Nostalgia. Deli. Bagels. Chicken soup. These are a few things that might come to mind when you hear the words "Jewish food." But what about sustainable farming? A tempeh reuben sandwich in Portland, Oregon? The ethics of food production? Hummus? Crisco? These are also part of the story of Jewish foodways. Please join esteemed food scholars Dr. Rachel B. Gross (San Francisco State University) and Dr. Adrienne Krone (Allegheny College) for a conversation about the history of Jews and food and the questions researchers are asking at this intersection in the twenty-first century.
Rachel B. Gross is Associate Professor and John and Marcia Goldman Chair in American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a religious studies scholar who studies twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Jews. Her book, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice, was a 2021 National Jewish Book Award finalist in American Jewish Studies and received an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the American Jewish Historical Society. She is currently working on a book about the religious adventures of the twentieth-century American Jewish writer Mary Antin.
Adrienne Krone is Associate Professor of Environmental Science & Sustainability and Religious Studies at Allegheny College, where she is also Chair of Jewish Studies. She is an ethnographer and a scholar of American religion and her research focuses on religious food justice movements in North America. Her book, Free-Range Religion: Alternative Food Movements and Religious Life in the United States, will be released by University of North Carolina Press in November 2025. Her current research project is an ethnographic and historical study of the Jewish community farming movement.
