Home Cooking National Cuisine:

How Jewish-Israeli Middle-Class Women Savour Home

AbstractThis essay pays close attention to middle-class women’s home cooking

and nostalgia in order to account for their contribution to national

cuisine. I use a case study of 25 Jewish-Israeli middle-class women who

immigrated to New Zealand since the 2000s to examine changes in their

home cooking over three generations in relation to Israel’s cuisine. My

historic analysis incorporates understandings based on theory in food

studies that focus on women’s enactment of kinship relationships

through cooking. This analysis is also incorporates recent developments

in the social theory of nostalgia that include the negotiation of gendered

power relations and expressions of social critique. I argue that women

employ nostalgically home cooked dishes to negotiate kinship, ethnic and

class-based relationships. Their negotiations reshape the national

cuisine, materialising their struggles to constitute belonging to the

national home over time. The historic analysis illustrates how the Zionist

ideology employed nostalgia and the food arena to constitute the social

connections that build the national home in two phases. First, during the

1920s (pre state) to the 1960s, Zionism constituted two gendered myths

that served the “double colonisation” of the Arab and the Jewish-Arab

populations by the Ashkenazi elite. Second, from the 1960s women’s

nostalgic cooking, which was previously relegated to the household, was

legitimized as enactment of ethnic diversity. The societal responses to

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second-wave feminism gave rise to a third mythical figure based on home

cooking. I, therefore, suggest that examining how women journey home

through their cooking should serve future comparative analysis that

looks into the reformation of national cuisines in other post-colonial

societies.

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Home Cooking National Cuisine:

How Jewish-Israeli Middle-Class Women Savour Home

IntroductionWhat is there in the Ashkenazi kitchen [east and central European Jewish cuisine] anyway? Gefilte fish and chicken soup with matzo balls…? It’s all bland foods and overcooked cheap vegetables that end up looking grey like your typical chopped liver pâté. In comparison, any Mizrahi kitchen [North African and Middle Eastern Jewish cuisines] is better. Take for example, my Moroccan mum’s kitchen, especially her couscous, it is amazing. Once, I invited a friend to eat the couscous I made, which is only half as good as my mum’s or my grandmothers’ couscous. She could not get enough, thinking to this day that my couscous is the best food she’d ever eaten in her life. The warm flavours, the smells, the textures, all blend in beautifully … there is nothing like it! (Nellie)i

Nellie’s passionate manifesto is a snippet paraphrased from a

conversation we held as part of my PhD research in social anthropology.

In my fieldwork I examined the everyday experiences of 25 Jewish-Israeli

women who immigrated to New Zealand with their families and settled in

Auckland since the early 2000s. The study focussed on why and how they

changed home cooking following migration, reformulating the everyday

practice that produces meals and snacks on daily basis with the intention

of non-commercial consumption. As such, home cooking remains one of

the domains most associated with the lives of middle-class women; an

everyday practice that is a gendered representation of the familial home,

despite the influence of second-wave feminism in many western

countries.ii

Considering that Nellie is married to an Ashkenazi husband, her short

manifesto above makes clear the powerful significance of her Moroccan

(Mizrahi) descent. She is idealising the memory of her own home cooked

couscous and the couscous of her Moroccan female kin, mother and

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grandmothers, while denigrating iconic Ashkenazi food. In is important

to note that while Ashkenazim and Mizrahim are the two main ethnic

groups in the Jewish-Israeli population, Zionist ideologues and policy-

makers perceived the Ashkenazim as the elite.iii

I contemplated my conversation with Nellie and compared her

experience with those of the other women in my study group. I then

realised that following their migration to New Zealand, the longing and

nostalgic memories of the women drove them to begin recreating dishes

that epitomise the memories of their close female kin and remind them of

their respective national homes. The dishes women in my study cooked

(or asked their husbands to cook for them) became metonyms of their

female kin and the nation-states that their female kin had emigrated

from. I noticed the complexity of their behaviour: many women in my

study regarded iconic Mizrahi home cooked dishes as better than iconic

Ashkenazi dishes. They employed their appreciation and longing for their

close female kin to idealise their home cooking and subverted the Jewish-

Israeli ethnic and class-based hierarchy. Yet in this regard I also found

that women expressed longing for Ashkenazi or Mizrahi home cooked

dishes and idealised their close female kin somewhat differently

according to their class and ethnicity, as shall be further demonstrated.

In this essay I pay close attention to the complexity of the emotions and

memories of Jewish-Israeli middle-class women as they are expressed

and materialised in their everyday experiences through their home

cooking over three generations. I recognise and validate the importance

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of these women’s home cooking, their emotions and memories by looking

into how their choices of dishes in the familial home reformulate their

national cuisine. A national cuisine is often understood as represented by

the typical foods and staples of a certain nation-state; foods that are

usually presented by the media, cooked by celebrity chefs, and often

represented in cookbooks and in other culinary texts by food writers.

These iconic representations materialise the long lasting symbolic

connection of citizens and emigrants alike with their nation-state as

social actors that define their cuisine in relation to the cuisines of other

nations in the world.

I argue that in order to fully understand the changes that occur in

national cuisines over time, one has to consider the contribution of

middle-class women’s home cooked dishes and the social connections

they materialise through dishes along generations. In particular I pay

attention to the nostalgia that women convey through home cooking,

highlighting their dishes as a metaphoric means to journey home by

which they negotiate social relationships. These social relationships

relate to the relationships that constitute familial homes by materialising

kinship, as well as the citizen-nation relations that form connections with

the national home. In the case of the women in my study the national

home is regarded as their Israeli nation-state, as well as the nation-states

of their female kin prior to their immigration to Israel: countries in east

and central Europe, North Africa and the Middle-East.iv

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By emphasising the link between familial homes and national homes, my

analysis expends on the scholarly inference that any national cuisine is a

contested “home ground”; the expression of social relationships that

materialise connections and powerful struggles between and within

cultural groups, constituting collective identities. Studies that consider

powerful identity struggles in the national food arena are found, for

example, with regard to the social processes and debates that gave rise

to the iconic status of pavlova (meringue-like cake) due to cultural wars

between New Zealand and Australia,v and hummus due to cultural wars

between Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians.vi

In order to highlight the links between familial and national homes that

are realised through food by women, my theoretical approach

incorporates two main bodies of literature: research on the home cooking

of mainly middle-class women, often first generation migrants from

different cultural groups, and the literature that brings to the fore recent

developments in the social theory of nostalgia.

