Pigs and the World Jewish Conspiracy: Meat and Jews in the Nazi Mind

Organized by Meltzer Schwartzberg Center for Israel Studies, American University in collaboration with the German Historical Institute Washington

In his new book, All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat, historian John Efron focuses on the contested culture of meat and its role in the formation of ethnic identities in Germany. Exploring a cultural history that extends some seven hundred years, Efron takes a panoramic view of what meat can tell us about modern German-Jewish identity, culinary and popular culture, Jewish and Christian religious and cultural sensibilities, and religious freedom for minorities in Germany. In his conversation with CIS director Michael Brenner and cookbook author Joan Nathan, Efron will focus on the fascinating story of Jewish cooking in Germany and in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the Nazi exploitation of antisemitic stereotypes of Jews and meat.

John Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California at Berkeley. In his work, Efron has focused on the way German Jewry attempted to reinterpret and reinvent Jewish culture in the wake of its complex encounter with modernity. Among his previous publications are Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe; Medicine and the German Jews: A History; German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic, and The Jews: A Modern History.

Joan Nathan is a richly awarded cookbook author, and authority on global Jewish cuisine, and culinary ambassador. Her recent memoir, My Life in Recipes, is a literary journey of Jewish lives in the diaspora and in Israel. Nathan, who has worked with celebrity chefs from Julia Childs to José Andres, is known through her TV documentaries, her regular contributions to the New York Times for over 30 years, and her 12 cookbooks. In her earlier careers, she worked for the New York Mayor’s Office of Midtown Planning and Development where she was one of the driving forces behind the Ninth Avenue International Food Festival, and as the foreign press attaché for Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek.