Two quick articles
Apr. 14th, 2008 12:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Matzo Sells Like Hotcakes
As Jewish children brush up on the Four Questions in anticipation of Passover, which begins on Saturday night, it is time to pose a fifth. Is gefilte fish the new sushi?
And the answer is, No. But.
In the universe of Passover-themed products, gefilte fish, the alarmingly brainlike glob that evokes nothing even vaguely piscine but is made from boned carp, pike and whitefish, remains the Edsel of the kosher product line. “It’s never going to catch on as the next Super Bowl snack,” says David V. Rossi, the marketing vice president for the R.A.B. Food Group, whose most famous brand is Manischewitz, and which traces its history as a kosher food company to 1888.
But, underperformers like gefilte fish (and borscht) notwithstanding, something quite remarkable has happened in the unsexy world of kosher food. In recent years, sales have grown steadily — to about $14 billion a year, Manischewitz officials say — with a dizzying array of products (apple-cinnamon matzo, nondairy cake frostings, garlic/olive oil cooking spray) and who’d-a-thunk-it events (the annual Manischewitz kosher cook-off, first won in 2006 by Candace McMenamin from Lexington, S.C.).
Kosher trends tend not to be at the top of the foodie-information food chain. But Manischewitz made its way into the news last month through a (very) minor catastrophe, a production problem at a new high-speed, computer-controlled oven at the company’s Newark plant. The company had to stop production of bite-size Tam Tam crackers — to some an essential part of the Passover experience, to others like cardboard without the taste.
Also shut down was production of items like Thin Tea Matzo, Yolk Free Egg Matzo, White Grape Matzo, Concord Grape Matzo and Spelt Matzo.
Newark does not instantly evoke images of Kosher Central, but a warehouse district on the city’s outskirts has been the home of Manischewitz’s core production since it consolidated three plants into one in 2006. And all those seemingly nontraditional products reflect the way kosher food has become a growth area in a country whose Jewish population is more or less stagnant.
The company says there are now 86,000 kosher-certified products, the market is growing between 10 and 15 percent annually, and more than 14,000 new kosher products have been introduced in the United States and Canada over the last five years.
Non-Jews make up the market’s fastest-growing segment, the company says. This actually sort of makes sense. If Americans increasingly want variety in food, why not more matzo ball soup and that Concord grape matzo (if not quite the gefilte fish) along with the Thai peanut sauce and Cajun wings?
“People drink more Irish ale, they’re more likely to eat a chicken burrito,” said Rabbi Yaakov Y. Horowitz, who heads the 17 rabbinical inspectors who oversee production. “Why shouldn’t it spill over to kosher food as well?”
If people are more focused on health and safety, they might be comforted by all those arcane biblical prescriptions on food preparation and those armies of attentive rabbis watching over it. As the kosher market grows, it tends to snowball, with more ingredients needing to be kosher to be used in production. And as observant Jews become a more conspicuous part of the Jewish population, an increasing part of the Jewish community tends to be interested in kosher goods.
Which brings us to the plant here, sort of Willy Wonka meets Sholom Aleichem. It is now past the peak kosher-for-Passover production season, which usually runs from August through February and includes the additional strictures for products that can be consumed during Passover. But the plant is still bustling, steamy matzo ball soup zipping along production lines in one room, matzo baked in a separate one with its 150-foot, three-zone tunnel oven churning out almost a thousand matzos a minute.
It’s all supervised by Rabbi Horowitz, a fourth-generation Hasidic rabbi, whose extracurricular activities include putting together a history of matzo in America as part of the historical organization he founded, American Jewish Legacy.
You might think a Hasidic rabbi would look askance at all these odd, seemingly nontraditional products clogging up aisles at Wal-Marts and Costcos and A.&P.s. But you would be wrong. It’s the less observant Jews who tend to turn up their noses at the notion of kosher Spanish pilaf mix or white grape matzo, he said. The traditional Jews, he said, are just happy there are more kosher products. It’s the process that has to be traditional, not the food that comes from it.
