It makes sense that we’d have this dish on both occasions. Thanksgiving is in part patterned after the Harvest Home, an English celebration after the fall harvest. And Harvest Home was, in turn, modeled on Sukkot, a holiday that typically falls in late September or early October.

The inspiration for including the recipe was simple: my mother. She is a first-generation American who grew up eating this sweet potato dish at every holiday—Jewish and secular. Her inclusion of this tsimmes at non-religious festivals is similar to what I’ve see happening around the country for ages—new immigrants and people who have been here for generations integrating ethnic and regional character into their Thanksgiving meals. What anchors all of these meals is, of course, the iconic turkey. But what surrounds that centerpiece differs from community to community and includes everything from Armenian stuffed grape leaves to Vietnamese spring rolls to matzoh ball soup, or even a traditional tsimmes of sweet potatoes and carrots. These dishes tell you who you are.

Though the turkey is the holiday’s commonality, its provenance tells different stories. Turkeys today can be heritage breed, kosher, organic, fresh, pasture raised, wild, or frozen Butterballs, the favorite of the late Julia Child. That range of choices is a relatively recent development; until the early 1990s almost everybody bought a factory-processed turkey.

Last month I spent a day on the tractor with Joel Salatin, immortalized by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, at his family’s farm, Polyface, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Salatin, a fundamentalist Christian, raises two kinds of free-range turkeys in his pasture and slaughters them humanely with a quick cut across the neck, “in the biblical way,” he explains—that is, according to Jewish dietary laws.

Across the country, many people are turning to farmers like Salatin, who thinks hard about the life and the death of his animals. Kosher producers like Wise Organic Pastures, Kosher Valley, and the two-year-old Grow and Behold Foods are following Salatin’s lead. “I feel like a turkey hunter before Thanksgiving,” said Naftali Hanau, Grow and Behold’s CEO and founder, who has been running around the country trying to find pasture-raised turkey, fed on non-GMO (genetically modified organism) feed. “Our customers have found that our turkeys have flavor and don’t dry out like conventional ones,” he says. Thanksgiving is a time when people who don’t generally eat meat indulge, Hanau says, and when they do, they want birds that are sustainably produced and slaughtered humanely.

If every family has its traditional sides, each also adds personal flourishes to turkey preparation. Linda Schiffer, a cooking teacher who offers a course called “In Bubbie’s Kitchen” at Middlebury College in Vermont, and her husband, Ira, the Hillel rabbi there, are turkey aficionados and prepare their bird with an apple-cider brine. Before they even get to that stage, they take great care picking out their bird. “I look at Vermont turkeys from farms that are growing free-range turkeys sustainably, turkeys that don’t get overheated by being cooped up and are naturally nice and plump,” Linda told me a day after she went fishing for local salmon and trout on Lake Champlain.

In addition to using local apples and cider to make her turkey, Linda, also prepares a terrine of turkey, goose, and duck as a first course. When she has guests who observe kashrut, as she will next week, she buys a kosher bird at a supermarket in Burlington, 50 miles away. Otherwise, she buys local turkeys from Misty Knolls Farm just down the road from her house. “I used to have a kosher kitchen, but a few years ago when I read an article about Aaron’s chicken and how they were slaughtered, I went local,” she says, referring to the Agriprocessors’ owner, Aaron Rubashkin. Now, “I can see how they are raised, how they live their life and how they are slaughtered,” she says. “This is an extension of our commitment to local and sustainable.” Brining, even if she has a kosher turkey—which is salted in the kashering process—has become her custom as well. Linda brines “because kosher is just the salt,” she says, “and I am adding flavors like brown sugar, thyme, and cider.” She brines for only 24 hours. “Otherwise the meat gets mushy,” she advises. “Longer is not necessarily better.”

As I prepare for Thanksgiving this year, I am finally adopting the Schiffers’ brining tradition. It has always tempted me, as the reduced cider makes the skin aromatic and golden. And, as everyone in my family knows, the skin is the best part of the bird. But despite the appeal of every new sweet-potato dish in magazines this fall, we’ll still rely on our favorite tsimmes recipe, topped with the marshmallows and laced with pineapples, served in our traditional turquoise, oven-safe casserole dish.

Maybe it was the kids at Nathan Bishop, the nearby public school, who showed us how much we were missing. (That is, when they weren’t throwing pennies at us.) Maybe we were seduced by the commercial that cheerfully sang, “Do you know exactly how to eat an Oreo?” The jingle became a handclapping game—like Miss Mary Mack—that rocketed around Jewish summer camps. An Oreo was a forbidden fruit, even more enticing than the one that got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden.

Ah, temptation. When I was 8 or so, questions about free will, crime, and punishment started dogging me. Our color war theme at Day School was ahava (love) vs. yirah (fear). According to Maimonides, we needed to experience both states to have a meaningful relationship with God. I was on Team Ahava. Team Yirah won.

I was very attuned to yirah, having devoured the stories of God’s omnipotence and cruelty. In school, we spent a lot of time on the book of Genesis, source of the juiciest Bible stories. It’s rife with examples of God’s scariness—the expulsion from paradise, the great flood, the Tower of Babel, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. Yet we were told God loved us and had chosen us; we were supposed to obey out of love as well as out of fear. Figuring out the balance of love and fear is essential to the creation of selfhood in child-development theory, too; we begin to internalize and believe in our own moral code, acting as we do because we believe in right and wrong, not because we’re afraid of punishment or want to win a pat on the head. As I got older, I wanted to explore what I believed. I just wasn’t sure what that was. Did I want to keep kosher? What would happen if I flouted God’s law?

One afternoon, I walked to the corner store, psyching myself up with each step. I bought a packet of Oreos. I didn’t have a purse, so I hid it in my sock, as if I were a young Rosa Klebb and it was a poison-tipped knife.

I knew I was about to do something momentous and terrible. I couldn’t bring those cookies of death into my home. I seriously worried God would strike the house with lightning and take out my family.

So, I took the Oreos to the gardening shed in our yard and ducked inside. That way, if it got hit by lightning, I’d be the only one to fry. I unwrapped the package—they really did look exactly like Hydrox!—took a deep breath, and nibbled the edge of a cookie. Nothing happened. The skies stayed un-rent. The seas did not boil up. I ate half. I remember it as having a slightly smokier, deeper taste than Hydrox; the lardy center was grainier and less greasy. And I was not dead.

Three decades later, when I read The Foreskin’s Lament, by Shalom Auslander, I was gobsmacked that someone else had had the exact same experience. Auslander’s Oreo was a Slim Jim. (“Imagine that,” he writes. “A stick of meat!”) He too worried that eating trayf would trigger God’s vengeance upon him and his family. (“He’d find a way to drown me,” he thinks as he stands at the Snack Shack. “Then He’d drown my mother. She might even be dead already.”)

I didn’t turn on God completely, though. I bobbed and weaved, still unsure about how observant I wanted to be. I left the day school after 8th grade, along with almost all the other non-Orthodox kids, and went to public high school. There I was a vegetarian (it was easy to blend in with the hyper-sincere animal-rights activists) except when it came to kosher meat cooked by Mom. When I went to college I ate no meat at all, which was probably a good thing given the state of the cafeteria. And when I moved to Manhattan after graduation, I kept a veggie kitchen. But I kept only one set of dishes, and I began to eat chicken outside the home.

Meanwhile the world changed. Oreos became kosher. Joe Regenstein, professor of food science and director of the Cornell Kosher and Halal Food Initiative, told students in a 2008 lecture how it all went down. “It was probably the most expensive conversion of a company from non-kosher to kosher,” Regenstein said. The process took more than three years and millions of dollars, and concluded in 1997. It involved rabbis climbing into the company’s ovens (I know!), each one about 300 feet long. To meet the strictures of the Orthodox Union, the 100 or so ovens had to be manually blow-torched inside on the highest heat.

Ironically, Nabisco, which makes Oreos, replaced the lard with trans fats, which are today considered demonic obesity-engendering child-killers but in the ’90s were considered healthy, at least compared to animal fats. Eliminating the lard was a way to woo new cookie fans, both Jewish and non.

Oreos remain the canonical sandwich cookie; Kraft (which now owns Nabisco) claims that worldwide, 7.5 billion Oreos are eaten every year. The Oreo line is ever-expanding, much like the universe itself. In a flurry of inexplicable spelling and internal capitalization, Nabisco has created DoubleStuf Oreos, Fudgees, Oreo WaferStix, Big Stuf, White-Fudged-Covered Oreos, Oreo Cakesters, and the Triple Double (a layer of vanilla creme and a layer of chocolate creme pancaked between three chocolate wafers). “Our fans’ passion and enthusiasm has challenged us to raise our game,” Jessica Robinson, associate director of consumer engagement, said in an unironic statement. There are also Oreo Sippers, chocolate straws lined with creme so you can actually drink your milk through an Oreo, but they’re sold only in Canada.

While Oreo’s embrace of kashrut contributed to its juggernaut status, poor underdog Hydrox fizzled out. In 1996, Sunshine, Hydrox’s manufacturer, was bought out by Keebler. In 1999, Keebler renamed Hydrox Droxies, which sounds like a band of drunk leprechauns, and continued producing them until 2003. For Hydrox’s 100th anniversary in 2008, Kellogg’s (which had bought out Keebler in 2001—are you keeping up?) brought back Hydrox in a flurry of nostalgic ads. But by the end of the year, Hydrox had quietly disappeared from grocery shelves again.

My relationship with kashrut is still ambivalent. I married a man from Wisconsin, who would no sooner be a vegetarian than a Minnesota Vikings fan. Oreos continued to play a role in my life. In 1999, I took a job at a new TV network located at the just-gentrifying western edge of Manhattan, in an industrial building that once housed the National Biscuit Company. Yes, I worked in the original Oreo factory. In a referential bit of hipster architecture, the iron base of one of the original ovens remained embedded in the floor 10 feet from my desk.

Today my husband and I still have only one set of dishes, but I insist on buying only kosher meat. I follow my own inconsistent, semi-random rules. When Josie was not quite 3, she attended a wedding in Utica where she tasted her first pork breakfast sausage in the hotel restaurant. Over two days she ate 13 of them. I felt strangely sad but didn’t try to stop her. Maxine, on the other hand, has my palate; she doesn’t like meat at all and is essentially a vegetarian. We all love Oreos.

