Sarah Rose is a writer living in New York. She is currently working on a non-fiction book, FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA, the story of a 19th Century botanist-turned-spy who stole the secrets of tea from Imperial China and brought tea plants to India as an undercover agent for the East India Company. To be published by Viking 2008 (Hutchison in the UK). Sarah has worked as a journalist for Reuters and the Miami Herald, and as a stringer and travel-writer based in Hong Kong. She was previously Managing Editor of Plenty Magazine, a lifestyle magazine for the “green” generation. She holds a bachelors degree from Harvard in English literature and a masters degree from the University of Chicago in humanities.
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Concerns over working conditions at Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meat processing plant, are heating up after a walk-out organized by the United Food and Commerical Workers, The Forward reports.
The NYTimes piled on with a profile of Conservative rabbi, Morris Allen, leading the charge for a social justice oriented tzedek hecsher.
Allen joined a team of rabbis who investigated the Postville plant last summer: “We weren’t able to verify everything [the Forward reported on working conditions]” Rabbi Allen recalled, “but what we did find was equally painful and filled with indignities.”
The Orhtodox Union equivocated.
My work here is done: The Jew and the Carrot are launched and my planet needs me. I leave you in the excessively capable hands of Leah, your new editrix in chieftess, now in the holy land.
In my last act, I give you my Great Aunt Lil’s homemade bagels. They come from Duluth, Minnesota – where the Jews are tall and above average. Not New York bagels; these are small and tough and chewy. Boiled and baked, these bagel put up a fight. My Aunt Lil’s bagels are right, New York’s are wrong.
My long gone maiden aunt made a batch once a month, every month, for at least 90 years. I have never gotten them right and can never hope to make bagel that good. Though I try. And I consider it a most worthy goal.
Litvak Bagels, Duluth, Minnesota circa 1900
(yield 5 to 5 1/2 dozen – this recipe takes most of a day to complete)
You still have time to vote for The Jew and the Carrot as best new Jewish blog of 2007.
Polls for the first round close at 10pm EDT Sunday.
[jibawards.com]
Every once in a while, I get this terrible alert in my inbox. The video goes up on youtube, the video is pulled down.
I debated not linking to it, or just linking to the wikipedia article instead, but decided in a free soceity I get to iterate just how stupid and wrong and hurtful the myth of the “kosher tax” is without being afraid to say so.
I’m naive, but it still surprises me to find anti-semitic hate speech about ketchup.
Jewish food in America doesn’t have a high gastronomic reputation. Criticized for stringy meat and starchy, schmaltzy sides, the censure is to some degree well earned. The peasant food of Eastern European immigrants reflects the landscape and lives from which it came – the winters were long, the vegetables few, and meat was left on the hob from sundown to sundown.
Yet Jewish cuisine is fixed in the American dietary consciousness via the kosher delis of yore, despite a reputation for gummy brown food. You can find a bagel anywhere in America. (Price Chopper carries bacon and egg bagels.) Corned Beef and Pastrami are in every supermarket in Minnesota. Matzo balls have made their way to Hawaii.
In America’s Great Delis, author Sheryll Bellman provides a timeline for deli culture, starting at 6000 BC when hunter gatherers boil water, which she declares the birthday of borscht. (Borscht Belt humor, thankfully, has not made it too far past the Catskills.) In a book that is lovingly produced with archival photos and the occasional recipe, Bellman pays homage to the transmission of Jewish culture through deli food.
Food History has a cute (perhaps apocryphal) story about the first kosher butchers to arrive in Cairns, Australia.
The two shochetim willingly opened all their cases. The smallest case, flat as a briefcase, was filled with sharp blades polished and bright and dangerous. Big enough to kill a cow with one stroke and cause it no pain. Big enough and sharp enough to worry Customs. Customs called Security and the two Israelis were taken to a side room for further investigation.
The Australian who was supposed to interpret was unacountably detained and the Israelis didn’t have much English so they sat in the side room, trying to work out what to do.
“All we need,” said one to the other in Hebrew, “Are the English words for ‘Anachnu shochetim’ and they’ll understand the knives.”
New York city Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposes the congestion tax.
“Like with the smoking ban,” he said, “we did it, and whole countries followed us.”
We heart him.
For its 10th Anniversary gourmet fundraiser, the JCC of Washington DC has changed its kosher policy to “kosher-style”, angering observant supporters, the Washington Jewish Week reports.
The chief reasons cited by representatives of local Jewish organizations for serving kosher-optional fare are that kosher meals are relatively costly and not particularly popular among attendees a combination that can reduce the net proceeds of fund-raisers. (Only 7.2 percent of local Jews eat strictly kosher food both in and outside of the home, according to the 2003 Greater Washington Jewish community survey.)
Disgruntled former masgiach to theatre district kosher favorite, Le Marais, has a rockstar past, the NYPost reports:
April 16, 2007 — He was European rockin’ royalty until he saw the light of the rebbe. Now Isaac Bitton’s former bosses at Le Marais, a French kosher steakhouse in Manhattan, may use his fast-living past against him in their $10 million lawsuit denouncing allegations they failed to maintain a kosher kitchen.
In his youth, Bitton was famous as Jacky Bitton, the drummer for Les Variations, a hard-rock band that topped France’s music charts and played on bills with 1970s supergroups Aerosmith, Kiss and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
The intricacies of the Conservative movement’s proposed tzedek or “justice” hechser get a look from PA’s Jewish Exponent:
Lyon [a rabbi on the committee] stressed that the commission members are still figuring out what criteria will be used, and how deeply certifiers will have to dig to investigate conditions. It’s also not clear whether the hechsher will just stick to labor issues, or if it will also take a page from the eco-kosher idea — developed by leaders of the Jewish Renewal movement, including Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Philadelphia Rabbi Arthur Waskow — and also examine a slaughterhouse’s effect on the environment.
Voting is still open for the 
