Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 1, 2021

Family is at the core of our food, and our story, Rabiyah wrote on Instagram. Our family members include some of the last Iraqi Jews that grew up in Iraq. Their memories feel so important to preserve.

In December, Rabiyah partnered with the Brooklyn-based collective Experimental Bitch Presents in their production of a play called In The Kitchen. Rabiyah developed the recipe for baaba beh tamur, an Iraqi cookie typically made for the Jewish holiday of Purim. To adapt to the pandemic, the project was a play-in-a-box: audience members received boxes with the audio play and the ingredients and recipe for the cookies.

Listeners heard the voice of Hannah Aliza Goldman, an actor, performer, writer, and food historian, draw on her own family historyher fathers lineage is Sephardic from Morocco, and her mother is Ashkenazi.

In preparation for the play, Goldman retraced her grandmothers journey and returned to the village in Morocco where she grew up. In the 1930s, more than 250,000 Jewish people lived in Morocco, while today that number hovers around 3,000. For Goldman, much like Rabiyah, cooking traditional Sephardic recipes is a way to rebuild lost connections to that side of her cultural heritage.

In Jewish culture we have different definitions of homeland, Goldman said. My grandmother was very religious. For her, Eretz ZionIsraelwas the homeland and they chose to move there for religious reasons. In the same vein, Morocco was also her home.

Championing Sephardic and Mizrahi cuisine while telling the stories of migration and multiple homelands is a way of preventing cultural erasure, said Coral Cohen, the plays director. For this reason, she plans to work with other Sephardic and Mizrahi artists in the future as well. Like Goldman, Cohen comes from a Mizrahi and Ashkenazi family. Being white-passing, its important to acknowledge the privilege that we have, but really important to strongly identify as Mizrahi Jews, as Sephardic, as Iraqi, or Persian, because we are so erased in this country, Cohen added.

Cohen and Goldman relied on community partners, such the Sephardic Mizrahi Q Network, a community of LGBTQ-identifying Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who gathered around meals before the pandemic, to get the word out. The Q Network was inspired to use food as a way to reconnect with heritage, tell stories, and demonstrate that there are multiple valid ways of being Jewish.

Link:

The Awafi Kitchen Connects Iraqi and Jewish Food Cultures - Civil Eats

Category: Sephardic
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