SAFN is pleased to announce that the 2025 winner of the Christine Wilson Undergraduate Student Award is Arinel Paddock, for their essay “Who’s Afraid of Gefilte Fish.” The Christine Wilson Awards go to outstanding student research papers that examine topics within the perspectives of nutrition, food studies, and anthropology. Reviewers praised the essay for beautiful writing, noting that “the exploration of irony, genuine affection, and their overlap in the space of food and tradition was excellent.” They also commented on the “playful and authentic ethnography” and the skillful use of theory. Congratulations, Arinel!
Arinel Paddock is a 2025 graduate of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, with a B.A. in Anthropology, the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions, and Jewish Studies. “Who’s Afraid of Gefilte Fish” is a part-ethnographic, part-narrative exploration of a community Arinel has spent their college years as a part of: the young adults of Bard’s Jewish Students Organization, and the older community members that surround them. The paper asks the seemingly trivial question of why these young adults have a habit of ironically consuming stereotypical Jewish food items they deem “bad”—cloying Manischewitz, pungent pickled herring, or dense gefilte fish. This question leads the paper on a theoretical journey through the history of Jewish food in the United States, the centrality of food in distinguishing Jewish religious identities, and the importance of food to the thorny, nebulous concept of ethnic “authenticity.” To suggest an answer, the paper analyzes young people’s relationships to irony and sincerity and brings in the concept of “camp” as a tool young people use to create real, sincere meaning within their ironic, cynical interactions with consumerism and normative identity. Arinel coins the term “authenticity play” to describe this inscrutable dance between irony and sincerity, in which young people use food to humorously toy with entrenched ideas of heritage and identity and to “navigate and remake Jewish authenticity in ways that feel meaningful” to them.
This paper was adapted from a chapter of Arinel’s senior project at Bard College, titled “And Then We Eat: Food in Jewish identity and practice for young people in the Hudson Valley region.” The full project, now housed in Bard’s Stevenson Library Archives, is a multidisciplinary exploration of how particular practices of growing, cooking, sharing, and eating food factor into the religious lives and cultural identities of children and young adults within Jewish communities in the Hudson Valley region of New York State—the area where Arinel grew up and attended college. The project uses interviews, firsthand experiences, and a range of existing literature to argue for the relevance of food habits in Jewish practice and in contextualizing debates on Jewish continuity, authenticity, and identity.
“Who’s Afraid of Gefilte Fish,” and the project it is adapted from, are informed by a diverse range of approaches to academic writing. They blend traditional ethnography with elements of creative nonfiction and memoir, influenced by Arinel’s experience writing fiction, poetry, and essays. Short stories of theirs have been published in Feeding the Crows, Bard College’s literary journal (most recently, “Wheels” in its May 2024 issue). Arinel also studies the Yiddish language and has spent two years writing Yiddish poetry and translating works between Yiddish and English. Their translations and original works have appeared in the 2024 and 2025 issues of Sui Generis, Bard College’s translation journal. The 2025 issue features their most recent work “Bimheira veyameinu/A tkine far tsurikkern,” a poem in Yiddish, English, and Hebrew about the ongoing Palestinian genocide.
In addition to writing and translation, Arinel (under the pseudonym Pashe) is a singer, accordionist, and multimedia artist whose work often explores similar themes to “Who’s Afraid of Gefilte Fish,” including religion, irony, and contemporary American culture.
FoodAnthropology 