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An amended Conservative Jewish Passover policy taps into the booming gluten-free market
(JTA) — Ahead of Passover 2020 — as life worldwide ground to an abrupt halt in the face of a rapidly spreading pandemic and people faced the specter of empty grocery shelves, or staying confined at home — a range of rabbis tried to make it a little easier to observe the holiday.
Long lists of foods and newly lenient guidelines from Jewish organizations circulated among people who keep kosher for Passover, explaining which foods they could purchase and eat on the holiday, given the year’s extraordinary circumstances. The message — sometimes explicit, sometimes implied — was that these special permissions applied only temporarily.
Now, one rule instituted as a COVID provision by the Conservative movement is becoming permanent: Before Passover begins, Jews may buy certified kosher products that have kosher-for-Passover ingredients and are certified gluten-free and oat-free — even if they aren’t explicitly certified kosher for Passover.
When it first appeared in 2020, that rule was written in a way that suggested it was an emergency measure, using the words “when the situation demands.” This year, that four-word phrase has been removed from the Rabbinical Assembly’s Passover guide, and the guidance has moved from a separate section into the main list of allowable products.
The edit reflects how some shifts in Jewish practice that first appeared at the outset of the pandemic, as stopgap measures, have since been normalized. It also allows — for at least a narrow set of Jews who observe Jewish ritual in accordance with the Conservative movement’s dictates — more robust and potentially less expensive options for keeping kosher during Passover.
Rabbi Aaron Alexander, chair of the Kashrut Subcommittee on the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which issues the movement’s Jewish legal rulings, said the change does not reflect a shift in the movement’s approach to Jewish law, known as halacha. Instead, he said, it reflects confidence that the Food and Drug Administration’s strict rules about how products can be labeled can be trusted when it comes to Passover observance.
“It’s not a significant change in how we understand halacha in general and how we understand the general Passover laws,” Alexander said. “It’s always been the case that there are products you can buy without a KP [symbol] before Passover, when you can be pretty sure that there’s no chametz and that any accidental admixture would be minimal.”
The requirement for foods to be certified gluten-free and oat-free, Alexander said, is “an extra line of defense” for people buying products before Passover that are not explicitly labeled kosher for Passover.
The policy shift opens new doors to kosher-keeping Jews: Rather than seeking out specialty items with Passover kosher certification, often carried only in kosher supermarkets and in major markets, they can observe Passover by taking advantage of the increasing number of products that are labeled kosher, gluten-free and oat-free, as long as the ingredients accord with Passover laws.
The gluten-free marketplace is estimated at $6 billion a year in the United States and is growing by an estimated 10% each year, according to industry trend reports. The marketplace serves people with celiac disease — whose incidence is rising — as well as people who seek to reduce or eliminate their gluten intake for perceived health reasons.
Some people with celiac disease say they look forward to Passover because more products will hit shelves that they can count on to be free of gluten. Now, Jews who follow the Conservative movement’s guidance can benefit from some of the wide array of gluten-free foods that are already available.
On Passover, five types of grain are prohibited (except for when they are used to make matzah): wheat, spelt, barley, oat and rye. By purchasing products that are certified gluten-free and oat-free, consumers can avoid buying food that contain those five ingredients.
“In an effort to definitively alert consumers to the presence of wheat gluten in packaged foods, the FDA mandates that any product including the words ‘gluten-free,’ ‘no gluten,’ ‘free of gluten,’ or ‘without gluten’ must contain less than 20 parts per million of glutinous wheat, spelt, barley, or rye,” a footnote to the guide states. “This eliminates the possibility of a gluten-free packaged food containing 4 of the 5 hametz-derived grains in any quantity that would be viable according to Jewish law.”
Alexander emphasized that the gluten-free and oat-free guidance should be seen as “a good way to figure out whether or not the products you’re getting before Passover could be problematic.” He cautioned that looking at the rest of the ingredients is crucial: Some certified gluten-free products, for example, could still be prohibited for Passover because they contain yeast.