Which are under fire again. They’re a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the current American food system. The company’s marketing of 100-calorie packs (each containing a small handful of communion-wafer-like “thin crisps”) isn’t fooling anybody. Today’s upper-middle-class Jewish kids, if they get cookies at all, get Late July brand organic vanilla bean cookies (“sustainably harvested from a beautiful orchid”) or Newman-O’s (made with “organic cacao that comes from small farmers in the Talamanca region”). How’s a Jewish mother to decide? Newman-O’s uses certified “slavery-free” cooperatives, but Late July makes a version with “white chocolate between Endangered Animal Vanilla Cookies,” which makes it sound like they’re made of actual Sumatran rhinos. Orthorexia is the new kashrut. The attention our people once lavished on fins and scales, vein-removal, and proper bloodletting is now dedicated to finding boxes that say “antioxidant” on them. Today’s trayf is anything stuffed full of chemicals and polyunsaturated fats.

Apparently Jewish Oreo ambivalence comes in stages. First there’s the ambivalence about being denied the cookie. Then there’s the ambivalence of being allowed to eat the cookie. (As Rabbi Joshua Hammerman pointed out on his blog, assimilation is a double-edged sword. “I know that in some perverse manner my Oreo envy kept me safely at the outer edges of middle America, shielding me from total absorption into the vanilla masses. … Oreo denial was, for me, a direct extension of Egyptian slavery—it made me uncomfortable enough to feel different and different enough to feel proud.”) Now there’s the ambivalence of not wanting to buy into the trend of demonizing foodstuffs, thus feeling ambivalent about feeling ambivalent about the cookie. Sometimes you yearn for the taste of your childhood; sometimes you don’t.

Though drawn heavily from Jewish themes and settings, the stories are not all tales of rebellion against a verboten dietary item or a cultural taboo. There are love stories and stories about heartbreak and transgression. In one memoir, a woman encounters an ultra-Orthodox man walking plaintively down Tel Aviv’s popular Shenkin Street on the Sabbath, searching for a restaurant that serves pork. In another, a man looks back at himself as a young boy in a Newark, N.J., hospital, fending off a nurse determined to feed him a ham sandwich.

There are stories of deception and self-deception as well as tales of unlikely kindness and cruelty. Like Chinese food on Christmas, the tales bear elements of Jewish identification and affirmation. They take place in Israel and America, but also in Mali, Spain, and the Russian Far East, where tolerance and religious pluralism rank low in priority. And, strange as it may seem, the range of the narratives together create a decidedly Jewish universe.

For Yoskowitz, a freelance journalist who recently spent a year researching Israel’s pork industry for a book he’s writing, the complex relationship between pork and different people of all backgrounds—pork being a forbidden fruit in many religious and cultural circles—makes for compelling insights about humanity.

“Food is a powerful metaphor. For many authors, bacon represents the comfort of home, even if it is microwaved or served raw, or precisely because it is microwaved or raw. For others, it’s a means of holding onto identity and culture, be it religious or moral,” says Yoskowitz, who launched his site in January. “We are what we eat, of course, but with pork, for Jews, Muslims, and even vegetarians, we are also defined by what we don’t eat.”

The 27-year-old Yoskowitz, who currently lives in Brooklyn, was raised in a Conservative Jewish home in New Jersey. His upbringing was heavily influenced by the specter of the Holocaust in his family history; the experience of his grandparents, who were slave laborers in Siberia and refused to eat pork, reinforced his own decision to keep kosher. After the war, his grandfather worked as a ham boner in a pork-provisions factory in Boston, Yoskowitz says, but he continued to abstain from eating the meat. “He used to accept hams as gifts for Thanksgiving and Christmas and just give them away to his neighbors,” he says. “I was always proud of him for that.”

In addition to being a writer and a foodie, Yoskowitz is also a farmer, pickler, and what he calls a “Semitic swinologist.” Such scholarship angles focus on the ways that pork intersects with culture, religion, and politics. Yoskowitz believes that Muslims and Jews should find more common cause because of their religious dietary provisions. He also finds the parallels between anti-beef laws in India and anti-pork laws of the Middle East endlessly compelling.

In Israel, Yoskowitz found that consuming pork came to stand for something important and distinct in the lives of secular Jews, Russian immigrants, and foreign workers in a Jewish State. Elsewhere in the world, eating pork can represent assimilation, seclusion, and the range of emotions in between. Pork Memoirs came about after conversations about his research on the pork industry yielded a supply of narratives from others.

“Every story somehow moved me, and I started to realize that for those who love pork or hate it, those who abstain from it or indulge in it, this meat stirs emotions unlike any other meat,” he says. “I said to myself that when the time was right, I would find a way to share these stories that are precious insights into our culture that we don’t always hear, or at least don’t see together in one place as an investigation into how the pig influences culture and shapes identity.”

The stories on his site move beyond the meat itself. One piece, written by Ange Tran, a former waitress, describes the camaraderie of truckers eating pork-laden Sizzlin’ Skillets at Denny’s. In the story, Tran has the kitchen substitute ground beef in the dish in order to allow a Muslim trucker admittance to the early morning ritual. Another memoir by Alix Wall, perhaps the most poignant of the collection so far, tells the story of her mother, a hidden child in wartime Poland, whose rescuer fed her raw bacon to survive. Wall concludes that occasionally eating pork is a tribute to her mother as well as to her mother’s rescuer.

While pork continues to polarize, the conflict offers up compelling personal stories. From reading the site, it’s easy to imagine that if Yoskowitz did one day decide to follow the lead of many of his contributors and take the plunge into eating pork, it might be a thoughtful enough maneuver to retain its Jewish kernel.

“As popular as the pig may be in Brooklyn nowadays, I don’t foresee myself crossing that line just yet,” Yoskowitz says. “But I do order a tempeh bacon sandwich every week from a local sandwich shop that definitely satisfies some kind of urge.”

But Rosenzweig’s job, and that of his halal counterpart, are now on the line: Last week, the lower house of the parliament overwhelmingly voted to ban ritual slaughter, by a margin of 116 to 30. (The upper house still must approve the legislation before it becomes law.) A majority of Dutch voters say they support the ban, which will be more noticeable in the much larger Muslim community, which numbers more than a million.

On the eve of the vote, members of the Dutch parliament were invited to observe the ritual, an attempt by Rosenzweig’s bosses to show their opponents that their animals don’t suffer. Only one legislator turned up, from the tiny Christian Union party.

Marianne Thieme, leader of the country’s animal-rights party, had no interest in attending. “I don’t want subjective observations,” Thieme says. “I want scientific proof.” Her Party for Animals is small, with only two parliament members, but it managed to galvanize the anti-ritual slaughter on the grounds that it causes unnecessary suffering to animals. If the law goes into effect, it will require that all animals must be stunned, or anesthetized, before they’re slaughtered. Both the kosher laws governing slaughter, or Sh’hitah, and halal laws dictate that animals be fully conscious when killed. “Maybe theirs was the best way to slaughter 3,000 years ago, but not now,” says Thieme.

“It’s depressing,” says Binyomin Jacobs, chief rabbi of the Netherlands, pointing out that one of the first laws enacted by the Nazis in 1940 closed ritual slaughterhouses. (Seventy percent of Holland’s Jews were killed during World War II, including Rosenzweig’s grandfather, who was also a shochet.)

“Religion in a secular country is easy to attack,” says Ronnie Eisenmann, head of the board of the Jewish Community of Amsterdam. “If you say Jews and Muslims do medieval things, then of course people are against it.” And Muslim leaders agree. “Besides the direct and irreversible restriction of freedom of belief, the fate of two world religions is totally left to officials, scientists, veterinarians, and owners of slaughterhouses,” the Contact Committee for Muslims and Government, a liaison group, said in a statement.

The law, as passed, does include one potential loophole: If it can be proven that animals who are slaughtered by kosher or halal ritual feel no more pain than animals who are stunned, then ritual slaughter could continue. “But how can you prove that?” asks Jacobs. He said that kosher slaughter respects animals, not only during the kill, but before: Animals can’t be wounded while transported (or else the meat is unusable), and they go one by one to the slaughter (they’re not allowed to see the animal in front of them get killed).

Ritual slaughterers receive an extensive education, training for several years under a master and requiring certification. “Motty had 10 years of training before becoming a slaughterer,” says David Serphos, the former director of the Jewish Community of Amsterdam. “He studied for two years how to sharpen his knife before getting near a chicken.”

“The knife used is sharp and smooth so the cut itself does not cause any pain,” Rosenzweig says. “The blood pressure immediately drops, and in a few seconds the animal is unconscious.” He is proud of his family’s shochet roots in the Netherlands, but he already works several days a week in Belgium and France; he thinks his professional days in his hometown are numbered. “The feeling I get here is, ‘Do it our way or leave,’ ” he says.

In recent years, the Netherlands, like many European countries, has seen a major influx of Muslim immigrants, and this influx has at times led to tensions. But Thieme says that her party’s concern is for the well-being of animals, not against religion. “The freedom of religion is not unrestricted,” she says. Roos Vonk, a professor of psychology at Radboud University, recalls being a member of an animal rights group in the early 1980s; its members considered taking on ritual slaughter but didn’t dare. “It was impossible then to say anything against Muslims and minorities,” Vonk says. “The whole of Holland would roll over you. We didn’t want to appear racist. But that was before Pim Fortuyn”—the right-wing populist who rose to prominence a decade ago on his anti-Muslim positions. (He was murdered during the 2002 election campaign.)

In the week leading up to the ritual-slaughter vote, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte declared multiculturalism dead, his Cabinet announced plans to cut funding for programs aiding immigrants (a move that three-quarters of the Dutch say they support), and the popular anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders was acquitted on charges of inciting racial hatred for comparing the Quran to Mein Kampf, among other things. The country once thought of as among the most liberal and tolerant in the world is now known for its increasingly conservative and populist mindset.

“I sympathize with anyone trying to make sense of the emotional state of this country’s population,” says Tom Eijsbouts, professor of law at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Leiden. “People seek certainty in the extremes.” He views the ritual-slaughter ban as a misguided attempt by the Dutch public to deal with its discomfort over the mass production of animals. “It seems to me that the bad feelings have been diverted to a non-essential aesthetic issue of slaughter without stunning,” he says. And the Netherlands is not alone; Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Switzerland have banned ritual slaughter, too.

