His more satisfied life in Swan Lake is filled with feathers, hay, and farm chores. The farm, which he runs with his son, Eliezer, houses a sustainable kosher-chicken company, Pelleh Poultry, that processes 4,000 chickens each week. (Industrial slaughterhouses, in contrast, often handle tens of thousands of chickens every day.) And in November he launched Bethel Creamery, the country’s only organic, Chalav Yisrael (a strictly kosher designation endorsed by Hasidim) dairy—selling the milk to customers in Monsey and Brooklyn.

Franklin’s move to his farm can seem prophetic. Today, the country’s growing obsession with local, traceable food has increased the demand for products like his and lured some young people away from office jobs and toward the farm. This holds true for the Jewish world as well. There are programs like Adamah, an agricultural fellowship in Connecticut, which brings together Jewish twentysomethings to live on a farm, tend its eight acres of organic crops, and milk goats, make pickles, and celebrate Shabbat. This summer, Adamah’s founder, Adam Berman, launched Urban Adamah—a similar program in Berkeley, Calif., that focuses on increasing food access for low-income residents, as well as sustainable farming. Meanwhile, synagogues and JCCs across the country are launching a number of farm-to-shul initiatives, from community-supported agriculture projects to parking-lot gardens.

But with all this new interest in Jewish farming, Jewish Americans’ agricultural history remains largely unknown. In the decades prior to World War II, upstate New York was dotted with egg, dairy, and produce farms owned and run by Jews. Petaluma, Calif., in Sonoma County, boasted a thriving community of chicken ranchers from the 1920s through the 1960s. Indeed, Franklin’s street in Swan Lake was once home to four Jewish farming families whose rousing post-Shabbat gatherings, he told me, routinely piqued the curiosity of non-Jewish neighbors.

Many of these farms were beneficiaries of the Jewish Agricultural Society, an organization founded in New York in 1900 by a German Jewish philanthropist, Baron Maurice de Hirsch. An urban Jewish businessman with utopian, pre-industrial leanings, de Hirsch spent his fortune helping Eastern European Jews escape anti-Semitism in their home countries and settle on American pastures, far away from the cities’ tenements. The society provided loans for purchasing land, seeds, and equipment and offered practical education to the settlers, many of whom had minimal prior experience as farmers. It even published a magazine in Yiddish and English called The Jewish Farmer. With the baron’s support, and the opportunity to own land in America (a privilege not consistently afforded to them in Europe), these farmers had the chance to build on Judaism’s ancient agricultural legacy—a heritage filled with agricultural tenets (“in the seventh year thou shalt let [the land] lie fallow,” Exodus tells us) and joyful harvest holidays like Shavuot and Sukkot.

From its founding through the middle of the 20th century, the society helped settle nearly 5,000 Jewish farmers and their families on homesteads in New York and beyond. It also placed tens of thousands of Jewish workers on established farms throughout New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Florida. In California, the German Jewish Haas family—heirs to the Levi Strauss denim fortune—helped fund the Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma. In the 1920s, Yiddish plays and concerts were staged in Petaluma, and Golda Meir considered it a vital enough community to make it a fundraising stop in the 1930s.

It’s no coincidence that the wealthy, assimilated, urban philanthropists moved to assist their less-fortunate brethren by helping them set up shop far away from the cities. “Very rich German Jews, they always wanted the Russian Jews should be farmers,” Petaluma resident Hymie Golden says in Kenneth Kann’s Comrades and Chicken Ranchers. “They wanted to prove that not all are merchants or bankers like them.” In 1938 Time reported that there were nearly 100,000 Jewish farmers working in the United States, including Max Yasgur, the amicable dairyman who would famously allow Woodstock to erupt on his fields in Bethel, NY.

Many of these mid-century farm families enjoyed modest success, while raising their children on hard work, socialist politics, and fresh country air. While not overtly religious, the communities maintained Jewish lives that were built around a synagogue, Hebrew or Yiddish schools, and organizations like Hadassah and B’nai Brith. “The local synagogue migrated to the country along with us,” Sonny Whynman, whose family moved from the Bronx to start an egg farm in Toms River, N.J., in the mid-1940s, when he was 7, told me. Many people from his old Bronx neighborhood decided to settle in rural New Jersey, too, he said.

But as the years passed and farming in America declined, the Jewish farms became increasingly harder to maintain. In the early 1960s, the Jewish Agricultural Society surveyed Jewish American farmers. “In the beginning farming was very good, but now [it’s] in very bad shape,” wrote farmer Aron Bakal, from Wurstboro, N.Y. Asked for his thoughts on the future, he wrote, “Time will show everything.”

The Jewish Agricultural Society closed up shop in 1972, and soon the once-vibrant Jewish farming communities were gone. By the late 20th century, when Franklin started his farm, the established notion was that American Jews belonged in cities or suburbs, working as professionals. Farming—aside from the occasional stint on an Israeli kibbutz—seemed antithetical to Jewish American identity. In 2003, Slate ran an article headlined “Why Jews Don’t Farm,” arguing that Jews’ preoccupation with literacy and education had lifted them above manual labor toward more academic pursuits.

Adamah was launched in the Connecticut Berkshires that same year. The program has thrived and inspired spinoff projects like Philadelphia’s Jewish Farm School and Chicago’s The Gan Project. Other Jews, like Franklin, found their own way to farming. Tanya Tolchin—a niece of Sonny Whynman, the onetime Toms Rivers egg farmer—and her husband, Scott Hertzberg, started a farm in Upper Marlboro, Md., that provides fresh produce to CSA members, and they recently launched a Jewish Farmers of America Wiki. Jewish farmers “are pretty much falling from the trees these days,” Hertzberg joked.