Food studies since the mid-1990s have extended our understanding of

the power relations between cultural groups in the national home. Many

such studies emphasize the power of migrant populations to resist

assimilation, discussing how they cope with the challenges posed by

health policies, the schooling system, the mass media and the mass

consumption of fast food. Certain works specifically address the idea that

homogenisation of taste is instigated by the rise of national cuisines.vii

Other studies that focus on middle-class migrant women’s home cooking

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portray their practice as a means to resist processes of homogenisation.viii

In particular, migrant women’s home cooking is regarded as an

intergenerational means of maintaining cultural continuity by

transmitting culinary knowledge to the next generation and shoring up

ethnic identities.

There have been two main developments since the 2000s in the social

theory of nostalgia, with the first suggesting that women negotiate

gendered power relations in the family and beyond, emphasizing

resistance as inherent in nostalgia.ix Studies in this literature portray

women as liberated via their longing to return home, as the analysis of

Pamela Sugiman exemplifies.x Sugiman examined the life stories of

Japanese-Canadian migrant women who suffered the deliberate

destruction of their communities and families in Canada in a form of

“cultural genocide” during the Second World War.xi Sugiman claims that

these women’s expression of nostalgia for their youthful prewar lives in

Japan is a means of reclaiming their power, dignity and positive identity.xii

The second theoretical development derives from a growing body of

literature on post-Socialist and post-Communist societies.xiii This

literature examines the results of the disintegration of the USSR (1989)

and the subsequent political changes in east and central Europe. Most of

the studies in this literature argue that it is the critical engagement of

cultural groups with their present lives, which leads them to recast their

past by idealising the memory of their national home in order to

articulate the desire for solidarity. This desire is also expressed through

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their social critique towards their contemporary conditions of living as

they reformulate citizen–state relations.

In the historical account that follows the description of my fieldwork and

methodology, I use secondary analysis of a few ethnographies that relate

to the experiences of Jewish-Israeli women in Israel and many historic

studies. My account identifies the important trends that the Jewish-Israeli

society has seen since the pre state 1920s. The discussion questions the

impact of the Zionist ideology on the everyday experiences of women

through their food production and consumption in the familial home and

their place in constructing their national home, relating to two main

phases: the 1920s–1960s and post-1960. In the first phase, I claim that

the Zionist ideology legitimised national-European nostalgia on account

of other non-European nostalgias; those of the marginalised social groups

in the Israeli society, by constituting two mythical figures. These mythical

figures deliberately marginalised of the Arab and the Arab-Jewish

(Mizrahi) populations and promulgated their ‘double colonisation’. In the

second phase I focus on societal responses to second–wave feminism in

the food arena via the regeneration of a third mythical figure. Finally, I

offer concluding remarks that bring to the fore the complexity of

women’s journeys home, materialising intimacy and tensions, also by

reflecting on my own home cooking and nostalgia.

The Fieldwork, Methodology and Study Group

I conducted fieldwork (2007-2011) in the homes of Jewish-Israeli migrant

women through over 300 hours of repeated in-depth, open-ended

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interviews and participant observation. I focussed on changes that the

women engendered in six everyday domestic food practices following

their migration: grocery shopping, cooking, baking, casual and festive

hospitality and dieting for managing weight. My fieldnotes were

incorporated into the analysis, in part by transcribing verbatim and in

other parts by paraphrasing conversations, also using some self-

reflections. In addition, I examined how the food media employ nostalgia

by comparing television advertisements and programmes in Israel and

New Zealand. Lastly I analysed public events related to food in the

Orthodox Jewish community in Auckland that a few women from the

group participated in. Their minimal participation in these food events

was due to the fact that most of the women self-identify as “secular”

Jewish (apart from one woman who self-identifies as “traditional”

Jewish).xiv

The women in the study were all born in Israel and at the time of my

fieldwork their ages ranged from 35-55. While most of the women were

born to migrant parents, for all, migration to New Zealand was their first

migration. The women belong to the middle-class; an affiliation that

constitutes their migration experience and their experience regarding

food and cooking. They were able to withstand the economic pressures of

moving to New Zealand, demonstrating their economic power. Over two

thirds of the women acquired tertiary education in Israel and all held

white collar jobs there. In New Zealand, however, only a third of the

women held white collar jobs, partly since a third of the women chose to

leave their paid employment to become “stay-at-home” mothers. The

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economic status of the women enabled most to conduct biannual visits to

Israel with their family, despite the geographical distance and their

economic hurdle. The women used their economic means to fulfill their

food carvings in these visits and also purchase food that they brought

with them. Similarly, they enjoyed food parcels sent or brought by others

from Israel, and their ability to purchase many special food products

from Israel and the Middle-East in New Zealand that are usually costly.

Overall the changes the women engendered in their food production and

consumption practices at home materialised connections with both Israel

and New Zealand, where they also established close relations with

largely the European middle-class, while a few women set-up food

businesses.

The First Phase: The Sabra and the Polania in the Zionist Home-

Building

Like most national ideologies of their time, Zionism, the primary political

force that propelled the establishment of the state of Israel, integrates

socialist and liberal ideals.xv Yet Zionist ideology is also premised on a

unique nostalgiaxvi that recasts prominent Jewish values and messianic

beliefs as secular, modern and civilised, and as a means of ensuring the

survival of the Jewish people through political upheavals and

transformations.xvii The main aim of early Zionism was to turn the new

Jewish state into a modern nation-state, like any other of the world’s

nation-states.xviii All life spheres were included by Zionists in the quest to

free, and indeed redeem, the Jewish people from the melancholic,

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effeminate and demeaning self-images that they had internalised in

recent European history.xix These negative images were specifically

associated with diasporic Jews in east and central Europe,xx who

constituted the elite of Jewish-Israeli society, known as the Ashkenazim.

