Behind the Scenes at Noshland

I wrote a new short story on Hevria -- well, okay, half a short story -- but I have the whole thing in my head, and I'm, like, 98% sure that I'm going to post the other half in 2 weeks. Or next week, if Elad lets me.

And I'm kind of overbrimming with behind-the-scenes stuff to tell you about it.

Last Night at Noshland

BY MATTHUE ROTH • JULY 5, 2016 • STORY

Zvi needs to leave Crown Heights behind, and he is leaving it behind, but every step he takes brings him a new wash of sadness, the nostalgia sinking deeper into his brain and skin and his nose, even though he hasn’t even left yet.

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And Now, the Commentary Track.

• The genesis of the story: I love one-night (or one-day) stories, like American Graffiti and Superbad and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I like giving my stories time limits in general, like how Goldbergs had to end at the end of the summer and this memoir I'm working on goes from Halloween to Thanksgiving. That gives me a ruler to pace everything. Having a single night is even better. It's like a puzzle where every single thing that happens has to fit.
  
• Yes, the name of the shop in the story is based on the dear, wonderful Nosh World, zichrono l'vrocho (the characters and even the store itself are as complete fabrications as anything can be), but another major influence in the title and the story is the book Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan. It's about a Red Lobster that's shutting down, and there's a snowstorm coming, and workers keep not showing up for their shift, and it's really sad and beautiful -- and specifically, the way it was taught to me by my professor Alexi Zentner, who has a new book out this week that I'm not sure I'm allowed to say is really by him.
  
• I'm doing this sort of as a challenge to myself: both to finish something, and to put it in front of people. I've been in kind of a sad place lately. My last novel is in limbo and the new one I'm writing is taking forever, and I keep starting stories and then not finishing them. So I'm trying to vanquish my writing anxiety with performance anxiety. I've put up the first half! Now I have to finish the damn thing.
  
• I just also want there to be more fiction on Hevria! And more stories about Hasidim that aren't about how pathetic we are or people running away or what a horrible place the community is. Not that this is exactly a happy story (nothing I'm gonna write right now is going to be that), but I really do like Zvi, the main character, and I hope other people will too.
  
• I was working on the last part of the story this morning and I realized with a shock of horror, there's almost no chocolate. Sure, I mention ice cream once or twice, but it is in no way true-to-life to write about a snack shop in Crown Heights and exclude chocolate. There's a paragraph in the second part about a girl who buys a bag of tortilla chips, and it would make way more sense for her character to be eating chocolate, but it makes way more sense for me as a person to think of someone eating nachos:
  
  
  And she buys a 50-cent pack of chips, of Golden Fluff tortilla strips, a brand whose name has always puzzled him (no gold? no fluff?) but whose taste is undeniably solid, that perfect balance of spicy and tangy and sweet, that he once read the Japanese call umami, a harmony of flavor, the perfect culinary addiction of which he was the purveyor. He loved the boldness of Tsivia Singer’s pre-party indulgence, and the vision of her walking down the street with the umami tang on her breath, neither of which he would ever taste.

Kosher on the Road-ster

We're four episodes in, and my Lesbian Hasidic Cross Country Road Trip story -- a little serial thing that I'm writing for Hevria -- finally gets on the road. Basically, we make it to the first bathroom break.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should keep writing. I'll let you know what happens.

Kosher on the Road

BY MATTHUE ROTH • DECEMBER 8, 2015 • ESSAY

One thing I hadn’t counted on when I hit the road: How would I eat? I don’t know if you know, but the kosher diet is one of exquisite restriction, that whole no milk and meat together thing, but also a host of other things we can’t have — namely, anything cooked in a kitchen that’s ever had anything non-kosher inside it. In today’s modern world of packaged food and artificial everything, it’s gotten a little easier — Oreos, for instance, might look like cream-filled wafers, but there’s no dairy, no meat, the whole thing’s basically a lump of sugar cooked by a robot.

But I’ve heard tell of supermarkets on the road where not even the orange juice and bottled water is kosher, where the tiny Ks and Us and Hebrew letters we search for in our secret codes are absent, where even the potato chips and white-bread loaves are baked with lard. When Elyse and I planned our cross-country expedition, I just figured I’d stack up before we left. Or on the way. Or before we got too far.

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2:00 A.M., Thursday night

I'm half asleep. There's a scuffling from downstairs. Eventually, Itta, freshly home from her restaurant, trudges upstairs.

ITTA: Sorry, I ate your leftover falafel.
ME: I was planning to take it for lunch tomorrow!
ITTA: You should've gotten food for me!
ME: You work at a restaurant!
ITTA: I can't eat restaurant food all the time!
ME: But my leftovers were from a restaurant!
ITTA: Okay, I'll make you sandwiches to take for lunch.
ME: You so don't have to. It's two o'clock in the morning.
ITTA: It's fine.
ME: You really don't have to.
ME (thinking): jackpotjackpotjackpot
ITTA: It's fine.

ITTA proceeds downstairs and makes two sandwiches. I return to sleep.

And that, my friends, is what is known in the vernacular as a win-win situation.

G-d Dialogue

Internal dialogue while bringing cereal back to my desk.

ME: I already have a spoon at my desk! Thank G-d I remembered to leave it there before.
ME (smarmy): You know, it really isn't G-d's fault. You kinda got that one on your own.
ME: Yeah, but people are always blaming G-d for stupid things when they go down, and it isn't really G-d's fault at all; it's their own. So why not thank G-d for something that isn't necessarily G-d's direct doing for a change?
ME: Ah, but G-d created the universe and everything in it, and therefore, nothing that happens is an accident. So one way or another, G-d really manipulated you to leave a clean spoon at your desk earlier...right?
ME (undeterred): Thank G-d there was soy milk in the refrigerator. I hate it when they're all out.

THE END.

(Well, the end of the dialogue. The beginning of my very late breakfast.)

Yom Kippur Jury Duty

So I need to tell you, it's really weird being called onto a jury the day before Yom Kippur. When I tell people, they've mostly been quick to freak out about the religious rules about it -- mostly, that I'll be in court until an hour before the holiday starts, and apparently you're supposed to have a great, grand feast the day before Yom Kippur. In the exact words of the Talmud (I don't remember; I'm totally paraphrasing) -- "Anyone who stuffs his face the day before Yom Kippur, it is like he fasted for two days."

Something tells me people don't eat in courtrooms. I don't know this for sure, but I feel like I'd remember it if I saw someone on Ally McBeal or Law & Order crunching on some Dipsy Doodles. (Or, on Ally, probably unpeeling a suggestive-looking banana.) I actually don't know at all what to expect, beyond the specifics of the trial. Officially, I'm not allowed to share it with you, but let's just say I found it strange that they still accepted me as a juror -- considering my new book came out last week, and I told them all about the accident at the center of the story. *whistles*

I know I should have tried to get out of it. Believe me, as a small nonprofit employee who writes a daily email and a father of two, it's really freakin' hard to make the room in my life for it. (And I guess you could make the case that Idid try to get out of it -- see above, the part about my book.) The real kicker came when I asked a lawyer-friend, and he said, "You'll get off without a hitch. They never choose Orthodox Jews for a jury." And now I sort of feel like I'm the first Hasidic Jew who's ever served on a jury, and I've gotta make a good run of it, or else everyone will think Hasidic Jews are draft-dodgers. Jury-dodgers. Whatever.

But as the trial date gets closer and closer, I find myself getting both more apprehensive and more excited. Partly it's that I'm going to be put in charge of somebody's future, someone's fate, and maybe a lot of money. Partly that it's reflexive. Just like this person's going to be standing in front of us, I'm going to be standing in front of God, defending my lifestyle choices and excusing my slip-ups and asking for another shot.

I don't think any of this renders me partial to the defendant or the plaintiff. Or maybe it does? That's all any of us can really do, right? -- take our life experience and apply it to our verdict. I'm talking about the New York District Court case, and to my own divine case.

So I probably won't get to have my pre-Yom Kippur feast this year. But I have a feeling it'll still be meaningful. Plus maybe I'll meet Lucy Liu?

Kosher Zombies & Vampires

Are zombies kosher? Or, more specifically, can zombies keep kosher? Asks a friend, the amazing comic writer Ashley-Jane Nicolaus:

Long story short, a friend of mine moved to a new place next to a really really old Jewish cemetery - so that got us thinking, if the zombie apocalypse were to happen, are brains kosher? Inquiring minds need to know...

I'm no kosher expert, but a few decades of eschewing the swine have prepped me with a little background knowledge. Not to mention thoroughly geeking out with random books of Jewish law.

So here's the deal.

You can actually eat the brains of a kosher animal. Well, some kosher animals. My mother-in-law (who, I should note, is a native Australian) LOVES cracking open fish skulls & sucking the brains out. (I'm a vegetarian & i think she does it to psyche me out. It doesn't work.)

But that's not what you want to know. If you want to know about zombies, you want to know about REAL HUMAN BRAINS. Well, humans -- or any part thereof -- is not permissible to eat, regardless of whether you're talking about kosher-keeping humans or non. (You really wish that whoever started the blood libel rumors had Google access to give them a clue.) In order for any animal to be kosher, it has to have cloven hooves and chew its cud. So basically, if you're a kosher zombie, you are screwed.

One additional consideration: Kosher vampires are screwed as well. In the process of making meat kosher, the animal's body has to be completely drained of blood. So you know how, on Buffy, when Angel and Spike became good guys (or impotent), they had to drink the blood of animals? (Just kidding. You don't actually need to know that.)* Animal blood is out, too. I suppose there's a case to be made that, when a life is at stake,** Jewish laws such as kashrut don't apply. Then again, zombies and vampires aren't technically alive, are they?

If you're curious for more, you should probably check out Are Dragons Kosher?
__________
* -- I believe a similar thing happened in Twilight, but I've mostly blacked it out.
** -- Notice how I avoided a pun about stakes? Joss Whedon is rolling over in his grave.***
***-- Apologies. I know Joss Whedon is not dead.

Kosher Cooking in Melbourne

Just in case you weren't ready to have your mind blown, turn back now. You might think Darth Vader is narrating, but it's my uncle. (I mean that as a compliment, I promise.) And you can spot glimpses of my brother-in-law as well as my soul brother, local (Melbourne) Jewish celebrity Bram Presser, ex-lead singer of YIDCore.



OK -- I laugh, and you kind of need to laugh, but this video is awesome. Partly that kosher cooking has gotten sophisticated enough so that a competition like this (a) exists, (b) is taken seriously, and (c) people are paying money to go to a swanky theater (that isn't even a Jewish theater) to watch the competition. I mean, sure, they do this kind of kosher cooking contest in New York (and my wife reports on it)...but in Melbourne? Go you people.

I really should be rooting for my bro, but DL, the wife of my chevrusa, is also involved. It's hard.

Eating Pork in New York

It was close to midnight, the latest I've been out in months. My friend Fred Chao had brought me to a comedy show in Chinatown, which led to some drinking in Chinatown, which led to us wandering around the streets of Chinatown with our heads full of stories and our bodies craving warmth. It was a weird feeling to get lost in those streets -- most of New York is a neat, orderly grid, but once you hit the Manhattan Bridge, Canal Street turns into a sudden mountain, half going up and half going straight down, and you're never quite sure when a street is going to splinter into three different streets and when it's going to dead-end in the middle of a block. (It's twice as cool because Fred's a comic artist and his story Johnny Hiro: Half-Asian, All Hero, which takes place on these very streets, has just been excerpted in the 2010 Best American Comics.)

In the middle of all this, Fred and I both realize that we are massively hungry. My stomach muscles, through a few years of this, have grown accustomed to being both kosher and out late. My stomach growls, I reply that we are out on the town and that there are no kosher restaurants around, and it quietly sulks to itself in a corner.

Fred is not so disciplined. "I know a great place right around here," he says. And then he suddenly vanishes around a corner, disappears, and takes me along with him.

I don't usually sit with people in restaurants. I feel too much like a second-class citizen. Everyone else is pigging out, eating great-smelling food (and food always looks better in non-kosher places) and you're smiling to yourself and telling them, don't worry, you're really in the mood for ice water.

But it's late, and I haven't seen Fred in a while, and I don't want to kill the conversation. So we take our seats.

"What should I have," he asks me. "Meat or seafood?"

Is this a test? A test from God?

"I'm always weird about seafood," I say. "Not just the kosher thing. It just feels like, is that stuff really dead? Was it ever alive?"

"Okay," he says. And so he turns to the waitress and orders the pork soup.

Wham.

I manage meekly to say: "I'll just have a cold drink." And I dash for the refrigerator.

Okay. But the truth is, I'm curious about trayf. How it looks. The way it tastes. The animals it comes from. And I've also been way curious about real Chinese restaurants, the kind that real Chinese people eat in, because I've always suspected that the places where white people eat, kosher or not, are faking it, the same way that Jackie Chan exaggerates his accent in the Rush Hour movies.

Almost immediately, they bring a plate. It's just a pile of bean sprouts, with a little lemon slice sitting on top. Is that supposed to be a salad? Fred ignores it. He's like that with salads, though.

Then the bowl comes out, and it's huge. He didn't say "large" or "small," but this soup is the size of a Thanksgiving turkey. There's a stack of those special Chinese-food spoons upside down, in the same holder as the soy sauce and hot sauce. I've never seen that before. Fred takes one, and he breaks into his chopsticks, holds them close to the ground and whittles them twice, to throw off the splintery pieces. He dumps the sprouts into the soup, explaining that that's what you're supposed to do, which I never would have guessed.

And then he starts eating.

He alternates with the spoon and chopsticks, working his way through the meat and noodles. I ask him what that meat is, and from time to time he explains. The pink stuff floating on top is nearly raw. The chef does that in order to show you how fresh the meat is. Underneath, pretty much all the meat is brown or gray. There are a few marble-spattered parts, which Fred says are tendons. And then there's a white bumpy substance, which he thinks (but isn't sure) are the stomach lining.

Stomach lining! "That's gelatin!" I say.

"Are you sure? I thought gelatin was the hooves."

I frown. Instead of ice-water, I have opted for a beer, and it's hard to recall the basics of whatever I've read on animal slaughter. "You might be right," I say. "My family-in-law makes this Yiddish food thing out of cow hooves. It's these yellow cubes. I think they're called gullis?"

"Oh yeah! My family makes something like that, too," said Fred. "It's called," he said, and here ends the tale of charming culture-mixing, because he said something in Chinese that there was no way for me to understand, much less transcribe the next morning.

He scooped the last of the soup-meat dregs into his spoon with chopsticks and slurped it up. Then I let him have the last of my beer -- call me a fundamentalist zealot, but I get squeamish about pork-breath in my beer bottle -- and then we were out. 

Thanks to No-Frills Recipes for the pork pic.

Kosher Nation

Why do we love to read about food?

I'm in the middle of Kosher Nation, a history of kosher food in America. The if the industry is a veritable behemoth -- kosher sales, according to writer Sue Fishkoff (who blogged for us last week), make up a billion-dollar subset of the American food industry -- then this book is a travelogue of its guts and insides. Fishkoff writes with a surgeon’s steady hand, casually recounting episodes in the past few hundred years of kosher food in America in between these bizarrely compelling interviews with kosher supervisors, Reform and independent rabbis, and Chabad rebbetzins who give challah-baking classes. In a nutshell, she talks to virtually everyone across the spectrum who has something to offer to the discussion of kosher food in America -- what it means, where it comes from, and why people care about it.

I haven't felt quite so passionate about a book since I read Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer, last year. Animals wasn’t just about the vegetarian/non-vegetarian battlefront -- it was about the idea that a large portion of the food we eat has a story behind it that we only know the barest, vaguest parts. I saw Foer speak a few weeks ago at the Slingshot conference and he was emphatic about his book being for omnivores: Chefs in NYC non-veg restaurants, he said, kept asking him to come and speak. They had no idea what happens to their meat before they get it, and they wanted to learn.

I love food writers. (It’s not just that I’m married to a meat-loving personal chef, I promise.) I’m fortunate to work with two of the best, Tamar Fox and Leah Koenig, who aren’t just foodies but writers with a lust for flavor: When they write, you can feel the saliva sandwiched between the words, oozing out. People are surprised by how many food books are coming out these days, but they shouldn’t be -- just look how much erotica/porn/gossip/dating books are written and published every year. People love reading about sex because we all have it (or want to). But we’re so damn intrigued by reading about food because we constantly have it. And need it. And, just like skeletons, we all have one, but we’re never sure what they look like up close -- and when we see it from afar, we’re both scared and fascinated.

Fishkoff is a great writer, and it’s easy to imagine her sleeping in a bed each night surrounded by kosher symbols and diagrams of cut-up kosher animals. But the passion that people are already feeling about her book -- that gets me wanting to read passages out loud to everyone in the room at the time -- isn’t just the mark of a great book. There’s something about food that fires us up, that makes us more personally invested.

Maybe it’s that we all eat. Or maybe it’s that Fishkoff and Foer, in writing about where our food comes from, know more about what we’re eating than we do. And in their stories there isn’t merely an emotion that we recognize, but a pre-conscious action that they’re defining for us, peeling away the layers of flesh and showing us what we look like on the inside.

Snoop Dogg and Kosher

Maybe it's the fact that all the Israelis I knew growing up were seriously cute girls (Orali in fourth grade, I'm looking at you), but Hebrew versions of words always sounded so...cute. I'm not talking about the guttural ch that pops up everywhere. But the rest of it -- the doubling-up of words (kacha-kacha), the addition of -y to every name, whether it makes sense or not (for years, I was "Matty" to every Israeli I knew), the fact that Israelis always sound so condescending when they deign to speak English to us non-Israelis -- just strikes me as really sweet and 10-year-old-like.

You know who else uses made-up words and suffixes a lot? Snoop Dogg.

