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Food is a defining feature of every culture and seldom has this been truer than among the world’s Jews. Judaism lays down specific dos and don’ts—what can be eaten, what can’t—that far flung communities across the world have adapted according to available local ingredients. Even Jews who never keep kosher often retain some family food traditions. Global Jewish Foodways is an essay collection that explores how food has helped maintain boundaries for Jews and how those boundaries and their culinary markers have shifted across time and geography. The Eastern European Jews who immigrated in large numbers to the U.S. never knew falafel, as common now in Israel as hamburgers in the States. Global Jewish Foodways is also an engaging look at little known chapters in Jewish history, including the millennia-old communities of Iraq, whose existence was cut short after 1948.
