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Journal of World Philosophies Book Reviews/193

Jewish Vegans between Scholarship and Activism ______

YOAV MEYRAV Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Hamburg, Germany ([email protected])

Jacob Ari Labendz and Shmuly Yanklowitz, eds. Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism: Studies and New Directions. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2019, pp. xxiii + 348. ISBN 978-1-4384-7361-1.

The collected volume Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism: Studies and New Directions aspires to explore the growing phenomenon of Jews adopting a meat-free way of life from different perspectives and disciplines. Despite a number of standout contributions, it does little to advance scholarship in the field. The present review first discusses the various articles included in the volume and then reflects on the problematic editorial approach that hinders its enormous scholarly potential.

Key words: Judaism; vegetarianism; veganism; animal rights; activism; North American Jews

The intersection between Judaism and veg’ism1 has huge academic potential from various different perspectives. For one thing, the whole course of human history in biblical eyes can be interpreted as if it is bookended between a vegan Garden of Eden and a vegan End of Days. In addition, Jewish law is full of regulations concerning the use/abuse of animals in the contexts of labor, consumption, enjoyment, and worship. Moreover, with the rapid growth and success of vegan movements worldwide and the vast theoretical literature that accompanies it, it is fascinating to explore the intersection and dynamics between universalist and particularistic modes of argumentation in this context. On top of this, the dominance and success of vegan movement(s) in Israel in the past ten years is a highly complex phenomenon expressing the immanent tensions and contradictions within Jewish-dominant Israeli society and its various components and competing ideologies. To this short list, many other perspectives can be added. This state of affairs certainly calls for extensive study—from the perspectives noted here as well as from many others—and the present collection aspires to address several of them in various disciplines and contexts. Unfortunately, aside from a few notable contributions, it does not do much to further the study of Jewish veg’ism, for reasons I discuss in the last section of this review. However, in order to avoid creating unnecessary bias on the part of the reader, I will first discuss the individual papers according to their running order. After an introduction (to which I return below), the book is divided into two main parts, “Studies” and “New Directions,” followed by a report about Jewish veg movements in North America and an afterword. The “Studies” section starts strongly with Beth A. Berkowitz’s “The Slipperiness of Animal Suffering: Revisiting the Talmud’s Classical Treatment.” Berkowitz offers a beautiful reading of Talmudist interpretations of biblical laws against animal suffering, which seem to become less and less interested in how the animal suffers and more in how it affects humans as Talmudic discussions progress. Berkowitz surveys traditional approaches to this issue and identifies their respective weaknesses, only to argue that the gradual marginalization of the suffering animal from Talmudic discussion is itself an expression of the threat of distraction from animal suffering. This is a fascinating and highly original hermeneutical move by a scholar who knows her sources very well. I hope Berkowitz’s position receives further elaboration (and defense) in future research. Unfortunately, this level of analytical subtlety is rare within the confines of this volume.

