Sabbath Meals

But that's ancient history....

I had an email from a reader, asking a question:

I am interested in old, very old, Hebrew (Jewish) meals.  I teach a fifth-grade religious class and we are discussing what we call the “Holy Family”, i.e. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and what their lives were like.  I have a regular lesson plan, but it only teaches the religious aspects of their lives.  I want to take my students one-step further.  I want to give them a look-see into what life was really like, the daily activities and meals.  I want my student to experience the “history” as well as the religious teachings of our faith.  To do this I am attempting to construct a day in the life of the “Holy Family”, from wakening up at dawn, having breakfast, Joseph living for work, Mary going to the market, fetching water, sewing, weaving, cleaning, preparing supper, and the supper meal itself and the singing, pray, and the sharing of stories of faith.

My question is what kind of meals did they eat and what did they typical eat for breakfast, dinner, and supper?  Do you have recipes for those meals?

Now, this has very little to do with the subject of this blog, but it just so happens that I taught a family education class some years ago at my Jewish community called "The History of the Jewish People through Food" and I have some idea of how to answer this question!

First, let's rule out all the things that they did not eat. In Hellenistic period Palestine,

There was no corn (maize)
There were no potatoes
There were no avocados
There was no chocolate
There were no tomatoes
There were no chili or bell peppers

All of these foods came from the Americas,  so  no one in the Middle East or Europe ate them. If you have ever been to the modern State of Israel, you know that Israelis now cultivate several of the items on that list, especially tomatoes and avocados.

Some other things this family didn't eat:

They didn't eat pork
They didn't eat shellfish
They didn't eat animals that had been hunted

We know that because we know they kept some form of Jewish dietary law (kashrut). We don't know whether their kashrut looked exactly like the kashrut of Jews today, but they didn't eat these unclean foods.

Now, I learned a lot about what they might have eaten from an article by Shimon Dar, "Food and Archeology in Romano-Byzantine Palestine" from Food in Antiquity, Wilkins, Harvey and Dobson, eds. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995.) Dar took as his starting point a section of the Mishnah (Ketubot 5:8-9, if you want to look it up) that details what a husband who travels far from home owes his wife in terms of maintenance. Dar translated and quoted the selection, and then figured out that the rabbis thought the bare minimum that a woman would eat was a little over 3,000 calories a day. The Tanaim thought that a typical diet would have in it, at least as a bare minimum:

• Wheat (for bread)
• Legumes (for example, chickpeas and lentils)
• Olive oil
• Dried figs

Think of this as being kind of like a poverty level diet. Typically, Dar thinks that most people in this period in Palestine got more than 50% of their daily calories from bread. They used wheat and barley as their main grains. They probably also ate porridges, but bread was their main food.

Bread took up a lot of time for people in this period, especially for women. If they lived in a city, they either bought their bread from a baker, or bought pre-ground flour. The majority of people, who lived in rural villages, ground their own grain on grinding stones right before they baked. Or at least, that's what the Talmud tells us. Rural women had to rise three hours before sunrise to grind flour for their families. Urban people could get the flour ground, but not everyone could afford the flour they liked. Really poor people ate bread made entirely of barley flour.

When they did make bread, they used a sourdough to leaven it. There was no commercial yeast, obviously, because commercial yeast wasn't invented until the 19th century. Probably every family kept some dough from the previous batch overnight, and shared the old dough with their extended family when they started new households.

I do not know whether these families had their own small family ovens or whether they used communal ovens. Certainly in other periods it was typical to use a communal oven, which is one reason why urban people were dependent on commercial bakers for their bread.

Anyway, that tells you a lot about what Mary was doing every day. She might not have ground her own flour, because she might have lived in too urban a place to need to do that, but baking bread took up a lot of her days.

Dr. Dar also tells us that, in spite of what we have before us in the Talmud, people ate a lot more meat in this period in Palestine than we used to think. They mainly ate lamb, mutton and goat meat. They would sometimes eat beef, but not very often at all. Jewish farmers raised pigs for their non-Jewish neighbors, Dar says. (I find this quite shocking!) They also ate poultry, including chickens, geese and ducks, though apparently they ate a lot of pigeons because archeological evidence has been found for pigeon breeding in caves.

