Kitchen Judaism
While the relationship between femininity and food has long and, to us, obvious legacy, it’s fraught with contradictions and connotations.There’s foodwork as labor, often unpaid in the home and related to motherhood and feeding a family. There’s the relationship with eating beyond that which is disordered and focused on deprivation. There’s cooking as an embodied form of expression, gender norm or culturally scripted role felt viscerally in the female body. There’s food as site of patriarchal domestic labor – and there’s food as self-expression, meaning, power, and identity.“As the Jewish rabbinic male chef calling the shots has receded from the stage of history, the sous-chef (often constructed as female) who buys, cooks, serves, and transmits recipes of Jewish food, has become the “star” of the performances of Jewish edible identities. The Jewish food we consume is female. Jewish food is what our grandmothers and mothers cooked. Jewish food is our immigrant grandmother’s negotiations with kashrut— that is, what she chose to adopt and reject from among her abundant new American options, and her choice as to when to cook Jewish or go out for Chinese or Italian.”
– Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus
These tensions coalesce in the culinary lives of the 20th century “Jewish housewife cum priestess," securing her home as a source of Jewishness. She practiced what Marcie Cohen Ferris calls “domestic Judaism” and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet refers to as “kitchen Judaism,” acting as an arbiter of nutrition, religious authority, and modern consumer. Responsible for feeding the family literally and metaphorically, she reproduced both recipes and values, both Old and New, through her food. We might refer to this woman as a baleboste: a Yiddish term adapted from Hebrew baal-ba-bayit directly translating to “owner of the home,” the baleboste exemplifies how women’s relationship to food, cooking, and caretaking is one of both power and subjugation.
While food and home are typically culturally scripted as women’s domains, when religion and food are interwoven, men take on a much more prominent, public role. This shift evokes the archetypical characters of the masculine professional chef and the feminine home cook. In this case, it’s the masculine Talmud- and Torah-interpreting, Kosher-industry creating rabbi versus the feminine home cook. Though standards of kashrut were developed by men, Jewish text and interpretation place the responsibility for cooking, and thus for keeping kashrut, on women. Men may have established the rules – but women were implementing them. They were relegated to their domestic role, but they had control over this deeply important practice of daily sanctimony and housebound holiness.
As such, interwar and postwar Jewish American women were arbiters of purity and consumption. While some scholars argue that considering food as fuel or nutrition removes conceptions of culture from food, that doesn’t hold here. For one, keeping a family healthy via nutrition and purity of food reinforces traditional gendered expectations of wives and mothers and adds to their unpaid labor. Moreover, seeking nutritious, healthy food could indeed be a means of practicing religion and culture. As Joselit puts it, the ritual caretaking of kashrut “helped to build healthy Jewish bodies, for kashrut, its adherent boasted, induced greater immunity from disease and promoted longevity.”
This isn’t to say all Jewish households kept kosher. Observance ebbed and flowed; keeping strict kosher was one of the first rituals abandoned by new Jewish immigrants. Immigrant women had to work for wages – they had less bandwidth to be concerned with kashrut standards, if they could even afford more expensive kosher goods. And as Charlotte Biltekoff argues, “eating right is a kind of unexamined social privilege.” While she implies right as nutritiously, I want to read right as righteous: observing kosher rules became a sign of socioeconomic mobility over the twentieth century.
Beginning in the 1930s, Jewish middle classness was marked by the return of the woman to the home – and with that, a return to more control over family foodways. Being part of the middle class gave women the ability to purchase kosher food and keep multiple sets of dishware. They became skillful consumers, with their purchasing power enhancing their roles in both public and religious life. For these women, the pursuit of economic mobility and the "American dream” was interwoven with maintaining Jewish culture in the home: they were responsible for ushering in American palettes and cultivating contemporary Jewish-American taste. They could afford to maintain a lifestyle that was standardly American or ritualized by choice in some instances only – “kosher-style.” Ferris illustrates this overlap of food, class, and gender in the segregated South: Jewish women would cook kosher or ritual food on holidays only, while Black domestic labor would cook non-kosher southern food for everyday consumption.
There’s no universal truth about how women engage with foodwork because that relationship holds so many truths: patriarchal expectation, bodily autonomy, ritualized practice, racialized and classed labor, joyful consumption. I read postwar Jewish women’s food femininity, then, as one that makes the most of a contained life, exerting discretion, choice, and value within bounds.