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Next comes Nick Underwood’s “Vegetarianism as Jewish Culture and Politics in Interwar Europe,” a confusing paper that examines and attempts to contextualize three distinct Jewish vegetarian moments: Fania Lewando’s (1865–1941) vegetarian restaurant in 1930s Vilna2; Jewish responses to legislation against kashrut (the set of dietary prescriptions in Jewish law) in Nazi Germany; and Jewish cuisine in France in the late 1920s. This is all very interesting, but the connections are hasty (how does Lewando’s restaurant “catalyze a new Jewish dietary and national[!] identity” [34]?), the interpretative categories are unclear (how do we know that a restaurant serving “lacto-vegetarian” meals [39] doesn’t simply mean that it is dairy rather than meat orientated—a fundamental distinction in kashrut?), and some obvious questions are not asked (did the compulsion to give up meat due to anti-kashrut laws affect Jews’ conception of animal suffering or their dietary preferences?). It has too many generalizations, jumps too swiftly from topic to topic, and there are not enough meaningful takeaways. It would have been better to focus on one of the various topics discussed and develop it more patiently. In the field of literary studies, we find the contribution of Irad ben Isaak (“‘I am a Vegetarian’: The Vegetarianism of Melech Ravitch”), based on the author’s MA thesis (in Hebrew). For the most part, the contribution is anecdotal and almost caricaturizes the image of Ravitch (1893–1976), a central figure in twentieth-century Yiddish literature and journalism. This is a shame, because the author’s excellent MA thesis, which is available online,3 contains a much more nuanced treatment and better situates Ravitch’s persona and poetry within his intellectual climate and literary career. Of course, reprinting the thesis in its entirety would be beyond the scope of the volume, but a different balance between overview and analysis would have benefited this chapter. Hadas Marcus (“Farm Animal Welfare in Jewish Art and Literature”) offers a random survey of Jewish and Israeli authors and painters (some veg’s, some not) with minimal commentary and some interesting anecdotes, but nothing in her paper suggests new insights about the figures she discusses or whether there is some common thread that connects them (besides being Jewish). They are all lumped together according to the author’s tastes and vegan agenda.4 Besides some subjective impressions, this paper does not offer much in terms of literary criticism or art theory and has only a handful of references to academic literature on the subject. As the only paper in this collection that represents art theory, it is somewhat disappointing. Michael Croland’s “Vegetarianism and Veganism among Jewish Punks” does not fare better. While it is full of interesting and sometimes entertaining stories about Jewish punks, the connection to Judaism is mostly limited to the fact that all punks discussed are Jewish (the connection between punk and veg’ism already benefits from a rich literature). Croland’s paper is more of a survey than an academic paper, sometimes even content with listing punks that happen to be Jewish (see, for example, p. 102). Like other authors in this volume, Croland does not distinguish between “Jewish” and “Israeli,” treating Israeli punk musicians and Jewish punk musicians outside of Israel collectively. Adrienne Krone’s contribution, “Opening the Tent: Jewish Veganism as an Expression of an Ecological Form of Judaism,” suffers from several problems. First, the brief surveys of Jewish and vegan identities it offers are problematic, because the author uncritically adopts a “religious studies lens” (119) to veganism without reflection about the justification for this, rendering the whole exposition arbitrary rather than productive. Second, the focal point of the paper is the Jewish communal farming movement, which is not a vegetarian or vegan movement at all. In fact, of the two people Krone decided to interview, one actually became vegan because of the shock of experiencing kosher slaughter in one of these farms. How all this coheres into a meaningful discussion is not clear to me. Victoria Greenstone and Shlomi Shmuel offer an insufficiently developed study, from a linguistic point of view, about “Jewish Perceptions of Animal Suffering.” The research question, per the authors, is “to clarify the meaning of suffering, specifically animal suffering” in a Jewish

