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• 1 media/chicken-soup-1.jpeg 2022-03-29T08:55:23-07:00 Introduction 11 Why Jewish Food? Why Chicken Soup? image_header 2023-04-08T08:18:35-07:00 “Jewish cooking is love made edible,” David Apfelbaum, a deli owner, writes. “And it is home.”
  
  Apfelbaum, originally from Lodz, Poland, included this line in a pamphlet he used to introduce Jewish food to his San Francisco customer base. By chance, he shared it with anthropologists Len Plotnicov and Sydney Mintz, both in town for a meeting of the American Anthropological Association, who published a rendition of the essay for their colleagues. Food, faith, family, history, community – as Apfelbaum's essay suggests, they were all one and the same when it comes to Jewish food. 
  
  I grew up eating family dinners every night. No matter how busy work was for my parents, no matter how many activities and commitments my brother and I had, we’d all end up around the kitchen table. My dad is still the chef in our house, subverting gendered expectation through culinary exploration after having grown up eating the same kosher and, as he saw it, uninspired meals day after day. He reads cookbooks for inspiration, subscribes to The New York Times Cooking section, makes his own vanilla extract – and he’s passed that love of food and novelty on to me and my brother. For us, food is certainly a matter of what Jenna Weissman Joselit, a historian of everyday life, calls “domesticity, ritual, and identity.” We shop farmers’ markets and co-ops; our group message thread is mostly tales of triumph and woe re: baked goods. And though we draw on global flavors and spices and textures, we also fall back to the same foods year after year: hamantaschen on Purim, noodle kugel and Hanukkah cookies each winter, chicken soup whenever sick.
  
  Those foods – their creation, timing, purpose – are perhaps our strongest routine connection to our Jewish identity. My family’s Jewish observance and belief have waxed and waned over time – I think we’d all consider ourselves agnostic these days – but what has remained consistent is our cultural connection to Judaism. Jewish food makes that connection visceral, embodied. Rabbi Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus explains this, unpacking the adage “you are what you eat”: for Jews, identity construction can come via food. And it’s not always the ritual or holiday that makes Jewish food part of identity. As Jewish studies scholar Rachel Gross writes, “Eating traditional Jewish foods, particularly in a public setting such as a deli, may be a meaningful part of a Jew’s life, but it may be too ordinary, too easily overlooked, to be described as essential or important....Commonplace activities such as eating Jewish foods are often quietly fundamental to religious identities rather than explicitly identified as essential to them.”
  
  It makes sense, then, that Jewish food history scholarship is often rooted in religious studies. Existing work in the field also frequently emphasizes the cuisine and culinary nostalgia of Ashkenazic Jews in the United States, treating food as a object of religion. With Stock Images, I intend to expand Jewish food studies scholarship by taking an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on history, gender studies, and critical race theory. But the idea of “culinary nostalgia” is at the core of this project: I consider Joselit's "domesticity” in both forms: family and nationally. I use Jewish food to explore the transition of a community from racialized immigrant other to white middle-class Americana. I’m telling that story with Stock Images: a monograph on chicken soup. 
  
  In Yiddish, chicken soup was called “goldene yoich,” or golden broth – just as the United States was called “goldene medina,” or golden land. Chicken soup is an emblematic food in Jewish culture. It’s a quintessential comfort food, an embodied cognitive link to fulfilling the need to belong. Historically speaking, chicken soup predates Judaism; archeological evidence found in China suggests that domesticated chickens may have been boiled and served well before 6,000 BCE. But chicken soup has gained ubiquity in the Jewish community. Maimonides, a renown 12th century philosopher and physician, attested to its healing power, with “Jewish penicillin” still considered a folk remedy today. References to chicken soup appear in 1950s advertising cookbooks and today’s blogs alike. It’s even the cover of The 100 Most Jewish Foods – a visual representation of its cultural importance.
  
