I’m Joel Haber, and for at least 15 years or so, my life has largely revolved around Jewish food. I do many different things within this field, and they each feed off of, and into, each other. This site is dedicated to my food scholarship, and the many projects I’ve embarked on that connect to that.
I live in Jerusalem, the beating heart of the Jewish people, where I have worked for well over a decade as a licensed tour guide. My single most popular tour, by far, is a culinary tasting tour in Shuk Machane Yehuda, Jerusalem’s famed open-air market. To date I have guided well over 5,000 individuals in “the shuk,” and have also appeared in many videos and been featured as an expert in numerous articles. I once heard someone quote a rabbi who said, “If you want to talk to God, go to the Kotel (the Western Wall). If you want to see God, go to Shuk Machane Yehuda!” I can’t agree more. The produce on offer — the vast majority grown locally here in the Holy Land — is truly God’s bounty.
As I developed my shuk tour, I also became exposed to (and fascinated by) Jewish food history. I dug down into the many foods on offer at the market, and it opened up a whole new world for me. I saw how our foods express our unique culture and history, particularly the diversity of the Jewish nation and our powerful unity within that diversity. Eating your way through the restaurants of Israel is like a gustatory ramble through the Jewish diaspora. As someone who keeps kosher, I’ve never had as wide a variety of eateries to choose from in my life! But even if that is not a requirement for you, the culinary scene here is vibrant, diverse, ancient and modern simultaneously, and super tasty. That is what I focus on in my work here, and I hope and trust that you’ll be as captivated by it as I am.
Before “making aliyah” (immigrating to Israel) in March 2009, I grew up in New Jersey, attending a “Modern Orthodox” Jewish day school and went on to study at Yeshiva University. When I was younger, I was blessed with a mother who was both a great cook, and a cosmopolitan one. While my family is Ashkenazi in origin, and we ate many traditional foods of that culture (particularly on the holidays when my mother associated those days with the foods her mother made). But my mother loves foods from other segments of the Jewish people (such as Persian gondi) as well as other world cuisines (Indian, for example). This gave me a diverse palate, and an adventurous spirit when it comes to food. It also opened my eyes to the diversity of Jewish culture beyond the “Ashkenormative” society that is so prevalent in the America of today. This is one of the main focuses of the food work I do.
As an adult, I lived for many years in New York City and then Los Angeles, working primarily in the film industry on the screenplay side of things. And through that whole time, I maintained my love of food, and used cooking it as another creative outlet. I love entertaining, and one of the highlights of my year is the annual Passover seder that I host (more than twenty-five to date, with countless friends and strangers over the years). Now that I more actively study and research Jewish cuisine, our foods from around the world often work their way onto my table.
My new book, Cholent: The Most Jewish Food on Earth (Green Bean Books, September 2026) takes everything that I do with Jewish food to the next logical step. I hope you’ll check it out, and find it inspiring as a celebration of Jewish peoplehood.
