Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster for this guest post. Rabbi Kahn-Troster is Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights North America.

In Judaism, confession is a group experience. On Yom Kippur, we stand together as a community and in one voice confess our collective sins before God. Amidst the various lists of transgressions, the Al Chet prayer contains a line that deals with sustenance: Al chet she chatanu liphanecha b’ma’achal u’mishteh, literally: “For the sin we have sinned before You through food and drink.” “Food and drink” is often translated as “gluttony,” which narrows the sin to the idea that we are confessing to having eaten more than our share, wantonly, without thinking. I think the original translation is helpful—we have committed sins through all kinds of acts of eating and drinking, but also through the way our food is produced, distributed, and wasted. Read more »

Back in May, with Agriprocessors in the middle of its downward spiral (how far down it goes, nobody knows…), it seemed like there were people in Postville who still had some respect and appreciation for the jobs brought by the slaughterhouse, and felt their town was being unfairly picked on. On their blog Postville Voices, they wrote “We’ve had enough of every organization with an agenda cynically misrepresenting our town and workplace to further their own ends,” and added that, “There is one thing we do know — the people that run Agriprocessors are good, decent, honest people and we trust that they have acceptable answers.”

Well folks, the Associated Press has reported that the blog, was in fact created by none other than the son of Agriprocessors’ CEO Sholom Rubashkin, Getzel Rubashkin. And according to a professor of government at Harvard, this type of fake-grassroots known as “astroturfing” is common and generally accomplishes its goal.

“There’s not a big penalty associated with doing this and being caught,” said the professor, Herman B. Leonard. “There’s a potentially substantial benefit from being able to get out there with something that seems like a well-informed and active and energetic view that does not seem to be self-interested. So if you get away with it, it’s a plus. If you don’t, they say, ‘Well, it’s not too surprising.’”

Rubashkin claims that at the time, it did not occur to him that he ought to present his name on the blog in conjunction with the views espoused, and he did not intentionally leave off his identification in order to be deceptive. We’ll believe that when we also have all the accurate information about the meat coming out of the plant and the way it’s produced.

Note to self: Be sure to investigate the last names associated with all so-called front group blogs. Maybe it will be clear that they are barely even front groups after all.

The Associated Press reported that in response to the raid on Agriprocessors kosher meat plant last May (and the legal fallout surrounding it): “an organization of Orthodox Jewish rabbis announced that it was forming a task force to devise Jewish principles and ethical guidelines on the kosher food industry.”

According to the story, published in the NY Times:

The group, the Rabbinical Council of America, said it would publish the results in a guide. Rabbi Asher Meir, an author and expert in Jewish business ethics, will lead the task force.

On the one hand this is great news - and Rabbi Meir et al deserve advance praise for their efforts.  But I’m left feeling disappointed that the Orthodox task force has, it seems, chosen to work in isolation rather than reaching out beyond denominational lines to the Hekhsher Tzedek project, which is currently endorsed by both the Conservative and Reform movements.  While working together would certainly be more difficult, the opportunity to build ties across “party lines” on such an important issue seems a shame to miss.  And in the end, the creation of a implementable, cross-denominational Jewish ethical certification has much more potential to make real change than a published guide.

Over the next four weeks, Jews will be sitting down to together to more celebratory meals in succession than they likely do the entire rest of the year.  Many of those meals will be kosher, and many more will include meat as either a main or side course - or both.  Meanwhile, Jewish people around the country are also beginning to think differently about the meat that they eat, in light of the immigration raid on the kosher meat plant, Agriprocessors earlier this year, and of all the transgressions related to the conventional meat industry (CAFOs, hormones and antibiotics, worker abuse, etc).  For some people, the easiest response is to go vegetarian.  But for people who choose not to go the veggie route, what are the options?

We asked some of the leading voices of the New Jewish food movement to answer the question:  “If I choose to eat meat over the high holidays, what is the number one thing I should consider?”

Read their responses below - and share your own.

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The fact that an announcement about the OU threatening to pull its certification from Agriprocessors came out during the month of Elul is too poignant to overlook.

Shortly after Iowa’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Agriprocessors’ owner, Aaron Rubashkin (for child labor violations), The Orthodox Union decided that unless management is replaced very soon (the quote from Rabbi Menachem Genack claims to have two weeks as its very latest point), they will no longer see the company as fit to bear its stamp of approval.  Many people couldn’t be happier.

