American Jewish foodways provide individuals with a sense of community and belonging across time and space. In keeping with broader understandings of religious practice as meaning-making activities, it becomes clear that engagement with American Jewish cuisine is an example of lived religion, activities that practitioners might not recognize as religious but that provide meaningful structures to their lives. Preparing and eating certain types of food places American Jews in a nostalgic network of sacred relationships with family members, friends, and coreligionists living and dead, historical and mythical. Jewish culinary revivalists enthusiastically reaffirm their longing for their individual and communal pasts, and they proclaim that their approach to the past is as fresh as their ingredients.

- Rachel Gross

When I’m asked if I keep kosher, I like to respond "well, technically," cheeky toned and smirking. It's not because I'm observant – my Passover tradition involves a baguette, and I love some screen time on a Saturday – but because I’m a vegetarian.

In some ways, my vegetarianism makes me more Jewish. My choice to avoid consuming animal products means that I automatically abide by at least some rules of kashrut; more significantly, my attempts to eat sustainably and locally sourced food supports the ethos of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. My way of engaging with farmers market vendors and small-batch producers is rooted in the same spirit of curiosity, camaraderie, and citizenship that defined Jewish women’s social action for generations.

Even when I want Jewish food that’s traditionally meat-laden, the creative culinary process of rethinking, questioning, and trying vegetarian alternatives is one that ties me closer to Judaism. Rejecting some elements of tradition and reclaiming others keeps my Jewishness alive. Food is the conduit to this connection, whether having my friends over for latkes and kugel for Hanukkah, hosting a social justice seder for Passover, or FaceTiming my parents to ask for the hamentaschen recipe.

For me, food and Judaism are so closely mixed together, emulsified – and nostalgia is the binding agent.

There’s scientific evidence that food consumption yields positive emotions of nostalgia. It’s tied to what researchers dub the “Proust effect” – physiological, neurological, and psychological responses to sensory stimuli that trigger strong memories. Eating food like our grandmothers made makes us remember them more strongly, viscerally. When you add in the evidence that nostalgia also allays feelings of risk and uncertainty in today’s food systems, it’s no wonder that nostalgic foods are making a comeback – especially for Jewish Americans. For those of us who negotiate our Jewish Americanness and American Jewishness in turn, who might not be “fully Jewish,” or practicing Jews, or embedded in a Jewish community, food is a concrete and consumable means of communicating Jewishness and communing with other Jews. Our food reflects the ways we consider our own identities and ways we fit in the world. For my generation, less affiliated with synagogues and Jewish social organizations than any of our predecessors, food is our means of Jewish practice.

In 2014, a piece in The Atlantic explained that Millennial Jews ushered in a sustainable, hipster and deeply Jewish cuisine, complete with pop-up Shabbat dinners. In 2015, a book about the history of delis indicated that young Jews were returning the deli to “cult status” to reclaim their cultural ties. And in 2023, a New York Times article spotlighted “Jew-ish” cuisine – food that’s not necessarily kosher and certainly not traditional, but which harkens back to Yiddishkeit in the name of storytelling, defining identity, and “introducing a rising generation of Jewish eaters to their ‘great-great-grandmother’s food.’” 

Thanks to this storytelling, youthfulness, and reinterpretation of classics, there’s renewed interest, vigor, and flavor in Jewish American cuisine. Jewish food institutions are making a comeback: Russ & Daughters in Brooklyn, Kenny & Zuke’s in Portland, Jew-ish in Richmond, Call Your Mother! in DC, Wise Sons in the Bay Area, (Ish) Delicatessen in Raleigh. Jewish chefs aren’t defined by their Jewishness but infuse it into their recipes. Molly Yeh’s Chinese-Jewish identity against a backdrop of her North Dakota farm yields a culinary perspective that’s pastoral, eclectic, rich in history and heritage. Claire Saffitz’s desserts play with tradition and reinvent staples of her youth, like a flourless chocolate cake that’s light and fluffy and, she notes, both pareve and kosher for Passover. Jake Cohen’s Jew-ish blend of his Ashkenazi heritage foods and those loved by his Iraqi-Jewish husband is an example of queering Jewish food, flipping gender expectations on their head.

These venues and creators reject what doesn’t work and reclaim what does, bringing modern Jewishness to the forefront of the culinary world. It’s the two-way street of assimilation: as Jews adopt and adapt to American taste, they infuse Jewishness into the American palate. And they’re not bringing gefilte fish or borscht or bland chicken soup made Friday afternoon before the Shabbat meal. Instead, it’s chicken soup infused with lemongrass and filled with bamboo shoots, infusing Vietnamese flavor. Instead of matzah balls or noodles or kreplach in broth, it’s dumplings, nodding to Southern tradition. Instead of dill and schmaltz, it’s turmeric and ghee, incorporating Indian ingredients. Instead of serving plain soup chicken, it’s transforming boiled meat into enchilada fillings, emulating Mexican gastronomy.

Today’s Jewish food isn’t my grandmother’s food. It’s campy and kitschy and fun. As a Thrillist article declares, “Jewish food is everywhere, and it’s undeniably cool.” 

Magazine articles don’t need to explain what kosher is. The top of the New York Times Cooking section proclaims “Passover” most of April. Jewish food is celebrated and created by people who aren’t Jewish at all: you can buy Thomas Bagels by the half-dozen at the grocery store, order a togarashi sesame bagel with pimiento cheese cream cheese from Everything Bagel downtown, or have real New York bagels overnighted through Goldbelly.

It's not an inherent religiosity of Jewish food that makes it Jewish. It’s the nostalgia it evokes – not for trauma, exclusion, or hunger, but for full-bellied laughter, family, and joy in times of darkness. It’s not the stuff of grandmothers, yearning for days of yore and emulating the Old World, but for all of us, celebratory and revelatory. It’s matzo ball soup, filled with schmaltz, youthful indulgence, and innovation.