Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
Summer 2009
ISSN
0738-2480
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Language
en-US
Abstract
In "Safe Treyf' (http://soc.qc.cuny.edu/Staff/levine/SAFE-TREYF.pdf), Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine explain how Chinese Food helped New York Jews overcome the Jewish Taboo on eating pork. Chinese Food "disguises the tabooed ingredients by cutting, chopping, and mincing them.... [It] could be adopted by rebellious Jews because the forbidden substances were so disguised that dishes did not reflexively repulse and so undermine their ability to rebel." Daphne Barak-Erez, a professor at the faculty of law at Tel Aviv University, has written a fine book in which she looks at the history of the pork taboo-but from the perspective of Israeli Jews.
This angle is quite unique. It is one thing to be a secular Jew in a country that upholds the separation of state and church. It is another thing to be a citizen in a state like Israel, where the boundaries between nationhood and religion are fluid and enigmatic. Barak-Erez's book reviews the history of the regulation of the pork industry in Israel. She argues that to the secular majority of Israelis pork was, but is no longer, "reflexively repulsive" and shows how this development is reflected in the legal history of the country. In other words, she demonstrates how, even without the intermediation of Chinese Food, the concept of "treyf' (forbidden) has become obsolete (at least for large enough sections in society) and pork consumption largely "safe."
Recommended Citation
Pnina Lahav,
Review of Outlawed Pigs: Law, Religion, and Culture in Israel
,
in
27
Law & History Review
460
(2009).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/2238
Comments
Review of Daphne Barak-Erez, Outlawed Pigs: Law, Religion, and Culture in Israel, University of Wisconsin Press (2007)