Chosen Food: Adaptation, Identity, and Debate in American Jewish Foodways

FAIN: GE-50072-08

Jewish Museum of Maryland (Baltimore, MD 21202-4606)
Karen Falk (Project Director: January 2008 to March 2010)

Planning for a traveling exhibition, a catalog, a website, and educational and public programs examining Jewish foodways as expressions of tradition and adaptation.

The Jewish Museum of Maryland (JMM), a leading center of American Jewish history and culture, requests NEH support to research and plan an interpretive project titled Chosen Food: Adapation, Identity, and Debate in American Jewish Foodways. This grant will provide funds for a team of humanities scholars adn design consultants to help JMM staff and its institutional partners plan an integrated intitiative consisting of a 2,000 square-foot exhibition which will travel to at least three venues across the United States, an exhibition catalog and interpretive brochure, public programs, educational activities, and an interactive website. "Chosen Food" will interpret the many meanings of Jewish foodways to a large, multicultural audience across the country. For Jews, as for other Americans, food is never just about consumption: food is a means to observe and to celebrate, to maintain tradition and to makr transition, to preserve memory and to produce new meaning.