Marcus Butchers, the only kosher butcher shop in Amsterdam, is located in the south of the city. It’s a stone’s throw from the house on Merwedeplein where Anne Frank and her family lived before they went into hiding. The store’s manager, Luuk Koole, hopes that the ban won’t pass the senate and become law. If it does, he says he’ll have no choice but to start importing meat. “I’m not so afraid for business,” he says, “but our prices will go up if we have to import.”

A customer, Rabbi Chaim Rodrigues Pereira, was buying kosher sausage and veal for Shabbat. “I don’t think it’s anti-Semitism,” he says of the ban. (He chalks it up to a modern emphasis on animal welfare, which he supports.) “But if they tell us we may not slaughter kosher, they know we’ll go to Belgium, where they’ll have to slaughter more. They want civility in Holland but they don’t care if they do it in Belgium or France.”

If there is an upside to the slaughter saga, it’s that opposition to the ban has brought the Jewish and Muslim communities closer together. “Working together may be a big word, but we are on the same side,” says Ronnie Eisenmann. “In a secular society, the Jewish community has more in common with Muslims than the Dutch—family, special education, circumcision, ritual slaughter. We’re both more conservative.”

Lauren Comiteau has been reporting from the Netherlands for Time, CBS Radio, the CBC, and the Chicago Tribune, among other publications, others since 1996.

CORRECTION, July 11: Anne Frank and her family lived on Merwedeplein before they went into hiding. This error has been corrected.

Jewish food that actively thumbs its nose at the laws of kashrut clearly holds tremendous social allure for some. As Jeffrey Yoskowitz wrote in the Atlantic, Traif’s Marcus “is counting on other Jews to hear about his restaurant and think, ‘Cool, I’m a non-kosher Jew too.’ ” Indeed, most of the critical praise earned by establishments like Traif and Mile End has highlighted—knowingly or not—the clever disjuncture of embracing Jewishness while simultaneously rebelling against it. Thus when the New York Times fawned over Traif’s “seared foie gras, slumming it with fingerling potatoes, crisp shards of ham, and a fried egg, all dribbled with maple syrup and hot sauce,” the reviewer, Ligaya Mishan, had to add: “Now this is chutzpah.”

Before starting rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2009, I put in time behind the stoves at Telepan on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where I smoked upward of 5,000 trout, and at Restaurant Saul, in Brooklyn, not far from Mile End, where I once cooked by candlelight when the block lost power in the middle of dinner service. At the time I was working in kitchens I was not observant—and I therefore ate just about every abomination in the book. I also learned all the tricks at chefs’ disposals. But now I know some of the rabbis’ tricks, too, and, with this dual knowledge, I can’t help but see the menus offered up by this new generation of trayf-worshippers as lazy—not religiously, necessarily, but culinarily.

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Traditional Jewish foods, mostly of Ashkenazi origins, have been cropping up on the American culinary landscape for more than a century. For most of that time, their makers have frequently disregarded the dietary restrictions that historically characterized Jewish eating. (The Carnegie Deli, founded in 1937, has been slinging matzo brei alongside ham and eggs for decades.) Neither these older restaurateurs nor their contemporary counterparts are interested in kashrut—to say nothing of their customers. Rather, as Leah Koenig, author of The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook, told me, they aim to “celebrate Jewish heritage and cuisine in a broader more global context.” They aren’t concerned with the ritual specificity of traditional Jewish eating, and they divorce themselves from the emphasis on inwardness, on home and hearth, that has been an integral part of Jewish cookery for thousands of years.

But is such a disjuncture really possible? The game of baseball, for instance, only makes sense within a certain framework—of three strikes, three outs, nine players, four bases. Could you hit a ball with a tennis racket instead of a bat and still, with integrity, call it baseball? To call food “Jewish” only makes sense in the context of what “Jewish” has meant throughout history. That history has included innovation and change, but it has also included a crucial element of preservation and repetition.

This isn’t a religious argument. The best “Jewish food” has historically been created by Jewish cooks who were trying, simultaneously, to preserve and innovate. One of the staples in the Ashkenazi Jewish larder, for example, was schmaltz. Usually made by rendering chicken or goose fat (the leftover crispy bits, called gribenes, became a delicacy in their own right), schmaltz was an essential element of Ashkenazi cookery because frying meat in butter is forbidden, and the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe didn’t have ready access to non-dairy alternatives (like sesame and olive oil) that were common in the Mizrahi world. Eventually, in an effort to produce more and more goose fat, Jews began over-feeding their birds. In addition to ramping up the rate of gribenes consumption (and perhaps the rate of heart attacks) among Ashkenazi Jews, the process of force-feeding geese produced an inadvertent by-product—foie gras, which would go on to become a cornerstone of haute-French gastronomy. Although fattened goose liver was a well-known delicacy in the ancient world (the Talmud actually mentions the process of intentionally fattening geese), it was subsequently lost to European cuisine until 16th century, when, as Michael Ginor writes in Foie Gras: A Passion, renaissance chefs, looking to expand their culinary repertoires, started exploring butcher shops in the Jewish ghettos.

And so, while Jewish cooking has always been driven by cultural exchange, it has also, crucially, been influenced just as much by cultural boundaries—which dictated that Jews participate in a shared ritual system, through which the meal became an opportunity to reify and reinforce one’s commitment to a certain way of life.

Thus, the incorporation of outside cuisines also included their adaptation to the dietary restrictions of kashrut—which is how someone came up with the idea to cover toast in schmaltz instead butter, which couldn’t be eaten with meat meals—or to the rhythms of Jewish life, which inspired the one-pot braise known as cholent that was meant to cook all day on the blech.

The early rabbis made the laws surrounding kashrut more stringent precisely to ensure that Jews and non-Jews never ate meals with one another. In a section of the Babylonian Talmud dealing with idolatrous practice, Rabbi Kahana says that while bread baked by a non-Jew is not forbidden according to the Torah, the rabbis forbade it nonetheless. Bread being fundamental to a proper, halakhic meal, traditional rabbinic thought understands this prohibition in terms of an overarching effort to prevent Jews and non-Jews from ever developing close relationships. While reasonable people can certainly disagree about the wisdom of this sort of mandated cultural insularity, the fact remains that rabbinic stringencies have left on indelible imprint on Jewish cookery. Culinary traditions around the world use braises, but they occupy such a central place in Jewish cookery because they provide solutions to the restrictions of cooking on Shabbat. And many cultures around the world produce rich, celebratory egg breads (the Czechs’ Hoska, often eaten around Christmastime, is even braided), but their recipes almost invariably include milk. Because most Jewish communities have a strong tradition of eating meat on festive occasions (indeed, there is a statement in the Talmud that says there can be no celebration without meat), Jewish egg-bread leaves the milk out, an omission that makes the loaf heavier and gives challah its signature chew.

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To be sure, it is possible to inflect non-kosher food with Jewish culinary influences. These inflections often speak of genuine cultural exchange. The offerings at Telepan, my former employer, include not only smoked trout, but brunch options like the “Upper West Sider” (smoked salmon, gravlax, scrambled eggs, whitefish salad, and a mini bagel with cream cheese), and “babka-style” French toast. What my old boss is doing is exploring Jewish cookery by riffing on Jewish dishes that have already entered the broader cultural lexicon—a lexicon in which knishes stride alongside sushi, lo mein, and pork belly. He’s not interested in an ironic, self-consciously hip return to one’s roots, the subversive frisson evinced by Mile End’s breakfast sandwich, a dish that includes bacon and calls it “chazzer.”

More than 100 years after the founding of Bagel Bakers Local 338, a Manhattan trade union comprised of Yiddish-speaking bagel makers, celebrated chef Wylie Dufrense opened up shop on the Lower East Side and made an everything bagel out of ice cream and served it with smoked salmon threads. He did not, however, throw pancetta in the dish.

By abandoning the uncomfortable tension that comes from pushing to innovate while also striving to preserve, many young Jewish chefs are balking at the challenge inherent in creating truly new Jewish food—the kind of food that is so successful, so popular, and so Jewish that it finds its way into the collective imagination of an entire people and takes its place among their ever-evolving traditions. Six generations hence, Jewish culinary lights, out of an inevitable desire to reshape Jewish cuisine according to their own visions and contexts, will have to reinterpret whatever we pass on to them. But what will be our current legacy? Where do you go from bacon cholent?

Why didn’t we eat at home the way her Hebrew School teachers had told her Jews should eat? And what did Jewish law have to do with her adolescent concern for the welfare of animals? The grandchild remembers what the son never learned, says a Yiddish proverb. “I wasn’t raised that way,” I told my daughter. “I don’t have a good answer. But here’s something that might help.” We sat down together to read Michael Wyschogrod’s essay “The Revenge of the Animals.”

That was before I met Michael in 2007 and well before I had the honor to edit his contributions to the monthly journal First Things. Lord Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, told me that Wyschogrod had produced “the closest thing we have to a systematic theology.” Born in Berlin in 1928 to Hungarian-Jewish parents, Wyschogrod and his family escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, fleeing to New York, where he attended an Orthodox yeshiva, Torah Vodaath. He studied Talmud with the great Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, while writing a dissertation on Kierkegaard and Heidegger at Columbia University. He is one of the last of the great European-Jewish scholars who mastered both the Jewish religious sources and the corpus of Western philosophy. What mattered to me at the moment, though, was his little midrash on Genesis.

Kashrut is a stumbling block for modern Jews. Rational defenses of the dietary laws ring hollow—for example Maimonides’ claim that kashrut promotes health (“Anyone who thinks that kosher food is healthy has never had Shabbat dinner at my mother’s house,” said Harlan Wechsler, the rabbi at Congregation Or Zarua in Manhattan). I was too modern to observe mitzvot simply because the Torah said so—like the German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, about whom I had published several essays, my attitude toward much of observance was, “Not yet.”

Rational argument about kashrut falls short, but I was ready to hear a biblical argument, especially now that my daughter had called me on the carpet. And so we read Wyschogrod’s commentary together. Christians saw the serpent in the Garden of Eden as Satan, he began, but that never occurred to the rabbis of antiquity. The snake was only the cleverest animal of the many God made to try to keep man company, for, as it says in Genesis 2, “it is not good for man to be alone.” But “for Adam no fitting helper was found.” And then God made Eve. “Only woman is the proper companion of man,” Wyschogrod argued, but “animals are also companions although less than fully satisfactory ones.”

