About this Publication : the "Sephardic Heritage Cookbook" as a Case Study
This site arose from a Digital Humanities learning initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. It features the work of undergraduates in “Food in the Islamic Middle East,” which Professor Heather J. Sharkey offered in Spring 2023 as a Benjamin Franklin Scholars seminar, through the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Dr. Arthur Kiron, curator of Judaica collections in the Penn Libraries, originally suggested pursuing a digital group project and helped to acquire and identify relevant materials for this class. Emily Esten and Dr. Amanda Licastro offered advice in the early stages. The Price Lab for Digital Humanities at Penn lent its support. Dr. Cosette Bruhns Alonso, the inaugural Contemporary Publishing Fellow in the Penn Libraries’ Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship and Penn Press, played critical roles in providing guidance and expertise as the class developed content and launched the site. Cassandra Hradil, Digital Humanities Specialist in the Price Lab for Digital Humanities and Penn Libraries' Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship contributed to the design and development of this publication.
The class used one cookbook – the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook, published by the Or Chadash Sisterhood of the Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel of Los Angeles in 2016 – as a basis for this collective project. The pages below explain why we chose this cookbook and the insights that it provides.