Sarah Chandler, an ordained Hebrew priestess and Jewish educator who used to run a pickle business, already bought food with gluten-free labels during her pre-Passover shopping.
“It’s very practical, and it’s also consistent with other levels of kashrut,” Chandler told JTA regarding her pre-Passover shopping. “The fact that you and I can go to a grocery store and buy eggs — you don’t need a kosher symbol on it. We just know that it’s eggs. We’re not worried that the egg is from a bird of prey and not kosher. We can just assume that [if] it says ‘chicken eggs,’ they’re chicken eggs.”
She added, using a Hebrew term for kosher certification, “We don’t need a hechsher on it. The hechscher just means a certain level of supervision.”
Chandler is a vegetarian and eats a variety of nut butters, which are often expensive. Recently, she bought a jar of gluten-free cashew butter that was on sale for $6 instead of its regular price $12. (A jar of almond butter by a kosher brand marketed for Passover can run around $18.) Because it’s still unopened and the ingredients are kosher for Passover, she plans to eat it during the holiday.
Kosher-keeping Jews with gluten intolerance and celiac disease have especially found a lifeline in the growing marketplace of gluten-free food.
Lisa Goldman, also known as the “Gluten Free Jewish Momma,” is an Orlando-based advocate for the gluten intolerant on behalf of her now-grown daughter, who was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2012.
“My daughter was crying over not being able to have matzah balls because matzah [is] very high in wheat,” Goldman recalled. “So it was so exciting when all of the Jewish brands started to come out with a gluten-free version of many of their products.”
By the Way Bakery, a kosher, gluten-free and dairy-free bakery in New York City founded in 2011 by Helene Godin, may be a destination where Jewish shoppers who abide by the Conservative ruling could get food for the holiday. It is offering multiple Passover items this year, though the menu isn’t certified kosher for Passover.
By the Way Bakery is certified kosher, and its individual products that are sold in Whole Foods are in the process of being certified gluten-free.
“I’m really careful with the word ‘certified,’” Godin told JTA. “We are not certified with respect to Passover. I can tell you what is in [our products]. We’re very transparent. If you go to our website and you go to the FAQ section, there’s a link to our ingredient summary. And we list everything that’s in every product.”
Some of the items on this year’s Passover menu include an orange almond cake that Godin calls “the little black dress of desserts” because it goes with everything, and a chocolate truffle torte. By the Way Bakery’s cakes and cookies are made with wheat flour alternatives, many of which fall into the category of kitniyot, or foods such as legumes, corn, and rice that some Jews, including many Ashkenazim, avoid eating on Passover. Sephardic Jews traditionally eat kitniyot on the holiday and the Conservative Movement began permitting the consumption of kitniyot during Passover in 2016.
“There are people who say, ‘You’re not kosher enough,’” Godin said. “And there are people who say, ‘Oh, I’ll eat that.’”
Another popular gluten-free kosher bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel, is offering non-kitniyot foods for Passover. Like By the Way Bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel is not certified kosher for Passover, but all of its kitchen’s ingredients are kosher for Passover.
Godin says her company gains new customers every Passover, but this year has been an especially busy time. The number of orders for the orange almond cake, which has not been on the menu in several years, was three or four times larger than what she expected.
“Our projections were that we would be up 20% over last year. And we’ve well exceeded that,” she said. “Post-COVID, people just want to celebrate and get together.”
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In the world of Jewish translators, she was known as a mentor, a friend and a literary giant
Barbara Harshav, widely considered one of the most important translators of Jewish literature of our time, passed away June 24 at age 85. She translated from French, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish — and won acclaim from scholars and fellow translators for her range and high standards. Her curiosity and willingness to tackle difficult material were legendary.
“Few people would be able to and feel comfortable translating from French and German alongside Hebrew and Yiddish,” Shachar Pinsker, professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at The University of Michigan, wrote in an email.
