Food and Class: Emigration Experiences of German Jewish Women - Julie Fitzpatrick

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research shares this public lecture by Julie Fitzpatrick (PhD candidate in History, Royal Holloway, University of London), the Center's 2023-2024 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow. This lecture was presented at the University of Southern California and on Zoom on November 16, 2023.
Learn more about the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research here: dornsife.usc.e...
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The saying goes that ‘we are what we eat’. As such, the history of what we eat - and how we eat - touches on the basic fundamentals of the human condition. What does this look like in a period of intense food scarcity, persecution, and mass migration? In her research, Julie Fitzpatrick examines these questions in the context of the Holocaust. In this lecture, she will discuss middle-class German Jewish women’s experience of food in emigratory landscapes: the choices women made when planning to move their home overseas, their experience of domestic service and housewifery, their navigation of food novelties, and the influence of food and its cultures in rebuilding life in the wartime and immediate postwar years. The move abroad exposed many to financial hardships, smaller apartments with inadequate kitchens, and acute lifestyle challenges. Ms. Fitzpatrick will analyze German Jewish women’s relationship to their middle-class identity and how issues of class complicated their experiences of prewar migration, as evidenced by their interactions with food.