Social research since the 1980s demonstrates the resurgence of interest in whakapapa and growing recognition in the importance of whānau for the affirmation of being Māori in contemporary Aotearoa, New Zealand. Analysing memories of home, this paper integrates the latest development in the theory of home and nostalgia with empirical data from social psychology on the well-being of contemporary Māori Jews. The data is based on open-end, in-depth interviews with twenty-one Māori Jews between the ages of eighteen and sixty-seven years old, highlighting relationship with whakapapa through funerary practices and food. It demonstrates that contemporary Māori Jews express longing for home and intimacy as well as ambivalence, pain and grief as they critique home. In their lived relationships with whakapapa the Māori Jews in this study employ defiant memory to resist the intergenerational racial tension within their whānau. In this way, they constitute their infrastructure of intimacy and ameliorate their well-being.

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This study uses the lens of Jewish-Israeli middle-class women’s home cooking and nostalgia to account for the reformulation of Israel’s national cuisine over three generations. My historic analysis incorporates two recent developments in the social theory of nostalgia, which argue that women negotiate gendered power relations in the family through this complex emotion, and also critique their national home. The analysis illustrates how the Zionist ideology employed nostalgia and the food arena to constitute gendered myths during the first phase, from the pre state 1920s to the 1960s (post state). These myths served the “double colonisation” of the Jewish-Arab and Arab populations by the Ashkenazi elite. The analysis also regards the societal responses to second-wave feminism in the food arena during the second phase, post 1960s. My focus on the nostalgia and home cooking of middle-class women throughout the analysis shows their dishes are enactment of ethnic diversity. Yet beyond this point, my focus illustrates that women’s home cooking is a manifestation of their longing to return to homelands (other than Israel). This idea indicates that women employ their dishes to negotiate kinship, ethnic and class-based relationships that reshape the national cuisine over generations. While some women may contest the national Zionist hierarchy through nostalgic cooking, above all, their home cooked dishes depict struggles to constitute collective belonging. Examining women’s metaphoric journey home through their cooking should, therefore, serve future comparative analysis that looks into the reformation of national cuisines in other post-colonial societies.Dans cet article fondé sur le concept de la nostalgie et les pratiques culinaires à domicile des femmes juives israéliennes de la classe moyenne, nous étudions la reformulation de la cuisine israélienne au cours de trois générations. L’analyse historique a comme point de départ le concept de la « nostalgie » : à travers cette émotion complexe, nous argumentons que les femmes pouvaient à la fois négocier leurs rôles au sein de la hiérarchie familiale et critiquer la nation. L’analyse montre que l’idéologie sioniste se servait de la nostalgie et de la nourriture comme topos pour établir des récits portant sur le rôle des genres (années 1920 à 1960). Selon l’analyse des données, ces récits, ou mythes, appuyaient une « double colonisation » des peuples arabo-juifs et des populations arabes par l’élite ashkénaze. L’analyse historique considère aussi les réponses sociales face à la deuxième vague féministe dans la sphère alimentaire après les années 1960s. Les plats cuisinés par ce groupe constituaient, à notre avis, une mise en scène de la diversité ethnique. De plus, on y voit un désir de la part des femmes de vouloir retourner à un lieu d’origine (mis à part Israël). Donc, la cuisine à domicile, et les plats qui s’en découlent sont pour ces femmes un moyen de négocier les liens de parenté, les origines ethniques et les relations fondées sur la classe. Ces plats servaient ég...

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