Abstract
Over the last few years on Thursday evenings, the main streets of Bnei Brak, one of Israel’s largest haredi (ultra-Orthodox) cities, becomes a culinary meeting place. The Eastern European Jewish cuisine sustained by the haredi kitchen attracts non-haredi visitors to a society that tends to keep to itself. This article presents an ethnographic investigation of a new culinary scene that brings together local haredim and secular visitors. I draw upon the concept of “eating the other” to argue how the “haredi other” represents a complex kind of “otherness,” whose encounters with secular visitors simultaneously mark boundaries and cross them. These encounters demonstrate how culinary tradition can provide a link to collective memory and help build individual and group identities.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 69-90 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Food and Foodways |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2 Apr 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020, © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Funding
I thank my good friends and colleagues Omri Grinberg, Nissan Rubin, Orna Sasson-Levy, Nissim Leon, Samuel Cooper, Hizky Shoham, Larissa Remennick, and Galit Ailon, for their careful reading and constructive comments on preliminary drafts of this manuscript. Special thanks to Carole Counihan and the four anonymous reviewers of Food and Foodways for their substantial and most constructive comments on the advanced versions of this article.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Galit Ailon |
Keywords
- Culinary tourism
- Israel
- ethnic kitchen
- haredi
- inclusion
- marking boundaries
- secular
- “eating the other”