Food in the Islamic Middle East: A Case Study of the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook

Sephardic American Culinary Cultures

This site, again, is the product of a collective effort, and arose from a seminar offered at the University of Pennsylvania in Spring 2023.  While a few students in the seminar identified as Jewish, the majority did not.  And so, for many students, learning about Sephardic cuisine through the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook meant learning about basic aspects of Jewish culinary culture: for example, about what makes food kosher, why Jews eat unleavened bread (matzoh) for Passover, or even what it means to observe the Sabbath or holidays like Purim and Rosh Hashanah.  Some students expressed an interest in knowing more about the congregation, Temple Tifereth Israel, whose women’s society produced the cookbook; others were curious about how this congregation fit within the larger tapestry of Los Angeles-area Jewish communities.  Instead of focusing on the United States, still others welcomed the opportunity to understand the cookbook and its community relative to the lands from which its congregants’ families had migrated – in the process, understanding how Jewish peoples shared a culture, through food, with their Muslim and other neighbors.  More broadly, recalling the importance of African American community cookbooks in her own grandmother’s kitchen, one student set out to understand how the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook exemplified the American community cookbook as a literary genre.  From their research on a variety of topics, which they shared and discussed with each other, students emerged with a clearer sense of the cultural specificity and universality of Sephardic cuisine in its local and global contexts.


 

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