They used sheep and goat's milk to make butter and various kinds of cheese. Dr. Dar doesn't go into a lot of detail about this. We have more linguistic than archeological evidence for this, so we just have to guess that they ate the same kinds of dairy products that are traditional in that area of the world--hard cheeses and salty soft cheeses. John Cooper  asserts in his book Eat and Be Satisfied that dairy products were not an important part of the diet of Jews in the Talmudic periodd.

Some other things about the food Jesus might have grown up eating: they probably ate a lot of vegetables, but as these tend to be listed as just "herbs" or "vegetables", we don't know which ones they liked or in what combinations. Dar points out that vegetables aren't preserved in archeological sites the way that some other foods are. Meat leaves bones, olive oil and wine leave clay jugs, but vegetables don't leave much of a trace. We know that they ate lettuce, spinach, beets, kale, radishes, turnips, carrots, artichokes, black cala, leek, onion, garlic, cucumber, watermelon and squash. They also gathered wild herbs, maybe in a salad like this one. (I love that recipe, but keep in mind they probably used garum rather than salt, and maybe vinegar instead of lemon.)
 

They probably used a lot of herbs, dried and fresh, to flavor their food, things like mint, cilantro, parsley, marjoram and oregano. I don't know whether lemons were in common use at this time. There is a famous article by Erich Isaac from 1959 that suggests that Jews were responsible for the cultivation of citrus fruit in the Greco-Roman world. (This was because of the use of the citron in the rituals associated with Sukkot.) I don't know how early that began and whether it meant that people in Palestine used lemons the way they do in the State of Israel for cooking today. John Cooper, in Eat and Be Satisfied, says that they definitely knew about citrus fruit, but he only cites evidence of Jewish people eating citrons in this period. They probably used grape wine vinegar and verjuice (the sour juice of green grapes) for cooking.

One weird thing they used for flavoring was garum, a sauce made of fermented fish. I don't know how you would approximate this if you were trying to cook a meal as they did. Maybe you would use Worcestershire sauce, which has a base of fermented anchovies. Or you could use Asian fish sauce, anchovy paste or soy sauce. (They didn't have soy beans, but my guess is that the flavor is somewhat similar—a salty, fermented sauce.)

Fruit was a very important part of their diet. First of all, they drank wine. It was not a long fermentation because they didn't have appropriate vessels for that, so it was probably relatively sweet, and they cut it with water. They ate a lot of dried figs and dates, because they were portable, and they made date honey (really a kind of syrup) and wine from the dates. Other fruit trees archeologists have found were pomegranates, peaches, apples, and pears. They also ate nuts, including walnuts, almonds, carob and pistachios.

Even though sugar was first refined in the Middle East, I'm pretty sure they didn’t have refined sugar by this period. They did make sweetened desserts with honey or date syrup. They definitely had lots of kinds of cakes and goodies, though probably they didn't eat them all the time.

Since this is a blog about Sabbath meals, I want to pay attention to that aspect of their diet. Since the early Middle Ages, Jewish people have been making a special dish called a hamin that is cooked overnight on the Sabbath. Most Jews who live in the US who came here from Eastern Europe call this dish cholent. Apparently, according to John Cooper in Eat and Be Satisfied, Jews in the Hellenistic period did not eat hamin or cholent. Their practice was to completely cook a dish and then to pack it in straw or other insulating material to keep it warm. They did have the practice shared by Jewish people through the ages of eating the nicest food on Shabbat--higher quality bread, meat, sweets, that kind of thing.

I do not know to what extent their celebration of Shabbat and holidays resembles that of Jews today. We have very well-developed liturgies and liturgical songs and customs that I'm pretty sure differ from theirs.

If I were going to try to make a typical meal from this period with a class of fifth-graders, I would probably try to make some version of homemade flatbread and a lentil stew with salad and non-alcoholic wine or grape juice mixed with water, and dates. If you can't bake the bread you can always buy it, but the best thing would be to make it with a sourdough starter.  Try getting Ed Wood's book out of the library, he has a chapter on Arab bread.  I would also provide some za'atar and olive oil for the children to dip their bread. Most people also wrapped their bread around onions or leeks, but that's kind of strong!

Good luck and I hope this is interesting for the rest of my poor neglected readers...

RH, Shabbat Shuvah, YK and Shabbat 10/14/05

I've done a lot less cooking than you might expect from someone who blogs about Shabbat cooking. For Rosh HaShanah, we were invited out for the first night and first day lunch, went to a potluck for second night dinner, and did a cooperative meal at our house for second day lunch. So not much cooking for me there.

