Michael W. Twitty on Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew: Nonfiction

Judith Williams, Ph.D., is a sociocultural anthropologist whose ethnographies of restaurant workers explores the construct of racial hierarchies within the country’s restaurant industry. A former chef and caterer, Williams’ experience working in the upper echelons of the culinary industry infuses her work with an experiential dimension of understanding. Her current research explores the phenomenon of “Maître Divas,” tokenized Black women who work in lucrative front-of-house positions in the restaurant industry. She is an assistant professor in the anthropology of race and ethnicity at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

Michael W. Twitty is the author of The Cooking Gene, winner of the James Beard Award for writing about food, and the noted culinary and cultural historian creator of Afroculinaria, the first blog devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacies. His work has appeared in Ebony, The Guardian, and on NPR. In Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew (Amistad), Twitty explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisines and issues of memory, identity, and food. He considers the marriage of two of the world’s most distinctive culinary cultures today: the African Atlantic foods and traditions and the global Jewish diaspora. To him, the creation of African-Jewish cooking is a conversation of migrations and a dialogue of diasporas that offers a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them. The question that most intrigues him is not just who makes the food, but how the food makes the people. Jews of color are not outliers, Twitty contends, but significant cultural creators in both Black and Jewish civilizations. Koshersoul, which includes 48-50 recipes, also explores how food has shaped the journeys of numerous cooks, including Twitty’s passage to and within Judaism.