It’s all part of the push-pull of the immigrant experience in America, one that has taken a turn with kosher food that few would have predicted in the ’60s and ’70s. So, for now, there’s the matzo, the last link, Rabbi Horowitz says, that many Jews have with the world of their fathers. And there’s the brave new world of kosher cook-offs making salmon primavera, chicken in balsamic cherry sauce and falafel pizza.
“Anything that makes people realize that it’s fun, it’s not difficult — well, not too difficult — to keep kosher is a good thing,” he said. “We’re living in good times that these things are happening.”
Guidebook to Understanding Liberation of the Jews
Why is this book different from all other prayer books used in Jewish services?
This book, of course, is the Haggadah, which contains the prayers and acts for the Passover Seder. Unlike the more official prayer books used in synagogues, the Haggadah becomes part of each family that uses it at home for the annual ritual meals commemorating the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt.
Families choose among many different editions or construct their own from bits and pieces of the ritual. Different editions have been written — and, more than any other Jewish text, illustrated — in response to different needs in different eras.
“The Haggadah is a book not just of the Jewish People, but of ordinary Jewish people,” Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman wrote. “It is a book we all own, handle, store at home and spill wine upon.”
It is hard to imagine anyone spilling wine on “My People’s Passover Haggadah,” a fascinating two volume collection of text and commentaries for which Rabbi Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, was co-editor.
Just published by Jewish Lights, “My People’s Passover Haggadah” provides a new translation of a traditional Hebrew text introduced by background essays and interwoven with contemporary commentaries.
One introductory essay, by David Arnow, an author of works on enriching Seders and Rabbi Hoffman’s co-editor, examines the earliest Seder ceremonies as prescribed in the Mishnah and Tosefta, two rabbinic codes from around 200 to 250.
Both texts, included here in Hebrew and English, featured the four cups of wine; the matzoh, or unleavened bread; the bitter herbs; haroset, a sweet paste of fruit and spices; engaging children in the ritual; and many of the prayers found in Seders today.
It was the Mishnah that prescribed the retelling of the Passover history after a child’s question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
The 11 commentaries by scholars from every branch of Judaism explore Jewish laws and biblical passages shaping the Haggadah, its history and elaboration in rabbinic interpretations, medieval additions, Hasidic stories, Kabbalic doctrines, theological themes and spiritual guidance.
All the great voices of Judaism over the centuries are heard.
One commentary, however, uses recent Haggadot devised for feminist Seders to interject feminist insights and alternatives into the traditional ritual. Although the Tosefta long ago suggested that a man should make his wife happy on this holiday — “with wine, as it is written” — women, who bear the burden of preparing the Seder, have been largely invisible in the ritual.
Another commentary, by Carole B. Balin, who also teaches at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, draws on material from the wider array of modern Haggadot.
A 1927 Soviet “Haggadah for Believers and Atheists” called for washing away “the entire bourgeois filth” and annihilating “all the outdated rabbinic laws and customs.” In 1969, the first of the “Freedom Seders,” nicknamed the “Hippie Haggadah,” included readings from Allen Ginsberg and the “Rabbi Henry David Thoreau” and lyrics from “the prophet Dylan.” There were Haggadot for kibbutzniks in Israel and others written in the shadow of Nazism.
Rabbi Balin tells of the “Maxwell House Haggadah,” ingeniously offered since 1934, with the purchase of a can of coffee, of course, as a follow-up to an advertising campaign assuring people that the brand’s coffee was “kosher for Passover.” By now, “more than 50 million copies of the Maxwell House Haggadah have been printed,” Rabbi Balin writes, “making it the most widely used Haggadah in the world.”
Rabbi Hoffman, who worked for two years on these volumes, said, “We thought of this Haggadah as an encyclopedia of wisdom surrounding the Haggadah and Passover.” Everything is there, he said.
That everything includes a number of telling illustrations. The four children asking questions at one point in the Seder, traditionally the wise son, the wicked son, the simple son and the son who does not know how to ask, are pictured in strikingly different ways for Jews in 16th-century Prague, in Victorian America and on Israeli kibbutzes in the 1950s.
Where the Seder ritual explains that the bitter herbs symbolize the way that slavemasters embittered the lives of the Israelites in Egypt, some medieval Haggadot included depictions of husbands pointing to their wives as a similar source of bitterness. The ancient tradition of misogynist jokes!
An unusual 14th-century illustration appears here, with the wife returning the favor by pointing back at her husband. Rabbi Hoffman pointed out that the Hebrew wordplay they exchange on scrolls over their heads show that the wife, no less than the husband, “is portrayed as knowing the Talmud,” suggesting “an entirely different view of women” at this time.
The ways of using this Haggadah are endless. One could follow a single commentary through the Seder the way one might a discussion thread on a blog. Rabbi Daniel Landes, an Orthodox scholar in Jerusalem, explains questions of Jewish law. Questions of translating the Hebrew into English are explored by Joel M. Hoffman, a linguist and translator who is also Rabbi Hoffman’s son — the “wise son” Rabbi Hoffman said.
Or one could delve into a particular aspect of the Seder like the competing theories of how the symbolic foods should be arranged on the Seder Plate and the debate over whether there should be two matzohs or three, or the mystery of the word “afikoman” and the rules surrounding the game of hiding this piece of matzoh for children to find.
One could discover, in Rabbi Hoffman’s essay and commentary, how Jewish and Christian influences have been entwined — “like a double helix,” he says — in the relationship between Passover and Easter and between the unleavened matzoh, “the bread of affliction,” and the Eucharist.
Have you ever been puzzled or troubled by the biblical account attributing the first six plagues afflicted on the Egyptians to Pharaoh’s hardening of his heart but then the final four plagues to the fact that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart? Well, you can find out about the Talmudic sages who have been troubled before you.
You can even learn of a ninth-century text that describes Pharaoh repenting just before drowning in the Red Sea, being resurrected by God and installed as king of Ninevah when Jonah is sent there to prophesy.
“My People’s Passover Haggadah” is not for use around the table. It is for periodic inquiry or systematic study. It may arrive too late for Passover, which begins next Saturday night. But next year at the Seder!
As Jewish children brush up on the Four Questions in anticipation of Passover, which begins on Saturday night, it is time to pose a fifth. Is gefilte fish the new sushi?
And the answer is, No. But.
In the universe of Passover-themed products, gefilte fish, the alarmingly brainlike glob that evokes nothing even vaguely piscine but is made from boned carp, pike and whitefish, remains the Edsel of the kosher product line. “It’s never going to catch on as the next Super Bowl snack,” says David V. Rossi, the marketing vice president for the R.A.B. Food Group, whose most famous brand is Manischewitz, and which traces its history as a kosher food company to 1888.
But, underperformers like gefilte fish (and borscht) notwithstanding, something quite remarkable has happened in the unsexy world of kosher food. In recent years, sales have grown steadily — to about $14 billion a year, Manischewitz officials say — with a dizzying array of products (apple-cinnamon matzo, nondairy cake frostings, garlic/olive oil cooking spray) and who’d-a-thunk-it events (the annual Manischewitz kosher cook-off, first won in 2006 by Candace McMenamin from Lexington, S.C.).
Kosher trends tend not to be at the top of the foodie-information food chain. But Manischewitz made its way into the news last month through a (very) minor catastrophe, a production problem at a new high-speed, computer-controlled oven at the company’s Newark plant. The company had to stop production of bite-size Tam Tam crackers — to some an essential part of the Passover experience, to others like cardboard without the taste.
Also shut down was production of items like Thin Tea Matzo, Yolk Free Egg Matzo, White Grape Matzo, Concord Grape Matzo and Spelt Matzo.
Newark does not instantly evoke images of Kosher Central, but a warehouse district on the city’s outskirts has been the home of Manischewitz’s core production since it consolidated three plants into one in 2006. And all those seemingly nontraditional products reflect the way kosher food has become a growth area in a country whose Jewish population is more or less stagnant.
The company says there are now 86,000 kosher-certified products, the market is growing between 10 and 15 percent annually, and more than 14,000 new kosher products have been introduced in the United States and Canada over the last five years.