For this purpose, the Ashkenazi Zionists replaced the Jewish belief in

God with the redeeming powers of the nation-state, the state armyxxi and

food,xxii in this way constituting the iconic masculine figure of the sabra

(li. Prickly pear), the native-born Israeli. The sabra is characterised as

the antithesis of the diasporic Jew: bearing a European, virile and healthy

body. He is a self-reliant, resourceful, innovative, hard-working,

spontaneous, open, direct and confident man.xxiii According to these

images, Jewish-Israeli men working the land were seen as ‘impregnating’

the barren soil and bringing about abundance by the physical and

symbolic powers vested in their labouring bodies. There is prolific

literature on the mythical figure of the sabraxxiv and he continues to figure

in popular discussions of Israeli identity.xxv

Another important aspect of the Zionist ideological formation was the

establishment of a broad social hierarchy based on perceptions of

gendered bodies, labour and food practices. Even before the

establishment of Israel, the spiritually transforming power accorded to

food and eating practices drove Zionist policy makers to introduce new

foods to new Jewish immigrants (and to remove familiar foods like rice),

rather than promote the consumption of local Arab foods. In this way the

production and consumption of food in the familial home was a prolific

site for redesigning the eating and feeding practices of the Jewish

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population in a way that excluded Arabs from the national collective. The

‘tozeret haaretz’ (product of the land) campaign, launched in the 1920s

during the Yishuv (lit. settlement) period, further promulgated this

boundary.xxvi

In the process of creating ethnic and class boundaries within the Jewish

population in Israel, Mizrahim were colonised and marginalised by the

Ashkenazi elite.xxvii While the Ashkenazim mobilised the Zionist movement

via modernisation and secularisation,xxviii Mizrahim were and still are

considered to be more “traditional” than Ashkenazim.

Simultaneously Zionist ideologues epitomised middle-class Jewish-Israeli

women as housewives, viewing them primarily as mothers and depicting

their labours of bearing and rearing children and cooking for the family

as fundamental for the survival of the family and the building of the

nation.xxix Women were also seen as bearing the main responsibility for the

health and well-being of the family.xxx These labours were, however,

perceived as less prestigious than, and secondary to, the manual and

militaristic labours associated with men (Rosin 2005:190).xxxi

Mizrahi women faced the double burden of ethnic and class

discrimination. During the food scarcities of the rationing period (1949–

1951), new Mizrahi migrant women and their families commonly

inhabited temporary camps, sometimes for years.xxxii Because of

discrimination, these women were accused by Zionist ideologues of

prioritising food provision for their husbands or themselves while

neglecting their children. As a result, state supervision separated women

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from infants and children up to the age of twelve during mealtimes under

the guise of protecting children’s welfare.xxxiii

In practice, however, because of the severity of the food rationing, lower-

to middle-class Ashkenazi and Mizrahi women alike put their children

first when feeding and cooking.xxxiv Jewish-Israeli womanhood came to be

modelled on a premise of problematic care: the “excessive” care of over-

anxious, but “good,” Ashkenazi women and the “poor” level of care by

Mizrahi women. State demands for food abstinence, and the associated

sacrifice of pleasure on the part of lower- to middle-class women, not

only contrasted with the fundamental value in Judaism that celebrates

life by eating,xxxv but also conveyed a sense of threat by depicting Jewish

women as providing unsatisfying levels of care. Without a doubt, these

models intensified the hierarchy of gender, class and ethnicity among the

Jewish population that had already begun to form before the

establishment of the state.xxxvi Anecdotal evidence regarding the everyday

lives of Jewish-Israeli women in this era hints at how they kept up at

home nostalgic cooking, evoking a “little” Moroccan/Iraqi/Polish

homeland through their dishes and hospitality by upholding distinct

Jewish traditions.xxxvii

The sense of threat to survival at the time is strongly evident in the

stereotypical Jewish feminine figure of the polania (li. Polish woman),

formulated by Zionists as a sacrificial sufferer who enacts guilt and

attempts to control others through blame. Historically, however, it is

hard to pinpoint the exact period when this stereotypical figure arose,

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with some studies suggesting that the polania may have been a response

to the gendered denigration of Jews in Europe as effeminate.xxxviii The

figure of the polania also depicts European upper class aspiration

through emphasis on education and economic mobility and the desire for

respect. The desire for respect is manifested by the importance placed on

making a good impression, civilised table manners and appearance.xxxix

Studies that examine the socio-historic conditions in the lives of Jews in

Britain and the USA prior to the First World War relate to the formation

of an equivalent myth, the ‘Yiddish Mama’.xl

The figure of the polania remains distinctly overlooked in social research

on the everyday life of women in the Jewish-Israeli society, despite its

prevalent role in popular culture, particularly in humour and in the media

to this day. A few very minor exceptions are found in work on Jewish

cooking by Claudia Roden,xli suggesting that the Israeli national sense of

insecurity is one reason for current (i.e. since the 1980s) propensity for

“constant noshing or grazing.” Roden explains this propensity as the

manifestation of the motherly worry of the polania, a manifestation that

she regards as a national phenomenon. Further two MA theses stand as

important exceptions in showing that the polania is a persistent figure

against which Jewish-Israeli women measure themselves, regardless of

their ethnicity and class.xlii

The Jewish-Israeli women in my study group, for example, enact both

intimacy and social tension through their home cooking by grappling

with the myth of the polania, as they negotiate their relationships with

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their kin and the land of Israel. Women often portray this homeland as an

overbearing mother by relating to Israel as a place in which people care

“too much” about women’s looks and weight. Women’s social critique

towards Israel is also demonstrated by using the biblical quote of “a land

that eats up its inhabitants” to convey political scorn.xliii However, these

tensions are complemented by their longing for and intimacy with the

tastes, smells and textures of certain vegetables and fruits, dairy

products and even salt in this “land of milk and honey”, as they put it.xliv

Regarding kinship relationships some women like Geffen, for example,

attest that to this day they are disgusted by gefilte fish, relating their

disdain of the jelly-like texture, and the taste and smell of the dish. In the

case of Geffen, more than any other dish, gefilte fish materialises the

memory of her “domineering Polish mother”. Needless to say, women

like Geffen reject cooking dishes of kin that pose a threat to them and

evoke and materialise negative memories.

Often women, similarly to Yvette, as another example, also reject worry

over cooking to feed children, instead blaming kin for “behaving like a

polania”. In this way, women criticize others for an ongoing emphasis on

education and the strong drive for upward mobility instead of expressing

genuine care. They commonly employ self-deprecating humour to convey

self-irony by referring to the myth of the polania. Hinting at the pleasure

and relief they find in remembering their collective past in this way, they

blame themselves for over care as they mock their own “obsessions” and

“faults” regarding home cooking and feeding others. For example,

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Yasmin and Nora assert their polania-like behaviour to emphasise that

they ensure that their children and guests are satisfied with and take

pleasure in the Israeli food they regularly prepare in New Zealand.

