Like Justice Potter Stewart, I cannot definitively say what constitutes food porn, but I know it when I see it. Food porn isn’t erotic in a traditional romantic sense (Although South Park aired a 2010 episode about it in which Randy gets a little too involved with the Food Network). Rather, it’s the glamorization of food with images—and thanks to Instagram and other social networking platforms, it’s become a colloquial phrase. Capitalizing on that trend are two 24-year-old University of Colorado grads with their new website, MrFoodPorn.

Mixing photos and prose, Noah Rinsky and Josh Seigel use their site as a Manhattan-based forum for detailing their experiences with high-end food. Writing about expensive dining can quickly turn people off, so they opted for a silly name and quirky logo—a messy man all suited up, with a turkey leg in hand and stains dribbled on his lapel—to garner a wider audience. And to keep Mr FoodPorn from being too indulgent (the site’s ‘About Us’ section reads, “We’re devourers of all things fleshy, bready, and over indulgent; eaters to the first degree, scaling the highest meringue-mountains of wanton culinary delight!”), Rinsky and Seigel devoted a page to two hunger-fighting charities, Food Bank for New York City, and City Harvest. Giving back is important to them, and I’m sure it helps the conscience when you’re sinking your teeth into those sugar-cured bacon strips, which Rinsky won’t eat because he’s kosher. Instead, Seigel gives him play-by-plays of the bacon-wrapped matzo balls at Traif in Brooklyn.

They seek to add substance and creativity to the language around food porn. Instead of simply photographing your deep-fried dinner and adding a #nomnom hashtag, Rinsky and Seigel describe exceptional meals for their audience, who can read leisurely while salivating freely. They both work in the food industry, so they write about the culinary world beyond just the dining experience. In this excerpt, Mr FoodPorn describes his high-stress experience as a trainee waiter at the upscale Manhattan restaurant Eleven Madison Park.

“What is so unique about the river that runs along this vineyard?” he asks, and I assume that the metaphor will become more lucid if I’m ever allowed in the inner circle. Or is he just quoting The Master?

“I-I’m…” stutters the seasoned waiter. “I’m not quite sure.”

A look of disgust consumes the manager’s face as he calls on another server, who he applauds for saying something that I find cryptic at best, moronic at worst. I keep asking myself if I even want this job, and I consider the money; the huge bills, the massive tips; fifteen courses, hundreds of wines, five-thousand-dollar tabs. I do. I really really do want to work here. Before entering the dining room, I watch servers fold napkins as they go over the menu with me. The napkins must be folded identically and each stack must be the same height. When this is through, I’m asked to go look at myself in the mirror and am told that my collar isn’t right. I search without finding error, and a server is nice enough to fix it for me. Dinner service starts and I follow Jacob, my server for the night, into the grand dining room. Eleven Madison Park’s ceilings seem to expand and soar, and the huge windows give the impression of Old World Europe. The job is constant movement, and I sweat right through my cotton shirt. Each table is assigned a team of servers. There are so many that I’m afraid of knocking something over, so I ask Jacob what happens if I do.

Rinsky and Seigel just threw a launch party for Mr FoodPorn, and according to Seigel, who’s been tracking analytics, the site has been steadily gaining readers (he recently quit his day job to work on the website full time). While they continue to develop and grow the site, more poutine and calf liver will no doubt be consumed—and, of course, viscerally described, bite by bite.

The post Two Hungry Jews Create ‘MrFoodPorn’ Site to Chronicle Eating Adventures appeared first on Jewcy.

My sister and I walk into a restaurant. We sit down, look over the menu, and there it is—my personal sin, the bacon burger. The photo glistens temptingly and I surrender to it. I place my order and my sister gives me the ultimate ‘You bad, bad Jew’ expression. I know that I’m lucky to get away with just a frown from her, as it typically is accompanied by a verbal reminder that we are Jewish and shouldn’t ever eat bacon as a result. After her distaste is properly displayed, clear of conscience, my sister orders herself a plate of popcorn shrimp.

Soon the taste of my delicious bacon burger simmers in my mouth. In my mind, though, the little long-bearded, kippah-wearing angel sits solemnly on one shoulder shaking his head back and forth, while a miniature Howard Stern, in twisted rabbinical form, says on the opposite shoulder: ‘Come on! What’s the big deal? Baco-Jewish pride, man!’