Non-Jews make up the market’s fastest-growing segment, the company says. This actually sort of makes sense. If Americans increasingly want variety in food, why not more matzo ball soup and that Concord grape matzo (if not quite the gefilte fish) along with the Thai peanut sauce and Cajun wings?
“People drink more Irish ale, they’re more likely to eat a chicken burrito,” said Rabbi Yaakov Y. Horowitz, who heads the 17 rabbinical inspectors who oversee production. “Why shouldn’t it spill over to kosher food as well?”
If people are more focused on health and safety, they might be comforted by all those arcane biblical prescriptions on food preparation and those armies of attentive rabbis watching over it. As the kosher market grows, it tends to snowball, with more ingredients needing to be kosher to be used in production. And as observant Jews become a more conspicuous part of the Jewish population, an increasing part of the Jewish community tends to be interested in kosher goods.
Which brings us to the plant here, sort of Willy Wonka meets Sholom Aleichem. It is now past the peak kosher-for-Passover production season, which usually runs from August through February and includes the additional strictures for products that can be consumed during Passover. But the plant is still bustling, steamy matzo ball soup zipping along production lines in one room, matzo baked in a separate one with its 150-foot, three-zone tunnel oven churning out almost a thousand matzos a minute.
It’s all supervised by Rabbi Horowitz, a fourth-generation Hasidic rabbi, whose extracurricular activities include putting together a history of matzo in America as part of the historical organization he founded, American Jewish Legacy.
You might think a Hasidic rabbi would look askance at all these odd, seemingly nontraditional products clogging up aisles at Wal-Marts and Costcos and A.&P.s. But you would be wrong. It’s the less observant Jews who tend to turn up their noses at the notion of kosher Spanish pilaf mix or white grape matzo, he said. The traditional Jews, he said, are just happy there are more kosher products. It’s the process that has to be traditional, not the food that comes from it.
It’s all part of the push-pull of the immigrant experience in America, one that has taken a turn with kosher food that few would have predicted in the ’60s and ’70s. So, for now, there’s the matzo, the last link, Rabbi Horowitz says, that many Jews have with the world of their fathers. And there’s the brave new world of kosher cook-offs making salmon primavera, chicken in balsamic cherry sauce and falafel pizza.
“Anything that makes people realize that it’s fun, it’s not difficult — well, not too difficult — to keep kosher is a good thing,” he said. “We’re living in good times that these things are happening.”
Guidebook to Understanding Liberation of the Jews
Why is this book different from all other prayer books used in Jewish services?
This book, of course, is the Haggadah, which contains the prayers and acts for the Passover Seder. Unlike the more official prayer books used in synagogues, the Haggadah becomes part of each family that uses it at home for the annual ritual meals commemorating the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt.
Families choose among many different editions or construct their own from bits and pieces of the ritual. Different editions have been written — and, more than any other Jewish text, illustrated — in response to different needs in different eras.
“The Haggadah is a book not just of the Jewish People, but of ordinary Jewish people,” Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman wrote. “It is a book we all own, handle, store at home and spill wine upon.”
It is hard to imagine anyone spilling wine on “My People’s Passover Haggadah,” a fascinating two volume collection of text and commentaries for which Rabbi Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, was co-editor.
Just published by Jewish Lights, “My People’s Passover Haggadah” provides a new translation of a traditional Hebrew text introduced by background essays and interwoven with contemporary commentaries.
One introductory essay, by David Arnow, an author of works on enriching Seders and Rabbi Hoffman’s co-editor, examines the earliest Seder ceremonies as prescribed in the Mishnah and Tosefta, two rabbinic codes from around 200 to 250.
Both texts, included here in Hebrew and English, featured the four cups of wine; the matzoh, or unleavened bread; the bitter herbs; haroset, a sweet paste of fruit and spices; engaging children in the ritual; and many of the prayers found in Seders today.
It was the Mishnah that prescribed the retelling of the Passover history after a child’s question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
The 11 commentaries by scholars from every branch of Judaism explore Jewish laws and biblical passages shaping the Haggadah, its history and elaboration in rabbinic interpretations, medieval additions, Hasidic stories, Kabbalic doctrines, theological themes and spiritual guidance.
