Family Heirlooms: Annabel Rabiyah And Arielle Tonkin

"If you are able to cook the food you grew up with, you can recreate home wherever you go. "

-Annabel Rabiyah

In the final installment of our series on A Fence Around The Torah we're joined by two artists who were part of a four-person group multimedia installation for the exhibit titled “I mean…how do you define safety?”

Annabel Rabiyah and Arielle Tonkin discuss Jewish Iraqi food, recipes as family heirlooms, assimilation, the roles of food and ritual objects in pushing back against cultural erasure for Mizrahi Jews and more.

Here’s what the artists behind "I mean...how do you define safety" said about the installation in their artist statement.  

“I mean…how do you define safety?” is a multimedia exhibit of oral history, visual art, and nourishment. It explores what “safety” means for Jews from Arab lands, who after hundreds to thousands of years of relative safety in the region, were torn from their homes, customs, languages, and ancestral roots upon the establishment of the state of Israel. This piece explores the questions, longing, and desires of the women who are descendants of those who left. Although much was lost, stolen, and erased – remnants of our food, language, and other anchors connect us to our ancestors.”  

Annabel Rabiyah (she/they) is an urban farmer, chef, and cofounder of Awafi Kitchen, an Iraqi Jewish cultural food initiative based in Boston. Through sharing recipes and making meals, Awafi pays tribute to a lesser-known culinary heritage. In addition to their social media presence, Awafi Kitchen hosts pop-up restaurant events, virtual cooking demos and presentations on Iraqi-Jewish history. Awafi Kitchen is a platform centered on building community between members of the Iraqi diaspora, Jews with lesser-known histories, and anyone interested in the history and stories behind food.

Arielle Tonkin (they/she) is a queer mixed ashkesephardimizrahi artist living on Ohlone land in the so-called San Francisco Bay Area. Arielle works to dismantle white supremacy through art practice, arts and culture organizing, and Jewish and interfaith education work. The Muslim-Jewish Arts Fellowship, Arts Jam for Social Change, Tzedek Lab, SVARA, and Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute are among their networks of accountability, collective power, creative collaboration and care.

Transcript

(Please note that this transcript may contain errors.)

Mark Gunnery: Disloyal is a podcast committed to a broad representation of thought, ideas, and creative imaginings. The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent the opinions of the staff, management, board, or volunteers of the Jewish Museum of Maryland. 

Annabel Rabiyah: There's strong assimilation narratives, pretty consistently in the US immigrant experience. There's a lot of messaging that to succeed in this country, you have to erase your past or let go of it, or at least rebrand it in a way that's more palatable. And I think these sort of family recipes are often one of the last things to go. 

Mark Gunnery: Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm your host, Mark Gunnery.  

Today we’re wrapping up our series on A Fence Around The Torah. Stay tuned through the end of this conversation to hear a preview of the next series of Disloyal and a programming note. And keep up with all things Disloyal at our new website, Disloyal Podcast dot com. 

A Fence Around The Torah is the Jewish Musuem of Maryland’s latest contemporary art exhibit, which explores how Jewish communities navigate the concepts of safety and unsafety in traditional contemporary and futuristic ways. I’ve been speaking with the artists and curators who made the exhibit possible. You can experience the art from this exhibit at  afencearoundthetorah.com. 

Today on the podcast, I'm talking to two of the artists featured in A Fence Around The Torah, Annabel Rabiyah and Arielle Tonkin. Together with Coral Cohen and Hannah Aliza Goldman, they created the multimedia group installation that's in the physical center of the exhibit called, "I mean, How Do You Define Safety?" Annabel Rabiyah is an urban farmer, chef and co-founder of Awafi Kitchen, an Iraqi Jewish cultural food initiative based in Boston. Annabel contributed a number of recipes to A Fence Around The Torah, including both family recipes and a new one. Annabel Rabiyah, thank you for joining us today.

Annabel Rabiyah: Thank you for having me. Good to be here.

Mark Gunnery: I'm also joined by Arielle Tonkin. Arielle Tonkin is a queer mixed Ashke Sephardi Mizrahi artist, living on Ohlone land in the so-called San Francisco Bay area. Arielle works to dismantle white supremacy through art practice, arts and culture organizing and Jewish and interfaith education work. The Muslim-Jewish Arts Fellowship, Arts Jam for Social Change, Tzedek Lab, SVARA, and Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute are among their networks of accountability, collective power, creative collaboration and care. Arielle Tonkin, thanks for joining us.

Arielle Tonkin: It's great to be back.