Keeping all this in mind,there's a new kosher restaurant in Brooklyn. I don't know what the name is supposed to mean (it's a dairy restaurant, and, like every other kosher restaurant in New York, they also serve sushi), but it's called Shabazzle.

What do you think -- is Shabazzle an Israeli way of saying "yummy"? Or the Hebrew vernacular equivalent of "Yo, party's on Coney Island Avenue"? I couldn't tell you for sure. Clearly, though, it's an example of Israeli cute-ification in action.

And clearly the sort of place that Snoop Dogg would eat at. If, you know, he was Shomer Shabizzle.

(Thanks to the awesome kosher blog Thanks A Glatt for the tip.)

Almost a Restaurant Review

There's a new kosher restaurant right near our office. It's called Tiberias. The food looks yummy and the decor looks great and, rarest of all for a kosher restaurant (or, as I'm given to understand through reading way too many Anthony Bourdain books, rare for the restaurant business in general), the owners are actually perched by the door, welcoming people, and happy for you to be there. Oh, and hey -- they're giving out free coffee.

And yet, I'm not there.

Let me start from the beginning: Last night, I made the Best Sandwich Ever. (I know because I Twittered about it and everyone else on Twitter agreed.) And, over the course of arguing with one daughter about the social propriety of wearing a bathing suit to school and changing the other daughter's diapers, I kinda forgot to put it in my backpack.

So here I am, at work, starving, and the day is close to half over. I weigh my choices with all the usual overanalysis -- can it be vegan, or do I need protein? how cheap is cheap enough? when's the last time i ate pizza? -- and decide to hit the local kosher Dunkin' Donuts for a bagel.

And, on the way, I stumble into Tiberias.

At first I don't even know what's going on. All I see is two grinning guys out front, kissing hands and shaking babies and looking like they just won the lottery. One of them stops me -- the owner, it turns out. Today's the first day of business. He's super excited to be there. There is, he mentions several times, free iced coffee.

But the reason I stopped drinking iced coffee is the same reason my brain is working overtime: because I have an anxiety disorder, and I think too much, and caffeine only exacerbates it.

I'm peeking in the counters, and there are actually vegetables (another kosher restaurant rarity) and they look beautiful -- the eggplant sliced thick and juicy; corn as yellow as a field of radioactive flowers; perfectly grilled zucchini and red peppers. The menu in my hand lists the prices, and there's nothing less than $6.95. Except for soup, but I'm talking real stomach-filling food. The real meal meals are closer to $15.

I do the lunchtime math in my head. Packing my own sandwich costs $2 or so. Buying pizza, which is filling but not healthy, is $5 or $6. For another dollar or two, I could eat here, except that that's 20% of a meal, which is to say, I could eat out 5 times at a junky restaurant for every 4 times that I eat at this place. Or I could just pack lunch, save all that money, and spend it on my kids instead. Or save it for our trip to Australia. Or that subscription to McSweeneys that I really want.

But, really, is all this worth arguing about (or doing math over)? Kosher food, as Tamar says, is expensive. Kosher food in Midtown is expensive squared. We pay for convenience, and that convenience is multiplied when you're Jewish -- you're not merely paying for the food to be made for you, you're paying for someone else to pick out your vegetables and look for the kosher markings on the hummus carton and the bagels you would otherwise be checking out yourself. Elie Kaunfer wrote a couple months ago that most Jews don't know how to make their own matzah, and that's true, but that's just the tip of the iceberg -- there is no Jewish working class. There are upper-class people who can pay $20 for lunch, and there's this scraping-the-barrel class that packs our own lunch...or forgets to.

I do the Walk of Shame. I shuffle my feet the three storefronts down, to the donut store. I order a bagel.

The woman beside me turns around and checks out my yarmulke so deliberately that she's either making sure I'm Jewish or sizing me up for her niece. "You know," she remarks casually, "there's a new kosher restaurant that just opened up down the street. They're serving free iced coffee and it looks really good."

My face goes from zero to blushing. "I know," I manage to stammer. "I'm going to check it out when...when I'm eating lunch for real."

"I'm sorry," she gasps, seeing that she's offended me, but not knowing why. Meanwhile, I gaze at the intrepid worker who's currently toasting my bagel, enabling me to make it to 5:00 today...and wondering whether I shouldn't be toasting my own bagels instead.

http://store.mcsweeneys.net/index.cfm/fuseaction/catalog.detail/object_id/aa5ec80d-0bc9-45ea-9bce-275ed0c28bb9/McSweeneysIssue27.cfm

Re-Chametz-ification

I still haven't broken Passover. And I'm kind of cool with that.

(Okay, I sort of promised myself as I sat down to write that this wasn't going to turn into a my-Passover-was-cooler-than-yours post. I'll try to keep it that way. But it still might.)

A few years ago, when I was living in Israel, I went out to lunch with a bunch of folks. This was two, maybe three weeks after Passover ended. My friend B., who's kind of a spiritual giant and lives on a different plane of existence than the rest of us -- he routinely takes half an hour or longer to pray the (usually 3-minute) mincha service -- happened to mention, while we passed around the wicker bowl of laffas, that he hadn't broken Passover yet.

This was soundly greeted by a round of "Whut?!"s from the table.

B. explained. It's not that he was purposely prolonging Pesach (say that three times fast) -- he just wanted to hold on to the feeling. He didn't even say that. What he said was much more subtle, and much more wise. Something about how going from from chometz to bread, was a single huge step, like going from slavery to freedom, and if we do it all at once, we miss the full spiritual experience.

Caveat #1: Not everyone has the patience (or the space in their lives) for a full spiritual experience like that -- and most of us need to dive back into our bread. I was going to make a salad for lunch today, but I didn't have time, and so I grabbed a bagel from the freezer, slathered on some cream cheese, and made my train in time. But yesterday I packed Passover leftovers, and I was feeling pretty damn good about it. (Caveat #2: my wife is a personal chef, which most people aren't -- and hence, my lunch of manchego gratin and ratatouille was probably not most people's Passover experience. Gloat gloat gloat.)

