All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat

Join UC Berkeley’s Center for Jewish Studies, the Magnes, Department of History, Department of German, and Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion for an author’s discussion featuring historian and UC Berkeley Professor John Efron’s latest book, All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat.

Thursday, January 23, 2025 | 5:30-7:00 pm

In person at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA

If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at magnes@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 643-2526 with as much advance notice as possible.

About the book

In Judaism, meat is of paramount importance as it constitutes the very focal point of the dietary laws. With an intricate set of codified regulations concerning forbidden and permissible meats, highly prescribed methods of killing, and elaborate rules governing consumption, meat is one of the most visible, and gustatory, markers of Jewish distinctness and social separation. It is an object of tangible, touchable, and tastable difference like no other.

In All Consuming, historian John M. Efron focuses on the contested culture of meat and its role in the formation of ethnic identities in Germany. To an extent not seen elsewhere in Europe, Germans have identified, thought about, studied, decried, and gladly eaten meat understood to be “Jewish.” Expressions of this engagement are found across the cultural landscape―in literature, sculpture, and visual arts―and evident in legal codes and commercial enterprises. Likewise, Jews in Germany have vigorously defended their meats and the culture and rituals surrounding them by educating Germans and Jews alike about their meaning and relevance.

Exploring a cultural history that extends some seven hundred years, from the Middle Ages to today, Efron goes beyond a discussion of dietary laws and ritual slaughter to take a broad view of what meat can tell us about German-Jewish identity and culinary culture, Jewish and Christian religious sensibilities, and religious freedom for minorities in Germany. In so doing, he provides a singular window into the rich, fraught, and ultimately tragic history of German Jewry.

About the author

John Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History at U.C. Berkeley. He specializes in the cultural and social history of German Jewry. His scholarship is focused on the ways that German Jewry has attempted to reinterpret and reinvent Jewish culture in the wake of its complex encounter with modernity. In particular, he has written on the German-Jewish engagement with medicine, anthropology, and antisemitism. His publications include Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Yale, 1994), Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (University of New England Press, 1998), co-edited with Elisheva Carlebach and David Myers, Medicine and the German Jews: A History (Yale, 2001), The Jews: A History (Penguin, 2nd edition 2013), with Steven Weitzman and Matthias Lehmann, German Voices of the Jewish Sixties, co-edited with Michael Brenner (2014) and German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton, 2016). His newest book, All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat (Stanford) will be published April 29, 2025Efron is an elected fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.