Kosher USA follows the fascinating journey of kosher food through the modern industrial food system. It recounts how iconic products such as Coca-Cola and Jell-O tried to become kosher; the contentious debates among rabbis over the incorporation of modern science into Jewish law; how Manischewitz wine became the first kosher product to win over non-Jewish consumers (principally African Americans); the techniques used by Orthodox rabbinical organizations to embed kosher requirements into food manufacturing; and the difficulties encountered by kosher meat and other kosher foods that fell outside the American culinary consensus.
Kosher USA is filled with big personalities, rare archival finds, and surprising influences: the Atlanta rabbi Tobias Geffen, who made Coke kosher; the lay chemist and kosher-certification pioneer Abraham Goldstein; the kosher-meat magnate Harry Kassel; and the animal-rights advocate Temple Grandin, a strong supporter of shechita, or Jewish slaughtering practice. By exploring the complex encounter between ancient religious principles and modern industrial methods, Kosher USA adds a significant chapter to the story of Judaism’s interaction with non-Jewish cultures and the history of modern Jewish American life as well as American foodways.
Table of Content
Prologue: Uncle Stu’s Question
1. My Family’s Sturgeon
2. Kosher Coke, Kosher Science
3. The Great Jell-O Controversy
4. Who Says It’s Kosher?
5. Industrial Kashrus
6. Man-O-Manischewitz
7. Harry Kassel’s Meat
8. Shechita
Conclusion: Kosher Ethics/Ethical Kosher?
Epilogue: Remembering, Discovering, Thanking
Notes
Index
About the author
Roger Horowitz is a food historian and director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. He is the author of
Negro and White, Unite and Fight: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1990 (1997) and
Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (2005).
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