Macalester College DigitalCommons@Macalester College Religious Studies Honors Projects Religious Studies Department Spring 5-1-2013 When Kashrut is Not "Kosher": The oP st Postville Struggle Over Eating, Ethics and American Jewish Identity Rebecca Z. Hornstein Macalester College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors Part of the Jewish Studies Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Hornstein, Rebecca Z., "When Kashrut is Not "Kosher": The osP t Postville Struggle Over Eating, Ethics and American Jewish Identity" (2013). Religious Studies Honors Projects. Paper 11. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/11 This Honors Project - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Religious Studies Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Religious Studies Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. When Kashrut is not “Kosher”: The Post Postville Struggle Over Eating, Ethics and American Jewish Identity Rebecca Hornstein Advisor: James Laine Religious Studies April 11, 2013 1 Introduction: A Desecration of God’s Name Before the spring of 2008 the town of Postville, Iowa was best known as a setting of unlikely multicultural interactions many saw as only possible in the American heartland. Since the late 1980s, the tiny Midwestern town had been the site of Agriprocessors, the country’s largest kosher 1 meatpacking and processing plant. A group of Haredi 2 Jews belonging to the Lubuvitcher sect of Chassidic 3 Judaism ran and operated Agriprocessors. Through their ownership of the plant the ultra-Orthodox Jews, and their mainly Guatemalan and Mexican immigrant workforce, lived alongside Iowans who had called Postville home for generations.