All the great voices of Judaism over the centuries are heard.
One commentary, however, uses recent Haggadot devised for feminist Seders to interject feminist insights and alternatives into the traditional ritual. Although the Tosefta long ago suggested that a man should make his wife happy on this holiday — “with wine, as it is written” — women, who bear the burden of preparing the Seder, have been largely invisible in the ritual.
Another commentary, by Carole B. Balin, who also teaches at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, draws on material from the wider array of modern Haggadot.
A 1927 Soviet “Haggadah for Believers and Atheists” called for washing away “the entire bourgeois filth” and annihilating “all the outdated rabbinic laws and customs.” In 1969, the first of the “Freedom Seders,” nicknamed the “Hippie Haggadah,” included readings from Allen Ginsberg and the “Rabbi Henry David Thoreau” and lyrics from “the prophet Dylan.” There were Haggadot for kibbutzniks in Israel and others written in the shadow of Nazism.
Rabbi Balin tells of the “Maxwell House Haggadah,” ingeniously offered since 1934, with the purchase of a can of coffee, of course, as a follow-up to an advertising campaign assuring people that the brand’s coffee was “kosher for Passover.” By now, “more than 50 million copies of the Maxwell House Haggadah have been printed,” Rabbi Balin writes, “making it the most widely used Haggadah in the world.”
Rabbi Hoffman, who worked for two years on these volumes, said, “We thought of this Haggadah as an encyclopedia of wisdom surrounding the Haggadah and Passover.” Everything is there, he said.
That everything includes a number of telling illustrations. The four children asking questions at one point in the Seder, traditionally the wise son, the wicked son, the simple son and the son who does not know how to ask, are pictured in strikingly different ways for Jews in 16th-century Prague, in Victorian America and on Israeli kibbutzes in the 1950s.
Where the Seder ritual explains that the bitter herbs symbolize the way that slavemasters embittered the lives of the Israelites in Egypt, some medieval Haggadot included depictions of husbands pointing to their wives as a similar source of bitterness. The ancient tradition of misogynist jokes!
An unusual 14th-century illustration appears here, with the wife returning the favor by pointing back at her husband. Rabbi Hoffman pointed out that the Hebrew wordplay they exchange on scrolls over their heads show that the wife, no less than the husband, “is portrayed as knowing the Talmud,” suggesting “an entirely different view of women” at this time.
The ways of using this Haggadah are endless. One could follow a single commentary through the Seder the way one might a discussion thread on a blog. Rabbi Daniel Landes, an Orthodox scholar in Jerusalem, explains questions of Jewish law. Questions of translating the Hebrew into English are explored by Joel M. Hoffman, a linguist and translator who is also Rabbi Hoffman’s son — the “wise son” Rabbi Hoffman said.
Or one could delve into a particular aspect of the Seder like the competing theories of how the symbolic foods should be arranged on the Seder Plate and the debate over whether there should be two matzohs or three, or the mystery of the word “afikoman” and the rules surrounding the game of hiding this piece of matzoh for children to find.
One could discover, in Rabbi Hoffman’s essay and commentary, how Jewish and Christian influences have been entwined — “like a double helix,” he says — in the relationship between Passover and Easter and between the unleavened matzoh, “the bread of affliction,” and the Eucharist.
Have you ever been puzzled or troubled by the biblical account attributing the first six plagues afflicted on the Egyptians to Pharaoh’s hardening of his heart but then the final four plagues to the fact that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart? Well, you can find out about the Talmudic sages who have been troubled before you.
You can even learn of a ninth-century text that describes Pharaoh repenting just before drowning in the Red Sea, being resurrected by God and installed as king of Ninevah when Jonah is sent there to prophesy.
“My People’s Passover Haggadah” is not for use around the table. It is for periodic inquiry or systematic study. It may arrive too late for Passover, which begins next Saturday night. But next year at the Seder!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 03:38 am (UTC)(I don't actually speak so much as the teeniest word of Yiddish. Well. Some teeny words of Yiddish, but totally devoid of context.)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 03:43 am (UTC)