Indeed, by the 1960 state policy discourses of Zionist ideologues had led

to the constitution of an Israeli national cuisine by detaching certain

Mizrahi and Palestinian-Arab foods from their specific national, ethnic

and class associations and turning these dishes into national iconic

foods.xlv Falafel, hummus, soft white cheeses like cottage, quark and labne

(yoghurt-based soft cheese), shakshukah (a cooked egg and tomato dish)

and Israeli-Arab salad (diced vegetables dressed in lemon juice, olive oil,

salt and pepper) are prominent examples of popular and cheap foods that

Jewish-Israelis enjoy eating at home or as street foods and in other ready-

made commercial forms.xlvi Israel’s national cuisine is comprised of such

simple dishes and the iconic breakfast featuring the aforementioned

cheeses, Arab/Israeli salad, bread and eggs. The popularity of these foods

sustains their relatively low status as street foods in Israel, along with

the fact that most of these dishes are provided by Mizrahi restaurants

kept mainly by Mizrahi Jews and Israeli-Palestinians.xlvii

All the women in my study group convey longing for these dishes, taking

great pride in preparing them at home, while also demonstrating their

cooking abilities to children, friends and guests by feeding them with

their own nostalgic memories. Many of these foods, including the iconic

breakfast, receive a celebratory status in family meals on weekends, and

casual and festive hospitality events that attest to the pleasure that

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Jewish-Israeli women take in cooking and eating well. Two notable

women even decided to commercialise their longing home by beginning

to sell these dishes to New Zealanders through the businesses they

established in Auckland.

The Second Phase: The Myth of the Bashlanit in Life after

Second-Wave Feminism

The rise in individualism, increased Americanisation and consumerism

saw to more middle-class women becoming career-oriented and working

outside the home,xlviii and more women gaining tertiary education. In

accordance, two MA theses on middle-class Jewish-Israelis argue that

from the 1980s there has been a rise in the number of middle-class men

cooking at homes by acting as the “Key Kitchen Person”.xlix

Yet life after second-wave feminism in the Israeli society (post 1960s)

was subject to other and more important changes concerning gender and

ethnic power relations, as well as food practices among the secular

Jewish population. These changes contributed to the growing legitimacy

of expressions of nostalgia in the public sphere; longing for the

homelands from which various Jewish groups had immigrated to Israel

and the Jewish traditions they held there, previously considered taboo.l

The rise of multiculturalism from the 1980s replaced the social-culinary

metaphor of the ‘melting pot’ for the national Jewish home and

acknowledged the importance of the preservation of heritage and legacy

dishes of various Jewish ethnic groups. By this time, third-generation,

middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish-Israelis had begun expressing nostalgia

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for Ashkenazi traditions as they began cooking the dishes of the shtetl:

gefilte fish (fish patties), tzimmes (a dish of cooked, sweetened carrots),

and kreplach (stuffed dough pockets).li In doing so, they caught up both

with Jewish-Israelis from other ethnicities and with the Jewish ethnic

populations in other locations around the world.lii This process

encouraged the perception of specific dishes, spices, eating practices,

modes of hospitality, festive celebrations, culinary styles and food

preferences as strong ethnic markers in the public arena.liii For example,

each Jewish ethnic group has its own festive and Shabbat dishes cooked

slowly on residual heat overnight to be eaten on Shabbat morning–

chulent and d’fina are variations on the same dish with different names

and nuances according to their ethnic origins.

Following their migration to New Zealand, the women in my study turn

these dishes into metonyms of their female kin from the past two

generations. They begin to cook dishes that resonate with homelands

other than Israel, places they had never lived in or visited. In fact, by

cooking such iconic dishes, the women express longing for the longing of

their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations.liv Rotem, for example,

claimed that “I took the best out of my Moroccan mother and Romanian

mother in law by combining their different ingredients, spices and

serving methods when learning to cook chulent in New Zealand”. Shivon,

as another example, noted that in cooking kube shwandar (beetroot soup

with meat dumplings) according to her Iraqi grandmother’s recipe, the

dish evokes memories of distant times, places and events from her

childhood. The soup materialised the memory of Shivon’s grandmother,

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whom Shivon regarded as her “guiding light”, in contrast with the

general message she had received at home from her mother as “not

being good enough”. Often when conveying critique over tensed

relationships with mothers or mothers in law, women like Shivon skip a

generation to their grandmothers’ recipes.

Yet generally the women’s admiration for female close kin coalesced with

idealising their dishes as the materialisation of love and care at homes

regardless of ethnicity. However, when Mizrahi female kin were idealised

women depicted their cooking skills and culinary knowledge as

embedded in their senses, emphasising their ability to overcome poverty.

Women also associated some Mizrahi home cooked dishes with poverty

negatively, epitomising them as the “jailhouse” foods of low class, often

due to high fat content. In comparison, when Ashkenazi female kin were

idealised, women associated them with sophisticated and highly literate

home cooking that demonstrated civilised manners. Women who cook

iconic Ashkenazi dishes express trouble in acknowledging their kin’s

teaching and confine these dishes only to certain Jewish festive times. By

beginning with memories from their own childhoods through to

adolescence in Israel they emphasise how they gained and increased

their status after moving to New Zealand as bashlaniot (pl. cooking

women).

The myth of the bashlanit (sing.) is the result of the unique coalescing of

Jewish values with Zionist ideology in response to second-wave feminism.

In its modernised guise, the bashlanit echoes at least two earlier Jewish

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feminine myths, Eve in the Garden of Eden and eshet chayil (‘a woman of

great valour’). This figure epitomises feminine prowess and modernity:

not only is she technically able, well equipped, and pragmatic (she uses

convenient ingredients such as tinned food and makes one-pot meals),

she is also capable of successfully synchronising her womanly

obligations, all the while emanating love. This ideal is premised on the

wish for an omnipotent femininity depicted through the pleasures of

cooking and feeding.

The bashlanit is a woman who hosts spontaneously and warmly, but is

also capable of planning lavish and impressive hospitality around Jewish

festive meals, and keeps to kosher rules, in contrast to the elitist model

of Israeli male chefs.lv These male chefs cook complicated and typically

non-kosher dishes in expensive restaurants for rich customers and have

gradually entered into the heart of the public culinary elite;lvi in

particular, Mizrahi, and homosexual men gained high profiles through

upmarket restaurants, cookbooks and the Israeli media. As these men

became Israeli icons, presenting a new form of national belonging

through their ‘softer’ or more effeminate masculinities, the love of

cooking and eating became a vital marker of Israeli masculinity.

