childrenprominently displayed in the foreground (WJC 138); a photograph of aKurdish Jewish family in Jerusalem also features the wife and daughtersin the foreground (WJC 196); a young Jewish woman from California posesin a sukkah, the focal point of a 1908 snapshot (WJC 200); a Beta Israelmother from Ethiopia, squatting in front of a reed hut, cooks flat-bread(WJC 273); a Moroccan Jewish woman in Arabic dress serves tea from anelaborate Levantine tea set (304); and a Baghdadi Jewish woman'swedding portrait introduces the section on confections (WJC 356).

The World of Jewish Cooking shows how potentially divisive issuesof gender and Jewish religiosity were subsumed beneath celebratorycookery stories that testified to the diversity and resilience of aburgeoning kashrut nation. As American Jewish institutions andindividuals in the nineteen-nineties argued over the legitimacy ofnon-Orthodox conversions, the ordination of female rabbis, and the placeof gay and lesbian Jews within congregations and on the pulpit, both TheWorld of Jewish Cooking and Sephardic Cooking placated Jewish readers,and intrigued non-Jewish ones, with a happy public display of Jewishunity--of Jews always at home in their dispersal, of exotic Jewishdifferences always dressed up and domesticated in recognizablytraditional attire. In their nostalgia for the social, cultural, andgender stability represented by an exotic Jewish past these cookbooksoffer what now seems both an ironic and yet fitting resolution for thevarious crises roiling American Jewish communities: asserting thatJewish social, cultural, and gender differences, as mediated andinterpreted through the uniform Jewish dietary laws (which is to saythrough a rabbinic Judaism supervised by men), are precisely what provethat Jews have been and continue to be the same as they ever were--bothexceptional and normative, shaped by conflict and conformity, atransnational nation that is the same as, yet different from, othernations possessing unique, national cuisines.

This ostensibly old but really quite contemporary kashrut nation istherefore best understood not as another incarnation of a Jewishsensibility injected into the popular literature of the U.S. bodypolitic--and so producing a certain pathology, behavior, or taste.Rather, that symbolic collective is a literary construction that, in itsattempt to manage the social anxieties of the time among American Jewsand within the U.S., in fact reflected the culturally diverse,economically expanding, and politically fractious nature of both in thelast decade of the twentieth-century.

The Jewish Import/Export Work of a U.S. Literary Product

To understand the dynamics and implications of that sharedaffiliation, consider Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food: AnOdyssey from Samarkand to New York (1996) and Faye Levy's 1,000Jewish Recipes (2000). (34) Roden's introduction, "ACelebration of Roots: Of Generations Past, Vanished Worlds, andIdentity," opens with a brilliantly condensed explanation of therelation between food and storytelling that also helps explain thekashrut nation described here: "Every cuisine tells a story. Jewishfood tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanishedworlds. It lives in people's minds and has been kept alive becauseof what it evokes and represents. My own world disappeared forty yearsago, but it has remained powerful in my imagination. When you are cutoff from your past, that past takes a stronger hold on youremotions" (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, theIberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Yemen, North Africa,and Eastern Europe (BJF 4), its language a "polyglot" of thelocal French vernacular, Arabic jargon, Italian nouns, and expressivebody language (BJF 5). Roden's colorful memories of her exoticcommunity and family, not surprisingly, set up the criteria for how shewill answer the question, "Is there such a thing as Jewishfood?" For Roden Jewish cooking is indeed "distinctive andrecognizable" (BJF 10) because of the Jewish dietary laws, becauseit "has always revolved around the Sabbath and religiousfestivals," because it betokens a culinary "cosmopolitanismwhich broke even through ghetto walls," and because Jewish cuisinewas shaped by Jewish "mobility," Jews' "propensityto move from one place to another" (BJF 10-11). Kashrut is hererhetorically linked to communal memory and to a mobile cosmopolitanism,connections reiterated in the explanatory chapter "The JewishDietary Laws of Kashrut" wherein Roden explains that the Ashkenazim"have been much stricter in their practice of kashrut," whilethe Sephardim "usually managed a synthesis between religiousconsciousness and the world around them" (BJF 21).

