[Live on Zoom] The Dairy Restaurant
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Conversation
Hosted by The Great Big Jewish Food Fest Co-presented with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Admission: Free Registration is required. |
In the new graphic novel The Dairy Restaurant, author and illustrator Ben Katchor retells the history of where we choose to eat—a history that starts with the first man who was allowed to enter a walled garden and encouraged by the garden’s owner to enjoy its fruits. He examines the biblical milk-and-meat taboo, the first vegetarian practices, and the invention of the restaurant. Through text and drawings, Katchor illuminates the historical confluence of events and ideas that led to the development of a “milekhdike (dairy) personality” and the proliferation of dairy restaurants in America, and he recollects his own experiences in many of these iconic restaurants just before they disappeared. Join us for a conversation with Ben Katchor and writer and specialist in food culture and immigrant history Lara Rabinovitch, led by Eddy Portnoy, YIVO’s Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions and author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press.
About the Speakers
Ben Katchor is the author of, among other books, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer; The Cardboard Valise; and The Jew of New York. He was the first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. He teaches at Parsons/The New School in New York City.
Lara Rabinovitch, PhD (NYU, 2012) is a writer and specialist in food culture and immigrant history. She is co-curator of the upcoming exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, “I’ll Have What She’s Having: The Jewish Deli.” Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Saveur, The Globe & Mail, and other media outlets as well as apps such as Google Maps. She co-edited the book Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language & Culture and was Consulting Producer on “City of Gold,” the 2016 documentary about the Pulitzer prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold.
Eddy Portnoy is the Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press 2017).