During that time (the 1980s) two Ashkenazi women, Ruth Sirkis and Nira

Rousso, became renowned role models for middle-class Jewish-Israeli

women in regard to food production in the domestic sphere, recasting

the mythical figure of the bashlanit.lvii Sirkis and Rousso recast this

mythical figure by publishing cookbooks and other forms of culinary texts

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that were, and still are, highly popular among Israeli domestic cooks

(including the women who participated in my study). They deliberately

base their model of the bashlanit on the American success of Julia

Child,lviii targeting middle-class women who work in paid employment and

cook on a daily basis. Whilst the model of Julia Child revolutionised

American middle-class domestic cooking by emphasising the personal-

visceral pleasure in cooking for the sake of cooking,lix the model of Sirkis

and Rousso created an idealised image of a family woman.

Concluding Remarks and Some Self-Reflection

In this essay I have argued that middle-class women’s home cooking and

their nostalgia contribute to the realisation of the collective space of a

national home as they redesign national cuisine over time. I claimed that

as home cooks, middle-class women take an active role in reformulating

this arena by enacting generational kinship relationships and negotiating

ethnic and class-based relationships. To highlight women’s experiences, I

began with the food contestation of Nellie, who intentionally subverts the

social hierarchy of ethnicity and class through her nostalgic regard

towards home cooked couscous. Couscous evokes and materialises

Nellie’s nostalgia towards the past two generations of her female kin in

Morocco and Israel. The nostalgic experiences of other women in my

study, like Nellie, materialise both intimacy and tension through home

cooking. It is their nostalgia that motivates women to commence

recreating the home cooked dishes of their kin; dishes that also epitomise

connections with their national homes prior to immigration to Israel. In

21

contrast, when disgusted by home cooked dishes women would reject

their recreation on account of associations with female kin that

somewhat differ according to their class and ethnicity, as is the case

when idealising kin.

Looking back at my own experience, I realise that longing for past homes

urged me to embark on a similar metaphoric journey through my

cooking. While I began emulating the Ashkenazi dishes of my

grandmothers and mother, by enlarge I preferred cooking on daily basis

the Mizrahi dishes of my mother in law, as if I could amend social

injustices in this way. Similarly to the women in my study, I materialised

connections with the national homes of my female kin, for the sake of

making myself and my children feel ‘at home’ in New Zealand.

The historic analysis in this essay uses the lens of women’s experiences

in home cooking and their nostalgia to acknowledge their part in

reformulating Israel’s national cuisine, focussing on their intimacy and

ambivalence. I have shown that their practice of home cooking is never

separated from the national ideology and the aspiration for building

homes; rather, women employ this practice alongside and against such

ideologies to constitute their current identities. The politics of the dishes

women cook at home and their nostalgia should not be overlooked by

academic research that relates to national cuisine, but instead be used to

substantiate a prolific “home ground” for further comparative analysis of

the power dynamics between genders, ethnicities and classes that

women negotiate in other postcolonial societies.

22

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I am grateful to the anonymous readers who reviewed this essay for their comments and to my partner, Yossi Ore, for his remarks.

27

i I use pseudonyms to protect the privacy of the participants.

ii The women in the study group were all born after the second wave feminism in Israel

(1960s), and their gendered division of labour did not change following migration, as is the

common case in other migrant groups in the world. As such, 21 of the women are the home

cooks, one of the remaining women alternates with her husband all cooking responsibilities,

and three more women do not cook, but shop for groceries, set up meals and clean up after

their husbands who are the home cooks.

iii The women in my study group associate with various Jewish ethnicities: five Mizrahi

women, seven Ashkenazi women, 13 women with ethnically-mixed parents. 16 out of the 25

women were married to men from Jewish ethnicity other than theirs. Ashkenazim immigrated

from east and central European countries during the first two waves, before 1948, the year

Israel was established. Mizrahim are Jews from Arab speaking countries in North Africa and

the Middle East who immigrated to Israel after the establishment of the state, marginalised by

the Ashkenazi Jewish-elite. There is also a third minority ethnic group called ‘Sepharadim’

percvied as descendants of Jews expulsed from Spain and Portugal (1492), some of whom

lived in Palestine for centuries, centred in the four holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberius

and Zefat. Thelma Barer-Stein, You Eat What You Are: People, Culture and Food Traditions,

2nd ed. (Ontario, Canada; Buffalo, New York: Firefly Books, 1999)., 246-247. In this essay I do

not discuss other ethnic Jewish groups that immigrated to Israel mainly from the USSR and

Ethiopia nor the Arab population.

iv The discussion in the way the women in my study formed new connections through home

cooking with New Zealand as a national home is beyond the scope of this essay.

v Helen Leach, The Pavlova Story: A Slice of New Zealand's Culinary History (Dunedin:

Otago University Press, 2008).

vi Liora Gvion, Culinary Bridges versus Culinary Barriers: Social and Political Aspects of

Palestinian Cookery in Israel [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2006); Dafna Hirsch, "“Hummus

is best when it is fresh and made by Arabs”: The Gourmetization of Hummus in Israel and the

Return of the Repressed Arab," American Ethnologist 38, no. 4 (2011); Ronald Ranta and

Yonatan Mendel, "Consuming Palestine: Palestine and Palestinians in Israeli Food Culture,"

Ethnicities 14, no. 3 (2014).

vii Richard Wilk, ""Real Belizean Food": Building Local Identity in the Transnational

Caribbean," American Anthropologist 101, no. 2 (1999); Sami Zubaida, "National, Communal

and Global Dimensions in Middle-Eastern Food Cultures," in A Taste of Thyme: Culinary

Cultures of the Middle East, ed. S. Zubaida and R. Tapper (London and New York: Tauris in

association with Centre of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, School of Oriental and African

Studies, University of London, 1994); Yael Raviv, "The Hebrew Banana: Local Food and the

Performance of Israeli National Identity," Journal for the Study of Food and Society 5, no. 1

(2001).

viii Lynn Harbottle, Food for Health, Food for Wealth: The Performance of Ethnic and

Gender Identities by Iranian Settlers in Britain, vol. 3, The Anthropology of Food and

Nutrition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000); Krishnendu Ray, The Migrant's Table: Meals

and Memories in Bengali-American Households (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,

2004); Ghassan Hage, "At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, 'Ethnic Food'

and Migrant Home-Building," in Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney's

West, ed. Helen Grace (Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press, 1997); Sherrie A. Inness, Secret

Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2006); Harvey A. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern

America, Rev. ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003 [1993]); Brinda. Mehta,

"Culinary Diasporas: Identity and the Language of Food in Gisèle Pineau’s Un papillon dans la

cité and L’Exil selon Julia," International Journal of Francophone Studies 8, no. 1 (2005).

ix Carol Bardenstein, "The Gender of Nostalgia, Transmissions Interrupted: Reconfiguring

Food, Memory, and Gender in the Cookbook-Memoirs of Middle-Eastern Exiles," Signs 28, no.

