Debbie Nathan

Kosher Food Porn

Yom Kippur is past and now we are into the five days’ preparation for Sukkot. It’s a harvest fest that also commemorates the 40 years of wandering post-Exodus, with the Jews living in temporary huts in the Sinai while God waited for everyone to die who’d picked up slave mentalities in Egypt.

Nice story, but only that — a story — according to revisionist archaeologists. Lately they’ve found evidence suggesting the Jews were plotzed in Canaan the whole time the Bible has them enslaved in Egypt, then wandering the Sinai. As reported by writer Daniel Lazare in Harper’s a few years ago, competing desert tribes from the period, including Jews, invented “wandering” and “conquest” myths to lay claim to land they’d never been kicked out of but were simply trying to hold onto, in part by spinning elaborate rationales.

One of the fruits of those rationales, literally, is the etrog, or citron. (Also known as esrog, with an “s,” among Ashkenazim of a certain age, including yours truly). Go to the Williamsburg Bridge this week and see black hats caressing the fruit in one hand and ritually waving long, green fronds (lulav) in the other. Or skip the bridge and check an article in this week’s Forward that outdoes Ben Katchor:

“This is a good year for etrogs,” said Levi Zagelbaum, a wholesaler who is president of the Esrog Headquarters Inc. in New York…“It’s not an easy business … I’m so nervous and tense that I haven’t slept for nights. I can find an etrog that I think is perfect, and someone will send it back to me because he doesn’t think so. And then I might sell it for a lot of money to someone else who thinks it’s beautiful. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

… But what determines beauty? Most agree that a beautiful etrog should be shaped like a tower, with a wider bottom and a narrower top. … there is the Chazon Ish (or Lefkowitz), which is shaped like an egg, and the Braverman strain, which has a bumpy exterior. Another type, the Kivilevitz, is a sub-strain of the Braverman. Some like etrogs that are narrow in the center, commonly referred to as “belted” etrogs…Zagelbaum himself prefers an etrog that is straight and bumpy.

Etrogs cost $50 to $100 — apiece. (Do the goyim need to know this? Is it good for the Jews?) Quite the fetish, and the commodity to boot, as evidenced by Mr. Zagelbaum’s brisk business and high anxieties. The Forward recommends a Kosher chocolatier in Park Slope, Brooklyn where one can buy jelly made from etrogs. Presumably it’s to be eaten with pate of hummingbird tongue.

Typically, an etrog is the size of a lemon (for some soft, food-porn etrog footage, click to this Youtube). At least, it was lemon sized in the shtetl. Today, there appears to be something called the Braverman fertilizer, related to the Kivilevitz hydroponic and the silicohen implant. The result: etrogs bigger than XXX-rated breasts (see second Youtube clip).

Speaking of which, look how Chabadniks are sexifying the etrog (final Youtube). Accosting people on the streets to do mitzvahs has taught the Lubavitchers at least one thing: 2 turn people on 2 atavistic religious rituals, u gotta help them shake shake shake. If not their booty, then at least their etrog.