Roden's reasons for the distinctiveness of Jewish cooking makeovert the contemporary transformation in thinking about Jewish cuisinethat I have been tracing: the transnational diversity of Jewish cultureis the warrant for a unique Jewish cuisine and kashrut is the differenceupon which such a cuisine, and a concomitant sense of Jewish belonging,was built (BJF 10-11). By placing her own diaspora story at thebeginning of her narrative about Jewish food, Roden makes her situationas a Sephardic Jew (born and raised in Cairo, educated in Paris,residing in London, published in the U.K. and the U.S.) and thepolyglot, cosmopolitan nature of her childhood community the models forthat cuisine. Indeed, a version of her community and its religiouspractices, geographically enlarged and smartly historicized, isreplicated in her cookbook through the section headnotes, culinarysidebars, and recipes. The throng of recipes readers encounter over thecourse 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-Sfereet-Beignets dePaques--mimics a polyglot crowd settled comfortably within thedeterritorialized "home" of the book's English languagenarrative and format.

Less overt is the fact that Roden's cookbook and the memorywork it reflects participates in the contemporaneous, popular turn inAmerican mass culture toward multicultural and ethnic exoticism, and toreal and imaginary "heritage trips" abroad in order to explorecultural and ethnic "homes." (35) In that light, themainstreaming of Jewish cuisine during the nineteen-nineties is evidentnot only through its validation by Roden and others as a nationalcuisine without borders, but also, as Roden's cookbook exemplifies,by that cuisine's newly secured place and stature within ahistory-obsessed mass culture and commercial publishing industry. Thislent Roden's cookbook tangible cultural and economic capital. Themultinational nature of U.S. corporate publishers (Knopf is a subsidiaryof Random House, Inc., which is a division of Bertelsmann AG) meant thatRoden's arguments and her answer to whether there is such a thingas a uniquely Jewish cuisine circulated back to the very places wheresome of her recipes started out; like the bounce of a sonar wave thecookbook thus proved there was a cuisine hiding under their surfaces.(36)

This is evident from reviews in The Observer (U.K.) and TheJerusalem Post, which reveal how the book's argument sparked localdiscussions about Jewish cooking and Jewish identity. For Jay Rayner inThe Observer, Roden's cookbook and its focus on kashrut as adistinctive feature of Jewish food provided a "scripture" withwhich to justify declaring himself "a Jew by food I worship at mymother's fridge. ... Bernard Levin once referred to my lot asPantry Jews. Well, I like the term; it certainly defines a large part ofme." (37) Phyllis Glazer in the Jerusalem Post, reviewing theAmerican edition in 1998, ends her review, and her interview with Roden,with this question: "Does Roden see any real change in Israelicuisine in the 24 years since she first visited here?" (38) Theanswer is yes, and though one might presume that a quarter century wouldinvariably produce "real change" in a Western-oriented countrylike Israel, it is Roden and her cookbook who provide the seal ofapproval.

The Book of Jewish Food is thus an intriguing example of whatMichael Berube calls "worldly English," literatures in Englishthat facilitate global lines of communication. (39) Here, an Americanpublication and formula literature provide a frame for articulating andmanaging the ties binding together a kashrut nation. In Roden'scookbook these ties are rhetorically predicated on the Jewish dietarylaws and modeled on the cosmopolitanism and the multilingualism of herchildhood community. But from a materialist perspective these ties aremanifested through the physical production and distribution of her bookto English-language readers around the world; the internationalcirculation of Roden's cookbook, indebted to U.S. cultural andcorporate power, plays an important role in justifying her argumentabout a transnational national Jewish cuisine worthy of mainstreamappreciation.

