The word kasher/kosher is not “universal”. Among the Neo-Aramaic speaking Jews of northern Iraq, the Arabic word, Halal with an Aramaic suffix, Halala, was used for “kasher”;and Harama for “unkasher”. Very “Kasher” meat was Halala ‘ikh pisir ghazala “As kosher as the meat of Gazelle”. The word kasher was used more for proper marital relations, as in ‘ishsha kashera “lawful wife”.

My wife recently saw an episode of the HGTV program Property Brothers that featured a couple and their kosher kitchen. The religious couple was having their kitchen remodeled, and the show explained all of the ins and outs of a kosher kitchen. She said that it was a very well done program, and that they treated the kosher angle well. The show will be rebroadcast a number of other times. Information about times of the rebroadcasts can be found here.

Question: A ritual slaughterer bought a sword from an executioner who had used it to execute people, and he gave it to a blacksmith to make it into a knife for ritual slaughter, is it permitted to use it to slaughter or not?
Answer: It is forbidden to slaughter with a knife like this since we hold that a sword is like a corpse and it transmits impurity to meat that is slaughtered with it. Although it is permitted to slaughter with it since a knife is purified through immersion.

It seems as if the solution was to immerse the knife in either a ritual bath or a body of water that was fit for immersion, and then it would be permitted to use.

Do you remember the copepods, those 1-2 mm long crustaceans that are treifing up NYC water? The above picture is an award-winning picture by Dr. Jan Michels of a copepod. Read all about the photo here. If you were wondering, it is usually transluscent and this is not its natural color.

Not to make an already controversial issue (for some) more complicated, what do you think about gelatin derived from human DNA. Green Prophet writes the following:

The latest stomach-turning development in the science of food processing is gelatin derived from human genetic material. According to this article from the American Chemical Society, scientists at the University of Chemical Technology in Beijing, China, are working on culturing human collagen genes to yeast. In this highly synthesized process, the human-DNA-laden yeast does what yeast does so well, reproducing itself many times over and making massive amounts of gelatin. The advantage in this gelatin over the conventional animal-based kind, is being able to get around allergic responses and risk of infectious diseases carried by animals, claim the Chinese scientists.

Would it be fleishig? Pareve? Or maybe just gross.

By the end of the eighteenth century about 80 percent of rural Jews in Poland-Lithuania were involved in the sale and production of liquor. According to available data, Jews comprised 94 percent of urban and at least 78.7 percent of rural tavern keepers among seven towns and fifty-one villages in Bielsk County (Podlaskie District) during this period. A centerpiece of the reform initiatives of the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian monarchs who annexed the Polish lands during this period was the elimination of the rural Jewish liquor trade, which they attempted by means of escalating concession fees and outright expulsions. Surprisingly, few rabbinic or Hasidic leaders protested these draconian measures. It appears they themselves were uncomfortable with the tavern keeping profession.

One might also want to read this selection from a famous responsum of the Maharshal (no. 72) about the lack of an obligation to cover one’s head, in which he pointed out, what was in his eyes, quite a hypocrisy.

And now I will reveal to you the disgrace of the Ashkenazim. Surely one who drinks forbidden wine (yein nesech) in a Gentile motel and eats fish cooked in their vessels and is acting strict when he believes the inn keeper that they haven’t cooked any food in this vessel, [they] are not suspected of anything and nobody doubts them, and they are treated with respect if they are rich and bossy. But one who eats food that is definitely kosher yet with an uncovered head, they are treated as if they have left the fold.

Mermaid

Long the bane of sailors, the mermaid is half-human, half-fish. Much like sirens but unlike their distant cousins the banshees, they often have the thankless job of singing to sailors to enchant them or lure them to their deaths.

Kosher? If the mermaid is Jewish, the rabbi will probably marry you.

Soloveitchik’s book is a study of the subject of yayin nesekh (or “idolatrous wine,” that is, wine that has been touched by gentiles and is therefore forbidden to Jews) as it affected the day-to-day lives of medieval German Jewry. In the author’s words, it “traces the development of halakha [Jewish law] as it relates to each stage of production, from the vat to the chalice: winemaking, transport, household use, and wine vessels and their purification.” This fascinating volume touches on two areas that are impossible to separate: halakhic research and the history of the Jews of Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages. The halakhic matters it discusses are not simple, but the author presents them in a clear fashion, such that a layman can also understand them. As a rule, the book, which includes numerous colorful maps and illustrations, is written out of a kind of delight and joyfulness that can’t help but infect the reader. Soloveitchik, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University, in New York, presents what amounts to a portrait of the everyday lives of the Jews in Ashkenaz and France in the Middle Ages.

See here for the full review.