Eating the Bubbe: Culinary encounters between secular and haredi jews in Bnei Brak

Over the last few years on Thursday evenings, the main streets of Bnei Brak, one of Israel’s largest haredi (ultra-Orthodox) cities, becomes a culinary meeting place. The Eastern European Jewish cuisine sustained by the haredi kitchen attracts non-haredi visitors to a society that tends to keep to itself. This article presents an ethnographic investigation of a new culinary scene that brings together local haredim and secular visitors. I draw upon the concept of “eating the other” to argue how the “haredi other” represents a complex kind of “otherness,” whose encounters with secular visitors simultaneously mark boundaries and cross them. These encounters demonstrate how culinary tradition can provide a link to collective memory and help build individual and group identities.