In truth, the coop’s nearly 16,000 members are actually a varied bunch, representing a cross-section of Brooklynites seen in few places outside of the subway. Yes, many are like me: a white, liberal, college-educated parent who lives in brownstone Brooklyn. But the aisles are also populated by Rastafarians in knit hats, silver-haired women surviving on Board of Education pensions, artsy kids who live with 10 roommates in Bushwick, and a sizable number of Orthodox Jews loading up their carts on Thursday nights in preparation for Shabbat.

It’s the last group that would likely feel most compelled to leave the coop were the proposed boycott instituted, although many nonreligious Jews and non-Jews probably would as well. Barbara Mazor, a coop member since 1988 who lives in Midwood and describes herself as “ultra Modern Orthodox,” is one of the most vociferous opponents of the proposed ban. She estimates that as many as 20 percent of members would leave the coop if such a ban did pass.

The effort to have the coop join the international campaign of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel has percolated on the fringes of the organization for years, largely through vociferous letter-writing to The Linewaiters’ Gazette, the coop’s house newspaper. Proponents consider Israel’s occupation of the West Bank illegal and its treatment of Palestinians unconscionable, and they believe in blocking the sale of Israeli goods as a nonviolent way to denounce such actions. (Identical measures have roiled other food cooperatives around the country, passing in Olympia, Wash., and defeated in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Sacramento and Davis, Calif.) The effect at the Park Slope Coop would be almost entirely symbolic since it currently carries only four Israeli products: paprika, bath salts, vegan marshmallows, and the SodaStream seltzer machine.

The issue was officially discussed at a monthly coop general meeting this winter, the first step in a long process to try to establish a ban. Because the coop is just that—a cooperative—it’s governed by deeply democratic processes that allow everyone a voice and often move at a glacial pace. At general meetings, for example, any member can submit any subject for discussion (this could hypothetically include, say, a discussion about whether the earth is flat or dill pickles are superior to half-sour). But on July 26, the proposed boycott finally came up for discussion at the general meeting. There was no vote on whether to put the matter before the entire membership, but that could eventually happen if attendees at a future general meeting vote in favor of holding a membership-wide referendum—a rare, slow, and expensive process that hasn’t occurred since the landmark “Should We Sell Meat and Beer?” vote of 2002. (This was a real referendum that did eventually pass.)

Anti-boycott members have been organizing in opposition to the effort, arguing that the proposal runs counter to the coop’s mission of being accessible to and respectful of all, and that the boycott movement is wrongly focused only on Israel’s role in the Middle East conflict and ultimately seeks the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state.

Barbara Mazor, the Orthodox Midwood resident who has been a coop member for 23 years, was incensed by the proposed ban. Last March she began organizing, launching a blog (“Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions really means Bigotry, Dishonesty, anti-Semitism,” it proclaims), founding the anti-boycott group of 130 members that dubbed itself “More Hummus, Please,” and spearheading the writing of group letters to The Linewaiters’ Gazette.

“I think what it’s really about is being able to circulate their Israel vilification propaganda to the 16,000-person membership, just constantly creating this ‘Israel is a bad state’ narrative,” Mazor said. “Do I think it would pass? I would hope not, but I don’t see it out of the realm of possibility. That’s why we’re campaigning against it.”

Pinny Lew, a Lubavitcher from Crown Heights and father of seven who has belonged to the coop for eight years, said that a neighbor of his left the coop about a year ago, disgusted that a boycott was being considered. Lew noted that despite his own family’s deep commitment to local, organic, and fair-trade food, they too would leave were the boycott instituted. He doubted it would come to that. “It’s hard for me to believe that more than 5 or 10 percent of the total coop population, confronted with the facts, would say, ‘I’m for this,’ ” he said. In my nonscientific polling of about a dozen religious Jewish members, the general consensus was that they would leave the coop if the boycott passed (as would I) but were skeptical that it will actually happen.

Another Orthodox man, from Cobble Hill, concurred. “I would feel ethically obligated to leave the coop, but since it’s the best source of food we have, it would be very difficult,” said the man, who didn’t want his name used. Referring to the international campaign of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, he added, “It isn’t going to be able to have as much power here as they have in other communities. The value of political diversity will win out over imposed conformity.”

But Mazor is less sanguine. She fears that the boycott proposal might pass if it does ever come to a coop-wide referendum. The issue has already caused her to curtail her own coop shopping, but not for the reasons one might assume. “Because I’m spending so much time doing this,” she said of her campaigning, “I don’t have as much time to shop at the coop. I get takeout from Avenue J.”

CORRECTION, August 16: The Park Slope Food Coop is 38 years old, not 28. This error has been corrected.

“Shabbat?” I said. “Are you serious?”

My husband, you see, is a proudly secular Jew who thinks that religion amounts to at best harmless superstition and at worst nefarious brainwashing. He’s outwardly respectful of the religious, of course, and he has adapted admirably to my request that we keep kosher at home (even as he relishes his bacon cheeseburgers at restaurants). He dutifully sits through my family’s two lengthy Passover Seders every year. But he maintains that belief in God is as preposterous as belief in the tooth fairy.

So, it was somewhat shocking when he came up with this Shabbat idea, although I knew what had inspired it. We’d been feeling that something just wasn’t right about answering non-emergency work-related phone calls at 10:30 on a Friday night, or checking email reflexively upon awakening on Saturday. We yearned to carve out a space in our week to shut it all down.

This feeling was not unfamiliar to me. I have been on and off the Shabbat wagon for years as I’ve pinged among Orthodoxy Renewal, and all points between. At times I have kept Shabbat in ways that seem less like religious practice than like obsessive-compulsive disorder: I have pre-cut toilet paper; I have taped over the refrigerator light to prevent it from turning on; I have huffed up 14 flights of stairs in an elevator building; I have refrained from draining the water from a can of tuna lest I violate the rule against borer, or sorting. While I had experienced the sublime sensation that can arise through Sabbath observance, I could never muster enough spiritual certainty to say that it was essential.

