Some Jews returning to food traditions later in life

By Robin Mather Jenkins
Chicago Tribune

When Barbara and Marc Slutsky of Highland Park, Ill., married, she never thought she would end up keeping kosher.

After all, Barbara was raised in a reform Jewish family on Staten Island, N.Y. “We were pretty assimilated,” she recalled recently. “Keeping kosher wasn’t in the fine print,” and she knew nothing about kashrut, the Hebrew word for kosher.

Yet today she knows a lot about kashrut. The Slutskys switched to a kosher lifestyle when their children were small — about the time Marc and others founded Aitz Hayim, a “synagogue without walls,” and the family agreed its acts should match its faith.

Having converted to a fully kosher kitchen in 1989, the Slutskys may have been ahead of the kosher curve. Jews who grew up in non-observant households and have made the change are driving a booming market. For them, keeping kosher is one way to align daily life with their faith.

Joan Nathan is the author of the forthcoming “The New American Cooking” (Knopf, $35) and a number of books on Jewish food, including the prize-winning “Jewish Cooking in America.” She doesn’t keep kosher herself, she said, but a cousin in France became kosher late in life.

“There’s a lot more fundamentalism in America today, and the Jewish people who are fundamentalists are coming back to keeping kosher,” she said. “I’m secular, and not strictly kosher. But I do understand why people do it: They may want the religious connection, or the historical connection, or both.”

Sales of kosher foods have skyrocketed, with sales of more than $8.2 billion in 2004, up 15 percent from the year before. Many new products make it easier for Jews who want to follow regulations that are thousands of years old.

Keeping kosher means following rabbinical laws based on dietary rules laid out in the Torah (and also found in the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus). The rules are complex, but prohibit pork and shellfish. They insist on the humane slaughter of healthy animals. Because they bar dairy and meat at the same meal, keeping a strict kosher kitchen requires two sets of dishes and cooking equipment: one for dairy meals, one for meat meals.

login to post comments