Judeo-Futuristic Food
The interconnected vines of Jewish diasporic food traditions
This reflection on “Judeo-Futuristic” food is derived from the performance “Judeo-Futurism” that took place on December 11th 2025 at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam. The event – a collaboration between David Bernstein, Julie Weitz, and Lara Bongard was part of the public series called “Imagining Futures: The power of futures thinking in uncertain times” curated by Mirthe Frese. “Judeofuturism” was a collection of ideas and creative practices using ritual and humor to build Jewish futures that are imaginative, inclusive, and joyful.
The performance on December 11th, 2025, was a time of moving through the darkest days of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. A liminal and magical time. It was only eleven days until the Winter Solstice – the longest night, the shortest day – with the light festivities of Chanukah and Christmas just around the corner.
These dark days not only illustrated the season, but also our times. The future is unclear; the path ahead is hard to see. We are in a real crisis, where old illusions are dissolving, and quick-fix structures reveal their fragility. And yet, darkness is also necessary. We are called into our cocoon, into the unseen, to reflect on where we have been and where we are going. To really become very honest with ourselves. In times of collapse, new visions can be born. Things have to break in order to be rebuilt.
The audience was invited to oil their hands with St. John’s Wort oil (Hypericum Perforatum), a plant used across cultures to bring light into the darkest days. The Yiddish name of the plant is shedim shuts, meaning “demon protection”. It is also called Devil’s scourge or Devil chaser in European folklore, Witch’s herb in old English traditions, Klamath weed in Native American regions, and Hierba de la luz (herb of light) in Spain. There is a Russian proverb: “It is as impossible to make bread without flour as it is to heal without St. John’s Wort.”
St. John’s Wort is a light carrier. I harvested it on the longest day of the year – the Summer Solstice, June 21st, just outside of Ghent. The sun at its peak was absorbed into the tiny golden flowers, and infused into oil, and onto the hands of the participants in the audience. The plant asks us to reconnect with our inner light to guide us in times of darkness.
David created a drink made from the Wandering Jew plant (Tradescantia zebrina) which grows across continents, carrying both colonial and indigenous histories. Its name refers to antisemitic origins of the “invasive” Jew who belongs nowhere and “spread” everywhere like a weed. Because of this contradiction, it’s also known as the Wandering “Dude”. Yet, within its wandering there’s also richness: in belonging nowhere, we can belong everywhere.
In Mexico, this same plant is known as Matali and is used in some Indigenous communities as a medicinal tea, traditionally consumed to cool the body. The drink asks questions of adaptivity, survival, displacement, and appropriation. From a Judeo-futuristic lens, the plant becomes a shapeshifter, mingling with new plants like interconnected vines – wherever it goes – it meets the watermelons of Palestine and the infused figs distilled into Boukha in Tunisian Jewish communities – drink it, and it becomes part of you.
I was carrying a mobile food distributor. Inspired by historical images of market vendors in Eastern Europe, I carried a basket made out of knots by Veerle Melis, a garlic necklace, and strings of sushki around my shoulders, as I walked in spirals while distributing the food to the audience.
Food writer Claudia Roden describes Jewish food as “the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanishing worlds”. In its essence, Jewish food is a kaleidoscope of interwoven cultures, a mirror of the movements of the Jewish people across continents, weaving different traditions and localities over time. Jews never lived in a vacuum. The book Woven Roots by Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel points to a long history of cultural exchange and dynamic coexistence through plants. As Edward Saïd’s Travelling Theory suggests, it is in the nature of food to move – to be adapted and transformed, acquiring new textures and flavours as it passes through different hands.
Food can inspire intense feelings of possession and ownership: this is “our” dish. Food can also be used for appropriation, exploitation, and erasing cultures. And yet, it is also in the nature of food to be shared – instead of to divide, to be fluid, to travel, to change and exchange. Each recipe carries a story of collective memory – of displacement, migration, and identity.
The movement of Jewish communities reveals their deep interconnectedness with many lands, cultures, soils, and ecosystems. They had to make home wherever they went, which is a testament to their resilience, adaptability, and creativity. When persecuted and forced to move on, they carried their foods to their new homes. Always carrying things with them, and leaving things behind.
Through their movements, they had to get to know new soils and climates, learning how to grow food within them. The Yiddish – Doykeit, the practice of here-ness – meant adopting and adapting the local cuisine and plant traditions, while symbiotically sharing their traditional dishes and culinary wealth with their new neighbours. In Gil Marks’ words: “The Jews developed many distinctive cuisines, reflecting the local cultures in which they lived and passed on to the next generation as part of their legacy.”
