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Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 65-66         ©  American Folklore Society 2020 

Review of: 

A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture 
Shachar M. Pinsker. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 
369, notes, index.  

Review by: Nic Hartmann 
____________________________________________________________ 

Whether in university towns or large metropolitan areas, café culture has long been a 
space for intellectual discussion, social change, and community gathering. Neither 
work nor home, the café has been described as a “third place.” In the world before 
globalization commodified the concept of this third place and turned it into a 
standardized product, the café became simultaneously the middle ground and 
signifier of local and regional culture. As Shachar M. Pinsker illustrates in A Rich 
Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture, cafés did more than just 
establish a third place: they shaped religious communities, cultural movements, and 
creative activity within the Jewish world. A café, according to Pinsker, was “rarely 
considered a Jewish space,” but nevertheless shaped Jewishness from a very early 
point in history (6). Combined with being a symbolic space for the development of 
modern urbanness, the café, according to Pinsker, is a place where tradition and 
variation emerge, carrying both a symbolic past and a sense of “otherness” with them 
(7).  

Rather than organizing his book thematically by keywords or cultural concepts, 
Pinsker divides A Rich Brew into chapters that demonstrate the power of café 
culture in specific hubs of the Jewish world. Starting with the relatively young 
community of Odessa (founded in 1794), Pinsker’s analysis of café culture within the 
city clearly highlights that Odessa—as a young, multiethnic, and diverse city with a 
large population of newcomers from around the world, including a large population 
of Jews—is unlike other cities of the Russian empire. In focusing on Odessa’s 
dichotomous ways as a city of both deeply devout Jews and of corrupt, vice-laden 
individuals, Pinsker successfully highlights Odessa’s status as a European-looking, 
modern Russian city that lured many people to its opportunities, especially its cafés. 
The discussion of a sociopolitical understanding of the fall of the Russian empire, 
combined with turn-of-the-century pogroms and the rise of the Soviet Union, draws 
the reader into the book’s essence: the idea that politics and social change cannot be 
separated from café culture. Pinsker’s approach remains the same as it proceeds to 
the discussion of café culture in Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin: asking how café culture 
shapes, and is shaped by, social, political, and cultural forces.  

The various chapters also highlight the challenges of understanding Jewishness as 
both religious and ethnically-based, exploring how the intersections of religion and 
ethnicity shaped popular understandings of Jews and their café culture. Excerpts 
and anecdotes from literature, theatre, and art of the time bolster the discussion, 
bringing to light the cultural power of regional culture in a broader understanding of 
Jews, non-Jews, and the concept of the “other.” This exploration continues in two 
chapters that focus on communities of exile outside Europe; although the other 



Hartmann, Review, Rich Brew  Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 66 

chapters successfully discuss the role of cities in providing Jews with new places to 
live (such as Warsaw), the sections that focus on New York City and Tel Aviv-Jaffa 
demonstrate the determination of Jewish communities to establish their cultural 
presence abroad. For New York City, Pinsker demonstrates how cafés helped Jewish 
people negotiate their status as exiles and refugees, and the simultaneous emotions 
of community and solitude that arose from being away from their homes. Nostalgia 
and optimism continue as themes in the chapter on Tel Aviv-Jaffa, where café 
culture was part of a radical transformation from a largely Arab community to a new 
Jewish city that became a European city away from home. Pinsker also highlights 
how, just like in New York, younger generations of Jews with less connection to a 
homeland shied away from the café culture of the earlier generations, and 
assimilated more into the community at large. The sense of otherness that built café 
culture was greatly reduced when the new generations were no longer the other but 
were accepted as part of the bigger society.  

The focus on examining individual cities is one of the book’s strongest points, as each 
chapter is a mini-historiography of class, religion, ethnicity, and gender. More than 
anything, however, A Rich Brew is an examination of the role of nostalgia for home 
in shaping everything from café discussions to creative output to historical reflection. 
A welcome addition for anyone interested in the role that coffee culture can play in 
contextualizing religion and ethnicity, A Rich Brew also serves as an interesting 
counter-narrative to studies of history within larger cities, such as Odessa and 
Vienna, which have long been places where other, more dominant populations have 
been able to tell their stories.  


