Temple Grandin is justly famous for her accomplishments in animal rights, whether teaching people how understand their pets or training meat companies to slaughter animals in a humane manner. Far less known is her vital role defending ritual Jewish slaughter – shechita – over the last 40 years.

Grandin first encountered ritual slaughter in the late 1970s, as her efforts improve the practices of American meatpacking plants were just commencing. Her initial experience with a crude kosher operation left her with nightmares; many years later Grandin could still remember the horrific “frantic bellowing of cattle” whose terror “could be heard throughout the office and parking lot.” This terrible experience, however, did not turn her again shechita. She also visited kosher plants where cattle were handled gently and restrained in non-stressful manner; she noticed that they didn’t react to the shocket’s cut all, standing calmly in place until becoming insensible from blood loss.

These experiences left Grandin committed to improve ritual slaughter, since she felt that its core, the use of well-trained religious men to kill cattle following a complex set of requirements, was more humane that methods commonly used in the meat industry. Her preferred kosher method was a high-speed system that could compete with the rapid methods used by non-kosher slaughterhouses. While effective where installed, there was little interest in the technology from a meat industry that largely viewed kosher slaughter as an unprofitable sideline. Blocked by industry indifference, she turned to the ASPCA pen, a device developed in the 1960s and 1970s that restrained cattle in a large box. She improved its effectiveness by designing a device that held the animal’s head in the optimal position for the shochet.

In doing so, she convinced Orthodox organizations of her sincerity. Working behind the scenes, Grandin and the Orthodox Union managed to have most kosher plants install the ASPCA pens by the 1990s. During those years Grandin authored a steady stream of articles in publications of the meat industry and animal rights organizations defending ritual slaughter as humane and explaining the improvements that had been made. Focusing on practical success, rather than publicity, Grandin simultaneously contributed to updating Jewish slaughtering methods and defending this ancient tradition.

The controversies aroused by the practices of the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa posed her greatest challenge. Its owners dismissed Grandin’s repeated efforts to advise them, and refused to install the technology that she and the OU preferred.  Video clandestinely recorded by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in 2004 graphically exposed the company’s troubling slaughtering practices. The deeply disturbing recording showed cattle remaining conscious and active for more than a minute after their throats were cut and, in a departure from traditional kosher methods, their trachea was removed.
In the ensuing outcry, Grandin artfully combined categorical denunciations of Agriprocessors’ practices with defense of shechita. “This tape shows atrocious procedures that are NOT performed in any other kosher operation,” she announced in a widely-quoted statement posted on her web site. Agriprocessors made changes in response to these criticisms, and brought Grandin in for an endorsement; but when another PETA video in 2008 showed a return to its poor practices, Grandin did not equivocate.  She bluntly stated that the company’s practices would “definitely cause the animal pain” while simultaneously defending shechita, explaining to reporters that “I have no problem with ritual slaughter when it is done correctly.”
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Temple Grandin’s approach influenced American animal rights organizations such as PETA and helped to avert the kind of attacks on shechita that have become commonplace in Europe and other nations. Her remarkable achievement was to use modern technology to update ritual slaughtering methods, and at the same time help kosher meat remain accessible. Quietly, yes forcefully, Jews wanting to be able to obtain kosher meat have found a great ally in this remarkable person. 

Abraham Goldstein started the kosher certification programs of both the Orthodox Union and OK Kosher Certification, the two largest agencies today; his legacy can be found in the kosher symbols that adorn approximately 40% of the item in a typical supermarket. Yet silence shrouds his historical role as a pioneer of modern kosher certification.

A devout Orthodox Jew and a chemist by trade, Goldstein appreciated the complex challenges of certifying modern kosher food long before many rabbis whose knowledge of kosher law was rooted in non-industrial settings. Born in East Prussia, Goldstein received training as a chemist before moving to America in 1891 and settling in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. In the 1920s he led the nascent certification program of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregation’s subsidiary, the Orthodox Union, and was certainly at the table when the OU created its distinctive U in a circle symbol to place on Heinz’s vegetarian baked beans in 1923. Billed as the OU’s “chemical expert,” Goldstein wrote a monthly “Kashruth Column” in the small Orthodox Union magazine, where he answered queries from observant food shoppers.  

