Michael W. Twitty - Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew

SHECHECHEYANU

For the people who kept me alive to reach

this day, and didnt even know it:

Rabbi Hayyim Kassorla

Andrew Melzer

Mark Meyerhoff

Elissa Kaplan

Phyllis Greene

Judy Treby, ztl and Family

Adrian Durlester

Arnold and Gayle Brodsky

Rabbi David Shneyer

Meirav and Elah Levenson and Family

Rabbi Michelle Fisher

Lisa Pressman

Lisa Goodman

Rabbi Johanna Potts

Avi West, ztl

Hazzan Enrique Ozur Bass

Rabbi Deborah Cohen

Sidney Stark

Razi Yitchak ztl

Dr. Marcie Cohen Ferris and Bill Ferris

Jennifer and Nathan Wender

W hen I first started talking about developing this book, a fellow African American food writer asked what it was about, saying, So youre not writing about Black [food], youre writing about Jewish [food]. My response was reflexive: No, this is a book about a part of Black food thats also Jewish food; this is a book about Jewish food thats also Black food because its a book about Black people who are Jewish and Jewish people who are Black. What youre holding is the second in a three-book trilogy about the intersections (thank you for the language to describe this, Dr. Kimberl Crenshaw!) between food and identity. I never set out to write tomes of recipes that we could quickly lose among the many. I want to document the way food transforms the lives of people as people transform food.

I meant my first book, The Cooking Gene, to be an early birthday gift to America, but especially the African American people on the verge of the solemn birthday of (Anglo-mainland) Black America, four hundred years past the arrival of the White Lion at Jamestown. In the text were laid the seeds to talk about being Black, Jewish, of Southern heritage, and gay, while focusing on the journey to find out how the story of food shaped my family tree and how the food we produced, prepared, and consumed along the way defined us, soul by soul, down to me. The vulnerability was the gamble of putting myself under the microscope to ask readers to understand my American journey through a culinary lens. I didnt want to leave anything behind. Its my conviction that our plates are constantly shaped by everything we encounter and everything in us.

We were swallowed by four years of attempted repudiation of messages of change and hope carried in on an era of swift and distinct change. Despite an outrageously different eight years from anything we have known in our collective narrative, we never really have had a national recognition of the particular four-hundred-year commemoration we needed to have. The year 2019 was followed by a year that can only be described as a postmodern nadir of Black existence, one completely in need of the wisdom from the past few centuries that exposed all the underlying challenges from before and beyond us. However, I was quite chuffed that no matter what else my inaugural book meant, it stood proudly in defiance at the opening of the dark ages. We were here not only before the Mayflower; we were here before the Drumpfs, and that was not to be forgotten or overlooked.

That same era also helped to stall this project. To talk about The Cooking Gene was to remind people of the Black experiences harrowing journey, bring back an awareness of our accomplishments, and assert a distinctly ethnic branding to our food story over the oft-assumed racial gloss. Meanwhile, all hell was breaking loose, and the growing loss of sleep spoke to our unease. Political scandals came and went like a battery of storms, and many hoped to see the pillars come down. They didnt.

Every day was a new flashpoint in the story of Culture Wars III. Each twenty-four-hour media cycle saw an uptick of red-meat policies to punish marginalized, oppressed, and outlier communities. The rising hate crimes and suspicions and anger from one group to another were painful and exhausting. Worse yet, the cloud above us, the knowledge that only a disaster that would affect us all could loosen the grip, loomed, and indeed on poisoned breaths and invisible biological bombs came the nasty release of a promiscuous plague. At last, something was present that was crueler to us than we were to one another.

I had to absorb some of this energy and motion to render this book honestly without condemning it to the times. This book is not a prisoner of the discourse of the forty-fifth presidents rages, or of his minions, and at the same time, it is not possible to be liberated entirely from that stain. Even in this reflective moment, the Wests original sins of anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism, as well as other forms of white supremacy, used to stir up resentment and anger and fuel conspiracy theories, have merged with continuing impulses toward misogyny, the suppression of the rights of the disabled and mentally ill, the continued struggle of sexual minorities, and the undisguised contempt for those struggling financially and for the working poor. In that nexus, Blacks and Jews and their Venn diagram have seen considerable turmoil and pain, and this too is a fundamental ingredient.

No matter the national sociopolitical climate, we humans are condemned as long as we breathe to the urge to eat and, when we eat, to find pleasure in the act and define our personal foundation. The Jewish people of the West and the African Atlantic Diaspora did not start their journey with exhausting shared pains or weaponized joy in their days; millennia and centuries have gone by with ample practice. That they, and we, have all survived yet again is another testimony to whatever magic lies in our traditions. Even when we were starving, our imaginations and hopes for redemption formed a feast in our minds that kept us going. We, the outsiders, have time-honored practice at seeking refuge in our pots and peering inside to see ourselves in the days when the outside world erases us. We, the children of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel, the children of Mother Africa, are ever finding meaning in our kitchens and our plates to overcome the next chapter of They tried to kill us, we won? Lets eat. I guess.

If The Cooking Gene was a present to African America on the pulse of its birthday, Koshersoul is recovery food. Koshersoul is chicken soup for the soul of Jews of African descent, the American and global Jewish peoplehood, and the folks in between in a spirit of celebration of our endurance and as a motivation for our healing in the raw and tender moment in which we find ourselves. There are other works about the existence and practice of Jews of African descent, but this is not an academic journey, and its purposely not a cookbook. Koshersoul is an eclectic recipe file of diverse and complex peoplehood. My goal is to go beyond the strict borders of what Black Jews eat or how Black Jews cook, or even how mainstream Jews (with mainstream being nothing more than a polite term for white) have absorbed Black food traditions not usually seen as Jewish. It is the border-crossing story of how the ups and downs of daily existence as a Jew of color affect us from kop to kishkes as we sit down to partake in the soul-warming solace of our meals.

Much like the people within these pages who have shared something of their lives, Koshersoul is not to be taken at face value. Its not just the food traditions of Jews of color that matterits the people and their lives and the legacy they want to leave in two peoplehoods where tradition and the power of heritage loom large even when the choice is to cast off or change directions. The net is vastfrom the experiences of Black non-Jews who cooked in Jewish households to the foodways of Black