Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (Studies of Jews in Society) - Hardcover

Raviv, Yael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803290179 ISBN 13: 9780803290174

Verlag: University of Nebraska Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

When people discuss food in Israel, their debates ask politically charged questions: Who has the right to falafel? Whose hummus is better? But Yael Raviv’s Falafel Nation moves beyond the simply territorial to divulge the role food plays in the Jewish nation. She ponders the power struggles, moral dilemmas, and religious and ideological affiliations of the different ethnic groups that make up the “Jewish State” and how they relate to the gastronomy of the region. How do we interpret the recent upsurge in the Israeli culinary scene—the transition from ideological asceticism to the current deluge of fine restaurants, gourmet stores, and related publications and media?

Focusing on the period between the 1905 immigration wave and the Six-Day War in 1967, Raviv explores foodways from the field, factory, market, and kitchen to the table. She incorporates the role of women, ethnic groups, and different generations into the story of Zionism and offers new assertions from a secular-foodie perspective on the relationship between Jewish religion and Jewish nationalism. A study of the changes in food practices and in attitudes toward food and cooking, Falafel Nation

explains how the change in the relationship between Israelis and their food mirrors the search for a definition of modern Jewish nationalism. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yael Raviv is the director of the Umami food and art festival in New York City. She has a PhD in performance studies from New York University and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at NYU. Her work has appeared in Women and Performance, Gastronomica, and elsewhere.

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Falafel Nation

Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel

By Yael Raviv

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-9017-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. Putting Down Roots: Agricultural Labor and Icons, 
2. Patriotic Distribution: The "Hebrew" Watermelon, 
3. Kitchen Lessons: Educating Home Cooks, 
4. The Virtual Kitchen: Making Room for Pleasure, 
5. The Professional Kitchen: Articulating a National Cuisine, 
6. No Table Required: Consumption and the Public Sphere, 
Conclusion, 
Appendix: Historical Context, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Putting Down Roots

Agricultural Labor and Icons

A land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, land of olive trees and honey.

— Deuteronomy 8:8

Food has been used as a marketing tool for the land of Israel since ancient times. In biblical times the land of milk and honey was advertised with the aid of grapes, and ever since, food has continued to play a significant role in Zionist propaganda and Israeli tourism campaigns. These campaigns tend to use natural, whole foodstuffs such as grapes, olives, and oranges. These "fruits of the land" are perceived as direct links to the land itself, and creating and enforcing these links has been the primary concern of the Zionist movement. The most significant change in the treatment of these culinary symbols began with the First Aliya (immigration wave) toward the end of the nineteenth century. The members of the First Aliya had a new point of view: they not only were interested in consuming symbolic slivers of the promised land but also attempted to forge a more direct and powerful link with the land of Israel. They wished to put down roots by growing these products themselves; by working the land, they attempted to create an immediate and intimate bond between people and place.

This chapter focuses on agriculture in the Zionist project, particularly in its early years, as both practical tool and ideological trope and on the relationship between ideology and practice (sometimes supportive and often at odds). "Working the land" was a fundamental stage in the Zionist national project, a performance of Zionist ideology in the sense of "execution," "doing": connecting to the land of Israel in the most literal way and establishing an independent economic foundation. Growing food meant establishing strength and self-reliance in the present and the future, as well as forging a bond with the physical land both by working its soil and by consuming its fruit. In addition to the greater project of agriculture, specific agricultural products took on a similar role: growing and/or consuming them equaled the praxis of Zionism. Before the national movement could rely on official state symbols, it could use these products as physical markers of national identity.

One of the early challenges of the Jewish national movement was the first encounter of the young immigrants from Eastern Europe with the reality of life in the land of Israel. The Zionist movement could claim that the Jewish people are directly descended from the biblical Israelites, but in reality the new immigrants were raised in a different climate and were used to different foods. One of the most trivial-seeming yet essential steps to settling in a new land is being able to live on the available food products. The early Jewish immigrants felt this acutely because of the difficult economic situation and the limited products available to them.

The difficulty in adjusting to the unfamiliar foods of Palestine during this period is beautifully described in S. Y. Agnon's novel Temol Shilshom (Only yesterday). The "green" pioneer, Izchak, is offered a meal by a more experienced fellow pioneer after a frustrating day of unsuccessfully trying to find work in the moshava (village). The meal consists of tea, bread, tomatoes, and olives. Both tomatoes and olives are strange to Izchak and not quite to his liking even after he is persuaded to try them, but his friend admonishes him: "If you wish to be a son of the land of Israel, you have to learn to eat what you find."

Agnon makes it clear that one cannot be "a son of the land" if one cannot live off what that land provides. We are later told that Izchak becomes accustomed to these new foods: "Even the foods that were foreign to Izchak at first became tasteful to him. The fried eggplants in oil and in tomato sauce and all manner of dishes that are common in the land, are his foods every day, and needless to say olives and tomatoes." This is an essential step in the assimilation process of the immigrant Izchak. Agnon follows this with a lush description of the available seasonal fruits: apricots, grapes, prickly pears, watermelons, figs, dates, pomegranates, oranges, and mandarins. These fruits were more readily accepted by most immigrants, since they were already somewhat familiar with them. The immigrants had been exposed to them in Europe as very expensive, special, and prized products representing the land of Israel, the land of milk and honey. The sweet taste of dates, oranges, or pomegranates would symbolize the promise of the biblical land of Israel. These fruits are used in the novel to help present the land as bountiful, although one had to be open to trying the local products.

Culinary Icons

As Agnon's story demonstrates, fruit as a symbol of the "promised land" was a familiar device. In the early days of Zionist settlement in Palestine, these symbols were extended and expanded to forge both emotional and literal links to the land. Several food products were employed both as concrete symbols of an intangible connection to a new land, a unifying device, and as an attempt at a practical solution, a crop choice for a new farming endeavor.

Four decades after Agnon wrote Temol Shilshom, Benyamin Tamuz wrote a fictional account of a young halutz visiting his family in a town in Eastern Europe during approximately the same historical period. He brings them olives as a special gift from the land of Israel. Tamuz highlights the gap between the idealized image and the sometimes literally bitter reality:

As soon as he said it must be olives, immediately everyone almost fainted. Olives we have seen only in the Bible when we read "land of olive oil and honey," as it is written in the book of Devarim, as we have learned; and you must remember well that it is written there also "olives you will have in all your borders ..." and in Prophets olive is written a thousand times. But who in his life has seen an olive? ... "So a man walks into a store and buys olives?" asked grandfather in a whisper. "Sure," said Yehiel, "they are very cheap and the halutzim eat them a lot since they are very cheap."

The family then invites most of the town (everyone who is anyone) to view and partake of the olives. They all gather promptly and wait for the rabbi, who, after a short deliberation, gravely announces that these are indeed olives from the land of Israel. The gathered crowd is beside themselves. They pass around a crystal dish with the olives for everyone to have a small taste.

2. "A land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, land of olive trees and honey" (Deuteronomy 8:8). From the collections of the Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.

The taste was, may the kodesh borech-hu...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Nebraska Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0803290179
• ISBN 13: 9780803290174
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 281
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar