The “Best” Restaurant in America?—An Analysis (12 May 2019) by Lawrence Davidson
We are having one of those “official” Orwellian moments. You know, a moment when one thing stands in for its opposite, like “war is peace” or more to the point here, “ignorance is truth.”
It’s “official” because it is being asserted by an organization with authority in its field. The organization is the James Beard Foundation, which states its mission as follows: “to celebrate, nurture, and honor chefs and other leaders making America’s food culture more delicious, diverse, and sustainable for everyone.” In order to achieve its mission, “the foundation is guided by the values of respect, transparency, diversity, sustainability, and equality. We believe that in order to achieve our mission, it is expected that everyone who works in and with the foundation shares similar values and operates with integrity.”
OK. That is admirable. One of the ways the James Beard Foundation does its job is by making a yearly award for what it considers to be the “best restaurant in America—open ten years or more.” It should go without saying that in order to bring this off with any authenticity, those making this selection have to know something about the cuisine served by the restaurant they are honoring. They have to make sure that the restaurant is offering that cuisine with, to use the foundation’s term, “transparency.” If it does not, the foundation runs the serious risk of misrepresenting one cuisine for another.
This year the foundation has honored the Philadelphia restaurant Zahav as “the best restaurant in America.” Zahav is a self-described Israeli restaurant where, according to its website, “modern techniques elevate a traditional Israeli menu.” That the James Beard Foundation appears to have taken this claim at face value suggests that its staffers did little or no research into the history of “Israeli” cuisine. Their lack of awareness suggests a sloppy selection process that negates all the hype it has generated.
First of all, it is problematic that there is anything “traditional” about “Israeli” cuisine. Zahav’s menu offers, among others, hummus, tehina, fried cauliflower, kibble, kebabs and other “shishliki” dishes, none of which is actually “Israeli.” Sometimes Zahav does introduce European touches to its dishes. For instance, it offers something labeled “Romanian beef kebab and (oy vey iz mir!) “grilled duck hearts” with “fried cippolini.” But then there is the suggestion that its food is a gateway to the “Israeli soul.”
The truth is that most of Zahav’s dishes are variations on the traditional food of the Palestinians. But for reasons explained below, the Zahav folks might be reluctant, at least in public, to admit that these dishes have a Palestinian, as well as Syrian and Lebanese origin and character. As a result the customer looking for authenticity can eat much of Zahav’s basic fare a lot cheaper and just as tasty (albeit within a different ambiance) at Philadelphia’s Manakeesh Cafe Bakery and Grill, and other authentic Middle Eastern restaurants in the area.
Under normal circumstances, one can go along with this sort of borrowing and mixing cuisines. After all, judging Zahav’s charade in a superficial way, the restaurant is guilty of little more than plagiarism—claiming something is “traditionally Israeli” when it is demonstrably something else. However, we are not dealing with anything like normal circumstances. To demonstrate just what is going on here, I reproduce below my August 2018 essay on the seriousness of Israeli appropriation of Palestinian food. It is hard to believe that the owners and staff at Zahav are not aware of this less-than-honest dimension of their business. The rest of us—those of the James Beard Foundation in particular—should as well be aware of what is happening if only to avoid complicity in a nasty bit of theft.
Food Appropriation as a Form of Cultural Genocide—An Analysis (6 August 2018) by Lawrence Davidson
Part I—Cultural Genocide
Back in 2012 I wrote a short book entitled Cultural Genocide (Rutgers University Press). It looked at four case studies of this phenomenon: the American Indians, Russian treatment of Jews in the 19th century, Chinese assimilation of Tibet, and Israel’s ongoing treatment of the Palestinians. It is an aspect of Palestinian plight that I want to revisit here.
The idea behind cultural genocide is relatively simple—it is the systematic erasure of the culture of indigenous people subject to colonization. The endgame here is that the conquered land will no longer be popularly identified with the culture and traditions of those who were once native to it. Instead, their culture will be replaced by that of the colonizer. The most common way of doing this is to disperse or actually wipe out a good part of the indigenous population, with the resulting trauma causing their culture, at least in its native form, to disappear. However, sometimes the colonizers will appropriate elements of the native culture as their own. This is cultural genocide by theft as well as destruction.
In Cultural Genocide I laid out how the Israelis were attempting to undermine and ultimately destroy Palestinian culture in a seemingly never-ending effort to “Hebraize” the territory now called Israel. Here are some of the techniques employed: (1) the practice of renaming, which began as early as the 1920s: “With the help of archeologists, geographers and biblical scholars” the Zionists “began to systematically erase Palestine’s Arab history and heritage from what would be Israel’s own official records, maps and histories”; (2) The physical destruction of Palestinian archeological sites, artifacts, ancient mosques and historic houses to the extent that the Unesco World Heritage office describes the Israeli actions as “crimes against the cultural history of mankind”; (3) The purposeful looting and subsequent destruction of Palestinian libraries, archives and museums; and (4) the imposition of literally thousands of regulations designed to make it impossible for Palestinians in occupied territory to express themselves culturally or politically. For further information, see Cultural Genocide, pp. 77-80.
