Coffee from the corner bodega, the stoop in front of my building, the hardware
store that smells like varnish, aspects of my own everyday existence so unremarkable
they hardly register. It took reading yizkor books—testimonies from people who had lost
everything– to show me how meaningful they can be. Yizkor books were conceived as monuments to the Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust. Overwhelmingly, what their authors chose to memorialize was the sights, smell, sounds of everyday life: muddy streets, double-paned windows stuffed with rags, the town water pump. This talk will look at that choice and what it can tell us about our own lives.

Before we’re anything else—citizens, believers, or members of a
community—we’re creatures who eat. A lot of what we humans do is organized around food, pursuing it, preparing it, consuming it. The fact that it’s so elemental, that it touches so many aspects of our existence, makes it a kind of cultural master key. Knowing what people ate, why they ate it, how it was cooked and who did the cooking can help you understand what they valued, how they saw themselves and who they aspired to be. 

Despite their aura of permanence, traditions are things we invent, rethink, and
revise. Some we lose completely. What American Jews think of as our culinary
inheritance—chicken soup, chopped liver, gefilte fish—are all foods once reserved for
the Sabbath. Less familiar are the everyday foods that Jews relied on for survival.
Starting in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, this talk will explore pre-immigration
Jewish food traditions and what happened to them when they reached America. (Hint:
American abundance meant that Jews could afford a diet upgrade. Foods once viewed
as holy became everyday fare, while the old foods of poverty were abandoned.)
Continuity is illusory, but that’s okay. It’s the perception of continuity that matters. 

Over time, American Jews have experimented with what it means to “eat Jewish.”
Starting from the premise of food as cultural master key, this talk will look at three
interpretations, each reflecting the zeitgeist of a particular time and place.
1. 1880s: Reformed German Jews came up with a radical new interpretation of Jewish dietary laws. Informed by science–not scripture–they decide that kosher
means “healthy and clean.” 
2. 1960s: Jewish immigrants—Russian/Polish and newly middle-class–indulged
their food fantasies in Borscht Belt dining rooms. Jewish haimishness meets
American glamour. We explore a synthesis of Old World and New World that is
quintessentially Jewish-American.
3. 2000s: Young Jews, chefs, fermenters, bakers, and deli mavens, reclaim the
foods of their immigrant ancestors, the way they used, before getting “corrupted”
by assimilation. (Think jarred gefilte fish!) This reflects the yearning to connect with
one’s Jewish roots but also to belong – Food as a way to honor and preserve the past while cooking as a form of remembering.

This talk about the value of food history, this time as a window onto the lives of women.
Traditionally, the subjects favored by writers of history have been rich, powerful, and
male. It’s only in recent decades that women were deemed worthy of our attention. The
challenge is finding them in the historical record. For a variety of reasons—Jane mentions them in the talk–historical evidence about the lives of women is frustratingly sparse. Food is one of the most fruitful places to look.

There are TWO options for this talk:

 1: (For a Jewish audience) – A discussion of women’s lives in the shtetls. Jane focuses on responsibilities,limitations, spirituality, all seen through the lens of food. 

2: (A Very American Story) – Jane shares the story of the Bureau of Home Economics, a woman-run government agency dedicated to all things domestic, including cooking and nutrition. Jane covers the rise of the food expert and government dietary recommendations.

We typically recognize History as the printed word of the powerful and privileged. In the
decades after World War II, grieving Jews, ordinary people grappling with unfathomable loss, came together in groups to write their own history. The result is a body of writing known as yizkor books. Their motivation was complex. 1) To save a vanished world from oblivion. 2) To document their Holocaust experiences for the benefit of future generations. This talk is about “regular folk” who assume responsibility for recording what they know to be true. Keenly aware of their own scholarly limitations, they claimed the authority of the eyewitness. The tradition of the citizen historian is alive and well in our own time, aided by a new recording tool: the cell phone.