I made a huge pot of clear vegetable soup with egg and flour dumplings for the potluck. I got the dumpling recipe from the Claudia Roden Book of Jewish Food--they are sort of amoeba shaped and kind of cross between matzah balls and the eggs in egg drop soup. In other words, really good. I had to make that soup again and again for successive meals. Everyone had colds and I put a lot of ginger and black pepper in the soup. I made another pot for second day lunch, and a totally wonderful non-dairy polenta lasagne. I put it together from the component parts of two recipes in The Moosewood Restaurant New Classics. I need to type out the recipe so maybe I'll do that later and post it separately.

For Shabbat Shuvah I made a pretty boring menu:

red lentil soup with lemon, garlic and mint
cauliflower and chickpea curry with coconut milk
brown rice
roasted beet salad with fresh basil
carrot kugel

My son ate up all the carrot kugel. We had leftovers of the rich curry, no one was in the mood for that this week.

For Yom Kippur, I totally forgot that I had to prepare food for the pre-fast meal and the breakfast. For the prefast meal I whipped up another batch of vegetable soup with egg and flour dumplings. We had to eat it before 5PM to get to Kol Nidre services, and we were late anyway. We brought nothing to the communal breakfast. I felt guilty about that, but to assuage my guilt, everyone else brought heavily dairy food that we were afraid to eat because we thought we'd be sick to our stomachs.

I led children's services on both Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. My children's services aren't really services. When I was a kid, my parents brought us to these great family services at my totally formal, elegant Reform Temple. There was a choir and an organ, and majestic English prayers in the old Union prayerbook. Not very Jewish, but I recall puzzling over "he that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not taken my name in vain and hath not sworn deceitfully." I always got a lot out of those services, though maybe not what I would want my child to get out of Jewish prayer. I was a sanctimonious little girl, and I loved elevated language. Well, that part is still true.

My "service" is more like a little class, to make sure everyone knows what the holiday is about, what are the greetings, what's happening in the services, what's a shofar, what does "sealed in the book of life" mean, that kind of thing.  Then we read a story and discuss it, and make a brachah and have snack. The group is generally mixed, little toddlers with children of eight or nine, and some parents, so it has to kind of reach them all. Little kids are very thoughtful, from about age four or so, they can talk about sin and repentence with a lot of intelligence. Given the chance, I mean. This was the first year I also did the Rosh HaShanah service, and I decided that instead of talking about sin, we would talk about what a new year marks. I asked them when their birthdays were and also...when baseball season starts, and when is the World Series. (The boy in day school perked up at that.)  The older children were very interested in the whole idea of the lunisolar calendar. It's too bad I understand the science of calendar making so poorly.

I also led the Neilah service on Yom Kippur. For those not in the know, this is the last service of the 25 hour fast. The usual custom is to open the ark in which the Torah scrolls are kept, so that everyone is obligated to stand. Neilah means locking, it's the service of the shutting of the gates of repentence. I always find this a moving service, and our congregation prays it with tremendous feeling, everyone kind of egging each other on. They sing loudly and people weep. Well, I always do, maybe not everyone does, but I think I'm not the only one.  I must not be, we have kleenex boxes out everywhere. Leading this group, when I get to the line: "Anu ma'amerecha, v'ata ma'amerenu" (forgive bad transliteration--roughly--we are your choice, and you are our choice) I feel a rush and I tremble.

Okay one more menu--this weekend I made:

red lentil soup--just with lemon and curry powder, made at the last minute
broccoli and carrot kugel--improvised
roasted sweet and white potatoes with garlic and shallots
baked tofu (the usual, garlic, sesame oil and tamari with black pepper, random proportions)

Yes, it was boring but everything was easy to put together and very good. We were invited out for lunch, where we had some pleasurably spiritual discussion of the meaning of blessing God. Then after lunch, we sang the grace after meals out loud and then some zmirot, which we don't always do. My son sat up in a chair, wearing a kippah and a serious expression, and clapped along with the bensching (the grace) and then with the singing. It was beautiful to see, also to hear him say "Amen!" at all the right places and to repeat "shabbat menuchah!" in his sweet little voice. Life has so many pleasures.

