Author Jonathan Safran Foer Addresses Questions About Judaism and Meat
When The New York Times broke a story about what it called “grisly” animal abuse at the world’s largest glatt kosher slaughterhouse, it received wide coverage in the mainstream media. Based on a disturbing undercover investigation at AgriProcessors, Inc., it remains the biggest scandal in the kosher meat industry in recent memory.
For many in the Jewish community, the seriousness of these abuses and kosher authorities’ failure to denounce them raised fundamental questions about the consumption of meat. “If This Is Kosher …” is a video that takes on those questions.
Narrator Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, which won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Guardian First Book Award and is the basis for a feature film starring Elijah Wood. Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, has been hailed by Salman Rushdie as “ambitious, pyrotechnic, riddling, and above all … extremely moving,” and Warner Bros. and Paramount have jointly acquired movie rights to it. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages worldwide. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
To be a vegetarian is to disagree—to disagree with the course of things today. … [S]tarvation, cruelty—we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it’s a strong one.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate
In addition to Jonathan Safran Foer, “If This Is Kosher …” features Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg and Rabbi David Wolpe and is a must-see for anyone interested in a kosher diet and the ethical implications of eating meat.
Special thanks to Animal Liberation Israel and Animal-TV.org for supplying undercover video footage for this project.
Interested in what other celebrities and athletes have to say about vegetarianism? Check out PETA’s “veggie testimonial” site.
