A pinch of curiosity.

A dash of interest in food and history.

Heaping spoonfuls of research.

Combine and let marinate, occasionally stirring, for 14 years.

This may have been what ultimately led to ’s long-awaited new book (Columbia University Press, 2026). But it wouldn’t make the grade for cooking instructions in the iconic book Rubel profiled—one that would become the most successful charitable cookbook in American history. Every recipe in The Settlement Cook Book, which has sold more than two million copies and evolved through more than 40 editions since its 1901 debut, is tested, retested, and standardized using exact measurements and detailed directions.

This precision helped cement its enduring reputation—a reputation that intrigued Rubel, the Ģ����ý’s Elizabeth Denio Professor in the , as far back as her time in graduate school in the early 2000s.

In the intervening years, “I did go down quite a few rabbit holes,” admits Rubel, a first-generation American Jew whose scholarship focuses on understanding the religions, identities, and diversity of American Jews. “The research took twists and turns as I thought about the life stages of this book and how it meant different things to different people.”

What is the historical significance of The Settlement Cook Book?

“The significance of The Settlement Cook Book is that it emerged out of a period of immigration in an attempt to teach Jews how to become American. Later, it became an icon of American Jewish material culture,” explains Rubel.

On the surface, The Settlement Cook Book is a compendium of recipes with nutrition information, serving procedures, and household management advice. Recipes include “Matzos Pancakes” (matzo brei), chicken stroganoff, and banana cream pie. (Its original subtitle, The Way to a Man’s Heart, lasted until the 1970s and reflects the initial target audience: young women and homemakers.)

But the book also represents deeper themes that Rubel explores in Recipes for the Melting Pot. Immigration is one of those themes. In the late 19th century, southern and eastern Europeans came to the United States, and settlement houses emerged to help Jews learn English, prepare for employment, take citizenship classes, and adapt to life in America.

This period also saw the rise of community cookbooks, a subgenre of cookbooks that were frequently fundraising projects taken up by a group, including women’s and activist groups.

This is where Lizzie Black Kander comes in.

Reflecting—and shaping—American Jewish identity

Rubel spent a good amount of time learning about the woman who created the original Settlement Cook Book based on her kosher cooking classes at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. Kander, from a middle-class Jewish family, was a go-getter. When the mission’s all-male board denied her request to fund the cookbook’s first print run, she created sponsorships through advertisements and sold out of 2,500 copies by the end of 1902.

The late 19th century also saw Reform Jews rejecting ritual elements such as kosher dietary laws, preferring to focus on ethical teachings, according to Rubel. The Milwaukee mission’s kitchen, however, kept kosher “so people would feel comfortable coming to the settlement regardless of whether they kept kosher at home,” she explains. Even so, she adds, the women who ran the kitchen did not keep kosher at home, “which is why you see all kinds of non-kosher recipes in The Settlement Cook Book from the beginning, such as oysters, ham, and frog legs.”

“There’s an understanding that there are certain foods that are seen as Jewish, even if they just became Jewish in the United States. Like bagels and pickles.”

The cookbook changed over time as the Jewish community in America evolved.

“Jewish food becomes a very big part of cultural Jewish identity when people become less affiliated with religious institutions,” Rubel says. “There’s an understanding that there are certain foods that are seen as Jewish, even if they just became Jewish in the United States. Like bagels and pickles—they’re not necessarily Jewish in Europe, but they become Jewish here.”

These days, pickles are having a moment—so much so that Rubel joked that “it’s possible .”

Foods that have become associated with Jewish identity point to a larger truth about migration and memory, shares Rubel. She points out that people lose things when they move to new places—either by choice or circumstance—and “food is one of the things that continues to linger in memory.” While Jews aren’t exceptional in this regard, she notes, they do have a full calendar of holidays and observances closely tied to food, including the weekly Shabbat.

“There’s such a connection between smell and memory and pleasure when it comes to food,” Rubel says. “There’s so much joy there.”

More than food for thought

Aside from working on Recipes for the Melting Pot at several writing retreats, Rubel wrote the book mostly from a comfortable, well-lit home office she fashioned from “a glorified storage space” during Covid. (Most importantly, the room is a respectable distance from the television and coffee maker.)

In 2012, she submitted the proposal to the publisher. During the intervening years until the book’s recent release, Rubel let it simmer on the back burner, so to speak—working as a full-time professor, starting and raising a family, serving as director of the , and chairing the Department of Religion and Classics.