Journal of World Philosophies Book Reviews/195 context, and the motivation for this is to better understand the growth of Jewish veganism. But how this specific question serves as a means to this end is not explained. The conclusion, according to the authors, and based on an admittedly non-representative sample of questionnaires, is that “the Jewish understanding of animal suffering was not a categorical refusal of certain experiences (such as emotional duress or pain) but a call for moderation” (147). The authors were surprised to find that elements of Jewish religiosity (especially kashrut) were completely absent from the subjects’ responses. This raises the question of relevance of Jewish identity to one’s approach to animal suffering, a question that cannot be answered without appealing to non-Jewish subjects as well to provide some control. The authors do not bring up this option, but instead call for “larger and more representative samples of Jews around the world” (149).5 How does all this advance our understanding of the growth of Jewish veganism, which was the original aim? The “new directions” section opens with David Mevorach Seidenberg’s “Veganism and Covenantalism: Contrasting and Overlapping Moralities,” which offers an interpretation of the biblical categories of dominion and covenant in an attempt to introduce a positive Jewish morality of animal treatment that goes beyond common traits in animal rights discourse, which tends to be defined negatively with respect to what one should avoid. Instead, Seidenberg offers to take a serious look at actively sharing the world and its cultivation with the animals in the spirit of the biblical covenant. This is a highly thought-provoking idea that should be explored further, because it offers a framework for a meaningful relationship between animals and humans instead of simply “leaving the animals alone.” Seidenberg’s suggestion is fascinating, and his approach seems to be a promising start for an organic Jewish-veg theology, which may be a good way to avoid the tensions between other justifications without trivializing the Jewish element. Reading this contribution alongside Krinsky’s paper (discussed below) is a rewarding experience that shows how fruitful the engagement between Judaism and veg’ism can be when done properly. Geoffrey D. Claussen’s “Musar and Jewish Veganism” is a confusing piece. On the one hand, the author provides a lucid explanation of the principles governing the nineteenth-century Lithuanian Musar movement and the high ethical bar it sets, to which the author is ostensibly committed. Claussen also does much to elucidate the movement’s demand for empathy towards non-human animals and its spiritual meaning. Still, the author acknowledges that the Musar movement is not a veg movement and does not preach avoiding consumption of animal products. No conceptual link between Musar and a veg’ist approach is offered, save the fact that it inspires the author’s personal choice, as he notes at the beginning of his contribution. Richard H. Schwartz and David Sears’s piece, “The Vegetarian Teachings of Rav Kook,” contains nearly the exact same text as the blog post upon which it is based,6 effectively exhibiting no editorial control (and making one wonder about the efficacy of the anonymous review process). The paper itself comprises of a set of replies to anti-veg critiques that rely on Rav Kook (1865– 1934)—one of the most important rabbis in modern times, who advocated a vision of gradual Jewish movement towards vegetarianism—in order to promote veg’ism. However, the anti-Kook comments’ source(s) is/are never indicated, and the responses are weakly argued and highly speculative. On a positive note, it is pretty much the only place in the book where someone cares to respond to—let alone simply acknowledge—anti-veg arguments. Alan D. Krinsky’s contribution, “Relevant and Irrelevant Distinctions: Speciesism, Judaism, and Veganism,” is an exciting piece. Krinsky argues convincingly that since Judaism is fundamentally speciesist, Jewish veg’ism cannot be built upon an anti-speciesist worldview, which is one of the most dominant justifications for veg’ism, owing to the works of Peter Singer, which are neatly presented and analyzed. This approach is provocative, but also highly productive. Like Seidenberg’s paper, Krinsky understands—and thoughtfully communicates to the reader—that if one wants to develop a Jewish veg’ism, one must find a way to make it work with Jewish tradition instead of reducing it to worldviews with which it does not necessarily harmonize, or at least work much harder to achieve this harmony. This is a challenge, indeed, but one that can only do good

