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.

Because We Are Jews

Gideon Aronoff

The results of the November elections did little to further the hope that comprehensive immigration reform is a realistic goal for the immediate future. For much of the 20th and all of the 21st century, this country has been living a conundrum as far as immigration is concerned. On the one hand we [...]

The Right to Be Israeli: Race in Israel

Karen Paul-Stern

The Ethiopian aliyah to Israel that began nearly 20 years ago has posed ethical problems for Israel like no other immigration wave. With more than 100,000 Ethiopians living in Israel today, some already second generation, the community continues to face numerous absorption and assimilation challenges. First, there is the very question of who [...]

Morally Offensive Enforcement Schemes

Robert Rubin
Jews support progressive immigration policies, but not just because we are admonished in Leviticus and Exodus to respect the stranger. Yes, as Rabbi Bonnie Koppell argued recently on this page, views on immigration can be visceral and “public policy must be based on more than what our hearts tell us.” But sound legal, logical, [...]

Compassion vs. Justice

Bonnie Koppell
Rabbi Amy Eilberg poignantly articulates the visceral Jewish response to the Arizona law, AZ SB 1070, when she writes that, “My heart tells me there is only one authentically Jewish response to the immigration debate raging in our country.” Yes, we Jews have always stood in solidarity with the stranger, the outsider. It is [...]

My Neighbor/Myself: Thoughts on a Jewish Ethic of Immigration

Amy Eilberg
My heart tells me there is only one authentically Jewish response to the immigration debate raging in our country. The story of the immigrant, the stranger, the “other,” is our own story. As Jews, we can do nothing less than champion the needs of the immigrants in our midst with the full force of [...]

Slaughtering a Turkey, Considering Kashrut

Tali Biale
Food has taken me to Bologna, Italy, a place where food is more a way of life than a simple source of nutrition; through the hot, sweaty kitchen of one of New York’s best-known restaurants; and most recently, to a small farm in rural Vermont… If food could motivate such travels, surely it could bring me to contemplate [the] laws [of kashrut] so integral to my religion.  I wanted to understand these laws and see if, kashrut cynic that I am, even I could discern in their midst some life lessons. 

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.