Koshersoul The faith and food journey of an African American Jew

Review by Booklist Review

James Beard Award--winning culinary historian Twitty (The Cooking Gene, 2017) lives a life of overlapping identities, African, Southern, Jewish, and gay. An expert in the many multicultural connections to African American food culture, his conversion to Judaism brought him to a rich new world of culinary exploration. Here he traces the long, alternately joyous and painful relationship between African Americans and American Jews, noting the allegiances and conflicts between European Jewish immigrants and African slaves, Jewish farmers and Black freedmen, and Jewish housewives and their kosher-cooking Black domestics. Twitty is fiercely loyal to both communities and revels in the mouth-watering results of this culinary cross-pollination. The book's many recipes showcase Jamaican, Haitian, Ibo, Yoruba, and Creole Jewish dishes as well as the flavors of the Iberian Sephardim and the Middle Eastern Mizrachim, resulting in such astonishing combinations as latke fried chicken and kosher adaptations of such Black staples as crawfish and gumbo. While Twitty stumbles a bit in some of his historical explanations, this is a fascinating, cross-cultural smorgasbord grounded in the deep emotional role food plays in two influential American communities.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Twitty stuffs his follow-up to James Beard Award winner The Cooking Gene with wide-ranging ideas as generously as he fills kreplach with collards. "You don't have to be Black, gay, or Jewish," Twitty writes at the book's outset, "but if you are, we have a little something to kibbitz about before we nosh." What follows is a rich call-and-response between the academic and the personal as Twitty explores the shared customs and cuisines of his African and Jewish roots. In conversations with everyone from teenagers he teaches at a Hebrew school to scholars like T.J. Tallie, author of Queering Colonial Natal, he meditates on Black queerness, the tradition of gathering in both Jewish and Black culture, their continued "gestures toward true inclusion" in American society, and the Black Jewish community's "resistan to engaging in the flashpoints and crises of identity that other people have against us." Evocative descriptions of food provide a rich through line: A rundown of an African American seder plate suggests a chicken bone in place of a lamb shank bone, while Southern selections are given for tashlich, the tradition of sprinkling crumbs into the water to symbolize doing away with sins before Yom Kippur (with peach cobbler to atone for gossiping). Serving up a hefty helping of heart and wit, Twitty's narrative is thrilling in its originality. (Aug.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Twitty's new book is the second in a kind of trilogy about African American cuisine (following his James Beard-awarded The Cooking Gene). Here Twitty focuses on the intersections between food and identity--specifically, how food, identity, and memory define people and cultures. He does this by reflecting on the Jewish and African diasporas and his own experience as a Black Jew. Divided into five sections, this is part memoir and part exploration into African-Jewish histories and identities, Black and Jewish relations, racism, and other topics. The volume also includes interviews with other Black Jews and chefs. Throughout the text, Twitty makes the case that Blackness and Judaism coexist in beautiful harmony, and this is manifested in the foods and traditions from both cultures that Black Jews incorporate into their daily lives. VERDICT Twitty wishes to start a conversation where people celebrate their differences and embrace commonalities. By drawing on personal narratives, his own and others', and exploring different cultures, Twitty's book offers important insight into the journeys of Black Jews.--Jacqueline Parascandola

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A searching sequel to The Cooking Gene that explores the intersections of "food and identity." Black, Jewish, gay, earthy, intellectual: Twitty is a man of parts, all of which come together in the kitchen. The first two ingredients are perhaps the most important, where the bitter herbs of exile manifest in a dish of collard greens. "Blacks and Jews and their Venn diagram have seen considerable turmoil and pain," he writes, and the cuisine of diaspora is one expression of it. "Being Black and being Jewish is not an anomaly or a rare thing," writes the author, enumerating, among others, ancient Ethiopian and Eritrean Jewish communities and the actor Yaphet Kotto, "whose Panamanian mother kept strict kosher and whose Cameroonian father reminded him of their deep Jewish roots as African royals"--just one African family among many to whom Judaism had arrived long ago. Then there are the converts, sometimes uncomfortable participants in a social dance by which one is placed within the "networking system of American Jewish identity." White Jews are more accepting of Blacks than "the rest of self-identified white America," and in that context, Twitty lauds the "world's nicest white lady," who unquestioningly accepted him into the Jewish community without prerequisites. The author chronicles his discussions with a range of Jewish foodies and chefs of many ethnicities to limn what "koshersoul" cuisine might encompass: chicken bone instead of lamb shank bone at seder; hoecakes as "the closest analog to matzoh, the flatbread of slavery"; diaspora gardens teeming with za'atar, yellow onions, eggplant, garlic, field peas, and hundreds of other delicious plants. He follows with recipes both gathered from his research and invented, from those maror-like collard greens to all-healing chicken soup made soulful with the addition of Senegalese ingredients and yam latkes. He also includes a helpful glossary. A thoughtful, inspiring book that will have readers pondering their own ancestors and their presence in the kitchen. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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