 and a round of applause for Maya Yusef, who's a graduate of the SOAS MA in Ethnomusicology and currently a PhD student here in the school who played the kanun for us earlier. I'm Harry West, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the SOAS Food Studies Center. And on behalf of the SOAS Office of Development and Alumni Relations and the Food Studies Center, welcome to what promises to be a very special event. The lecture this evening is, excuse me, one of many organized annually by my colleagues in Alumni Relations in order to facilitate the continued engagement of SOAS graduates in the life of the school. Tonight's talk is also a highlight event on the calendar of the SOAS Food Studies Center. It's the eighth of the Center's Distinguished Lecture Series. Before I introduce the speaker, please allow me to say a few words about the Center and the Lecture Series. The SOAS Food Studies Center was founded in 2007 and is committed to the study of the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of food and more specifically to the dynamic interaction between these dimensions, whether in the past, present, or future, from production through to consumption, not only in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but also in the rest of the world. More than 40 members of staff at SOAS belong to the Center, while several hundred students, academics, and from other universities, policymakers, activists, journalists, makers and vendors of food also belong to the Center as associate members. The Center fosters the teaching of food-related courses at SOAS, it facilitates supervision of research theses, and it builds networks between scholars with an interest in food at SOAS and beyond. Among its most important public functions are the weekly SOAS food forum and distinguished lectures such as tonight. And beginning with this lecture, the Center will partner with Gastronomica, the Journal of Critical Food Studies, in the organization of its distinguished lectures, which will be published as such in the journal. Should anyone wish to join the Center as an associate member, which is free of charge, and be placed on the Center email list, please send an email to soasfoodstudiesatsoas.ac.uk. You'll also find that address in the postcard that's in the bag that you will have found on the seat when you came into the room. In that bag, you will also find a small box and a fork to go with it. This treat has been prepared for you in one of Autolenghi's kitchens, and it includes a cucumber and poppy salad with chili, which is taken from Autolenghi the cookbook, roasted butternut squash with chickpeas, manuri, smoked paprika, and onion, a popular salad from Autolenghi's current catering menu, quinoa and herb cakes with spicy red pepper and tomato sauce, an adaptation from a recipe in Yotam Autolenghi's most recent book, Plenty More. Please save this parcel until after the lecture has ended. Be surprised. At the weekly food forum, we actually do eat while the speaker speaks, but we won't be doing that tonight. At the end of the lecture, you'll be ushered through the foyer on this floor and into the Brunei Gallery on this level, into the exhibition space, where drinks will be served to accompany your food. We invite you to converse there and to browse the exhibition, which is entitled Serendipity Revealed, Contemporary Sri Lankan Art, an exhibition that provides glimpses of Sri Lanka's untold stories in the aftermath of the nation's 30 year long civil war as conveyed by some of its foremost contemporary artists as well as emerging artists, in some cases with surprising humor. Finally, just outside of the gallery exit on the ground floor, you will find that the so-as bookshop has a selection of our speaker's books for sale should you wish to purchase one. Now, allow me to introduce our speaker. Yotam Ottolengi was born in Jerusalem in 1968. He grew up in a secular Jewish household. His father, an Italian born professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University and his mother of German background was a high school principal who went on to work in the Ministry of Education running the country's high schools. Yotam excelled academically and in 1991 began study at Tel Aviv University in the interdisciplinary combined BA MA degree program. During his years as a student in Tel Aviv, he also worked for one of the major daily newspapers in Israel. Upon finishing his coursework and while writing his thesis on the ontological status of the photographic image in aesthetic and analytical philosophy, he moved with his then partner, Noam Bar, to Amsterdam where he worked for a time in a Dutch Jewish newspaper but also began taking cooking seriously. Something about which we're all quite happy. In 1997, he and Bar moved to London where he pursued his interest in cooking by enrolling in a six month course at Cordon Bleu. He contemplated doctoral studies as well as a career in journalism but ultimately decided to make a career of his growing love of cooking. Between 1997 and 2001, he worked at various London restaurants, ultimately becoming