Book Talk: All Consuming

Author John Efron will engage in conversation with distinguished historian Michael Brenner and renowned Jewish food authority Joan Nathan. Together, they will discuss Efron's book All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat from the dual perspective of German-Jewish history and food history.

Meat is one of the most visible markers of Jewish distinctness and social separation. In his most recent book, John Efron argues that meat has played an especially important role in the formation of Jewish and Christian identities in Germany from the Middle Ages until today. To an extent not seen elsewhere in Europe, the importance of meat is reflected in many realms including the visual arts, literature, religion, politics, commerce, and home life. Studying the history of meat and its multiple meanings in Germany tells us much about the changing nature of German and German-Jewish identity, as well as the links between religion, nationality, politics, and food. Above all, focusing on meat provides us with a singular window into the rich, fraught, and ultimately tragic history of German Jewry.

John Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California at Berkeley, where specializes in the cultural and social history of German Jewry. A native of Melbourne, Australia, he has a B.A. from Monash University, an M.A. from New York University, and a Ph.D. at Columbia University. In his work, Efron has focused on the way German Jewry attempted to reinterpret and reinvent Jewish culture in the wake of its complex encounter with modernity. Among his publications are Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Yale UP, 1994); Medicine and the German Jews: A History (Yale UP, 2001); German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton UP, 2016); The Jews: A Modern History (Routledge, 2025); and All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat (Stanford UP, 2025).

Michael Brenner is Distinguished Professor of History and Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at American University in Washington DC, where he serves as director of the Center for Israel Studies. He also holds the chair of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He is the International President of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture and an elected member of the Bavarian Academy of Science, the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Italy and the American Academy for Jewish Research. In 2014 he was awarded the order of merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2020 he was the first recipient of the first Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Award for Scholarly Excellence in Research of the Jewish Experience. In 2023 he was awarded the Cultural Prize of Honor of the City of Munich.

He serves as member on many advisory committees, among them the Commission of the German Government to Reappraise the Terror Attack at the Munich Olympics 1972, the Institute for German and European Studies at the University of Haifa, and the Jewish Museum Berlin.

He published 9 books, which have been translated in 12 languages, and edited 19 volumes. His latest publications are In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism (Princeton University Press 2022), In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018), and A Short History of the Jews (Princeton University Press 2010).

Joan Nathan is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and other publications. She is the author of twelve books, including My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Recipes (2024). Her groundbreaking Jewish Cooking in America and The New American Cookbook both won James Beard Awards and IACP Awards, and her celebrated King Solomon's Table won an IACP Award and a Gourmand World Cookbook Award. She lives in Washington, D.C., and on Martha's Vineyard.