By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
You wouldn’t think that a humble mixture of chickpeas, tahini, olive oil and a few associated ingredients would become a touchstone of cultural, political geographical (not to mention culinary) intrigue. Yet that’s the fascinating narrative of what is may be Israel’s most ubiquitous foodstuff: hummus.
“Israelis are crazy about hummus,” Dafna Hirsch acknowledges in the preface to her book, The Israeli Career of Hummus: Colonial Appropriation, Authenticity, and Distinction, published this past March by Indiana University Press.
“In one of the funniest parodies on Israeli masculinity I have seen on screen–Dennis Dugan’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (2008)–the Israeli macho protagonist dips a chicken leg in hummus, uses hummus as a hair dye, and even puts out a fire with a hummus jet,” Hirsch writes. “Although Israelis do not yet put out fires with hummus, the film’s depiction of the Israeli obsession with hummus is accurate.”
A sociology professor at the Open University of Israel in the tech-heavy city of Ra’anana, Hirsch learned early about the resonance of cross-cultural dining.
She writes of how, while she was growing up, her family frequented a particular restaurant in Jaffa called Younes, which “became fashionable among Jewish diners from Tel Aviv and the vicinity in the mid-1960s as an affordable option for out-of-the-ordinary and ‘authentic’ Arab food.”
At the same time, “in the opposite direction from where we lived…was a line of simple restaurants serving similar food as Younes but owned by Jews descended from Arab countries. In contrast to Younes, we considered these restaurants unrefined and unsophisticated and looked down on them and the people who ate in them as anything but authentic.”
Her book, then, became an inquiry into “the ways in which appetites and culinary desires are historically and politically produced and reproduced.” She looks at several dynamics (“settler-colonial cultural dynamics…the expansion of Israeli capitalism, and ethno-class relations” – all the while acknowledging the “Arab/Palestinian source of hummus.”)
Crossover appeal, too, is a hallmark of American tastes and sensibilities. Just ask Jacob Carr, the fellow behind Yalla Y’all, a Lexington, Ky. pop-up that’s gained a reputation for excellence in all things chickpea. “I’ve been making hummus for 20-years-plus,” said Carr, who was a featured food vendor at the Trager Family JCC’s Shalom Y’all Block Party on Sunday, Aug. 23.
“My dad worked for an Israeli company,” Carr said during a recent Zoom interview, “and we briefly lived in California with his Israeli boss. That was my first experience eating having hummus or falafel,” hummus’s deep-fried close cousin.
For the young Carr growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, the issue of cultural appropriation – Arab-to-Israel-to-the World hummus progression – never occupied the foreground of his culinary consciousness.
“I didn’t see it as a Jewish food or an Israeli food, or Arabic for that matter,” he recalled. “I’ve always associated it like pizza – you’d never go to a pizza restaurant and accuse the person making it that they’re not making authentic pizza because they’re not Italian or Roman.”
Simply put, “I’ve grown up mostly vegetarian, and these were just protein sources that my family utilized,” Carr said. “That’s how foods work – they present themselves in similar ways to people of similar regions.
“However,” he continued, “I will say that it’s not lost on me the culture surrounding Palestinian and Arab erasure in this food. I don’t think a lot of people do a great job of claiming or understanding where this food comes from, and I can admit that that whenever I started making hummus professionally, I didn’tunderstand the nuances of everything.”
As in much of life, timing proved critical when it came to Carr’s food-driven journey.
“I started selling hummus in July of 2023, right before the (October 7) war broke out,” he said, launching his business while he was living in Israel.
Returning to America to continue his venture, “I always expected it to be a way to bridge a divide that I could clearly see,” Carr said. “But in the last three years since I’ve started this company, the divide has only gotten larger. When the war broke out, I organized an event and raised money for Palestinian and Israeli suffering. But it’s been an uphill battle, and I’ve had to defend myself along the way.”
Carr isn’t alone in pondering issues related to what and how we eat.
“Cultural foodways are always interpenetrating and widely shared,” said Ranen Omer-Sherman, who directs the Jewish Studies program at the University of Louisville.
“I think that when we call a Middle Eastern food or cuisine ‘Israeli,’” he added, “we should always respectfully invoke its wider Middle Eastern origins and perhaps just refer to it as one of many variants across the Levant.”
