Ori Z. Soltes highlights the unique Jewish culinary traditions that typically don’t appear in reporting on the community. “Growing Up Jewish in India,” a well-researched text published by Niyogi Books, contains contributions from three other authors who help tell the story from different angles. What truly shines through in the book, which is scheduled to…
Category: Writers
JLF 2018: No cutting this umbilical cord, says author Sethu on India’s bond with Israel
The twin pulls of India and Israel were the focus of a session including Jewish Indian writing. During the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) 2018 at Diggi Palace, Esther David (left), author of Shalom (an Indian Jewish Fiction), speaks with A Sethumadhavan, also known as Sethu (right). One is a member of India’s Bene Israel community,…
Israeli writer fighting Indian deportation order
According to the Times of India, an Israeli-British writer obtained a deportation order from a municipal court in Kochi, India, and aims to challenge the matter to India’s Supreme Court. Susan Nathan, 62, was born in England and moved to Israel in 1999. Her book “The Other Side of Israel,” published in 2004, studied the…
How One Writer Started a Cookbook and Discovered Her Indian Jewish Heritage
It wasn’t until Nandita Godbole began researching her family’s history that she realized how little she knew about her past. “We used to visit my father’s parents a couple of times a year when I was a kid in India… “[My grandmother’s] ethnicity was never truly discussed,” Godbole, a cuisine writer who has published two…
Why India’s Hindu nationalists worship Israel’s nation-state model
Hindu nationalists in India and the Israeli right share a surprising kinship. “Prime Minister Modi, we have been waiting for you for a long time, over 70 years,” Binyamin Netanyahu said in welcoming Narendra Modi to Israel while 2017. We see you as a like-minded individual.” The two premiers, who are both up for re-election…
Writing Indians and Jews: metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian literature
Tertullian, who attempted to draw a false distinction between Greek philosophy and Jewish faith. However, Hazony’s objections are not limited to the Father of the Latin Church. The author also criticizes German research universities and their teachers for jointly perpetuating the notion that the Hebrew Bible is a work of unreason and irrelevance, based on…
Jews in Indian-language writings
In Hellenistic and Medieval times, Indians and Jews met in person, communicated through trade, or “imagined” each other (discussed more fully in the next chapter). In the nineteenth century, Hindu Indians first heard of Judaism as a world religion. 74 Respect for and rejection of Judaism can be seen in texts from the time. What…
Writer: Joseph David Penkar
The ability to move between different worlds was an asset to Jewish writers and film-makers. Joseph David Penkar was a prolific playwright, screenwriter, director, and lyricist. He wrote and directed in Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, and Urdu while being fluent in Hebrew and English. Like many other members of the Bene Israel community, he lived in…
Writer: Nissim Ezekiel
Nissim Ezekiel (16 December 1924 – 9 January 2004) was an Indian Jewish poet, actor, playwright, editor and art-critic. He was a foundational figure in postcolonial India’s literary history, specifically for Indian writing in English. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983 for his Poetry collection, “Latter-Day Psalms”, by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s…
Author: Esther David
Esther David (born 17 March 1945) is a Indian Jewish author, an artist and a sculptor. She was born into a Bene Israel Jewish family in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. She won Sahitya Akademi Award in 2010 for The Book of Rachel. Her father, Reuben David, was a hunter-turned-veterinarian, who founded the Kamala Nehru Zoological Garden and…