Journal of World Philosophies Book Reviews/196 to Jewish veg self-determination. But perhaps Krinsky goes too far for the editors, because they— in a somewhat comical twist—take extra care in apologizing on his behalf (in the author’s bio section) that “despite the arguments he makes in his chapter, Alan is indeed a vegan” (333). Shmuly Yanklowitz’s chapter, “A Morally Generative Tension: Conflicting Jewish Commitments to Humans and Animals,” is not very clear concerning its objective. Its first half consists of a highly informative history of legislation for animal rights in the USA. Its second half is a summary of various attitudes to animals in Jewish sources—most of which are already present, again and again, in many other parts of the book—concluding that “Jewish ethics offer not absolutes but a host of conflicting values that must be carefully navigated and balanced” (262). (This conclusion is somewhat banal, as it seems to apply to nearly any ethical system.) The chapter ends with a short—too short—discussion, which aspires to connect the first two parts by suggesting to employ Jewish heritage for the sake of “pushing for stronger legislation” to “protect and grant rights to animals” (263). But why should USA legislators see Jewish heritage as relevant for legislation about animal rights? And what does this have to do with veg’ism? The author, at the end of his contribution, notes that “little doubt is left that an ethical vegan diet should be viewed as most morally optimal for all who recognize the sanctity of all life” (263). This position is, of course, not necessarily Jewish or even religious, and while I personally agree, I do not think that this is so obvious that no argument need be given. Sherry F. Colb’s contribution, “Linking Judaism and Veganism in Darkness and in Light,” also suffers from citing too many Jewish sources that have been cited ad nauseum in this volume (not the author’s fault, but the editors’). Nevertheless, it contains two highly illuminating insights that warrant further study and form an interesting link to Labendz’s contribution that follows. First, Colb brings to the fore the traumatic experience of dehumanization that is passed on from Holocaust survivors to their second- and third-generation descendents as a first-person experience of what it is like to be considered less than human. The ability to empathize with animals, as a human being that experienced degradation, is as fascinating as it is disturbing, and for me, as a grandson of Holocaust survivors, rings a particularly familiar bell. This common experience is far more intimate and far less sensationalist than Bashevis Singer’s oft-cited (including in this volume) dictum about Treblinka being animals’ eternal experience. Colb’s insight offers a radically different avenue for Jewish veg’ism than examining the Jewish canon, and one which warrants further exploration. Second, Colb’s stress on Jewish consciousness about food is productive from the ethnographical point of view. Colb rightly points out that growing up in a kosher home makes one aware of what one eats from a very early age, and this food literacy does not go away even if one loses faith. Finally, Jacob Ari Labendz’s “Jewish Veganism as an Embodied Practice: A Vegan Agenda for Cultural Jews” is a captivating read that attempts to explain veg’ism among American Jews as a cultural phenomenon and as a way for contemporary Jews to come to terms with their identity. The author openly states that this has barely a religious element, and instead ties in his story with the history of American Jewry as a social entity. Labendz and Colb’s papers are first person accounts that nevertheless seem to be representational, and the questions they raise about veg’ism and Jewish identity in a non-religious context call for a study of this sort on a larger scale. In the final part of the book, Sarah Chandler and Jeffrey Cohan offer a report about Jewish vegan and vegetarian movements in North America. Despite being a modest “report,” this part of the book is in fact highly illuminating not only because of the information it provides, but also because it effectively contextualizes the entire volume as—more than anything else—a product of these movements. In this respect, the book reveals itself as its own case study. In his short afterword, Aaron S. Gross offers an eloquent framework for reflecting about the coherence, possibility, and organicity of “Jewish veg’ism” in the context of Jewish culture, religion, and history, creating space for discussion rather than pretending to know all the answers.

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Gross’s contribution should have been the foreword to this volume and a required reading for many of its authors. Discussion

While the book is full of information in different, sometimes arbitrary cases of Jewish veg’ism, the level of analysis it displays is on the whole disappointing and extremely unbalanced. A few contributions contain top-tier research, others not so much, and still others should not have published in an academic setting in the first place and would have been better off in other venues. A more careful screening of contributors and a more hands-on approach on the part of the editors (and the publishing house, and the peer reviewers) would have been expected. However, this volume’s flaws are more fundamental, and I will attempt to explain why by tackling it as a whole. For all practical purposes, and besides a few exceptions, this is not a volume that studies Jewish veg’ism, but a volume that utilizes a scholarly arena to promote it, with a heavy leaning towards North American Jewry and its mainly Ashkenazi roots. The editors, to their credit, are open about both these points.7 The North American bias could have been easily dealt with by simply naming the volume Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism in North America. The deeper problem is the delicate interplay between activism and scholarship, which ought to be handled with extra care. The editors know this very well, as they note in the introduction:

Without reservation, we hope for this volume to advance our common cause and help construct Jewish veganism as a part of our world. Although we have remained committed to the standards of academic research and publishing, we also conceive of this volume as an act of structural activism (xiii).