Mark Gunnery: Annabel Rabiyah, I want to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your culinary practice and your project, Awafi Kitchen?

Annabel Rabiyah: Sure. So I've always gravitated towards food and in multiple ways so growing food, cooking food, learning about the history of food. And grew up with a very rich practice or experience eating the Iraqi food that my family grew up eating and brought here, and didn't ever see that represented in the mainstream. And so several years ago, I started Awafi Kitchen with my cousins, and this started as a series of popup dinners and brunches and lunches across restaurants, and was very well received. And we share food as a sort of narrative cuisine, telling stories through recipes. I think being Iraqi Jewish, I think it was a very politicized identity, often hard to talk about.

And food felt like a very natural way to have more challenging conversations about history, in a way that a lot of people could relate to. Plus, I think Iraqi food is amazing and it's great to share it with people. And over the years, the project has evolved and we do less direct cooking for people these days and more cooking classes and talks on Iraqi Jewish food and history. And so that's where, how I really connected with Hannah and In the Kitchen and how I ended up in this amazing exhibit.

Mark Gunnery: You shared some of your own family recipes in this exhibit. How did you learn those recipes and why did you want to present them to people seeing this show?

Annabel Rabiyah: So I learned most of the recipes that I continue to cook and that I share through Awafi, mostly through just cooking with family. So assorted family, there's not really a single individual person that I learned from. It really was a team effort in terms of preserving these recipes so largely from my father, who I grew up with eating this food and then his siblings and his aunts and uncles as well. And so I had a lot of different experiences sort of in the kitchen, cooking with them growing up. And then as I got older, being a bit more meticulous about recording these recipes.

And so yeah, many of the recipes weren't written down, but we do have this written record of sorts, which is a series of index cards that my dad and my uncle actually wrote down. They were collected recipes from their mother as she was dying, essentially. And she was initially reluctant to share the cooking with the two men in the family. That wasn't traditional. I think she was resistant at first, but then in her last months of her life realized that this was the way that these recipes were going to get passed down. And so those aren't that old, but they definitely have been aged by use and are, you can see in the photos of the recipes, are sort of a scribbled mix of Arabic and English. And following my grandmother's very loose instructions, often don't have exact amounts.

And I think these recipes are, when we were developing In the Kitchen, which was this take home recipe box and podcast experience. We talked about the sort of index card recipe as a very universal way that people preserve recipes and have their grandma's recipes written down. I was thinking about recipes. So my family actually fled Iraq in '67, and similar to anyone who leaves their home under those types of circumstances, didn't have a bunch of heirlooms that they brought with them from the motherland. We have very little tangible, physical remains of their life in Iraq, but that is why a lot of diaspora people hold onto food so much. It's sort of an heirloom of sorts. And so those recipes are the closest, tangible thing that I have to family heirlooms from Iraq.

Mark Gunnery: Yeah. That makes me think about this line in your artist statement where you say, "If you're able to cook the food you grew up with, you can recreate home wherever you go." Can you talk a little bit about that and about food's role in pushing back against cultural erasure?

Annabel Rabiyah: Yeah. Well first, just what you just said about pushing back against cultural erasure. I really do think, I mean, I think there's strong assimilation narratives, pretty consistently in the US immigrant experience. There's a lot of messaging that to succeed in this country, you have to erase your past or let go of it, or at least rebrand it in a way that's more palatable. And I think these sort of family recipes are often one of the last things to go. They're the things you hold closest to you. And so, yeah. I think that statement sort of came to me like from the process of learning these recipes that I, as someone, There isn't people just full time in the kitchen anymore, or necessarily that are tasked with inheriting these recipes.

And so you really do have to make, we're all in this capitalist society where we have to be so productive all the time, and there isn't necessarily slotted out time to learn these. Iraqi food, and I think a lot of older style food is very labor intensive and there often isn't time to learn these recipes. But in the process of learning, I think, especially for me, these pastries that I was really lucky to learn from cousins and great aunts through multiple rounds of practice. Once I finally was at a place where I could recreate them in a way that reminded me of what they tasted like when I was a child, getting them at family events, being fed by my grandmother or other family members. I had this very visceral reaction that I was home or that I was back in these places that felt so comforting to me. And back in this, these people who are no longer around, some of whom I've lost in the process while learning from them.

And then being able to recreate these recipes brings them back in a way and so that was very empowering in that now I have this skill, and I could go anywhere and I could just. Some ingredients are easier or harder to find, but for the most part I can replicate these memories in a way. Anyone can really, if they can learn their family's recipes.

