This year our Sigi Ziering column focuses on the ethics of kashrut. Each month an esteemed guest columnist will wrestle with what Jewish texts and our tradition teach us about the food we eat; the preparation of food; the people who prepare our food; the food and restaurants that are deemed kosher. This column is sponsored by Bruce Whizin and Marilyn Ziering in honor of Marilyn's husband, Sigi Ziering, of blessed memory.

Teaching Kashrut

Yonah Bookstein
When I was studying for smikha, I asked my mentor, Rabbi Haskel Besser, “Why do I spend years studying the laws of kashrut? After all, most Jews don’t salt and soak their own meat anymore. And when did someone recently use a dried udder to make cheese? Shouldn’t I spend time on more relevant [...]

Kashrut: Reining in Expenses

Rachel Kahn-Troster
One of my favorite pieces of modern halakhah on the ethics of Jewish eating comes from the Mishnah Berurah. Commenting on the idea that Shabbat should be an oneg, a celebration, it states that, traditionally, this was understood to mean that meat and wine would be part of the meal. This Mishnah goes on [...]

Sustainable Agriculture

Devora Kimelman-Block
A year ago, I found myself in inner-city Baltimore, shoveling manure into a garbage bag in a gas station parking lot. The gas station attendants were none too pleased when my farmer’s trailer, with live cattle in [...]

Keeping Kosher: Now What?

Nigel Savage
For 3,000 years, Jewish people have asked, “Is this food kosher?” — that is, is this food fit to eat? You might think that, after all this time, we’d have sorted out what this question means, and/or how to answer it.

Kashrut and Community

Ruth Abusch-Magder
Live and let live is our answer to the diverse visions of prayer in our contemporary Jewish community. Let many options thrive, allow for diversity, and spare conflict.

Kashrut Is a Law: It’s Not About Ethics

Daniel Alter
We make a mockery of Jewish tradition when we draw inaccurately on our sources to make claims about kashrut…Ethics is ethics; kashrut is kashrut.

A Journey into the Ethics of Kashrut

Dyonna Ginsburg
Although I had been involved in many social justice ventures before, it wasn’t until I switched my eating habits that my entire outlook shifted. All of a sudden, I saw things that I had not seen before and became sensitive to the suffering of people whom I had previously ignored.

A Prescription for an Ethical Religious Practice

Irene Lehrer Sandalow
Standing in Postville, Iowa, I was faced with a fiercely rumbling stomach and a personal decision: ethics vs. halakhah.

A Culture of Kashrut

MORRIS J. ALLEN
A person blinded in one eye is exempt from making the pilgrimage. (Hagiga 2a)
While this talmudic text is speaking only of the three-times-a-year obligation to appear in Jerusalem in ancient times — on Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot — the ancient rabbinic dictum holds great importance for modern Jews. Indeed, Abraham Joshua Heschel gave [...]

America’s Creative Capital as “Ground Zero” for the Homeless

Stephen Julius Stein
Yesterday at one of our food pantries, the 18 year-old teen, with a beauty befitting a star on “90210,” lay against the stone wall, her boyfriend comforting her as a case manager phoned 911, and I offered words of support to a dehydrated, vomiting, two-monthspregnant homeless woman.