Part II—Mislabeling Palestinian Cuisine
When I wrote this book in 2012, the issue of the appropriation of native foods as the colonizer’s own did not come up. It was, if you will, “under my radar.” It got on my radar about five years ago, whereupon I began complaining (often to no avail) to supermarkets and restaurants about hummus and falafel being advertised as “Israeli food.”
I was again reminded of the issue by a series of events, most recently, a local catered dinner to raise money for Playgrounds For Palestine. The food was all Palestinian. The well-known chef Anan Zahr reminded us all that “this is a crucial time for the Palestinian people, whose identity and culture are aggressively threatened on a daily basis by the Israeli government. It is so important for us to highlight and showcase the Palestinian cuisine to prevent ongoing food appropriation.”
To “highlight and showcase Palestinian cuisine” here in the West is a difficult task, if only because the effort must overcome a sea of ignorance and indifference. Despite the decades of ongoing conflict that has been grist for the mill of mass media, there are still millions of Americans, and others too, who know little about the cultural genocide of the Palestinians. What resides now in the minds of most people (when they consider the topic at all) is Israel presented to them as a “normal country” periodically threatened by Muslim Arabs. And, just as the Italians eat Italian food, and the French eat French food, the average American assumes that the Israelis eat “Israeli food.”
A good example of this was the controversy sparked by celebrity chef Rachel Ray, who appears on a number of
on-line and televised cooking shows. Back in December 2017
Ray, who is not Jewish, put out a number of tweets describing “an Israeli nite meal.” The foods she tweeted about included hummus, tabbouleh (“tabouli”), stuffed grape leaves, chicken fried in za’atar and cucumber salad—all of them traditional Palestinian foods.
As the Times of Israel described it, “the posts spurred a cascade of more than1,600 replies, most of them critical.” This is an expression of the fact that Palestinians “see Israeli claims to these foods as just one more form of oppression.” Yousef Munayyer, who directs the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, placed the situation in context: “place names, street names, historical markers have been changed. Forests have literally been planted above our villages, obfuscating the very remnants of our history and the graves of our ancestors. So please understand, when you label this food ‘Israeli’ you’re participating in a broad process of replacement that goes way beyond what is on a plate and is instead about denying Palestinians [to] even have a place at the global table.” He asserted that Ray’s tweets had contributed to “a culture in which Palestinians, as a people, are often told they do not exist.” In other words, by taking Palestinian food and renaming it Israeli, the Zionists perform an act of cultural genocide.
All of this must have left Rachael Ray’s head spinning. She did not directly respond to the consequences of her faux pas but quickly moved on to tweeting about Greek cuisine. As far as I can learn, her mislabeling of Palestinian cuisine as Israeli was largely due to ignorance. She has no particular connections to Israel beyond the fact that she has a friend who goes there and brings her back recipes. She certainly is no hard-core Zionist. For instance, back in 2008 Ray was accused of giving moral support to a “murderous Palestinian jihad,” by appearing in a commercial for Dunkin Donuts
wearing a scarf that “looked too much like a keffiyeh.”
Part III—The Zionist Response
Zionists and their supporters have a response to these complaints. However, like all their other arguments, they rest on an utter unwillingness to take responsibility for their own collective actions. What they do in this case is talk around the issue, thus avoiding a complete picture. Thus, their principle response, given here by one Alex Kay, goes like this: “Israeli cuisine is a beautiful celebration of Jews from around the world, including 800,000 Jewish Arabs thrown out from Arab countries. In Israel you have Eastern and Western food mixed perfectly. … Palestinians don’t own chopped salad or za’atar.”
It is quite beside the point whether or not Israeli cuisine is “a beautiful celebration of Jews from around the world” or “in Israel you have Eastern and Western food mixed perfectly.” The context for the complaint of food appropriation has nothing to do with the celebration of “Jewishness” or a melding of cuisines. Nor, quite frankly, has it to do with the allegation that 800,000 Jewish Arabs were “thrown out from Arab countries” soon after Israel was founded. This assertion is an exaggerated element of the broader Zionist mantra. Jewish Arabs faced much less hostility in most Arab countries than the Zionists say they did, particularly considering that, at the time, the Zionists had begun to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. However, in every case these Arab Jewish communities faced relentless Zionist pressure to emigrate. And, when they did go to Israel they faced discrimination because of their Arab heritage.
The only pertinent allegation in the Zionist retort is “Palestinians don’t own chopped salad or za’atar.” Yet, within the broader context in which Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian food takes place, the truth is that the Palestinians do “own” these foods—not only historically, but also morally. As noted above, that greater context is one of purposeful destruction of the Palestinian people, and that makes all the difference. As long as the Israelis practice ethnic cleansing and continue down the road to apartheid state status (as they did with their recent nationality law), their claim on any aspect of Palestinian heritage—be it land or food—is a de facto act of cultural genocide. And, if this form of destructive racism is not to become ever more frequent, every aspect of Zionist appropriation must be fought, right down to the last “Israeli” falafel.