Arielle Tonkin: Annabel, can I share a little bit about the one time we met in person?

Annabel Rabiyah: Sure.

Arielle Tonkin: Set the scene for folks at home. Okay. So Annabel and I met in person in October 2021 and I was on the East Coast briefly. And I was whisked away by our mutual dear pal, Nadav David, and all of us are connected through the Mizrahi Collective, which is an amazing collective of Mizrahi identified folks around the specifically Turtle Island, around diaspora in the United States. And Nadav scooped me up. I was supposed to be on a plane back home a few hours before my flight got canceled and then I was like, "Oh, great. You can come to this Mizrahi collective event." Or maybe it even had another name. There're various forms of how Mizrahi Jews are organizing in various organizational clumps, regionally and nationally.

And Nadav was like, "Oh, great. Come. We're going to Annabel's house." So Nadav drove half an hour out of his way to scoop me up. We drove out to close to the airport where Annabel lives and all of a sudden it was, yeah. It was like there was magic in play instantly. So we came into Annabel's backyard and the sun is starting to set and there's this big wooden staircase up to the brick walled place where Annabel lives, with their roommate. And the kitchen was starting the hum and there's fish on the stove, and there's all of these salads in play. And there was a visiting artist whose name is Rafram Chaddad, a Tunisian artist who is going to be the featured guest of the night.

And Annabel was producing this giant feast very, very, quickly from their kitchen. And myself, and Chaddad and a few other folks just sort of joined in the swirl and the dance of it and started bringing dishes, and food, and condiments. And Annabel hands over this, it's called Amba. It's like a mango pickle condiment. And you said something like, "This is the good stuff. This is, yeah. We definitely need this." And you also had this, maybe it was like a special elderberry vinegar or something like that. There were this ...

Annabel Rabiyah: Berry vinegar.

Arielle Tonkin: Which one, which one?

Annabel Rabiyah: Mulberry vinegar.

Arielle Tonkin: Mulberry vinegar, yeah. And so it was this mixture of very traditional recipes and then also, these special. And some of them are, I don't know, quote unquote ethnic foods that you would see, processed ethnic food, like the Amba and then the mulberry vinegar, which was clearly a special farm to table thing of a friend. And all of that's getting mixed in with these traditional Iraqi dishes and just what I wanted, why I wanted to share that is just the verb of it and the motion of it and the velocity of it and the smells. And it's just a surround sound experience of immersion in back home.

And all of us are coming from particularisms inside of back home, but it's like Annabel conjured this three dimensional, four dimensional experience that all of us could just swirl right into. And so we're carrying down these dishes, it's October. It's of course the pandemic so we're gathering outside and someone starts to get a big bonfire going in the backyard. And then Rafram, the artist who was featured that night, just started telling these amazing stories about art and life in Tunisia, and very intense experiences that he's had and beautiful examples of how. So the fish that Annabel had prepared for all of us, fish has a very recurring symbol in art, from where all of our people are from, and specifically in Tunisia. And is an Amuletic symbol and Rafram's used it in incredible ways.

Arielle Tonkin: And he was tying that to his experiences in prison as an artist and just, there was this really strong felt sense of such a strong queer presence, such a strong radical left presence. And all of it just in the smile and the nurturance of the food, and the smells and the fire. And this was, it was just so festive of such an incredibly electric kind. And I don't know, I met you for the first time that night, but I felt so connected to you ever since. And it's important to share this with folks at home because whatever we all made, Hannah, Coral, Annabel and I, that we are getting to share in this exhibition is like an objects that are encapsulating these lived relationships.

Arielle Tonkin: And we're all finding each other in some ways, very newly and recently, but in the confluence of all of us, we get to remake temporarily these vestiges of the worlds that our families come from, that we're all trying to piece together in diaspora. And the aggregate of all of it is much, much bigger than the sum of its parts. So I don't know, just wanted to share that. And it's so exciting to see you again.

Annabel Rabiyah: Yeah. That was really beautiful. Thank you for capturing that in words.

Mark Gunnery: Arielle Tonkin, I want to turn to you. Before we get into talking about your art, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about what Annabel has been saying about food and culture. Does any of this resonate with you and your own food traditions and culinary practices?

