Yael: And all the rabbis gather, and the first course is clams. And then the evening continues, and there is shrimp, and there are frog’s legs in cream, and there are numerous other types of bivalves, as Rabbi Wise later describes them, and chaos ensues.
Schwab: Well, they’re a kosher option even.
From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Yael Steiner.
Schwab: And I’m Jonathan Schwab. Making this series, especially on Jews in America, has been really special and really fun. If you’ve been enjoying them, please share one of our episodes. Share a favorite with a friend, post about it on social media, help these really interesting stories, very relevant to this year, reach more people.
Schwab: Y’all, I think you have something completely different for us today, but perhaps related and perhaps with more connections to what we’ve been exploring this series on Jews in America.
Yael: This is going to be a unique episode for us because it will get into some of the philosophical and theological underpinnings of various religious denominations within the American Jewish community. We are going to be talking about how changes in religious observance created controversy, and both positive and negative reactions, throughout history. I’m hoping merely to present them as historical happenings — I don’t want people to think that I value or devalue any which way they choose to observe or not observe religion.
Schwab: With all of those caveats, I feel like this is going to be a really interesting episode, if it’s going to get that controversial.
Yael: It’s also going to be a bit TMZ oriented. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen TMZ, but we’re going to be talking about a social event — a really particularly gossiped-about social event. It didn’t have the worldwide appeal of a Taylor-Travis wedding, but it definitely got press coverage and created a controversy: some people found it to be an extremely positive, cool thing that happened, and some people found it tacky, and some people found it to be an abomination.
Schwab: Whoa. So what are we talking about?
Yael: We are going to be talking about an evening in July 1883 that has since become known as the Trefa Banquet. It was not then called the Trefa Banquet, and it was never supposed to be. What it was supposed to be was a dinner celebrating the first graduating class of rabbis from the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, who had just completed eight years of rabbinical study. Their ordination had been earlier in the day, and the high-society Jews of Cincinnati sponsored a fairly lavish, Gilded Age-appropriate dinner for the Jewish community at a hotel high on a hill called Highland House. You had to take a funicular to get there. It was multiple courses, with wine pairings, and it was extremely lavish.
Schwab: But this is a big occasion — the first graduating class of a rabbinical school, Hebrew Union College, which is Reform, right? And these are, I’m assuming, among the first, if not the first, rabbis ordained in America.
Yael: Great question — these are the first rabbis ordained in America. The founder of Hebrew Union College, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, had tried to open a school called Maimonides College about a decade earlier, and it failed because it ran out of money.
Yael: I want to go back to your point about Hebrew Union College being Reform. Today, Hebrew Union College is the largest rabbinical school for the Reform movement, certainly in the United States. It was founded in 1875, eight years before these rabbis were ordained. But in 1875 — and still in 1883, the night of this banquet — it wasn’t clear that Hebrew Union College was capital-R Reform. We’ve talked before about the evolution of the Reform movement, including in our episode on Moses Mendelssohn, who didn’t consider himself a Reform Jew but has been claimed by Reform Jews as a forerunner of their movement.
Yael: The Reform movement as we know it today really originated in Germany in the first few decades of the 19th century. What Reform Jews did at that point was try to make themselves more similar to their neighbors, in the wake of emancipation.
Schwab: Their non-Jewish German neighbors.
Yael: Right. As we’ve talked about in past episodes, there was never really a formal emancipation of Jews in the United States, because as soon as the country was founded, Jews were, in theory, equal citizens. But in Europe, this spirit of Enlightenment leads to emancipation, and suddenly German Jews are, in fact, German. Given this new freedom to fully participate in German civil life, Jews wanted to be more like their neighbors.
Schwab: Yeah, sure.
Yael: One of the things they did was start translating some of their liturgy into German — sermons given in German — which was incredibly controversial at the time. And one of the first practices to be abandoned, even before the leaders of what would become capital-R Reform Judaism settled their theology, was kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws.