His insistence on the relevance of science, however, increasingly placed Goldstein at odds with central leaders of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis (the Agudath Harabonim) who felt reliance on secular knowledge undermined rabbinic authority. Seeking his own platform, in 1935 Goldstein created the Organized Kashrus (OK) Laboratory to serve as a scientific research lab for rabbis seeking to better understand the chemical composition of food they had been asked to certify. Its quarterly journal, the Kosher Food Guide, grew rapidly in circulation to well over 100,000 and became a magnet for observant shoppers, who sent letters to Goldstein asking his advice on foods commonly found on the shelves of new national food chains such as A&P. Answering dozens of queries in each issue, the dialogue between Goldstein and worried Jewish consumers opens a window on the challenges to kosher traditions posed by modern processed foods.

In his responses, and sharply worded articles, Goldstein presented views at odds with prominent Agudath Harabonim leaders. Relying on his authority as a scientist, he ridiculed their opinions, deeply offending the European-trained rabbis accustomed to deference from laymen. When the OU insisted that he submit issues of the Kosher Food Guide for advance rabbinic approval, Goldstein refused. He ended all association with the OU and constituted OK Laboratory as its own certification agency. Just before World War II a rabbinic court sought to end Goldstein’s influence by directing Jews and businesses to ignore the Kosher Food Guide; while effectively banning him from official Orthodox circles, the edict had little discernable effect on the journal’s circulation and the placement of advertisements by food companies.  
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When Abraham Goldstein died late in 1944, his son George took over OK Laboratory; until the mid-1950s it certified more kosher products than the OU, which took decades to recover from Goldstein’s departure. By then his views were not controversial; both his positions on particular products and his insistence on the use of science in kosher certification were now accepted. Yet, even as Orthodox Judaism moved to embrace Goldstein’s views, the silences surrounding his historical role remained. Even today, Abraham Goldstein remains the invisible chemist. 

I came across an amazing man while looking for information on kosher meat. A Harry Kassel came up in a New York Times search, appearing in a 1973 article about meat shortages and described as the largest wholesaler of kosher meat in the New York area. Other searches turned up nothing more; so I turned to one of the historian’s great resources – the telephone book—and found him living on Long Island just past the end of the Belt Parkway. Spry and sharp at 89, he told me about his remarkable life, and in so doing gave me the backbone of chapter seven in Kosher USA, which I called “Harry Kassel’s Meat.”
 
He was born in Racine, Wisconsin to a Jewish family that tried to keep kosher. He joined the military during World War II, and rather than trying to build up his military service, joked with me in his self-deprecating manner that since the US wanted to win the war, they kept him in the country. Recently demobilized in 1946, he agreed to a blind date with Zeena Levine, who was then a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. The two hit if off (even though she called him a “cheapskate” in our interview since he took her to a bar instead of a restaurant) and were soon married. Harry joked that since she wouldn’t go to work, he had to, and took the easy way out by joining his new father in law’s business.
 
Zeena’s father was a butcher – on a big scale. With his partner Sam Cohen, Joe Levine owned several large kosher butcher shops in Brooklyn and a small chain of non-kosher shops. Kosher meat was a thriving business after World War II, and Levine took in his son-in-law and taught him how to evaluate recently-slaughtered meat and decide which carcasses to buy for his butcher shops.
 
After a few years Kassel went into business for himself and established a meat wholesale company in the Brooklyn plant once operated by Swift & Co. His training made him acutely aware of the peculiar nature of kosher beef – that the same animal yielded kosher and non-kosher cuts. The Ashkenazi tradition was to only consume the forequarters, so even though these cattle yielded kosher briskets and rib roasts, the desirable loin cuts could not enter the kosher trade. Kassel made a name for himself by buying the hindquarters of prime, kosher-killed cattle and distributing the tenderloins and porterhouse steaks so prized in New York’s white tablecloth restaurants.
 
