Francesco Spagnolo (Magnes/Berkeley): "Jewish Soul Food: Music, Eating and Identity in the Global Diaspora"
Department: Jewish Studies
Date and Time: May 28, 2015 | 5:00 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 1010
Event Details
Francesco Spagnolo (University of California, Berkeley; The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life)
Jewish Soul Food: Music, Eating and Identity in the Global Diaspora
May 28, 2015 at 5pm
Humanities Gateway 1010
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 is the Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and a Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Laurea in Philosophy from the University of Milan, Italy, and a PhD in Musicology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the editor of Italian Jewish Musical Traditions (Rome-Jerusalem 2006), the co-author of The Jewish World (New York 2014), and the curator, most recently, of the exhibition Gourmet Ghettos: Modern Food Rituals (bit.ly/gourmetghettos).