The cultural influence and economic dominance of U.S. publishersalso help a cookbook like Faye Levy's 1,000 Jewish Recipes todirect traffic in a vocabulary of Jewish cuisine in and out of the U.S.Like Roden, Levy also argues that "Jewish cooking ismulticultural" (TJR xv), and that the laws of kashrut as well asthe Jewish holiday calendar tie the varieties of Jewish culturaldifference together. Levy, too, has lived and cooked in a number oflocales--the U.S. (Washington, D.C., Los Angeles), France, and Israel.And like The Book of Jewish Food, 1,000 Jewish Recipes builds on theauthor's previous cookbooks; in many ways it resembles Levy'sInternational Jewish Cookbook (1991), albeit in a rhetorically andstructurally more developed form. Unlike Roden and that earliercookbook, however, Levy's focus on transnational Jewish diversityis always filtered through the rules and customs pertaining not only tokosher food, but also to the running of a kosher kitchen throughout theJewish year. 1,000 Jewish Recipes promotes kashrut as a tangible way ofmaintaining a connection to the Jewish past and to the Jewishcommunities around the world, most no longer extant, whose dishes makeup Levy's cookbook. Whereas for Roden the nexus of that connectionremains 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 Judaicculture serves once again as an inspiration for Jewish cookingeverywhere," 1,000 Jewish Recipes makes a point of lauding Israelas "a center for the renaissance of Jewish cooking" (TJR xvi),and so combines an emphasis on kashrut and culinary diversity with apromotion of the Israeli table as the very model of a Jewish cuisine.

Making culinary and literary space for Israeli foods and recipeswithin her kashrut nation, Levy's rhetorical use of kashrut linksJewish cooking with a kind of translation work. Throughout the cookbook,but especially in her headnotes explaining the foods associated with theJewish holidays and the cooking customs dictated by kashrut, Levyinvariably notes Israeli practices and customs, conveying to readers"the Hebrew names for leeks," or how" Israeli homecooks" improvise a recipe, or what Jews who attend Israelisynagogues or communal celebrations do and eat. Clearly, Levy means toeducate both Jews and non-Jews about the centrality of Israel to atransnational kashrut nation. The culinary vocabulary of Levy'skashrut nation becomes a bridge nor only between the Jewish past and thepresent, but also between Israel and the U.S.

What I am trying to show here in brief is how a cookbook likeLevy's helps to translate not only words, but also thosewords' contexts and implications into the U.S. via cookbookliterature. One of the most obvious ways in which American Jewishcookbooks like The Book of Jewish Food and 1,000 Jewish Recipesexemplify a worldly English is through their importation and translationof Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, French, German, Italian, and Spanishwords that help phrase Jewish dishes and Jewish concepts. This iscommonly the function of cookbook glossaries, and in that regardLevy'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 Jewishcookbooks. And words like "soofganiyot," and "ozneihaman," as well as culturally marked terms such as "allaGiudia" and "Israeli salad," have found their way intoAmerican Jewish usage in part through those same cookbooks.

As examples of worldly English, then, Roden's and Levy'scookbooks, as well as the other cookbooks examined thus far, evince acomplex import-export business. They carry different kinds of literary,intellectual, cultural, and economic information, which taken togetheror in part offer readers both the excitements of cultural hybridity andthe solace of community, another privilege courtesy of U.S. corporateand cultural hegemony. Diaspora and homeland; during a decade in whichAmerican Jews worried and reworked the relation between themselves andIsrael, as well as between various modes of Jewish identity andreligiosity, these cookbooks offer an interpretation of Jewishcollectivity that allow readers to have it both ways. Each stokes thedesire of American Jews to have a cuisine of their own, an open-endedcuisine of endless reconfigurations and renegotiations--a never-endingDiaspora story. And each fulfills that desire. In doing so they awardAmerican Jews all the rights and responsibilities of such a culinaryhomecoming: to learn the laws of kashrut, to fix menus, to standardizerecipes, and to settle questions of provenance and definition. (41)

Kashrut as Interpretive Code, Cookbooks as Secular Bibles

But kashrut, of course, is more than just a token of citizenship insuch a symbolic Jewish interpretive community. It functions as theinterpretive code for religious as well as cultural border-making.Therefore, in answer to the question asked at the beginning of thisessay, examining the rhetorical function of kashrut in these fiveAmerican Jewish cookbooks reveals just how essential that function wasto the "discovery" of a distinctively Jewish cuisine duringthe nineteen-nineties. Kashrut as a safety net, as a common factor inthe exotic, as a totem of Jewish male authority, as a ground of Jewishdifference and hybridity, and as a bridge for culinary and culturaltranslation--in each instance kashrut distinguishes, provides a boundaryfor, or authorizes a Jewish cuisine whose transnational diversitythreatens to undo the very category it means to describe.