1 (2002); Sinead McDermott, "Memory, Nostalgia, and Gender in A Thousand Acres," Signs

28, no. 1 (2002); S. Radstone, "Nostalgia: Home-Comings and Departures," Memory Studies 3,

no. 3 (2010); Ayşe Parla, "Remembering Across the Border: Postsocialist Nostalgia among

Turkish Immigrants from Bulgaria," American Ethnologist 36, no. 4 (2009); Jean Duruz,

"Haunted Kitchens: Cooking and Remembering," Gastronomica 4, no. 1 (2004); R. Rubenstein,

Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); R. Salih, Gender in Transnationalism: Home, Longing and

Belonging among Moroccan Migrant Women (London: Routledge, 2003); Pamela Sugiman,

"Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese-Canadian Women's Life Stories," in Diaspora,

Memory and Identity: A Search for Home, ed. Vijay Agnew (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 2005); Jean Duruz, "Home Cooking, Nostalgia and the Purchase of Tradition,"

Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review XII, no. 11 (2001)., 29-30

x Sugiman, "Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese-Canadian Women's Life Stories."

xi Ibid., 49

xii Ibid., 65

xiii Philip V. Bohlman, "To Hear the Voices Still Heard: On Synagogue Restoration in Eastern

Europe," in Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former

Soviet Union, ed. D. Berdahl, M. Bunzl, and M. Lampland (Michigan: The University of

Michigan Press, 2000); Dominic Boyer, "Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern

Germany," Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006); M. Palmberger, "Nostalgia Matters: Nostalgia for

Yugoslavia as Potential Vision for a Better Future," Sociologija 50, no. 4 (2008); Parla,

"Remembering Across the Border: Postsocialist Nostalgia among Turkish Immigrants from

Bulgaria."; J.P.G. Bach, ""The Taste Remains": Consumption, (N)ostalgia, and the Production

of East Germany," Public Culture 14, no. 3 (2002); Daphne Berdahl, On the Social Life of

Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany, ed. Matti Buntzl (Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 2009); Maya Nadkarni, ""But it's ours": Nostalgia and the Politics of

Authenticity in Post-Socialist Hungary," in Post-Communist Nostalgia, ed. Todorova Mari︠a︡

Nikolaeva and Gille Zsuzsa (USA: Berghahn Books, 2010); Svetlana Boym, The Future of

Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Haldis Haukanes and Frances Pine, "Ritual and

Everyday Consumption Practices in the Czech and Polish Countryside: Conceiving Modernity

through Changing Food Regimes," Anthropological Journal on European Cultures 12, no.

Communities in Transformation: Central and Eastern Europe (2004); Z. Volčič, "Yugo-

Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia," Critical Studies in Media

Communication 24, no. 1 (2007); Susanna Trnka, "When the World Went Color: Emotions,

Senses and Spaces in Contemporary Accounts of the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution,"

Emotions, Space and Society 5, no. 1 (2011); Haldis Haukanes and Susanna Trnka, "Memory,

Imagination, and Belonging across Generations: Perspectives from Postsocialist Europe and

Beyond," Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthroplogy 66, no. June (2013).

xiv Though there is no clear cut separation between secular and traditional affiliations for

Jewish-Israelis, the main reason for the majority of the women to self-identity as secular, is

that they do not adhere to kashrut rules or practice Judaism religiously according to the

Halacha. For example, seven out of the 25 women intentionally increased eating pork and

crustaceans in New Zealand. The complexity of Jewish-Israeli identifications on this fluid

spectrum is further explained in the work of Joseph Loss, "Buddha-Dhamma in Israel: Explicit

Non-Religious and Implicit Non-Secular Localization of Religion," Nova Religio: The Journal of

Alternative and Emergent Religions 13, no. 4 (2010).

xv Baruch Kimmerling, "Sociology, Ideology, and Nation-Building: The Palestinians and their

Meaning in Israeli Sociology," American Sociological Review 57, no. 4 (1992); The Invention

and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 2001).

xvi The renowned scholar Ella Shohat as quoted in M. Talmon, Israeli Graffiti: Nostalgia,

Groups, and Collective Identity in Israeli Cinema [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv and Haifa: Open

University of Israel Press and Haifa University Press, 2001)., 16 notes that the Zionist project

employed what Walter Benjamin called “revolutionist nostalgia” through which the idealised

biblical past served to constitute a future utopia. The first two lines of the Israeli national

anthem, Hatikvah (The Hope), are sufficient to demonstrate the depth of this nostalgia: “As

long as in the heart, within / A Jewish soul still yearns”. The lyrics of the anthem were adapted

from a poem written in 1878 by the Jewish poet Naphtali Hertz Imber from Złoczów (now

Zolochiv), Galicia, and then a province of Austro-Hungary. The melody chosen for this anthem

is exceptionally mournful despite (and perhaps to emphasise) the hopeful meanings the

anthem conveys.

xvii Zali Gurevitch and Gidon Aran, "The Land of Israel: Myth and Phenomenon," in

Reshaping the Past: Jewish History and the Historians, ed. J. Frankel (USA: Oxford University

Press, 1994).

xviii Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli

Discourse and Experience (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997);

Loss, "Buddha-Dhamma in Israel: Explicit Non-Religious and Implicit Non-Secular Localization

of Religion."

xix David Biale, "Zionism as an Erotic Revolution," in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism

from an Embodied Perspective, ed. H. Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany, New York: State University

of New York Press, 1992); M. Gluzman, "Longing for Heterosexuality: Zionism and Sexuality

in Herzl’s Altneuland [Hebrew]," Theory and Criticism 11(1997).

xx Meira Weiss, The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society (Stanford,

California: Stanford University Press, 2005); "The Body of the Nation: Terrorism and the

Embodiment of Nationalism in Contemporary Israel," Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 1

(2001).

xxi Gurevitch and Aran, "The Land of Israel: Myth and Phenomenon."

