German-Jewish Cookbook: A food anthropology

From IJN High Holiday Foods in the 1990s, my brother brought a cassette of Jewish humor home from school. One of the routines featured a heimish Jewish woman who was competing in a quiz show about music. After hearing the music sample in each round, say an oompah band type folk song, she inevitably exclaimed, “that’s Jewish music!” The joke, I think, was that Jewish music borrows from music around it, but that this woman wasn’t worldly enough to understand that. That’s been the history of the Jewish people. We adapt to our surroundings, and as an exiled and persecuted people, those surroundings have spanned the globe. So, too, with food. While there are “Jewish” dishes, nearly every single one has an equivalent in the […]