Breaking Bread: Jewish Food Stories and Recipes from our Community

We started this year’s Jewish Film Festival, our 20th, with a thought to make it interactive, around something that binds the whole JBFC Jewish community together, particularly in a year where we’ve all spent a lot of time at home, isolated—but still cooking, as though secretly hoping for the guests to arrive. So we thought: Let’s ask people to contribute a recipe and we’ll create a Breaking Bread book, echoing the film of that name that Bruni, the festival programmer, selected for this year’s festival. (It’s one of her favorites.) Nothing quite expresses Jewish culture—indeed, any culture—as much as its food and the experience of eating it with others.

As we moved forward, we also thought: Let’s ask people for a story about their food, and their recipes. Well, it shouldn’t have surprised us, because as a film center we’re in the business of storytelling, but it turned out that the stories were often where the gold was. So many people managed to convey, even in the smallest slices, something big about food, something precious about their memories.

And what really jumped out is how fabulously different all these entries are. I bet the recipes are great too, but you’ll have the adventure of finding that out for yourselves—especially, as you’ll see, with the entries that aren’t quite what you’d expect a recipe to be.

Thank you to all our wonderful contributors!

Brian Ackerman
founding director of film programming,
Jacob Burns Film Center

Read Breaking Bread: Jewish Food Stories and Recipes, a collection of evocative memories and delicious recipes from our community.

Breaking Bread: Jewish Food Stories and Recipes was made possible thanks to generous support from Elisabeth and Gary Schonfeld