Ilan Stavans discusses his new book Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook, coauthored with Margaret E. Boyle. Through 100 recipes it tells the complex story of Jewish life in Mexico, from the conversos in the colonial period to the Sephardic Jews arriving from the crumbling Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century and the Yiddish-speaking seekers of the Pale of Settlement at the beginning of the 20th century to the Holocaust survivors of the forties and the Israeli emigrants of the seventies. Stavans, an internationally renowned scholar, translator, lexicographer, and cultural commentator, will reflect on the fusion of Jewish and Mexican flavors.
This event is presented live at the Yiddish Book Center. Following Ilan’s conversation there will be a book signing. No advance registration is required to attend this event in person.
Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast “In Contrast.”