head pastry chef at a restaurant bakery called Baker and Spice in Knightsbridge. There he met Sammy Tamimi who had also grown up in Jerusalem and also spent time in Tel Aviv before moving to London. Yotam and Sammy quickly became friends, sharing memories that were at once distinctive, overlapping and complimentary. For Yotam had grown up in the Jewish neighborhood of Ramah Denia and Sammy in a Palestinian household in the city's eastern quarter. Otolengi would leave Baker and Spice in 2001 but the conversations that he had had with Tamimi gave foundation to their eventual partnership along with Bar in the first Otolengi delicatessen which opened on Leadbury Road in Notting Hill in 2002. They were soon joined by a fourth partner, Cornelia Stobli, forming a group that remains together to this day. In 2004, they would open their first restaurant on Upper Street in Islington. The following year, another delicatessen was opened in Kensington and in 2007, a third in Belgravia on Montcom Street. The latest addition to the Otolengi family is the restaurant Nopi, opened in 2011 on Warwick Street in Soho. Drawing on the culinary traditions and flavors not only of Israel and Palestine but also of the broader Mediterranean region and interpreting these within an ever more cosmopolitan London foodscape, Otolengi's eateries have popularized simple, albeit to many often previously unfamiliar ingredients. While bountiful vegetables feature prominently, their offerings regularly juxtapose what some would classify as vegetarian fare with fish and meat, challenging categorical assumptions in provocative ways. Otolengi is known not only for his eateries but also for his contributions to food media. Since 2006, he has written a weekly food column in the Saturday edition of The Guardian. He has also published four cookery books which have sold over one million copies worldwide. The first of these written with Tamimi, entitled Otolengi the Cook Book, came out in 2008 with Iberi Press and has been translated into four languages. Next came Plenty, a collection of recipes first developed in The Guardian column, published in 2010 with Iberi. This book has received many awards and was ranked 40th on the Observer Food Monthly Best Cook Books Ever in 2010. In 2012, Otolengi and Tamimi co-authored a book entitled Jerusalem also with Iberi. In the words of Jane Kramer, the book is about the food of their home and the rich symbiosis of Arab and Jewish culinary traditions that survives in the markets and kitchens of an otherwise fractured city. And we'll hear more about this this evening. Jerusalem won the Observer Food Monthly Best Cook Book Award in 2013 along with the James Beard Award for Best International Cook Book. More recently, Yotam has published plenty more out with Iberi in September of 2014. Alongside these published works, he's produced a number of programs for television with which many of you will be familiar. The 2011 BBC Four Documentary Series, Jerusalem on a Plate, followed him as he returned to his hometown of Jerusalem to discover the hidden treasures of its extraordinarily rich and diverse food culture. And this was winner of the Guild of Food Writers' 2012 Kate Whiteman Award for Work on Food and Travel. Following that, the series, Otolengi's Mediterranean Feasts on More Four, Otolengi's Mediterranean Island Feasts also aired on More Four in 2013. He has also taught courses at various festivals at Lease Cookery School in London and has also taught courses on food writing for The Guardian and Arvong Foundations. Through all of these endeavors, Otolengi has, in the words of Jane Wheatley, quietly changed the way people in Britain shop and cook and eat. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you tonight Yotam Otolengi. Can you see this? Yes, okay. I think it's gonna be the first time that the introduction is longer than the actual presentation. But that's okay. And I've also unilaterally changed the title of the lecture. I didn't tell Harry, but I decided to change it because I actually wrote the proposal or the description before I actually wrote the lecture. So once I've written it over the last couple of days, I've decided to change the title. So I hope you don't mind. And then the images that I've chosen to show while I'm talking about Jerusalem, which is my hometown, are just kind of a random selection of pictures that I think convey the spirit of the place because I thought it would be good to show the food, et cetera. But it's not directly related to the topic that I'm covering. So if there is a slight contradiction between what I'm saying in the picture, just don't judge me for that. So I will start by, I will start now and then we've got time for Q and A. Yeah. So in 2010, my friend and business partner, Noam Barr, suggested that Sami and I would write a Jerusalem cookbook together. Sami and I both grew up in the city in the 1970s and 80s. He and Sami was brought up in the Muslim East side and I was brought up in the Jewish West side. And although we shared really an uncannily similar projectory, we only met in London in 1999. At