So, here we were, my husband daring to acknowledge a value to Shabbat that has nothing to do with God, and me trying to let go of my internalized Orthodox expectations and accept that Shabbat need not be an all-or-nothing affair. Casting around to envision our own customized day of rest, we quickly found models. In the New York Times, Mark Bittman a few years ago popularized the term “secular Sabbath” to describe his practice of going tech-free for 24 hours. In last year’s The Sabbath World, Judith Shulevitz argued for observing some kind of Sabbath not necessarily because God said so but because it’s socially useful and psychologically beneficial. Advocating for a digital-free Sabbath is all the rage these days; there’s even a National Day of Unplugging, spearheaded by the media-savvy Jewish group Reboot, which recently released a no-irony-intended iPhone app that enables users to announce their unplugged status to their Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

After my husband and I decided to take the plunge, we came to the task of setting our parameters. We agreed that would shut down our phones and computers—really shut them down, none of that wimpy silent crap. We would light Shabbat candles. We would bless and drink wine (as well as gin martinis). We would try not to use money or travel except by foot, but, in an unapologetic departure from Orthodoxy, we would allow cooking, playing music, writing, and even occasional DVD-watching.

Our experiment began around New Year’s. On a Friday afternoon, we called our parents to remind them that we would be unreachable for a day, as if bidding them farewell before a long plane flight. We turned off our phones and computers with the kind of high drama that seemed to warrant its own blessing (“borei pri ha power button,” perhaps). Then we sat down and took a deep breath, suddenly becoming aware that we actually had lungs. On Saturday, we ate good food, took a walk, and read. We listened to music carefully, focused on every lyric and instrument. We played and laughed with our young daughter.

And there were corporeal pleasures too. Say what you will about hazelnut gelato or Swedish massage, but is there anything more indulgent than sex in the afternoon? I recalled the popular teaching that it’s a “double mitzvah” to have sex on Shabbat, as both observing the day of rest and having sex with your spouse are mitzvot.

But our greatest enjoyment was simply being suspended in a day of being rather than doing. Piled on the couch together as a family without the distractions of interactive technology, divorced from the acquisitive and aspirational impulses that drive most of modern life, we understood in the most visceral way how the deprivations one enforces on the Sabbath enable a kind of liberation. Our attention was reserved for each other. The world was overlaid with glittery stillness. We stepped back from the buzzing of our lives and said, “Here we are.” Without being able to articulate exactly what holiness is, we agreed that it felt holy. Even my non-believing husband, who did not revise his ideas about God, was convinced. He became nearly fanatical about Shabbat.

Secular justifications for the Sabbath are, of course, not new. In her book, Shulevitz reviews dozens of them, invoking Freud, Marx, and Hannah Arendt, and explaining the urge to observe a Sabbath based on community bonding, political utility, or common overwork. Even Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 1951 masterpiece, The Sabbath, can be read as a celebration of what he called the weekly “cathedral in time” for its positive effects on humanity, without necessitating belief in a supernatural God.

“To set apart one day a week for freedom,” Heschel writes, “a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature—is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man’s progress than the Sabbath?”

It’s been nearly six months since we began observing our modified Sabbath. There have been relapses, certainly. We turned on the computer one Saturday to look up guitar chords for a certain song, and the next thing I knew we were absentmindedly scrolling through real-estate listings. On a few occasions, when an airplane flight or work meeting has been unavoidable on a Saturday, we have wondered if it would be so terrible to move Shabbat to Sunday.

But largely we have stuck with it. Mindful of the invocation to enjoy the seventh day with community, we invite family and friends over for Shabbat lunch, labeling the meal “brunch” and serving waffles and omelets, all the more comfortable for the secular. We fantasize, perhaps naively, that once our toddler daughter is allowed TV and computer time, we will continue to enforce Shabbat as a timeout from screen absorption. We explain to others why we don’t answer their phone calls on Saturdays and see them respond with equal amounts of amazement, admiration, and envy. Their eyes widen and they inquire in hushed tones, as if we had stumbled upon a stash of an amazing new illicit drug. Really? What’s it like?

What we tell them, with nearly evangelical fervor, is this: Shabbat is like exercising. You avoid it. You groan about it. You think of a million other things you would rather do. Finally, you drag yourself to do it and you feel amazing. You vow that you will keep doing it over and over again and become a whole new super healthy glowing you. You approach Oprahish levels of inner calm and rejuvenation. And you may just feel so present that you forget about your plugged-in life altogether. It’s a religious ritual that even an atheist can love.

Sheila from Des Moines is the imaginary shopper who Einav Gefen thinks of while at work at Unilever North America, a branch of the global consumer-products titan that earned nearly $60 billion last year. Anyone who licks a cone of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, eats a sandwich with Hellmann’s mayonnaise, sips a cup of Lipton tea, spreads Skippy on celery, slurps Slim-Fast shakes, or munches toast topped with Country Crock has Unilever to thank. Like God, or molecules, Unilever is everywhere.

Gefen is the company’s head corporate chef in the United States, and she develops new food products for its North American market. Unilever produces items on such a massive scale that it is said to buy, for instance, 3 percent of the world’s palm oil, 4 percent of its tomatoes, and 12 percent of its black tea. This requires a certain mindfulness; when Gefen and her team of chefs created a new raspberry-hazelnut vinaigrette for Wish-Bone, the company had to purchase the entire hazelnut crop of Washington state that year. When she wanted to add a little arugula to a frozen meal being created for Bertolli, a mid-range Italian brand, she learned that there was simply not enough time to alert growers about the sheer volume of arugula that would be required, so she had to give up the ingredient. In a project to reformulate Ragú pasta sauce with more vegetables, she had a moment of realization that her own tinkering in the kitchen involved “endless, endless fields of tomatoes in California,” she said. “To wrap my head around that was like … wow.”