Jewish food, like our identities and our sense of home and place, exists in a constant state of transformation: fluid and alive. We carry the memories of those who came before us, while those who will come after us already live within us. Like home and identity, meaning is never fixed. It remains in relationship – to many times, lands, people, animals, plants, and microbes – always in a constant state of becoming. We are multiples, interwoven with the wider fabric of life.
Judeo-futuristic technology becomes a grounding force within these multiple, entangled layers. In this, we carry both freedom and responsibility. We have the choice to decide what we take with us, and what we very consciously leave behind. So the question becomes: how can you be a good ancestor?
A short explanation of each food element follows.
Garlic: Smell the garlic, feel it in your hands, the weight of the bulb, the crackle of its papery skin. What memories rise as you touch it?
Garlic has long carried layers of protection, power, and meaning in Jewish and European folk traditions. In the podcast Jewitches, they describe how bulbs of garlic were hung in front of doors and windows; cloves and heads were tucked into pockets, sewn into clothing, or placed beneath pillowcases. If one planned to sleep outdoors, it was recommended to wear a bulb of garlic around the neck.
During the performance, David, Julie, and myself wore necklaces made from garlic strands braided twisted, and intertwined that carry both charm and protection. In Ladino, ajo also means “eye,” reflecting its role as a guard against the evil eye.
At the same time, garlic has long been entwined with antisemitic imagery – the image of the “smelling Jew,” used to mark and stigmatise otherness. And yet, in Jewish thought and folk belief, garlic holds an almost opposite power: it is connected to dissolving jealousy and bitterness. Some interpretations say it “burns away” negative emotions – envy, resentment, even harmful thoughts – much like it burns on the tongue. A plant turned into a weapon of othering is, at its core, a medicine for cleansing and restoration.
The garlic necklace was made in collaboration with Veerle Melis.
Ensaïmada: The basket was filled with home-made ensaïmadas, the iconic spiral shaped pastry from Mallorca, which you can see everywhere at Palma airport - tourists traveling with them tax free. This pastry is dusted in powdered sugar and has Jewish and Arabic roots. Ironically, “saïm” means ‘pig fat’.
Tomeu Arbona, a renowned pastry chef and culinary anthropologist, has researched the ensaïmada’s origins, linking it to the round, braided challah bread of Shabbat. The Mallorcan version was once made with olive oil, in keeping with Jewish dietary laws. With the 1492 Inquisition, Jews were expelled or forced to convert. To prove their Christian faith, Mallorcan conversos replaced olive oil with lard. Since families baked at communal village ovens, switching ingredients became a survival tactic, an attempt to blend in.
Arbona’s research suggests that the spiral shape of the ensaïmada was more than aesthetic – it carried deep symbolic meaning, much like the round challah of Rosh Hashanah. In Judaism, time is understood as non-linear – a spiral rather than a straight line, like a snake eating its own tail, endlessly regenerating. The present is always carrying the past, while holding the future within it.
(See my previous article on the ensaïmada)
Sushki: Sushki are small, ring-shaped hard pastries found in Russian, Belarusian, Polish, and Ukrainian cuisines. The name sushka comes from the word “to dry,” reflecting their dense, crunchy texture. They are cousins of the Polish bagel, the Ukrainian bublik (which has a larger hole), and the Russian baranka (slightly larger and softer). Sushki are even smaller and drier – more like a hard cracker.
Their circular shape is traditionally believed to represent eternity. An old anecdote about their quality holds that if a sushka can be broken into four equal parts, it means the ingredients and proportions were correct. In Russia and Ukraine, sushki were traditionally sold strung together on a thread at markets, and children often ate them directly from the string.
The bagel is the predecessor of these pastries. The first known written mention of the bagel appears in Kraków in 1610. It spread across Poland, particularly in areas with significant Jewish populations. The bread was traditionally offered to women who had just given birth – representing the cycle of life.
We invite you to chew on these ideas, digesting new ideas and new perspectives. Each year, we return to the same stories, the same rituals, but from a new perspective. The spiral is a form of regeneration – a way to revisit the past, digest it, and reimagine possible futures. Chewing on histories, ruminating on belonging, and imagining nourishment for worlds that don’t yet exist. To collectively dream of Judeo-futuristic futures. We practice an ongoing act of reworlding and restor(y)ing, repairing the world through imagination, reflection, and care.
Sources:
Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food, 1996
Edward Saïd, Travelling Theory, 1982
Deatra Cohen & Adam Siegel, Woven Roots, 2025
Deatra Cohen & Adam Siegel, Ashkenazi Herbalism, 2021
Podcast Jewitches: “Jews & Garlic,” 2023
Les Blank, Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers, 1981