She translated giants, including Shmuel Yosef Agnon, winner of the Nobel Prize; Avrom Sutzkever, the towering Yiddish poet; the Israeli novelist Meir Shalev; and the beloved poet Yehuda Amichai. But she was also loved as a mentor and friend to scholars and translators of several generations.
“I knew Bobbi Harshav through reading her translations before I met her for the first time, when I helped her carry a suitcase to a room in Berkeley’s Bancroft Hotel in 2005,” Pinsker recalled. “Since then, we have seen each other in Ann Arbor, Tel Aviv, New York and Boston. It was always a thrill to meet her, speak and correspond with her, and learn from her.”
Her personality was reflected in the books she translated.
“Bobbi had a fierce sense of curiosity and independence that carried her forward. I can’t think of anyone else who would translate the Palestinian author Emile Habibi’s essay ‘Your Holocaust and our Catastrophe,’ alongside poetry by Abraham Sutzkever, Yehuda Amichai, the best of American Yiddish poetry, as well as novels, stories, and plays by Hanoch Levin, Yoram Kaniuk, Yehudit Hendel, Yehudit Kazir, and Leah Goldberg,” Pinsker wrote.
Harshav also co-translated many books with her late husband, Benjamin Harshav, including Sing Stranger: A Century of American Yiddish Poetry.
Her translations included some of the most challenging books in recent Jewish literature, like Agnon’s fiction. Made up of layers upon layers, with allusions to Jewish texts everywhere, it is notoriously challenging, if not impossible, to translate.
“Bobbi took on the heroic task of translating S.Y. Agnon’s Tmol Shilshom (“Only Yesterday”), which many considered untranslatable, and although she was aware of the limitations of Agnon in English, she proved them wrong,” Pinsker recalled.
“Perhaps the main thing about this translation is that Bobbi captured Agnon’s sense of irony, because of her own smart and wicked sense of humor.”
On social media, scholars mourned this loss.
“I just read her translation of The Loves of Judith. It’s a stunning and masterful translation of a book that plays with languages, gender, timelines and so much,” Shayna Weiss, Senior Associate Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis, wrote. “What a loss.”
Weiss, in an email, shared that she was reading Harshav’s translation of Shalev’s book because she is speaking at a film festival that is showing For the Love of a Woman, a new film based on this book.
Bobbi, as she was known, was famous inside translation circles for her warmth and kindness to other translators, including invitations to live in her home, rent-free, while translating.
She was especially encouraging to beginners.
When I was a graduate student, she emailed me out of the blue and invited me to participate in a panel at the American Literary Translators Association conference, which was meeting that year in Chicago. I knew no one there, and made a friend — the Yiddish translator Leah Zazulyer, also gone now — while waiting for Bobbi to show up.
I did not know it then, but Bobbi was a celebrity in that conference; she was a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Later she would become the only Hebrew or Yiddish translator in history to win the PEN/ Manheim medal.
The Manheim medal is awarded every three years for lifetime achievement in literary translation. Bernard Malamud and Gay Talese donated the initial funding for the award; it received additional support from the family and friends of Ralph Manheim, the American translator of Mein Kampf, who died in 1992, and it is now named after him.
The medal recognizes translators “whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of their work.” Prior winners include Gregory Rabassa, translator of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which Gabriel García Márquez famously declared superior to his original, and Edith Grossman, translator of Don Quixote and author of the influential book Why Translation Matters.
Harshav published more than 40 books of translation including works of poetry, drama, fiction, philosophy, economics, sociology and history.
“I know that the Manheim Lifetime Achievement medal acknowledges the full range of Barbara’s work, including her translations from French and German, but the fact that this award casts the spotlight on Hebrew and Yiddish translation, languages that often are overlooked in the world literary economy, is just monumental,” translator, scholar, and Oxford professor Adriana X. Jacobs said when Harshav won the medal.
