Kraemer, David Charles. Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

I was interested in learning more about Kashrut and its meaning in the Jewish religion for this project. Due to that I started my research by typing three keywords into the library search engine, “Kashrut”, “Kosher”, and “Jewish”. Those three keywords brought me to a large collection of news articles, journal articles and books on Jewish eating. After I narrowed the search down to only books there were five options. I further narrowed that down to two options, this book and a book specifically on kosher. I decided to go with this book because I thought it would be interesting to learn about Jewish identity in general. I think it will be really interesting to look at how the way they eat, what they eat and with whom they eat influences their life and the way they interpret their religion.

When I first picked this book up I was intrigued by how plain the cover design was. It is a solid blue cover with the title and author’s name written on it in bold white letters. This simplicity made me want to look further into the book. It made me wonder what made the author choose a cover so plain. I wondered if maybe the author thought the content was so interesting and well written that they would not need an overdone cover to draw readers in. Another theory I had was that the author just wanted to stick with something simple for simplicity’s sake. These questions pushed me to take a look inside the book.

This book is separated into nine chapters with an introduction at the beginning and footnotes at the end. I took a quick read through the introduction and it delved into the idea that it is not just kashrut and the Jewish religion in which people form identities through their food. The author gave several different examples of other religions and other cultures throughout history in which people have formed their identities by what they eat. I think that this is a really interesting idea and I am looking forward to learning more about it. After the introduction there are nine more chapters, they are as follow: The biblical period: Our animals, their animals, The second temple period: The food of the gentiles, The rabbinic period: “Thou shalt not eat a calf with a mother’s milk”, The rabbinic period: Problematic mixings, The rabbinic period: Blessing food, Waiting for the next meal, Separating the dishes, Crossing boundaries, and “Bugs in the system” (The kashrut wars). When I was looking at the different chapters one of the questions that came to mind was why the rabbinic period is split up into three different chapters while everything else simply has one chapter. I think this question and many more will be answered through looking at this book and using it to help write my paper. I am very excited to write about this topic.

Finally while I was looking in between the stacks for this book there was one other, that I had already seen in the search catalogue, that caught my eye. This other book was the one that I had to choose between in order to narrow down my search to the book I chose. This book looks like it has a lot of background information on what Kashrut actually is and how to follow and perform it. This will be very helpful in writing my paper because it will provide background information and a good base before I start looking into why Kashrut helps form certain identities. After looking through the section I think that I will have good success in my research for this next paper.