first, Sami and I were a bit reluctant. We both had the sense that this would be a massive task to write a book like that. It would require some painful whittling at something we weren't quite sure that is going to make sense at the very end. More importantly, we had doubts whether we really wanted to revisit Jerusalem. Jerusalem is an ancient place with the burden of its history very much evident in every alleyway and every stone wall. It is constantly looks back, it constantly looks back at its past to validate the present. It is frequently somber and reflective. In short, the sort of place that anyone young and forward looking would like to run a million miles away from, which is exactly what Sami and I did in our youth to embrace a modern, carefree, Western lifestyle first in Tel Aviv and later on in London. The food we ended up cooking and serving in our restaurants, although often utilizing ingredients from the Middle East is also far from traditional. In a sense, it's more San Francisco, Sydney, or London than it is Jerusalem. So why did we actually go back and write this book? And it all happened one afternoon when I came to Sami's house in Acton. It was rainy and we started sharing memories of our childhood and food. Things that were really kind of, it's hard to describe it. I think the pictures will do more justice than the actual descriptions, but I think I have tried to put it in words. A sneaky falafel in a pita on the way home from school, dried fruit and nut vendor, which was the must stop in the city center. Little cakes drenched in rosewater syrup and other made with goat's cheese and pistachios. We remembered Kurdish semolina kippe in a lemony broth on a Friday afternoon in sweet Jericho oranges squeezed freshly for juice. We got excited like children with the memory of stuffed vegetables cooked for hours in tomato and spice sauce or a plate of fresh labneh drizzled with oil and finished with the dusting of zaatar. It really didn't take very long to us forget it's so pilly nostalgic about Jerusalem that we grew up in and we were happy to delve in this world and start exploring and cooking. But the more difficult task was really for us, the challenge was we're the choices we had to make. What would end up in the book? How could we possibly do even a slight justice to a place with such a vast ancient history and a very, very intricate present? The forces that play in the city's culinary stage are numerous and diverse as the number of visitors in the city. And there's a number of Jewish diaspora and Jerusalem is made up of Palestinian and Jews and lots and lots of others. As we were listening, listing our ideas it quickly transpired the only way around was just to tell our own private memories. I had to get in my mother's pot petoni which is the most amazing meatloaf with capers, pistachios, and gherkins. She used to serve it for the seder for Passover. And Sammy had to absolutely have in there his hilbe which is a semolina fenugreek cake. That all I can say is it is a little bit like marmite. Either you like it or you hate it. And there's nowhere in the middle. So our choices ended up being very, very idiosyncratic. They were based on our private palates, our private stories and on the stories of the people that we were researching. We were talking to while we were researching for the book. Instead of trying to cover all grounds we covered the grounds that we liked. And our book is full of, as a result it was full of Palestinian and Sephardic dishes, kebabs and homo splatters for example or spicy fish or stuffed aubergine. But it does much less justice to Ashkenazi which is the Eastern European Jewish kind of food and there's no gefilte fish in sight to anyone who knows what that is. Still, although this may seem arbitrary and almost unfair I believe that we did somehow manage to capture some unifying themes that reflect the city's atmospheres and share some light over what the people of Jerusalem actually serve at their dinner tables and why. In the same fashion I would like to start today by drawing up a few arbitrary images for you to imagine. This is not just to get you in the mood it is just no other way really to begin to understand the nature of Jerusalem. The city is so diverse and so torn it is deeply rooted in real historical episodes but at the same time it is so fictional and imagined. It's a place that eludes any definition or a grand narrative in my mind. So I would like to draw a few images now for you and afterwards come back to them and try to make a little bit of sense of the images. So you've got those images and the images that I'm gonna give you now and then I'll come back and try to explain it or to make some order in it. So imagine a Palestinian mother telling her teenage daughter to quickly brush up on her skills at rolling vine leaves or her chances of finding a suitable husband will diminish rapidly. What the mother in this case Sammy's mother has in mind is a perfectly thin vine leaves rolled like a fine cigar with the rice filling tightly held in place ready to absorb the exact amount of liquid which