As co-owner of Grass Fed, Rochester’s first vegan butchery, Rubel brings more than a scholarly interest to the subject of food. In fact, she once wanted to write a cookbook, but the project took a backseat to the aforementioned academic pursuits, including authoring (2009) and coediting (2014), both published by Columbia University Press.

She recalls: “I thought, ‘Alright, I have other things I could be doing right now. I’ll come back to this.’”

Some ideas need time to marinate.

As an undergraduate, I loved studying African history—Ethiopia, Senegal, Angola—and literature, film, and history from Latin America. Those two interests felt like separate tracks.

The turning point came in a lecture on Black conquistadores of Mexico. I remember sitting there thinking, “This has to be wrong,” because I had never heard this history before—and I spent most of my childhood in Mexico. It completely floored me.

Suddenly it clicked: I could bring my two interests together, asking what it means to study Blackness in Mexico, a place so closely associated—visually and narratively—with Indigenous civilizations like the Maya and Mexica.

On an exploratory trip to Mexico,  I reviewed a box of documents from the 1600s. Right away, I found dozens of references to enslaved Angolans and Congolese. I thought: If this random request yields so much history, what would a true, in-depth study produce?

That led to my first book, (Cambridge University Press, 2018). So much of my archival material never made it into the book, so when Covid hit and the archives closed, I wrote (Hackett Publishing, 2024).

There’s a will from Zacatecas, in northern Mexico, written by a man in the 1700s who owned something like a convenience store. He lists his stock—20 yards of ribbon and lace, four pounds of candles—and then itemizes what people pawned to buy things: a coral bracelet, a silver pendant. A student might read that and think, “My sister has a pendant like that.” Suddenly, 1712 doesn’t feel so distant.

Another document that has stayed with me is an investigation into a gay community in Mexico City. I was never taught that queer communities existed in the colonial period. The document is violent—these people are being persecuted by crown officials—but within it you find lists of homes where they dined, and their nicknames for each other: La Rosada, “the pink one,” and La Coqueta, “the flirt.”

Mapping those communities onto the past and then asking what we do with that knowledge has been powerful. A student raised in the 2000s or 2010s will see things in that document that I never would. That’s what keeps me committed to primary sources: Each generation reads them anew.

My current research follows 1,463 people kidnapped in a pirate attack in Veracruz and dispersed to places like colonial Charleston, South Carolina, and Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). What did it mean for those people, and for those left behind? What did it mean to land in a foreign port, not speaking the language, and, in some parts of Saint-Domingue, in a setting with very few women?

I’ve always been drawn to the footnote on the page that says, “We don’t know what happened to this person.” I’m obsessed with those gaps. Why don’t we know? What connections are we missing?

For me, sport offers another way into these questions. I try to HIST 154: World History Through Soccer every World Cup cycle. It always strikes me how central sports are to everyday life in Latin America, the United States, and Europe—and yet when we open many standard histories, they’re barely mentioned. How can that be, when on a given Sunday in some cities a huge share of the population is either at the stadium or listening on the radio?

In Buenos Aires alone there are 79 stadiums; that’s a profound transformation of urban space that we rarely treat as historically significant.

I’m especially interested in the history of women’s soccer. Archival photos of women playing in uniforms in Chile in the early 1900s raise questions about why those stories disappeared in the 1960s. If I ever move fully into researching the 20th or 21st century, it will likely be through this lens. We don’t take sports seriously enough in academia.

Dan Wang ’15 is, by any measure, having a moment. His book,  (W.W. Norton, 2025), about China’s dizzying ascent on the international stage and what the United States can learn from it, has become a must-read among world leaders and policymakers since its publication last year.

It was spotted on the desk of Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Aides to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer reportedly read it on their recent trips to China. It made The New York Times bestseller list, was named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year. . And it landed Wang on some of the most influential �����Ի��� in America.

Yet when Wang (pronounced “Wong”) joins a video call with Rochester Review from outside the Hoover Institution—a public policy think tank at Stanford, where he is a research fellow in its History Lab—he seems amused by the notion that his work has had an impact.

“You never really know what happens when you write a book,” Wang says. “One always hopes that people will pick it up and read it. I’m glad some people have.”

Wang attributes some of the book’s success to timing. It came out in a year of headlines about China, from the trade war to DeepSeek. It was also published a few months after Abundance, another bestseller by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. That book has been called a guide for reforming government and overcoming socioeconomic problems in America—if progressives can stop blocking big dreams and good ideas with what the authors call “an endless catalog of rules and restraints.”

Both primed readers for the idea that Americans are right to be frustrated by the state of their state. “The stars aligned,” Wang says.

