TJHTalks x TISH. Creating Community: Jewish Recipes and Stories – online event in collaboration with Taube Center
POLIN Museum and the Taube Center invite you to a conversation about how food brings us close to one another with Katja Goldman, Manhattan's "Upper West Side challah queen" and Joy Levitt, Executive Director of the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, moderated by Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.
- 4 October (Sunday), 8.30PM
- the transcription of the video in English >>
The starting point for their conversation is "The Community Table: Recipes and Stories from the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan and Beyond", contemporary recipes inspired by Jewish tradition and their meaning in Jewish life. The conversation will also touch on connections between Jewish and Polish cuisines and their creative reinterpretation today. THE CONVERSATION WILL culminate with a holiday challah, one of many Jewish holiday recipes in The Community Table.
"The Community Table: Recipes and Stories from the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan and Beyond"
While sitting down to enjoy a meal together is undeniably bonding, working together to prepare it is even more so. In 2015, three chefs and longstanding members of Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan – Judy Bernstein Bunzl, Katja Goldman, and Lisa Rotmil – shared such classic recipes as Weekly Challah, Latkes Four Ways, and Pumpkin Rugelach, plus an inspiring selection of contemporary dishes with a farm-to-table emphasis and international flavors. With anecdotal contributions from JCCs all around the country, this cookbook highlights the JCC’s vibrant, eclectic community – and celebrates all of its many flavors.
Katja Goldman is known as the unofficial challah teacher of the Upper West Side, having taught literally hundreds of community members to bake challah. She co-authored the "Empire Kosher Chicken Cook-book: 225 Easy and Elegant Recipes for Poultry and Great Side Dishes" and co-authored "The Community Table with Judy Bunzl and Lisa Rotmil". Katja was a co-founder of YIVO’s Food as Roots program and is very active in Jewish communal life. Katja was also a co-founder of the Slice of Life Bakery in Cambridge, MA and the executive chef for Barclay Bank.
Joy Levitt is the Executive Director at JCC Manhattan. Prior to coming to the JCC, she served as a congregational rabbi on Long Island and in New Jersey. She earned a Bachelor's degree from Barnard College and a Master's degree from New York University. She was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She is the founder of the Jewish Journey Project, an initiative designed to revolutionize afternoon Jewish education for children and the co-author of A Night of Questions: a Passover Haggadah. She serves on the boards of the Shefa School, a new Jewish community day school for children with language-based learning disabilities and Plaza Jewish Community Chapels. She is married to Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, and together they have five children.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her books include Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); and They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt). She has contributed entries on Jewish cookbooks and Jewish food to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Encyclopedia Judaica, and Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, and articles to Gastronomica, and is an avid cookbook collector. She received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