He quickly realized the benefits of buying the entire carcass, and sending the forequarters into kosher distribution channels while the hindquarters went to the high-end restaurant market. By the mid-1960s Kassel’s company was selling all over the United States, and was the nation’s largest kosher beef wholesaler. He was one of the first to work with the new Cryovac technology that allowed plastic packaging to be shrink-wrapped over meat before shipment, vastly extending the time it could spend in transit. Able to send cuts from the non-kosher hindquarters to institutional buyers throughout the United States, Kassel was well-positioned to manage distribution of meat from the forequarters to kosher outlets.
 
A Reform Jew and an active benefactor of Jewish causes, Kassel was able to manage the tricky shifts in kosher meat supply and demand in the 1960s and 1970s. The large slaughterhouses in the New York area that had supplied kosher meat to the region for decades had largely closed by the 1950s, pushing kosher meat production to the Midwest and into small regional plants. It took a wholesaler with feet in both the kosher and non-kosher meat trades to sustain a steady supply to both markets. He was especially adept at provisioning Hasidic and Orthodox customers who wanted glatt beef, a demanding standard that gentile slaughterhouse owners had a hard time understanding. Committed to respecting the preferences of his co-religionists – even if their notion of Judaism was different than his – Kassel worked diligently to make sure that the meat he supplied fully met the requirements of the supervising rabbis.
 
Harry Kassel left the meat business in 1980, convinced that meat consumption was going to fall (it did) and worried about the pressures of the new large meat concerns on his operation. His concerns were well-placed. Turmoil swept through the meat industry in the 1980s, with old firms going bankrupt and new dominant companies forming out of this chaos. He put his skills to use for Israel, helping to create Yarden, an export-oriented cooperative that brought Israeli food products to an international market, and serving for many years as vice-president of his synagogue. And every fall, Harry and his wife Zeena travel to France to see the places they love to visit. It was a great mitzvah to have the chance to get to know this remarkable man.
 
 

The Orthodox Union’s certification of medical marijuana offers a seemingly absurd juxtaposition – authorization by leading Orthodox Jewish rabbis that, yes, observant Jews can now ingest what was once a marker of America’s irreverent counter-culture.
 
Yet even more significant is the claim by the OU that marijuana needs kosher certification at all. Under kosher law, plants and minerals are inherently kosher; onions and apples do not receive kosher certification and yet are acceptable under kosher law. Yet as the reach of kosher certification agencies has expanded, so too have the claims of rabbis that ever more products need to be labeled with a rabbinical hecksker (endorsement). Science has provided a legitimate rationale for some, as food companies embed hidden ingredients, processing agents, and preservatives into seemingly innocuous foods such as frozen broccoli and canned tomatoes. But even the Orthodox wince at some more marginal claims, such as the need to place the OU’s distinctive logo on bottled water and aluminum foil.
 
So in this sense, the claim to certify marijuana is of a piece with certifying Deer Park spring water – an assertion that only the rabbis know whether products that can be ingested (or touch items that can be ingested) should be used by Jews. It reflects the aspiration of modern rabbinic Judaism to serve as the interlocutor between Jews and the modern world.
 
OU officials assert that it is the processing required for medical marijuana that requires their attention, as the product is ingested and not rolled into a joint. In that sense it is the same issue as certifying vitamins, as placing a B-12 complex into a gelatin (and thus non-kosher) capsule creates a non-kosher product. Unstated though is whether it is now acceptable under kosher law to obtain marijuana legally for recreational purposes, such as in Colorado where it is permitted by state law. If the rationale for certifying medical marijuana is how it is processed, then is it acceptable under Jewish law to smoke the raw stuff?
 
The OU is on uncertain ground when it comes to certifying pot for recreational purposes. It refuses to certify cigarettes on the basis they serve no useful purpose and are harmful to health, even though tobacco is, like marijuana, an inherently kosher plant. But it is willing to put its trademark U in a circle on many kinds of alcohol, not only wine which can serve ritual purposes, but also gin and vodka that, to my knowledge, are hardly part of Jewish traditions. What difference is there, after all, between a taking a toke of Hawaiian Haze, a leading Colorado marijuana strain, and knocking down a shot of OU-certified Glenmorangie Original single malt whisky? Managing the boundary between and ancient religion and the modern world certainly is a very tricky business.