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The Old Testament forbids the eating of animals with cloven hooves or who do not chew their cud, or fish without scales, and of course, there is also that clause about not boiling a calf in its mother’s milk. But it is fairly bare-bones in its instructions beyond that. The more tortuous rituals of
kashrut
—like the separate sets of dishes, what foods may follow others, the sanitizing of sullied implements by burying them in the dirt, etc.—are all
later extrapolations of the Babylonian Talmud, the multivolume text of rabbinical commentary.

The Talmud is composed almost entirely of dispute, and the arguments were still raging several centuries later and many oceans away when, in 1885, a rabbi named Kaufmann Kohler authored a call for the modernization of American Judaism in a document that came to be known as the Pittsburgh Platform, Article 4 of which states: “We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.”

This rejection of what was dismissed as mere “kitchen Judaism,” had surely found fertile soil two years previously when, for the 1883 banquet of the graduating class of rabbis from the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, the menu included clams, shrimp, and frog legs. Now widely considered to have been nothing more than the mother of all caterers’ errors, the mythology of the “
treyf
banquet” was taken up as a clarion call by the burgeoning Reform movement and such men as Kohler and his komrades.

Internecine disagreements among an interpretive rabbinate are emblematic of the interrogative nature of Judaism itself. We are a questioning people. Why shouldn’t something as beyond-the-pale forbidden like the eating of pork become normative among people who fully and proudly identify as Jewish? It can be quite confusing to the outside observer to see Jews whose adherence to the laws of
kashrut
has all the logic and elasticity of quantum physics. Jen C., a freakishly gifted voice-over artist, able to switch from a guttural Queens housewife to a spot-on
Yoko Ono without even taking a breath, might have developed such versatility growing up in a “Conservadox” household. “My father came from an Orthodox background and my mother was Reform. But he wanted to maintain certain aspects of his Orthodoxy, so we were sent to super-crazy Orthodox yeshiva, but he also liked eating butterfly shrimp in Chinatown on Sunday night. At yeshiva, the worst thing you could possibly say was, ‘I saw you eating a ham sandwich.’ That was the ultimate bus taunt. We had a kosher home befitting any Orthodox Jewish family. The kitchen was kosher,
but
if the Chinese food was brought straight from the car to the coffee table in front of the TV and eaten on paper plates, then that was okay.” This doesn’t even take into account the C.s’ all-bets-are-off “ConservaForm” beach house where anything went. “I remember I was five or six and I was telling my grandmother a story that somehow involved me eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s not kosher,’ so I changed it to a plain ham sandwich. She was horrified and I quickly said, ‘No, no! It wasn’t ham, it looked like ham but it wasn’t!’ I was covering.”

A Red-diaper baby, raised according to the precepts of good old-fashioned pinko socialism, becomes an entertainment lawyer, successful enough that he can afford to send his son to that august private institution, the Trinity School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. One day, the man’s eight-year-old son comes home and says, “Dad, we learned about the name of our school today. It’s called Trinity because there’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
”

Horrified, the father grabs his son by the shoulders before he can continue and, shaking him, says vehemently, “Joshua, get this straight: there is only
one
God! Who does not exist!
”

———

For other, more progressive Jews, religiosity in all its opiate forms was anathema. The modern dispensation of the Pittsburgh Platform was no different from, nor any more attractive than, the dusty pages of the Talmud with its incomprehensible and inapplicable Aramaic. Both smacked uncomfortably of the clergy, and neither was going to bring about justice or help create a new society, of which
treyf
-eating was one demonstrable aspect.

