Book Talk: "Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture" With Shachar Pinsker

Coffeehouses profoundly influenced the creation of modern Jewish culture from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. With roots stemming from the Ottoman Empire, the coffeehouse and its drinks gained increasing popularity in Europe. The “otherness,” and the mix of the national and transnational characteristics of the coffeehouse perhaps explains why many of these cafés were owned by Jews, why Jews became their most devoted habitués, and how cafés acquired associations with Jewishness.  Examining the convergence of cafés, their urban milieu, and Jewish creativity, Shachar M. Pinsker argues that cafés anchored a silk road of modern Jewish culture. He uncovers a network of interconnected cafés that were central to the modern Jewish experience in a time of migration and urbanization, from Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin to New York City and Tel Aviv.

Professor Shachar Pinsker is a specialist in modern Hebrew and Jewish literature and culture and studies Hebrew literature written in Palestine/Israel, Europe and America, as well as Jewish literature in Yiddish, English, German and other languages. He has a joint appointment at the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.

Co-Sponsored by the Taub Center for Israel Studies, the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, and the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies