Not Kosher

Your editor was raised in a kosher home. Keeping kosher was less a religious observance than a custom designed mainly, I think, to please my father's parents. (My mother's father was a socialist who owned rental real estate and bought his wife a fur coat. "Only in America," as they used to say. He had no taste for religion.)

The myth that kosher meat is necessarily better than mass-produced non-kosher meat was shattered a few years ago. Now the Forward, the New York newspaper, originally published only in Yiddish and still with a Yiddish edition, reveals that at least one kosher meatpacker treats its workers in ways reminiscent of the villains in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

According to the Forward's story, the workers at the AgriProcessor's plant in Postville, Iowa--the nation's largest kosher packer--are ground down, endangered by poor working conditions and grossly underpaid. A drive to unionize the plant recently failed; in all probability, the mostly-Hispanic workforce caved in to the bare-knuckled tactics so typical of American workplaces these days.

A sad, but not unusual story? Perhaps, but the owner of AgriProcessors, one Aaron Rubashkin (his brand is Aaron's Best), bears a special responsibility. As a kosher packer, his business is inextricably bound with Judaism, and the poor treatment he gives his workers--most of whom are Catholic, apparently--reflects poorly on Jews even if it does not spark outright anti-Semitism. (It would not be hard to think of several anti-Semitic stereotypes that Rubashkin seems to fit.)

I have never been a very devout Jew, but there is one line from the Passover Haggadah, the story of the Israelites' enslavement in Egypt and of the Exodus, that I think of often. During the service that precedes the Passover meal, the congregation says, "This is for what the Lord did for me, when I went out of the land of Egypt." For me--not for my ancestors, but for me. When I--not my ancestors, but I, myself--went out of the land of Egypt. Each Jew is supposed to feel as if he, himself, was freed with Moses.

It is that attitude--honed, no doubt by additional centuries among the downtrodden and dispossessed--that explains the historic Jewish commitment to social justice.

Like all peoples, Jews proclaim themselves the chosen people (although, like Tevye, we might say, "Couldn't you choose someone else next time?), but if we are chosen it is not because Jews are better than others, but because we should be better.

That's what makes a story like the Forward's especially disheartening. Jews who abuse their workers, engage in racism or otherwise give vent to mankind's worst impulses are not merely betraying their own better natures, but demeaning, perhaps even endangering, an entire people. Some of our worst enemies are Jews.