Breakneck examines why the United States struggles to build housing, high-speed rail, and energy infrastructure at speed and scale while China appears to erect towering bridges, superhighways and gleaming railways, and sprawling factories overnight. �²��Բ�’s conclusion: The American elite is “made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction,” whereas China is run by a “technocratic class, made up mostly of engineers, that excels at construction.”

China, Wang writes, “is an engineering state building at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”

Learning from the masters

It may be tempting to view Wang as an overnight success. ���ܳ���Breakneck was seven years in the making, and �²��Բ�’s ascent to his rarefied perch in the global conversation about power, technology, and economic development was anything but linear.

The foundation for his book is a series of annual letters he wrote to family, friends, and followers that chronicled his observations during the seven years he spent in China after graduating from the URochester, a graduation that almost didn’t happen.

He recalls his years at Ģ����ý with gratitude. He enrolled in large part, he says, because the University made going to college possible for him. Born in southwest China, Wang immigrated with his family at age seven to Canada, where he was raised mostly in Ottawa before his parents relocated to the Philadelphia suburbs when he was a teenager. As a Canadian citizen from a family he describes as being “not well off,” Wang required “substantial financial aid” to attend college. Ģ����ý’s generosity was the deciding factor.

“I was able to graduate from college debt-free,” he says. “It has been a nice thing.”

But he was, by his own admission, an unremarkable student, despite earning accolades. In 2013, he was recognized as the “Student Employee of the Year” for his work as a news assistant in the Office of Communications.

In nominating him, then–Associate Vice President of Communications Larry Arbeiter wrote that Wang had an uncanny knack for framing stories about the University that drew national media attention. “That kind of success is highly sought by experienced professionals,” Arbeiter wrote, “and is basically unheard of by a student.”

When he wasn’t working in the office, Wang roamed the stacks in Rush Rhees or hunkered down in his “default study space” in the library’s music section. “It was a tremendously pleasing experience to walk through so many books and be able to pull out books as one wishes,” he says.

He devoured the works of Edith Wharton and Honoré de Balzac. In the music section, he browsed scores and once copied a Gustav Mahler symphony by hand, measure by measure. Wang did the same with prose, retyping articles in The New Yorker as something of a self-directed monastic apprenticeship aimed at absorbing the language, cadence, and rhythm of masters of their craft.

“I think I did that three or four times, just rewrote the entire article by retyping it to see the choices a writer makes,” Wang says. “And I did the same thing as a music student because I thought seeing the choices a composer makes was important.”

Wang majored in philosophy, wrestling with logic and classical texts that helped him hone arguments. But it was an economics professor, Michael Rizzo, who had the biggest impact on him as a student.

Rizzo, he says, organized reading circles of the works of Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek that left an impression on Wang and exposed him to great thinkers of the economics blogosphere like Tyler Cowen, who later became an intellectual influence. (Cowen’s praise for Breakneck as “arguably the best book of the year flat out” is displayed prominently on its cover.)

“Dan was the kind of student who inspired me to want to learn more myself, and he had an extreme restlessness about him that resonated then and still does today,” Rizzo says.

That restlessness became more apparent than ever when, after his junior year, Wang dropped out.

A detour, then a diploma

Wang had landed a job in marketing and communications in Toronto at the cloud-based e-commerce platform Shopify when the company was in its infancy. He was making good money and enjoyed the work. “There was a point in my life when I thought I was going to be quite happy to be a dropout,” he says.

���ܳ���Ģ����ý officials persisted in trying to persuade him to
return and finish his degree. He says he told them he preferred to stay at Shopify. “Then they asked, ‘Is there anything you would like to do?’” Wang recalls. “I’m being a bit cheeky here, but I said, ‘You know, I would like to spend my last semester drinking beer in Germany.’

“And, again, I’m being stylized and cheeky, but they said, ‘We have a program for that!’” Wang finished his degree in Freiburg im Breisgau through the Institute for the International Education of Students, better known as IES Abroad.

He skipped commencement to take a content marketing job in Silicon Valley at the supply chain logistics company Flexport. There he stood at the corner of global trade and technology—an intersection that would become the backbone of Breakneck.

“Rochester mailed me my diploma,” Wang says. “But I’m glad I had the patience to finish my degree.”

In 2017, Wang moved to China. He joined an economic research firm as a technology analyst, writing about semiconductors and clean-tech manufacturing primarily for an audience of hedge fund clients around the world.

“I felt like I moved to China on the cusp of a technological flowering. I knew people were underestimating China, but living there was kind of like being on a very different branch of the technological tree that Silicon Valley wasn’t going down.”

