Offbeat Israel: Kitchen Appliances Visit the Mikveh
By Nathan Jeffay
Of all the characteristics Israelis have been blessed with, electrical safety is not one of them. Bare wires are a common sight. Earthing appliances is seen as a quaint indulgence a bit like wearing ties — popular abroad but not part of the culture here. And oy, the love affair with splitter sockets.
One doubts there’s any country in the world with as high a number of many five-way electrical splitter sockets as Israel. Everywhere you go, home, office or restaurant, the current runs around the place via splitter socket upon splitter socket. It’s easy to wonder whether the whole country is plugged in to a single socket in Jerusalem through an elaborate arrangement of splitters and extensions chords.
In the last few years, a couple of factors have come together to make things even more dicey — a trend for kitchen gadgetry and increasingly strict religious standards in the Orthodox world.
According to Jewish law, some kitchenware, crockery and silverware items need to be toiveled on acquisition. This means that they need immersing in a mikveh, a ritual bath. Different rabbis take different views on what items need toiveling, with some saying pretty much everything and others taking a minimalistic approach.
August 19, 2009, 9:04pm
How Whole Foods Resembles a Kosher Kitchen
By Elissa Strauss
Last month Whole Foods announced that it has become the country’s first nationally certified organic grocer. In order to receive this seal, the chain implemented a series of rules to avoid any commingling of conventional and organic unwrapped products. To anyone who has ever tried to separate milk and meat, these are rules that seem a bit familiar.
Jill Richardson, who took a job there for her recent piece on Alternet, explains some of the new more arduous rules: “I, following the rules closely, occasionally had to decline customers’ requests to slice their non-organic bread in our bread-slicing machine, as it was designated for organic use only. Likewise, certain spoons and pitchers were reserved exclusively for organics, which we had to wash in separate sinks from the dishes used for conventional food.”
It’s not the only way the organic industry has come to resemble the kosher industry. In order to get its organic certification, Whole Foods had to go through the California Certified Organic Farmers — an independent non-profit agency that provides growers and retailers with their imprimatur, for a price. And just like with kosher products, the consumer often ends up covering the costs of such oversight.
July 15, 2009, 7:06pm
Agriprocessors: Execs Await Trial, Workers Stage a Play
By Nathaniel Popper
An Iowa judge recently postponed one of the trials for top executives at the Agriprocessors kosher meat company. The executives were charged with nearly 10,000 separate child labor violations after the company was the subject of a massive immigration raid last May. This postponement means that the full story of the underage workers arrested during a raid at the plant will not be told until next year, at the soonest, when the trial is now set to commence.
In the meantime, though, some of workers who were caught in the raid are finding other venues in which to tell their story. Many of the former workers have been interviewed for an upcoming documentary film, abUSed, which is being done by the Guatemalan director Luis Argueta. A more unexpected forum for the voices of workers came in a very novel piece of theater that has been playing in small towns around the Midwest over the last few weeks. The production is called, “La Historia de Nuestras Vidas,” or “The History of Our Lives,” and it stars seven former Agriprocessors workers who were caught in the raid and sentenced to five months in jail. The men were brought together by a group called, Teatro Indocumentado, or Undocumented Theater, and coached on how to deliver their stories on stage.
As the Forward reported last fall, many of the former workers have been released from jail but kept in the United States until the trial of Agriprocessors’s executives. The actors are all in this category, and they tell of their confusion in the play.
Our American Dream had become a nightmare.
And the land of freedom had become our prison.
We came here so that we could provide for our families, and improve their future.
But we’ll return to them with empty hands.
We made friends here, but now they are gone, deported, I don’t know where.
And meanwhile, we wait — without knowing for how long,
We are still waiting,
Unable to make a life here and unable to return home.
When the production appeared in Minnesota, a reporter on local public radio wrote, “The acting wasn’t stellar and the writing wasn’t award-winning, but the close of the play brought down the house, and everyone got to their feet to applaud the performance.”
July 10, 2009, 2:40pm
Big Brother: Kashrut Edition
By Devra Ferst
Israel is a spiritual place — a place where many say they can always feel God watching over them. Thanks to two newly proposed virtual monitoring initiatives — a virtual kosher supervisor and cemetery guard — God may not be the only one watching.
The Chief Rabbi of Beersheva, Yehuda Deri (brother of former Shas leader Aryeh Deri), recently proposed the installation of kosher surveillance cameras in restaurants and bars in the city that are open late, Ha’aretz reported. The cameras would replace expensive late-night kashrut supervisors by sending a video feed to a central kashrut-supervising agency, which would monitor the kitchen’s activity.
While some look forward to the savings, others claim that the effort would violate their privacy.
In the same week, the Religious Services Ministry began to push for surveillance cameras to prevent vandalism of gravesites on the Mount of Olives, just outside of the Old City, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The mountain is home to 70,000 graves that date back as far as biblical times, such as those of Zecheria and Absalom. Among its more modern resting members are Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandate, and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Israel, look out, Big Brother is watching.
June 30, 2009, 12:35pm
This Week in the World of Kosher
By Nathaniel Popper
What goes into making food kosher?