“What does that have to do with eating animals?” my daughter interrupted. That was where Wyschogrod was heading. Genesis tells us that even if the animals are not as close to God as are we, neither are they so far from him. The Torah is the first document in history to evince concern for the welfare as well as the sentiments of animals; domestic animals must rest on the Sabbath, and an ox must be allowed to eat the grain that it threshes. To kill and eat them is a grave matter; we have no rational calculus by which to weigh the human requirement for nutrition against the trace of the divine in animal life. That is why Jews may consume meat only with supernatural sanction, under restrictions imposed by God himself. God, Wyschogrod offers as an afterthought, probably would prefer us to be vegetarians.

My daughter and I agreed that we would consume no more non-kosher meat, and we would separate it from dairy. Some months passed before it dawned on me that I had migrated to the inside of Judaism, rather than pressing my nose against the window and looking in. I did not take the leap of faith across the chasm toward Jewish observance, to be sure: I was pushed by a stern-faced 14-year-old. Still, the world felt different afterward: I ate meat less frequently, and with a sense of awe at the God who rules over life and death. First one does, then one understands. The hard part is to understand enough to start doing.

Judaism is a religion of the body, Wyschogrod teaches. God chose Abraham and his descendants in the flesh, and it is in the sanctification of the body of Israel that God finds a home on earth, he wrote in his masterwork The Body of Faith. In his most controversial argument, he draws a parallel between our belief that God’s indwelling (Shekhinah) resides in the flesh-and-blood people of Israel, and the Christian idea of incarnation—the belief in “the indwelling of God in Israel by concentrating that indwelling in one Jew rather than leaving it diffused in the people of Jesus as a whole.” This raised eyebrows in some parts of the Orthodox Jewish world, for the idea that something like incarnation is found in Judaism is an uncomfortable thought.

By the late 1980s, Wyschogrod had become an important figure in Jewish-Christian relations. Against the prevailing sentiment in the Orthodox world, he argued forcefully for a theological dialogue with Christians, not only because he respected his Christian counterparts—above all the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth—but also because he believed that understanding the Christian belief in incarnation cast a clarifying light on the sanctity of the physical, bodily Jewish people. He became something of a cult figure among young Christian theologians, but he remained somewhat remote from the Orthodox Jewish mainstream. He is now appreciated as one of Orthodoxy’s most important and original thinkers.

By uncovering this parallel between Judaism and Christianity, Wyschogrod drew the line of division all the more brightly. Christians believe that God was present in the flesh of a single Jew; Jews sanctify their flesh through the mitzvot. It is the act of sanctification, not the belief, that defines our practice. As Franz Rosenzweig said, Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but they cannot know it for sure; but the existence of the people of Israel is a physical fact.

Jews who undertake a return to Jewish observance begin with a spiritual hunger and—if they succeed—arrive at the practice of Judaism. We do not return to Judaism from nowhere, but rather from the ambient Christian culture in which we live. The centrality of belief and the sovereignty of conscience are the hallmarks of this culture, and Jews who grew up at a distance from Judaism inevitably look at Judaism through a Christian lens.

Wo es sich christelt, da judelt es sich auch, in Heinrich Heine’s word-play: It says more or less, “Where Christians do something, Jews do the same,” but with the onomatopoetic sense in German of “tinkling” (christeln) versus “doodling” (judeln). A rationalized rather than a lived Judaism comes down to doodling. Judaism that emphasizes “ethical monotheism” against “ritual observance,” and rejects or qualifies the chosenness of Israel, really is mainline Protestantism with a tallis.

Judaism without commandments never made sense to me. If you observe the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” because it comes from God, why not also observe the commandment in the next verse not to wear cloth woven of two kinds of material? And if these don’t come from God, where do they come from? No surviving school of philosophy claims to derive any system of ethics—let alone “love thy neighbor”—from reason. Even if we think that ethics can be deduced from reason, why do we need the Torah? Or if we believe that altruism is an evolutionary adaptation, why should ethics have anything to do with Judaism? If “love thy neighbor” is not a divine commandment, and if it is not a logical deduction, then what is it? For semi-affiliated Jews, it’s the residue of a faith to which formerly observant Jews of an older generation have a sentimental attachment.

There is a great gulf fixed between “ethical monotheism” and traditional Jewish observance, which demands that we accept God’s will rather than our own criteria of judgment. As Wyschogrod notes, just that was the sin of Eve and Adam, who ate the forbidden fruit in order to acquire autonomous knowledge of good and evil. Such knowledge is what the philosophers promised from Plato to Kant, but failed to deliver; philosophy walked out on ethics in the 19th century and never looked back.

The trouble is that Jews who grew up surrounded by Christian culture do not know any way to act except according to their own autonomous criteria of judgment, yet the exercise of autonomous choice undermines the spirit of Jewish observance. How do we get there from here? One answer is Chabad-style outreach: Just perform one mitzvah, then another. We won’t harangue you; little by little, you’ll get to like it. I respect this approach, but it would not have reached me.

Wyschogrod reaches out in a different way.

Conscience, he explains, is not historically a Jewish concept. Conscience can tell us to do precisely what we shouldn’t. Christians place great emphasis on conscience, but that can lead to perverse results; he cites the dictate of St. Thomas Aquinas that if a man believes that “to omit fornication is a mortal sin, when he chooses not to fornicate, he sins mortally.” The secular reading of conscience is even more troubling. Heidegger tells us that conscience has nothing to do with ethics in the first place; it is our inner voice telling us to be authentic (which might explain why Heidegger’s Nazi party membership never troubled his conscience).

Judaism asks us to follow not our own conscience, but rather God’s commandments. What makes us accept these commandments? In the past, Jews may have kept the commandments to conform to community standards, but this no longer can be the case when only a minority of Jews keep the mitzvot: “It is much more probable than ever before that a Jew who remains faithful to the covenant in this day and age is acting out of conscience instead of social conformity,” Wyschogrod writes. “The Judaism of our day can no longer dispense with conscience as part of our theological arsenal.”

The solution, Wyschogrod maintains, is to acquire a biblical conscience—and here he draws on Karl Barth, who taught direct engagement with revelation. Jews can bridge the chasm between autonomous choice and divine command “by exposing conscience to those events and documents which constitute the record of Israel’s relation with God.” We cannot separate the Torah from our national life of the past 4,000 years and the lasting belief that God loved us and made us his inheritance. We answered that love by accepting the means God gave us to sanctify the quotidian, bodily life of Israel. The Jewish conscience, he argues, is “developed by the tradition of revelation to which the people of Israel are witness and without which Jewish conscience is impoverished and isolated, cut off from its source of historic sustenance.”

And that is why the little essay “The Revenge of the Animals” gobsmacked me: It impressed upon me that the “narrative” and the “legislative” parts of the Bible, the “ethical” and the ritual,” the ineffable mystery of life and death and the rules of the kosher kitchen, all are woven into one seamless fabric. We stand in fear and trembling before the terrible mystery of death; our fate, said Solomon, is the same as the beasts’, for all is vanity. In such matters, philosophical rationalizing leads to nonsense or madness—in the extreme case, to Peter Singer’s infamous claim that a healthy pig has more right to life than a crippled human infant. Judaism instead provides a supernatural answer to the mystery: God gives us means to sanctify our physical life on earth and therewith the promise of eternal life.

Eating is more important than prayer, remarked Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. There is no direct instruction to pray in the Pentateuch, which tells us plainly, “You shall eat before the Lord.” It takes work to learn to daven, but it was harder for me to learn how to eat—to live like a Jew rather than just sound like one.

Sometime later, I worked up the courage to invite Michael to dinner. He chose kosher vegetarian.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things magazine and the “Spengler” columnist for Asia Times Online.

So it goes. The first time I visited the White House was as a tourist in 1977 when I had just moved to Washington. Years later, I attended a reception there during the Reagan Administration with my husband, who was a political appointee in the Justice Department. While I sadly have no recollection of the food, I do remember two things vividly. First, my sense that the size of the White House was a populist reaction to the end of the French monarchy. This people’s house—“President’s House,” as the executive mansion was first called—had none of the regal proportions of the palaces of the Louvre or Versailles. The other thing I recall is meeting President Ronald Reagan.

I had recently read an article in which Reagan’s brother had described a peculiar and endearing habit the president had as a child—a habit he shared with my then-4-year-old daughter, Daniela. Reagan rubbed earlobes, both his own and those of other people. This was something my little Daniela did whenever there were grown-ups visiting our home. I mentioned this shared habit to him just before it was our turn to shake the president’s hand for the requisite photo. His reaction of absolute surprise, and that of his wife, Nancy, was immortalized in a photo now in my study.

Awareness of dietary restrictions has been around for some time in this country. When Franklin Roosevelt was governor of New York, he had two regular guests, Jewish men, to lunch at the executive mansion in Albany. When it came to the attention of the governor and his wife, Eleanor, that these men abstained from everything offered them except for fruit, dessert, and coffee, Mrs. Roosevelt realized she should serve dairy and vegetables in a new set of dishes especially reserved for these occasions.

Some decades later, in the 1960s and ‘70s, as Jewish pride grew and people in general became less afraid to indicate their dietary preferences, the White House began ordering special kosher meals for kashrut-observing guests. Kosher state dinners got underway at the end of that period, during the Carter Administration. Henry Haller was the White House chef in 1978, when 1,300 guests were invited for the Camp David Peace Treaty dinner. Of those meals, 50 were kosher, ordered from a local caterer.

Two years later, in 1980, the White House held its first entirely kosher state dinner; it was in honor of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin with 180 guests. The menu included cold Columbia River salmon with sauce verte and golden twists, roast duckling with glazed peaches, wild rice, fresh asparagus, and mixed green salad. The wines came from California and were kosher—Kedem, Seyval Blanc, Chaumac, and sparkling white. In those days, White House pastry chefs usually served butter-rich petit fours; at Begin’s dinner, they prepared a non-dairy frozen orange sherbet cake with Grand Marnier sauce along with pareve pastries.

Ann Amernick, the assistant pastry chef under Haller and later the first female pastry chef at the White House, remembers how the White House kitchen was made kosher. “The mashgiachs came with blowtorches as big as they were,” says Amernick, who’s the author of The Art of the Dessert. “They spent all day burning and covering surfaces with aluminum foil. The kitchen was unbearably hot. I felt it was a historical moment and at the same time it was comical. Roland Mesnier, the pastry chef, was desperately trying to get the sorbets made and one of the mashgiachs was following him around with the blowtorch. Every time Roland turned around the mashgiach was there. While some of the cooks had a partial understanding of kashrut from past experience in hotels and lessons in cooking school, the reality in the White House was another story.”