No doubt many would argue that this reflects a "commonsense" understanding that the Jewish dietary laws are intrinsic toanything calling itself Jewish cooking or Jewish foods. My reply to thatis twofold. First, how those laws are discursively understood anddeployed is, as other scholars note too, historically contingent, thoughit bears repeating given the current prestige of common sense outsidethe academy Kashrut promises standardization, but is itself subject tothe vagaries of ideology and interpretation--not so much in terms ofwhat is and is not forbidden to eat or mix (arguments about sturgeon andnatural and artificial flavoring notwithstanding), but in terms of itsuse as a stamp of approval, of acceptance, of right reading. Kashrutmakes kosher in an ideological and interpretive sense as much as in aritual sense. Removed from material practice and placed in a rhetoricalpractice, kashrut is a powerful tool with which to allay anxiety aboutbiological or cultural continuity and to forge connections betweenreaders with similar interests and tastes, readers who may live at bothfar and close distances from each other. The rhetorical function ofkashrut in cookbooks of the nineteen-nineties specifically reflects thatdecade's obsessions about history and memory as well as its socialand cultural landscape: conflicts about diasporic and homelandidentities and about Jewish continuity and authenticity; the resurgencein America of a conservative religiosity and of a desire among AmericanJews to reconnect with "traditional" Jewish practices; and theproliferation of gastronomically diverse as well as internationalcookery stories within the American cookbook genre.

Second, kashrut is undeniably the engine driving the cultural powerof contemporary American Jewish cookbooks. This aspect of its rhetoricalfunction, overlooked by scholars and critics, unwittingly helps justify"pantry" or "gastronomic" Jews. As Jay Rayner'sreview of The Book of Jewish Food illustrates, the mass circulation ofcookbook histories of Jewish food, and their rationales for the relationbetween food and identity, delivers to individuals knowledge thatlegitimates what in other contexts might well be thought of as"mix-and-match" Jewishness. The five cookbooks examined inthis essay quite clearly teach one how to read food Jewishly, and theydo so by making the basic grammar of that reading the Jewish dietarylaws and the ritual observances associated with them. In most of thecookbooks that grammar is made to seem timeless; in all of them thatgrammar enables readers to understand their own subjective tastes ashistorically grounded, culturally unique, serious, multicultural (asopposed to simply eclectic), and a source of pride. Kashrut, in otherwords, lends cultural legitimacy and social prestige to Jewishidentity--and so these cookbooks become secular bibles. As in SephardicCooking, where the observant and non-observant find room in Marks'skashrut nation, the actual practice of kashrut is beside the point. Ifreaders do cook up the recipes in these cookbooks, they might do so forthe practical, observant purposes that Faye Levy's cookbookspresume. But they can also do so as an act of personal worship, likeRayner, or as an act of cultural tourism, as with Copeland Marks, and inkitchens far removed from the kosher ideal literally illustrated on pagefifteen of Spice and Spirit. Policing the kashrut nation described bythese cookbooks is, in the end, a self-regulated matter.

That Jewish law can be used to sanction subjective notions ofidentity is hardly a new phenomenon, yet as an irony within AmericanJewish cookbooks it is both an aspect of American Jewish culture of thenineteen-nineties and of the ever more complicated branding of identityin America. The varied searches by American Jews over the course of thatdecade--for authenticity, for a useable Jewish past, and for meaningfulJewish affiliations--helped create a cultural and social environmentripe not only for a new-old Jewish cuisine, but also for new communalinitiatives and organizations (the Andrea and Charles BronfmanPhilanthropies, the Joshua Venture fellowship program, Makor at the 92ndSt. Y), and for new cultural productions and publications (the TooJewish? exhibition, the klezmer revival, Storahtelling, Plotz: the Zinefor the Vaclempt, etc.). The kashrut nation in American Jewish cookbooksexemplifies one of the many new cultural interpretations that offeredready material for the culture industry markets to distribute to a massaudience.

