Azri Amram, PhD. Anthropologist
Food Anthropology
A dish that one person remembers as a grandmother’s specialty may be familiar to someone else as street food, and to a visitor as a first taste of Israel. As an anthropologist specializing in food and culture in Israel, I’m interested in how these meanings come to coexist and why they sometimes come into conflict. Anthropology gives me a way to trace them. I spend time with people as they shop, cook, and eat, listening for what changes when a recipe passes from one generation to the next or a dish moves from a family kitchen to a restaurant menu.
The Anthropologist's Points of View
My fieldwork in Kafr Qasim, a Palestinian city in Israel, brought these questions to life in the city’s market and in homes where families host visitors for a meal. Those encounters inform my research into hospitality, religion, and the question of whose histories are told when a cuisine is called Israeli.
At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, I teach courses on the culinary experience in tourism and leisure. I invite students to consider a market tour from several points of view. What does the guide choose to show? What would the vendor like visitors to understand? What do the visitors notice, and what do they overlook?
From 2023 to 2025, I taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I learned how to make the complexities of Israeli society tangible to American students. My courses explored food, culture, and justice in Israel/Palestine, and the ways travelers come to understand a place. Food gave us a way into these conversations. Teaching across that cultural distance sharpened my own understanding of eating in Israel.