Gefen, 39, is ropy and thin, with big brown eyes, a pointy chin, a sprinkling of freckles, and a girlish gap between her two front teeth. She has the vivacity and enthusiasm of a cheerleader along with Hebrew-accented English and Israeli matter-of-factness. (“Jennifer, lee-son to me.”)

Unilever’s North American headquarters, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., spreads out over a sprawling campus of low-slung office buildings. Inside is a vast, fluorescent-lit warren of cubicles and boardrooms and glass display cases that show off the company’s products like pieces of art. Gefen’s fiefdom, the research kitchen, is an oasis of warmth and savory smells situated in the middle of this corporate expanse. It looks like a modern home kitchen multiplied by 20: a great sweep of black granite counters, custom wooden cabinets, stainless-steel sinks, luscious incandescent lighting, and multiple electric stoves, gas stoves, convection ovens, microwaves, toasters, and blenders.

On a brisk morning recently, she was flitting around Unilever’s research kitchen in chef whites and comfortable black shoes, overseeing preparations for a lunchtime presentation to members of the company’s frozen-foods team. Her team of chefs was dispersed around the room concocting the afternoon’s lunch presentation, about which I was sworn to secrecy. One chef pulsed a blender full of fresh herbs, another pulled trays of ice cream treats from a freezer, and another fired up four burners at a restaurant-caliber stove. They explained that they were working on a frozen-meal concept, inspired in part by the success of P.F. Chang’s Home Menu: Frozen Meals for 2, a line of frozen Chinese food that was introduced by the company last year. Gefen and her team had spent two years developing it. She had no expectation that the fruits of the current project would appear in stores any quicker.

“It’s like giving birth,” Gefen, a mother of three, told me. “For this, there’s no epidural.”

Growing up in Ramat Ilan near Tel Aviv, Gefen was interested in food from a young age. She watched her mother, Ruthie, channel her German roots through baking (“She loved measuring things exactly”) and her adopted Israeli self in cooking with fresh, seasonal food, largely because that’s all there was in Israel at the time. Imports were rare.

“You had tomatoes only in the summer and avocados only three weeks of the year, and God knows in those three weeks we ate enough avocados for a year,” Gefen said. “My mom would make very Israeli things. She took strawberries and bananas and mixed them with sour cream and sugar—that was my favorite. She used to grate tomatoes and mix them with a little cheese and salt, and I was in heaven.”

The family was secular, although like many secular Israelis, they lit candles and gathered for traditional Friday-night dinners featuring Ashkenazi staples.

“My uncle grated fresh horseradish, and my father’s aunt used to make gefilte fish. She had the carp in the bathtub and killed them herself,” Gefen said. “She made it with a lot of garlic, more savory than sweet. I love gefilte fish.”

Gefen’s father, Gershon, was a pilot for Arkia, Israel’s second-largest airline, and he often brought home treats from other countries—stinky cheeses, exotic mustards, strange spreads—that fascinated her. Eventually, Gefen tagged along with him to South Africa, England, Austria, and elsewhere. Her primary interest on these trips was to go to local supermarkets and observe what people bought.

After her army service, Gefen studied social behavior and communication in college, but the only behavior she wanted to research centered around food. She inserted herself in a hole-in-the-wall Ethiopian restaurant near Tel Aviv’s old bus station to watch injera bread being baked. She wrangled an introduction to her classmate’s Bukharian grandmother to observe what she and her neighbors did in their kitchens.

Instead of pursuing a medical or law degree as her father hoped, Gefen got an entry-level job assisting the head pastry chef at Orna and Ella, a popular bistro on Tel Aviv’s fashionable Shenkin Street. Upscale cuisine was blooming in Tel Aviv at the time. For years, serious Israeli foodies had to leave the country to experience fine dining. But by then, a cluster of top Israeli chefs who had worked abroad had brought their skills back to their native land. At Orna and Ella, Gefen learned to make classical French pastry and earned a reputation as a tireless worker and quick study. In 1995, she heard about an opening for a line cook at Mul Yam, one of Tel Aviv’s best restaurants, and she asked her boss to recommend her for the job. He phoned Mul Yam and said, “Look, we have this young woman here. She has no idea about cooking, but she can fold 50 egg whites into chocolate.” She became Mul Yam’s first female line cook, and eventually its sous chef.

Gefen came to New York in 1999 to attend culinary school, and her career progressed at a steady clip, including a stint at Daniel, the flagship restaurant of Daniel Boulud, and two years as the executive chef at Danal, a French restaurant near Union Square. By then, Gefen was a mother, and the grueling pace of restaurant life was taking its toll. To slow down, she became the director of the culinary center at the then-new Jewish Community Center of the Upper West Side, where she oversaw the design of the teaching kitchen and programmed culinary classes; part of her job involved explaining kosher compliance to guest chefs and walking them through their anxieties about it (“Their question was always, ‘What are eggs? Dairy or meat?’ ”) She then went to work as an instructor at her alma mater, the Institute of Culinary Education. In 2008 she heard that Unilever was hiring.

The most challenging part of her Unilever interview was an Iron Chef-style exercise, in which she was given 90 minutes to create three meals out of whatever she found in the research kitchen. She made chicken with sumac, olive oil, and garlic, marinated in beet juice and served over rice pilaf with raisins and almonds; flank steak smothered in mango barbecue sauce with curried potato chips; and a pomegranate tea-smoked pork loin with quick pickled cucumbers.

“I explained that the chicken and rice represents Israel, where I come from; the flank steak is America, where I am, and the pork smoked in pomegranate tea is my perception of food in the future, where I want to be,” Gefen said.

It can be perplexing to try and understand how a chef who knows full well the difference between sauce béchamel, sauce soubise, and sauce bordelaise can be satisfied making a frozen beef-and-broccoli dish that’s sold in a foil bag. Part of it seems to be the challenge of taking the artisanal trends emerging at restaurants in New York and Los Angeles and imagining how they might be adapted to play in Peoria.