The ideologies of those interpretations proved no impediment totheir commercial uses--they were, in fact, quite helpful, Elsewhere Ihave written about the burgeoning American Jewish culture of oppositionduring the same decade and its relation to the "new Jew" brandat the turn of the millennium. (42) The exponents of "radicalJewish culture" (a phrase borrowed from John Zorn and his circle ofklezmer experimentalists) aimed to subvert or recontextualize the tirednarratives, stale images, and fey sounds dogging American Jewish cultureand religiosity. Intuiting the mass appeal of such alt-Jewish-ness--andof the self-described "new Jews" populating New York'sdowntown arts scene--product designers, Jewish outreach professionals,arts programmers, and the editors of magazines like Heeb rushed tointroduce it, and the philanthropies and advertisers who hoped to profitfrom it, to American and American Jewish consumers. The success of the"new Jew" brand that Heeb, Jewcy Hebrew Couture, the webzineGenerationJ.com, and VH-l's documentary "So Jewtastic"helped formulate in the first years of the 21st century was in largepart attributable to the "do-it-yourself" ethos and Jewishhumor those enterprises appropriated from oppositional Jewish culturalproductions of the nineteen-nineties.

Similarly, the kashrut nation formulated in commercially publishedAmerican Jewish cookbooks of the nineteen-nineties is becoming ananalogous kind of brand this decade. The purchase of what one reviewer,in the April 2006 issue of Moment magazine, calls "history-heavycookbooks"--his term for the recent crop of cookbooks made possibleor influenced by Roden's The Book of Jewish Food (and, I wouldargue, 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, ofsalvaging, what was good from a past that would otherwise urge us todamn the world rather than bless it." (43) This culinary recoveryof a Jewish transnational past is the key to marketing "The SeriousSide of Jewish Cookbooks," as the review was titled; indeed, theserious and conservative nature of a kashrut nation, and the appearanceof this review in a middlebrow publication like Moment clarify themarket niche for such a brand. Whereas the "new Jew" brandappeals to buyers interested in cultural subversion, the solaces ofindividualism, and the flatteries of contemporary fashion, a kashrutnation, as both an interpretive community and a brand, appeals to buyersinterested in cultural conservation, the solaces of history, and theflatteries of collective memory. They are, in fact, flip sides of thesame coin--the contemporary, commercial marketing of eminentlyconsumable Jewish identities to the American middle-class.

That is an awkward pun, but it does underline why the Jewishdietary laws provide a helpful brand name for one such identity. It alsoreminds us that in America's current food-obsessed mood the notionthat "we are what we eat" is so hackneyed that it too hasbecome unchallenged common sense. Perhaps, then, the most compellingfantasy retailed in American Jewish cookbooks today is not that there isa Jewish cuisine, but that such a profitable idea was ever in doubt.(44)

(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 PopularCulture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); and Janice Radway, Reading theRomance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina. Press, 1991). I use the term "formulaliteratures" rather than "formula stories" or"popular literature," as a more accurate designation for thevariety of popular narratives that employ or depend upon a recognizedformula for their fictional or non-fictional storytelling, bur which arenot belles lettres or journalism. Cookbooks, comics, and even calendarsare better categorized this way given how similar their narrativestrategies are to formula stories in general.

(2) Cookbooks marshal and disseminate notions about gender rolesand social norms; about community and politics; about ethnic selves andethnic Others; about national cuisine and personal identity; aboutfeminine stereotypes and their feminist refigurings; and aboutautobiography as fictional leftover and Derridean supplement. SeeJessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Moms Home Cooking: Cookbooks andGender in Modern America (Baltimore and London: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2003); Anne L. Bower, ed. Recipes for Reading:Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories (Amherst: University ofMassachusetts Press, 1997); Glynis Ridley, "The First AmericanCookbook," Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1999): 114-123;Steve Siporin, "From Kashrut to Cucina Ebraica: The Recasting ofItalian Jewish Foodways," Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 107,No. 424 (1994): 268-281; Arjun Appadurai, "How to Make a NationalCuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India," Comparative Studies inSociety and History, Vol. 30. No. 1 (1988); 3-24; Susan J. Leonardi,"Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and KeyLime Pie," PMLA, Vol. 104 (1989): 430-447; and Parama Roy,"Reading Communities and Culinary Communities: The Gastropoetics ofthe South Asian Diaspora," positions: east asia cultures critique,Vol. 10, No. 2 (2002): 471-502.

