The story of Jewish women throughout history is one of resilience. Faced with oppression and violence not only from outside forces but also within their own communities, Jewish women have had to find ways to make their unfriendly realities fit comfortably countless times. One way that this comfort has been found is through food. Tasked with preparing food for the family, cooking is not something that would be foreign for any Jewish woman during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The act of creation and nourishment in the face of destruction and scarcity, is something that even today many Jewish women resonate with. The history of Jewish food and cooking tells the story of resistance through the kitchen, of the power that food can hold. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under the strict dietary laws that many Jews followed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, kashrut<\/em>, cooking became a sacred duty. Inspecting each vegetable, draining all meat of its blood, and sorting through grains of rice for imperfections, women each day were preforming a religious ritual simply by preparing food (Sered, Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem<\/em>). Excluded from a formal religious education and many religious events, women had to find ways to live fulfilling spiritual lives separate from traditional religious structure (Baskin, Jewish Women in Historical Perspective<\/em>). By subverting the patriarchal force that had once used the kitchen to contain and oppress them, cooking had became a religious rite that rivaled anything that men were doing in synagogs. Where men were observing and practicing religion, women were creating it. Their relationship with God was everywhere and in everything they did, not just in Temple. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Expected to cook multiple meals a day following the tenets of kashrut<\/em>, food preparation is the quintessence of Jewish women\u2019s domestic and personal approach to religion (Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration<\/em>). Cooking is a major part of the Jewish faith and by following kashrut<\/em> women not only saw holiday cooking as a sacred religious act, but also everyday food preparation. By sacralizing the act of cooking, kashrut<\/em> gives women a direct relationship to God in their everyday lives where they would be otherwise excluded. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For Jewish women of the time, cooking was important because it granted them religious autonomy. Not confined to the temple or a certain set of prayers, women were free to communicate with their God just by going about their daily lives. Women were able to create their own relationship to religion and dictate that of their families. By taking rules and roles placed on them by men and reclaiming and altering them, women gave themselves the power to rule over their own spiritual lives; to domesticate the holy, and make holy the domestic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that in this, there is a lesson. By taking their everyday tasks and duties, and turning them into something that is beautiful and meaningful, Jewish women were able to carry out fulfilling lives and gain power over their own existence. Ritual is hugely important in life, especially in the absence of daily routine. The ritual of cooking, of honoring both your hunger and its satisfaction, is something that was healing for Jewish women throughout history and something that is still powerful today. In a time where everything seems mundane and at times hopeless, we must create or own environments, to push against the darkness with a wooden spoon in hand and a full belly. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PC: Amelia Pressman, 2021<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":462,"featured_media":194,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"geo":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/462"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/tmtaa-portfolio-w21-amelia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}