Awareness of religious and ethnic diversity is part of life today in the White House. During the administration of George W. Bush, the first couple hosted a Hanukkah party with 400 kosher latkes. The Obamas, whose personal chef, Sam Kass, is Jewish, have now held two Passover seders; kitchen staff have prepared recipes culled from the mothers of Jewish White House employees.

In addition to thinking about ethnic cuisine, the White House is now concentrating more on fresh foods and foods from the garden, a practice initiated by the earliest presidents. Not only was there a White House garden during the time of the founding fathers, but Thomas Jefferson, while president, marketed with his French chef in Georgetown, selecting foods suited to his mostly French, English, Dutch, and Italian menus. When time permitted, he also helped prepare the dishes and select the wines.

My favorite visit to the White House was with a group of visiting chefs for a behind-the-scenes tour of the kitchen and the garden. It was organized in September by Bill Yosses, the current pastry chef and a dear friend. In the vegetable garden, eggplant bushes grew as tall as I am. Kale was everywhere. And the ripe tomatoes showed no signs of the blight that had hit the rest of the Middle Atlantic crop. Nearby we saw the honeybee combs, tended by a White House employee who is also a bee keeper. White House honey, in tiny jars, is given away to guests at state dinners.

Later, over coffee, I tasted Bill’s freshly made lemon pound cake. It used nine lemons fresh from the White House garden, and it was delicious.

LEMON POUND CAKE SUPREME
Adapted from The Perfect Finish by Bill Yosses and Melissa Clark

11 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus additional for the bottom and sides of the pan and the parchment paper
9 lemons
2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1½ cups superfine sugar
1½ teaspoons baking powder
Dash of salt
3/4 cup crème fraiche or heavy cream
6 large eggs, at room temperature
1½ cups granulated sugar
½ cup confectioners’ sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, putting a rack in the center. Use butter to grease the bottom and sides of a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan, line the bottom with parchment paper or waxed paper, then grease the paper.

2. Set 2 of the lemons aside. Grate the zest of 4 lemons, and set those lemons and their zest aside also. Slice off the tops and bottoms of 3 unzested lemons. Stand each lemon on end on a cutting board and use a small knife to slice away the skin and white pith, leaving the flesh exposed. Working over a bowl, cut the segments away from the membranes and let the fruit and juice fall into the bowl (remove any seeds). Using a fork, break the segments into 1-inch pieces.

3. Sift the flour, superfine sugar, baking powder, and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer. Begin mixing on low speed, then add the crème fraiche or cream. Increase the speed to medium and beat in the eggs one at a time, the butter, and 3 tablespoons of the lemon zest. Gently fold the lemon segments and juices into the batter. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake on the center rack for 15 minutes. Use a sharp knife to cut an incision lengthwise down the middle of the cake. This will prevent the cake from splitting on the side. Bake for 30 minutes longer. Lower the oven to 325 degrees, and bake for 40 to 45 minutes longer, until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean.

4. Meanwhile, juice the 6 lemons you set aside in step 1 and strain the juice. Put the granulated sugar and the confectioners’ sugar in a pot over high heat and add 1½ cups water. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved. Stir in the lemon juice and remaining zest and let cool.

5. When the cake is done, transfer it to a wire rack to cool in the pan for 30 minutes. Raise the oven temperature to 350 degrees. Slide a thin knife or offset spatula around the sides of the pan and turn it over to unmold the cake onto a sheet pan, and carefully peel the parchment or waxed paper from the bottom of the cake. Pour the lemon syrup over the cake and very gently squeeze the cake to help it absorb the syrup. Carefully turn the cake over and squeeze a bit more until all the syrup is absorbed. It makes for messy hands, but it is worth the effort. Transfer the cake to a clean cookie sheet and return it to the oven for 10 minutes to set the glaze. Cool on a rack.

Yield: 1 (9-inch) loaf to serve 8

EGGPLANT SALAD
Adapted from Dahan Catering

½ cup olive oil
2 eggplants, cut into ½-inch dice (about 2 pounds)
8 plum tomatoes, seeded and skinned, fresh or canned
4 shallots, finely diced
½ bunch of Italian flat leaf parsley (1 cup)
The grated zest of 1 lemon
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Heat the oil in a large nonstick frying pan over high. Sauté the diced eggplant until browned and soft, but not mushy, stirring occasionally. It should take about 5–7 minutes. Remove the eggplant from the pan with a slotted spoon so that any remaining oil will stay in the pan and drain the eggplant on a paper towel.
2. If using fresh tomatoes, score the bottoms. In a large pot bring to boil 5 cups of water. Once the water has come to a strong boil, put tomatoes in for 15 seconds. Remove the tomatoes and put immediately into an ice bath. Once the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, gently peel back the skin, trying not remove too much flesh. Then, slice tomatoes in half to remove the seeds and cut into ¼-inch dice.
3. Reheat the sauté pan on medium heat, and sauté the shallots until translucent. Then add the tomatoes and half the parsley and cook on medium heat until most of the excess liquid from the tomatoes has evaporated. Sprinkle on the lemon zest and season to taste with salt and pepper. Let cool and refrigerate for later use or serve immediately, sprinkled with the remaining parsley.

Yield: About 6 servings

“Pork has become very much in vogue,” says food writer Ed Levine. “It tastes good. People can cook with it easily; you can make pork chops or roasts, or you can cook with bacon—and bacon makes everything taste better. You can’t do the same thing with chicken.” But for Jewish chefs and foodies, such an indulgence is more complicated. Though the rules of kashrut forbid pork consumption, the advent of a bacon-cream cheese shmear, to choose instead of lox spread, suggests that adherence to anti-pork restriction is hardly what it used to be.

We’re living in an era of “post-modern food,” says Hasia Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University and the author of Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. The trayf-meets-traditional combinations are just another example of a phenomenon that includes “jalapeno-Jack rugelach, chocolate chip bagels and, frankly, Tandoori salmon,” she says. “Show me a salmon that went anywhere near India.”

The particular mix of Jewish cuisine and pork is “part of the increasingly porous world we live in,” Diner says. “The idea is that things don’t have to be in fixed boxes: X is Jewish so it can’t have pork; Y is Italian so it can’t have pineapple and tuna. All of these are now open to the creativity and predilections of whomever wants to make or consume them.”

Not everybody does. For Gil Marks, a kosher-observant rabbi, chef, and cookbook writer, “the thought of a bacon bagel sort of turns the stomach,” he says. “Not just from the religious perspective—though there is that—but from a sociological perspective. It’s like an American eating a horse.”

Nonetheless, Marks, at work on an encyclopedia of Jewish food due out this summer, sees a bright side to the heretical trend. “You always retain your roots, to a certain extent, no matter how hard we try to reject them,” he says. “No matter how assimilated you are, certain things draw you back—like comfort food and nostalgia for childhood; when you were sick you got homemade chicken soup with matzo balls. By adapting these foods, you’re embracing them in a certain way, without totally embracing them.”

And to many Jews, the allure of pork is simply irresistible. “It’s the ultimate taboo,” says Dan Levine, who as “Porky LeSwine” is the co-founder of BbqJew.com, dedicated to news about North Carolina pork barbecue, a topic which enjoys religious-like devotion. “Where we live, pork is in so many dishes,” says the Chapel Hill resident. “It’s a flavoring ingredient in everything from vegetables to cornbread.”

The “ultimate taboo” also makes a great marketing tool. “It gives us a bit of identity and sets us apart in the barbecue world,” says David Rosen, a co-founder of Jubon’s, a competitive barbecue-making enterprise with a name that plays on the words “Jew” and “Ubon’s,” the Yazoo City, Mississippi, barbecue restaurant that mentored the team. The team mascot is a yarmulke-wearing pig, and its slogan is, “At least the salt is kosher.” “It’s a little controversial, but so what?” Rosen says. “We’re not out to offend.”

This movement evolved thanks, in part, to the increased prominence of celebrity chefs, says Heather Lauer, author of Bacon: A Love Story: A Salty Survey of Everybody’s Favorite Meat. “Now we’re watching more cooking shows and doing more cooking at home,” she says. “Bacon is a secret weapon in the kitchen.” The Internet, too, plays a role in selling artisinal pork producers as well as purveyors of products like bacon mints and bacon-print shoes.

Others are less tolerant of the combination. “It’s sacrilege, in my opinion, and disrespectful of the tradition,” says David Sax, the author of Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen. “Jewish food was defined by the fact that it was made in this way, and didn’t have these certain products.” And this month, Hall says, he got his first piece of “hate mail” from someone who called his creations “a cheap thrill.”

But such rebukes have failed to slow this trend. Jubon’s is winning accolades at barbecue contests across the country for their slow-cooked pork ribs, and a retired Israeli cardiologist named Eli Landau is self-publishing an entire cookbook devoted to pork, allegedly Israel’s first.

Jews eating pork, as Hasia Diner points out, is simply a fact of modern life. Moreover, there’s nothing particularly “traditional” about, say, cinnamon raisin bagels, either. “There are people who believe there is a clear boundary between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic,’ ” she says. “But what we think is authentic was once brand new. Culture is always being reinvented, and every time it has a certain contentiousness to it.”

Lisa Keys is a freelance journalist in New York City.

Growing up in a kosher home, I always took for granted that I’d be confronting a limited menu, though the way my family practiced kashrut was a lot less restrictive than the way some other families did. We had two sets of dishes, of course, and never mixed milk and meat. We never ate a huge amount of meat anyway, but what we did consume was kosher. Anything on the list of forbidden animals (from the obvious—pig, shellfish—to the less intuitive, like catfish) was verboten. We ate in restaurants pretty often, which wouldn’t have been possible if we were limiting ourselves to kosher ones; in public, we were vegetarians by default. Perhaps owing something to the fact that my father is a Reform rabbi, we were practically the only family I knew who kept kosher, but our version of things made sense to me and was what I’d always known.

It was so ingrained in me that that’s what kashrut was—basic vigilance, and some manageable rules that were foreign to most people—that I was shocked to discover that more observant Jews made kashrut look like obsessive-compulsiveness. For them, kashrut meant they couldn’t eat in non-kosher restaurants or in the homes of friends who didn’t keep kosher. Everything they bought—from chicken to cereal to chocolate—needed to be certified by a solemn rabbinic authority. Conscious consumption was one thing, but it seemed strange to me to take such fanatical caution with absolutely everything you ate. The fundamental rules of kashrut, as I understood them, were about there being things you could eat and things you couldn’t. Cheese pizza, Goldfish crackers, and unfrosted Poptarts might not have a hecksher, but what could possibly be un-kosher about them?

