UJC/The Jewish Federations of North America, collectively among the top 10 charities on the continent, announced last week the launch of the First Annual Jewish Community Hero Awards, which celebrates the selflessness and courage of individuals who are bettering their communities through service and outreach.

The initiative — to-date the largest-ever Jewish social-networking effort — will honor one Jewish Community Hero of the Year, who will receive $25,000 to put towards his or her work, and also recognize four additional finalists. About 50 partner organizations are supporting the initiative, in addition to Jewish Federations across North America.

Any individual or group can nominate a hero through an open, online submission process. After screening, each nominee is posted on the Jewish Community Heroes Web site, where people can vote for their favorite Jewish heroes.

Thanks Nina for posting the trailor of Food, Inc. last month and for folk’s comments.

I recently had the fortune to join a group of community members from Boston’s Moishe/Kavod House Food Justice Campaign for a screening of the film. Here’s my review of the film–the good, the bad, and the ugly:

• I was first struck that the film would make an excellent education tool for students in grades 5-12 and beyond. Robert Kenner divides the film into chapters that do a nice job framing and connecting the dots on the key industries in our current food system–livestock issues, genetically modified organisms (GMO), the hidden costs of food and the ubiquity of corn. Showing this in health, science, political science or other classes would be a great way to provide students with a primer on where food comes from as well as a powerful, if at times graphic, illustration of what’s wrong with it.

A reminder to all who have not done so to please participate in the food poll to aid The Jewish Museum of Maryland in their research for a Jewish food exhibit!

The traveling exhibit is tentatively titled “Chosen Food: Cuisine, Culture and American Jewish Identity.” The exhibit will be accompanied by a catalog and an exhibit-related website, all of which will look at a huge range of questions about Jews and food, including the type of issues that the Jew and the Carrot and Hazon are interested in.

Yeah, so we talk about our vegetables a lot.  Last week after I picked up my CSA share I thought about blogging about taking my veggies out on the town (I had participated in the New Israel Fund’s event Love, Hate, and the Jewish State – vegetables in tow). I ultimately decided against it.  But others have been more forthcoming with their CSA adventures.

Each week Rebecca Tanen, one of the Jew and the Carrot Associate Editors, has been sharing her weekly adventures in her CSA box as a “CSA Newbie.”  And the Hazon CSA in Chicago (Tuv Ha’Aretz Chicago) has even started their own blog.   Anyone else have any more stories to share?

You are invited to apply (by June 15!) for a highly subsidized five-day Tour of Israel (November 15-19, 2009), from the unique perspective of: food!

What social justice issues do you care about?  Being a Jew and the Carrot reader one would imagine you might think about food justice, hunger, fair trade or local and sustainable food systems – and often through a Jewish lens.  So if we care about food issues, but how do we share that with others?  Over the next three weeks, we are very fortunate to have Jill Jacobs, the Rabbi-in-Residence for Jewish Funds for Justice offering her insight and thoughts on contentious challenges facing America today.

Not only that, but Jew and the Carrot readers will have the opportunity to share their experiences in tzedakah (financial support for the poor) and chesed (acts of loving-kindness) to enter to win a copy of Rabbi Jacobs’ book There Shall Be No Needy.   Simply leave us a comment about how you have given tzedakah or performed chesed. Did you intentionally give your CSA share to someone in need?  Have you volunteered at a soup kitchen? Tell us about it.

Are you looking to live the land?  Dine on organic food that you grow yourself?

Bake in a thermal mass oven?  Build durable mud buildings? Recycle EVERYTHING??

Want to do all of this in ISRAEL?

ECO-ISRAEL, based on the Hava & Adam eco-educational farm between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel,   offers English-speaking Jewish young adults, ages 18-30, a 5 month professional apprenticeship and coursework in permaculture and sustainable living.  Upon completion of the program, participants will receive an internationally recognized certificate in Permaculture Design.

This is my first of a series of posts chronicling my family’s first experience with community-supported agriculture. My mother and her friend, who happens to be a nutritionist, have decided to split a CSA box every week this summer.