Part of it also seems to be a kind of gastronomic pragmatism, an acceptance of how people actually cook and eat rather than how they’re told to. Unlike the Michael Pollans of the world, urging Americans to prepare meals from scratch with organic ingredients grown within 10 miles of their homes, Gefen is happy to meet them where they are, which more often than not is in the frozen-food aisle of the supermarket.

“Our ability to cook is diminishing. We’re reaching the point with new mothers where their own grandmothers didn’t cook anymore, so they didn’t have anyone to watch in the kitchen,” she said. “It’s great to feel you can contribute … making their lives easier and tastier so at the end of the day their kids say, ‘Yo, mom, awesome dinner!’ ”

As lunchtime rolled around, 10 members of the company’s frozen-foods team gathered at Unilever’s research kitchen to evaluate the super top-secret meal that Gefen’s unit had spent the morning preparing. They listened to a description of the food and watched a PowerPoint presentation about similar products offered by their competitors. They scrutinized the handsomely displayed dishes as if they were suspects in a police lineup. Then they dug in.

I cannot share the highly proprietary details of this lunch because I fear that the team would come after me with ice picks, not to mention lawsuits. But I can tell you that there were savory ———— stuffed with fragrant ———— and —————, braised ———— topped with ————, and a colorful platter of ——————— flecked with savory ———— and ———. In a couple of years, you may be able to walk into grocery store and buy these dishes for yourself. In the meantime, let me just say: They’re delicious.

On the tree of wacky media subjects, evangelical Christians are usually seen as the lowest-hanging fruit. They have those mall-like megachurches, pimply teenagers signing pledges to guard their virginity, and hardcore bands that have kids moshing to songs about salvation, to say nothing of the Jesus coffee mugs, Jesus baby-T’s, Jesus messenger bags, Jesus picture frames, and Jesus mouse pads that help make up the $4 billion Christian merchandise industry. Their depiction is often as nuanced as a uniform block of gun-toting, abortion-hating, Jesus-loving, Bush-voting fascists.

But a pair of new filmmakers, Gerry Corneau and Leah Belsky, have taken a different path and simply thought to consider evangelicals as human beings. The fruit of their labor, Seeing Red, is a documentary for which the filmmakers traveled the country to ask evangelicals what drives their faith.

Corneau is a forty-eight-year-old father of two who lives in a small Rhode Island town near the Connecticut border. An industrial insulator by trade, he is a political progressive as well as a Christian spiritual seeker, although he long ago abandoned the Catholicism of his youth. After the 2004 election—regarded as proof of the country’s moral divide—he was dumbfounded.

“I couldn’t square that some big part of my country would vote for somebody based on values I had a really hard time conceiving,” he says in a phone interview.

Corneau batted around the idea of writing a book that explored the alleged moral divide, but eventually settled on making a documentary, although he had no experience in film. He met Leah Belsky through a posting he put up on an online bulletin board for women filmmakers; she was interested in exploring similar terrain.

Belsky, now twenty-six, was working at the World Bank in Washington after having graduated from Brown University. She had just a little more filmmaking experience than Corneau, with one documentary course under her belt. Like Corneau, she was perplexed after the 2004 election. Instead of casting judgments, Belsky wanted to understand who the Christian “values voters” credited with securing Bush’s presidency were.

“I have a strong Jewish identity,” she explains. “But to me, Judaism hasn’t been about faith and religion. It’s been about culture. Part of me was curious to see if, in spending time around these people who were more faithful, I would be able to relate a bit more.”

The unlikely team linked up and started traversing the fifty states with a video camera, interviewing dozens of people about their faith with the aim being to “present people from their own viewpoints,” according to Belsky. Nearly everyone they approached was eager to speak. They paid for the venture themselves, and added to their polyglot team associate producer Elon Green (another Jew) and assistant director Amrita Das (a Hindu).

Their finished product, Seeing Red, premiered in fall 2006. In the film, we meet megachurch congregants and Christian rock concertgoers, along with a handful of scholarly experts and, for good measure, a table of gay ex-Christians at a bar in Brooklyn. Perhaps the most striking thing about the film is that it casts an entirely nonjudgmental eye on its subjects, recognizing the humanity and dignity of all of them.

The film’s impartiality makes it a bit of a Rorschach test, and secularists who break out in hives at the mere mention of God, religion, or spirit will probably get twitchy over some of the subjects. But few interviewees evoke the caricature of right-wing Christians. Most are deeply reflective people who seem genuinely driven by love and kindness.

But where does their love and kindness take them? In some cases, it seems to have driven them where you might suspect. “The holy spirit led me to vote for George W. Bush,” declares one woman. There is a testimony of support for the war in Iraq, a vast church choir dressed in American flag regalia, a preacher who rides a sequined red-white-and-blue electric chariot up the church aisle to his pulpit. It’s a scene that even the most nonjudgmental among us probably can’t resist a little chuckle over.

But much of Seeing Red shows a more nuanced view of evangelicals, owing in some part to the filmmakers’ inclusion of themselves in the narrative. Corneau, for one, became “saved” during the making of the film, and is now a born-again Christian.

“Having been someone who in a past life made fun of evangelicals, I used to think you had to check your intellect at the door of a personal relationship with Jesus,” he says. But some of those they visited in making the film were Christian progressives, and those experiences affected Corneau profoundly. “Just because you have a deep relationship with the Lord doesn’t mean you’re going to be a Republican or a Christian conservative,” he said. “I’m as much if not more of a political progressive as I ever was.”

Belsky remained firmly Jewish, but describes becoming so comfortable around evangelicals—even when they evangelized to her—that she tried to get her adventurous grandmother in New York to accompany her to a local megachurch. “The evangelical communities we visited, if you look at the song and prayer, there’s something very attractive,” she says. “Not attractive in that I could relate to the faith in Jesus. But striking in terms of the community that these Christians have managed to create.”