Arielle Tonkin: I guess, differently and similarly in a variety of ways. So I have strong olfactory memories in the literal, like the pristine cookie sense of the word of my grandmother's gallette, which is like a hard biscuit cookie that's not super sweet it. And it's, I don't think it has butter in it. It's not like a rich biscuit, but it has these fennel notes and it's we dip it in tea. And it's one of my earlier olfactory memories and it connects me to my auntie Titi and all of the aunties, and the whispers of the way Moroccan culture was getting sort of coated over and sandwich layered in between a lot of Ashkenazi intermarriages and things. Galette is one very, very strong memory from childhood for me.

Annabel and I've also only just gotten to talk about this ourselves, but I grew up in a big blended Jewish and Catholic family. And I grew up in a system of nine kids and three of my siblings with whom I don't share ancestry. So I'm Moroccan and Ashkenazi, but these three siblings of mine are Iraqi Jewish, but via India and Ashkenazi. And their mom was born in India, and they were very, very close with their grandparents. So I didn't have tremendous lot of contact with my family, but my step siblings were very, very, very connected to that part of their lineage. So I think part of also the magic of being around Annabel is, and also part of what makes my story and lots of Hannah's, Coral's story very, I guess, uniquely diasporic is we're mixes of so many different lineages.

And so my way of connecting with part of my dad's family in a lot of ways was through my step siblings. And they, for example, would cancel the Torah trope in the Mizrahi way because their grandfather was a cantor and have a show in Philadelphia bringing all those Indian Iraqi Jewish sounds and traditions. So I would say for me, just as Annabel's grandmother right towards the end of her life, there was transmission of recipes. I didn't necessarily have many touchpoints of direct transmission. It's already been passed. There was all sorts of things to do with war, rupture, dislocation, immigration, divorce, intermarriage that made those, that direct transmission not as directly receivable by me. But I guess I represent maybe the beginning of the generation of us who are reaching out more Rhizomatically or horizontally or sideways, and pulling together threads. Both from vestiges of family lineage, but then also relationship among peers who are also pulling at their own threads, if that makes sense.

Annabel Rabiyah: And we'll just add the fennel biscuit cookies, exactly what I was thinking of when I was, when that statement about making home wherever you go with some food. That's the exact type of, I mean, it might be slightly different, but I think it's essentially the same thing. So just to highlight the Rhizomatic connections, there's definitely a lot of diversity in the cultures that we come from. Like Morocco, Iraq are very, India are very different distinct places, but also there's a lot of fluidity in between them.

Mark Gunnery: Annabel, that makes me think of something that you've said around Awafi Kitchen, centering quote, building community between members of the Iraqi diaspora, Jews with lesser known histories and anyone interested in the history and stories behind food, end quote. Can you speak more about the community building aspect of your work?

Annabel Rabiyah: Yeah. So I mean, I think it started as a way of making people with similar heritage feel seen, and that definitely has been a rewarding experience just hearing feedback from people that are excited to see that. As someone who didn't see that growing up and there's a feeling of, is this just me and my weird family in this little, we're just this floating in space alone. And feeling like you're not the only one when you aren't represented, that's sort of the core of the building community aspect. But what was unexpected about starting the project is the scope of who would feel connected.

Annabel Rabiyah: So, we actually had a lot of Iraqis of not Jewish heritage, Iraqis even in Iraq, Iraqis of other, AssyrianIraqis, other Iraqi minorities, Muslim Iraqis all sort of coalescing around the stories we were sharing and how they resonated with that. Or their interest in, I think Iraqi Jewish history is a history of a region. Jews have been there for thousands of years and so people are interested in that history as a part of their regional history, even if it's not their exact history. And then the other element of people, realizing that a bunch of Southwest Asian, North African Jewish people had very similar diaspora narratives and sort of unifying around that.

Annabel Rabiyah: And so just all being able to feel more represented and feel more seen has been important. And actually, I will just highlight what one thing that's been bringing in. Something I'm really excited about right now is I'm bringing sort of my agriculture background into the work in that I've co started this Iraqi seed saving collective. And where there's a lot of these varieties of crops are really at risk of extinction and so there's a bunch of North American growers who are all of, there's some Iraqi or Mesopotamian heritage that are growing these varieties. And being able to sort of connect with different people that don't have necessarily the same story, same exact story, but really have that same drive to stay connected to their roots and help make sure that they stay around for years to come. And so that's been really beautiful and another community of sorts.

