Hélène Jawhara Piñer

Hélène Jawhara Piñer, a Sephardic chef, holds a Ph.D. in Medieval History and the History of Food. She has lectured at Yale, UC Berkeley, Bar-Ilan University, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions. She is the author of the award-winning “Sephardi: Cooking the History” (Cherry Orchard Books, 2021) and “Jews, Food, and Spain” (Academic Studies Press, 2022), which was finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. She hosts the culinary series, “Sephardic Culinary History with Chef Hélène Jawhara Piñer.” In 2018, she received the Broome & Allen Fellowship from the American Sephardi Foundation, and in 2021, she was honored with the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies’ David Gitlitz Emerging Scholar Prize. Since 2022, she has been a member of the Foodish Advisory Board of ANU Museum in Tel Aviv. Her latest cookbook, “Matzah and Flour. Recipes from the History of the Sephardic Jews,” was published in December 2024.