(3) Ruth Abusch-Magder, "Cookbooks," in Paula E. Hymanand Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America: An HistoricalEncyclopedia, Vol. IA--L (New York, London: Routledge, 1997): 281-287.

(4) Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, "The Kosher Gourmet in theNineteenth-Century Kitchen: Three Jewish Cookbooks in HistoricalPerspective," The Journal of Gastronomy, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1988): 57and 62.

(5) Jenna Weissman Joselit, "Food Fight: The Americanizationof Kashrut in Twentieth-Century America, "in Leonard J. Greenspoon,Ronald A, Simkins, and Gerald Shapiro, eds., Food and Judaism, Studiesin Jewish Civilization, Volume 15 (Omaha: Creighton University Press,2005), pp. 335-345, and The Wonders of America: Reinventing JewishCulture, 1880-1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), ISO and 177; HasiaR. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, & Jewish Foodwaysin the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA & London; Harvard UniversityPress, 2001).

(6) This ethnic display follows general trends in postwar Americancookbooks. As Jessamyn Neuhaus notes, the cookbook market expandedrapidly after the war, and the concomitant explosion of specialized andniche cookbooks (including ethnic cookbooks) pushed all but the mostwell known general cookbooks out of demand (Neuhaus, Manly Meals, p.166).

(7) Jennie Grossinger, The Art of Jewish Cooking (New York: RandomHouse, 1958).

(8) As Grossinger proudly writes, "French cuisine may befamous for its Escoffier. Italian for its Alfredo. But Jewishcooking--well, for generations and generations, way back to Sarah,Rebecca and Rachel, the master chef has always been the mistress of theparticular tent: Mom" (p. viii).

(9) Gertrude Berg and Myra Waldo, The Molly Goldberg JewishCookbook (reprint, New Hope, PA: Ivyland Books, 1999); Sara Kasdan, Loveand Knishes: An Irrepressible Guide to Jewish Cooking, rev. ed.(Alexander, NC: Alexander Books, 1997); Ruth and Bob Grossman, TheKosher-Cookbook Trilogy: The Chinese-Kosher Cookbook, The Italian-KosherCookbook, and The French-Kosher Cookbook (New York: Paul S. Eriksson,Inc., 1965).

(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 andSpirit: The Complete Kosher Jewish Cookbook (Brooklyn, NY: LubavitchWomen's Cookbook Publications, 1990). Hereafter cited in the textas SS.

(15) I find that the way "transnational" is employedand/or described by Paik Nak-chung (who cites Goethe and Marx) andMichael Berube (who cites Andrew Hoberek and Paul Jay), is most usefulfor describing the knowledges present in American Jewish cookbooks. ForNak-chung, "transnational," as in "a transnationalmovement for world literature," refers to a kind of creative andintellectual networking by writers and literary intellectuals around theglobe achieved "through reading of one another's work andshared knowledge of the important journals as well as through personalcontact" (Paik Nak-chung, "Nations and Literatures in the Ageof Globalization," in Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., TheCultures of Globalization, [Durham and London; Duke University Press,1998], p. 223). For Berube, "transnational," as in "atransnational perspective on English" (which he more specifically,and more consistently, terms the "globalization of English"),is the recognition that American writers and literary intellectuals haveavailable to them, and ought to avail themselves of, a wide range andmix of world literatures and traditions, which are accessible courtesyof 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 mydrafting of "transnational" to denote a process of literaryand cultural communication and to connote the flow of Jewish culturalcapital and American Jewish literary longing across national lines.

