When it comes to the crunch... my matzah must come from Leeds
SHOVING MY way through the prePassover crowds in Brookline, the Golders Green of Massachusetts, and into the Butcherie supermarket, I didn’t want shmurah matzah, handmade in Brooklyn or Jerusalem and toasted by an amateur pyromaniac. I didn’t want spelt matzah from Streit or Manischewitz, either, even if it does save you from digestive trauma. I wanted the real thing, and my faith was wavering — I was worried that the supply-chain crisis might make this year different from all other years. But there they were: the pride of Leeds, a stack of red Rakusen’s.
I put six boxes in my trolley while I could. There is fierce competition for the annual shipment of Rakusen’s. There are South African Jews in the neighbourhood. I know this because the Butcherie also has homemade kosher Boerewors, a spiced spiral sausage, in the freezer cabinet. They probably eat it year-round on Rakusen’s matzos. Not this year, my friends.
It’s not true that Rakusen’s is the only matzah to taste of something. One of the top American brands tastes like wet newspaper. It is so soft and fluffy that it can be eaten without teeth; perhaps they know their demographic too well. Another top American brand has a mouth feel and taste so unnatural and dusty that I suspect it is shipped in the cardboard boxes our cat litter comes in. No other matzah has the crunch and smoky crispness of a Rakusen’s.
Connoisseurs of cheese and wine will tell you that terroir makes all the difference. Is it Yorkshire Water’s peat-rich moorland reservoirs that give Rakusen’s their depth of flavour, or the British wheat? Perhaps it’s the extra water-cooling unit that, the box tells me, “maintains a constant low temperature for dough”. Perhaps it’s the “exclusively designed mixer” unique to Rakusen’s, which ensures a “perfect mix with no flour residue” and “no heat development on beaters and bowls”. My theory is that Leo Rakusen of blessed memory knew that he’d have to build a matzah fit for Anglo-Jewry, a wafer that could stand up to stresstesting by slabs of mature cheddar and lashings of Branston Pickle.
“Any questions for the rabbi?” the box asked. “You can email him.” So I did. While I await his reply, I’d like to thank the importers, Fortis Foods of Sacramento, California.
THE LATEST ANTI-ZIONIST JEW
I had questions for another rabbi this week, but he refused my invitation for an interview.
In 2015, Brant Rosen founded Tzedek Chicago as “America’s first anti-Zionist synagogue”. It isn’t. There are uncounted anti-Zionist synagogues among the Haredim, and the number must be growing as fast as their numbers are. Also, anti-Zionism has a long history in America. The American Reform movement was formally opposed to Zionism until the 1930s, though prominent rabbis such as Stephen S. Wise and Judah Leon Magnes disagreed. It took the Shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel to persuade Reform that Zionism was “fully within the spirit and purpose of Reform Judaism”.
And not forgetting the utopian
socialist tradition of the Bundists, and the Autonomists, though they are indeed mostly forgotten these days. The Autonomist dream of a Yiddishspeaking Jewish province somewhere in Eastern Europe went into a ditch along with its spokesman, the historian Simon Dubnow, courtesy of the Germans and their Latvian accomplices in 1941. A park in Tel Aviv is named after Dubnow. Oh, the irony.
Rabbi Rosen used to be a Reconstructionist, but he parted ways with his congregation in 2008, when Israel had the temerity to respond to rocket attacks by going into Gaza. Since then, Rosen has progressed, if that is the word, to what we might call his Deconstructionist phase. He is fully within the spirit and purpose of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), a farleft group that campaigns for BDS and wishes to destroy the “apartheid” State of Israel.
Rosen says he wants his congregation to disavow “settler colonialism” and immerse itself in its local culture; Israeli culture, he says, is a “Western colonial culture”. Wait til he finds out about America. The church in whose basement Tzedek Chicago meet is, like everything else in America, built on “stolen land” by “settler colonialists”. As a man of principle, he should deport himself back to the Pale of Settlement
forthwith. And stop talking in the settler-colonial language of English.
Rabbi Rosen is positively overflowing with love for humanity — with one exception. The milk of his human kindness curdles pretty fast when it comes to his fellow Jews. He describes pre-Exilic Judaism in the language of the Nazis, as a “blood and soil tradition”.
He calls American Jewish organizations a “beast” that is working “in tandem with the State of Israel”. A “perverse Faustian bargain” with Christian power was, he reckons, “at the core of Zionism all along”.
Jews as Nazis. Governments subverted by the secret machinations of the “beast”. Perversion and Faust: Rabbi Rosen paints Jews in satanic imagery. In attributing cosmological wickedness to the State of Israel, groups such as JVP are the Neturei Karta of the left.
Rabbi Rosen may be suffering from the condition that Philip Roth called “Jew-on-the brain”. He certainly seems keen to share it. So keen, in fact, that Tzedek Chicago solicits non-Jews as members and shows a boldly innovative approach to the liturgical calendar. This year, it ran its Passover seder via Zoom, three days early. It invited Saeb Erekat’s niece, a Palestinian American “activist” against Israel, to speak on Yom Kippur.
This may read like parody. It sounds like Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, in which a character called Philip Roth is tormented by another character who pretends to be called Philip Roth and uses his authority as a successful novelist to promulgate Diasporism, the exodus of Jews from the State of Israel and back to Eastern Europe, there to engage in cute Yiddishism and inspiring displays of political helplessness. But this is no parody.
These impulses have always been on the radical margins of modern Jewish life. Their increasing prevalence is one of the realities of current Jewish American life. The hatefulness with which they are expressed reflects the declining civility of American life in general, and the attenuation of secular Jewish life in particular into woozy sentimentality.
This is the last gasp of assimilation in its most liberal forms. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly popular on campus. Most young Jews, like most young Americans, have a limited grasp of history. Most young Jews, despite all those synagogue dues and Hebrew lessons, are in religious terms semi-literate at best. They are sitting ducks for intimidation and indoctrination, so of course many of them will elect not to be a target. They are not the first Jews to side with their enemies, and they will not be the last. The numbers of potential converts to the cult of JVP will only rise in the coming years. The assimilation of America’s secular Jews, and the leftward drift of the universities, is multiplying the ranks of the “As-a-Jew” Jews who specialise in denouncing other Jews.
For a man who preaches peace, Rabbi Rosen seems awfully negative. He is disgusted that Israel has become “the functional centre of Jewish life”, so he elevates anti-Zionism into Tzedek Chicago’s catechism of principles — and mirrors the institutionalised Zionism which he hates. He complains that Israel and the Jewish American “beast” speak on behalf of all Jews, then speaks on behalf of all of us, in the name of a miniscule minority. In his passion, he becomes what he hates.
I don’t dispute his right to say it, or that he is the heir to a long tradition. But the extremity of his attitudes is revealing. Rabbi Rosen and the other sages of the JVP Rabbinical Council take a tougher line on Israel than the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. They are willing to collaborate discreetly, while he wishes to expunge the Jewish state from the face of the earth. With friends like Brant Rosen…
He takes a tougher line on Israel than the rulers of Pakistan