Student Brief: Culinary Zionism

Abstract

While discussions of Israeli cuisine as a distinct cultural field are relatively new, the cuisine already proliferates in media, food service, and industrial production. In content, it reflects influences from a variety of global sources. This article argues that Israeli cuisine arose through the application of Zionist historical intelligibility to diasporic and indigenous Arab cuisines. The result is a cuisine that embodies the characteristic, teleological “ingathering of exiles” to appropriate diasporic culinary traditions. This process characterizes Israel's hegemonic control of the means of narration and the production of a superfluous diasporic Jewish and indigenous Arab population.