Hungering for America

Hasia Diner never really explains why she concentrates on Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigration in this study, yet her choice has obvious attractions for the understanding of ethnic [End Page 113] American foodways. As discussed by Diner, Italians forged a New World national identity using food as a symbol to overarch the distinctions of region and class that were pervasive in the Old World. In contrast, Irish immigrants demonstrate for Diner an "inability to use food as a medium for community solidarity" that stemmed from the legacy of the Great Famine of 1845-48 and "made it impossible for them to create a distinctive Irish food in America" (p. 145). Eastern European Jewish migration illustrates yet another pattern, in which, according to Diner, immigrants "had been formed by a culture which entwined food with Jewish identity," but experienced new conflicts that "upset the boundaries between sacred and ordinary, Jewish and non-Jewish" because of a redefinition of "what had once been venerated as God's reward and the embodiment of Jewishness. . . into one of their new nation's gifts to them" (pp. 218-9)

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