People like B. amaze me, not because they have spiritual experiences, but because they have such a talent for making spiritual experiences last. For me, I have a great morning prayer, or hear a great song, it's gone the moment I step out the door and the angry Brooklyn traffic crashes me down to reality. Sooner or later, I know real life is going to sink in -- and, with it, the hametz.

Ignoring Passover

I always look forward to the Passover seder. Any ritual organised around reading a book is good by me (those people who shout Bible verses in your face on the subway platform notwithstanding...although, if you catch them in a quiet mood and ask about their lives, you'll get some pretty wild verbal autobiographies), especially when you're with the people you love, or a bunch of strangers with interesting things to say, or some combination of the two, which is the way it played out this year.

We were de-invited from our first seder because our hosts' kid developed mumps, which, since we've got an 8-months-pregnant woman and a toddler, is not an ideal situation. (Of course: we live in Crown Heights. Where else in the world is there an outbreak of mumps in 2010?!) On the other hand: Being that we're in Crown Heights, it's totally natural and normal and not at all a breach of social etiquette to call some random folks and say, we need a seder, can we come over?

And that's what we did -- my friend (and awesome poet) Jake Marmer's in-laws were glad to take us in for the night. And the next night, we returned the favour -- not to them, but to the aforementioned combination of friends and strangers, some of whom knew the seder inside, out, and backwards, and some of whom hadn't been to a seder in years.

That's one of the advantages of a seder. With the same text in front of you, the preeminent Torah scholars of the generation and the Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask a Question are on the same footing. The big question of the Haggadah isn't "How is this night different?" -- anyone can see how this night is different, and the Four Questions are really just statements that echo that. The real question is, why is this night different? And anyone is equally qualified to dig into the text and answer that.

When I was a kid, Passover eating was pretty simple. Most nights, we had regular meals with matzah replacing the bread: matzah burgers, matzah pizza, matzah lasagna. It's totally doable, and even cool as a change-of-pace sort of thing. Desserts were plentiful: macaroons, coconut marshmallows, and jelly-filled whatevers. My grandmother made "matzah rolls" out of matzo meal and lots of eggs, and we could even have sandwiches. We were always okay with that, with the matzahfication of our food. Or at least we were for the first couple of days, until we got bored of matzah and our pee started smelling like burnt toast and we started counting down the days (ok, hours) until we could eat the B-word again. Life -- for the 8 days of Passover, the day before (when you stop eating grains in mid-morning), and the month before (when you stock up desperately for food you can barely stand) -- becomes centered around this frantic rush of fortifying our boundaries to Passover. Food substitutes and iPhone apps seem to be created for that very purpose, to help us ignore the un-ignorable: that we're neck-deep in a leaven-less life.

This year, it seems to be the official position of MJL's blog (well, of Tamar's posts and my own) to advocate a different sort of simplicity: rather than doing a simple find-and-replace routine on your diet, where you replace any sort of grain with matzah, try eating simpler foods, unprocessed foods, and stuff that doesn't come out of a package.

All of this is a long way of saying, there are as many ways to keep Passover (both food-wise and otherwise) as there are people who are keeping it. And one of those ways is to pretend that nothing's wrong, that your diet is completely fine and that you just forgot to buy some bre -- yeah. But why turn a potentially awesome transformation of your diet into a gnarly routine of substitution?

Matzo lasagna image from Albion Cooks.

The Costs of Keeping Kosher

No one ever said keeping kosher was easy -- or cheap. As we get closer to Passover, things like this become painfully apparent to anyone who's walking in the vicinity of any supermarket: small bottles of grape juice for $5? Marshmallows for $10!? And let's not even start with the matzah cakes....

(Although, of course, you could get all the matzah you need absolutely free -- just send us a few sentences about your favorite Passover!)



This article about recession pizza specials in New York -- it focuses on the heated competition between a $1.00-a-slice pizza place and a $.99-a-slice place -- is one more reason for us kosher keepers to grumble. The cost of a lunch special at either of those restaurants ($2.75 for two slices and a beverage) is less than the price of a single slice at a kosher place. But, as the article says, it's a "basic fundamental of the city’s economy — charging as much as you can whenever and wherever you can."

On the other hand, pizza is notoriously bad for things like your heart and your fat glands. And, whether you're talking about Passover or the other 357 days of the year, kosher food can actually be a lot cheaper than non-kosher food -- just make it yourself. My family and I, hard-line fundamentalist zealots that we are, don't use any processed foods for Passover.* Our grocery receipt for the holiday reads like a shopping list in Odessa, 200 years ago: Onions. Beets. Radishes. Apples. Walnuts. Milk. Avocados. Quinoa. (Okay, maybe they didn't have quinoa or avocados back in Odessa -- but they're some necessary ingredients for a vegetarian Passover.) It wasn't originally intended this way -- mostly because they didn't have things like MSG or high-fructose corn syrup during the redacting of the Talmud -- but one aspect of keeping kosher is the simplicity of the food. No tallow. No solidifying fats. No additives. These days, kosher-food manufacturers are as bad as the rest of the world with that stuff (some are even worse, in the case of "pareve" foods that are about 90% fake-stuff). But the best kosher food -- like the best non-kosher food -- are the foods we make ourselves.

But, if you must eat in restaurants, console yourself with this: Kosher-keepers don't have to deal with the other, sinister side of restaurants: the ostentatious overpriced luxury-food places that sell thousand-dollar omelets.

* -- There are a few exceptions, of course: things that are necessary for the holiday, like wine and matzah, and a few things we can't easily make, like olive oil. (I know. We'll get an olive press, I promise. But probably not till next year.)

Tznius Envy

There are deadlines, and then there are deadlines. I'm the Writer in Residence this month over at BrooklynTheBorough.com, and I was supposed to turn in my column Friday. How I feel about deadlines is best expressed in an email that my (other) editor (at Scholastic) just wrote me in the form of an epic poem beginning "O deadlines! How I hate thee" and spiraling from there.

But sometimes deadlines can be fun. Nicole, who runs BrooklynTheBorough, asked me to write "a piece just about being a Hasid in Brooklyn...you know, a slice-of-life sort of thing." I know she wanted me to write about the conflict between Hasidic and hipster worlds, but I just couldn't stomach it. (Sorry, Nicole.) It's just that I live that way 24/7, and there really isn't much of a conflict.