The country was, in many ways, familiar terrain. He had visited relatives there growing up and spoke fluent Mandarin thanks to his mother, a former television news anchor, who saw to that.

But living there as an adult, Wang observed distinct differences between the China he knew as a child and his homes in Canada and the United States. While Silicon Valley cast itself as the unquestioned center of technological innovation, he saw in China a country that was positioning itself to compete, often ferociously. There was a sense of optimism.

The country was churning out new cars, including varieties of electric vehicles, in a fraction of the time that American companies did. It leapfrogged from credit cards to mobile payments. Tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance were going toe-to-toe with their peers in the West.

“I felt like I moved to China on the cusp of a technological flowering,” Wang says. “The magnitude was not quite what I expected. I knew people were underestimating China, but living there was kind of like being on a very different branch of the technological tree that Silicon Valley wasn’t going down.”

He chronicled his observations and thoughts in his letters and eventually compiled them into a narrative in Breakneck, where he framed the differences between his native and adopted countries as the result of an “engineering mindset” in China that valued ideating, building, and scaling, and a “lawyerly” one in the United States that regulated, litigated, and protected.

To drive home his point, he details how in 2008 both countries began construction of roughly 800 miles of high-speed rail—in China 
between Beijing and Shanghai, and in the United States between San Francisco and Los Angeles. China opened its line three years later at a cost of $36 billion. California is still struggling to complete the first phase of its line, and authorities estimate it won’t be operational until 2032 at a price tag of up to $128 billion.

Wang is not romantic about China. He fiercely criticizes its authoritarian reach in areas like its one-child policy, “zero Covid” lockdowns, censorship, and individual rights. He says he wishes the country were “50 percent more lawyerly.” On the other hand, he wishes the United States were “20 percent more engineering.”

“Building homes should not be that difficult,” Wang says of America’s housing shortage. “We know how to build homes.”

Wang left China in 2023 to return to the United States. “I choose the West,” he says. “That’s unambiguous. I want the United States, with its values, to succeed.”

Today, he splits his time between Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his wife is a professor at the University of Michigan, and Northern California, where he works at the Hoover Institution under another Ģ����ý alumnus, Stephen Kotkin ’81.

���ܳ���Breakneck has Wang hopscotching the globe for speaking engagements. He is, it seems, moving at breakneck speed and, like he did at the URochester, engineering his own future.

This story appears in the spring 2026 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.

When the international art extravaganza opens on May 9, visitors to the pavilion sponsored by the Vatican will find a fusion of past and present in the music of the 12th-century German Saint Hildegard of Bingen being interpreted by some of today’s most innovative artists.

Helping bring the exhibit to life is , a professor of musicology at the Ģ����ý, whose extensive research into Hildegard has shaped how the world understands and performs her music.

Meconi was among the consultants to the creative team behind the Holy See’s pavilion, titled which as one of “eight pavilions that have the Venice Biennale buzzing.” The life and work of Hildegard inspired the exhibition and, according to the Holy See, centers on themes of “slowing down, listening, contemplating, and caring” and features performances by 24 artists, including stars like FKA Twigs, Brian Eno, Dev Hynes, and Patti Smith.

“One of the things I’ve always loved about Hildegard is how inspiring her music is to artists of all kinds,” says Meconi, whose book (University of Illinois Press, 2018) remains the first and only English-language text devoted to Hildegard’s work as a composer.

“Her music consists of a single melodic line that modern musicians use as a tabula rasa, bringing their own ideas and interpretations to it while still engaging with something authentically medieval,” Meconi says.

The Venice Biennale was founded in 1895 and is held every two years. Often described as the “Olympics of the art world” for its pavilions hosted by countries, the festival brings together artists, architects, and musicians and is a major stage for new ideas and cultural exchanges.

Part of the Vatican’s pavilion is located in The Mystical Garden in Venice, where visitors can listen to commissioned re-compositions of Hildegard’s music through headphones as they wander the secluded garden’s plots of vegetables and flowers.

The pieces were curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective, an experimental sound art organization based in Berlin and New York City.

Ģ����ý scholarship shapes a global stage

Meconi’s involvement began last fall when Soundwalk Collective contacted her seeking guidance on Hildegard’s music.

“They knew they wanted modern performers to interpret her work, so I provided editions and translations and answered questions about pronunciation, tuning, and so on,” Meconi says. “I was also able to suggest pieces that might be appropriate for specific artists.”

As part of her role, she was recorded singing Hildegard’s music at Electric Lady Studios, the legendary space founded by Jimi Hendrix in New York City.

