Abstract:
This ethnography studies the everyday experiences of twenty-five Jewish-Israeli women following their migration to New Zealand, questioning how they remember the ‘homes’ they left behind and how they constitute ‘home’ anew in Auckland. The analysis examines the changes that the women engender in their food practices, focusing on the domestic activities of grocery shopping, cooking, baking, casual hospitality, festive hosting and dieting. My findings suggest that the ‘homes’ these women remember and reconstitute after migration are composed of five dimensions: homelands, ancestral homes, communal homes, spiritual Jewish homes and the personal body as home. The women use their everyday domestic food practices to actively negotiate social boundaries with lands and people, connecting with homes across space and time as they claim multiple belongings. Their engagements with food trigger their nostalgic emotions, memories, and imaginations, traversing through homes near, far, past, present and future. In the process, they revise their collective pasts in order to claim they are ‘good enough’ Jewish-Israeli women in New Zealand. This study contributes a gendered perspective to the anthropology of home, showing how migrant women negotiate social relationships through their domestic food practices. Engaging with current theoretical works on nostalgia, I illustrate how women enact intimate relationships through nostalgic food production and consumption that invoke their pleasure, pride and the feeling of being ‘at home’. I also suggest how women use food to enact social tensions, expressing criticism through self-irony, ambivalence, anger and disgust towards particular facets in their domestic lives and identities. In sum, this study demonstrates Jewish- Israeli migrant women materialise building home anew in New Zealand, employing their engagements with food and their everyday domestic food practices to foster the feeling of being ‘at home’ within themselves, amongst their kin, and, more broadly, across their social networks.