"Recipes for the Melting Pot" Lecture by Nora Rubel

In Recipes for the Melting Pot, Nora Rubel traces the evolution of The Settlement Cook Book across forty editions and pens a cultural biography of an iconic cookbook that persevered through waves of immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization, and rapid changes in Jewish life. In the process, Rubel demonstrates how The Settlement Cook Book endured by celebrating pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation.

Nora Rubel, Elizabeth Denio Professor, associate professor of religion, at the University of Rochester, teaches and writes on a wide variety of topics related to gender, race, and ethnicity in American religion, particularly in relation to food and popular culture. She is the author of Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination, co-editor of Religion, Food and Eating in North America, and Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family. Her latest book, Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book is due out from Columbia University Press in spring of 2026.

Sponsored by the Humanities Center, American Studies, and the School of Arts & Sciences.