Euphemistic Mediterranean couscous

If you're a food writer, especially one with a Jewish name, and you want to write about Israel, be sure to provide a thorough disclaimer about what it all means.

In all seriousness, while I'd prefer no disclaimer being necessary,* I think David Lebovitz's is pretty spot-on, this especially: "The situation in the Middle East is challenging and one that’s not going to be resolved on a food blog. And most likely not by someone who bakes cookies for a living."

I'm not sure a disclaimer will shield him from criticism, though - any acknowledgment of Israel as an actual place people live/are from, as opposed to a faceless-oppressor-of-Palestinians, will be interpreted as an endorsement of Israel's right to exist (which it effectively is - same as he endorsed the right of Ireland, Tunisia, etc., to exist when visiting those countries**), which, in turn, will be equated with an embrace of far-right Zionism (which it most definitely is not). What might shield him from criticism is that food-blog commenters - like fashion-blog commenters - tend toward the sycophantic.

*Everything to do with Israel, and Jews more generally, somehow lends itself to disclaimers. Yes, the food that we know as "Jewish" sure resembles that of whichever countries of origin, and yes, Israeli food is an amalgam of all of those, plus regional influence tilting things more in a Mediterranean direction. But must we harp on how whichever food our grandmothers made wasn't Jewish but Polish? When it was in fact Polish-Jewish, influenced by Polish cuisine, as well as previous stops in that diaspora, as well as Jewish dietary restrictions, ones that would make a great many Polish-full-stop dishes impossible?

This isn't, of course, just about cuisine - witness the American Jews who, if pressed on their heritage, will announce that their great-grandparents were "Polish," and you, if you are me, will find yourself wondering whether either those great-grandparents or their Polish neighbors would have agreed with that assessment. Then again, we don't all have clearly in our minds when each diaspora community settled on the notion of Judaism-as-religion-only, which is to say, on the idea that a Jew could be Polish, Russian, etc., and it's only natural to project from our own understandings, as in, it would be offensive today to refer to 'a Jew residing in the United States and with U.S. citizenship' rather than 'an American Jew.' I don't know, off the top of my head, when that would have switched over in Poland. But I think the broader point holds - it's not so much about Jews being ashamed to admit to being Jewish, as it is about Jews trying to preempt accusations of Judeocentrism, of thinking everything of any interest on this planet came from Jews. We want to assure our interlocutors that we don't claim to have invented the idea of, for example, frying potatoes, or chopping up cucumbers and tomatoes, or otherwise applying simple food preparations to readily available ingredients.

**Thus why countries with bad PR - Greece comes to mind - keep flying out popular food-and-fashion bloggers. It's more difficult to hate a place if it seems real; if it's flatteringly photographed, all the more so.