will get the rice to cook but not too much makes them swell just at the right amount for the sweet and spice flavor to come through the vine leaves and cook the rice and afterwards get it to cool down and serve with thick yogurt. Over in West Jerusalem on the Jewish side I want you to imagine Rachela Schreffler who is preparing for the weekend. Who's coming? That's anyone's guess but Rachela who is immigrated from Iran at the age of 10 and now is in her 70s, has nine children and many grandchildren and plenty of family friends and all of which can show up any time be it Friday lunchtime, the evening of Shabbat meal, breakfast on Saturday morning or for leftovers at lunchtime meal. On Friday morning she's got dozens of pots and pans bubbling filled with anything from soups and stews to all kinds of meat stuffed with vegetables and dumplings. You can find Turkish, Kurdish, Yemeni, Moroccan, Persian and Ashkenazi dishes in her kitchen all of which are prepared using few ingredients, plenty of oil and hours of slow cooking. The dishes are designed so they can be kept warm and delicious throughout the holy weekend but they also represent various countries of origins of different members of the family. Now come back with me to East again and during the month of Ramadan and particularly during Eid which signifies its end, there is a slight chaos in many Palestinian homes when groups of women are rushing to make mountains of Marmoul which is the quintessential Arabic holiday cookie it's made out of a simolina dough and stuffed with nuts or dates or a mixture of them and some cinnamon. And now don't reach into your boxes please, it's for later. During Sami's childhood there used to be a dedicated local woman, Sami and his siblings used to call her auntie, that used to come every year and help the women of each family make enough cookies for the huge number of guests visiting the house during Ramadan but also for the local poor. Now from where Sami was brought up, not far from there there is Abu Shukri which is one of the most loved and respected hummus joints in town. And I'm just gonna stop here for a second and explain a little bit about hummus because most of you probably know hummus from a tab that you get in the supermarket, cold and horrible but a hummus is really a ceremony in Jerusalem in Jerusalem and other parts of the Middle East. It's a whole big lunch or brunch dish that is served at room temperature or sometimes even warm with lots of fantastic topping. So it's the local food in many senses but it's a whole ceremony of dining that is something that needs to be experienced in order to understand. So try to put aside all those hummus tubs that you've got in your fridge along with the coleslaw and imagine some of the images that will come later of hummus. Abu Shukri is one of those kind of most iconic hummus places in the old city. It's situated at the very heart of the old city on the Via Dolorosa which is officially the path which Jesus is believed to have taken carrying the cross to his crucifixion. The place is run by a father and son team probably 65 and 40, that's just my idea. Local Palestinians, Christian pilgrims, Israelis and tourists all come for the venerated hummus prepared daily in this local institution by mixing chickpeas, tahini paste, lemon juice and garlic and served with various toppings. The hummus is made fresh in the morning and served throughout the day but before it goes out to the first table the father, Raed Taha, must taste the hummus, his son's hummus and give his approval. Now, it seems that it's just too important, it seems to me because I've never asked him to leave this crucial decision to the youth even if the youth is a grown up man that has been making hummus for more than half his life. Another character is Daniela Lerner who is Jewish and lives in Western Jerusalem and also runs a traditional restaurant. Her tradition is very different though from the hummus place. She specializes in Spanioli food which is the tradition of Jews that have lived in the city for centuries but are mainly descendants of Jews that were expelled from Spain in the 15th centuries during the Inquisition. It is essentially Balkan food where many Jews were stopped on the way to Palestine heavily influenced by local motifs such as Ashkenazi Jewish cooking and local Arab dishes. Many come to Daniela's restaurant to try the famous pastelikos which are mini tartlets filled with ground beef and pine nuts but the menu also includes makluba which is an upside down rice and vegetable cake, absolutely delicious. There's a recipe in Jerusalem you've got to try and kuga which is a caramelized long-baked Ashkenazi pasta cake which you shouldn't try which is made but she serves it with tahini and black pepper in a much better outfit in my mind and albondigas which are meatballs also from Old Spain. The Spanioli food that Daniela strives to preserve is as diverse and complex as the city itself. This melange of traditions is an extreme opposition to our next stop which is the dining table of thousands of Jewish families in Mershearim which