What Is Jewish Food?

By Joe Baur

Jewish food is less about one specific food; it’s more about the place where you eat it and the feeling it gives you. Here, a Roman seder table includes artichokes. Photo by Penny de los Santos for Jewish Food Society.

Last May, I traveled to New York City with no greater purpose in mind than to meet with some Jewish cookbook authors and culinary thinkers I admire. Among them was Andras Koerner, an 81-year-old culinary historian who still remembers the wartime Budapest ghetto he and his family were forced to live in.

I mentioned kasha varnishkes –– a bowtie pasta dish with roasted buckwheat groats (kasha) historically served at Jewish delis in New York. It's a dish linked to Ukrainian vareniki (stuffed dumplings). I brought it up because it’s not a particularly sexy or Instagrammable dish. Nonetheless, it’s been making something of a comeback among this new generation of Jewish cookbook authors reimagining the central and eastern European dishes of our ancestors. 

But Koerner said something that stopped me in between bites of chocolate babka at Breads Bakery in the Upper West Side.

Kasha varnishkes is not Jewish food. At least, not to him. His tradition is Hungarian-Jewish, a cuisine he noted was essentially the same as what non-Jewish Hungarians were cooking in their kitchens. It made sense to me as soon as he said it. In fact, I felt somewhat silly not having thought of it before.

Ashkenazi Jews, those with roots in central and eastern European countries like Hungary, have always comprised an overwhelming majority of the Jewish population in the United States. Although Ashkenazi Jews share an ethnic, cultural and linguistic connection, we do not all come from the same place in recent memory. We come from various collapsed empires that once stretched over the contemporary lands of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, to name a few of our former overlords. Our ancestors brought those cuisines with them, perhaps slightly altered to respect the kosher diet if they observed it.

So, what is Ashkenazi food? The phrase brings to mind images of matzo ball soup, golden-brown challah and, for better or worse, a piece of gefilte fish topped with an oval-shaped slice of carrot. How did these foods come to represent a people?

Perspective and Geography

The answer, as with almost all things pertaining to Jewishness, is complicated. For starters, it has to do with perspective and geography. 

Dr. Nora Rubel is a professor at the University of Rochester, where she researches American Jewish culture, culinary history and religion. She’s also the cofounder with her husband, Rob Nipe, of the vegan Jewish deli Grass Fed in Rochester, New York. Rubel points out that for many, Jewish food is just New York food. 

She compares it to the old Lenny Bruce “Jewish or goyish?” routine from the 1950s and ’60s. The bit revolves around the idea that even if you’re a non-Jew in New York, you’re Jewish because you grew up surrounded by Jewish culture and food. But if you’re a Jew in, let’s say, North Dakota? Goyish. Rubel still sees the crux of Bruce’s joke at play with her students. She recalled a non-Jewish student from Connecticut expressing surprise that his friends didn’t grow up eating matzo ball soup on the regular. 

Rubel’s example touches on Koerner’s interest in context and what he calls “the fight against generalization.” For him, what makes Jewish food what it is is the context in which it’s enjoyed. We’re talking holidays, family traditions and the establishments where this food is made for hungry souls. (There’s a reason many still call the deli the “secular synagogue.”)

Jeffrey Yoskowitz, co-author of The Gefilte Manifesto and a Jewish food expert, doubles down on the location aspect. He refers to Jewish eateries as cultural institutions that codified and canonized a particular kind of American Jewish food. 

“Unlike Italian immigrants, Jewish immigrants were much more disconnected from the places that they left,” he said. “These places became repositories of Jewish culture and memory.” 

The result was a new American Ashkenazi Jewish identity.

Jewish food is less about one specific food; it’s more about the place where you eat it and the feeling it gives you. This is why, at the end of the day, Rubel is happy to borrow from Supreme Court Justice Potter’s oft-quoted sentiment on spotting explicit content and applying that to Jewish food: “You know it when you see it.”

But let’s go back even further. How did these dishes we think of as Jewish food come together? Immigration and marriage.