Shabbat meals 9/30 and 10/1/05

I made:

Golden Cauliflower Soup
Noodle Kugel (my husband's recipe)
baked tofu
lentil salad
tomato/artichoke heart salad

The soup, from a vegan blogger's blog, was both easy to prepare and good. I used an immersion blender, which is a great thing. The recipe calls for nutritional yeast to make it vaguely cheesy, and it was just that, vaguely cheesy. I served it hot Friday night and cold for Saturday lunch and it was better hot. I'm not a vegan, but I like to cook vegan dishes and vegan meals. They are more accessible to more friends, and I think but can't prove that they are probably more health promoting.

I don't think my husband will let me give out his kugel recipe to the whole web. It's a savory noodle kugel with vegetables, in this case with spinach, and sesame seeds on top. It's brilliant. I think this is only the second time I've made it in the whole 10+ years we've been a couple. He is a really great cook.

My son has started a structured playgroup on Friday mornings. I think that I'm going to trade off with my husband taking him to playgroup, until one of us gets a full time job or moshiach comes or whatever.

I would like to put some of my blogging energy into studying the Torah portion for each week, and posting about what I learn. I decided that in schul today. I thought "Gee, this is a really interesting phrase here, I wish I had read about it last night, I'll never have time to do it now." Aha! I've been reading lots of fiction (and fan fiction on the web!) and children's books, and other stuff, and I think I need to reclaim my ability to understand commentaries.

Besides, Bereshit is coming up and I can try to read Aviva Zornberg's commentaries.

That'll put hair on my spiritual chest, or clear my sinuses, or something. Nothing like a little really hard to understand psychological commentary to get the old kavvanah juices flowing.

Shabbat meals 9/24-9/25/05

I made:

Eggplant Marrakesh from Sundays at Moosewood
Carrot Orange Soup
baked tofu (improvised)
roasted vegetables
salad

The eggplant recipe is halved baked eggplants stuffed with an elaborate rice pilaf. The pilaf includes fried and then boiled pasta, chickpeas, raisins and tomato. It's very nice. If you make the eggplants with the absurd amount of olive oil the recipe calls for, they are excellent. I did. They were.

The carrot soup is simple and infallible. My son has enjoyed it since he was a year old.

I baked the tofu with lemon juice, sesame oil, garlic and tamari, and did that same thing of leaving it in the oven after I turned the oven off. It was great.

I screwed up the roasted vegetables (sweet potatoes and cauliflower with shallots and garlic) and had to re-roast them after Shabbat. I used instructions from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven. Use her instructions from Still Life with Menu, they work better! My vegetable combination was good, perhaps I'll try to make these work another time and post a recipe. Obviously the sweet potatoes take longer.

We had guests on Saturday whom I hadn't invited before. They are a good 15-16 years younger than we are, and are a straight couple, members of our schul. I meant to have them many times before. I think my weird moodiness lately has made me shy. We mainly shared the crucial details of our lives, since we didn't know each other that well, but it was good fun, not awkward.

I did not make it to slichot on Saturday night. My husband was going to go, and I was going to stay with the baby, but he wimped out. I had already put on my pjs or I would have gone instead. I don't feel ready for Rosh HaShanah, neither in a practical nor in a spiritual sense. My mother-in-law is coming and I do not feel proud of the state of our apartment, as usual. I am sad that we are still underemployed around here and feel guilty about my general inertia. I don't say laziness, but I could. I have taken a few steps in the right direction lately, mainly because yoga class started up again. I always feel a lot better when I'm exercising, and even just going to yoga once a week with our great teacher makes a difference.

I'll post more about the high holidays as they continue to loom.

Ooh, cinnamon and vanilla!

My web-friend Eemie just posted her challah recipe. Looks good! According to The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, cinnamon in bread dough will make the dough tear. Apparently this isn't a problem for Eemie though. I'll let you know when I get my act together enough to try this one.

Is it still tzedakah if you accept a payment from the government?

I don't usually post much about politics, for many reasons. Nor to I have the chutzpah to pretend to know a lot about halachah. This article at Truthout might give my more halachically-learned readers an opportunity for reflection.

After weeks of prodding by Republican lawmakers and the American Red Cross,   the Federal Emergency Management Agency said yesterday that it will use taxpayer   money to reimburse churches and other religious organizations that have opened   their doors to provide shelter, food and supplies to survivors of hurricanes   Katrina and Rita.

    FEMA officials said it would mark the first time that the government has made   large-scale payments to religious groups for helping to cope with a domestic   natural disaster.