My sister munches down her equally non-kosher meal not only free from self-critique or conflict, but with the knowledge that it’s highly unlikely that a random kosher squad will be patrolling what she eats. For some odd reason, it seems that, were we both to be trayf terrorists, the kosher squad would see her as only packing a hand grenade, while I’m holding the atomic bacon bomb.

At some point, though, we have to ask ourselves: Where did this outstanding anti-pork prejudice come from? Yeah, okay, it’s not kosher. But if you ask a lot of Jews today what other animals aren’t kosher, many will draw a blank.

But let’s be honest. Most of us don’t aren’t inundated with seedy back-alley images of that filthy, contaminating, $15-a-pound lobster. We don’t hear about the average Jewish parent keeping careful watch that the $90-an-ounce Siberian sturgeon caviar doesn’t get its little unscaled fishhooks inside their kids, leading them off the properly beaten kosher path.

But you eat one little slice of bacon, and boom—you’ve gone over to the dark side.

As strange as this may sound, I opted to eat bacon for health reasons. I am epileptic and, as such, I largely use the doctor-recommended ketogenic diet to maintain my body’s welfare. Of all the foods in the ketogenic diet, the one that I have found quieted petit mal seizures second best of all was bacon. Therefore, not only do I recommend giving bacon a shot, despite being a Jew, I’d even go so far as to recommend it despite being a rabbinical student.

And anyway, why are pigs so much more unclean than other non-kosher animals? Because pigs, unlike the vulture, the bat, and the weasel, decided to try and trick us. At least that’s the consensus rabbinical ruling on the subject. Technically, kosher law necessitates a cleft hoof and a chewing of cud. With most non-kosher animals, this is a fairly easy thing to assess. Just like the saying goes that you can tell everything you need to know about a person by their shoes, you can typically take a glance at the animal’s feet and know whether or not it’s kosher.

Except in the instance of the pesky pig. It’s the only animal that has a split hoof but does not chew its cud. Therefore, the pig alone has the ability to mislead the less-knowledgeable Jew into making a dinner out of it.

And what is cud chewing, incidentally? It’s the practice of vomiting food up and eating it a second time. Kosher animals, like the cow, prefer to enjoy their meals two times, not just one. This, the pig does not do. A strange fact, but it is due to spew that cows and their kosher brethren have come out spotless, while the primmer pig has become the poster child of uncleanliness in Judaism.

So what are the effects of the pig being the ultimate bad guy? Well, for one, when there’s one big bad guy, we tend to focus less on other offenders. Because of this, more Jews eat shrimp and caviar without moral quibbles, while pointing a finger at the so-called Baco-Jews. It winds up not only being a hypocritical situation, but one that has, to many, stifled true understanding of kashrut law. Were the pig not seen as so over-the-top horrible, perhaps more Jews who want to keep kosher would know to pass on shrimp, too.

Another result of vilifying the swine is that those condemning it may have actually added to its allure. In the days of prohibition, outlawing alcohol only made the public drink more. These days there are Baco-Jew stuffed animals, bumper stickers, posters, greeting cards, mouse pads, hats, and just about every other kind of available merchandise. I’ve seen T-shirts with slogans reading, “Jews for Bacon! Reform Now!” and “Citizens for Kosher Bacon!” For many, especially young people, it has become an American Jewish obsession—the love that once dared not speak its name, but now shouts it pretty loudly.

So, if we want the next generation to follow kosher law, what might be some steps we can take to better encourage that? First, knock the pig down from its unfair and shameful pedestal. We should teach that all unkosher animals are equally unkosher. The Shrimp Jew should not be allowed to mock the Baco Jew and get away with it, because so long as one is treated as a misdemeanor and the other a felony, the Jewish kitchen courtroom loses a large degree of credibility.

Let’s take the might and mystery away from bacon. Maybe it tastes good; maybe it doesn’t. But it shouldn’t be used as the symbolic embodiment of Jews Gone Wild.

Previously on Jewcy: Why Are Jews So Obsessed With Bacon?
Kosher Salt: I Don’t Eat Pork
Why I Gave Up God But Still Keep Kosher

***

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The post The Bacon Chronicles: Why All Trayf Should Be Created Equal appeared first on Jewcy.

