This is the Out of Our Kitchen Closets cookbook, published in 1987. While not within our historical framework exactly, it was published in San Francisco by congregation Shaar Zahav, which I wrote a précis on last week detailing their response to the AIDS epidemic. Evidently, sermons were not all they do. In this article by Shira Feder (linked below), the authors of the cookbook describe how they brought food to their fellow congregants in the hospital and used food to bond together. The cookbook also caused many queer congregants who were estranged from their families to reach out, asking for recipes. When asked why a cookbook, creator Susan Unger said, “I still have a cookbook my mother got from her congregation…It’s universal, it’s about holidays and togetherness.” The history of the Jewish cookbook tied together the ongoing queer crisis and their Jewish history. The food in the book is a mix of modern and traditional, from pumpkin soup and avocado omelettes to blintzes and chopped liver. The quotes on the image above are from the article, about the ways the cookbook honored their Jewish and queer culture.

Also, weird fun fact: when discussing the history of queer culture and food, this is a paragraph from the article:

““I’m going to say this to his face: Thank you James Beard for making a fat, gay man a powerful thing!” Jewish chef Michael Twitty declared upon winning a James Beard award. James Beard himself, essentially the face of American cooking, was a gay man who had been given the boot from Reed College for kissing a male companion.“

It’s a small world after all. Nice going, Reed College! 😬

Article: https://forward.com/life/406937/during-the-aids-crisis-this-gay-jewish-cookbook-kept-a-community-together/

Alyssa Feigelson (3.30)

In his article “Rarely Kosher: Studying Jews of Color in North America” from the Journal of American Jewish History, Lewis Gordon establishes common misconceptions about the complicated nature of the concept of race, especially as it relates to Jews. However, since his article plans on discussing the experience of Jews of Color, he attempts to give a brief history of Jews as a racialized group, for context of how Jews and Jews viewed as being “of Color” experience the world as an ethnic minority. The significance of this study is evident in Gordon’s claim that there is “reluctance to conjoin discussions of Jews with discussions of race” (105). He attempts to prove that while there is reluctance, due to the uncomfortable nature of addressing the history of racial prejudice, it is crucial to understanding how Jews interact with the concept of race.

In his case studies, Gordon acknowledges that he cannot cover every community of Jews across the world that might be considered “Jews of Color” and instead chooses to focus on Africa and the Caribbean in order to “offer insight into the situation in other parts of the globe” (107). This lends a strength his article, because it allows audiences to understand in advance potential shortcomings and understand that this is not a full view, but a look at a microcosm of a larger phenomenon. Another strong part of Gordon’s essay is found in his discussion of the origin of Jewish “whiteness.” Rather than claiming Jews as a group were originally white, or became white due to generations of assimilation, Gordon proposes an interesting alternative that accounts for the “dual identities as Jews and as members of their particular empires” (110). He looks at how subjective the concept of race is, based not only on skin tones but politics.

The most confusing part of Gordon’s article, for me, was some of the methodological jargon that I found difficult to follow. For example, he discusses an issue of “disciplinary decadence,” which he defines as when “practitioners deify their disciplines and treat their methodologies as all encompassing or godlike in scope” (107). Neither the term nor the definition are easily understood, and could have benefitted from some clearer language. His conclusion, as well, is short and does not offer a summation or takeaway from his case studies.

Despite these shortcomings, overall Gordon’s article is well-written and offers an insight into an area of Jewish history that is often overlooked and still affects many in the Jewish community today. As he states in his conclusion, acceptance of Jews of Color today “depends on the hospitability of congregations and the commitment of rabbis” (116). This proves only more that we as Jews need to study the history he presents, and learn from it for ourselves and for the strength of our community.

This image was found on the cover of La Luz magazine on August 25, 1933. The future imagined by the artist does not look too far off from what would eventually unfold, though there is no indication that the people being crushed by the giant swastika are Jewish (or Roma, etc.)

The fact that even across the Atlantic diasporic Jews were terrified for the future of their coreligionists indicates that there was a strong sense of community, even across great distances and cultural divides.

Alyssa Feigelson

Précis

March 21, 2021

Gregg Drinkwater’s article, “AIDS Was Our Earthquake: American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92”, begins by establishing the religious and moral superiority surrounding the AIDS crisis. He gives a background on the origin of the discovery of AIDS, and chooses to focus on how the Jewish community went from being largely silent on the issue to actively providing help to those affected from a Jewish perspective. Drinkwater demonstrates how Jewish communities did not always conform to the common Christian sentiment that people with AIDS deserved their illness. He uses these responses as proof that the two rabbis who began the large-scale response in San Francisco, rabbis Kahn and Kirschner, were the turning point in the Jewish community’s views of the AIDS epidemic and the LGBT community as a whole.

            In proving that the Jewish response to AIDS was different from the beginning, Drinkwater introduces Rabbi Barry Freundel, an Orthodox man who was later arrested for watching women in a mikveh. Freundel argued that those living with AIDS were suffering from God’s anger, but even this arguably terrible man conceded that the most important thing to remember at this time was that as Jews, there was an obligation to “heal and prevent death wherever possible.”[1] This establishes the norm in Jewish communities, even in those that despised the gay community, to help the sick. From Freundel, Drinkwater moves on to describe Temple Emanu-El’s rabbi’s powerful Kol Nidre sermon, urging his congregation to have compassion. Then he introduces Rabbi Kahn of Congregaiton Sha’ar Zahav, who gave his first ever sermon on the AIDS crisis to his queer temple, emphasizing his rightful anger instead of a plea for compassion.

The article was really strongly written and had some very beautiful moments, especially when showing how Rabbi Kirschner decided to write about AIDS in his Kol Nidre sermon. Drinkwater describes how Kirschner recited the kaddish to a man dying of AIDS at the man’s request, and was so moved he wrote a sermon to be delivered the very next day. Relatedly, the quotes Drinkwater pulled from the sermons and from contemporary writings were very powerful and served to strengthen his argument. Most notably, the line from Rabbi Kahn’s sermon: “We cannot begin the new year until we come to terms with the old…Upon looking back, I must say, before God and this congregation, I am not prepared to forgive. Before I can forgive, I must give voice to anger.”[2] This touching phrasing is so relevant to the current time, when we find ourselves balancing rage and the need to keep moving forward.

Despite these strengths, the article was little long for my taste, and some of the key points got buried due to its length. The first half of the article was so gripping, by the second half it felt as if some of the significance had fallen away. The article could also have benefited from centering the Jewish people with AIDS—he does a good job of giving them a lot of focus, but I think the article could have been more interesting if we could have seen how those being marginalized reacted to the turning tides.

[1] Freundel, quoted in Drinkwater, Gregg. “AIDS Was Our Earthquake: American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92.” Jewish Social Studies 26, no. 1 (2020), 123

[2] Kahn, quoted in Drinkwater, 129