Food: Food Writing
Australia: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
The first Jewish women, like the first Jewish men, arrived in Australia on the very first day of European settlement in 1788. Those convict pioneers were followed by free settlers who made Jewish communal and congregational life viable and helped to develop the vast continent. Jewish women have made significant contributions to Australia's national story.
Cookbooks in the United States
American Jewish cookbooks capture the range of Jewish religious and cultural expression in the United States. Women took advantage of the versatility and variety of cookbooks to add their voices to the growing and developing Jewish culture in the United States.
Chloe Coscarelli
Food in the United States
Food and foodways are a critically important area of documenting and deciphering the evolving experience of American Jewish women from the earliest days of immigration to the present. Food is a lens into American Jewish women’s worlds of family, religion, identity, work, political action, entrepreneurship, and more as they have encountered the forces of assimilation, anti-Semitism, systemic racism, sexism, changing consumer economies, and the long women’s movement.
Lizzie Black Kander
Lizzie Black Kander was a Jewish philanthropist who turned the recipe book she made for a cooking class for new immigrants into a two-million-copy bestseller. Her decades of service in the early twentieth century had an unforgettable impact on the Milwaukee Jewish community.
Nigella Lawson
Judith Montefiore
Many people fail to distinguish the achievements of Lady Judith Montefiore from those of her husband Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), who was probably one of the most important Jews of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the life of this “First Lady of Anglo Jewry” is of significance both to Anglo-Jewish history and to the history of Jewish women. While embodying all the Victorian virtues of high moral purpose, sense of duty, charity and public–mindedness, she was a fierce loyalist to her faith and her people, devoted to Jewish causes and the welfare of Jews the world over.
Lina Morgenstern
In the face of formidable anti-Semitic opposition, Lina Morgenstern was a highly successful feminist author, educator, and peace activist who was supported by many, including the Prussian Empress Augusta. In 1896 she organized the first International Congress of Women in Germany, which was attended by feminist leaders from all over the world.
Gwyneth Paltrow
Deb Perelman
Claudia Roden
Food writer and cookbook author Claudia Roden single-handedly opened up the world of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish foods to chefs, food critics and home cooks across the globe providing a new portal into understanding and experiencing Jewish food and culture.
Sephardic Food
Sephardic food tells the story of the Iberian Jewish community from its roots in ancient Spain and Portugal through the community’s expulsion in 1492 and subsequent global diaspora. Sephardic women acted as the main interpreters and preservers of the community’s culinary repertoire.
Alicia Steimberg
Fiction writer Alicia Steimberg (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933-2012) garnered important literary prizes. Her work as a translator was awarded by the Konex Foundation and she served the government as Director of Books of the Secretariat of Culture.