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

The post Why Are Jews So Obsessed With Bacon? appeared first on Jewcy.

• Our columnist Dvora Meyers on the guy who really wanted her to try pork. [Pork Memoirs]

• How I Met Your Mother get renewed for a ninth (and final!) season, and Jewish star Josh Radnor is excited for the “victory lap.” [Access Hollywood]

• Joe Winkler talks to the guys behind the Comedy Central show Workaholics. [Splitsider]

• Rachel Shukert says Chuck Schumer is America’s Uncle Leo. [Tablet]

• Drew Barrymore talks about Olive, hew baby with husband Will Kopelman. [HuffPost]

• Naturally, Jon Stewart had his own take on the Israeli elections: Circumdecision 5773. [The Daily Show]

The post Daily Jewce: Jon Stewart on the Israeli Elections, Josh Radnor’s Victory Lap appeared first on Jewcy.

While we generally leave journalists and political pundits to discuss and predict what the immediate future may bring, there are scores of nerdy, computer-literate, and otherwise “indoor” types who formulate what will happen in the next millennia, instead of in the next fiscal quarter. These are our dear and not-so-near science-fiction writers, whose pimply-faced audiences are turning their inventions into realities as we tweet. One of their more lighthearted prophecies is the satirical animated series Futurama, created by David X. Cohen and The Simpsons’ Matt Groening, which addresses the issues of life in 31st-century “New New York.”

The series, which was canceled by Fox in 2003 and revived by Comedy Central in 2008 due to high DVD sales and a committed fanbase, much like Family Guy, follows the dysfunctional misadventures of the crew of Planet Express, a dismally inefficient intergalactic delivery service. Under the auspices of the geriatric mad scientist Prof. Farnsworth, the business serves as a courier for such futuristic items like dark matter energy, alien aphrodisiacs, and honey from giant space bees. In this not-so-advanced landscape, aliens and mutants live alongside humans, hovercars and pneumatic tube travel are realities, and the preserved head of Richard Nixon is President of Earth.

The world of Futurama can also provide us with some foresight on what the Jewish legacy might be like in a thousand years through Dr. John Zoidberg: The pathetic and klutzy lobster-like extraterrestrial with questionable medical skills and a strong Yiddish accent, who also happens to be the resident doctor of Planet Express.

Disliked and ignored by virtually everyone on the show, this lab coat-donning crustaceous alien is perpetually scavenging for garbage scraps as well as any iota of sociable interaction and approval—(he is so unlikeable that you might get punched in the face for even imitating him. Unlike most other secondary characters on the show, Zoidberg is rarely seen engaging in any dialogue with others—he exists mainly as an entertaining and foolish sideshow, recalling Chaplin-esque misadventures and the reckless blunders of the Three Stooges. His eager desire for attention has even found its way into Internet culture with the popular “Why not Zoidberg?” meme—something that he never actually says in the show but was created as a pastiche from his need for recognition and Yiddish rhetoric.

Despite Zoidberg’s accent, which voice actor Billy West claims was influenced by “marble-mouthed” Jewish actor George Jessel as well as other “rabbinical” and Bronx voices (which is complemented by telltale grammatical constructions along the lines of “You want I should put it here?”), he and others of his species are never explicitly referenced as Jewish. We get many clues, however, such as the episode featuring his burnt-out movie star uncle Harold Zoid—who was voiced by the inimitable voice and character actor Hank Azaria (the same year he starred in a TV movie about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising)—that recalls the golden, and largely Jewish, age of Hollywood.

A later season showcases Zoidberg’s home planet Decapod 10, full of even thicker-accented Ashkenazi shellfish (perhaps planet Decapod 9 is full of Sephardic crabs?). Further solidifying his Jew cred, in my personal favorite Zoidberg moment and one particularly telling of his cultural and stereotypical Jewishness, he has a flashback of his mother reprimanding his dream to become a comedian and suggests he become a respectable doctor—yet she later reprimands him once more for being spineless and giving up his dream of becoming a comedian by going to medical school.

Yet aside from accents and behavior, nowhere does it ever mention that Zoidberg or his fellow trayf crustaceans are Jewish. Interestingly enough, the only explicitly Jewish characters on Futurama are a handful of robots—we witness a “Goldborg Bot Mitzvah,” complete with robot hora dancing, a banner reading “today you are a robot” in Hebrew, and a rabbi explaining his attitude toward Robot Jesus—he believes he was built, and well programmed, but not the robot messiah.

The Jewish robot life cycle also includes “Robanukah,” a holiday that spurs Bender, Planet Express’ mischievous robot, to sing a song explaining the traditional six and a half weeks of oil wrestling—which eventually faces a crisis when his oil supply runs short two weeks, prompting Bender to descry that he needs oil for the whole holiday since it isn’t a “lousy Reform Robanukah.” Although Zoidberg’s Jewishness is less explicit than the robots’, he is still clearly Jewish. As others have noted, unlike the Irish vaudeville comedy of The Simpsons, Futurama is pervaded by the Jewishness of its borscht-belt comedy and Woody Allen-esque despair, giving Zoidberg and others their distinct and not-so-kosher personalities.

Given his disguised yiddishkeit, Zoidberg appropriately plays the parts of the Jewish character types the schlemiel and schlimazel—the one who spills the soup and the one who gets spilled on. While one could lament that the legacy of Jewishness in Futurama is embodied by Zoidberg’s overwhelming ineptitude, it’s clear that the series serves as one more atomic bond in the ever-strong molecular chain between Jews and geekdom. And above everything else, I’m certainly glad that at least according to Futurama, Jewish humor has survived for another thousand years.

Previously on Network Jews:

Jean-Ralphio, the status-obsessed sidekick on Parks and Recreation.

Shoshanna, the scene-stealing afterthought on Girls.

Ruxin, the fantasy football-obsessed jerk on The League.

The post Network Jews: Dr. John Zoidberg, the Klutzy Jewish Crustacean on ‘Futurama’ appeared first on Jewcy.

Kosher Salt is Jewcy’s monthly comic about life as a blonde-haired, green-eyed, tattooed Jew.

Get your Kosher Salt fix:
On Forgiveness
Jews with Tattoos

Elizabeth Simins is a compulsive doodler living in New York. She splits her time between making paintings, being a production designer, and playing pretentious indie video games. She tweets here.

The post Kosher Salt: I Don’t Eat Pork appeared first on Jewcy.

I want to get close to Laney, to hear her say my name slo-wly. She is petite but taut-bodied in a yellow sundress, fabric so invitingly thin and wispy I wonder if I could blow it off her torso with a well-timed breath. She is telling me her fingers tremble when she drinks coffee, and that is why she has tiny green glops on the skin between the toenails she’s painted. Her small blue eyes twinkle, and I hold her gaze as if I’m spinning plates on my index finger: the longer I do it, the more likely she might be to applaud, take my hand, and invite me to rest my palm on the small of her back.

“Have you ever eaten at Belle Luna?” she asks me as we stroll the streets of downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. We’ve just eaten crepes at a French café: it’s our first date. “Nope,” I say, walking a little behind her to admire her bronzed legs. “Have you ever had a drink at Sapphire?” she asks. “No, but I’d like to, sometime,” I say. “Have you ever gone inside Sterchi Lofts?” “Well,” I say, laughing. “What?” she asks. “No,” I say, “I haven’t been there either.”

Outside of us both being law students and laughing at Will Ferrell movies, Laney and I don’t have much in common: it’s not just that we haven’t frequented the same bars or restaurants; it’s that we don’t like to visit the same regions of human experience. I love reading novels; she doesn’t care for them. She loves shopping; I get headaches at T.J. Maxx. But she’s a sweet girl, and that body…

I sit her on a bench and tell her I can read palms—“because my parents are Russian”—and she either buys my line of reasoning (Russian parents = metaphysical insight) or she accepts that I’m inventing a way to get my hands on hers. I disclose to her a future of three children, a husband, and good health. “Cool,” she says. “Oh, did you see the Christmas lights all along this street last year?”

“Yeah,” I say. “They were really cool.”

“Did you decorate your house for Christmas?”

“No,” I said. “I’m Jewish.”

“What?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“Seriously?” Laney registers my Jewishness with a squirrely wiggle of her nose.

“Yep,” I say. “So no Christmas.”

“Are you joking?”

I laugh aloud. “Why would I joke about that?”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

“Have you ever met a Jewish person before?”

Laney is from a tiny Tennessee town where controversy can break out if a Baptist considers going to a Methodist church. She thinks to herself and answers no, she’s never met a Jew before. “Do you go to church?”

“Sometimes I go to synagogue.”

“Is that Jewish church?”

“Basically, but it’s called synagogue. Sometimes I’ll go on Friday nights.”

“So you don’t go to Jewish church all the time?”

“Synagogue,” I say.

“Oh, sorry!” she says. “Do you eat special foods?”

And that’s when it hit me: I, a man who has never fasted on Yom Kippur, who has not read the Torah since his bar mitzvah, and who has eaten pork and assorted trayf by the boatload throughout his life, is to be the Spokesman of the Jews for an inquisitive girl from Small Town, Tennessee. Her curiosities and judgments about the whole of the Jewish people will likely be filtered through me in the future; me, the first Jew she’s ever known. I feel underqualified for the job and eerily aware of its weight: I can picture Laney at a dinner party, maybe five years from now, and the talk shifting to something or other related to Jews and Laney saying, “Ya’ll, I know one.”

In my life, I have been cocooned: I went to Jewish Sunday school until my bar mitzvah, I went to a private high school that, while not predominantly Jewish, had its fair share of them, and then I attended a university with a largely Jewish student body. Though I lived in places where Jews were the minority, I had never before been put into a position where I was to be quizzed (in the nicest possible way, of course, because Laney’s smile was very nice) about my faith, identity, culture, and religion. I even feel presumptuous using the possessive “my”: who I am to feign expertise on such a rich, complicated people, for the very word Jew unfurls into thousands of connotations depending on what books you read, who you talk to, and what you experience.

“Some people eat special foods,” I tell Laney. “Kosher.”

“What’s kosher?”

“Well, you can’t eat pork…and certain foods have to be treated a certain way.”

God. It was as if I’d sped-read Judaism for Dummies.

Even though I tell Laney that holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are more significant in the Jewish calendar, Laney wants to know about Hanukkah. “Is it like Christmas?” she asks.

My Sunday school education, long warehoused and growing musty with disuse, was suddenly called upon. I deliver what I know in fragments: the story of the noble Maccabee warriors, how they thought they had oil to help them survive one cold night, only to discover that the oil, miraculously, would last them eight. “So that’s why we light the candles on eight nights,” I tell Laney. “On this candelabra-looking thing.” I forget to tell her the candelabra-looking thing is called a menorah. “Have you ever eaten potato pancakes?”

“No…” she says, as if she thinks I might offer her one from my pocket.

I am lucky Laney is asking me about Hanukkah, because if she had asked me a broader question like, “What is a Jew?”, I would be flummoxed. The History of the Jews: a history of faith and strength and perseverance over oppression, of tradition and literature and art and family and. And and and. I wasn’t getting to the ands: I was only talking about Hanukkah. But then again, what else could I tell her if she did ask? Where would I start?

Talking about some of the basics of Judaism made me keenly aware of the scattershot knowledge I had of my own Jewish identity, and how difficult it would be for me to explain to a person who had no familiarity with it. My Jewishness has been passed down from my parents, Russian Jews who came to the United States as political refugees in 1979. On their Soviet passports, their nationality was listed not as RUSSIAN, but as JEW. They fled to America for the reasons so many flee: opportunity, freedom, both economic and religious.

In my family, I was a first-generation American Jew, born in Omaha, Nebraska and raised in Memphis, Tennessee on the soothing storyteller sermons of my Reform rabbi and the sing-song cadence of my cantor. However, my day-to-day Jewishness, especially past my bar mitzvah, was molded more by cultural than religious forces: Jerry Seinfeld’s nasal twang, Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song.”

Hanukkah again. “The potato pancakes are called latkes,” I tell Laney.

I don’t ask Laney if she’s ever heard of Moshe Dayan or Philip Roth or Larry David. I don’t try to present and flatten the contusions of the word Jew itself: is it a signifier of identity? Race? Religion? Culture? All of the above? How much do such distinctions matter when, in the dark pages of history, those who hate don’t care if you’re Orthodox or Reform or Conservative or culturally Jewish, or a Jew for Jesus, or an atheist Jew, or a Jewish Neurotic. For those who hate them, a Jew is a Jew—period. And while many Jews may be reluctant to define their people, even in defiant pride, with the same vocabulary that their enemies use, I am reminded of an Israeli speaker who hated the word “Jewish.” “Why,” he said to me and my fellow Birthright trip travelers in a hotel conference room in Jerusalem, “are you Jew…ISH?” He stressed the palms-raised-in-the-air nebbishness of the ISH. “No, you’re not Jewish,” he scolded us. “You can’t ish your way out of our family. You’re a JEW!”

