The culinary state

on politics of representation and identity in Israel

תקציר

In the past three decades, the Israeli food scene has become more diversified. Beginning in the 1980s, cookbooks and narratives on Israeli cuisine, targeting a non-Israeli audience, started to emphasize and celebrate the new multiethnic nature of the cuisine and of Israeli identity in general. Yet, few scholars have considered the structure of this new national rhetoric on Israeli cuisine and its relation to earlier representations or considered why it appeared only in recent decades. The ways Israeli cuisine is represented to the outside world is very much historically specific and therefore has changed over time as the articulation of Israeli collective memory and national identity shifted at particular historical moments. Through a historical analysis of the narratives of food in Israeli discursive formations, this study examines the imaging and imagining of the contested Israeli identity prior to the establishment of the state, as well as in light of the emergence of conflicting national desires throughout Israel's history. Drawing on an analysis of diverse sources and modes of representation pertaining to food that target the outside world, including cookbooks, pictures, posters, postcards,