Start Date
29-5-2024 12:15 PM
End Date
29-5-2024 12:30 PM
Description
The Exodus of the Israelites has long held meaning for African American Christians, as noted by scholars of African American religious history. Jewish studies scholars, meanwhile, have written about both Passover and Jewish relationships to the Exodus. Michael Twitty, public historian, James Beard award-winning author, and memoirist, has fused an identity for himself by drawing on the foodways of both traditions to remember and memorialize the trauma of both traditions While Twitty uses food to create meaning in the context of holidays, his memoirs, Kosher Soul and The Cooking Gene, explore how the food of trauma, poverty, and resilience provide link his African American and Jewish identities. Twitty focuses on the food that both traditions create out of poverty, writing about “struggle meals” such as gefilte fish and gumbo, an African American delicacy made out of scraps from the enslaver’s table. In merging his Jewish practice and Black heritage, Twitty creates a ritual container which acknowledges that, just as displacement echoes through Jewish experience, enslavement echoes through Black experience, and those experiences of trauma and resilience shape the present. Twitty provides African American Jews the religious support for living with racism that African American Christianity has historically provided, while grounding that experience in Judaism. By looking at how he does this in the context of both holidays and daily life, I will discuss his reshaping of Jewish temporal practice to meet the needs of Jews with diverse histories and his ability to create forward-looking foodways out of histories of trauma.
Creative Commons License
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/qa95-dn70
Included in
African American Studies Commons, Food Studies Commons, History of Religion Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Nonfiction Commons, Other American Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social History Commons, United States History Commons
The Creation of an African American Jewish Culinary Tradition: Michael Twitty and the Passover Seder as a Vehicle for Remembering Trauma and Celebrating Survival
The Exodus of the Israelites has long held meaning for African American Christians, as noted by scholars of African American religious history. Jewish studies scholars, meanwhile, have written about both Passover and Jewish relationships to the Exodus. Michael Twitty, public historian, James Beard award-winning author, and memoirist, has fused an identity for himself by drawing on the foodways of both traditions to remember and memorialize the trauma of both traditions While Twitty uses food to create meaning in the context of holidays, his memoirs, Kosher Soul and The Cooking Gene, explore how the food of trauma, poverty, and resilience provide link his African American and Jewish identities. Twitty focuses on the food that both traditions create out of poverty, writing about “struggle meals” such as gefilte fish and gumbo, an African American delicacy made out of scraps from the enslaver’s table. In merging his Jewish practice and Black heritage, Twitty creates a ritual container which acknowledges that, just as displacement echoes through Jewish experience, enslavement echoes through Black experience, and those experiences of trauma and resilience shape the present. Twitty provides African American Jews the religious support for living with racism that African American Christianity has historically provided, while grounding that experience in Judaism. By looking at how he does this in the context of both holidays and daily life, I will discuss his reshaping of Jewish temporal practice to meet the needs of Jews with diverse histories and his ability to create forward-looking foodways out of histories of trauma.