is an Orthodox neighborhood and with many similar neighborhoods all around the city. Here there is no attempt in a suitable picture to just came up. There's no attempt to break away from cuisine very much fossilized over centuries in Eastern Europe. Go to local grocery and you'll find frozen chunks of gefilte fish, we've discussed that already. Carp fishcakes those are in every shape and form. There is also kishke which is another beige food stuff which is made of intestines stuffed with mainly bread and fat, the ideal vehicle for absorbing flavors from the Cholent which is a traditional one pot cooked overnight for Shabbat with potatoes, meat, whole eggs in their shells and various years legumes and the legendary chopped liver and goose fat which is often replaced with a fake version of liver flavored aubergine which is an economical local invention from the days of the rationing. It's made to emulate the flavor of liver and actually it's become even more popular than the chopped liver nowadays. Much more attractive to me at least are the braided halabreads which with their keiki variants, crons or babka cakes that are light, sweet and fluffy and perfect base for breakfast toasts with butter and jam. On one of the main alleyways in the old city there's a famous spice shop with a prominent icon at the front which is a big Zaatar pyramid it's shown earlier, I don't know if you've noticed it which is meticulously erected as a real showstopper. The structure consists of little steps of dried and then powdered Zaatar leaves each topped with a bit of sumac and toasted sesame seeds which are the components of the dried powder which is also called Zaatar. This is just made, the whole thing is just meant to confuse you terribly. And at the top of the pyramid there's a little replica of the dome of the rock shrine which is that iconic golden dome which is the most recognizable symbol of Jerusalem. At the back of the shop sits a cantankerous old man, the owner who tries to convert everybody to Islam. His two sons who actually run the business and seem not to care too much about politics and religions are there to moderate the father and make sure they can make a living out of the spices. They are always courting the droves of Israeli and Jewish tourists that are the most recent converts to Zaatar that come to buy the spices and they do it whether the father likes it or not. The spirit of the father also hovers over a cafe Kadosch which is a Jewish bakery in a coffee shop that opened in 1967 by Mary Kadosch which is a Sephardi Jew who learned his trade from Ashkenazi Hungarian bakers that established, he established the bakery as the go-to place for Viennese pastries and typical Eastern European cakes like the cranes, the poppy seed and various cheesecakes. Mary's has died since but his son eats and carries on serving cakes that have become as typically Israeli as falafel and hummus. As iconic a culinary melting pot as Kadosch is it is almost as famous for being the venue for parliament. This is a daily gathering of veterans who get there at seven o'clock in the morning and eat their rugolach and drink their black coffee and put the world to right. Its cakes are the necessary background for heated debates on the topics ranging from the latest round of American brokered peace talks with the Palestinians to the dismal performance of one of the local football teams. A poil or betar, one is leaning to the left and the other to the right in a recent league match. So even the sports has political affiliation. Another local hub which is extremely popular with secular Jews from all over Israel and many visitors to the city is Machna Yuda which is a relatively newcomer to Jerusalem's culinary scene but a restaurant that single-handedly changed it dramatically. And they now have a branch in London which is called Palomar which I urge you all to go and try because it's very good. It's located by the city's bustling fruit and vegetable market and Machna Yuda calls it a market restaurant. It draws most of its produce from the market and bases the menu on the availability of local ingredients. But unlike other restaurants near the market which are normally more traditional, Machna Yuda doesn't cook the food of one particular ethnic group. It's oozing with creativity and makes all sorts of things from all over the region. You'd find tuna sashimi with watermelon and radishes, a salad of mixed herbs, bulgur and mozzarella or a deconstructed kebab with tahini yogurt, harissa and preserved lemon. Essentially the restaurant draws its inspiration for the international scene but also remains very much grounded in local Jewish and Arabic food traditions. By the way, this is the kugel, the pasta cake that I told you that I don't like but actually some people really love it so maybe you should give it a chance if you come across it but don't blame me if you don't like it. It's first you make caramel, then you make your noodles, then you put a couple of bottles of sunflower oil inside and then you leave it in the oven for about 24 hours. So back to this amazing restaurant, Komachniyudai, it