learn how abbvie could help you save. good morning and welcome to 'mosaic'. i am honored to be your host this morning. across our country, faith communities have a lot of conversation about the ways in which identity is formed and maintained. we want to invite you into a wonderful conversation about food and identity and the different ways in which a faith community uses food to form its identity and to sustain its identity through life itself. we would like to introduce you to this professor who is in the department of jewish studies at san francisco state university. and the founder of . and a

contributor to our local jewish newspaper. welcome rachel and alex. rachel, let's jump in with you and ask , what is this thing idtyteh asses on jewish food and identity. i began by telling my students that food might be the most important subject in the world. all of the time. when i mentioned it, everybody is thinking about it. but it shapes our worlds and it shapes us physically and it shapes who we are. as individuals and communities, as families and as nations. >> it is interesting. alex, you think about food and you talk about food and write about food and you have created this new organization. what is this

and what is this thing about food and identity? >> for me it has been interesting since i started this group 3 years ago. they are the not so secret society of they area, jewish food professionals. i created it after writing about jews who work in the food world and realize there are so many of us. and how we identify ? as a rabbi, living in the bay area there are so many jews who are not affiliated and never step foot into jewish institutions. when i created this group , they started coming out of the woodwork and i realized there are so many people here who identify as jewish but there is disqualifier like i am a secular jewish person or have not step foot in the synagogue in 20 years. they feel this need to tell me that as if it should bar entry to the group

i say, i am not a rabbi. i don't care how jewish you are. i feel like i created a group that ended up serving a some kind of jewish connection for people who otherwise often have nine. that has been an interesting thing for me. that is not exactly what i had in mind. >> you have learned there is a different kind of identity around food , as you brought people together. >> it is a connection point. it is something we can agree on. everybody needs to eat. even if we are not eating jewish food together , just coming together over food is something that is a natural connection point for people. more dand broadlood is at the core of so many ways in which we understand the world. the core of archaeology , if you want to understand how people lived . it is at the core of if apology, if you want to understand how people migrated across the world . it

is at the core of evolution, at the core of sociology and all these different feels. about medicine and theology. every faith tradition has this way of doing every ethnic group. you turn on a local cooking station and half are about a particular kind of food in a particular way of cooking and eating at a table. i am wondering in the context, what can we see about the way food make somebody feel jewish , or more jewish o usede experience. >> i am working on a book manuscript that i am calling, feeling jewish . i am looking at one of the chapters is on

american jews and food and precisely how food that has his culinary traditions in central and eastern europe and was developed in the united states, how american jews will sit down to that food. whether it is a pastrami sandwich or a pickle. food for them that feels like home and their community. it will bring up feelings of nostalgia . which is the subject i am most interested in. >> nostalgia in what way? >> not just for personal experiences . which is normally how we think of nostalgia. but nostalgia for community origins. jewish community origins . heritage in central and eastern europe and the way that american jewish traditions developed in the united states, in immigrant ethic neighborhoods .

>> we will take a quick break and come back to talk about this conversation. here on 'mosaic'.

good morning and welcome back to mosaic. i am honored to be your host this morning. we are having a conversation about food and identity. alex is the founder of a wonderful organization and is a contributing editor at our local jewish newspaper which is the jewish news of northern california. welcome back. we were talking before about the notion of nostalgia and food. i am wondering how you see that

topic. >> whether you call it nostalgia or not, for me i think recipes can be so powerful in what we make for the holidays and jewish food in general. it reminds us of ancestors that maybe are no longer living. i know when i took certain brisket recipe or an apple cake recipe , it reminds me of my mother who is no longer living. that is powerful to have the recipes she made. even though i feel like things might be pass÷, i make better things. the taste of it can evoke memories of her and that is powerful. i still make it sometimes. >> why do you think a newspaper has a food column anyway? do you think we like reading about food ? >> there has been this ascent

of food in the popular culture where so many more people are interested in it then used to be. i think also chefs have become rock stars and that did not used to be the case. especially, jewish parents did not want their child to become a chef. it was seen as a blue-collar profession. that has changed. food has grown in status and i think someone who has been in journalism for a long time , there are so many depressing things in the world going on. and i think food -- i call it fluff. sometimes i can be down on myself. i think it is equally important to have stories that are not about what is going on in israel, palestine or wherever. there are so many terrible things happening in the world. it is nice to read the art section and read about food. is a good distraction. >> i wonder if some historic

way, maybe if you are a faith community and you want to make it in a society , to get a food column in a newspaper is almost like a sign of status. like you have made it. other people are reading about your food. there is something about it that have to do with the mark of achievement in some way ? i'm not sure if that's what you mean by nostalgia. >> i think of nostalgia in a way that is different. alex distance herself from nostalgia which i think a lot of people do. i want to think about the ways in which nostalgia is productive . a story that is simplistic but provides a lot of meaning and helps us understand where we are in time and in the world . >> house so? >> we can think of our

communities or we think about the american jewish story , we tell a story of economic success, generally and we tell a story of jews coming from central europe, and we think of them as poor. we imagine them coming to the lower east side or other urban neighborhoods and struggling economically. and american jews, this is generally true but it is a simplified story that they generally get more money overall. in their communities are little more stable we might say. to look back at the food we imagine our ancestors eating, tells a story of who we are and who we think our ancestors and our communal ancestors were . >> is at the same way food works at a celebration ? the

way that we find meaning in our lives and in our religious lives , in our community lives , is always built around food. i am most interested in the food outside of those big, religious celebrations. i don't know where alex would point us. but i am interested in everyday food of our lives and how that makes up our lives and tells us who we are in the world. >> we will take another break and we will continue this conversation in just a moment here on 'mosaic' .