Belsky and Corneau are now selling the finished film on their website, and encourage community groups to set up screenings and discussions, a method modeled after the grassroots promotional effort used by director Robert Greenwald for his films Outfoxed and Iraq for Sale. Last fall, CrossLeft, a national progressive Christian group, sponsored a series of community screenings of Seeing Red.

It’s all to the effect of imploring people to put on their very best pluralist caps and listen to voices they might disagree with. “The thing that Leah and I hoped for was that nonbelievers would watch it and at the end, not be so freaked out by believers,” says Corneau. In the end, Seeing Red lets its viewers do just that, by presenting—not demonizing—the people and values associated with the red states. One only hopes that there are a couple of filmmakers out there in Wyoming or Alabama working on their own project: Seeing Blue.

Here were a couple of good Jewish kids who met during college in Boston, got married at 21, and started raising a family not long after that in suburban Chicago. They knew nothing of Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury. They joined the throngs at a few Vietnam War protests but could hardly be called radicals. My father never smoked marijuana, and the one time my mother tried it, she was so nervous about getting in trouble that she didn’t properly inhale. “On the ‘hip’ level,” she told me recently, “we were probably down in the negative range.”

But some things were, perhaps, unavoidable then, like inane news about Lindsay Lohan is today. By the time I was born in 1975, our house was punctuated with little emblems of the era; these shone for me like beacons. Despite my parents’ heavy Neil Diamond predilection, for instance, some Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel albums seemed to have fallen from a planet of fairies into our living room. My parents had chunky macramé plant hangers and trippy Marimekko hangings on the wall. And on their bookshelf was an oversized red volume called The Jewish Catalog.

The Jewish Catalog, a 320-page tome first published in 1973, was not necessarily a hippie artifact. But it had a profound effect on me growing up that I associated with hippie culture, subtly signaling that Judaism, like life, was a sort of groovy pursuit to be embarked upon however you wished.

The Jewish Catalog was a kind of choose-your-own-adventure book, inviting you to open to any page and follow your whims. Not meant for chronological reading, it was split into four esoterically titled sections—“Space,” “Time,” “Word” and “Man/Woman”—each of which contained subsections hewed to an aspect of Jewish life, ranging from the practical to the abstract. Did you want to learn how to travel cheaply in Israel? Turn to page 87. How to make cholent? A recipe on page 25 produces enough to feed “ten normal people or two Hungarians.” Want to bring the Messiah? There are 10 suggestions on page 250, ranging from “plant a tree” to “listen inward, inward to your own heart.”

Leafing through its pages, the pictures appeared like filmy images from a dream. There were long-haired kids wearing yarmulkes and peace-sign shirts, holding hands and dancing barefoot in the grass, or sitting low to the ground inside a breezy sukkah, mellow smiles on their faces. There were grainy old photographs of Lower East Side pushcart salesmen and square-jawed balabostas wearing kerchiefs.

There were lots and lots of pictures of Hasidim, walking around with shtreimels atop their heads or sitting at wedding banquets. Interspersed throughout the book were swirly, woozy little pen-and-ink drawings, as if the manuscript had been handed over to an illustrator on acid who was asked to decorate the margins.

The catalog was inspired, according to its editors, by the Whole Earth Catalog, the iconic late 1960s resource that encapsulated that era’s radical experimentalism, back-to-the-land practicality, and general counterculture vibe. First published in 1968, the oversized Whole Earth Catalog appeared twice a year until 1972, and was also divided into broad, esoterically titled sections like “Nomadics” and “Understanding Whole Systems.” Within was a comprehensive guide to just about everything, from where to buy a one-man sawmill, to the theories of Buckminster Fuller and Carl Jung, to how to form a community credit union. In the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog, information begot liberation, and everything was knowable, if not within the pages of the catalog itself, then in books it directed you to or pamphlets it encouraged you to send away for with a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Similarly, The Jewish Catalog was about getting equipped with the means to simply do it yourself. Within its pages lay step-by-step instructions for making your own paraffin Shabbat candles, crocheted yarmulkes, needlepoint challah covers, traditional Purim gragers, mezuzahs out of soft clay or walnut shells, and Sabbath feasts for 35, to say nothing of the precious directions for making your own shofar out of the horn of a ram, antelope, gazelle, or Rocky Mountain goat. “STEP 1: Boil the shofar in water for at least two hours and probably as long as five…. The cartilage can be pulled out with the aid of a pick. If the horns are small, the cartilage can be removed in about half an hour.”

I certainly didn’t see my parents dipping their own Shabbat candles, carving their own mezuzah covers, or scraping the cartilage out of a Rocky Mountain goat horn for a shofar.

But they did use it, so much that the pages became dog-eared and, it appears, stained with chicken soup. My father was raised Orthodox in New York, and my mother grew up reform in New Jersey. They agreed to meet halfway in their marriage and became Conservative, which still left my mother with quite a bit to learn. “I was brought up in a home where we didn’t celebrate any holidays other than Passover and Rosh Hashanah,” she says. “I went through years of Hebrew school, but by the time I was married, my knowledge was pretty sketchy.”

Most of their friends had copies of The Jewish Catalog, and for my mother, it was a user-friendly guide to a Jewish life she had never actually lived. Suddenly making Shabbat dinners, she mined it for recipes and information on the order of blessings. Celebrating holidays other than Passover and Rosh Hashanah, she consulted it for instructions on how to, say, decorate a sukkah. For my yeshiva-educated father, who was well acquainted with much of the information contained in the Catalog, it was meaningful in a different way. Like many kids who grew up Orthodox in the generation following the Holocaust, he’d grown up thinking Judaism was a strict, dour affair, but the catalog was evidence to him that in fact it could be fun. Together, my parents used it to help craft an earnest, positive Jewish household. And when I discovered it on their bookshelf, The Jewish Catalog let me believe that somewhere out there beyond the cut lawns and latticework sidewalks of suburban Chicago was an even greater Jewish fantasy world where everyone really did sit around crocheting yarmulkes and sewing needlepoint challah covers, and they looked really happy doing it. Jews looking happy being Jewish. Amazing.