does local fusion while breaking every rule in the book. The absolute antithesis to Abu Shukri, the hummus joint or the orthodox Maeshari neighborhood. Lastly, I would like to take you back in time, some 30 years back and imagine me. A goofy, lanky teenager, son of a middle-class family, a good boy with a great appetite. I grew up with a father from Italy and a mother from Germany, both of which taught me to love food and be very, very adventurous with it. There was no shyness or inhibition in our house when it comes to food. I must have been the first Israeli boy to have beef rendang cooked for me in the 1970s because my mom had this book called The Round the World Cookbook by Myra Waldo. I don't know if any of you remembers that, probably not. But anyway, it was kind of her Bible and she tried all sorts of wonderful things, sometimes weird things as well, which she constantly experimented with. My mother was also the one to throw caution to the wind and embrace her Germanic love for the swine in a city where pork could only be bought under the counter wrapped in a discreet brown paper bag, which is absolutely true, I've not made that up. Her, how proud I was to be munching on a real ham sandwich at school on the lunch break while telling my mates, this is my mom's advice, that these were actually pure 100% turkey sandwiches. But my pink turkey sandwich was a source of great satisfaction, I felt very special. So that was the last stop on the list of images that I wanted you to imagine. Now I try to make a little bit of sense of all this. First, from the images that I've chosen, it is probably apparent how diverse Jerusalem is. To my mind, this is a unique and very special kind of diversity because there's many other diverse places in the world. But I think Jerusalem has an extraordinary way in which the past interplays with the present. The tapestry, which is the city's peoples, draws heavily on an ancient past. It consists of a multiple of old religions that are fervently adhered to and serve as fundamentals of existence for the majority of the population. Yet despite these ancient and historical and religious roots, more than half of the people of Jerusalem are the first, second, or third generation in the city. That means that there are complete newcomers in historical terms. But so if you didn't know the Jerusalem psyche, you could have been forgiven for thinking that it's a young city. In actual fact, it's not young at all, especially not in people's mind. When it comes to the food, this psychological complexity warrants some serious confusion. The oldest inhabitants of Jerusalem are descendants of Muslims, Jews, and Christians who have inhabited the city for millennia. Despite their apparent religious rift, these actually have many food in common. Since they share a history of a time and a place, they also share culinary treasures like stuffed courgettes, served with yogurt and mint, homo-stopped with spiced lamb, fattoush salad, drizzled with tahini, or my favorite is majadra, which is a rice and lentil dish, which is covered with obscene quantities of fried onion. Yet other more recent arrivals have often had less of the tangible in common with each other. These are Jews from all corners of the earth who assembled in Jerusalem willingly, but more often pretty reluctantly over the last 120 years. They made the city, making their home in the poor ancient city that had lots to offer on the spiritual front, but very little materialistically. Polish Jews brought with them pierogi dumplings that they stuffed with potato and onion. Libyan Jews cook their haime, which is a spicy fish with caraway and cumin. Turkish Jews, they're cheesy borax. In Yemeni, they're spicy coriander and cardamom, chili sauce, which is called schug, and happened to become the national chili sauce. It's the Israeli ketchup. Regardless of whether they share foods, religion, or a historical narrative, Jerusalemites live in a shaky and a very uncertain reality. All the inhabitants of the city, Muslim Jews, Christians, old natives, or new inhabitants know very well the list of empires and peoples this place had seen. We're talking about a city where absolutely everything is transient, nothing is certain or permanent. Everybody knows how many rulers and occupiers Jerusalem has seen arrive with great grandeur and ceremony and then leave banished forever. The list is endless, Amorites, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, Brits. Jerusalem has seen them all. And that's a lot. Only in Jerusalem, unlike other well-trodden lands, it's not only the land that has seen the flux, it is part and parcel of the collective unconsciousness of the people. And it's not really unconsciousness because it is alive and well and reinforced every day by conflict and strife. So ancient historical facts play a vital part in very current events. The very recent trauma of the 20th century, the Jewish Holocaust of which the state of Israel structures its narrative and justifies its existence on is the latest and most ghastly in a series of national traumas going back