(16) Calling the object of my analysis "a symbolic Jewishinterpretive community" underlines my interest in this essay inexploring a particular rhetorical design within five American Jewishcookbooks and the way that design, and these texts, construct acommunity of readers. Calling such a community symbolic acknowledgesthat I am not surveying a group of actual readers and that my owninterpretive biases are implicated here, that what I have noticed is"what has been made noticeable, not by a clear and undistortingglass, but by an interpretive strategy," as Stanley Fish points outin "Interpreting the Variorum" The Norton Anthology of Theoryand Criticism, general ed, Vincent B. Leitch (New York, London: W.W.Norton & Company, 2001), p. 2084. The question of how readers usedthese cookbooks, and whether they adopted their interpretive strategies,lies outside the scope of this essay, I do not offer a sociological oranthropological study here. A symbolic Jewish interpretive community istherefore my portmanteau term for a representation of Jewish readers andof a certain kind of reading, both of which are made in and by the text.James L. Machor, in a very helpful footnote in his article "TheObject of Interpretation and. Interpretive Change," MLN, Vol. 113,No. 5 (1998); 1126-1150, notes that Fish has denned an interpretivecommunity both as a group of individuals who share reading strategiesand as a more abstract idea, "a point of view or way of organizingexperiences," and that for him Tony Bennet's term"reading formation" better suits the latter definition (p.1145). While I acknowledge the practicality of Machor'sdistinction, "interpretive community" better conveys a senseof collectivity, that feeling of belonging for which the five cookbooksI discuss stoke great desire.

(17) Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of theConcepts of Poluution and Taboo (London and New York; Routledge, 1989),famously interprets the Jewish dietary laws as extensions of the ancientIsraelite conception of holiness as separateness and wholeness: "Tobe holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity,perfection of the individual and of the kind. The dietary rules merelydevelop the metaphor of holiness on the same lines" (p. 55).Reading the negative rules of kashrut through this lens, Douglasconcludes, "If the proposed interpretation of the forbidden animalsis correct, the dietary laws would have been like signs which at everyturn inspired meditation on the oneness purity and completeness of God.By rules of avoidance holiness was given a physical expression in everyencounter with the animal kingdom and at every meal" (p. 58), JeanSoler, in "The Semiotics of Food in the Bible," in CarolCounihan and Penny Van Estrick, eels., Food and Culture (London and NewYork; Routledge, 1997), takes a related perspective on the metaphor ofholiness, arguing that the laws of kashrut are "a matter ofupholding the separation between two classes or two types ofrelationships. ... Everyone belongs to one species only, one people, onesex, one category" (p. 64). Unfortunately, at the end of his essaySoler applies his reading to a critique of "Hebrewcivilization," its abhorrence of hybridity, and thus to Israelixenophobia and political intransigence. For an overview of suchstructuralist approaches to the dietary laws, as well as otherapproaches, see also John Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social Historyof Jewish Food (Northvale, New Jersey; London: Jason Aronson Inc.,1993).

(18) Diner, The Jews of the United States, p. 313

(19) Cited in" J2K Problem. ..., " National JewishOutreach 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.

(22) For an example related to the challenge of feminism at theturn of the decade, see the chapter relating the learned dispute withinthe Library Minyan of Temple Beth Am, a Conservative synagogue in LosAngeles, over incorporating the Imahot into the Amidah in Samuel G.Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (NewYork; Simon & Schuster, 2000). Also evocative is the contemporaneouscommercial success of Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy (New York;William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991), and the University ofCalifornia Press' advertising slogan promoting Lynn Davidman'sbook. Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to OrthodoxJudaism--"Back to Basics." Under that slogan were blurbs byJudith Plaskow and Beverly W. Harrison; the ad itself appeared in anumber of publications, including Commentary, Vol. 93, No. 3 (March1992): 61.

(23) Haym Soloveitchik, "Rupture and Reconstruction: TheTransformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy," in Roberta RosenbergFarber and Chaim I. Waxman, eds., Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader(Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1999), p. 339.

(24) Appadurai, "How to Make a National Cuisine," p. 15.

(25) Appadurai, "How to Make a National Cuisine," pp.18-21.

(26) Copeland Marks, Sephardic Cooking: 600 Recipes Created inExotic 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 JackKugelmass, "Keys and Canons," in Jack Kugelmass, ed., KeyTexts in American Jewish Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London:Rutgers University Press, 2003).