    "I believe it's appropriate for the federal government to assist the faith   community because of the scale and scope of the effort and how long it's lasting,"   said Joe Becker, senior vice president for preparedness and response with the   Red Cross.

    Civil liberties groups called the decision a violation of the traditional boundary   between church and state, accusing FEMA of trying to restore its battered reputation   by playing to religious conservatives.

    "What really frosts me about all this is, here is an administration that   didn't do its job and now is trying to dig itself out by making right-wing groups   happy," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United   for Separation of Church and State.

Now this is a good point. The reason that religious people give charity is that it's a religious imperative. For Jews, that word "imperative" is the core of the matter. We give because it's a mitzvah.

It was the government's obligation to provide for the safety and health of the Gulf Coast residents. They had committed to certain actions that they did not carry out. Now they want to give away the apparently scarce resources of the federal agency that's supposed to help hurricane survivors to religious groups.

I think it would be a good thing if religious bodies in other states would send donations to sister congregations so they don't have to take money from the feds. I don't have a problem, in general, with government grants to religious organizations for work they contract to do. I understand that makes sense for both parties and doesn't necessarily violate boundaries of church and state. But this feels to me like a way for the federal government to excuse itself for not having provided appropriate aid.

Shabbat cooking, right! meals 9/16-9/17/05

I have not been keeping up with posting my menus, recipes and recipe links. For one thing, my cooking is getting boring again, especially as I haven't been planning the menus in advance. This week the food was delicious, though, and I guess kind of typical of my Ashkenazi cooking.

red lentil soup (improvised)
carrot kugel (improvised)
baked tofu (improvised!)
rice noodles from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cookery
potato salad with pesto (improvised!)
steamed broccoli
fresh tomatoes (present from guests!)

The red lentil soup was a variation on the famous Claudia Roden recipe. I put a cup of lentils and four cups of water in the pot with a finely diced shallot, and cooked them together until the lentils were a fine purée, about 30 minutes. Then I added a teaspoon each of turmeric and cumin, a tiny pinch of powdered chili pepper, the juice of a lime (out of lemons!) and a can of the Muir Glen roasted organic tomatoes.

The kugel I also improvised using the famous "shit method." I grated about 6 carrots. I did it by hand because I just couldn't find the grater attachment to the food processor. I added a little less than a cup of wheat germ (of course, I am the wheat-germ-in-kugel person) a big spoon of tofu mayonnaise, four eggs, a dollop of honey and a big handful of yellow raisins. I baked it in my fabulous oval casserole dish on 375  (fahrenheit, because I am an American you know) for 40 minutes, until the top was nicely brown. My son really liked the kugel! He's often nervous about eating mixtures of things, but not this. Since it was little better than a carrot cake, it's not a surprise.

The baked tofu was two sliced cloves of garlic, sprinkle of soy sauce and sesame oil of random proportions, baked in oven with kugel. Why did it taste so great? Don't know. When the kugel and tofu looked done, I just turned the oven off and didn't take them out, so maybe that helped the tofu absorb more marinade.

I improvised the basil pesto for the potatoes (basil, walnuts, garlic, olive oil in food processor) and then the potato salad (boiled potatoes, pesto, champagne vinegar and more olive oil, salt.) But it was good. Better with the tomatoes from our guests' garden.

If you don't have the Julie Sahni book, it's not from my not having flogged it sufficiently. That rice noodle recipe is the best of a whole book of fabulous bests.

Sometimes I can cook well even when I don't feel like it.

Jewish responses to Hurricane Katrina

What is an authentic Jewish response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina? I started this post in the immediate aftermath of the storm when I couldn't think about anything else, but then I sat on it because I didn't know what to say. Also I don't want you to think I'm obsessed with authentic Jewish responses. (Of course I am, don't be silly!)  This is the most obvious, generic and religious response, to me anyway:

Soloveitchik points out that on the contrary, Judaism actually refuses to make peace with death and tragedy. When someone dies, Jewish law requires that we mourn bitterly and tear our clothes. This is because Judaism demands that we be enraged by tragedy.

To Solovietchik, the real question is: How do I respond to tragedy? Our obligation in the face of a catastrophe is to act: to comfort and aid those who have suffered, and to use human creativity to prevent future catastrophes. The only Jewish response to tragedy is to restore human dignity and rebuild the world.

The most important lesson of any large-scale disaster is the commonality of all human beings; we all have the same vulnerabilities and the same aspirations. Most importantly, we are all created in the same image of God. It is up to us to learn how to live together as brothers and sisters, and help each other with our burdens.