Now this is not your ordinary CSA, since it is actually a Tuv Ha’Aretz – one of Hazon’s Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) Project, located at Tikvat Israel, a nearby synagogue.  This means that one should not be surprised when the woman coordinating the CSA explains in her weekly email that she will not be checking her email between 8pm on Friday and 9pm on Saturday…

This week’s CSA box included asparagus, rhubarb, spinach, head lettuce, mint (which we just put in the freezer to be used in future cups of tea), spring onions, salad mix and radishes. All the vegetables arrived in such an incredibly fresh condition that my mother was worried they would go bad quickly, so she hastily used them all in one or two meals. In addition, we went to the farmer’s market in Dupont Circle for mother’s day, where we purchased baby turnips and smoked mozzarella. Check out the meals we made with these goodies after the jump!

AJWS is accepting applications to the Dvar Tzedek Lisa Goldberg Memorial Writers’ Fellowship for 5770 / 2009-2010. The deadline is June 1.

AJWS Dvar Tzedek Fellows receive a modest stipend and write weekly Torah commentaries relating to the Jewish imperative for social justice. We invite you to apply for the fellowship and to circulate information about the fellowship to anyone you think would be interested.

To download the application for the fellowship, please click here. For more information, please contact Lisa Exler at lexler@ajws.org.

Shmuly Yanklowitz at Cafe Nana, the first restaurant to receive the Tav HaYosher

One year after the federal raid of the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, Uri L’tzedek (Awaken to Justice), an orthodox social action group,  has responded by establishing an ethical seal, Tav HaYosher, for all kosher eating establishments. “After seeing the pain and suffering inflicted by our own kosher industry on the stranger and the poor, the very people the Torah demands we protect, we realized we needed to be proactive and make a change,” said Shmuly Yanklowitz, founder and co-director of Uri L’Tzedek.

I  had the opportunity to speak with Rachel Rosenthal, an active member of Uri L’Tzedek and the Tav HaYosher campaign, and has taught about ethical kashrut in communities across the Upper West Side.

The Tav YaHosher campaign launches today with a public event 6:30 -8:30 pm at Cafe Nina, 505 W.115th St., 2nd floor, in New York City.  My interview with Rachel is after the jump.

The JNF Bronfman Green Fellowship is a ten-week Jewish and environmental learning and action fellowship.  The fellowship aims to explore the intersection of basic human needs, the environment and the Jewish tradition.

Students will meet weekly at the Bronfman Center and at site visits throughout New York City and New York State for hands-on learning and volunteering.  Students will commit to one day of volunteering and learning per week for the fall semester and will receive $150 each for their participation and the opportunity to work with professional environmental specialists to help implement a local improvement project with a budget of up to $10,000!

Photo by Julian Darwall. Illustration by Nick Shepard.

Attention Jewish Foodies! Check out this article, “Culture Clash in the New Jewish Food Movement”, published recently in New Voices, describing the question of elitism in the New Jewish Food Movement.  The piece is meant to start a conversation about the multiplicity of entry points and priorities in the Movement, and I hope you find it interesting. As an active member in the New Jewish Food Movement and a reporter on this piece, I found myself in some fascinating conversations that I hope will continue with all of you.

Months ago I had an idea for a themed Shabbat dinner: I would invite all of my friends from Commonwealth countries, and have a Queen’s Shabbat. I could serve Commonwealth inspired foods, and it would be a fun night to hang out with friends from all over the world. Since I host Shabbat meals all the time, the idea didn’t seem particularly daunting, but I never seemed to get around to setting a date and sending out an invitation.

Right before Pesach I met with Rabbi Yoni Sherizen, who runs the Jewish chaplaincy programs in the UK. Jewish chaplains (usually a married couple) are sent to live in a college town or on a university campus in order to help provide Jewish services to students at the local university. It’s a lot like Chabad, but without the rebbe, and it’s especially important in the UK, where there have been crazy amounts of anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Yoni and his wife Dalia were incredibly helpful to me when I was at Oxford in 2004, and I was concerned about how dire Yoni told me the situation was in so many British universities. Plus, the falling economy has meant a lot of funders have had to cut back, and some universities are in danger of losing their Jewish chaplains.