Eating My Way through Transparent

The first three seasons of Amazon’s award winning series Transparent have been heralded and dissected by scholars for their incredibly sophisticated presentation of both religious and cultural Judaism as practiced (or not) in contemporary America. One way that creator Jill Soloway’s series reveals and illustrates the Jewish world of the main protagonists, the Pfefferman family, is through their relationship to Jewish foodways. Each family member (“transparent” Maura, their¹ ex-wife Shelley, and the adult offspring Sarah, Josh, and Allie) expresses their character’s personalities, joys, pain, and longings not only through the show’s dominant modality of sexuality, but also significantly through what