Farming remains grueling work, both physically and emotionally. Demographically speaking, the Jewish farmer is still rare (and can sound like a punch line). But farming, like religion, can come down to faith. “I never expected I would farm full-time, I just wanted to live as far away from cities as possible,” Franklin told me. “But baruch Hashem, if you do it properly, farming is the most fulfilling life I could imagine.”

Was Max an observant Jew like his writer cousin? “We do not have good information on ‘how Jewish’ Max was,” Lipner told me. “But his welcoming hundreds of thousands of people onto the farm strikes me as a rather extraordinary example of the Jewish value of hachnassat orchim—welcoming guests.” Max Said Yes! isn’t an explicitly Jewish book, and it doesn’t draw an overt parallel between Max’s behavior and that of our tent-opening forefather Abraham, but the authors believe the analogy’s there. Still, is it weird to have a book about Woodstock that doesn’t mention sex or drugs at all? Lipner and Yasgur told me they’d joked around with some couplets that were left on the cutting-room floor:

In land filled with alfalfa seed
They relished LSD and weed.
They lay down in the fields and went to bed
With people to whom they were not wed

Mm, not so much. Ultimately, the authors decided that parents could use the book as a jumping-off point to talk about sex and drugs with their kids—or not. So for those of us—Woodstock Generation, Gen X, and Millennials—who did inhale, the question remains: how do we talk about drugs with our kids?

Kiki Schaffer, a social worker and director of parenting, family and early childhood at the 14th Street Y in Manhattan, laughs: “This subject is to parents of teens what sleep is to parents of newborns.” In other words: it’s the biggie, the giant bong in the room. Schaffer’s strategy is to plant the seed (as it were) early. “I tell younger kids, ‘Think about what we put in our body,’” she says. “Would you put worms in there?’” Schaffer believes that early education about drugs and alcohol is about encouraging kids to think about choices and self-regulation, so that when they grow older, they’ll continue to question what they ingest. As they reach preteen and teen years, she says, “Parents can start saying, ‘There are a lot of things we once didn’t think were harmful but studies have since shown they were: cigarettes, medications women were given in pregnancy.” Like many experts, Schaffer is not a fan of “Just Say No” education. “I hate it,” she says. “It doesn’t engage the hearts and minds of children or empower them to make good decisions—real life is about learning to be a decision-maker.” Indeed, those of us who grew up with Reefer Madness-style education learned only to laugh at parental paranoia.

Julie Holland, an assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine and author of the forthcoming Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER (Bantam, October 2009), agrees that the “Just Say No” approach is misguided. For one thing, she says, recent studies indicate that marijuana isn’t a gateway drug—hysterically insisting to your kids that one toke is a fast track to Cobainville makes you look like an untrustworthy doofus. In 2008, 43 percent of 12th graders reported trying marijuana once or more—clearly they haven’t all become raving, heroin-shooting, paint-huffing street addicts. A better strategy, Holland says, is to stress the potential consequences of doing something illegal. “Many schools have random drug tests,” she says, “and if you test positive, you can’t do sports. If you’re a senior, you could lose your student loans.” Explaining how drugs affect developing brains is also vital, she continues. “Because the adolescent brain is still in a formulation stage—pathways are getting laid down, connections are being made—in a perfect world kids wouldn’t use any substances, including alcohol. But in the real world, statistics show that’s unlikely.”

Holland stresses that parents should be as concerned about legal drugs (cigarettes, alcohol, and prescription drugs) as about street drugs. Unlike the kids at Woodstock, kids today rarely experiment with acid. Today, the big drug of choice is “pharmies.”

“Excuse me?” I say, like the old fart I am.

“‘Pharmies’ are what kids today call prescription drugs,” Holland explains. “So keep track of what’s in your medicine cabinet—especially all you neurotic Jews taking benzodiazepines [Xanax, Valium] so you can sleep.” Other modern-kid faves include narcotic pain killers (Vicodin, Percocet, Oxycontin), ADHD drugs (some kids resell them as weight-loss aids), steroids, and the cough suppressant dextromethorphan (which the kids call “Robo”). Not to harsh your mellow or anything.

So, my fellow post-Woodstockians, what should we do? There are terrific online models of nuanced, non-scare-tactic-y speeches to give to teenagers. With my own kids (now seven and four), my inclination is to wait until they start asking questions. But I also don’t want to end up in the same situation as my mom, when she tried to give me the sex-ed talk long after that particular train had left the station. So in a couple of years, I think I’ll sit Josie down and say, “You may start having kids offering you drugs to feel good—pills, things to drink, things to sniff, and things to smoke. My hope is that you’ll talk to me about it. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s safe. You don’t know who got what where. And if you ever get in a situation where you feel unsafe or out of control, know that you can call me or text me and I will help you or get you, no questions asked and no punishment given.”

And what if Josie or Maxie ask about Mommy’s drug history? Well, I’ll tell the truth. (And no, I’m not telling you.) And we’ll continue to share a regular sip of Shabbat wine. One recent study found that kids who drank with their parents were less prone to binge drinking. Thus in the spirit of Woodstock, I offer my own conclusion:

Your kids’ addiction you will head off
If you think of Max, and share a quaff.
Treat your kids like sensate beings.
And they’ll grow into responsible teens.

Or so I hope.