I might have gone on to decide that an illicit cheeseburger was the perfect act of teenage heresy. Instead, I became a vegetarian. It just made sense: I was hanging around with a bunch of vigilant animal-rights types, and at 14, in a small town north of New York City, taking that kind of stand was invigorating. Although I flirted with militancy, the decision was more instinctive than ideological. I didn’t even really like burgers. And though I had come to believe that all meat consumption was wrong, it was some comfort to know (as I digested some very convincing propaganda: horrifying undercover footage of blood-clogged slaughterhouses, and pamphlets that graphically detailed the injustices of jam-packed feed lots), that I’d never really been implicated in any of it. Those particular slaughterhouses weren’t where kosher meat came from; surely those would look different. For all of kashrut’s strange rules, the ethics had always been what really spoke to my family. My dad liked to say that keeping kosher was the next best thing to being a vegetarian; since keeping kosher meant animals suffered less, your meat supposedly arrived on your plate with less baggage. By choosing to keep kosher, I reasoned, Jews could opt out of the particularly appalling practices of the mainstream meat industry. I could rag on my parents for their occasional steaks and barbecued chicken, but compared to the rest of the world, they were less culpable.

By becoming a vegetarian, I was conveniently exempting myself from the specifics of kosher laws, But I was also building on those principles as my family practiced them, taking certain ethics to their logical conclusion. Being a vegetarian just meant I didn’t have to understand any of it in Jewish terms. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t thinking about that at the time.

Over the years, people would ask me why I shunned meat and fish: was it because of health issues? Moral ones? Did I think I’d eat this way forever? I’d shrug and say I didn’t know, and explain that it was hard to picture myself doing otherwise. Every once in awhile I’d find veganism seductive, and would tell myself that if I really cared about animal welfare, I wouldn’t eat eggs and milk products, either. Somewhere along the way, though, any dogma that once motivated my diet fell away. I started to remember that I’d made a choice. “We do what we can,” I began rationalizing, the handy slogan equal parts truth, consolation, and evasion.

I won’t try to explain my shift, because I can’t necessarily defend it. Let’s just say that my Food Network infatuation and habit of binging on food criticism took their toll: for the first time, I’m finding I want to taste prosciutto-wrapped figs, crab cakes, and southern fried chicken from the place down the street. I want to explore mysterious, possibly gross, yet fascinating foods like raw oysters. There’s a delicious novelty to eating certain things for the very first time in my late twenties, like I’m starting from scratch.

At least in theory—I haven’t quite gotten there yet. Some subconscious limits are hard to overcome. That redfish was one thing, but when I see shrimp or crab on a menu, my eye instinctively glosses over them. I’m daunted: it’s not my food. We don’t eat that, says a voice in my head. Theoretically, I may be eager to eat adventurously, but my childhood eating habits are having an unexpected influence on what I can stomach. Though I’ve never felt strongly about keeping kosher, I can’t deny the hold its basic rules have on me, more than a dozen years after I last ate anything they specifically sanctioned. It’s a reflex, really—a blocked nerve.

When I was growing up, my family’s diet reinforced the fact that we were different, at a time when that was the last thing I needed to be reminded of. When my mom was a kid, her family didn’t keep kosher outside their house in any way. And my dad’s family didn’t keep kosher at all. “I certainly don’t feel commanded to do it,” my mom told me recently. Jewishness is ingrained in me in ways I can’t always explain, and one of the places it’s hunkered down seems to be my palate. But I don’t want to relate to it by way of restrictions on things I’ve never experienced. Left up to me, Judaism isn’t about what I can’t have, or won’t try. For that, there’s always vegetarianism.

Organic is the True Kosher [Ynet]

Here, food as metaphor deals with bread, literally and figuratively the staff of life, and salt, a real and philosophical purifier. Bread and salt represent the practical and the spiritual and, together, are part of a common Sabbath meal ritual of pouring salt on a piece of challah after saying the Motzi but before it is eaten, following the admonition of Leviticus 2:13: “Never shall you suspend the salt covenant with your God. With all your offerings you shall offer salt.” That, more or less, will be the scope of this monthly column: food as it affects and touches various aspects of our lives. Our choices and preferences can reflect our aspirations or prejudices; changing attitudes and styles redesign the meals we read about and then hunger for.

On the practical side I will bring news of delicious things to eat, where to find them or, occasionally, how to prepare them. Some columns will relate to time-honored Jewish traditions concerning food and the changing world of kashrut.

On the philosophical side, there will be descriptions and explanations of food and how it figures into lifecycle celebrations primarily in cultures where wheat or rice are the sustaining grains, from the blessings over challah and matzo to the Christian Eucharist to the wedding cake that evolved as a sweet form of bread or oat cake that was to be broken over the heads of the bride and groom in 17th and 18th century Britain. In some Slavic countries a round, flattish loaf is topped with various toys indicating professions to be placed within reach of a toddler. The first toy he or she picks up is considered a forecast of the profession that will provide money for bread in the future.

Salt figures similarly in life and lore. In Japan handfuls are strewn across the mat as a sanctifier before every sumo wrestling match. Knock a salt cellar over at the table and you will have an argument with a loved one or even worse luck unless you toss some over your shoulder to ward off the evil spirits you have angered. Salt in the wound? Bad as far as pain goes, good as far as killing bacteria. For that is the property–the ability to kill living things, by dehydrating them–that makes salt an effective preservative and explains why nothing lives in the Dead Sea and why animal foods are koshered with a salting down. In ancient Rome, salt was so precious that workers were paid with it, or with coins entitling them to a ration of it, thereby giving us our word salary although hardly anyone would accept it as payment today, unless perhaps it was an exotic black, orange, pink, or green coarse sea salt for which tastings are held in cutting-edge restaurants and, by the way, how do such salts really differ in flavor?

For gourmands, salt is essential to flavor, and no less a respected chef than André Soltner, former chef-owner of the late-lamented Lutèce, once advised that salt must be in every single dish one prepares, even sweet confections and cakes. I forgot to ask him about coffee and tea.

What would we do without it? Or, as expressed in the New Testament, Luke 14:34, “But if the salt shall lose its savour wherewith should it be seasoned?” And do without it we apparently are expected to as control-freak chefs banish salt from the table, implying they know our palates better than we do. Perhaps they are unaware of the sensory science related to salt and how no two of us experience levels of it alike, something that will be a future subject here.

Though bread and salt undoubtedly will remain staples of Jewish cuisine, that cuisine is also changing rapidly. Centuries-old and honored observances such as kosher laws are being updated and modernized in many interesting ways. How and why such things occur–sadly or happily–and what they lead to is another subject for exploration.

Thirty years ago I would never have believed that kosher dairy restaurants would virtually disappear from New York and other large cities to be replaced by Israeli-Sephardic “dairy” restaurants. These serve light and enticing falafel and hummus, pita and baba gannouj, pizza and tabbouleh, instead of heavy and enticing cheese blintzes with sour cream, scorching hot mushroom–barley or cabbage soup, eggs scrambled with lox and onions, and baskets bursting with cascades of breads and rolls, fragrant with onions and veneered with sesame or poppy seeds. A younger generation intent on keeping kosher but looking for more spicy, diverting, healthful, and fashionable dishes are flocking to Indian vegetarian restaurants in urban areas. They are de facto kosher for their Hindu customers who do not eat fish, meat, fowl, eggs, or cheeses set with rennin, the acidic enzyme in rennet that begins coagulation of milk and is produced in a cow’s stomach.

Recognizing this growing market, many of those Indian restaurateurs now go the extra mile by employing a mashgiach and having separate hand sinks in the dining room to be used before saying blessings over the food. But how a novice navigates one of those menus will be the subject of a future column as will a few of the kosher Indian vegetarian restaurants around the country.

In a way, Jews might well have been the unwitting pioneers in what is currently celebrated as fusion cooking. Now, perhaps, a new worldwide Jewish cuisine is being born that, like the old Ashkenazic and Sephardic cookery, borrows from other cultures, fusing to modern tastes while still honoring their beliefs. But as butter and schmaltz give way to olive oil, no-fat sour cream stands in for the luscious high fat original, and croutons replace gribbenes, we are left with one important question: if heartburn becomes extinct, who will buy Nexium?

“It’s funny, that guy over there just asked if we were dating,” I mentioned, as I reached for some tortellini with pesto. “It’s not the first time I’ve heard that question. Earlier this week, someone asked me the same thing.”

“Well, it’s not like I haven’t thought about it,” he replied idly as he scooped carrot salad onto a paper plate.

I stopped mid-spoonful, frozen. I hadn’t expected that response. “I don’t think now is the best time to talk about this,” I said.

He shrugged. “Why not?” he asked without looking up.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it, too,” I said carefully, which froze him as well. Carrot salad ignored, he looked at me.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly, “maybe this isn’t the best time to talk about it.”

That moment at the buffet table marked a change in our relationship. But it was only the latest food marker in our time together. Food had originally been part of what kept us apart.

Aaron and I had met years earlier through a mutual friend and kept running into one another at Jewish community events in Cambridge, Mass. Occasionally we both attended the same service in a congregation that pushes the boundaries of Orthodoxy by allowing women to read the Torah and lead other parts of the service. But unlike me, Aaron keeps the Sabbath. And he keeps kosher. Strictly.

To my mind, I also keep kosher. I grew up with separate meat and milk dishes. Now, I am a vegetarian and have only a single set of dishes. But this wasn’t enough for him. If he eats cooked food outside of his house, he only eats it in strictly kosher homes and restaurants. By contrast, I don’t look for a hechsher on anything I buy, rendering my kitchen, by his standards, off limits.

Though Aaron and I had known each other for years, our friendship had intensified over the preceding six months. We’d been spending a great deal of time together, going out regularly to a neighborhood bar to catch bluegrass, grabbing a beer, and discussing our love lives. When we talked about dating (other people, of course, not each other), I said I couldn’t see someone who wouldn’t eat out at a restaurant with me. He said he’d never date someone who ate at non-kosher restaurants, as she’d expect the same of him.

