A Peek Into Their Kitchens

Abstract

Jewish community cookbooks in the postwar era offer a peek into the kitchens—or at least the imagined kitchens—of American Jews during a major turning point in history. They capture a range of conflicting social trends and negotiations of religious and cultural identity that in part characterized the period. Such diversity of practices and beliefs, even within one institution, community or synagogue, is particularly evident within the prolific, sometimes didactic, and often laissez-faire charitable cookbook genre of the postwar period. Given the unprecedented number of Jewish community cookbooks produced in the postwar era, they also offer historians unique access to women's lives and the choices they made in representing themselves and their communities in print. Yet what appears within the cookbook—the recipes, illustrations, and introductions— reveals nearly as much as what remains unsaid.

Keywords:

• community cookbooks
• postwar
• women
• American Jewry
• suburbia

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lara Rabinovitch

Lara Rabinovitch is a PhD candidate at New York University. Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, 53 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012, USA ([email protected]).