Origin is a tricky word in this particular context.
“It is difficult to determine when chickpeas and tahini united for the first time,” Hirsch writes. “The earliest known recipe for a mash of cooked chickpeas, tahini, wine vinegar, pickled lemons, nuts, herbs, and spices appears in a Syrian cookbook from the mid-thirteenth century: Kitāb al-wusla ilā l-habīb fī wasfal-tayyibāt wa-l-tīb (Winning the Beloved’s Heart with Delectable Dishes and Perfumes). Yet we do not know what the historical relationship between this dish and contemporary hummus bi-tahine looks like, or when mashed chickpeas with tahini became typical of the Levant (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel).
Thornier still is the issue of cultural possession.
“Questions regarding origins, identity/difference, and authenticity may become significant in the context of debates over ownership, especially where a politically charged dish such as hummus is concerned,” she observes, “yet historical evidence is unlikely to conclude them.”
It’s as much a social dynamic as a culinary one.
“Food is an important way for people to nourish and connect,” Ranen-Sherman emphasized, mentioning a recent conversation on the topic with his wife, Professor Michali Kofman.
“Historically, foods have been shaped by migration, exchange, and cultural interpenetration,” he said. “Food moves across borders, changes as people encounter one another, and carries traces of the communities and histories from which it emerges. But those same processes can also become ways of upholding barriers to connection rather than breaking them down, and of erasing the people and histories from which foods emerge rather than recognizing and celebrating them. Hummus is just one example of this.”
Or as Hirsch puts it: “The integration of hummus, falafel, tahini, and other Arab staples into a repertoire of ‘Israeli food’ was part of a much broader effort to shape a symbolic ‘Israeli culture’ and ‘Israeli style’ that permeated many fields of cultural production, including music, dance, fashion, interior design, even beauty–each with its distinct dynamics, discourses, and timelines.”
Hummus’s popularity exploded once large food companies embraced it. In her book, Hirsch details how, during the 1950s, the Israeli company Telma pioneered the industrialization of hummus, transforming what had been a staple of home and restaurant kitchens into a commodity you could pick up from any number of retail establishments.
Today, hummus is as ubiquitous as the bagel, found everywhere from convenience stores to Costco (there is even – gasp – chocolate hummus available from such brands as Sabra, Boars Head, Cedars, and Target Stores’ Good & Gather label).
Regardless of where it originated and how it’s prepared, hummus remains an essential component of Israeli life – and no small amount of discussion.
“The real question is, ‘What is the best hummus in Israel?’” says Israeli-born Rabbi David Ariel-Joel of The Temple, answering his own rhetorical query by declaring “all surveys and hummus professionals agree that the best hummus is found among Palestinian restaurants.”
Ariel-Joel goes on to posit that, “based on years of searching, surveying and checking carefully, real hummus – really good hummus – is found in the Old City of Jerusalem. My favorite place is little Ziad on Via Delorosa. It’s a small hole-in-the-wall, with four tables. I went there seven times during my 2 ½ weeks in Jerusalem this July.”
And if Jerusalem is a bit too distant, there’s plenty of flavorsome hummus to be had here in the Commonwealth. Louisville chef Noam Bilitzer serves up an exceptionally satisfying smoked lamb hummus at his wildly successful NuLu restaurant MeeshMeesh, and of course there’s always Carr and his Lexington Yalla Y’all pop-up.
“My particular hummus is an Israeli style,” he said, adding that there are any number of worthy regional variations on the basic chickpea theme.
“Egyptian hummus sometimes has warmer spices, Syrian hummus may have different components, and some use butter instead of olive oil,” Carr said. “Mine is a tahini-forward mix, about 65 percent tahini to volume – which is a lot different than most other types of hummuses. When you think of store-bought hummus it’s so thick and intensely flavored. Mine is more delicate.”
Progress, however, means moving ever-forward.
“I feel like I’m constantly learning things, so the recipe is always in development,” Carr said. “I’d never bothered to write down a recipe to standardize it, but I worked feverishly and feverishly for weeks and weeks. My wife had just given birth, and at that point she could hardly stand the smell of cooking chickpeas. I was making massive batches every week.”