Some people go to yechidus for love or financial decisions. I go for fashion advice.
The broken deadline got me writing about everyday life in Hasid-land, which I don't often do -- mainly because I hate getting too garish or showy about it. I can write fiction, and I can write about what I think about things, but if I started getting blog ideas from walking down the street? Well, (a) I'd be here till tomorrow, but also (b) I'd feel like I'm faking it among my family-in-law and my friends even more than I already feel.

Even so, a deadline is a deadline. And so I wrote, and this is the pastiche that came out. I'm actually sort of proud of it.

The bar mitzvah was a totally crazy affair, as might be expected. In one way, Hasidic Jews are unfailingly, unflinchingly conservative. In another way, it’s an anything-goes scenario. The party started at 9 pm, an hour away from Brooklyn, which isn’t crazy until you remind yourself that the target audience is 11-to-14-year-old kids — and that these parties often go for four, five hours. The mechitza was in full force with a wall dividing men and women, which meant that I couldn’t even play arm-candy to my wife. Our cousin Shmop was there, who’s just about the nicest, most magnetic and fluid guy you could think of. He’s Orthodox but modern, clean-shaven and he wears a tie – both things that make him stand out in this crowd – but he’s got this lackadaisical, no-stick personality that makes him able to get along with anyone. Seamlessly. Five minutes after we hook up, he’s gliding through the crowd, shaking hands and kissing the hairy cheeks of every rabbi in the room, coasting straight to the women’s section as I struggle to keep up with him, dodging furry hats aimed at the level of my head as the crowd threatens to rip the umbilical cord by which I have attached myself to him.

Hasidic Jews are pretty strict about this stuff. And if you missed it right there, that’s the understatement of the century. Half of the family is pretty cool with these casual social interactions. The other half — well, there’s one Hasidic dynasty, of which many of this family are members, that has a custom of men and women eating in separate rooms. The mechitza is properly only for the dancing which will take place later that night, and so that men and women don’t sit at the same tables and, I don’t know, accidentally bump into each other or get into food fights or something, but when Shmop whizzes me across the floor to the other side, my anxiety squeezes a huge rubber band around my stomach and my eyes pop half out of my head. Not from looking at women. Possibly from watching Shmop’s overwhelming casualness. Mostly from the realization that, one way or another, I am probably about to be kicked out of the family, the social hall, or, possibly, Judaism.

Here. Read the whole thing on the BtB site.

i hate it when you say a blessing on food that's way too hot to eat but you already said it, nothing you can do, so you just have to shove it into your mouth and hope for the best.

just saying.

The Good Wife: Who You Callin’ Extra?

Matthue Roth worked on the set of the new CBS drama The Good Wife as an extra, and blogged about it Friday and Tuesday. The episode, "Unorthodox," is about the Hasidic Jewish community in Chicago. It aired yesterday.

If you who don't know, the main use of extras in film and TV is as background. Our job is to make reality look normal, or at least palatable, and fill it with much the same grouping of people who would otherwise exist on the very same street or park or police station -- only we are specifically hired, instead of gaping at the movie stars or straining to overhear the story, to completely ignore all of it.

So it's not surprising that, when they were originally casting this, they didn't think to call real Hasidim.You don't have to have an intimacy with God or an extensive knowledge of esoteric kabbalistic teachings to be able to walk down the street in a fur hat. As a matter of fact, it's probably better if you don't. A bunch of us were hassled by wardrobe people for having our tzitzit on the side, covered by our coat, instead of sticking out in front like a weird sort of phallic symbol. Authenticity gives people a reason to worry. They want to make things look right, not be right, and rightly so -- they're in the business of visuals. Instead, we give them roadblocks.

And more than a few additional problems.

We were supposed to have a sukkah. It is the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles, and observant Jews don't eat anything outside of a small palm frond-covered booth. Okay, anything is an overstatement. In severe cases, there's dispensation for eating snack food in small amounts. And it has to be certain kinds: only foods that satisfy the most general blessing, which means they basically have to be either completely ground up or chemically based. (Potato chips, for instance, are a question, because they still sort of look like potatoes.**) But that doesn't change the fact that the catering crew is putting out the lunch buffet, and it smells really good. Even when the menus are posted, and they're serving -- wait for it -- barbecue pork loins. It's not offensive. It's just funny.

Rabbi Elli grabs me by the kapote and whisks me out of there. We head to a local bodega, where we secure the most healthy choices we can muster with our restrictions: tortilla chips and hummus. When we return, everyone's looking at us. When we sit at our own table, with the other Hasidim-for-a-day, and start digging into our Garden of Eatin' Sesame Blues, it does nothing to diminish our conspicuousness. We might all be playing Hasidic Jews, but one thing never changes: the more Jewish you are, the more you stick out.

By the end of the day, playing a Hasid has run its course. I'm a little edgy, since people told me the shoot would take half a day, we've been here since 6 am, and it's already 4:30 pm. I told work I'd be in a few hours late. The other actors laugh at me. "'Half a day' means till 5!" they exclaim. "A full day will take you till midnight or one am" Then everyone takes turns telling their nightmare stories -- Elli was once filming in a concrete tube off the river in the middle of winter until 4 am -- and trade fables of Golden Time. Union pay scale provides for time-and-a-half for hours 9-10 in a day; then double-time up to hour 16. After that is something they call "Golden Time" -- for every hour worked past the 16th hour of a day, actors earn an entire day's pay. Possibly the only thing more legendary than getting paid Golden Time is the tradition of telling set stories itself.

For the final scene, the producers bundle all the extras out into the sidewalk. A truck pulls away from the curb; Ms. Margulies and Ms. Panjabi stand in the center of the street, watching meaningfully as it zooms off. I'm again paired with my wife (sans kids, this time), and we take upon ourselves the now-familiar goal of walking down the street and pretending to talk to each other. Now, though, we actually talk. Either I'm getting to be a passable actor, or we have enough shared experience that we can.

