The Israeli Career of Hummus

How did an "Arab" dish become an Israeli culinary passion? Less than a century ago, hummus and other local Arab and Palestinian cuisine was often met with disinterest and sometimes outright rejection among Zionist settlers. Yet for modern-day Israelis, hummus has become something iconic: a dish whose everyday consumption is irrevocably intertwined with social and cultural perceptions of their indigeneity and masculinity.
The Israeli Career of Hummus tracks how hummus has turned from an "Arab" or "Oriental" food into a national symbol and culinary cult. Rather than regard this transformation as an example of the trope of "eating the Other," author Dafna Hirsch instead examines how changing gastronomic, economic, and political factors intersected with cultural production in a multi-layered colonial space. Hummus thus became a crucial nexus of identity formation for everyone from early rural settlers and later Arab-Israeli migrants to industrial food companies. With a nuanced analysis of key historical contexts, Hirsch demonstrates that, while hummus has often been "Israelized" and its Arabness suppressed, in other settings its Palestinian-Arab identity has been leveraged to lend authenticity to hummus-and to its consumers.
Shedding new light on the socio-historical process of culinary appropriation amidst settler colonialism and nation building, The Israeli Career of Hummus invites readers to consider the construction and mediation of a dish whose status of cultural symbol transcends the sum of its ingredients.

Dafna Hirsch is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel. She is the author of "We Are Here to Bring the West": Hygiene Education and Nation Building in the Jewish Society of Mandate and editor of Entangled Histories in Palestine/Israel: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives.