Observing the observant

In her quest to understand kashrut in America, Sue Fishkoff accompanied kosher supervisors on all sorts of daring missions.

By ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN
Kosher junk Kirspy Kreme Oreo-521 (photo credit: MCT)
Kosher junk Kirspy Kreme Oreo-521
(photo credit: MCT)
In her quest to understand the nexus between modern America and the laws of kashrut handed down millennia ago, accomplished journalist Sue Fishkoff has left no stone unturned. The result is a fascinating, well-organized and crisply written book that is just plain good reading.
In the best journalistic tradition, Fishkoff did not rely on phone calls or the Internet to collect her data regarding what has become a multimillion-dollar enterprise in the United States. She accompanied kosher supervisors (mashgihim) as they climbed into flour tanker trucks, hosed down vats of boiling grape juice, blow-torched barbecue grills, checked product codes on vats of chocolate and inspected lettuce for infestation. She watched hip Jewish foodies sample boutique kosher wine, slaughter goats and protest at a meat-packing plant.
Starting with the premise that “kosher food and the kosher food system... have become American,” Fishkoff points out that nearly one-third of all new food products in the US are kosher-certified, “including chocolate Easter bunnies and Christmas candies, items clearly not intended for the Jewish consumer.”
She discovered that curiosity and pride have often replaced hostility in liberal American Jews’ attitude toward kashrut. “Whereas their parents and grandparents viewed keeping kosher as part and parcel of an observant lifestyle that cut Jews off from society at large, increasing numbers of younger Jews, comfortable in their position in America, see it as a mark of Jewish identity, a declaration of membership in the tribe.”
This phenomenon and others – such as the story of the Jewish deli – are covered in depth from several angles, providing much enlightening information about the diverse consumers of kosher food in America.
But the primary focus is organized kashrut supervision, which started in 1912 when Procter & Gamble sought a rabbinic stamp of approval for Crisco shortening.
Realizing that marketing the vegetarian lard alternative to Jews could be quite profitable, P&G advertised Crisco as a product the “Hebrew race” had been “breathlessly anticipating” for 4,000 years.
Particularly in the early days, the American kosher food industry was plagued with fraud and even violence. In 1914, New York poultry market proprietor Barnett Baff, a suspect in a price-fixing scandal, was shot dead along with two eyewitnesses. The assailants “later confessed that one hundred kosher poultry retailers in the city had raised $4,200 to pay for the murders.”
In modern times, having a kosher seal of approval is considered so integral to a product’s salability that many companies insist on hiring certifying agencies to endorse items that are inherently kosher or aren’t even edible. Sometimes they are audacious or clueless enough to affix the endorsement symbol fraudulently, as when Fuji printed an OU on boxes of film in the belief that this would increase sales.
While the Orthodox Union was the sole player in the kosher certification business until 1935, by 2009 more than 1,000 individual rabbis and organizations were offering companies around the globe their own kosher seals for products ranging from food additives to aluminum foil. However, the “big four” remain the OU, OK Labs, the Kof-K and the Star-K.
Fishkoff tags along as OU mashgiah Rabbi Yitzhok Gallor and a young crew arrive in central Washington on a September night to kasher Tree Top’s applejuice tanks in “a blazing show of fire and water” before turning their attention to the grape harvest. Hours of grueling labor in isolated conditions stand behind an OU seal on a jar of grape jelly. Since grape processing requires 24/7 supervision for kosher certification, the mashgihim sleep in trailers on site for weeks on end, spending the High Holy Days away from family and synagogue.
While all kosher supervision work demands “integrity, flexibility and great attention to detail,” Fishkoff reports, grape-processing supervision demands even more. “These men are alone most of the time, in charge of supervising very complex operations where the potential for accidents and mistakes is great. Most of them are... more at ease studying Torah than driving combines, and they have to assert their authority with big, burly factory workers who aren’t used to dealing with religious Jews.”
She also follows the OU’s Rabbi Mordechai Grunberg on his rounds of ingredient-makers in China. In 1995, when mashgihim from several certifying agencies started traveling to the Far East, the demand for kosher supervision was mostly at the behest of foreign distributors wanting to source products in China.
“Today the vast majority of applications come directly from the local factories... It’s a strictly business decision, driven by customer demand.”
In every section of the book, Fishkoff conveys refreshingly accurate information on all aspects of kashrut, providing the Jewish legal details behind a complex system in an engaging manner.
Kosher Nation, like her earlier excellent work The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch, has appeal for a broad range of readers. Fishkoff, who has been described as a secular Jewish journalist, presents nuanced and even controversial facts from all sides of an issue without disparaging or championing any particular viewpoint. She writes about her own relationship with kashrut only in the introduction, where such material properly belongs.
This accomplishment alone puts her head and shoulders above many contemporary journalists, but it’s only the (kosher) icing on an already delicious cake of a book.