ONLINE EVENT
India, a country of almost 1.4 billion is home to only 5,000 Jews. This tiny population, known as Bene Indian Jews, preserves their connection to religious heritage in the diaspora through culinary traditions and rituals that have adapted to the ingredients of the Indian subcontinent.
In her book, Bene Appétit: The Cuisine of Indian Jews, author Esther David, herself a member of the Bene Israel Jewish community of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, explores “how Indian Jews have preserved their food habits in a multicultural country like India, which has diverse cuisines.”
This Hanukkah, you are invited to a virtual event with Esther David and Food Studies professor and researcher, Dr. Krishnendu Ray. They will begin the evening with a pre-recorded discussion that unpacks the food traditions of the Bene Indian Jews as detailed in Bene Appetit. The second part of the program will feature the prolific Jewish cookbook author and food historian, Joan Nathan, who will join Dr. Ray for a continuation of the conversation and live audience Q & A.
ESTHER DAVID
Esther David is an Indian author who lives in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. She writes in English and her novels are based on the Jewish experience in India. She weaves her stories around the Bene Israel Jewish community of India. Esther David has received the national Sahitya Akademi Award for 2010 for English Literature from the Government of India.
Esther David’s novels are based on the Jewish experience of living in India. She is often known as an Indian Jewish Author. She has also received the Hadassah Brandeis research award with photographer Bindi Sheth to prepare a photo-documentation on the Jews of Gujarat. Exhibitions of the same were held in Ahmedabad, Vadodara, New Delhi and Bangalore.
JOAN NATHAN
JOAN NATHAN considers food through the lenses of history, culture, and tradition. She regularly contributes to The New York Times and Tablet Magazine and is the author of 11 award-winning cookbooks. Nathan’s work preserves the heritage of Jewish and other ethnic cooking and encourages new traditions to take shape.
In 1994, Nathan’s Jewish Cooking in America won both the James Beard Award for the best American cookbook and the IACP/Julia Child Cookbook of the Year Award. The same James Beard Award was later bestowed on her 2005 cookbook The New American Cooking. An earlier work, An American Folklife Cookbook, was given the R.T. French Tastemaker Award in 1985 for American cooking. Nathan was on the 1998 “Forward 50” list of the 50 most influential Jews.
In 2001 she was honored as an inductee into the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who in American Food and Beverage, and she has also received the Silver Spoon Award from Food Arts Magazine. She was the guest curator of the 2005 Smithsonian Folk Life Festival’s Food Culture USA, a program which was based on the research for Nathan’s The New American Cooking. In May 2011, she was awarded a Special Recognition Award from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for her work to preserve Jewish foodways. In 2015, Nathan joined the Kitchen Cabinet, an advisory board at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and was awarded a Grande Dame from Les Dames D’Escoffier.
KRISHNENDU RAY
Krishnendu Ray is a faculty member in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. He was the Chair of the department from 2012-2021. He is the author of The Migrant’s Table (2004) and The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016) and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012). He is an Editorial Collective Member of the Food Studies journal Gastronomica. He was formerly a faculty member and the Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America (1996-2005) and the President of The Association for the Study of Food and Society from 2014-2018.