Is that sanctimonious, or does it ring your chimes? I can't decide.

My Jewish cultural response, for the first week of photographs, was hearing the opening lines of the book of Lamentations, as it is chanted on Tisha b'Av.  As I heard it in my head for months after 9/11. Well, years, actually. "Eicha yashva badad, ha-ir rabati am, hayitah k'almanah..."

In her September 4 "Give Thanks for Infrastructure" post, Adina found another cultural resonance in the "asher yatzar" blessing.

There's a traditional Jewish blessing said after using the bathroom, expressing awe at the complexity of the human body and thanks that we can rely on this system. Atheists and agnostics can search-and-replace God with Nature.

"Blessed are You, Hashem, our G-d, King of the universe, Who formed man with wisdom and created within him many openings and many hollows (cavities). It is obvious and known before Your Throne of Glory that if but one of them were to be ruptured or if one of them were to be blocked it would be impossible to survive and to stand before You (even for a short period of time). Blessed are You, Hashem, Who heals all flesh and acts wonderously."

The Katrina disaster shows how much we have become utterly dependent on manmade systems of wondrous complexity:

* water
* sewer
* electricity
* telecommunications
* natural gas
* gasoline

When these sytems are disrupted as with Katrina our civilization dissolves. This is incentive to give thanks every day for systems that we take for granted and for their maintainers. Every day there is light and water and indoor plumbing and net access is a day to be thankful.

My father had another classic Jewish cultural response; he said that he wished that the Head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, was not a Jew.  My dad heard an interview with Chertoff  and thought he must be lying. My paternal grandfather, z"tz"l, had very little Jewish education and taught us only this: being Jewish means being honest. I don't know whether my dad or my grandpa thought this was the heart of the matter because of the principle of not angering the gentiles, or because of the principle that Jewish people must sanctify God in our actions.

Either way, my dad was miserable about Michael Chertoff's seeming abdication of his responsibilities as head of Homeland Security to know what FEMA was doing and to make relief efforts go smoothly. I mentioned this to other Jewish people my own age, expecting them to not have thought of this as my dad did. But every Jewish person who knows what happened seems to wish Chertoff was an Episcopalian.

Or unemployed, it would be good if he were suddenly unemployed.

My dad also got tears in his eyes when I listed all the countries who had offered emergency relief to the US. (Unfortunately this was in the context of enumerating all the aid that FEMA initially rejected or delayed.) I love my dad for a lot of reasons but I especially love that he taught me to take what happens to the United States so personally. Is patriotism an authentic Jewish response? Because it's patriotism that makes us feel a strong connection to the people of our country, and that makes us mourn the loss of unique places and their cultures.

My husband is angry. He considers the Bush administration's policies to be nothing short of murder. I think this is also an authentic Jewish response. I can't say why. Maybe because we argued over a Shabbat meal about it. He is angry that people did not engage in political protest against the Bush administration for their inaction.

Perhaps the lack of political response is because we think you shouldn't have to exert political pressure in order to make aid available. I know that there has been a huge outpouring of charitable donation from everywhere to help the hurricane evacuees. If you want to donate to benefit New Orleans and Gulf Coast hurricane survivors who have been displaced, you have many options:

• United Jewish Communities has a Disaster Relief Fund, as does Mazon, a Jewish response to Hunger. You can also donate through the Shefa Fund and the Jewish Fund for Justice. So if you want your donation to come from the Jewish community, those are good options. You can find more here.
• HungryBlues has a post about the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. This is a project organized by civil rights and grass roots organizers to be truly accountable to people on the ground.
• Sharon Wachsler, a disability rights activist, put together an email listing the organizations that are helping people with disabilities on the ground in New Orleans. She recommends donating to Food Not Bombs.

Giving tzedakah is an authentic Jewish response. Nevertheless, I think my husband is right. I think this post from Orthodox Anarchist, "Katrina: Bush Admin Knew, Couldn't Give A Fuck" sums it up just about right. You wouldn't think that making federal agencies do their jobs would become a major civil rights issue, but of course it has. In a comprehensive critique of the emergency response, Kaspit points out the environmental effects of the massive conflicts of interest and other forms of corruption. I just don't know where you go, as a US citizen, to lodge your complaint. I think the next step is to bug congressional representatives and senators to investigate this formally. Maybe not as authentic as hearing Hebrew in your head, wishing that incompetent and/or dishonest public officials weren't Jewish, or donating to tzedakah. But if you are like me and you think "What would Grace Paley do?" (or "WWGPD?") perhaps indeed this is the way to go.