The debate over this question has recently raged in America after the poor working conditions at the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse were exposed. The new Magen Tzedek certification has proposed that kosher food follow certain labor and environmental standards, but many Orthodox rabbis have disputed whether kosher certification can encompass anything more than the strict rules of kashrut.
Israelis are having their own version of this debate, looking at whether kosher certification should look at more than how the food is prepared. The chief rabbinate in Israel, which provides most kosher certification in the country, wanted to pull its kosher certification of a bakery owned by a Messianic Jew — a Jew for Jesus. The Israeli Supreme Court said that the chief rabbinate could not hold this baker to a higher standard than any other baker: “The Kashrut Law states clearly that only legal deliberations directly related to what makes the food kosher are relevant, not wider concerns unrelated to food preparation.”
In making its decision, the court cited a famous previous decision about an American-émigré belly dancer. In that decision, the court had ruled that the performances of the belly dancer at a hotel or catering hall could not be used to disqualify the site for kosher supervision.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the debate over kashrut has taken a different form during a European Union session on creating unified standards for animal slaughter. Last month, the British Farm Animal Welfare Council released a report stating that kosher and halal slaughter did cause animals “significant pain and distress.” In the end, though, the European Union passed a regulation protecting kosher slaughter in all EU member states — thus exempting religious slaughter from a requirement that all animals be stunned before they are killed.
No word came from Brussels on the belly dancing issue.
April 8, 2009, 3:42pm
From Heroin Chic to Chicken Soup Heroine
By Dan Friedman
According to newspapers in Britain, Kate Moss has gone kosher-style — in the preparation of food, if not in its consumption.
An article in the Daily Mirror suggests that the waifish supermodel was inspired to go kosher-style by Stasha Palos — she is the stepdaughter of her pal Sir Philip Green (the billionaire businessman) and just wrote her own cookbook based on traditional Jewish recipes. And there’s talk that Moss may be planning a cookbook of her own.
Moss, it is reported, has been slaving over a hot stove making salt beef, chicken soup and potato latkes for her boyfriend Jamie Hince. Reports do not confirm whether or not she is in the process of simmering her brisket and gedempt potatoes for the Seder tonight.
December 30, 2008, 9:07pm
Kosher Food — Made in China
By Lindsay Feldman
Woody Allen once said, “My view of reality is that it has always been a grim place to be … but it’s the only place you can get Chinese food.”
In this week’s New Yorker, writer Patricia Marx tags along with rabbis/kashrut supervisors working in China — the fastest-growing exporter of kosher goods on earth. The rabbis in Marx’s story don’t care much for Chinese food (and one of them has never even heard of Woody Allen), but they do offer a theory on the affinity that Western Jews have for Eastern dishes: “Are there any foods that Jews don’t like?”
To the backdrop of China’s thriving kosher food industry, books such as “The Jewish People’s Bible for Business and Managing the World” — yes, managing the world — and “The Jewish Way of Raising Children” were Chinese-language bestsellers last year, Marx writes.
December 24, 2008, 11:54pm
A Kosher 'Shield of Justice'
By Anthony Weiss
The Conservative movement’s Hekhsher Tzedek Commission has released its newly designed logo for their proposed “Justice Certification” seal that they are proposing to affix to kosher foods that meet certain labor, environmental, and corporate standards. While the merits of the new logo (which, to this reporter, is a bit migraine-inducing) are up for debate, the real significance in the move may be in the new name being assigned to the stamp: Magen Tzedek, or “Shield of Justice.”
The Conservative movement has taken a lot of flack from Orthodox critics who argued that Hekhsher Tzedek was a move to horn in on the Orthodox-dominated kosher certification business, and who pointed to the word “hekhsher” (which translates as “certification” and commonly refers to the stamp of approval from a kosher supervisor) as a sign that Hekhsher Tzedek’s boosters were confusing Judaism’s kosher laws with its ethical precepts.
By switching the language from “hekhsher” to “magen,” it appears that the Conservative movement is trying to sidestep those charges.
March 5, 2008, 3:21pm
Jackie Mason Has Cow Over ‘Kosher Cheeseburger’
By Aram David
Talia’s Steakhouse on New York’s Upper East Side has started serving a “Kosher Parve Cheeseburger,” made with a beef patty and tofu cheese, but according to the New York Post, some observant Jews aren’t salivating over the prospect — including Jackie Mason.
“I would never entertain the thought of eating cheese — real or fake — with meat… It makes me nauseous just thinking about it,” the comedian said.
Rabbi Basil Herring, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America, gave a more serious assessment to the Post:
Jewish law is very concerned for appearances. Not only should you always do the right thing, but it should be seen as the right thing.
Any Jew who keeps kosher knows a cheeseburger is not permissible. But … what happens if a young kid, a 10-year-old, goes in there and says, hmm, maybe cheese on a burger is OK?
Detractors aside, there is apparently a constituency for a kosher cheeseburger. Talia’s owner, Ephraim Nagar, claims he has sold at least 20 of these $5-$8 burgers a night.
Note: Cheeseburger pictured above is not actual “Kosher Parve Cheeseburger” from Talia’s Steakhouse.
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