Jewish Soul Food: Music, Eating and Identity in the Global Diaspora

As a break from this semester’s Sturm und Drang, the CSULB Jewish Studies Program is delighted to bring back Dr. Francesco Spagnolo to Long Beach, to speak at the Alpert JCC (3801 E. Willow St., Long Beach) on Thursday, May 9^th, at 7 pm.  His topic is: Jewish Soul Food: Music, Eating and Identity in the Global Diaspora.

From Alexander Portnoy’s french fry cravings to eating Chinese food on Christmas, from the abominations of Leviticus to the legendary New York City kosher deli, Jewish foods combine religion and history, folklore and stereotype. In many ways, food’s remarkable powers of expression are encapsulated by the Jewish experience. Similarly, music is often understood as a quintessentially Jewish form of expression. While closely embedded with Jewish life in the synagogue, home, and the public stage, it also reflects the many cultural identities across the Jewish world. This presentation focuses on the connections between music and food, and examines a wide variety of food-themed Jewish songs from different times and places, including a 17th-century Italian poem for Purim, a Sephardic song listing seven recipes to cook eggplant, a Yiddish ode to gefilte fish, and Israeli Hebrew songs about tomatoes and, of course, falafel. 

Francesco Spagnolo works at the University of California, Berkeley, as the Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and an Associate Adjunct Professor of Music and Jewish Studies. He is the editor of Italian Jewish Musical Traditions (Hebrew University 2006), the co-author of The Jewish World (Rizzoli 2014), the author of many essays in books and academic journals, and the curator of forty museum exhibitions. 

Like all Jewish Studies talks, this is free and open to the public.  For security purposes, the JCC now asks people to rsvp at this link to speed the check-in process: https://jewishlongbeach.regfox.com/csulb-jewish-studies-speaker-series .