She tells me how she started out as a stage actor, got into this area. How she's good at this, how it's kind of become her regular schedule, how being stereotyped is an advantage. (Her agent says she looks "ethnic," which means that she's often called upon to play Jews, Greeks, and Arabs. Recently, she purchased her own burqa and learned to tie it, which means that, like my beard and sidecurls, she's paid $18 extra a day for "authentic attire.")

Last year, she scored the dream of dreams, a recurring role on a TV show that happened to be made by one of my favorite TV writers (Rob Thomas, who did Veronica Mars). The show was canceled, however, and she was back to doing this.

"It's not a bad life," she told me. "I get to stand in front of cameras. I get to be recognized. And sometimes, occasionally, when I get thrown a line or placed in a good spot in front of the camera, I get to really flex my acting muscles. I get to be somebody else."

My first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, was the story of a girl who starred on a sitcom about an Orthodox Jewish family. The girl, Hava, was Orthodox herself -- but being Orthodox was one small part of who she was. You'd never tell by looking at her: she was also a punk-rock New York kid who dressed in different outrageous outfits every day. On the sitcom, however, she wasn't playing the sort of Jew that she was; she was just playing a Jew, an everyman sort of stereotypical Jewish girl. For the time that the camera was on her, the rest of her sort of disappeared.

All day, I've been going through the same sort of thing. The pretty and familiar-looking girl who'd been walking down the other side of street all day -- as soon as the last cut was called, she whisked off her wig. Her jet-black wig was replaced by a shock of bright red Manic Panic-ed hair. Her Jewish features now could have been Turkish, or Greek, or Arabic or just straight-up generic American. She was a Jew for the day, and now the day was over.

As I pulled off my hat and coat and pulled on my actual cold-weather puffy coat -- still Hasidic, just a little less obviously so -- I felt the barest shudder of a Hollywood wish. Would Hasidim ever be more than that? Would anyone in television ever be more than a cliché of themselves? Did we even want to be?

The answer is, in some ways, embodied by Archie Panjabi, who plays Margulies's sidekick, the show's investigator. She might be the only Punjabi Sikh actor on prime-time American television. She is smart, sassy, flirty and just a touch mysterious. She doesn't have any trouble manifesting her cultural identity -- by which I mean, it isn't like she's acting white on the show -- but it's more that she is so many other things in addition to that.

Maybe that's why the knee-jerk reaction of Hasidic Jews to seeing Hasidic Jews on television is to be offended. Not because they're stereotyping us, but because they're reducing us. And, just like every Hollywood actor who gets glamorized in every inch of their lives, from their cellulite to their multiple adoptions -- and just like, I suppose, everyone, in their own way -- we just want to be adored.

____
** -- I'm grossly oversimplifying it, I know.

Paul Rudnick: The Man Who Tells Bette Midler What to Say

There is no better introduction to Paul Rudnick's book of essays, I Shudder, than its subtitle: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey. And there is nowhere that this description is more apt than the first essay: in which Rudnick tells his life story -- a common story, really, of being a writer and moving to the Big City and coming out as a gay man -- through a series of visits, by his mother and her two sisters, of his West Village apartments.

Rudnick has a gift for writing about any situation -- whether facing off against a movie producer high on cocaine or being a Jew doing fieldwork at a convent for a film script (Sister Act) or emigrating from New Jersey to Manhattan -- with good humor and total nonchalance. More remarkably, he shares that sort of easy wisdom with his characters. He doesn't offer a coming-out story so much as an understanding, sometimes silent and sometimes not, and even the darker sides of his new New York neighborhood are treated with a gentle glibness by his aunts: "'S and M,' said Lil, nodding her head. 'That's when people like to have other people beat them up, right? Like on dates?'"

Aunt Lil, the don of the Rudnick aunt mafia, reappears again and again in these stories. When Rudnick finally achieves the Jewish dream of dating a doctor, his Aunt Lil is the judge and jury to whom he must present his new acquisition. The comic tension is insurmountable, of course -- not so much because of the doctor's gender, male, so much as his name, John -- and the ensuing conclusions about his religion.

And then there are the essays that don't dwell on the Jew stuff at all. Reading about the making of the Addams Family film is a bit of gleeful joy that arouses both my sycophantic goth side and my faux-pas-friendly flamboyant side. Reading Bette Midler stories during the writing of Sister Act (she was contracted to star in the film, until the last moment) is pure joy. His series of grumpy-old-man meditations -- well, meditations, fashion tips, and plots to assassinate Rachel Ray -- are a weird series of interstitial fantasies that make the rest of his essays that much more vividly real.

Most compelling of all, however, is "Good Enough to Eat," which, though it's entirely devoid of gastrointestinal jokes, is no less a quintessentially Jewish musing on food than anything you're likely to find on Seinfeld or the humor bank:

An unlikely number of people, and particularly my family, have always been obsessed with my diet. This is because, since I was born, I have never had the slightest interest in eating any sort of meat, fish, poultry, or vegetable. I wasn't the sad-eyed victim of some childhood trauma; I was never frightened by a malevolent tube steak or a rampaging halibut. A greasy-haired stranger never lured me into his van and forced me to stroke an ear of corn while he took photos. I don't have what daytime talk shows and the Healthy Living sections of newspapers call food issues. What I have is a sweet tooth which has spread to all of my other organs. I probably have a sweet appendix.

I've always thought that David Sedaris was Jewish, even when I've been corrected by people much more in the know than I. Paul Rudnick has done more than enough to convince me -- not that Sedaris is Jewish, but that Rudnick is actually David Sedaris. It's good, and so is he.

Sukkot on the Run

One thing I've always wondered about the holiday of Sukkot: If the makeshift tabernacles that we're commanded to erect are supposed to function as our houses, then why do we spend so much damn time in them?

Let's review. We're commanded to go into the sukkah any time we want to eat. When we sleep. When we hang out with our friends. You know -- all the stuff that, normally, would be done at home, we do in a sukkah. Basically, for one week of our lives, we run a 24-hour marathon between our normal lives and our little palm-covered huts.