I am a Jew. This is what I had told Laney, the shiksa goddess from the Tennessee country, and she had asked me if I was kidding. If I had been kidding, what was the joke? What was its set-up, its punchline? What comic ammunition would I have gotten out of pretending to be a Jew?

With the fearlessness of an Israeli commando and the calm dignity of Moses, I ask Laney, “How would your dad feel if you, say, married a Jew?”

She turns her pillowy lips to me. “I think he’d be okay,” she says. “But he’d be mad if I married a black guy.”

Oy.

(image via Shutterstock)

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year
Did My Commitment to Dating Only Jews Make Me a Racist?

The post Jewish Law Student Seeks Blonde, Southern Belle appeared first on Jewcy.

I don’t care about food. Sometimes, I’ll forget to eat until three or four in the afternoon, at which point I’ll go to one of two cafes and get the same sandwich I always get. I often have the same meals day in and day out, with only the slightest variety in high-carb intake: instant mashed potatoes, seven minute pasta, raw cookie dough. If I ever tell you I’m going to cook for you, it will be a grilled cheese sandwich, maybe with a flourish of avocado if I’m feeling fancy. Beyond, needing it to live, food is just not a priority.

Growing up, however, I was told that God cared very, very much about what I ate. It was so important that God, and rabbis doing his bidding, created an elaborate set of rules to make sure I kept my body pure. Keeping kosher (kashrut, whatever) is ultimately the greatest divide between Judaism and Western Society, a day-to-day reminder that to be Jewish is to Not Be other things. Big Macs are not yours, Red Lobster is not yours, the food of a hundred other cultures from a hundred countries is not yours, nor are you to touch a piece of it. You have kugel.

I still keep kosher. I have, however, given up most of the other religious beliefs I was raised with. That makes me a kosher atheist, and I’m not the only one. A recent profile of Ezekiel Emanuel, wonder-doc and brother of Rahm and Ari, reveals that he, too, is an atheist who keeps kosher. Lisa Miller picked up on this, and questioned his eating habits in the Washington Post. Determining that Emanuel’s own reasoning is “wobbly,” she concludes that the real reason an atheist would observe these dietary laws is because—wait for it—they aren’t atheist at all! Rather, keeping kosher is a way to remain in contact with the “transcendent parts of life,” whatever those are. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an atheist. She writes:

Usually when a person ditches religion, he or she also happily ditches the antiquated rules and regulations that go along with a strict observance of faith. Good-bye, stupid rules about who can have sex with whom, and under what circumstances!

Really? That’s what people are thinking about? I’d never claim to speak for anyone else, but my own coming out as an atheist was nothing but painful. I grew up in a proud, loving, religious community. Every aspect of my identity was defined by a religious Judaism: not just who my friends were, but every person I knew, and every activity I participated in. Maybe there’s nothing unique about being raised religious in America, but I remember every detail of it. A lot of that rests on food: Friday night dinners, seders, getting the toys from Happy Meals without the burger.

I also remember slowly starting to realize that none of it was for me. As a kid, I had assumed that no one actually prayed, and when I realized otherwise, it started to become clear the whole God thing wasn’t for me. The summer before college, the big question among the students at my yeshiva was who would stay religious and who wouldn’t. For many, the answer was clear: some were already sneaking in trips to In N’ Out Burger during lunch breaks, and others were going to Israel. It wasn’t until I entered my college dining hall, 3,000 miles away from home, that I first grappled with the question myself.

Faced with endless food options, I backed myself into a pizza-filled corner. I had no fully formed opinions about religion, but figured that I could play it safe by eating only pizza. Breakfast, lunch and
dinner, that’s pretty much how it went for that first year. On spiritual autopilot, my only real crisis came when I won concert tickets—for a Friday night show. Panicked, I called a high school friend, who asked me to weigh what was more important: one night’s fun or 5,000 years of tradition. It was an odd comparison, I thought, but I ended up choosing the latter.