It’s hardly a maverick position to take; any revolution that includes a good carbonara is an awfully easy rampart to storm. It certainly helps that pork chops are so delicious, just one of the heavenly foods that come from what Homer Simpson calls “a wonderful, magical animal.” But that’s not the whole story. Attendant to all of this is the politically romantic and also very real notion that every part of a pig “but the squeal,” as they say, can be eaten and used. Pigs have sustained countless cultures throughout history. The proletariat-nourishing utility of the pig made it the ideal animal for fiery young utopians (back before such activism also comprised the emancipation of other species). Pork served as the ultimate demarcation from the hidebound small-mindedness and superstition of the shtetl. Let Him show Himself and strike them down for eating
treyf
, if He was so g.d. tangible. Jewish radicals of the Bundist labor movement used to hold Yom Kippur Balls. The gatherings featured music; dancing; mocking Yiddish parodies of Kol Nidre, the penitential prayer at the heart of the holiest day in the Jewish calendar; and most transgressively, food. One such ball in 1890, organized by Russian Jewish anarchists in Philadelphia, was to pointedly include “pork-eating.” At the eleventh hour it was called off, in deference to Sabato Morais, that city’s Orthodox rabbi who had that year
successfully mediated a strike by the cloak makers. In his Holocaust memoir,
I Shall Live
, Henry Orenstein reminisces about how before the war in his Polish town a small but vocal contingent of “nonbelievers,” no more than fifty, would commit the ultimate sin by eating pork on Yom Kippur. Every autumn, the gentile butcher, Mr. Krasnapolski, would ask the author, “Tell me … when is it, this day of the year when Jews are allowed to eat ham?”

Here would probably be a good place to say a brief word about crustaceans because, with the possible exception of the Cajuns, no one loves shrimp as deeply or as truly as the Jews (almost nothing fills me with a twingier regret than my recently determined allergy to the creatures). But the avid consumption of shellfish has its relatively recent roots in the New World Jewish habitat of the beach, and the country-club-striver weddings of the PhilipRothoisie. Among the many tenets of
kashrut
, it is the proscription against pork that sticks in the mind, for both Jews and Gentiles. Shellfish is nowhere near as freighted as pork. Many a Dungeness devotee would never dream of touching swine. Rabbi X has a colleague, also a prominent and respected cleric, who explains himself with, “I’ll eat shrimp. No Jew ever died refusing to eat shrimp. But pork, never. Shrimp is
treyf
, but pork is anti-Semitic.”

True enough. When I try to look up jokes about Jews eating pork, I am directed to an embarrassment of neo-Nazi sites, each boasting an exhaustive page of racist humor, with comic gems like: “Why don’t Jews eat pork? Because the Bible forbids cannibalism.” In a few keystrokes, I find myself at another website called
www.nukeisrael.com
(“exposing the Zionist lobby”),
which has a page titled “Jewish Stars Over Hollywood: A look at the hundreds of filthy heb [sic] swine that control the U.S. entertainment business,” listing noted Hebrews like Ellen DeGeneres, who I think is a nice Christian girl from Metairie, Louisiana, and Allen Ginsberg, who probably never set foot in a movie studio in his life and whom they identify, despite his mongrel-hood, as the “all time greatest American poet.”

And yet, with all of this, I almost never feel more Jewish than in that moment just before I am about to eat pork. Allow me to horrify kosher readers when I draw a parallel between that instant and the custom of the breaking of a glass at a Jewish wedding, the perfect illustration of the Jewish worldview. In this somber evocation of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. is a reminder that all joy houses the Newtonian capacity for an equal and opposite sorrow. As a Jew Who Eats Pork, extolling the boundless perfection of the baby pig at NY Noodletown at the corner of Bowery and Bayard necessarily requires a simultaneous split second of silent acknowledgment along with my blithe rhapsody that this is meat ineluctably bound up with my grim history. Otherwise, I’d just be a guy eating pork.

Granted, the Judaism I feel connected to has always been more cultural than religious, but both are predicated on a spirit of dissent, of voluble, welcome disagreement, and an institutionalized and fiercely protected duty to question authority.

(Forgive me, one more: A grandmother playing with her five-year-old grandson on the beach is horrified when a wave comes up and swallows the child whole, dragging him out to sea. Falling to her knees, she addresses the heavens in a state of near hysteria. “Oh God, please return my beloved grandson to me and I will be your devoted supplicant forever and always.” Her entreaty heard, the sky spontaneously clears, a second wave washes up on shore and belches
forth the child, returning him unscathed, dry even. The grandmother, elated, faces the horizon once more, and says with the merest trace of impatience, “He had a hat!”)

We are all enfolded, from the protest-too-much anarchists of the nineteenth century at their Yom Kippur Balls, up to the present day with our ever-growing ranks of Buddhists, even including, heaven help us, Republicans (who really ought to know better). We are all Jews. We are the true Big Tent. It is this that I taste: the fact that I do not have to be “on the bus.” I can, in fact, stand by the side of the road with a sign that says
DOWN WITH BUSES!
—or, more authentically phrased:
BUSES? FEH!
—and still be able to claim full and proud membership. Which I do, emphatically.