good morning and welcome

back to 'mosaic'. i am honored to be your host . we are in this conversation about food and identity. welcome back. let's continue our conversation . what were you thinking about this notion of everyday food and what we eat? >> living in the bay area i am used to friends with dietary restrictions and i would say so many of my friends are gluten-free or dairy free and the list goes on. my natural inclination was, i want to have a bagel brunch and that is something that i never think of doing on a normal weekend. when it is my husband and i. we don't get bagels, even though we have a great shop down the street. it felt like family.

when i was growing up on the east coast , their family always had bagel brunch. it was a thing. so many east coast families have bagel brunch on the weekends. i find that my california jewish friends, it is not part of their tradition. that has been a source -- i have found some jewish foods i consider so traditional, some people don't know what they are. i quizzed my friends and i was shocked. it is a buckwheat grain that has a nutty flavor. you could get with bowtie noodles. it is like jewish comfort food. nothing spectacular about it

but it is filling and delicious. i don't make it that often but it is a traditional food that a lot of people on the west coast have no familiarity with. >> do you think if you don't have a traditional jewish food , that means there is some way in which a jewish person might not feel they are observing the holiday or having a celebration? if you don't have matzoh ball soup at a passover seder , i know a lot of canadian jews have a particular way of doing soup. is a some way in which everyday food has an impact on how you feel , on how you're doing something? >> i think the food can act like other objects or other

rituals . where it makes things real for us. we know it is a holiday because we have those foods are we bring out those dishes. we know that it is really real because we have those things that are meaningful to us. >> you were talking earlier about nostalgia. how do you think about this notion of food and meaning and nostalgia in the way in which someone will feel like they are jewish or authentically jewish or whatever way we might think about those things for ourselves ? >> a lot of times we think about who we are in the world beginning with ourselves and the choices we make. how do we think about our family and our family's history and broadening to our communities. they tell

that story of who they are. eating up show me sandwich may connect them to a broader story. >> what is happening when jewish entrepreneur opens up a jewish deli on the corner and it is open to the public and our daily food is on this menu. any day of the week, and you're opening your shop of your ethnic identity everyday food to the world. what is the work that we are sharing in that way ? >> i think it is interesting that you named particular foods. jewish food has become recognizable by certain iconic jewish foods. we know what

belongs in a jewish deli because particular foods have been recognizable as jewish. at sf state where i teach a class on american jewish food history , we explode that notion and go through american jewish history , beginning with colonial merchants to were selling chocolate to each other and ask, is the jewish food? we look at bacon , the quintessential nonkosher food forbidden by jewish law and ask, if jews have a particular reaction , is that jewish food? we ask if crisco, a food that has been marketed to jews throughout the 20th century, is that a jewish food? there is an idea about we as individuals may have and the idea we can explode the notion of what is jewish . >> we will come back in just a moment on mosaic. thank you for being with us.

welcome back to 'mosaic'. i am rabbi eric weiss. we are in the middle of a conversation about food and jewish identity . welcome back. we were talking a little bit about how jewish food has come into the mainstream and i am wondering, with the way you think about food and jewish food,

>> this is always not the most favorable and it is comfort food for us and nostalgic and that is why we love it so much. i think it is not always the best food. last week, for those people who watch top chef, we are almost at the final and a woman chef from kentucky who is jewish, they had two something from their own heritage and mix it with chinese flavors. she went shopping in a store where she knew she could not read the packages. she bought crackers and made a matzoh ball soup with chinese broth and she won. hearing the judges discuss the merits of the matzoh ball soup, i felt such a sense of pride. this is a gourmet challenge and she might win the title with a bowl of matzoh ball soup . that is an incredible moment for jewish cuisine. >> it goes to rachel's point

about what really is jewish christine and what are the elements that define it? >> exactly. so much of how it has have been defined in the united states has been shaped by companies like the manischewitz company , which promoted matzoh ball soup as an everyday food. matzoh is a food for passover and matzoh ball soup only used to be dumpling soup for the holiday of passover. but the manischewitz company have this amazing idea they would sell their matzo meal from what you could make matzoh balls year-round. and therefore we get matzoh ball soup year-round , as a recognizably jewish food. >> from something that is every day, what you think is the question. what is the future of jewish food ? >> i think there is this trend toward elevating it by some chefs as alex was speaking to. there is still a home

tradition and the ways in which it is evolving through all of our food trends. >> i also think it has been interesting to watch what has happened with israeli food in the last couple years. first of all, as someone who has spent my lifetime visiting israel, the food did not used to be that good. now it is amazing and considered one of the world's best cuisines and we have celebrity chefs . they have elevated israeli cuisine to such a high level that people are waiting for the next book. the two of them are responsible largely for this . the celebrity chef culture , the combination of that and the fact that is really food over the years has increasingly gotten better and better.

>> alex and rachel, we are at the end of our show. thank you so much for being here. and i encourage all of you to get a recipe and go to a jewish deli and enjoy jewish food. thank you for being with us on 'mosaic'.

from cbs news, bay area, this is the morning edition. >> we cannot do it alone. >> people across california are in morning after four mass shootings in a week . some activists say that the strict gun laws may not be enough to prevent future tragedies. people are trying to build community in san francisco. this is with the celebration of both back history month and the lunar new year. and that president