Do you long to learn about bagels, lox, the perfect deli sandwich and more from the comfort of your own quarantine headquarters? Of course you do! Good news: YIVO’s Shine Online Educational Series presents more than 100 hours of digital content (interviews! chats! cooking demos!) through its new “A Seat at the Table: A Journey Into Jewish Food.” The online, seven-week course runs through Dec. 31; register anytime here. Oh, and it’s free!
Watch videos from culinary luminaries like Joan Nathan (“Jewish Cooking in America“), Michael Twitty (“The Cooking Gene“), Alice Feiring (“The Dirty Guide to Wine“), Mitchell Davis (James Beard Foundation), Niki Russ Federman and Josh Russ Tupper (Russ & Daughters), Jake Dell (Katz’s Delicatessen), Darra Goldstein (Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture), Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz (The Gefilteria), Lior Lev Sercarz (La Boîte), Adeena Sussman (“Sababa“), Ilan Stavans (Amherst College), Leah Koenig (“The Jewish Cookbook“) and Michael Wex (“Born to Kvetch“).
They’ll discuss things like ingredient sourcing, the influence of South America on over 2,000 types of moles (served with latkes! who knew?), lox slicing (a subtle art), the rise in national popularity of bagels, the evolution of the Jewish deli, cross-culturalization within immigrant groups on the Lower East Side (Jews, Chinese, Japanese) and more.
The New York City-based YIVO Institute documents, studies and preserves Ashkenazi Jewish civilization in all its forms, from culture and history to language, and it houses a whopping 23 million documents and artifacts.
Here’s a sneak preview from the course:
While it might not be doable to head down to New York City right now, well, we can live vicariously.