Even when it is an identity foisted upon me by others. A few years back, my first book was translated into German and I was flown over for a tour. I don’t kid myself: the primary reason for their interest in me was precisely because I am Jewish, our extirpated culture being somewhat fetishized in Germany today. I was a phantom talisman, like an ivory-billed woodpecker willingly visiting the strip mall that used to be his swampy habitat, or the walking illustration of that rueful old joke about the suburbs being the place where they chopped down all the trees and then named the streets after them. I spent a week as a Professional Jew.

The fetishization cut both ways. With as much Stockholm syndrome as the next guy, I am not without my own febrile fantasies of racial purity and historical redress (known in the common parlance as a Thing for Blonds). My friend Dan, Catholic but with the handsome Black Irish dark hair and eyes of a hot yeshiva student, filled my head with stories of his many conquests when he lived in Berlin. Conquests he didn’t even have
to work at. Apparently the merest possibility that they were bedding down for some restitutionary, penitential face-sucking with a genuine Jewish American boy had German men throwing themselves at him. My charms, such as they were, seemed more historical than erotic. The Germanized Yiddish I spoke to make myself understood to hotel clerks and taxi drivers was met with what can only be described as delight, and a kind of wistful nostalgia for a time no one really remembered anymore, which invariably led to the time none of them seemed capable of forgetting. Every conversation I had began precisely the same way: “How does it feel for you to be here?”

I told them that I was very happy to be in Germany, and indeed I was, although a distinct impediment to comfort never left me, as if I were spending my time walking in shoes of slightly different heights. In the Berlin Zoo, for example, even I, who could not be described as an animal lover, was unnerved by attitudes that seemed to have been barely updated since 1844, when they opened the place. The enclosures and structures were small, rickety, and archaically anthropomorphic. The animals were housed like the humans of their respective countries, the prey adopting the customs of the local predators. The wild boars lived in a small thatched cottage, much like the people who hunt wild boars might have had in the Vienna Woods. The rams made their home atop a fake mountain in a little Tyrolean cabin with latticed windows. It looked just like the kind of place where Heidi and her grandfather might have lived, if Heidi and her grandfather had been curly-horned ungulates who shit indiscriminately all over their
schloss
.

Strangest of all, however, was the fur rug on the floor of the vulture cage. I swear it, a fur rug in shades of mottled brown and gray with a deep, ragged, sexy pile that Barbarella might have favored. It seemed an odd choice for an outdoor space, especially
an outdoor animal enclosure. Approaching the bars, it became clear that this luxurious carpet was actually a large pile of dead rats and weasels. Some caring zookeeper had pre-killed a multitude of the critters, thoughtfully splitting them open from stem to sternum. A bald-headed bird eyed me casually as he picked at one of these rodent tacos. Giving his beak an upward jerk, a tenacious rat tendon stretched and finally snapped: the bored cashier with her chewing gum.

Morally neutral and completely natural though the food chain may be, and perhaps I’m overestimating the fame of Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece
Maus
, where the Jewish mice were represented as precisely the vermin the Nazis described them to be, but I can’t help feeling that if
I
ran the zoo—to quote Dr. Seuss—especially the Berlin Zoo, I would be extra careful about not leaving a pile of corpses lying around.

I take the U-Bahn, the efficient (duh) subway out to Hallesches Tor, to the Jewish Museum or, as it seems to be known, Architect Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. All around the basement level, which is a series of off-kilter hallways dedicated to the Holocaust, are small notice cards printed with explanation for why Architect Daniel Libeskind designed things in the way that he did. Statements along the lines of,
As you travel the Axis of Exile, Mr. Libeskind hopes that through disorientation comes insight
. His desire to justify his choices seems reasonable: this was a lucrative and very public gig. But the thinking behind the oddly funhouse atmosphere down here is completely opaque to me. I’m hard-pressed to see why the Holocaust needs to be gussied up with corridors from
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
. It’s fairly terrible and gripping all on its own. And there’s a creepy celebrity-chef quality to Libeskind’s omnipresence.
Mr. Libeskind
hopes you can detect the top note of Tahitian vanilla in the beef cheeks with razor-clam foam
.