“In all her translations, Barbara’s voice comes across so clearly and distinctly, even as she is capturing the qualities unique to a specific writer. And what I mean is that when you read Barbara’s translations, her commitment to her choices is evident. And every time I have heard Barbara speak on translation, this has been confirmed,” Jacobs said. “She can tell you why she made one choice and not another, why she chose to translate a particular text and not another, and she always — always — stands by her work.”
Harshav’s comments on writing and translation sometimes made it to Twitter and other social media, like this snippet from her talk at Davidson College: “Style is the morality of the mind. And obscurantism is sinful.”
She came of age in a time well before AI and before translation apps. Learning a language then was slow hard work. For French and German, she focused on basics, then read newspapers and novels.
“As for Hebrew, I started studying Jewish history and realized that I had a serious handicap because I did not know Hebrew at all, not the alphabet, nothing,” she told Rainer Schulte in Translation Review in 2012.
Unlike many Hebrew translators, Harshav came to the language relatively late, at 34.
“I literally fell in love with the language. There was the exhilarating feeling of learning a new language and a new alphabet at that age. It must have repeated the original childhood sense of learning to read, when the letters suddenly make sense and a new world is opened.” She learned Yiddish last.
Scholars and translators saw something distinctive in Bobbi Harshav’s work, in all four languages she translated from. In conversation, she often talked about translation quality; her goal was always excellence.
One reason for her excellence was that she was always reading. Another reason was her attitude, toward the text, and toward herself.
“I carry books all the time because you never know when the elevator will break down, and I am reading all the time,” she told Translation Review. “It is the element of play that is very important. Humility is also important, and the text is sacred. It is also true for performance. You have to have a kind of humility. I take what I do very seriously, but I do not take myself seriously.”
You can hear all of that in her translator’s note to Tmol Shilshom, or Only Yesterday, by Agnon. “If there is some other world, where translators can discuss ‘deviations’ with authors,” she wrote,” I hope Agnon will understand.”
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AIPAC isn’t to blame for the Graham Platner scandal — no matter what social media trolls say
“Zionists are just upset anti-Israel candidates are winning,” read one Instagram comment, which got 164 likes. “Israel working over time on this one,” read another, which garnered 341. “AIPC” — presumably meaning AIPAC — “is going hard against you, but fuk em keep going,” read a third, with 458.
These comments were prompted by allegations that Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, sexually assaulted a woman in 2021. Such insights did not exclusively come from random internet users: former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X, “I do find it interesting that Platner is hated by AIPAC and rape accusations show up years later from a woman who dated him.”
It’s impossible to determine how widespread a conspiracy theory that AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying group, is somehow behind Jenny Racicot’s credible allegations might be. But the fact that such a baseless idea is spreading at all is instructive in two ways.
First: It forces us to once again confront the fact that too much of our society tends to treat allegations of sexual violence as a team sport — only disqualifying if they attach to the side you root against. A version of this same trend was on view earlier this year, with the wildly disparate responses of pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian parties to reporting about sexual violence committed by Hamas and Israeli forces.
In fairness, the majority of the politicians who had previously endorsed Platner have retracted their support in the wake of Racicot’s allegations. But there are still people out there who would rather think that Israel and AIPAC somehow made a woman come forward than sit with the fact that these allegations were made against someone with whom they are ideologically aligned. (Racicot also told multiple people about the alleged assault years before Platner ever ran for office. I am unclear on how, exactly, AIPAC is meant to have coordinated that, although I have no doubt proponents of this theory have an explanation.)
This is what happens when we see having theoretically good principles as more important than actually being and doing good in the world.
Second, this discourse is a reminder of the importance of drawing a clear line between criticism of AIPAC and conspiracy-mongering, which can quickly edge into antisemitism.
The importance of this distinction has come up repeatedly in recent weeks, as political candidates have made criticism of AIPAC central to their campaigns.