There are different origin stories about The Jewish Catalog. I went to the source: Richard Siegel, one of its editors, who told me that it began with a kind of revelation. “A bunch of us hardware-challenged Jews were trying to build a sukkah,” he recalled. “I said there should be a Whole Earth Catalog where you can find the information on how to build one. A light bulb went off.”

Siegel, who subsequently became prominent as the executive director of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, was then a graduate student in Jewish communal service at Brandeis, and wrote his master’s thesis on the fledgling idea for the Catalog. Eventually he collaborated with Michael Strassfeld, also a Brandeis graduate student, and his wife, Sharon Strassfeld, to realize the project. They were all in their early to mid-20s and involved in Jewish counterculture, which centered locally around Havurat Shalom, an influential Boston-area Jewish community, and the alter zaydeh (old grandfather) of the idealistic havurah movement, the 1960s and 70s phenomenon of small, autonomous spiritual communities that challenged the traditionally hierarchical structure of the institutional Jewish world. (Some impulses, apparently, never change. While the havurah movement still exists, a more recent phenomenon of independent egalitarian minyans has revived much of the energy and interest that havurot did in their heyday.)

To create the Catalog, Siegel and the Strassfelds set about soliciting contributors who wrote sections on everything from scribal arts to Jewish film. The editors penned a good portion of it themselves as well. “In our minds,” Siegel says, “we were kind of writing this for our extended chevra.

We had some sense that there was a broader network, but we had no idea what the true temperament of the times was.”

They took it to the Jewish Publication Society, which printed an initial run of 10,000. That sold out quickly when the book was released in December, 1973, as did a second printing of 20,000 soon after. A story about the book in The New York Times helped boost sales, but it was largely a grassroots phenomenon.

“It was this revelatory kind of thing,” Siegel says of the astounding response. “People were searching for some access to a meaningful Jewish experience. This just opened up a world for them.”

The book’s success, says Strassfeld, now the rabbi of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York, had as much to do with its tone as it did with the information contained inside. “We weren’t saying, ‘Here are the 613 things you have to do to be a good Jew,’” he says. “We were saying, ‘We’re excited and interested in Judaism, and we’re just trying to give you access. If you really want to make candles, make candles.’”

Eventually, a second and third edition of the Catalog would be published, in 1979 and 1981 respectively. But nothing came close to the impact of that red-covered first edition, which has sold half a million copies and remains in print to this day. (It is the Jewish Publication Society’s second best seller, after the Bible.) Both Strassfeld and Siegel went on separately to make significant professional contributions to the Jewish community, but nearly 35 years later people still approach them, gushing with appreciation for The Jewish Catalog.

It’s easy to see why it appealed to people like my parents and vast numbers of others. The Catalog conveyed basic information on Judaism in a non-judgmental, folksy tone, as if it had been written by a patient friend. (“One can get a Jewish wall calendar from many places, especially from kosher butchers. There are also 100-year calendars which are good for those who like to plan ahead or for those who want to find out what their Hebrew birthdays were in 1953 or 1922, etc…”)

It appealed to a certain publishing ideal of the era that included not just the Whole Earth Catalog, but books like the Moosewood Cookbook and the Joy of Sex, all seeking to demystify the mysterious.

But how to explain the catalog’s continued appeal for someone like me? Surely I’m not the only one born in the 1970s who harbors nostalgia for The Jewish Catalog and its vision of groovy, do-it-yourself Judaism. I long ago commandeered my parents’ old copy with its stained pages and broken binding. When I was a teenager making zines including Mazeltov Cocktail, a kind of Jewish punk manifesto, I kept the visually chockablock Jewish Catalog on hand for graphic inspiration. It became a fixture on my bookshelf, accompanying me through nine New York apartments in 12 years. Nowadays, it sits in a cabinet with my most precious accumulated ephemera—other zines, copies of Sassy magazine, letters from old friends, and photographs from faraway lands.

In truth, I rarely use the catalog for what it was intended, and never really did. My day-school education and subsequent learning satisfied much of what I wanted to know about Jewish practice. The Internet has long since assumed the mantle of all sorts of reference books, including The Jewish Catalog, putting information about Judaism an easy Google search away.

But although I may not consult it in search of particular information, I’ve always found it good for serendipitously stumbling upon things I didn’t even know I was curious about, or renewing my inspiration around something I already know that I am. In my mind, it’s most important not as a compendium of information but for its sparkling spirit. That spirit still conjures the Jewish fantasy world that enchanted me as a child—a world of making things and being happy and sharing, a world where everyone was equal and leaders were nowhere to be seen, and a world where Jewish practice was as natural as breathing.

Some things were reassuringly familiar. There was a seder plate, cups of syrupy Manischewitz, and boxes of matzah. Then the seder began. We read from Xeroxed copies of the Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah. The first item was a social action blessing: “Blessed is the Source, who shows us paths to holiness, and commands us to pursue justice.”

The Haggadah recommended that everyone introduce themselves with their name and preferred pronoun, in order to create a friendlier space for transgender people. The first cup of wine was dedicated to those around the world who have risen up in protest against “unjust, racist and classist wars.” The traditional recitation of the ten plagues was recast as the “ten plagues of the occupation of Palestine.” Dipping fingers into wine, they were mourned: blockades and checkpoints, destruction of villages and homes, the security wall, war crimes.

Clockwise from top left: Co-director Konnie Chameides; Jews for Racial & Economic Justice; Micah Bazant, author of the Love and Justice Haggadah; and “Haddassah Ladies for Homos” perform for Purim.