xxii Orit Rosin, "Leben and Lebenia: About Food, Femininity, and Nation-Building at the

Rationing Times [Hebrew]," in A Full Belly: Rethinking Food and Society in Israel, ed. Aviad

Kleinberg (Jerusalem: The University of Tel Aviv and Keter Books Ltd, 2005); Raviv, "The

Hebrew Banana: Local Food and the Performance of Israeli National Identity."; "Recipe for a

Nation: Cuisine, Jewish Nationalism, and the Israeli State" (Ph.D., New York University,

2002); "Falafel: A National Icon," Gastronomica 3, no. Summer (2003).

xxiii Nitsa Ben-Ari, "Popular Literature in Hebrew as a Marker of Anti-Sabra Culture,"

Translation Studies 2, no. 2 (2009); Rivka Kaplowitz Ben-Mordechai, "Jewish and Israeli

Identity and Self-Esteem among Sabras" (Ph.D., Berkeley/Alameda, 1982); Tamar Katriel,

Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1986); Azzan Yadin and Ghilad Zuckermann, "Blorít – Pagans’ Mohawk or Sabras’

Forelock?: Ideologically Manipulative Secularization of Hebrew Terms in Socialist Zionist

Israeli," in The Sociology of Language and Religion: Change, Conflict and Accommodation. A

Festschrift for Joshua A. Fishman on his 80th Birthday., ed. Tope Omoniyi (London; New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

xxiv See for example, Oz Almog, The Sabra: A Profile [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved

Publishers, 1997); Gannit Ankori, "'Dis-Orientalisms': Displaced Bodies/Embodied

Displacements in Contemoprary Palestinian Art," in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of

Home and Migration, ed. Sara Ahmed (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Ben-Ari, "Popular Literature in

Hebrew as a Marker of Anti-Sabra Culture."; Daniel Boyarin, "Outing Freud's Zionism, or, the

Bitextuality of the Diaspora Jew," in Queer Diasporas, ed. C. Patton and B. Sánchez-Eppler

(Duke University Press, 2000); Kaplowitz Ben-Mordechai, "Jewish and Israeli Identity and

Self-Esteem among Sabras."; Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture.

xxv Rakefet Sela-Sheffy, "'What Makes One an Israeli?' Negotiating Identities in Everyday

Representations of ‘Israeliness’," Nations and Nationalism 10, no. 4 (2004)., 479; Talmon,

Israeli Graffiti: Nostalgia, Groups, and Collective Identity in Israeli Cinema [Hebrew].

xxvi Raviv, "The Hebrew Banana: Local Food and the Performance of Israeli National

Identity.", 30

xxvii Aziza Khazzoom, "The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management,

and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel," American Sociological Review 68, no. 4 (2003); Yehouda

Shenhav, The Arab-Jews: Nationalism, Religion and Ethnicity (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers,

2004); Ella Shohat, "The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernization: The

Case of the Mizrahim," Middle East Critique 6, no. 10 (1997); "The Invention of the

Mizrahim," Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (1999); Yehouda Shenhav, "Modernity and

the Hybridization of Nationalism and Religion: Zionism and the Jews of the Middle East as a

Heuristic Case," Theory and Society 36, no. 1 (2007).

xxviii Loss, "Buddha-Dhamma in Israel: Explicit Non-Religious and Implicit Non-Secular

Localization of Religion.", 86

xxix Rosin, "Leben and Lebenia: About Food, Femininity, and Nation-Building at the

Rationing Times [Hebrew].", 177; Ofra Tene, ""This is how we will cook" a House in Israel: A

Reading of Cookbooks from the 1930s to the 1980s " in A Full Belly: Rethinking Food and

Society in Israel [Hebrew], ed. Aviad Kleinberg (Jerusalem: The University of Tel Aviv and

Keter Ltd, 2005).,95,127

xxx Nitsa Berkovitch, "Motherhood as a National Mission: The Construction of Womanhood

in the Legal Discourse in Israel," Women’s Studies International Forum 20, no. 5 (1997);

Elana Bloomfield, "Conceiving Motherhood: The Jewish Female Body in Israeli Reproductive

Practices," Intersections 10, no. 2 (2009).

xxxi Rosin "Leben and Lebenia: About Food, Femininity, and Nation-Building at the Rationing

Times [Hebrew]., 190

xxxii Ibid., 190-195

xxxiii Ibid., 194

xxxiv Ibid., 179-181

xxxv E.N. Anderson, Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture (New York and

London: New York University Press, 2005)., 107 compares Christianity with Islam and

Judaism, asserting that Judaism in particular endorses the pleasure of eating to celebrate life.

xxxvi Tene, ""This is how we will cook" a House in Israel: A Reading of Cookbooks from the

1930s to the 1980s "; Rosin, "Leben and Lebenia: About Food, Femininity, and Nation-

Building at the Rationing Times [Hebrew]."; Reut Bendrihem, "Hybrid Motherhood:

Motherhood as a Faction in the Feminine Identity of Mizrahi Women in a Peripheral Town

[Hebrew]" (M.A., Ben Gurion Univestity in Beer-Sheva, 2006).

xxxvii Virginia R. Domínguez, People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in

Contemporary Israel (Madison: The University of Winsconsin Press, 1989)., 102-105; Tamar

Shine-Rakavy, "Food, Symbolism and Group-Identity: Aspects of Perception of Polish-Jewish

Food Culture among Israeli Women of Polish Descent" (M.A., The Hebrew University of

Jerusalem, 1999); Shohat, "The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernization:

The Case of the Mizrahim.", 16-17

xxxviii Gluzman, "Longing for Heterosexuality: Zionism and Sexuality in Herzl’s Altneuland

[Hebrew]."; Khazzoom, "The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma

Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel."

xxxix In the broadest sense, the Jewish perception of a civilised body is taught through the

concerns addressed by the priestly rules of kashrut (established between the fifth and sixth

centuries) based on the books of Leviticus and Ezekiel in H. Eilberg-Schwartz, "The Problem

of the Body for the People of the Book," in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an

Embodied Perspective, ed. H. Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1992)., 21-23. These rules dictate abstinence from specific types of food in order to become

Hebrew or Israelite, a vehicle for ‘civilising’ the body and a tactic employed to maintain a

cultural boundary that differentiates the Hebrews, Israelites and Jews from other peoples, as

suggested by J. D. Rosenblum, ""Why Do You Refuse to Eat Pork?": Jews, Food, and Identity in