(28) That attraction is evident in both the academy and in thegeneral journalism of the time. On the one hand, see Jonathan and DanielBoyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of JewishIdentity," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19 (Summer 1993): 693-725, andthe discussion of it in James Clifford" Diasporas," CulturalAnthropology, Vol. 9, No. 3 (August 1994): 302-338. The Boyarins arguefor an eclectic, synthetic ethnocentrism whose idealmanifestation--whose home--was Muslim Spain during the Golden Age ofSpanish Jewry in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, see the reviews ofMarks' cookbook and the side bar articles that explained the Jewishdietary laws and defined for general audiences terms like"diaspora": "Diaspora--dispersion, scattering--is theword used for the movement of the Spanish Jews after the expulsion. Theymoved slowly but surely, fanning out across the globe" (AnnBurckhardt, "The Cuisine of Spanish Jewry Sepharad," StarTribune [Minneapolis, MN], Taste; Pg. 1T). See also Bev Bennet,"Exploring the Routes of Sephardic Cuisine; Variety at Heart ofSephardic Cuisine," Chicago Sun-Times, April 9, 1992, Food; p. 1;NC; Sheryl Julian, "The Sephardic Connection: From Morocco toIndia," The Boston Globe, June 14, 1992, Magazine; p. 25; andLeslye Michlin Borden, "Savor a Sephardic Sampling forPassover," St. Petersburg Times (Florida), April 16, 1992, Food; p.1D.

(29) This seems appropriate for Marks, whose culinary authority waspredicated on travel; he worked in the Foreign Service and his familybusiness was importing exotic foods and textiles. See Eleanor Charles,"Westchester Guide," New York Times, June 19, 1994, p. A8; andEric Asimov, "Copeland Marks, 78, Author of Books on ExoticCuisine," New York Times, January 2, 2000, Obituaries, p. 35.

(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 JewishHome (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: TheLives 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 publicpersona--see, for example, Macy's display ad "Herald SquareWeekly," New York Times, December 7, 1997, p. 11: "Not only isGil Marks a noted chef, author of The World of Jewish Cooking and a 1996James Beard Cookbook Award nominee, but he's a Rabbi in his sparetime!"

(33) For insight into the ways that German-speaking Jewish women inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries actually negotiatedsuch rabbinic authority over the Jewish food chain, and how theyinfluenced the practice and observance of kashrut within the domesticsphere, see Ruth Ann Abusch-Magder' "Kashrut: The Possibilityand Limits of Women's Domestic Power," in Greenspoon, Simkins,and Shapiro, eds., Food and Judaism, p. 169-192. I am not aware of anycomparable study on contemporary American Jewish women.

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

(35) See Clifford, "Diasporas," pp. 310-313, and DavidRoskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington andIndianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999).

(36) Roden's cookbook circulated in two editions, one from theU.S. and the other from the U.K. Interestingly, Viking (originally anAmerican press but now a subsidiary of the Penguin Group with divisionsin the U.K. and the U.S.) omitted "New York" from the subtitlewhen they published the U.K. edition a year later in 1997. But the newsubtitle, "An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the PresentDay," which advertised the cookbook as a journey through timerather than to America, simply underlined both publishers' strategyto 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 JerusalemPost, May 29, 1998, Features section, p. 20.

(39) Berube, "Introduction: Worldly English," p. 1-5.

(40) Most of the cookbooks in this essay include glossaries, andPatti Shosteck's A Lexicon of Jewish Cooking: A Collection ofFolklore, Foodlore, History, Customs, and Recipes (Chicago: ContemporaryBooks, Inc., 1981) is in essence an expanded, annotated glossary.

(41) Another way, then, to understand the kashrut nation beingconstructed in American Jewish cookbooks is to see it as an example ofwhat Sidra Ezrahi calls the dialectic between exile and homecoming inmodern Jewish literatures, "an ongoing dialectic between thetemporal and the spatial, between the 'imaginary' and the'real,' the mimetic and the original, desire andfulfillment" (Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile andHomecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination [Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000], p. 3).

(42) Laurence Roth, "Oppositional Culture and the 'NewJew' Brand: From Plotz to Heeb to Lost Tribe," Shofar: AnInterdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer2007): 99-123.

(43) Abe Opincar, "The Serious Side of Jewish Cookbooks,"Moment, April 2006/Nisan 5766, p. 86.

(44) My thanks to Shari Jacobson, Susan Bowers, Deborah Starr, AlanRosen, and Mary Bannon for their invaluable comments and suggestions asI drafted this essay. I am especially grateful to Alan Mintz for sharinghis insights into Jewish foods with me over a sushi lunch. An earlyversion of this essay was presented at the 11th Annual Grass Colloquiumin Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of2005.

Laurence Roth

Susquehanna University