“That was surreal,” Meconi says. “But it is also surreal for someone who specializes in music before 1600 to see Brian Eno’s name in an email subject heading and to do a translation specifically for him.”

Another highlight for Meconi, as she tells it, was learning that Pope Leo XIV had translated one of Hildegard’s song texts into Portuguese for the famous fado singer Carminho. The song was one for which Meconi had provided the edition.

“Technically speaking,” she says, “the pope and I are now collaborators.”

Who is Hildegard, and why is her work so hot right now?

“She was the Boss Lady of the 12th century.”

Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine nun and polymath of epic proportions. In addition to founding a convent, writing theological treatises on her heavenly visions, inventing a new language and alphabet, corresponding with everyone who was anyone in the 12th century, and authoring books on the natural world and healing, she was a prolific musician. She penned 77 songs and a musical drama before her death at 81 in 1179.

“She was the Boss Lady of the 12th century,” Meconi says.

The Holy See says its pavilion responds to the broad theme of the Biennale, titled “In Minor Keys.” The festival’s curator, Koyo Kough, died last year, but wrote of the exhibition in her original curatorial statement: “In refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded.”

The Biennale runs from May 9 to November 22.

Americans are sharply divided over immigration policy, particularly enforcement measures, but share common ground on some fundamental issues, including broad support for birthright citizenship.

Those are the takeaways from a new nationwide survey of more than 30,000 adults across all 50 states conducted by the , a nonprofit joint initiative of the Ģ����ý, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Rutgers University.

While the findings highlight deep partisan divisions, they suggest Americans also leave room for nuance when policy matters become personal.

“Immigration is one of the most polarizing issues in American politics,” says Ģ����ý political scientist James Druckman, a coauthor of the study and a nationally recognized expert on political polarization. “But when you look closely at the data, you see that Americans will distinguish between different policies and principles.”

Deep partisan divides

The survey found that roughly two-thirds of Americans say immigration is important to them personally, but revealed stark differences along party lines in how they view policy and enforcement.

For instance, 37 percent of respondents approve of President Donald Trump’s handling of immigration, while 49 percent disapprove. Among Republicans, however, approval reaches 78 percent, compared with just 11 percent for Democrats.

Similar divisions appear in attitudes toward federal immigration enforcement efforts. Nationwide, a third of respondents approve of the tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, while nearly half of them disapprove. Yet Republicans are far more supportive of them than Democrats, with the gap reaching almost 60 points.

“These differences are among the largest partisan divides we see on any policy issue,” Druckman says.

Broad support for birthright citizenship

Even as Americans disagree sharply about enforcement, the survey finds majority support for maintaining birthright citizenship, the constitutional principle of the Fourteenth Amendment that grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

Nearly 59 percent of Americans support birthright citizenship, whereas 24 percent oppose it. Support crosses party lines, although at different levels. The survey found 79 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents, and 39 percent of Republicans favor the policy.

Support also extends across the country geographically. Support for birthright citizenship fell below 50 percent in just three states—Montana (46 percent), Wyoming (47 percent), and South Dakota (48 percent).

“The relative consistency of support—at least compared to enforcement attitudes—suggests that Americans distinguish between debates over immigration enforcement and long-standing constitutional norms,” Druckman says.

A shift when policy gets personal

Although Americans often express strong views about immigration broadly, the survey shows that opinions shift when policy gets personal.

Ģ����ý one in four respondents say they worry that a family member or close friend could be deported, while about one in five say they personally know someone who is undocumented. Those concerns nearly double among Hispanic Americans.

The nuance plays out when Americans are asked their thoughts on deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for more than 10 years.

“Americans may support enforcement in principle but become more hesitant when policies affect people who have built lives in the United States.”

Just 31 percent favor the idea of deporting longtime undocumented residents, including only half of Republicans, who widely favor stricter enforcement.

“That suggests Americans may support enforcement in principle but become more hesitant when policies affect people who have built lives in the United States,” Druckman says.

More aggressive enforcement proposals also face limited national support. Only about a third of Americans support using the military to assist with mass deportations.

Taken together, the findings suggest immigration remains a complex issue for American voters—one marked by sharp partisan divides but also pockets of potential agreement.

“People may have very different ideas about how immigration should be handled,” Druckman says. “But the data show that their views are often more nuanced than the political conversation might suggest.”

For the media

James Druckman
Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science

An expert in political behavior and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Druckman studies public opinion formation, political polarization, political and scientific communication, political psychology, and experimental and survey methods. He has published approximately 200 articles and book chapters. His latest coauthored book, (University of Chicago), was published in 2024.

• Learn more about Druckman.