They also cite David Mevorach Seidenberg’s warning (xii) “against the tendencies to make ‘superficial’ cases” for Jewish veg’ism (it is not surprising therefore that Seidenberg’s contribution is one of this volume’s standouts). But the editors do not abide to this commitment, nor do they adhere to this warning, and as a result the present volume does too little to deepen the scholarly engagement with Jewish veg’ism and functions more often than not as an echo chamber. The “structural activism” approach amounts to borderline dogmatism given the volume’s general disinterest in challenging its own assumptions, not only about Judaism and veg’ism, but also about their compatibility. As I have tried to show, in the few cases where such a challenge is given space, the reading becomes instantly more rewarding. But this is not merely a problem of being uncritical toward one’s own worldview; it is also a misrepresentation of the world. A reader of this book who is not familiar with Jewish religion might be misled to think that the connection between Jewish religion and veg’ism is a given and wonder why on earth there is a Jew in the world who is still not veg. On the contrary, the question, for many practicing Jews—if it ever comes up at all—is not whether Jewish law can prescribe veg’ism, but rather whether it at all permits it. (This question would also be formulated completely differently for Conservative, Orthodox, and Reform Jews—a distinction not made in this book at all despite its high relevance for North American Jewry.) The vast majority of practicing Jews are meat-eaters, and several Jewish commandments in the Bible ostensibly prescribe harming animals, either through sacrifice or through direct consumption (and the pleasure involved in it). This is not to say, of course, that a case for this cannot be made from the perspective of Jewish law. It certainly can, and perhaps should, but this is still very much an uphill, perhaps even a quixotic battle. The fact remains that defending veg’ism from the point of view of Jewish law is not an easy task. (I return to this point momentarily.) One can reply, of course, that this argument is irrelevant in the context of Judaism as a social/communal category rather than a religious category. Why should non-religious Jews care about the defensibility of their veg’ism from the point of view of Jewish law? I agree. They

Journal of World Philosophies Book Reviews/198 shouldn’t. In fact, one valuable lesson this volume successfully teaches is the possibility to conceptualize veg’ism as a vehicle for reinforcing a Jewish identity independent of religious concerns. What is more, one can be perfectly content in deriving inspiration from selected Jewish sources that can be appropriated for one’s choice of a veg life. Despite this, and even though for all practical purposes this has absolutely no bearing on the validity of their veganism as a life choice, the authors of the volume all too often fail to make this distinction and endorse without reservation a very specific interpretation of key Jewish texts that result in too smooth a connection between Judaism and veg’ism. In the more theoretical parts, several authors are content with repeating a closed set of Jewish sources that were originally compiled in Richard Schwartz’s pioneering Judaism and Vegetarianism, originally published in 1982, and have resurfaced in several publications since. But this quickly becomes self-defeating. Some quick research will show that every single piece of Jewish scripture or Talmudic tract that has been cited in support of veg’ism has been met with a Jewish “anti-veg” response. This amounts to a fascinating inner-Jewish debate about how to interpret Jewish sources that begs to be studied and is nonetheless not even acknowledged in this volume. Consequently, in this volume there is neither an engagement with anti-veg Jewish arguments, nor an exploration of new sources or attempts to broaden the canon. This is a shame, because whenever an attempt like this is made, everyone wins. For example, a few years ago, Asa Keysar, an Israeli Orthodox Jewish vegan, published a book in standard rabbinic format called We-lifnei ʿIwwer ha-Šalem (“The Complete ‘In the Way of the Blind,’” self-published 2018). In this book, Keysar argues that from the point of view of Jewish law, the current state and practices of the animal industry render it impermissible to consume any animal product. This argument, in itself, is not new (and has many responses). However, the sheer number of new sources Keysar lifts from rabbinic literature in support of his view is astonishing, adding a lot to the already impressive amount collected by Schwartz. Keysar’s book enjoyed a wide readership in Israel, and he has become a popular public speaker. It also sparked a lively debate, which featured careful and meticulous scrutiny conducted by Keysar’s Orthodox opponents in their attempt to discredit his views, in a discussion that keeps evolving, as well as op-eds by central rabbis in Israeli mainstream media. This is just one example that shows how much room for development and innovation there is within Judaism in the context of veg’ism, as opposed to the (academic and activist) futility of remaining in one’s own comfort zone and ignoring the opposition it faces. Let me repeat that I am not arguing that in order to identify oneself as a Jewish veg one must adopt a specific viewpoint about Jewish law or even care about it. But the fact remains that many authors use Jewish sources uncritically and through secondhand knowledge, and consequently end up making a “superficial case for Jewish veganism,” which is precisely what this book seeks to avoid. The responsibility for this lies, more than anyone, on the shoulders of the editors, who should have properly communicated to the authors the principles governing the book, or at least minimized the overwhelming amount of repetitions it contains. To put this more conceptually: there is a wide rift between the theological/halakhic dimensions of Jewish veg’ism and the social phenomenon of Jewish vegs (not to mention the Israeli context, which is a different creature altogether, and cannot be put neatly into either of these); each of these dimensions requires different research methodologies and different modes of justification. But since these analytical categories are not sufficiently demarcated, the volume rapidly loses coherence. Jewish veg’ism means something different to each author, and not in a way that leads to fruitful tension, but in a way that causes the concept to collapse under its own weight. Along with the generally insufficient level of scholarship exhibited in many of its papers, this volume ends up promising much more than it can deliver. In a nutshell, it neither makes a compelling case for Jewish veg’ism, nor does it study it properly. Hopefully, the few valuable points that it successfully raises will be developed more carefully in future research, and subsequent publications will be more careful not to allow their activism to undermine their scholarship.8 ______Journal of World Philosophies 5 (Winter 2020): 193–199 Copyright © 2020 Yoav Meyrav. e-ISSN: 2474-1795 • http://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp • doi: 10.2979/jourworlphil.5.2.13