to the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt, three and a half millennia ago. It is hard to overstate the degree and sensitivity that the Israeli Jews feel as a result of the Holocaust, the obstacles on the way of establishing a nation state after this trauma, and the conflicts that ensued with the Arab neighbors and the Palestinian population. The Palestinians carry the deep wounds of their Nakba, the displacements of hundreds of thousands of people and lost of villages and whole towns as a result of the 1948 war with Israel. The majority of the nation turned into refugees after 1948, and the rest live under Israeli occupation since 1967. Nowhere in the world it seems to me do the ancient and the current play such an intimate game in fundamentally and constantly shaping people's minds in their daily lives. Muslim and Jews alike repetitively tell themselves in their children ancient stories of the land and its significance. From Ishmael and Isaac, the half brothers and sons of Abraham who were the official forefathers of these two nations, stories of struggle and triumph are fought for the building of national identity, a coherent narrative that is meant to heal a fractured reality. These narratives though fly in the face of the shakiest of existence. All Jerusalemites are either recent newcomers, recently exiled, recently occupied, or recent occupiers. It is all extremely fresh and real and concrete, so I think everybody in a sense has a victim's consciousness. The repercussions of this are immense. For someone who is trying to understand the nature of the city, in my case it's food and culinary identity. This fractured reality means that it is all but impossible to draw conclusions that go much beyond the family circle or some private circumstance. How the Ma'amul begs for Ramadan in Sami's family could possibly be related to the Ma'amul which looks and tastes exactly the same that is served for Shabbat dinner at the tables of Sephardi Jews that immigrated from Aleppo in Syria. They're obviously the same things, yet this does not fit in any way with the stories that are told in Jerusalem about identity, tradition, and ownership. And now I get to the title of the lecture, Identity, Tradition, and Ownership. And I think that these last three themes are understood in tandem or played against each other are very effective keys in unreading many of the individual stories that are played out in the city. In an uncertain reality where your every very existence, the actual ground under your feet is permanently in doubt, a scent of solid identity is as essential as oxygen or water. To establish this identity tradition which is an acclaimed linear justensibly guaranteeing the solid historical underpinning of the reality or ownership which is an almost legal term, the legal right to your situation excluding someone else's, both of these are often used either in practice or in argument. Sami's sister's ability to roll vine leaves so they look like dainty cigarettes will guarantee her in her mom's eyes a solid place in the female family line and thus ensure a clear sense of identity for her and for the family in an age of uncertainty and general upheaval for both for Palestinian women in society at large and for Palestinian culture as a whole which is under threat by a stronger, often less traditional Jewish society. Abu Shukri, the homeless restaurant is a similar story, stickler to tradition this time on the male line which in the Palestinian society, the male, the men cook in public and the women cook at home which is quite often the case all over the Middle East and other parts of the world. Ra'ataha makes sure that the hierarchy isn't in any way compromised by his son acquiring the liberty to judge the quality of the hummus independently. More importantly, I suspect his age offers an implicit guarantee to diners that his hummus is traditional and therefore done properly. Tradition is also used here to aid in a tassel with Jewish restaurants in West Jerusalem who claim to make better hummus than the Arab counterparts. This is a part of the struggle over ownership of hummus which many Palestinians claim as having been colonized by Israelis and asserted as their own. In Jewish society, cooking on Thursday and Friday for Shabbat is an ancient tradition necessitated by the religious prohibition to light fire on Saturday and the demand for total rest on the holy day. In the diaspora, this was one among many signifiers marking out the Jewish community from the rest of society. But in Jerusalem with its Jewish majority, the preparation for Shabbat can single out traditional Jews from those who are completely secular. But it's also a way of making sure that a family or an ancient group doesn't lose all of the culinary tradition they had before immigrating to Israel. The Zionist project, which is what Israel is based on, at least in the early days, but still to some extent today, set out to erase all individual signifiers of the communities that were thrown together in the Israeli melting pot. People were expected to change their names, forget