Swine Stories

Wrote a profile of TFR friend Jeffrey Yosokowitz, a kosher kid who started a site called Pork Memoirs. Check it out here:

Though drawn heavily from Jewish themes and settings, the stories are not all tales of rebellion against a verboten dietary item or a cultural taboo. There are love stories and stories about heartbreak and transgression. In one memoir, a woman encounters an ultra-Orthodox man walking plaintively down Tel Aviv’s popular Shenkin Street on the Sabbath, searching for a restaurant that serves pork. In another, a man looks back at himself as a young boy in a Newark, N.J., hospital, fending off a nurse determined to feed him a ham sandwich.

There are stories of deception and self-deception as well as tales of unlikely kindness and cruelty. Like Chinese food on Christmas, the tales bear elements of Jewish identification and affirmation. They take place in Israel and America, but also in Mali, Spain, and the Russian Far East, where tolerance and religious pluralism rank low in priority. And, strange as it may seem, the range of the narratives together create a decidedly Jewish universe.