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Yoav Meyrav is a research associate at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies in the University of Hamburg, Germany. His studies focus on medieval Jewish philosophy, medieval Hebrew manuscripts, and Greek-into-Arabic-into-Hebrew translations.

1 Since the distinction between vegetarianism and veganism does not apply to the present review, I will borrow Aaron S. Gross’s abbreviation “veg’ism” as a term that applies to “the spectrum of plant-based diets that run from vegan to ovo-lacto vegetarian” (325). 2 Regretably, we are barely told anything about Lewando, who seems like a fascinating figure. Lewando’s cookbook has been translated into English, but even there one finds only a dearth of material about this person. See Fania Lewando, The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, trans. Eve Jochnowitz (New York: Schocken, 2015). 3 Irad Ben Isaak, “‘I am a Vegetarian’: The Vegetarianism of Melekh Ravitsch.” [In Hebrew.] MA Thesis. Tel Aviv University, 2017. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PYigxY- x594OQjyYHpUmrVxdaU5c3_f8, accessed May 19, 2020. 4 In a bizarre statement that should have been fact-checked by the editors, Marcus exemplifies the Israeli Defence Force’s pro-veg approach (a point often used to perpetuate its claim for moral superiority) by stating that vegan soldiers have “the right to refuse vaccinations if they are opposed to animal testing” (69). But this a distortion of the mere fact that Israeli soldiers have the right to refuse vaccinations, regardless of their reasons. It has absolutely nothing to do with veganism. 5 Looking at the questionnaires, they do not seem very precise. For example, like other contributions in the volume, the authors conflate Jews with Israelis. What is more, for some reason, vegetarians and pescatarians are lumped together. And also: how are the different religious categories in the Hebrew survey translated into the “yes/middle/no” format? And most baffling, it is only in a footnote that we discover that none of the “Israeli” questionnaires were eventually considered in the “statistical findings,” partly because of a “high amount of circular definitions that did not give rise to any new insights” (no example is given as to what this means), and partly because a question regarding Tza’ar Ba’aley Hayyim was misunderstood by many of the subjects (157, n. 51)—a point that could have been easily avoided with a more careful construction of the questionnaire and some preliminary research. 6 See https://www.jewishveg.org/schwartz/kook-expanded.html, accessed May 28, 2020. 7 It is commendable that the editors apologize at length for their inability to source a contribution from Jews of color. It is baffling that there is not even an apology for the complete absence of discussion of Jewish communities or figures from—to name just a few—North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, and the Balkans. The editors simply state, “More attention to Sephardi and Mizrahi frameworks would have further enriched this collection” (xiv). This sentence is, in fact, the only attention these frameworks receive in this volume. 8 I would like to warmly thank Sarah Wobick-Segev for her valuable comments and stimulating discussion when preparing this review.