"The Almighty Salad": The Yiddish Press Reacts to the Promises and Threats of Vegetarianism

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Abstract

The Yiddish press of the early twentieth century looked to a future in which the world, in the words of Morris Winchevsky, would grow younger. Among the Yiddish speakers in the United States before the Second World War, as in the old country, Socialism, Anarchism, Zionism, and Aguda (an Orthodox political movement founded as a reaction against the other contemporary revolutionary Jewish movements) offered wide-ranging visions of a better future that Jews might bring about for themselves. Some Jews seeking to hasten a kinder, more rational, or healthier future found a cause in vegetarianism. Sholem-Aleichem, in a letter to the editor of The Vegetarian Idea, compared the vegetarian movement to the cause of Esperanto, lauding both as harbingers of the future while poking gentle fun at the idealism and heartbreaking naivete of both movements. “I am utterly convinced that very soon, nu, let’s say in a thousand or two thousand years, all people will be vegetarian, all will speak one language, Esperanto, and all will observe one faith, Judaism, of course.”

While some writers explicitly linked radical eating to radical thinking, many otherwise revolutionary journals and newspapers such as the Forward and Freiheit were more likely to look upon growing enthusiasm for vegetarianism as a threat to continuity in traditional Jewish cooking. Yiddish newspapers published serious articles addressing the perceived dangers of a vegetarian diet and biting satire poking fun at the ridiculousness of vegetarianism.

Jewish foodways of the early twentieth century responded to new technologies, new ideologies and the desire of a community to try out new foods in an effort to become more elegant, more modern, and more American. This paper will interrogate the reactions of Yiddish writers and editors to changing Jewish foodways in the context of the crises of the early twentieth century.

Author

• Eve Jochnowitz, New York University