Got Gefilte?
demystifying columbia’s kosher campus
In Morningside Heights—on an island where roughly 15 percent of the population is Jewish, in a neighborhood that includes the Jewish Theological Seminary—surely delicious kosher eateries are as numerous as the soul-food purveyors near Morningside Park or the taco trucks a mile or so to the east in El Barrio. Right?
But first, a few explanations for the layman. Most Columbians, myself included, have a vague sense of what it means to keep kosher. But I sensed there were gaps in my knowledge, so I sought to fill them with tidbits from the most authoritative source I could find: Rabbi Joel Roth, Talmudic scholar, former dean of the rabbinical school at JTS, dissenter from the 2006 decision to permit the ordination of gay rabbis, and holder of far too many other accolades to list here. Theologically speaking, he is the grand homme of conservative Judaism.
Rabbi Roth graciously offered me a brief explanation of kashrut—Jewish dietary laws. “Only certain types of animals are kosher [i.e., not pigs], only certain types of seafood are kosher [i.e., not shellfish], and animals have to be slaughtered in a specific way, soaked and salted in a specific way before cooked and consumed. There is a prohibition of eating meat and dairy products together, so in a kosher home, you will see two sets of dishes, two sets of silverware and things like that.”
Rabbi Roth estimates that close to 98 percent of JTS students adhere to these laws. Brandon Wolfeld, GS/JTS ’10, offers a more modest estimate: “I’d say about 70 percent [of JTS students],” he says. Wolfeld does not keep kosher, and he considers himself more of a cultural Jew than a religious one. He says keeping kosher “is a perfectly good tradition to keep if it touches something spiritual within you, but if it doesn’t, it’s a most laborious aspect of Judaism to uphold.” He also estimated that about 10 percent of campus in general keeps kosher.
But how laborious? Curious, I decided to restrict my diet to kosher fare for an entire day. If 10 percent of campus (Wolfeld’s guess) and 98 percent of JTS (Rabbi Roth’s guess) could do it religiously day in and day out, I figured I could keep kosher for 24 hours.
The first stop on the tour was that oft-exalted epicenter of campus dining. I speak not of John Jay, nor of the Avery basement café, but of the Dodge Blue Java. I found sandwiches from some bastardized incarnation of Zabar’s lying in the fridge, pharisaically juxtaposing turkey and swiss, ham and gruyere. I strolled past the cave of worldly delights, calmly selected a croissant from the battery of pastries, and went up to the register.
“Flex or dining?” asked the cashier.
“Kosher or traif?” I countered.
“They’re kosher,” he retorted. “The pastries are from ‘Brother’s.”
“Todah,” I said cryptically. I bought the croissant and left.
Later, a Google Maps search would turn up a number of bakeries with “brothers” in the title, all of them in the outer boroughs, none of them offering verisimilitude of kosher fare. But the cashier’s assurance left me satisfied: after all, I said to myself, it is the mind that sins—not the body. Noshing on the last few bites of croissant while schlepping back to East Campus, it occurred to me that I was hardly satiated, so I reset my course for Hartley Hall, where I expected to find the fabled Hartley Kosher Deli.
Of course, I didn’t. The deli is actually in John Jay, inset between the lobby and the buffet area of the dining hall, like Israel between the Mediterranean and the Arab states. It is a small enclave of culinary civilization surrounded on all sides by the barbarism of laxative-laced cafeteria fare. I was greeted by a man with a flowing brown beard, yarmulke substituted for chef’s hat. I perused the menu, with its selection of knishes, reubens, and “appetizing” Israeli salads, and ordered a turkey sandwich, which he prepared perfunctorily and handed to me. When pressed for details, he revealed that his name was Yoel, and that the deli, as its indefensible borders betrayed, was a very small-scale operation indeed.
“Are there any other decent options for eating kosher on campus?” I asked. “Not that I know of,” he answered.
Still, I found a few alternatives. There is Café Nana at the Hillel Center across the street from Schapiro, as well as Hewitt Hall. After ingesting the entirety of my sandwich—typical campus fare of flavorless turkey, pulpy tomato, crunchy lettuce, trenchant mustard, I retired to my dorm for a few hours before heading across Broadway on a rare post-first-year dining hall expedition. After being swiped in, I fixed my gaze upon the gastronomic promised land: the kosher section. Rows upon rows of veggies fresh from the kibbutz clouded my vision, until I realized that I was under surveillance. I found myself shunted into the bread-lines that lead to surly servers and typify the Hewitt experience.
Upon returning home, I conferred with my friend Mandie Nowak, CC ’10. Nowak embodies the conflicting ethos toward observing kashrut at Columbia: she is an avowed cultural Jew, but not really religious—she observes “ingredient kosher,” that is, she refrains from eating pork and milk and meat together, but considers improperly slaughtered (“non-hescher”) chickens acceptable. She doesn’t evince the same self-renunciatory zeal of a Rabbi Roth, who explained neglect of kashrut as a willful exertion of moral remission. “Kashrut is a reflection of God’s will, and that in and of itself is the reason [for adhering to it],” he says. Rabbi Roth concedes that many Jews neglect the religion’s dietary restrictions, however.
Why the widespread disregard? Nowak, who does pay for access to Hewitt’s kosher section, rationalizes her creed of compromise. “If I’m at a Japanese restaurant, am I really going to expect everything they serve to be hescher? No ... but I’ll have the chicken or the tuna, and stay away from the pork and the crab ... I do what I can,” she says.
For some it is an issue of convenience—for others, of economics. Looking at my depleted wallet—the turkey sandwich at the Hartley Kosher Deli was $6.25—it was hard not to agree with such lines of reasoning, but if it touched something spiritual within me, even a croissant would be worth such a price. \\\