Mark Gunnery: So we got to wrap up in a couple minutes here, but I want to ask Arielle something else. So you contributed quite a few pieces to Fence Around The Torah, some of which we already talked about in another episode of the podcast that you were on with Hannah Aliza Goldman, and Coral Cohen. But I wanted to ask you about this one piece that we didn't get a chance to talk about, which is an Amuletic Amazigh Vest. Can you tell us about this vest, including who created it, how you use it and why you wanted to include it in this exhibit. And I'm also curious to ask if you can talk a little bit more about re imagining Jewish ritual for you, because you said in your artist statement that this vest is one example of how Arab Jews and the diaspora are re imagining Jewish ritual to connect to parts of our lineage that aren't transmitted through Jewish institutional life in the US. So I'm wondering if you can talk about the vest through that lens.

Arielle Tonkin: Yeah. I'll start, I'll work my way backwards. So I think that image is coming to me partially because there's been tremendous and blessedly, so tremendous cultural vibrancy around Yiddish cultural revival and language revival. And all sorts of ritual objects and practices and Torah textual practices from Europe. And one of the ritual objects that's become, I guess you could say very popular, but, and a little bit more ubiquitous around in my queer Jewish communities is called in Yiddish parlance, I think it's called tallit katan, or tallit katan. It's a small, it's literally translates a small tallit and it's a four cornered undershirt garment that the fringes the tallit are affixed to, and they're worn under clothes and kept really close.

So I was gifted and as a long term loan gift, this incredible wool woven vest by someone named Taya Mâ Shere who's one of the two co-founders of the Kohenet Priestess Institute. But we met, Taya was teaching at the Graduate Theological Union near where I live and we overlapped briefly in different ways. And Taya is currently living in Morocco. And before she left town, she entrusted with me this vest and an incredible Amazigh carpet. And one of the colonial names connected to Amazigh is Berber so that's a more familiar name for a lot of folks. But so when I saw this vest, which is, it's a saddle bag also. It has, it's like a bag in the front, in the back. So its ritual use in the places where my family comes from might not have been imagined as the same as a tallit katan or a small prayer shawl.

But I saw the similarity between the form and the shape of this vest and this, the saddle bag and the tallit katan that a lot of my other friends were using and starting to revive in their own prayer practices. And a light bulb went off for me. And I'm always interested in hybridity and cross-cultural slippages, but I thought that I could start praying with this object in a way. And I didn't put fringes on it. I didn't need to, but I like playing with these things.

Mark Gunnery: That is Arielle Tonkin. Arielle is a queer mixed Ashke Sephardi Mizrahi artist living on Ohlone land in the so-called San Francisco Bay area. Arielle Tonkin, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast again.

Arielle Tonkin: It's so fun to talk about the work and about our heritage.

Mark Gunnery: And I was also talking to Annabel Rabiyah. Annabelle is an urban farmer, chef and co-founder of Awafi Kitchen, an Iraqi Jewish cultural food initiative based in Boston. Annabelle Rabiyah, thank you so much for joining us today.

Annabel Rabiyah: Thank you. It was great. Yeah, it was great.

Mark Gunnery: Like I said at the top of the show, this is the final episode in our series on A Fence Around The Torah. We’re taking a break from releasing new episodes over the month of July. But tune in in August when we’ll bring you a new series inspired by Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare, the exhibit currently on view at the Jewish Museum of Maryland through October 31st, 2022.

Blacklist is an original exhibit created by and on loan from Jewish Museum Milwaukee. It tells the story of the Hollywood Red Scare, when actors, screenwriters, directors, and others were banned from working in the mid-twentieth century U.S. film industry because they were suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. We’ll use the exhibit as a launchpad for talking about how the history of the Hollywood Red Scare resonates today. 

That’s coming up in August. 

You can keep up with us on our new website, disloyal podcast dot com. You can also listen to all of our past episodes there, too.

Thank you to all of our guests on this series, the artists and curators of A Fence Around The Torah, who were so generous with their time.

And thank you for listening to Disloyal. 

We hope you enjoyed the podcast, and we'd love to hear your feedback. Visit Disloyal Podcast dot com or send us an email to disloyal@jewishmuseummd.org. You can follow us on Twitter at  jewishmuseummd, or on Instagram at jewishmuseum_md. Thank you so much to everyone who gave us feedback about the first series. 

If you're in Baltimore, come visit the JMM! Go to jewishmuseummd.org for more information, and to become a member if you're interested in supporting  content like this podcast. Visit afencearoundthetorah.com to check out our latest art exhibit. Disloyal is a production of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and it's produced and hosted by me, Mark Gunnery, with production assistance from Naomi Weintraub, the Jewish Museum of Maryland's Community Artist-in-Residence. And extra special thanks to Naomi Weintraub this week for designing our website.

Our executive director is Sol Davis. You can subscribe to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, take care.