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.

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.

Homelessness: Prayer as a Call to Action

Tamar Kamionkowski
While the plight of the homeless is addressed in a number of traditional Jewish texts (especially within law codes), one is hard pressed to find explicit petitions to God to provide shelter for the homeless in our liturgy.

Free Loans and Housing

Shana Novick
The highest degree of tzedakah, most famously articulated by Maimonides, is to help someone achieve self-sufficiency by means of a gift, an interest-free loan, or a partnership. Of these, only loans preserve the dignity of the recipient while also offering the possibility of enormous philanthropic leverage. That is why Central and Eastern European Jewish [...]

Housing: Change & Stability

Diane Levy
Eight years ago I bought a rowhouse in a working-class neighborhood where the majority of residents were African American. At closing, the seller commented that the neighborhood once had been Italian and Jewish. I thought to myself, Well, a Jew is moving back. I bought the home because it was affordable, near public transportation, [...]

Responsibility

Jacob Montgomery
After one spends time in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia, the sight of homeless people in American cities becomes normal, just one of the more unpleasant aspects of urban life. Seeing people sleeping in parks and on benches becomes an ordinary sight, one that doesn’t seem disturbing or unusual.