And yet I knew I was moving beyond friendship as I increasingly invited him to concerts or lectures around town. I loved talking with him. I wanted to hear his opinions. I wanted to see his huge smile and smile myself at his ability to find a comeback to any taunt or present a random piece of information on any topic. Suddenly I realized I had a problem: I was falling in love.

A week after the encounter at the buffet table, we went on our first official date. He took me to a sushi restaurant: he could eat the fish (uncooked), but wouldn’t eat the rice (cooked). The sake slid down our throats, spicy and sweet. We moved on to coffee (hot drink–not a problem), and he took my hand, stroking my palm. Chills flew up my spine. When he kissed my fingers I knew it was time to leave the restaurant.

Despite the food barrier, we tumbled into the relationship with an intensity that belied our differences. I suddenly, shockingly, had a boyfriend who could not take me out to dinner, except usually at one of a couple of local kosher joints. So instead, we cooked—at his house. We’d stop off at the supermarket and pick up whatever looked good, frying up tofu and vegetables, ad-libbing sauce for pasta, covering our hands in sticky fruit juice for mango and black beans. He said he’d rarely eaten so well.

Before we started dating, Aaron insisted it didn’t matter that he couldn’t eat hot food out at restaurants. “I can’t tell the difference between good and bad cooking, so I don’t mind.”

I quickly learned that was a lie, or at least a necessary delusion. I’d hold out the spoon while cooking and he’d sip it, wait a moment, then pronounce what should be added–lemon juice, salt, hot pepper, cumin. I trusted his taste. I called him a closeted foodie.

One Friday night we invited a half-dozen friends over for Shabbat dinner. Earlier, we spent the afternoon in the kitchen. He played sous-chef as I called out the steps for the recipes. The sauce for the fish bubbled on the stove as he smashed pistachios to go in the quinoa and I diced an array of jewel-toned vegetables for an Israeli salad. We carried the vibrant platters out to our guests in celebration of the gusto with which we’d performed this dance of domesticity. I surveyed the table with pride, relishing our shared culinary adventures, our love of food and community.

But I missed sharing other food experiences with him. I thought about visiting a close friend later that summer, and how she wouldn’t be able to cook him her Armenian crusty rice or whip up a vegetable stew. I regretted that I couldn’t introduce him to the salty sweet vegetarian kibbeh at my favorite Middle Eastern hole-in-the-wall, or the earthy, locally foraged mushrooms at a neighborhood French bistro.

Then, I started to think about traveling. And food.

I leave the country at least once a year. I’ve sipped soup with a Thai monk, dived into a hot fish taco with Mexican fishermen, gorged on rice and avocado salad after a day of hiking in Peru. How could we travel together?

And then I began to worry about children—and food. What if we married and had kids? What if he didn’t want his children, our children, to eat at the homes of my family and friends?

As the months passed, we talked about our differences in religion, and the conversations forced tough questions to the surface, questions about our differing views on the role of women in religious services, about Shabbat observance, about how to choose a home and synagogue if we were ever, together, to move away from Cambridge. I told him that I could see changing my life in some ways, living one more tightly bound by Jewish strictures. I was willing to consider, for example, having a kitchen that would meet his kashrut standards. But I would also need to know that he could find a way to be more flexible, a way to allow space for my values, too, in any future family we might create together. He listened, but said nothing, unwilling or unsure of how to answer.

At times I called my friends in a panic. “I love him,” I’d say, “but how will I know when it’s time to break up?”

Finally, over a beer one summer night, Aaron decided it was time. He said that he looked into the future, and saw struggles ahead. He didn’t think he was ready to take them on.

Dating Aaron made me examine the ways in which I’m willing to compromise. I already limit my diet by choice, and it’s not always easy. I can practically taste the rich aroma of my friend’s favorite lamb dish at a local upscale Mediterranean restaurant. After a week in Madrid, the rosy glow of cured ham tempts like a beacon from its premium spot on the wall of my favorite neighborhood tapas joint.

And yet within my chosen restrictions, the window of flexibility allows me an opening to the world. I can eat anywhere, even if my options are limited. My friends can share their love for me by sharing their food. I celebrate the play of an endless variety of flavors and textures that melt onto my tongue and fill not only my body, but my soul. I know this experience will be a part of what I will share with a life partner. Together we will teach our children that they can wander the world freely, experiencing the tastes of cultures and the joy of new friends from any background.

After my relationship with Aaron ended, I was sad and frustrated that we loved each other but couldn’t bridge the religious distance between us. Yet I understood that to Aaron, the rules of Judaism form the basis of his life. And being with him helped me realize that my more flexible approach to food is not simply based on an addiction to restaurants. It’s part of my life philosophy, as much a part of it as Judaism. I savor the freedom of being able to sit down with anyone, anywhere, and break bread.

Cynthia Graber is a freelance writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It is a paradox of Judaism, then, that a religion that honors such independent and active women should have evolved a code of law that sharply restricts women’s independence and activity. True, as Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton note in the introduction to their new edition of Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook, the role of women in traditional Judaism is hardly peripheral: Since much of Jewish religious life, including the celebration of the holidays and Shabbat, was home centered, women were undoubtedly aware of the extent to which the continuation of Jewish life depended on them.”

Kashrut, the keeping of the Sabbath, the ritual purity laws concerning sex and menstruation—these were the major responsibilities of women under Mishnaic law. And some of the earliest documents in this rich anthology show how Jewish women turned these domestic duties into religious occasions. The genre of tkhines—Yiddish-language prayers, many written by women—makes an ordinary activity like baking challah an occasion for worship: “Lord of all the world, in your hand is all blessing. I come now to revere your holiness, and I pray you to bestow your blessing on the baked goods. Send an angel to guard the baking, so that all will be well baked, will rise nicely, and will not burn, to honor the holy Sabbath.”

Other tkhines were more abstract, such as a prayer written by the woman, the rabbi’s wife, Mistress Sarah Rebecca Rachel Leah, daughter of the “brilliant and famous rabbi Yokel Segal Horowitz.” Appropriately enough, this writer invoked her namesakes: “Sarah, for whose sake You commanded and said, ‘Touch not my anointed ones’…Rachel, to whom You promised that by her merit, we, the children of Israel, would come out of exile.” The matriarchs, in these prayers, take on something like the role of Catholic saints, or even the Virgin Mary—benevolent intercessors with a stern God.

But until the 19th century, women were “exempted”—the rabbinic euphemism for “excluded”—from the more public and prestigious realms of Jewish observance: synagogue attendance and Talmud study. The now-notorious prayer in which Jewish men thank God for not making them women is meant to express gratitude for the greater obligations laid on men in Jewish law—the more mitzvot, the more chances to please God. By the 19th century, this segregation of women from the core of Jewish life took a definite toll, as the Sourcebook shows, perhaps despite itself. Umansky and Ashton mean to honor all expressions of women’s spirituality equally. But the poems and essays they gather from 19th-century Jewish women—mostly English speaking, mostly Reform Jews—have an anemic, abstract quality that betrays an increasingly remote connection with actual Judaism.

Take “Religion,” one of the hymns by Penina Moise, who lived in Charleston, South Carolina and published the first American Jewish hymnal in 1842:

“To smile when we on life’s breakers are tossed
And serenely its tempest survey;
To say, though the beacon of hope is lost:
Mercy’s star will direct our way;
Such trust in trial’s hour,
Springs from Religion’s pow’r.”

It is hard to see anything particularly Jewish about this; it is the kind of genteel Victorian stoicism that you could have heard in many a Protestant church at the same time. So, too, with the diary of Rachel Simon, whose husband Oswald was a leader of Britain’s Liberal Judaism movement. “My greatest wish,” Simon writes, “is to become perfectly religious; by this I do not refer to matters of form and ceremony, although the outward garb of religion must not be neglected. When I speak of religion I mean I constant inward sense of communion with God.” This is praiseworthy, but again, it nearly disclaims any connection with the substance of Jewish tradition—a tradition which Simon, as a woman, could hardly be expected to know.

The document in the Sourcebook that first announces Jewish women’s impatience with this state of affairs is a 1912 speech by Bertha Pappenheim, the pioneering German Jewish feminist. The Jew was bound by law to exclusively Jewish study in the Hebrew language,” Pappenheim notes, and this very training was the best school for sharpening the mind, and has rendered him, in every age, peculiarly receptive and responsive to other subjects of study. The women remained for the most part (less by law than by ancient custom) in total ignorance.. . . We have sufficient proof of the disregard of the woman in the Jewish service when we see that for purposes of prayer a woman is not counted as a member of the congregation; she is not called up to the reading of the Law, and she does not participate in the public ceremony of coming of age.”

Pappenheim herself was no traditionalist—in the same speech, she insists that Judaism “has and needs no outward forms and authorities to bind its members together.” Yet her insistence that women be admitted into the intellectual and legal heritage of Judaism would be responsible, in the 20th century, for an extraordinary renaissance of Jewish tradition. In the last section of the book, “Contemporary Voices,” covering the years 1988-2007, we see how women are remaking Judaism, not by whittling it down to a universalistic essence, but by engaging with the texts and practices that have always been at its core.

Thus Amy Eilberg, a rabbi in Minneapolis, writes in “The Gift of First Fruits” about how becoming a mother changed her understanding of the Torah’s injunction to dedicate the first-born child to God. She remembers davening for the first time after giving birth to her daughter: “That night, for the first time in my life, I encountered a feminine image of God, who rejoiced in the birth of my daughter and my own rebirth as a mother.” Eilberg turns to Psalm 8 to express her gratitude: “From the mouths of infants and sucklings you have founded strength on account of Your foes.” This is the kind of creative reading of scripture that is the very heart of Judaism. It is sobering to think that it was not until our own lifetimes that women could take part in it, and so help remake Judaism in their image.

I had come to the city’s only kosher deli and market for two reasons. The first was to get a sandwich; I’d heard their mock-shrimp po-boy was stellar. This accomplished—it tastes suspiciously like pollock—I began working on my second goal: to get a sense of the Jewish community in New Orleans, three years after Katrina decimated the city. I grew up in the Jewish communities of a handful of southern cities (San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta) and I wanted to understand why so many Jews had decided to come back to this one. Especially after it had been destroyed by a hurricane.

