Kugel and the Quiet Power of Jewish Storytelling

In 2015, during my first trip to Jerusalem as a young Indian PhD student studying Israel, I tasted kugel for the first time. My generous host insisted.

It arrived warm, dense, unfamiliar; a dish shaped by traditions I barely understood then. The taste was unlike anything I had grown up with: sweet yet restrained. I ate it politely and moved on. But I never went back to kugel.

Nearly a decade later, I encountered kugel again, not on a plate, but on a screen. This time, it stayed.

Kugel, the television series created by Yehonatan Indursky, is not merely a prequel to the internationally acclaimed Shtisel. It is a quieter, more introspective work that uses the everyday textures of ultra-Orthodox Jewish life to tell a story about belonging, compromise, and emotional inheritance. Set in Antwerp (Belgium) rather than Jerusalem, it follows Nuchem (familiar to audiences of Shtisel) and his daughter Libbi, long before they appear in the Shtisel series. What unfolds is not plot-driven drama, but something far more rewarding: an intimate study of lives lived within constraint.

I watched Kugel five years after finishing Shtisel, which was briefly available on Netflix in India in 2020-21 before being taken offline. In September last year, during my trip to New York, I asked a Jewish friend where I could watch Israeli TV series in India. She suggested the Izzy app. It was a jackpot. Not only did I rewatch Shtisel (noticing details I had missed earlier), I binge-watched Kugel, drawn into its slower, narrower, yet emotionally deeper world.

I have been studying Israel for over a decade, first as a doctoral candidate and then as a researcher. Having visited the country several times, I have come to know Israel as a place of striking contradictions: a society shaped by conflict yet insistently lively. Even with this familiarity, the ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic worlds remained distant to me. As an outsider, my only access to that inner world came through storytelling: through Shtisel, and now Kugel.

The genius of Kugel lies in its restraint. Where Shtisel unfolded like a rich ensemble of everyday lives revolving around kitchen tables, matchmaking anxieties, and generational disappointment, Kugel narrows its gaze. It lingers on Nuchem’s moral improvisations, his small-time schemes, his stubborn optimism. He is at once infuriating and endearing, deeply flawed yet unmistakably human. There is humour here, sometimes bordering on absurdity, but it is never mocking.

Libbi, his daughter, becomes the emotional counterweight: observant, searching, often silent. Their relationship carries the weight of unspoken expectation and inherited disappointment. The series captures this not through grand confrontations, but through pauses, glances, and moments that feel almost intrusive in their intimacy. Ordinary scenes: a bicycle ride through Antwerp, a bus journey, a shared meal, become sites of quiet revelation.

The title, Kugel, is itself telling. Kugel is comfort food, ritual food, diasporic food: served across Ashkenazi Jewish communities on Sabbaths and holidays. It holds memory, repetition, and restraint within it, as my Jewish friends have told me many times. Like the dish, the series is dense. It does not seek to seduce the viewer. It asks you to sit with it, to taste it slowly, to understand its texture before judging its flavor.

For an Indian viewer, this resonates deeply. India, too, is a civilization of ritual, hierarchy, faith, and negotiation between tradition and modernity. We understand what it means to live within inherited structures, to love them and resent them simultaneously. Kugel does not romanticize ultra-Orthodox life; nor does it sanitize it. It presents a community in all its contradictions: warm yet rigid, ethical yet compromised, deeply communal yet quietly lonely.

This is where Israel’s understated soft power emerges. In a global imagination dominated by conflict and violence, series like Kugel and Shtisel offer something else entirely. They reveal Israel, and Jewish life more broadly, through kitchens rather than Knesset sessions, through family arguments rather than political ones. Food, language, ritual, silence: these become the medium of understanding.

Ten years ago, kugel was simply a dish I did not quite understand. Today, Kugel has become a metaphor for a world that does not explain itself, yet invites empathy, for lives lived within boundaries that outsiders rarely see clearly. It reminds us that the most powerful stories are not always loud, and that sometimes, soft narratives do more diplomatic work than any official exchange ever could.

In that sense, Kugel lingers, much like its namesake, long after the first taste.