Criticism is about what an individual or entity is actually saying or doing. Conspiracy, on the other hand, is not about what someone is actually doing. It is about suggesting someone holds too much power and control, often over events that have little to nothing to do with them, rather than examining their actual actions.
It is not antisemitic to say, for example, that AIPAC has endorsed election deniers; that it spent more $4 million dollars in 2022 campaigning against a Jewish Democrat who sponsored a “Two State Solution Act” because it deemed him insufficiently pro-Israel; or that it spent almost $14 million across just four Illinois races this year. Those are just facts. To observe that they are things that happened is not perpetuating antisemitism, but noting reality.
There is nothing realistic, on the other hand, about suggesting that AIPAC somehow made Racicot talk to the press about her experiences with Platner.
Hence a basic rule: Grounded criticism of AIPAC isn’t antisemitic, and conspiracy theories about it are.
Take the example of Brad Lander, who recently won his Congressional primary in New York City, and who told The New York Times that he felt “queasy” discussing AIPAC critically but felt it needed to be done. Lander was making an important point: the fact that antisemitic tropes can be evoked while critiquing powerful Jewish and pro-Israel institutions does not mean that that any such critique is inherently antisemitic, as some have suggested.
Yet the fact that criticism of AIPAC isn’t inherently bigoted doesn’t mean that invoking it never is. Crying “AIPAC” to deflect from blame or responsibility, as those blaming the lobby for Platner’s scandal are, is absolutely antisemitic.
The stakes of this aren’t just Jewish well-being, or the future of a particular Senate seat. When we infuse our politics with conspiracies, it doesn’t matter if they come from the left or right: The end result is a politics that’s more hateful and deluded, regardless of the source. Those who wanted Graham Platner in the Senate because they yearn for officials who will further human rights and dignity should ask themselves whether that’s the kind of politics that helps us achieve those goals.
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VIDEO: Memories of the Workmen’s Circle in Montreal
מער ווי הונדערט יאָר לאַנג האָט דער אַרבעטער־רינג געשפּילט אַ וויכטיקע ראָלע אין דעם ייִדישן לעבן פֿון מאָנטרעאָל. די אָרגאַניזאַציע איז געווען איינע פֿון די וויכטיקסטע וועלטלעכע ייִדישע כּוחות אין דער שטאָט און האָט אין משך פֿון לאַנגע יאָרן אַנטוויקלט אַ רײַך קולטור־ און געזעלשאַפֿטלעך לעבן.
אין דער רעקאָרדירונג וועט איר זיך באַקענען מיט שלום (סאָל) עדלשטיין, וואָס האָט אָנגעפֿירט דעם אַרבעטער־רינג אין מאָנטרעאָל אין אירע לעצטע יאָרן. מיטן שמועס פֿירט אָן אלי בענעדיקט פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע.
אין די ערשטע יאָרן פֿונעם 20סטן יאָרהונדערט זענען געווען אַ ריי אַרבעטער־רינג-„ברענטשעס“ איבער קאַנאַדע, וואָס האָבן געפֿירט אַ רײַכע קולטור־אַרבעט, אַרײַנגערעכנט שולן, טעאַטער־טרופּעס און כאָרן. במשך פֿון די יאָרן האָבן זיך די „ברענטשעס“ צו ביסלעך פֿאַרמאַכט, און די פֿאַרבליבענע אַקטיוויטעטן האָבן זיך צונויפֿגעקליבן אין איין הויז אין מאָנטרעאָל. אין דעם לעצטן יאָר האָט זיך אויך דאָס הויז פֿאַרמאַכט. אין דעם שמועס וועט שלום עדלשטיין דערציילן וועגן די „ברענטשעס“, וועגן דעם לעבן און די אויפֿטוען אין דעם הויז, און וועגן זײַנע אייגענע איבערלעבונגען דאָרט.
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