Agree with its ideology or not, this was clearly not your old Maxwell House Haggadah, leaving you bored to tears and counting down the pages until the meal. In Young, Jewish and Left, an earnest and engaging if somewhat formless documentary by Irit Reinheimer and Konnie Chameides (the latter of whom—full disclosure—was at that upstate seder, and who I met briefly), there’s a scene with one of the co-creators of the Love and Justice Haggadah, an activist named Micah Bazant.

“There is a very old tradition, as old as any Jewish tradition, of reinterpreting… especially Passover and haggadot,” Bazant says, nodding to Jewish activists who preceded him, particularly Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who wrote the 1969 “Freedom Seder,” a civil rights-influenced alternative Haggadah. About his own motivation to create a new social justice Haggadah, Bazant gushes: “It was just love.”

In fact, it seems to be just love that motivates the dozens of young activists featured in Young, Jewish and Left, which functions as a kind of sprawling introduction to the new Jewish lefty scene. Occasional hints of brattiness, moments of condescension, and fuzzily articulated ideas are more than compensated for with humility, heart, and a basic human acknowledgment that we’re all in the same boat. (“We” being not just Jews.) The young people depicted here seem to collectively affirm Che Guevara’s famous statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

So, good, it begins with love. Then what? For the most part, you get the feeling that this movement (if it can be called a movement) is occupied primarily with opposing Israel, or with queer and transgender issues, or both at once, as in the case of a group called “Faygelehs for a Free Palestine.” There are times when it feels like the movie could have narrowed its narrative lens just slightly and been renamed “Young, Jewish and Anti-Occupation” or “Young, Jewish and Queer.”

Both of which are important issues better left for parsing elsewhere. In the context of this film, however, it’s striking to notice how much the enemy has shifted. Once, it was the pharaohs, the Cossacks, the czars, the Nazis, the sweatshop bosses, the union busters. Now, we are told, young Jewish leftists find themselves allied against other Jews—either the heterosexist ones who laugh trannies and queers out of shul, or the Zionist ones with their undying support for Israel.

The identification of “mainstream” Jews as the oppressor by the young leftists profiled in the film is so lacking in nuance that it’s sort of a relief when Loolwa Khazzoom, an Iraqi-Jewish writer, explodes while recalling her experience at a young Jewish lefty conference. “It was very clear that the root of everything was that Jews are white European oppressors and Palestinians are indigenous people of color and the Jews have done terrible things to Palestinians, end of story,” Khazoom says. “And I had it! My family was kicked out of Iraq. My family is Jewish refugees absorbed by the state of Israel. I have been told that my family history is completely irrelevant.”

It’s one of the film’s few moments of tension. Because Reinheimer and Chameides didn’t really set out to posit or defend any particular point, there are plenty of contradictions. The film has the aura of being held together punk-style with duct tape and staples and twine.

“Young, Jewish and Left” is most interesting from a purely anthropological perspective, when the film just saunters along, introducing us to people like Jonna Shelomith, an anarchist revolutionary who traveled to Germany with her “comrades” after the Berlin Wall fell and had an unexpectedly moving experience at Auschwitz, and And A. Lusia, a spunky young woman with dreadlocked pigtails who took advantage of Birthright Israel‘s free trip offer to go to Israel and confront Ariel Sharon. There is also a ticking off of subcultural ephemera like the Jewcrew Cookbook (motto: “Food for Thought, Recipes for Destruction”), the Suck My Treyf Gender party, a “queer, anti-imperialist Purim cabaret,” and the drag queens of Hadassah Ladies for Homos.

For those who wonder about the rightward political drift that seems to have gone hand in hand with the upward class drift of Jews in America, this film proves that the legacy of Jewish socialists, anarchists, feminists, Yippies, hippies, organizers, and agitators of the past century lives on in some form. Here, after all, are their progeny.

I held onto that business card for two years. My first semester at Columbia was mostly spent drinking 40s at punk shows on the Lower East Side and making ‘zines, but eventually I decided to seek out this mysterious rabbi. The synagogue was plain: pink walls, rows of metal folding chairs, a simple ark for the Torah, a disorganized bookcase, and a lace-curtained divider separating men and women. At the back near the door, a cherubic older man rocked and prayed. Turning, he asked my Hebrew name. Reb Shlomo smiled, kissed my forehead and said, “Chaya Sarah! I am so happy to see you.”

I had grown up in congregations where the aisles were used as catwalks during the High Holidays. Here, worshippers were freaks, geniuses, outcasts, and eccentrics—more like members of the tribe to which I imagined myself belonging. One was a former yeshiva student who now favored various Hindu gurus, but still kept Shabbat. One was a Kahanist alcoholic from Transylvania. One got arrested for aiding a runaway teenager and other congregants rallied to help bail him out of jail. Reb Shlomo referred to all of them as “holy schleppers.”

Years passed, and I continued to fiddle around in the liminal spaces between Jewishness and everything else. I met others who seemed to do so as well, consciously or not, and became sort of fascinated by how many other Jews there were like me. “Like me” meant someone who had hitchhiked across the country a half dozen times, traveling up the Pacific Coast highway with surfers, along Route 66 with Cherokee women, and across Interstate 80 with a shoe salesman. It meant someone who had been in and out of relationships with a punk boy from Memphis, an Ecstasy dealer from Toronto, a chain-smoking sculptor, an activist saxophone player, and a self-fashioned motorcycle adventurer. It meant someone who had glimpsed the divine at Sufi zikrs, Hindu kirtans, Buddhist meditations, pagan equinoxes, and Native American peyote ceremonies.

Like me also meant someone who had been reared on Solomon Schechter Day Schools, Shabbat dinners and bat mitzvah lessons. Someone who was second-generation American, named after a great-grandmother killed in Auschwitz, and who had grown up in an atmosphere thick with accents, foods, and melancholy. It meant someone who had studied in an Orthodox women’s yeshiva, and who felt maybe there is a Divine Source who expects something more from us than intellectual appeasement and Western liberalism.