Arena, the head cook, putters around behind the counter while she talks, ministering to the lunchtime crowd. Despite its name, the store is more Jewish New York than Cajun New Orleans—Cajun cooking, with its emphasis on things that live in swamps, is more or less the antithesis of kashrut. Instead, Kosher Cajun is laid out like a traditional New York delicatessen. Kosher meat is arranged in rows behind glass, and neat shelves stacked with Elite and Manischevitz products. The lunch counter serves roast beef sandwiches, knishes, and—as a single concession to the store’s name—the Kosher Shrimp Po-Boy. And the store is thriving, bustling with Jews from across the observance spectrum: men both bearded and clean-shaven, women in wigs and with their hair uncovered, children in felt yarmulkes.

Arena (right) and others at Kosher Cajun

Before Katrina touched down here three years ago today, New Orleans’ Jewish community numbered about 9,500, remnants of a community that had been slowly declining over the last quarter century. Now, about 7,500 call the city home. Of these, the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans estimates that 850, or roughly eleven percent, are newcomers.

When the call came to evacuate, just about everyone who could leave, did. Many Jews fled to Houston, Dallas, Memphis, Atlanta—large southern communities that, in the words of Kosher Cajun’s owner, Joel Brown, “could offer far more than New Orleans ever did.” Unlike many non-Jewish refugees, Jews tended to have places to go where they would be welcomed, and where they could start over.

Yet given a choice between resettling in a larger community or going back to a ruined city, most Jews came back to New Orleans. They were far more likely to return than non-Jews—after Katrina, the general population in New Orleans dropped by more than fifty percent; the Jewish population by only thirty.

And people are still coming. True, the Federation is offering grants to newcomers in an attempt to coax young, mobile Jews from other parts of the country. But just over 100 of the 850 newcomers have accepted grants.

Abandoned house in the Lower 9th Ward

This is a hard thing to understand, driving into the city. At first glance, New Orleans fails to impress. The moment you step from your car, the damp swamp air covers you in a grimy blanket. In the outer neighborhoods, along the muddy bayous seeping down toward the gulf, the empty lots gape among the rows of houses like missing teeth. The stench that rises from the bayous wafts over the city like a vague, unpleasant cologne.

Before the storm, Joel Brown evacuated to Memphis with his wife and children. Having grown up in New Orleans’ small community, he liked the greater possibilities Memphis offered. The Jewish community there had everything he could have hoped for—schools, markets, plenty of synagogues. He talks fondly, and at great length, about how great Memphis was for his family. But ten days after the storm, he left his family in Tennessee and drove down to New Orleans to start cleaning out the store.

Despite his affection for Memphis, Brown didn’t see staying away from New Orleans as an option. The very things he liked about the larger community helped drive him back to his hometown. As he told me, it’s nice to have a congregation of hundreds, “but it’s nothing like the feeling of being one of ten in a minyan.”

The more people I talk to, the more I hear that sentiment repeated. Native New Orleanians, both Jewish and not, took it as inevitable that they would return—New Orleans was home. They always say it like that, almost as though it’s italicized. As though it’s the only place they could ever call that. The relatively small Jewish community seems to experience this with particular intensity.

Last year, the Federation completed a study in conjunction with Louisiana State University, comparing Jews who had returned with those who hadn’t. Returnees, they found, were less likely to be depressed or alcoholic than those who stayed away. They were far more likely to be hopeful and optimistic about the future. In the report’s own dry terminology, they were far more likely “to sleep at night.”

“Nothing against Memphis,” Brown says, “but here we can make a difference.”

Kosher Cajun stands in Metairie, the neighborhood west of downtown where most of New Orleans’ Jews live. Lake Pontchartrain lies to the north, held back by a system of levees. When Katrina hit, Metairie was lucky. Unlike East New Orleans, or Lakeview, where the Orthodox community used to be, the levees didn’t fail.

When Brown came to check out Kosher Cajun, he was at first relieved to see that the damage was not as bad as he had feared: at least the store was still standing. He opened the front door, planning to run across to open the back entrance. “I literally threw up running door to door,” he says. “The smell was so bad—all the rotting meat and chicken. And everything was just kind of bulging from the gas inside.”

The flood that poured over the levee tops left four inches of water in the store. It had sat stewing and festering in the damp bayou heat as the floodwaters ebbed out, leaving behind dozens of pounds of kosher meat rotting in display cases and refrigerators. Black mold grew in the walls.

Clearly, Brown realized, everything would have to be redone.

And soon. A member of Metairie’s small Chabad community, Brown understood that life on the observant Jewish periphery is precarious. As the small observant communities of the South demonstrate, most of the aspects of community that we think of as essential—an eruv, a regular minyan, even a rabbi—really aren’t necessary. These things can be worked around. If there is no synagogue, a congregation can meet in a house. If there is no eruv, they can plan around carrying on Shabbat. If there’s no rabbi, they can simply do without.

But there’s really no way to work around kashrut—either you have kosher food, or you don’t. Without a source of kosher food, there was no way for the Orthodox community in New Orleans to re-establish itself. “People from the community were calling all the time,” Brown says, “trying to figure out if we were going to reopen so they knew if they could move back.”

Temple Beth Israel today

Kosher Cajun had been the only kosher market for New Orleans’ small Orthodox community of about forty families. The storm gutted Beth Israel, the main Orthodox synagogue. The floodwaters had irretrievably damaged the congregation’s Torah scrolls. But as long as there was food for its members to eat, the congregation could rebound.

Brown had to get the store running again.

Janice Arena has the wide shoulders and determined look of someone who has been working with her hands all her life. A religious Catholic, she had worked as Kosher Cajun’s head cook for five years before the storm, long enough to have picked up on the importance of a kosher market. She has a fierce loyalty to Brown, and to the store.

Arena waited out the storm in Kenner, a suburb of Dallas, and she came back to New Orleans as soon as FEMA allowed her. She returned to a ruined house in a ruined city. Her squat government-issue trailer sat in the yard outside her flooded house, and the formaldehyde that had been used to keep the house from rotting was slowly poisoning her. After a few days, she couldn’t take it anymore. She left to check on the store.

“My house couldn’t be saved. There were no other jobs. I had no family here anymore. It was clean up here or sit in my trailer and stare at the wall,” she explains. She holds up her arm, which is spider-webbed with red rashes, a lingering reaction to the formaldehyde. “No thanks.”

It took days to even begin moving the trash out of the store. Brown was lucky enough to hire to a friend who owned a construction company before he was swamped with contracts. Using oxygen masks to protect themselves from the stench and the mold, his workers cleared out the trash. They cut out the walls and replaced them, rebuilding the store from the inside out. Meanwhile Arena and her daughter would come in at eight in the morning and clean until it was dark.

Gradually, the store began to look functional again. It reopened in November, three months after Katrina.

“When we finally reopened,” Arena says, “one old woman come in. She said, ‘Thank God you’re open. I’ve been so sick of tuna fish . . .’”

She wasn’t the only one. Almost as soon as it opened, Kosher Cajun was supplying people as far down the Gulf Coast as Pensacola, Florida. Ever since Katrina, Jewish community organizations from around the country have sent hundreds of volunteer delegations to work at rebuilding. The Federation estimates that about half of these kept kosher, and most of them were supplied by Kosher Cajun.

The market also serves a fair amount of non-Jews—Brown says that only about forty percent of Kosher Cajun’s business is Jewish. The rest are mostly halal observant Muslims and people looking for New York-style deli food. “We couldn’t survive any other way,” he says. “There isn’t the critical mass of observant Jews here to support us.”

I tell him that when I was growing up in Dallas, the only kosher restaurant for a while was a vegetarian Indian place—their clientele was Indian, and since it was vegetarian, hashgacha was a snap.

He laughs. “Yeah, it’s kind of like that.”

Or as Diane Guevara, standing behind the cash register, says, “This is, after all, the only place in New Orleans to get a knish.” Though Guevara doesn’t keep kosher herself, she began to understand the importance of having kosher food around after her daughter, Holly, became observant and moved away to the Northeast. “Holly and her fiancé would come down to New Orleans,” Guevara explains, “and I knew that if they were going to stay at our house, I was going to have to find kosher meat. So I came here. And you know how boys eat—pretty soon I was coming in and buying out the whole store.”

When Guevara walked in after the storm to survey the damage, Arena and her daughter were on their hands and knees scrubbing the floors. “They needed help, so I helped,” Guevara says. Now she’s a cashier at the market.

Perhaps those six words—“They needed help, so I helped”—are the motto of all the Jews who came (or came back) to New Orleans. Driving into the city for the first time, my car rattling on the potholes, I remembered the Federation grants and thought, “Man, you couldn’t pay me enough to live here.” But three years after the storm, there is a strange zeal to the city, an almost-messianic desire to rebuild, refresh, remake New Orleans. You can feel it in the way people talk about the storm—as a catastrophe, true, but also as New Orleans’ best chance for a new future.

As Brown put it, “We’re like pioneers here.”

Guevara at Kosher Cajun

There’s a growing movement among environmentally conscious observant Jews to rethink kashrut. Its adherents place less emphasis on the official kosher stamp, and more on where their food comes from. They want locally and organically grown produce, and if they are meat-eaters, they want to know that the meat they’re eating comes from farms that treat animals humanely.

One devotee of this movement is an unassuming thirty-year-old named Aitan Mizrachi, founder of the AVDA Dairy, a small-scale goat dairy farm in northwestern Connecticut that produces organic, kosher raw milk yogurt and cheeses.

A few years ago, Mizrachi was, if not floundering, at least “uncommitted,” professionally speaking. But after completing a three-month Jewish leadership training program that incorporated organic farming practices, he decided to learn more about goat herding and cheese-making. One thing led to another, and now he’s guardian to eight does.

In his new vocation, he’s discovered that the combination of Jewish observance with goat farming makes for a very interesting dynamic. Can you milk the goats on Shabbat? What happens if one of your favorite small-scale organic farmers invites you to a pig roast?

To find out more about all of this, Jessie Graham spent a rainy weekend with Mizrachi, and sent us this audio postcard.

Photos by Jessie Graham.

Last Friday, Gertel’s Bakery—the most-loved of the Lower East Side’s three remaining kosher bakeries—permanently closed its doors, after 90 years in business. Joanna Smith Rakoff, the editor of Nextbook.org and a longtime consumer of Gertel’s prune danishes, talked to the shop’s final customers about rugelach, “water challah,” and the past and future of a neighborhood in flux.

Nextbook checked out this year’s Kosherfest, which occupied a vast hall at Manhattan’s Javits Center, to see what trends are emerging and to sample some of the more exotic offerings.