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• 1 media/Heather Challah Bread Closeup 27Feb2023.jpg media/20230512_125711.jpg media/Heather Challah Bread Closeup 27Feb2023.jpg 2023-01-20T14:40:11+00:00 About this Publication : the "Sephardic Heritage Cookbook" as a Case Study 37 image_header 2023-05-18T00:17:15+00:00 About this Publication & Acknowledgments
  
  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. 
• 1 2023-05-12T16:42:32+00:00 The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook (2016): A Case Study 11 plain 2023-05-18T00:21:13+00:00 Intrigued by the genre of American community cookbooks and interested in the history of Middle Eastern American cuisines, Heather Sharkey decided to focus this group project on one American community cookbook in the Penn Libraries.  She chose The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook, which the women’s society of the Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel of Los Angeles published in 2016.
  
  For class assignments, students wrote short research papers on topics associated with the cookbook.  In one essay, students focused on the history of the congregation, on the routes of migration that had drawn its members to California, or on particular dishes or practices.  In another, they studied a single ingredient. Later they engaged in an experiential learning exercise, with teams of three cooking from the book and documenting their efforts in writing and film.  Along the way, students learned about Sephardic Jewish history and culture in the context of the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberian Peninsula (including Andalusia, or Islamic Spain). On a more nuts-and-bolts level, they learned about producing public-facing scholarship, in this case by using the platform called Scalar, which supports the display of multimodal content via text, film, and sound.  
  
  The students assembled this site in the hope that it will interest members of the public who enjoy reading about the history of food and cookbooks; Sephardic Jewish diasporic cultures; and the intersection of American history and culture with the lands of the Middle East, North Africa, and broader Islamic world, including Andalusia (Spain), North Africa and Western Asia, the territories of the former Ottoman Empire, and Persia.
  
  Source: Sephardic Temple Or Chadash Sisterhood, Sephardic Heritage Cookbook: Ottoman, Persian, Moroccan, Egyptian Recipes and More (North Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016).  ISBN-13: 9781539430636