Roman Palestine," The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 1 (2010).

xl See Martha A. Ravits, "The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular

Culture," MELUS 25, no. 1 (2000); Rivka-Ellen Prell, "Why Jewish Princesses Don't Sweat:

Desire and Consumption in Postwar American Jewish Culture," in People of the Body: Jews

and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (New York: State

University of New York Press, 1992); R. Samuel and P. Thompson, The Myths We Live By

(London, England: Routledge, 1990)., 17-18; J. Antler, You Never Call! You Never Write!: A

History of the Jewish Mother (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2007).

xli C. Roden, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York (London:

Alfred A. Knopf Inc, 1996)., 207

xlii Bendrihem, "Hybrid Motherhood: Motherhood as a Faction in the Feminine Identity of

Mizrahi Women in a Peripheral Town [Hebrew]."; Shlomit Gil-Tin, "Food and Feeding the

Family: An Analysis of the Discourse in Dual Earner Families [Hebrew]" (M.A., The Ben-

Gorion University in the Negev, 2005).

xliii Numbers 14, 36-37

xliv Exodus 3, 8; Exodus 33, 3; Ezekiel 20, 6

xlv Gvion, Culinary Bridges versus Culinary Barriers: Social and Political Aspects of

Palestinian Cookery in Israel [Hebrew]; L. Gvion-Rosenberg, and Trostlerb, N., "Street Food

Vending: The Israeli Scenario," in Street Foods, ed. A. P. Simopoulos, and Bhat, R.V. (New

York: Karger, 2000); Raviv, "Recipe for a Nation: Cuisine, Jewish Nationalism, and the Israeli

State."; "Falafel: A National Icon."; Maya. Mazor-Turgman, "The Boundaries of Good Taste:

Cookbooks, Popular Culture and Publishing in the Global Israel " (MA, Haifa University,

2008); Michal Chacham, "Habit(at)tus - Urban 'Home-Making' in the Homeland [Hebrew]"

(PhD, Tel Aviv University, 2012).

xlvi In general, the commercial production and consumption of hummus in Israel became a

cultural site imbued with the politics of identity negotiating its ‘Arabness’, according to

Hirsch, "“Hummus is best when it is fresh and made by Arabs”: The Gourmetization of

Hummus in Israel and the Return of the Repressed Arab.", 617.

xlvii For comprehensive ethnographies on the transformations in Palestinian-Israeli food in

the past 60 years see the work of Gvion, Culinary Bridges versus Culinary Barriers: Social and

Political Aspects of Palestinian Cookery in Israel [Hebrew]; ibid.; "Cuisines of Poverty as

Means of Empowerment: Arab Food in Israel," Agriculture and Human Values 23, no. 3

(2006). Gvion’s first ethnography briefly refers to some of the nostalgic food trends of Israeli-

Palestinians since the 2000s Culinary Bridges versus Culinary Barriers: Social and Political

Aspects of Palestinian Cookery in Israel [Hebrew]., 170-177. Also, a historic and political

overview of Palestinian-Israeli cuisine that supports my view was recently published by Ranta

and Mendel, "Consuming Palestine: Palestine and Palestinians in Israeli Food Culture."

xlviii Nir Perez, "A Mother at the Office: Arenas as a Tool in Gendered Analysis of

Citizenship," Working Paper Series(2008),

http://ssrn.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/abstract=1152040.

xlix Gil-Tin, "Food and Feeding the Family: An Analysis of the Discourse in Dual Earner

Families [Hebrew]."; Shine-Rakavy, "Food, Symbolism and Group-Identity: Aspects of

Perception of Polish-Jewish Food Culture among Israeli Women of Polish Descent." This term

describes the person who invests the most time and energy in procuring, preparing, serving

and cleaning up food within the household unit. Mary Douglas, Food in the Social Order:

Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities (New York: Russell Sage

Foundation, 1984)., 8

l Ella Shohat, "A Reluctant Euology: Fragments from Memories of an Arab-Jew," in Women

and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of

Dislocation, ed. R. Lentin and N. Abdo (USA: Berghahn Books, 2002)., 241

li Gvion, Culinary Bridges versus Culinary Barriers: Social and Political Aspects of

Palestinian Cookery in Israel [Hebrew]., 175; Shine-Rakavy, "Food, Symbolism and Group-

Identity: Aspects of Perception of Polish-Jewish Food Culture among Israeli Women of Polish

Descent."

lii Miryam Rotkovitz, "Kashering the Melting Pot: Oreos, Sushi Restaurants, "Kosher Treif",

and the Observant American Jew," in Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy M. Long (Lexington:

University Press of Kentucky, 2004); Eve Jochnowitz, "Flavors of Memory: Jewish Food as

Culinary Tourism in Poland," in Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy M. Long (Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky, 2004); Steve Siporin, "From Kashrut to Cucina Ebraica: The Recasting of

Italian Jewish Foodways," The Journal of American Folklore 107, no. 424 (1994).

liii Mazor-Turgman, "The Boundaries of Good Taste: Cookbooks, Popular Culture and

Publishing in the Global Israel "; Chacham, "Habit(at)tus - Urban 'Home-Making' in the

Homeland [Hebrew]."

liv Leo Spitzer, "Back Through the Furture: Nostalgic Memory and Critical Memory in a

Refuge from Nazism," in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. M. Bal, J. Crewe,

and L. Spitzer (Hanover and England: University Press of New England, 1999). In this

important study Spitzer observed his own nostalgia for the nostalgia of his parents’

generation, as an anthropologist who is also the son of Austro-German Jewish migrants and

refugees that settled in Bolivia during Second World War. Spitzer’s study foregrounds the

resistant or critical memory embedded in nostalgia, a facet that many other studies later

confirm (see for example, Berdahl 2009, McDermott 2002, Sugiman 2005)

lv Emanuela Calò, "Change of Taste in Israeli Food: The Case of 'Italian Cuisine', 1980-2000

[Hebrew]" (M.A., Tel Aviv University, 2005)., 50-59

lvi Ibid., 56-59

lvii Calò, "Change of Taste in Israeli Food: The Case of 'Italian Cuisine', 1980-2000

[Hebrew].", 50-53

lviii Ibid., 66

lix Joanne Hollows, "The Feminist and the Cook: Julia Child, Betty Friedam and Domestic

Femininity," in Gender and Consumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialisation of

Everyday Life, ed. E. Casey and L. Martens (Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Ashgate Publishing Group,

2007)., 33-36