their native languages and start over in a new, strong, and independent state that puts the burdensome past behind. This total annihilation came at an enormous personal price. Immigrants with rich cultural heritages were left rootless and worthless with a whole generation lost in between a buried past and a promised future. Food and the customs attached to it remain the only link to the old country. For Achela Shreffler, who I mentioned earlier, cooking for Shabbat and feeding her grandchildren Persian saffron rice and Kurdish kubesoup is probably the only legitimate way for asserting yourself and keeping her sense of identity. The climbing up of descending voices that was advocated by early Zionists is also evident elsewhere. Other cities in the Middle East, Istanbul, Alexandria, Cairo, Damascus have always been the melting pot where people of different religions and ethnicities lived side by side and shared both culinary traditions and the joy of eating. But many of these cities are now much more homogenous than they used to be. In the 20th century, through the rise of nationalism first and then more recently religious fundamentalism, these cities have turned into monocultural places. The Greek cafes are gone from the promenade in Alexandria and the Jewish quarter from Damascus and the ubiquitous Armenian merchants which were everywhere were more or less banished. Jerusalem is different since everyone is prepared to protect it with their lives. No sect is able to dislodge the other from the city. For the Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews who reject Zionism altogether along with many other signs of modernity, having in the heart of the Middle East the exact same diet their ancestors had in Poland or Ukraine is a way of making sure that their sons and daughters are as deeply rooted as possible in their tradition and don't cast their eyes elsewhere. While less traditional Jews adopted Palestinian hummus and falafel as well as international foods and a bunch of popular dishes of other, the Ashkenazi Orthodox identity cannot withstand the culinary onslaught of the other. It's just got too much to lose. Paradoxically, my childhood obsession with pork is not completely dissimilar to the Orthodox stance. Looking back with hindsight as grown man it is pretty clear that the pleasure I got from this provocation was also all about safeguarding a sense of identity in a state of uncertainty. My way of dealing with my teenage angst, there's some, you can use it if you like, or with issues of adulthood and proclaiming my individuality was by extreme irreverence, by giving the finger to what was considered a taboo by 99% of the people around me. Identity, tradition, and ownership are also effective terms in understanding the restaurants I described earlier. Daniela Lera's Spanioli restaurant is a particular interesting case. It features the food of a small Jewish community which has been in Jerusalem for many generations before Zionism, but it corresponds perfectly with an official Zionist ethos that claims that the right to settle in Israel is partly based on the continuous presence of Jews in the land since ancient times. So the Spaniolim, the real Israelis, the ones that have never left, have not been tainted by the diaspora. They are, in a sense, they're pure. They need no remoulding as their brethren who have just come from far afield. So the Spanioli food is therefore more authentic and fits perfectly into the identity of the new Israeli. But Spanioli food is, in my mind, esoteric and also smells too much of the past. It's not really alive. Mahniudah, the market restaurant, promises to do what no one else has done before. It fuses together the foods of all Jewish diasporas with the local and traditional ingredients in an attempt to create a whole new cuisine. The new Israeli culinary identity that seems to be proposed by this restaurant is a construct which is extremely attractive to young Israeli and to visiting Jews. It melts together the old and the new, apparently seamlessly. It is saying we learned our lessons and are now willing to eat tahini as well as chopped liver and Yemeni chili sauce. And this means that we're finally part of the region. We have actually integrated so we can now stay. This is a clever divergence from the old Zionist ethos because it seems more enlightened because it reckons with the Jewish past and has a certain degree of dialogue as well with the local and the present. But the Mahniudah example of forging identity through food is the latest and freshest among all instances I've presented here, but yet I still feel that it's just one of many attempts to make order in a very fractured and multifaceted city. It works for a few, but it's definitely not the whole picture. What Sammi and I sense when we were working on our Jerusalem project that the city is just too diversified, too checkered and too raw to be covered by one story as still holds, I'm afraid. What we do have still are individual stories about identity, about tradition and about ownership and lots and lots of very good food. Thank you.