"What’s Cooking? Jewish Culinary Culture" – new temporary exhibition

Show me your plate and I will tell you who you are: where you hail from, who your ancestors were, who your neighbours are and what lifestyle you lead. In the new exposition, we show our audience what is cooking in the Jewish world—we acquaint the wide public with Jewish culture in various corners of the globe by showing typical Jewish dishes, the way they are fixed, their origin and symbolism.

• 11 March - 12 December 2022
• Order an e-book of the "What's Cooking?" exhibition catalog →

Culinary culture is a vital element of the Jewish identity—while enhancing the sense of belonging to a community, it testifies to Jewish distinctiveness. Shaped over millennia in different locations all across the globe, it has remained very diverse until today. That is why the tale about Jewish food is simultaneously a tale about Jewish religion, culture and history.

"What’s Cooking? Jewish Culinary Culture" exhibition takes you on a journey across time and space. We present the diversity of traditions and dishes consumed by Jews residing in the diaspora over the centuries. We demonstrate how certain dishes and products became widespread as a result of numerous migrations, from the Middle Ages to the great waves of migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We show the religious foundation which holds Jewish cuisine together—the rules of kashrut which inform the way certain dishes are prepared, as well as breaking away from that tradition today and rediscovering culinary roots. We also encourage our visitors to take a moment to reflect after viewing the four sculptures by Anna Królikiewicz produced especially for the POLIN Museum exposition.

By inviting you to come to the Museum and visit the exhibition, we encourage you to join us in seeking an answer to the question: what is Jewish cuisine? While discovering the link between potato pancakes and latkes, gołąbki with holishkes, cholent and adafina; while finding out why the New Yorkers regard pickled ghurkins and borscht as Jewish dishes, we acquaint ourselves with the richness of Jewish culinary culture.