  Chicken soup is made nostalgic in Yiddish poetry and made regretful in writings about the stereotypical Jewish mother, like that of novelist Erika Duncan: “the all-engulfing nurturer who devours the very soul with every spoonful of hot chicken soup she gives." But existing scholarship about Jewish-American foodways makes no inquiry into chicken soup, rather treating it as a given – a kind of cultural common knowledge gained through generations of not writing down recipes and eating the same thing weekly. For example, culinary researcher Jonathan Deutsch and Rachel Saks write about the ubiquity of Jewish-American “chicken in the pot” – whole chicken simmered into a soup, with the chicken then combined with vegetables to a main course – without interrogating why. For them, and for Jewish-Americans in general, chicken soup is a staple – but as a staple, it carries deeper meaning and demonstrates change over time.
  
  In the series of essays and primary document displays in this digital exhibit, I’ll discuss how chicken soup serves as a link between Old World and New World Jewish life, a symbolic representation of mothering and caretaking, and an example of how ethnic foods can be commercialized, all together telling a culinary story of Jewish-American assimilation and “becoming white” during the interwar and post-war periods.
• 1 media/Artboard 1@2x-100 Large.jpeg 2022-02-24T15:55:22-08:00 Method and Form 7 The Why and How of Food Study plain 2023-03-26T12:45:50-07:00 Stock Images is a multimedia exploration of identity, religion, and gender, using chicken soup as an object of inquiry; it’s a cultural history via food media analysis. And it’s my hope that this cultural history is as easy to digest as chicken soup itself. It’s important to me to create living scholarship, something that can be revisited and reinterrogated and perhaps even grow into something else. Stock Images represents the type of learning I sought through GLS: interdisciplinary, dynamic, and accessible.
  
  Food study also fits that description. Food isn’t just a commodity; rather, food presents a “site through which humans make meaning." Food study, then, unpacks that meaning: how culinary traditions, eating patterns, and ingredient choices reflect culture and society. We can consider food a prism that reflects historical, sociological, and cultural issues while being “embedded in nostalgia and a romanticized past.” 
  
  Food is embodied, communal, coded as both ritual and taboo. It’s a phenomenal example of cultural politics, inviting questions of practice and power, and of taste, class, and position in society. Because it’s so universal to the human experience, it’s hard to pin the academic study of food down. It’s disparate among disciplines, with no real canon to draw on. Jewish studies faces a dissimilar issue, with significant canon – but one that errs on the side of religious, Biblical or Talmudic, rather than contemporary, modern history or ethnic studies. (Freedman).
  
  As such, for Stock Images, I developed my own canon, drawing on literature primarily situated at the intersection of gender, food, and Jewish life. Through this work, I reference scholars whose work appears time and time again: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Hasia Diner, Riv-Ellen Prell, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Joyce Antler, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Rachel Gross. These women share my identity as a white Ashkenazi Jewish American, and much of their work highlights that community.
  
  Though I stay within the boundaries of existing research by interrogating Ashkenazi Jewish foodways, with Stock Images I contribute to scholarship through form and interpretation: curating a digital exhibit and linking together threads of Jewish womanhood, Americanization, and whiteness to create a monograph of a single food. The primary method I use in this work is archival collection and analysis. Through the Rubenstein Library, the National Library of Israel, and family records, I found (and, in the case of the former, digitalized) advertisements, cookbooks, and recipes that are the basis of my inquiry.
  
  Notably, advertisements are a useful tool for historical learning as they reflect and reshape cultural norms and speak to consumer mentalities of the era. I examine advertisements’ copy, images, and placement for how they project an idealized version of Americana and traditional gender roles, showing an aspirational life for consumers. The way I approach interpreting advertisements is rooted in existing scholarship, like Emily Contois’s Diners, Dudes, and Diets, which focuses on even the most minute details of multimedia advertisements and packaging to support her thesis of brands profiting from gender role disruption, and THE KOSHER ADVERTISING ONE, which examines kosher advertisements in the same period I’m interested in.
  
  Moreover, I rely heavily on cookbook analysis. Even among food scholarship, cookbooks have been largely ignored as texts for being too base or too unintellectual, with that sense rooted in misogyny – because cookbooks have predominantly been created by and for women, they’re seen as “inconsequential to historical narrative” (Nussel; see “peek into their kitchens”, Matheny). But cookbooks analysis is historiography of everyday material; they provide a means to understand the day-to-day life of women. Cookbooks carry explicit and implicit meanings and pose questions of authorship, purpose, and audience.
  