On disgust and authenticity

Well, doesn't this just figure? In the comments to this post, I learned that I have a faithful reader I don't know, who has read every post I've put up over a period of some months...and who finally came out of lurkdom to attack me. Signing the first comment "pretty disgusted" is one of those sure ways to tip someone off that you disagree with them.

What I was saying is you imposed the antisemitic overtones on the Snapes character out of outsize identification with fiction and insufficient connection to reality...[snip]I believe I've read every single post on this blog; I've been reading it for months. I like your blog well enough. But it's a self-conscious attempt to solidify ethnic/religious identity, and you habitually associate Judaism and Jewish values with all things the smart set consider "progressive". So when you free-associate to fictional characters who in some vague way remind you of overtly antisemitic fictional characters in past works, and consider yourself to have been "sensitive" (as a Jew) and to have detected some pernicious new fictional example of antisemitism, forgive me for pointing out that this demonstrates authentic Jewish identity and sensitivity to antisemitism in about the same way and to the same degree that Afro-Americans whose families have been living in the US for a few centuries and celebrate Kwanza demonstrate authentic connection to their African roots and sensitivity to oppression.

To me, this seems like a bit of an overreaction. (Ironic, as the whole point is to accuse me of overreaction. Hmm.) Of course, all criticism sends me into spirals of self-doubt, but as my husband pointed out, I really didn't make any huge claims about Rowling or her characterization of Snape. So a Jewish blogger finds it interesting to explore the resonances of 19th century literary anti-Semitism in the most popular book in the Western world, is that so unexpected? No more unexpected, I guess, than the way the word "anti-Semitism" draws negative comments to a blog.

Fortunately, this Kwanzaa example is great for illuminating  the assumptions on which Pretty Disgusted's disgust is grounded. I can't speak for people celebrating Kwanzaa, but okay, let's look at the parallels. I disagree that it is inauthentic for any cultural minority in the United States to invent a new ritual or practice based on their current values and beliefs. The implication of this whole line of thinking is that either 1) you can't be culturally authentic if you aren't personally, currently suffering violent oppression, or 2) the cultural identities that groups forge in diaspora are inherently invalid.

I guess I should put it this way: Is the point of Kwanzaa to make African-Americans into Africans? (According to this site it's Kwanzaa with two As when you are discussing the African-American observance.) Is the point of my Jewish observance to turn my America into the shtetl, or Budapest, or Riga, or Jerusalem, or some other lost landscape? You can light candles on Kwanzaa with full awareness that Kwanzaa was invented by an academic in the 1960s. What's so inauthentic about that? Are you going to go to the house of this hypothetical family and tell them, "Kwanzaa is dumb, that's not properly grammatical Kiswahili, and also, I don't like your drapes"?

I've always liked Jenna Weissman Joselit's  book The Wonders of America. In it she describes all the cultural innovations of Jewish life in the United States. Should we stop those dorky candlelighting ceremonies at bar mitzvah receptions? (My husband says "Yes!") Or the moving stone-setting ceremonies that many families conduct after a year of mourning? Are those inauthentic? No, they are as authentic as Chicago pizza, or fortune cookies, or Kwanzaa. That is, they aren't from the old country, they are the products of our current experience and what historians sometimes call "memory." What we think is a vestige of immemorial antiquity is often quite recent, but that doesn't make it less authentic. We can only live our own experience, not return to a mythic past.

I guess it's not surprising that I am more invested in this question than in reading Harry Potter. I don't live to read Harry Potter. It's not even my favorite children's/young adult book. I think I'm with this confirmed  Harry Potter fan who prefers The Once and Future King. She writes:

Isn't that--isn't that perfect? isn't it lovely and painful and doesn't it tell you everything about wart and everything about merlyn and everything that really good children's literature should do? i STILL don't understand the vast, vast majority of white's allusions. i never will. but that's the glee of the porpoise, that's the beautiful thing, that's what makes really good books really good books, that they leave you leaping joyfully along in their wake. every time i re-read Sword, I get another complicated joke, catch another terribly sad foreshadowing, realize another beautiful, subtle nuance in Wart or Kay or Ector or Merlyn or even (goofy, wonderful, wonderful) Pellinore. every time i re-read the HP books, i might catch another clue as to, you know, why i should have caught on earlier about Crouch; but the people are static and strange to me. rowling...i just don't think she taps into that joy, that love of the unfamiliar, even the incomprehensible, which is so unique to children.

