Fishkoff - Kosher Nation

ALSO BY SUE FISHKOFF

The Rebbes Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch

Copyright 2010 by Sue Fishkoff

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fishkoff, Sue.
Kosher nation / Sue Fishkoff.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-8052-4288-1
1. JewsDietary laws. 2. Kosher food. 3. Kosher food industry. I. Title.
BM710.F56 2010
296.73dc22 2010011326
www.schocken.com

v3.1

For my grandparents

On my bookshelf, tucked away between Mollie Katzens Moosewood Cookbook and Irma Rombauers The Joy of Cooking, is a tattered little yellow book, its worn binding barely held together by a few dusty pieces of Scotch tape.

This is my copy of Love and Knishes, Sara Kasdans 1956 guide to Jewish cooking, passed down to me by my mother, who was presented it by her mother-in-law, my grandma Belle, soon after my parents married in December of that year.

Written in a folksy, Yiddish-inflected narrative tone, Love and Knishes offers strictly Old World, Ashkenazic fare: sweet and sour cabbage, stuffed derma, gefilte fish made from live carp, chopped liver with gribenesall of it swimming in schmaltz, the rendered chicken fat generations of Jewish women used instead of butter for meat meals to avoid transgressing the laws of kashrut (the Hebrew term for keeping kosher).

Grandma Belle wanted to make sure her daughter-in-law knew how to prepare the right kind of food for her new husband, a man who, unbeknownst to my grandmother, wanted nothing to do with boiled brisket or pickled tongue or any other culinary reminder of his parents roots in the Russian Pale.

My mother tried valiantly for months. I can still make out her scribbled notes on the lokshen (i.e., noodle) kugel page, reminding herself to add chopped apricots and a third egg to the recipe. Finally, my father said, Enough! And out came the Kraft mac and cheese, the spaghetti with meat sauce, and, for a real treat, the Swanson TV dinners.

That cookbook was pretty much all I knew about kosher food growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1960s and early 70s. Kosher food was something we got once a year at my grandparents Passover seder, and in my young mind, it became inextricably linked to the history of our people. We would read the Haggadah, the story of the Exodus from Egyptmy only exposure to Jewish textand then tuck into matzo ball soup, gefilte fish with red horseradish sauce, roasted chicken, carrot tzimmes, boiled potatoes, and noodle kugel.

No green vegetable sullied the table, in accordance with Ashkenazic norms. Kasdans salad chapter, Papa Called It Grass, contains just three recipes, only one based on actual greenery. Her explanationJews dont do vegetablesis one my dad has always taken to heart.

It was years before I encountered kosher-keeping Jews at close range and began to understand the deep spiritual connection observant Jews have to their food. It certainly wasnt present at the Israeli kibbutzim where I spent much of the 1970s and 80s, the cooperative settlements whose dining halls eschewed the dietary restrictions their founders left behind in Poland and Ukraine.

No, the understanding came later, in 1991, when I spent a year studying Jewish texts at Pardes, an egalitarian yeshiva in Jerusalem. As one of the few students who did not keep kosher, I felt the loneliness on Friday nights when the others refused my dinner invitations.

But I also experienced the rare beauty of a traditional Shabbat meal, where blessings are said over the wine and the bread, where the food has been chosen and prepared according to laws meant to remind us that we are not alone in the world, that we are part of an intricate, carefully balanced network of life and death that existed long before us and extends far into the future.

Jews arent the only people with a tradition of sacred eating, although our laws are the oldest to have survived into the modern world. How we sow, how we harvest, how we slaughter, how we prepare our food, how and when we eat itJews are hardwired to link our food choices to moral and political beliefs, which is probably why so many Jews are active in the organic, locally sourced, and vegetarian movements. What we put in our bodies has a lot to say about who we are and what we value.

Two separate incidents provided the immediate impetus for this book. Some years ago I found myself in Sumy, an industrial city in northeastern Ukraine, researching an article about a young Chabad couple who had moved there from Malibu, California. One afternoon I drove with the rabbi, his wife, and their three children in a rickety Russian-made car two hours out of town to a farm to watch the farmer milk his cow. Many ultraobservant Jews will only drink cholov Yisroel, milk that is watched from the time it leaves the cow, and it was so important to these parents that their children enjoy fresh milk that they went to this considerable effort two, sometimes three times a week. I was struck by their determination to keep the laws of kashrut in such a difficult environment.

A year later, while covering a National Havurah Committee retreat in New Hampshire, I sat with a group of young Jews active in the independent minyan movement. The indie minyans, as they are called, are a loosely knit collection of lay-led prayer communities run by and for Jews in their twenties and thirties. In their efforts to be welcoming to all, they explained to me, many of them follow a two-table system of kashrut at their potluck meals. One table is for vegetarian food that carries a hekhsher, or kosher certification, and one table is for vegetarian food that does not carry such a label. Thus everyone can bring food and everyone can eat food, no matter his or her observance levelradical inclusiveness tempered by a twenty-first-century sensitivity to religious belief.

Seeing, on one hand, the lengths to which a hassidic family will go to keep kosher in Ukraine, and on the other hand, the determination of young Jewish social-justice activists to honor Jewish tradition while excluding no one, I was struck by how broad the spectrum of Jewish sacred eating has become.