Bloody Shankbones and Braided Bread: The Food Voice and the Fashioning of American Jewish Identities

Abstract

American Jewish consensus on what constitutes a “good Jew” has faded in recent decades in the wake of American trends of declining communal authority and increasing emphasis on individual fashioning of religious and ethnic identities. Sociologists of American Jewry have begun to look at everyday activities to discover new configurations of Jewish belief and practice. In this study, food narratives are shown to be an important site for both the articulation and authentication of atypical Jewish identities. Two women respondents, taken from a larger interview study of American Jewry, use food stories as a vehicle to reject standards of proper Jewish attitudes and behavior and justify their differences from the norm. This study suggests that American Jewish foodways, usually studied as evidence of American acculturation or Jewish nostalgia, can also be fruitfully examined to better understand personalized Jewish identities.