i feel like. and this is something i have been thinking. the weird obsession with bagels or whatever stereotypical Jewish food being the end-all be-all of Jewish culture is such a deviation from how people treat any other culture. in most cases, basing your view of another ethnicity/culture on their most well-known food would be considered pretty offensive. not jews though.
then you add the layer of the non-Jewish view of Jews either being "assimilated and western" or "exotic and eastern". "white jews" and "brown jews". bagels are an Ashkenazi food. rings of dough are boiled in water. they were invented by Jews in Poland during a time when Jews were banned from baking challah. Many other Ashkenazi staples were a result of having to eat whatever we could, given that we were forced into poverty, banned from many professions and markets and activities, and living in a place that did not have the same climate (and therefore, food sources) as the place our culture originated from. when we began to immigrate to the Americas (mostly as refugees), we brought these foods with us.
Bagels are great. people love bagels. they love bagels so much they forget where bagels come from. they hardly even know how bagels came to be. hell, a lot of bagel places don't even boil them. they put all sorts of crap on bagels (i have a collection called 'goyische bagel crimes') and completely remove them from Jewish culture. they do not do this with other foods developed by Ashkenazi Jews out of survival necessities. they call those other foods "gross", "depressing", they say those foods are supposed evidence that Ashkenazim have no real culture compared to other Jews. Gefilte fish is the funniest thing they've ever heard of. Jews were called "garlic eaters" in a derogatory manner because we ate garlic. Ashkenazi Jews were eating "gross" types of meat (fish heads, anyone?), foraged plants and mushrooms, vegetables that were easy to grow in a rough and cold environment. because we had to. and now we have to hear our food be made into a massive joke.
and I think a large part of simplifying Jewish culture (specifically Ashkenazi culture) to just "bagels" and whatever comedian they hate the least is rooted in a refusal to contend with the antisemitism that is so deeply integral to modern society. it poses a threat to Christian hegemony, to this idea they all have (but will never admit to having) of Jews as being extinct, as being incomplete, primitive, and... rootless. their denial of our indigenous culture in Eretz Yisrael, the fact that two major world religions exist directly from the decontextualization of our mythology, the inability to truly make amends for centuries upon centuries of oppression, massacres, theft, sexual violence, genocide, forced conversions, expulsions, and murder. throughout thousands of years of Jewish history, we have maintained so many aspects of our ancient culture. we kept our native language alive to the point we could speak to Jews from other sides of the planets and revived it as a spoken language. we maintained a culture that was deeply connected to our native land. pomegranates don't grow in Poland, but you'll see iconography of them all over Ashkenazi art.
they do not love us. they do not love our culture. they do not love any of the context our cultural foods developed in. they do not respect the roots of our foods. they find the foods to be fucking hilarious.
There is also something to be said about the fact that many things seen as being only part of Sephardic or Mizrahi culture is... also definitely Ashkenazi. and that these distinctions mean something completely different to Jews than in how non-Jews use them. never let them create divides between us.
Okay. "My bagel is Jewish" not in the way this phrase is being used, but in the way that bagels represent my people's ability to survive, adapt, and invent lovely things, even when we are suffering. we are spiteful and stubborn. we are brave and persistent. we make good food. that is what a bagel being Jewish means to me.
(sorry for long ass rant, hope this is coherent in what i am saying. ive been thinking abt this for a while)
