Earlier this month, the condiment company J&D’s (“Everything should taste like bacon”) released—and quickly sold out of—a line of bacon condoms. The product is now only available by waiting list, and if you don’t believe that artificially-flavored latex prophylactics would sell, see for yourself.

Not surprisingly, J&D’s is a half-Jewish enterprise, the Jewish half being Dave Lefkow. In an interview, Lefkow said that he thought it would be funny to get J&D’s seminal product, Bacon Salt, kosher certified (it contains no actual bacon).

Traif is a hip(ster) restaurant in Brooklyn whose executive chef is, no surprise, a Jew—and whose tag line is “Celebrating pork, shellfish & globally inspired soul food.” The late David Rakoff wrote about his experience of eating pork in Germany, which made him feel very aware of his own Jewishness. Luzer Twersky, a former Satmar who left his Hasidic community (and may soon star in a reality show about it), told the New York Post, “When I had the first bite, I felt angry…I felt how could my parents keep this from me?”

Bacon is more than a pig product. It’s a cultural statement. The fetish, the joke, and the irony justify consuming bacon, though it is fattier than fat, and the trayfiest of trayf. Did the Post ask an ex-Hasid about an innocuous non-kosher food like Starburst Fruit Chews or Jell-O? No. Because who cares about Starburst Fruit Chews and Jell-o? They went right to the bacon. Bacon carries cultural currency.

As an observant Jew, here’s what bacon represents to me: If you’re Jewish, even if you’re a secular Jew, eating bacon is saying, ‘I am Jewish, but I think I am refuting my Jewishness by eating trayf in public, so therefore I am totally affirming my Jewishness.’

I myself am stringently, stubbornly kosher. When it comes to bacon, though, I’m an outsider. I didn’t grow up kosher, so I’ve tasted it—and I think it’s gross. I’ve thought it was gross since way before I even considered going kosher. Smelling it as I walk by the bodega every morning makes me nauseous. I usually hold my nose past the coffee carts selling egg and bacon sandwiches on my way to work. My worst nightmare is to be feeling a little sick on a warm, poorly-ventilated, rocking subway car only to have some pork eater get on the car eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich. I feel like puking into my messenger bag. (I actually carry barf bags with me in case of this very situation.)

The weird resurgence of bacon in the past five years as an object of culinary fetish seems to me to be a direct reaction to increased awareness of healthy food (Skinny Bitch, Fast Food Nation, et al.), and also to what is basically the emergence of the second wave of American baalei teshuva (the first being in the 1960’s). Suddenly every dudebro and his “ironic” hipster cousin are indulging in bacon as a statement.

That statement is a lot like that of the “bad kids” I went to high school with, the most obnoxious of whom used to sing in the halls to his Rage Against the Machine tape on his walkman, “F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” Except he totally did what people told him. He’s for sure making more money now than I am—and playing a lot of golf. (I know that because of Facebook.)

At Pardes, Brooklyn’s boundary-breaking gourmet kosher restaurant famous for its unlikely combinations of flavors, the chef occasionally makes beef “bacon” ice cream. Pushing the porcine flavor of bacon in the already revolting medium of parve ice cream has to be done to make a point (because there is no way it could be done for flavor). The point is, as Dr. Evil said in Austin Powers, “I’m with it…I’m hip.”

I don’t really care what other people eat, as long as they don’t strap me to a chair, hold my nose, and shove their nasty food in my mouth. But the Jews and bacon shtick—and it is completely shtick—it’s a fetish. It’s a symbol. If Jews want to eat bacon in private because they have a compulsion for it, that’s none of my business.

But Jew fools himself if he eats bacon. No matter what he eats, if he two-fists bacon-wrapped scallops covered in mayonnaise on white bread and washes it down with a glass of milk while kneeling down to idols, he will always be Jewish. In that case, why not give the Jewish soul what it actually wants: kosher food.

From this author: It’s Hard to Be a Mensch at a Crowded Kosher Supermarket on Thursday Night

Previously on Jewcy: Kosher Salt: I Don’t Eat Pork
Hebrew National and Me: Answering to a Higher Authority
Insane Trayf Item of the Week: Bacon Coffin
Exposed: The Jewcy Bacon Fetish

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Forget fashion week—this season’s sartorial drama involves rabbis and skinny jeans.

As if the tension between hipsters and Haredim in Williamsburg wasn’t enough, an edict released by a group of Haredi rabbis, including the son of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, bans their male constituents from wearing tight pants. Clearly, they don’t believe skinny jeans and True Religion have much to do with each other.
 
The letter encourages men to “uphold the sanctity of the camp,” and also includes the apothegm, “The clothes of a person are an indication of his character.” The other side of the letter features an image of Haredi rabbis of yesteryear sporting loose-fitting clothing.
 
This does not bode well for jeggings.

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• Art Garfunkel defends, well, his art.

• Matisyahu’s The Posession beat out Shia LaBeouf’s Lawless in the battle at the box office.

• Forget those bungalows: it’s Rockaway Beach’s style that has hipsters heading out there en masse.

• Yiddish theater heads to Williamsburg this fall.

• Changes in how Israel depicts and presents the Holocaust are seen at the country’s various Holocaust museums.

• If you’re Matt Groenings waitress at Bennigan’s, he just might leave you a napkin filled with these awesome Simpsons-themed doodles:

The post Daily Jewce: Yiddish Theater Heads to Brooklyn, Rockaway Beach Has Style appeared first on Jewcy.

Just due to a few of the folks who appear in this video for Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand,” it could be considered the most Jewish dance track of the year:  A-Trak, Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, and well, Questlove could put any Jewfro to shame.  That’s pretty nasty personnel.

That’s not even taking into consideration the fact the track is named after Queen Jewess herself, and that it  a total banger.  So we’re gonna issue that award a few months before the end of the year.

The best part was we were hipped to it by The Atlantic.

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