In the first of many emails I received about it the OU’s decision today, the sender framed it as the OU bowing to market pressure. I actually fear that many people will see it as such and applaud their boycotts and outraged blog posts. Now, I have stopped eating Agriprocessors meat for quite a while (ever since the first PETA video, and its subsequent rumblings), and have made my share of outraged statements, several times in very public fora, but I firmly believe that making statements about the OU caving to market pressure is counterproductive and bordering on the offensive. Read more »

Agriprocessors just keeps getting better and better. Following on the heels of the recent Forward article about conditions for Brooklyn workers, the Times reports that Agri is asking the Supreme Court to deny workers in their Brooklyn distribution center the right to unionize because they are “not documented workers and not allowed to work.” According to the Times, Agriprocessors claimed “to have just discovered that…the workers were illegal immigrants,” just a few days after the 2005 union vote.(1) An image comes immediately to my mind: Captain Renault in Casablanca declaring, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

I don’t get to geshrei on my own website, so I’m going to let it out here. There’s a level of public lying which is not easily excused. A level which is so lowly and bald-faced that there really can’t be any normal or average t’shuvah process (repentance) for it. I think Agriprocessors may have reached that level a while ago.

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I first started out in the Jewish environmental movement back in 1981 (I was already an environmentalist of the 70’s variety in high school). Back then the majority of Jewish enviros were ideological vegetarians, the backbone of Jewish Vegetarians of North America (JVNA), people like Richard Schwartz, Jonathan Wolf, and Roberta Kalechofsky. Their zeal for vegetarianism was as strong as any other passion they had for the earth.

Though I empathized with their feelings, they never rang true for me. I’ve been a vegetarian for about 30 years, well more than half my life, and well before I was into Judaism. When people asked me why, I could give a dozen reasons, related to human health, the health of the land, the suffering of animals, etc. But I’ve never been an ideological vegetarian, and I never thought it was my mission to get everyone to stop eating meat.

That’s not to say that I never thought it would be a good idea for more people to “go veg.” Especially now, when we hear about things like what happens on the killing floor at Agriprocessors, vegetarianism looks like the better option.(1) Agriprocessors is not the only great argument for vegetarianism. So is global climate change—a huge percentage of the global warming gases emitted by our civilization come from the two ends of a cow.

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Last Thursday, the Forward revealed a new twist in the Agriprocessors’ story - or rather, the same old story, closer to home.

It turns out that the largest kosher meat packing plant in America, the one whose Iowa-based plant was raided by immigration officials back in May, has faced similar struggles with undocumented immigrant workers at their Brookly-based warehouse. Article author, Nathaniel Popper, writes:

“The company has been locked in legal battles for the past three years over its immigrant workers, who wanted to unionize the warehouse [in Brooklyn] because of what they described as mistreatment… The brown-brick meat market in Brooklyn also houses two other kosher meat distributors, Eastern Meats and International Glatt Kosher Meats. Both of these companies have a unionized work force that has health care benefits, paid sick time and a starting salary above the minimum wage. “Every job has its downside,” said Dave Young, regional organizing director for United Food and Commercial Workers. “But for the most part, International is a decent place to work. The workers have been there for years. It doesn’t have to be like it is at Agri.”

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The news about Agriprocessors is spreading both within and beyond the Jewish community, reaching sites as nearby as a Jewish educators’ conference in Vermont, and as far away as acclaimed political publications like The Nation and The Huffington Post.  Check it out:

The CAJE Conference, a Jewish educators’ conference, which is largely focused this year on the connections between Judaism and ecology (to the collective sound of thousands of die-hard Jewish environmentalists slapping their foreheads and muttering, “finally!”)  reportedly decided to not serve any Agriprocessors’ meat during the conference.  The JTA’s Fundermentalist blogger author, Jacob Berkman, quote conference organizers as saying Agriprocessors’ products are “just not in the spirit of CAJE.”  Berkman also quoted Hazon’s own, Nigel Savage, who commented, “We want to shift the axis of what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century so that it necessarily means to be involved in the larger issues that concern us.”  Read it here. (hat tip: Arieh Liebowitz)

The Nation, known for its no-nonsense, lefty political commentary, included a brief mention of the Agriprocessors scandal in their most recent edition.  The Jew & The Carrot and I got a nice little shout-out in the article, along with a tally of how many times the Jewish Press has covered the Agriprocessors’ story over the last three months, since the raid.  (For the record: 11 articles in the NY Times, 12 in The Forward, 14 in The Jewish Week, and a whopping 25 in the JTA.)  Read it here.