However, here are the most frequent locations where those actions take place for me:

Eating: At my desk at work, and/or walking down the street.
Sleeping: Subway, riding home from work.
Hanging out: Gmail's little chat windows.

To be fair, I could definitely accomplish the last one while inside a sukkah. But the others? Not so house-intensive, for the rest of the year. Last year, I was so busy that, instead of trekking to have my lunch at the beautiful (but impractical) West Side Synagogue all the way on 9th Avenue, I just didn't eat.

This year, I'm going to try to do it different. In our prayers, Sukkot is called "zman simchatenu," which translates to "the time of our rejoicing (or, if you're feeling literal, "happy time"). In the times of the Temple, everyone traveled to Jerusalem to bring their harvest offerings.

It really was a vacation time -- or, at least, it was as close to a vacation as the Children of Israel got in those days. Even though there are five work-days crammed right in the middle of Sukkot between the first days and Shemini Atzeret, it's not supposed to be a return to our dreary business of working and running and not-eating-until-9-p.m. -- it's God demanding that, even when we return to our between-holidays lives, we bring a little bit of the holiday with us. And if I have to take a little bit longer to run out to the sukkah and get back, and put my mind in a different mental space just as I put my body in a different physical space...well, that's putting the "moed" in "hol hamoed," I guess.

(Note to bosses: I'm not actually going to take a two-hour lunch, I promise. Er...every day.)

How to Hate the Gays

Last night I was working at our local co-op market. The crowd there is pretty diverse -- Hasidic Jews, Caribbean immigrants, Park Slope people with $50 t-shirts (ironic, baby, ironic!)...and anyone else in search of good, cheap food. Once a month, I wait in front of the store in a loud orange vest and carry people's groceries. Sometimes you get some good conversations. Other times, you can't believe the people you're talking to.

It was almost the end of my shift. An woman in her late 60s showed up (danger, my mind flashed, slow walker) asking for an escort to the subway station (another danger sign: it's 15 minutes away). I smiled and said sure. She was an old black woman with one of those hairdos that is frozen into place and pastel pink church clothes. It turned out that she lived a block or two away from me.

We made conversation for a few minutes, and I could tell she was gunning up to ask me something. (When you've got a beard and sidelocks and a t-shirt, it's only a matter of time until people ask, in one phrasing or another, what's up with you.) She prefaced it: "Now, don't feel you have to answer this..."

Oh, boy. This was going to be a good one.

She told me how she was a God-fearing, church-going woman, and she believed in every word of the Bible ("Old and New," she said). And she didn't think homosexuality was right. But what, she asked me, do I think about that man in the homosexual club?

"The gay club murders, you mean?" I said. "In Tel Aviv?"

She nodded. "I mean, I know those people have it comin'," she said. "But that thing that happened, it just seems...wrong."

This next part, I don't understand at all. I could have told her how some of the holiest people I know are gay; how the most devout Christian I've ever met was a gay man who believes that Jesus made him gay as one more way of accentuating how we'll never truly understand the mysteries of Creation, and how one of the most Godly books that's been written this generation, Wrestling with God and Men, is about the incomparable onus of being queer and religious, and was written by Rabbi Steve Greenberg, an Orthodox rabbi and a gay man. Or I could just tell her how I helped start the straight-gay alliance in my high school and how a group of tranny boys showed me that being a man was okay (or just showed her the book I wrote about it).

But I didn't.

Instead, I said, "Of course it's wrong -- it's just as wrong as opening fire on people because they're spending money on the Sabbath or wearing the wrong color of clothes." I told her I believed that God made everyone the way they are for a reason, and it's not up to any of us to try and decide what that reason is -- it's between them and God."

She went "Mm-hmm" -- that kind of conversational combination of amen and keep on talking that I learned about when I was doing fieldwork in college at black Baptist churches and haven't heard anywhere else. "It's like Sodom and Gomorrah," she said. "People there were doin' all kind of Lord knows what, and God took care of them. And I know that day's coming, but I ain't gonna be the one to tell 'em that. He told Abraham and his nephew to leave that city, and only after they left, God swept down the destruction."

I said, "Who knows what God's really thinking? God's got an agenda. He didn't put us down here to be the Angel of Death; He's got angels for that. All He told us was to love our neighbors."

He? Since when had I referred to God as He? And why was I agreeing with her?

At this point, my brain split up into a few parts. Part of me was freaked that she was asking me as a typical Orthodox Jew, and I was supposed to answer like some sort of spokesman or something. And then part of me saw it as a teaching opportunity, like I was undercover as a gay-people-supporter and I could subvert all her bigoted views and show her the One True Path.

And then there was a part of me that wasn't being subversive at all, but was instead trying to reconcile my own personal beliefs about homosexuality -- as a person -- with the beliefs of everyone around me. And, perhaps, with the beliefs that I am supposed to hold.

And I realized, I'm kind of answering her truthfully. How do I know what God believes about gay people? How does anyone? For all I know, maybe God really did give the queer gene to certain people in order to test their willpower. That sure as hell doesn't sound like the God I believe in -- but, then again, I really firmly believe that God is both more powerful and more clever than anything that we give God credit for.

So, yeah -- I didn't say any of that to her. And she didn't say much more to me -- just took her bags from my hands, nodded like she agreed with me, and started to descend to the subway.

"I think you're right," she said. She'd stopped on the third step down, turned around, and cocked her head, that universal gesture of going into Deep Thought mode. "The Bible doesn't say 'Abraham destroyed the city of Sodom,' it says that God did. I'm going to think about that."

With that, she disappeared into the belly of the subway system, leaving me stunned and thinking. Of all the lessons I could have gotten from her, this was what I least expected: using texual analysis to combat hate -- or, at least, to learn how to hate more lovingly.

She was absolutely right. Man, if she walked into the club in Tel Aviv, I bet she would've given those people a hug. And possibly taught them a thing or two about how to wear floral pastels.

And more illuminatingly, I think she hit upon the basic flaw of fundamentalists -- or, at least, fundamentalists like the Tel Aviv gay club murderer: They really never read what the Bible actually says.