What is Ashkenazi food? The phrase brings to mind images of matzo ball soup, golden-brown challah and, for better or worse, a piece of gefilte fish topped with an oval-shaped slice of carrot. Mushki Brichta, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Immigration and Codification of Jewish Food

At the turn of the century, there were nearly 1 million Jews in the United states, making it the third-largest Jewish population behind Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Around half of the U.S. Jews lived in New York City, easily surpassing Warsaw as the most populous Jewish city at the time. A total of 1.75 million Jews immigrated to the United States between 1900 and 1924.

Why are we counting up to 1924? Because that's when Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924, otherwise known as The Johnson-Reed Act. With his signature, the U.S. started putting a quota on the number of immigrants permitted into the country based on their national origin. Immigrants from Asia were completely excluded. The Ku Klux Klan was among the act’s supporters.

As a result, Jewish immigration was sharply reduced with no modifications to the law even during the height of World War II and the Holocaust. It wasn’t until after the war that the quotas were adjusted to allow Jewish refugees into the U.S. Although the restrictive 1924 Act was eased in 1952, it wasn't fully replaced until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that ended the country’s draconian closed-door policy. Rubel called 1965 a watershed moment for the changing face of the United States with respect to religion and food.

“After decades of stasis, new immigrants such as Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews begin to infuse Jewish life with new flavors and traditions,” says Rubel.

With very few exceptions, the Jewish population of the United States was almost entirely Ashkenazi for a majority of the 20th century, and it was rare to marry outside of the tribe for the first half. But immigrant Jews and their children with roots in different European lands did marry, blending their respective cultural and culinary traditions. New York City, especially the Lower East Side, became something of a melting pot of Ashkenazi Jews. 

For example, a Hungarian Jew with their chicken paprikash marries a Ukrainian Jew with their borscht. They might have Yiddish signage and a Star of David to broadcast its status as a Jewish establishment serving Jewish food. Extrapolate that a few hundred times over half a century in one of the country’s most influential cities and Jewish food starts to take shape in the national imagination. 

This is all reaffirmed through Jewish cultural touchstones from the wildly popular The Goldberg’s radio show from 1929 to 1944 to Seinfeld with its slew of Jewish food references from babka (“cinnamon takes a backseat to no babka!”) to the black and white cookie meant to symbolize racial harmony. 

Even the latest season of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm includes a scene with Larry at the grocery store proclaiming his love for jarred gefilte fish –– a popular dish with Catholics in the Middle Ages that has long since migrated to the Ashkenazi culinary cannon.

“I love gefilte fish!” he shouts, holding a jar over his head. “And I'm gonna have it with a schmear of cream cheese on a bagel!” 

A Navel-Gazing People

Since the first snacking human plucked an apple from a tree or the prehistoric citizens of Western Asia flattened their first pita, food has always been regional. 

Although Ashkenazi Jews continue to make up approximately 90 to 95 percent of American Jewry, there’s a growing emphasis on the cuisines of the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, as well as that of Jews from West Asia and North Africa.  And that doesn’t even get into the explosion of Israeli restaurants that are viewed separately from “Jewish food” in the U.S.––a subject worthy of its own book.

The growing diversity, or at least acknowledgment of it, is a welcomed development for Koerner in his fight against generalization. Yoskowitz agreed, advocating for the use of more descriptors and adjectives to get away from frustrating overarching terms, like “Jewish food.”

The nonprofit Jewish Food Society is at the forefront of pushing Jewish culinary diversity with its work to preserve, celebrate and revitalize Jewish culinary heritage from around the world. Because Jews have lived all over the world, the organization’s goal is to represent as many families, recipes, and histories as possible in their digital archive.

“I think one of the most beautiful things that the archive does is it shows the diversity in Jewish food,” says Amanda Dell, program director at the Jewish Food Society. “The vibrance and the beauty of the archive is the diversity.”

Though at the end of the day, the growing awareness of Jewish culinary diversity might end up being an intracultural development. Yoskowitz referred to “a particular navel-gazing quality to Jewishness in America.” In other words, American Jews like to talk about things with Jewish goggles on to infer a certain kind of Jewishness to anything and everything. Rubel mentioned it as well. 

“We think about our stuff to the point where we think that other people are thinking about us, but they're not,” she says.