  Consider how ingredients are listed. Pinches and dashes rather than measurements, “until done” instead of a specific temperature – this indicates oral tradition and passing down of family recipes or inherited cultural knowledge.
  
  Look at what ingredients are called for. Butter or margarine or Crisco can reveal nutrition trends, culinary norms, or capitalism-driven choices.
  
  How are recipes listed and grouped – by holiday? By meal? By protein, or lack thereof? What does this order tell us about a social order and how people organize their lives?
  
  As texts themselves, cookbooks offer the opportunity for robust rhetorical, visual, and content analysis, breathing new life and understanding the many meanings of what can be seen as mundane. And as a genre, cookbooks put domestic life in the public sphere and demonstrate how women can access cultural authority (Nussel, Elias).
  
  It’s only fitting that this project’s form captures that same ethos of accessible cultural knowledge. That’s the goal of a monograph archival exhibition: to create something that is easy to understand, weaving together scholarly work and personal story, and to spotlight the archival materials themselves, lending them a scholarly platform – in some cases for the first time.
  
  Gross provides a list of singular monographs in Jewish food study; the one I found most inspirational is Laura Silver’s Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food. Knish is a cultural history of the potato-filled pastry, in which Silver’s family history coincides with vivid descriptions of food, historical accounts of businesses in Poland and New York, and commentary about Jewish cuisine and memory. Likewise, two exhibit books use multimedia presentation to examine Jewish American life, serving “to affirm one’s identity, to define one’s values, to take stock of the present, and to contemplate the past” (Joselit 141). The first, The Borscht Belt, is a book of photo essays documenting “Jewish Vacationland” – resorts in the Catskills that catered to Jewish families who were unwelcome or prohibited from vacationing elsewhere. The book juxtaposes archival photos from the interwar and post-war eras with contemporary images of the abandoned hotel sites – empty, cracked pools and animal bones in the grass outside a kitchen – telling a story of nostalgia and ruin through images. The second, Getting Comfortable in New York, is based on an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, combining representations of works shown in the exhibit and long-form scholarly writing. Notably, the work includes Kirshsenblatt-Gimblet’s “Kitchen Judaism” and Joselit’s “A Set Table: Jewish Domestic Culture in the New World,” both pieces which directly speak to the communities and questions at hand in Stock Images.
  
  Scalar, the platform Stock Images is built on, allows me to display archived works a la an exhibit, annotate visual media, and write long-form essays or short-form captions. It’s a nonlinear, recursive platform – you’ll see links that overlap between distinct parts or allude to pieces you’ve already seen and read. You shouldn’t feel like you need to read this project in any particular order. As you click through this project, be sure to hover over highlighted text, look for symbols, use the visualizations and path tools – there’s layers to the project that aren’t all accessible via the Contents tab and rather need to be found while exploring the work. It’s one of the ways I hope Stock Images engages an audience, encouraging new ways of reading and thinking about something as simple and familiar as chicken soup. And because Scalar is open-source and accessible, I can share consumable information about this comforting consumable.
  
  Finally, I can’t earnestly write about method and form without also discussing a crucial ingredient in the mix: time. I took a year off from this project – a professional and academic break to recover from burnout and refocus my engagement across all parts of my life. When I returned to Stock Images, I reshaped how I approached this work. Realizing my own gaps in recollection, I needed to find additional secondary sources and was pleased to find new scholarship published since my initial research. And more subtly, I found myself playing with recollection and refocusing on nostalgia and memory. That shift in perspective shows itself through this platform, both in my interpretation of primary sources and in my writing – there’s more orientation around my own identity. This work plays with autobiographical elements, placing self and family in context and sometimes erring on self-indulgent. Nostalgia is embedded in this project: early 20^th century immigrants, for the Old World; second- and third-generation Americans, for insular communities lost over time; mine, for my family and for the foods we’ve shared.
  
  Through Stock Images, chicken soup isn’t just a comfort food. Rather, it’s the prism through which I study midcentury Jewish American life and better understand Jewish American identity – my identity – today.