More “Agriprocessors, elsewhere” coverage below

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Since the raid on the Agriprocessors plant on May 12th, bashing the kosher meat giant has become something of a sport. Everyone from the New York Times to failed messiah to yours truly has taken a few shots (some cheap, some well-deserved) at the Rubashkin family and the business they run out of Postville, Iowa.

I’ve never been big fans of the Rubashkin family. In fact, I called for a boycott of their meat in January, months before Uri L’Tzedek was on the case. But I’m getting a little frustrated with the way the scandal is being dealt with by liberal-minded people like me.

More, after the jump.
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I first read Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld’s thoughts about Tisha B’Av and Agriprocessors (re-printed below) via email this morning.  My fiance’s dad is on a Jewish listserve where the article was forwarded as a d’var Torah, and he sent it along to me.  I was deeply touched by Rabbi Herzfeld’s words - both their emotional and spiritual resonance and also his coherent assessment of Agriprocessors’ rippling impact on the Jewish community. “Who was this Rabbi Herzfeld?” I wondered. More importantly, “Would he let me re-print his d’var Torah on The Jew & The Carrot, so I could share it more widely?”

Then I picked up (meaning read on my laptop) the New York Times - and there he was again!  This time, his words were in the form of an op-ed - slightly edited from the d’var - but equally powerful.  Yesterday, I mentioned hypocrisy on the blog, in the context of examining our own food ethics, and not always liking what we find.  Rabbi Herzfeld picks up on similar themes in his article.  Kol ha’kavod to him for his brave words.

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The concept of sustainable kosher meat has been swirling around the Jewish community for a couple of years now, but tracking down the real thing is about as tough as an undercooked brisket.

I have come to partly dread the semi-regular emails I receive from hopeful people asking if I can tell them where to find kosher organic chickens in Topeka or, heck, Berkeley. Same thing for the farmers who call and say they have the chickens, or cattle, or lamb and just need to find a shochet (kosher slaughterer), and can we help them with that? In some cases, the answer is yes, but overwhelmingly I find myself apologizing that, while the demand for such a thing is growing, supply - and especially willing schochtim - just haven’t quite caught up yet.

That’s why I was excited to hear that New York City resident, Dr. Maya Shetreat-Klein, is making it a little easier to eat one’s values, through a new sustainable kosher meat co-op: Mitzvah Meat.

Read more »

When a big news story - like say, the Agriprocessors raid - breaks, there’s an immediate storm of “you heard it here first” reports, and “you heard it hear differently, no really!” follow up reports and interviews, as well as a hail storm of commentary from urgent bloggers who mine new story angles, chomp noisily on old ones, and introduce both fact and hearsay into the mix. It’s an urgent, emotion-driven process that wipes away other news headlines, and shouts for readers’ undivided attention.

And then. There’s a pause.  A lull like the last few kernels of popcorn smacking against the pot lid, but mostly settling into stillness.  Other stories begin to trickle back into public consciousness (”Speaking of underage workers, did you hear about those Chinese gymnasts?”). Activists worry that people have stopped caring.  But they haven’t - they are just catching their breath and digesting everything they have read and heard.

It seems that the most recent Agriprocessors story, which started in mid-May after the raid, is beginning to enter its post-pause phase.  During this time, articles begin to move beyond the shocking, breaking-news headlines and dig a little deeper into the story’s nuances.  These articles are more reflective, and they begin to point to the longer-lasting impact that a story might have on public consciousness.  Today’s article in the New York Times, which focuses on the stories of underage immigrants who worked for Agriprocessors, is a good example of a post-pause article - one of others that will undoubtedly begin to surface now that the dust (or maybe feathers?) has cleared.

Read it here or below the jump.

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The JTA reported that an interfaith coalition is planning to demonstrate in Postville this Sunday, July 27. Participating Jewish organizations include The Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Jewish Labor Committee, and The Workmen’s Circle. Similar to the Darfur rally in Washington DC, which made waves of a couple years ago, participants will drive and bus in from across the region and country to Postville (with transportation funds supported by Mazon) for the rally. JCUA’s Executive Director, Jane Ramsy said:

There are two targets here. One is a message to the government for comprehensive immigration reform on the one hand, and secondly to Agriprocessors for the permanent implementation of livable wages, health care benefits and worker safety.”

Read the article here.