It's not that Rowling is somehow defying political correctness in her characterizations and that's making everyone read the books. If anything I would say she's selectively politically correct. Perhaps my interlocutor will be just as annoyed by this essay exploring Rowling's tokenism with black characters. Nu. It's still a good example of what I mean by selective p.c. I would attribute Harry Potter's popularity to three factors:

1. the books realize a fully-envisioned alternative universe through the vehicle of word-play
2. Rowling's use of visual imagery is cinematic, which is perfect for her audience
3. very effective marketing

I would even say that that effective marketing and relatively weak characterization has opened up the field for speculation and interactivity, which enhances the books tremendously for me. Nothing pleases me more than to be able to talk about  a book I enjoyed with so many different people at so many different ages.

Well, this was stimulating. I can't believe I have a blog post that includes both Jenna Weissman Joselit and The Once and Future King. I must say I prefer people to stimulate me by saying nice things rather than attacking me, but still. At least they aren't complaining about my kugel.

Shabbat meals 8/26-8/27/05

I made:

Chickpeas in coconut milk curry from Vegetarian Thai Cooking  By Vatcharin Bhumichitr
Thai-style fried rice
potato salad with mustard-raspberry vinegar dressing and basil
steamed cauliflower
gazpacho

(we also had delicious black plums, cookies and non-dairy frozen desserts)

This was a successful week in the kitchen! I made almost all of the dishes in about an hour and a half, with no sweating or cursing. I have made the chickpea dish many times; it's not a typical Thai dish, since as Mr. Bhumchitr explains, whole beans aren't a usual part of Thai cuisine. He collected the recipe from a Buddhist monastery. It calls for a paste of coriander roots, garlic and black pepper, and then for additional curry powder. This time I had made the master curry powder recipe from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking. I also had both fresh August garden tomatoes and fabulous basil. Then I decided to improvise a fried rice based on all the recipes I had around--I fried sliced shallots and scallions, then added grated carrot and pineapple chunks, then the rice, sugar, soy sauce. If it had been authentic I would have used chili peppers, but I was worried that my son might accidentally smear chili in his eyes.

We didn't make the gazpacho until Saturday morning. My little guy got me up and we went into the kitchen, and he helped me, sorta, as I grated and chopped cucumber, tomatoes, scallion, cilantro. We added a bit of oil and vinegar and some tomato juice, salt and pepper. The tomatoes were a combination of some organic heirloom ones I got on sale at Whole Foods and a windfall of garden tomatoes. Every imaginable huge and texture of tomato: red, yellow, red with orange stripes, orange, green with stripes. It was a beautiful gazpacho. My son ate his at lunch saying "pretty, pretty!"  We had it again with some friends at Seudah Shlishit.

Oh it made me happy to have them over on the spur of the moment, we picked them up on our walk, took them to the playground with us, and then kind of lured them home. I used to have people over for summer suppers on Shabbat all the time. We would study, or I would read stories to one of the children, and then we would eat, and sing songs, and say Havdalah. I really love that and we haven't been doing it much. This time we talked about community issues. We didn't dwell too much on the anti-Semitic fliers, but instead talked about ways that people where we live have been trying to make inter-community contacts. We also talked about parenting--our friends are expecting--and how intimidating it can be to make friends with other moms.

I just want to tell you that my 2 1/2 year old has picked up a bunch of prayer vocabulary. We have explicitly been reciting the Shma to him at night before he goes to sleep, and I knew that he knew what a siddur was. But lately he has pointed to the siddur and said "shma!" and also "kedushah!" (It is amazingly moving to have your child say "kedushah!" which means "holiness!" He was saying it because it's the name of a prayer, as is "Shma". I think that's why, it might also have been because I refer to the siddur as a "sefer kedushah.")  I don't want to give you the idea that he is some kind of genius, though. Tonight he had my copy of the Alfred Kotlach name book. He saw that the book had Hebrew and English and said "Siddur! Shma! Hebrew!" So yes, he knows which is Hebrew and which is English, but no, he doesn't actually recognize the Shma on the page. It's amazing what he can pick up without trying.