For some, I began to think, being Jewish was the main-course brisket on their identity dinner tables. Everything they do, everyone they know is Jewish. Maybe they have a couple of side-dish identities—being a woman, a litigation attorney, from St. Louis—but by and large, they are Jews. But then, there were people for whom identity itself is more of a dim sum, and their Jewish part like one small, tasty dumpling amid a variety of other yummy treats. I was a dim sum Jew, and so were most of my friends. I had the idea one autumn day to make a magazine for us. This magazine, I decided, would be called Heeb.

It took about a year and a half for me to get my magazine going—to procure funding, cobble together a volunteer staff, set up a little office in my apartment, solicit and edit content, and find a designer who would work for nothing. I got a rudimentary website up, figured out how to accept online subscriptions, made a subscriber database, printed T-shirts in my living room, and organized a launch party. I had been working 80 hours a week and was just short of losing my mind.

Finally, the first issue came out. It had some funny pictures of Jewfros, hip-hop reviews by the grandmother of one of our editors, and a Neil Diamond centerfold. It had a dryly hysterical analysis of the connection between Nazis and Pizza Hut, a memoir of one young writer’s teenage affair with Allen Ginsberg, and staged photos of a sexed-up wedding. Nothing too declarative or definable. It was an attempt to capture what was Jewish by sideglance rather than head-on.

There was an odd publicity blitz. In a flash I was interviewed by the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Hartford Courant, CNN, ABC, New York Magazine, the Village Voice. It was disembodying, and the press generally either adoring, mocking, or fascinated. But through it all, the magazine clearly became a symbol that young Jews had arrived—and weren’t afraid to make fun of our ourselves. I found myself to be the movement’s unwitting spokesperson, and thought I was done with it until a call came one afternoon from Howard Stern’s show.

An NPR kind of gal, I had never heard Howard Stern before and didn’t know what to expect. It was like being stuck in a room with a bunch of fourth-graders for 40 minutes, more bizarre than insulting. Howard railed against my magazine, commenting on the unforgivable offensiveness of its name (what it must take to offend Howard Stern) and making tangential remarks about gas chambers. He also got me (under truly irrefutable pressure) to show him my ass. The show finally went to a commercial break. Howard leaned over, shook my hand, and said, “Sounds like a great magazine. Good luck.”

In many ways, Heeb was exactly as I’d intended it: secular, irreverent, political, and funny. It was my own subconscious writ large and distributed at Barnes & Noble. Therapy probably could have afforded me a less revealing sphere in which to work out my questions about what the hell this Jewish thing meant, but the train had already left the station.

As it turned out, it was a train that other people wanted to get on. Emails and letters came in from everywhere—Montana to Missouri, Long Island to Las Vegas—saying variations on the same thing: “Finally.” They wrote in about dating angst, neurotic families, and seders. They wrote lurid tales of what happened to them at bar mitzvah parties, summer camp, and Hebrew school. Some wrote about having been the rabbi’s daughter, or having shtupped the rabbi’s daughter (on the bima, no less). The cumulative effect spoke to some deep longing that people seemed to have—to be cool in their otherness, to belong to a subculture that was theirs alone.

But as more people got into Heeb, the more disconnected I felt. After a while, it was like I was putting out a magazine for people with brown hair. Sure, I have brown hair. I like having brown hair. But I can talk about it only so much until it feels irrelevant, not to mention self-indulgent. Being the poster girl for hipster secular Judaism wasn’t really me. And although I was glad for Heeb‘s success and worked very hard for it, the popular message was, roughly speaking, that being Jewish is cool.

Being Jewish, cool? Um, dork factor: ten.

It’s not cool now, it never has been, and it never will be. But, this was the message taken by many people, and I was its mortified messenger.

I preferred the definition of Jews as ultimate outsiders. That I bore this ridiculous message of coolness made me want to crawl under a rock. I finally felt true Jewish guilt, having created and unleashed a monster against my core beliefs. I didn’t want to be a “cool Jew.” If anything, I wanted to be a holy schlepper.

So after four issues and almost three years, with an easy exhale, I left.

Not long after I was having coffee with my friend Moishe, who grew up Hasidic in Brooklyn, had been a talmud chohem, sent to the most prestigious yeshivas. From a young age, the rabbis predicted he would be among the greatest minds of his generation. He loved learning Torah and was very good at it. Except he couldn’t find proof that God existed. He attacked the idea from every possible angle, but nothing could help him overcome his persistent doubt. So at 27, Moishe shaved his beard and went to live in the secular world, which he found terrifically cold and alienating compared to his Hasidic community, but at least there, he felt he was no longer living a lie.

Moishe and I were talking at a diner. At some point, he told me this story:

Once, there was a young rabbi. People came from near and far to hear this young rabbi speak, because the way he spoke about Torah made them feel like they were flying through the air. And when the rabbi spoke, he himself felt like he was flying, such was the enjoyment he received from teaching Torah. Once he met with his own rabbi in the privacy of his study. There, he confessed that he didn’t believe a word that he said. He didn’t believe that the Torah was true.

“Oy,” said the young rabbi, “how can I go on like this? They hang on my words, and I enjoy teaching them, but this is hypocrisy!” The great rabbi looked at him and replied, “So you enjoy it, and they enjoy it. You get joy from it, and they get joy from it. The only one it’s bad for is hypocrisy!”

I thought of how far I had drifted from the 18-year-old who hung out at Carlebach’s synagogue between acid trips and punk shows. Back then, I had my own weird little search going on for a place within Judaism. It was something I tinkered with in a quiet, personal way. When the tinkering turned public, it ceased to be mine anymore.

Moishe and I looked at each other, he who had left his prodigious study, and I who had left Heeb‘s hipster posturing. They were things we were good at, that gave others joy. But they were lies of a sort, and the guilt of hypocrisy was too great to brush aside. It felt more truthful—more Jewish, even—to be outsiders.