Co-opting domesticity: apartheid, South African Jewish women, and community cookbooks

ABSTRACT

At the onset of the apartheid era, Jewish women across South Africa began to publish community cookbooks to raise money for Jewish schools, synagogues, and other organizations. Through their combination of recipes, titles, advertisements, prefaces, and guidelines, community cookbooks narrated the economic, social, and cultural successes of the women who compiled them. In the postwar period, South African Jewish women sought a place for themselves in Jewish communal life, and in the white middle class of the country’s new apartheid order. By producing and consuming community cookbooks, these women armed themselves with the organizational platform and the cultural capital that would help them claim that place. In order to be able to step into the public sphere while meeting their domestic obligations, they came to rely on the invisibilized labor of the black women who worked in their homes and kitchens. The paper uses cookbooks to think critically about the position of South African Jews in the apartheid system, analyzing how Jewish women benefited from the privileges of whiteness in the intimate arena of their homes.

KEYWORDS:

• Community cookbooks
• postwar
• South Africa
• apartheid
• Jewish
• Judaism
• women

Acknowledgments

This article began as my MA thesis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I am indebted to my thesis advisors, Louise Bethlehem and Anat Helman, for their support. I presented this research at the “Jews in South Africa: New Directions in Research” international conference. Many thanks to organizers Shirli Gilbert and Adam Mendelsohn, to Eric Goldstein for his response, and to other participants for their comments. A group of scholars read drafts of the article, and provided comments and suggestions that significantly improved the final outcome: Stefan Aune, Louise Bethlehem, Hasia Diner, Natalia Dubno Shevin, Anat Helman, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Julie Livingston, Roni Masel, and Mapule Mohulatsi. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Librarians and archivists at the National Library of Israel, NYPL, and NYU provided support and access to cookbooks. My profound thanks go to the many South African and expat community members and leaders who sent me cookbooks and supported the project, and to my family and friends for their encouragement. The cookbooks will be preserved in a digital archive, located at sajewishcookbooks.org.za, with funding and support from the NYU Center for the Humanities and the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Vereeniging Union of Jewish Women’s first cookbook, for example, sold two thousand copies, a figure of which its editors were enormously proud. See (E. Cohen, Jacks, and Cutler 1980, foreword). The sheer scale of participation can be traced through the cookbooks themselves, which typically credit by name the contributors of each of the hundreds of recipes included within. South African Jewish women also produced commercial, single-author cookbooks, which are not covered here. See, for example, (Belling 2013b).

2. I intend to address the meaning of “traditional” Jewish food in South African Jewish cookbooks, along with the role of Zionism and religious revival, in a separate article.

3. Afrikaans recipes for the 1950 edition of the Goodwill (G.H. Cohen 1950) were contributed by the Chair of the South African Women’s Institute of Home Crafts, and for the 1950s edition of the Magen David Adom Recipe Book (Miller, Schauder, and Glasser 195?, 44) by a Miss van Zyl.

4. Caring for the health of one’s children was, over the course of the twentieth century, one of the most consistent messages that food advertisements directed at women (Parkin 2006).

5. For this phrasing and a discussion of Jewish women resisting the conservative gender ideology of the postwar period in the American context, see (Diner, Kohn, and Kranson 2010).

6. For a comparable discussion of how Indian women in South Africa used cookbooks to create a place for themselves in the public sphere, see (Waetjen 2009).

7. My thanks to Louise Bethlehem for sharing this story with me.