Soon after that, a family friend back home, and a pillar of our synagogue’s community, died suddenly. I ran to American University’s Kay Spiritual Life Center to pray, but as soon as I opened the siddur I realized I felt emptiness in what I was doing. These were words written by wise men from the Middle Ages who didn’t know the man who died, and, even more disturbing, I knew their words were going nowhere. The idea of existence beyond the grave felt, first and foremost, false. All my past hesitations with religion suddenly made sense. I left the Spiritual Life Center knowing that I had no use for it anymore.

There wasn’t any joy in that, at all. No vitriolic triumphalism, no throwing the rule book in anyone’s face, just the knowledge that God wasn’t (and still isn’t) an idea I could accept. It was a very depressing thought, honestly. It led to hours-long conversations with my parents, since I was convinced that with one more explanation of the Jewish people I’d finally understand the concept of faith. I tried to embrace secular Judaism, a disaster which left me crying in a bookstore holding a copy of Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Writings. All I had left were the rules.

And then those fell, one by one. Keeping Shabbos was the first to go; the joys of Saturday Netflix came easily. Hanging out with a mainly Jewish crowd also quickly fell out, as all the kids who went to the Hillel were assholes. It became clear that the thousands of years of tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, just didn’t mean a whole lot to me.

The one thing that remained were those sticky dietary laws. They felt removed from the culture they had come from, as if my parents had conjured them out of thin air. I was lonely on the opposite coast, and picking out what I did and didn’t eat gave me a tangible connection back to the warmth of Los Angeles. Months became years, and I eventually realized that I had stopped eating meat altogether.

In the profile, Emanuel plays coy about why he still keeps kosher, stating that “Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are not the same.” I’m pretty pleased with that obnoxious non-answer, mostly because it reflects my own uncertainty as to exactly why I keep these rules. Acquaintances are routinely shocked (shocked!) when I tell them I’ve never had the slightest curiosity about oysters, pepperoni slices, or that holiest of holies, bacon. Maybe someday, but I doubt it. And my knowledge about vegetarianism extends as far as the liner notes to Moby’s album 18 (he makes a pretty convincing argument about utilitarianism and the world’s resources).

A friend suggests that Emanuel does what he does because “it annoys people,” which makes sense to me. It’s a way for us to embrace our parent’s traditions and communities on our terms. I wish Miller would look past hokey terms like “transcendental” to describe decisions to remain involved in religious communities. I eventually came to realize that just because I was giving up yarmulkes and the six hundred and thirteen mitzvahs didn’t mean I had to lie about who I had grown up with. Keeping kosher is a concrete way to keep alive the ties to the people who raised me—my parents, my friends, my first community. And there’s nothing more real than that.

Art by Margarita Korol

The post Why I Gave Up God But Still Keep Kosher appeared first on Jewcy.

Rookie, Tavi Gevinson’s online teen magazine that is anything but a teen magazine, published an interview with Carrie Brownstein today, and something big happened midway through. While the endlessly talented Brownstein, writer and star of IFC’s Portlandia and a 2010 Big Jewcy, was explaining how she taught herself to play guitar, Tavi chimed in unexpectedly:

TAVI: Guys, sorry to interrupt, but I just had bacon for the first time.

ANAHEED: What?!

CARRIE: You loved it!

ANAHEED: Wait, you’ve never had bacon before? You totally did it the right way: you didn’t pre-announce that you were about eat bacon for the first time.

CARRIE: Because then we would’ve been watching you. And now there’s bacon on everything else we ordered, so.

Mazel tov, Tavi, and welcome to the club.

Previously: The Big Jewcy: Carrie Brownstein, Musician/Writer
Carrie Brownstein Does Everything
Related: Hey Rookie, Welcome to the Big League [Tablet Magazine] America’s Next Teenage Jewish Fashionista [Tablet Magazine]

(Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images for MIU MIU)

The post Tavi Gevinson Eats Bacon For The First Time With Carrie Brownstein appeared first on Jewcy.

• When Orthodox chefs can’t eat the food they prepare.

• Obama’s Park Slope brownstone.

• Homemade cars from 1960s Poland.

• Here’s Seth Rogen looking all serious in stills for his new film, Take This Waltz.

The post Daily Jewce: Recapping #BeinartVGordis, Kosher Chefs Cooking Trayf, and more appeared first on Jewcy.