Schwab: Yeah, because dietary differences create separation — that’s a huge barrier to participating in society, to relating to your neighbors, to sharing a meal with them.
Yael: Exactly. And that’s exactly what these people wanted: to sit in a café in Hamburg and dine with their new co-citizens. They were given the opportunity to fit in, and they took it. So kashrut initially fell by the wayside among people who realized they could be Jews without being particularly Jew-y. And instead of saying they were forgoing religion altogether, they said there was a new way to practice religion in the modern world — services in German, in some cases services on Sunday instead of Saturday.
Schwab: So it sounds like what you’re describing is an adapting of Judaism to say: we’re keeping some practices, but doing them in ways that let us fit into this society better.
Yael: Yes. This evolution of Reform Judaism — theologically and organizationally — happens in Germany earlier in the century and moves to the United States, particularly in the 1840s, when many Reform communities spring up. Reform Jews are still the vast majority of people who affiliate as Jews in America today. And in terms of religious influence and changing how America views Judaism, I’d say the years from 1840 through just before World War I are when Reform Judaism has its biggest influence.
Yael: After the Civil War, there’s a different kind of emancipation and a different spirit taking hold in the country — this idea, going back to colonial and revolutionary times, of the self-made man, of all men being created equal. Jews, building on the theological innovation from Germany, start living this out themselves. The first innovation is family seating in the synagogue, something borrowed from Protestant churches.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: They start giving the sermon in German — hugely controversial. Some congregations bring an organ into the synagogue. And as new synagogues are built, moving west with the country’s expansion, Reform Judaism flourishes in the Midwest and those cities become hotbeds of the movement. And when they build these new, ornate synagogues, they start calling them temples — for two reasons, originating in Germany.
Schwab: Right — synagogue feels specifically Jewish, or shul certainly does, but ‘temple’ is more like a general house of worship.
Yael: Right, it matches other religions. But also, on a theological level, it demonstrates that there is no longer one Jewish Temple in Jerusalem that they are longing to return to. That era of messianic longing is over.
Schwab: That’s a pretty big shift.
Yael: So you can have the Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati, because they’re not waiting to go back to the Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. That’s a huge theological shift — because, as we often mention when discussing Zionism and the right of return, our liturgy traditionally includes the return to Zion, certain sacrifices, certain forms of worship, as part of our daily prayer.
Schwab: So I assume, along with renaming their houses of worship, there’s also a significant change to the liturgy — because if you’re taking out ‘return to Zion,’ there’s a lot to remove.
Yael: There is a huge change to the liturgy. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who founded Hebrew Union College, had a goal of writing a siddur, a prayer book, for all American Jews. At this point, Jews hadn’t yet separated into true denominations. There were just lowercase-r reformers — people trying to reform Judaism as a whole, not advocating for a schism, just saying that as American Jews, certain reforms should be made to how we practice.
Schwab: We talked about this with Caribbean synagogues having sand floors — there are so many places Jews have lived, and so many customs and amendments that took on local flavor. Although it sounds like this is less a gradual evolution and more a quick, planned change.
Yael: It takes place over a couple of decades, but Wise in particular has a personal mission to create this unified American Jewish community. He writes this prayer book with facing pages — one in German, one in Hebrew — because he’s truly a reformer, not an abandoner. Unfortunately we won’t have time to talk about him today, but Rabbi David Einhorn, a much more radical reformer, wrote his own siddur entirely in German.
Schwab: None of it was in English? And there wasn’t an idea that those people’s kids would grow up speaking English?
Yael: As time went on, their documents did come to be printed in English. But at the time, these rabbis were preparing for congregations full of immigrants — Jewish immigration to the U.S. from the 1810s to the 1860s was dominated by German Jews, almost entirely.
Yael: So Rabbi Wise, wanting to create a unified American Jewish community, creates an organization called the Union of American Hebrew Congregations — an umbrella organization for synagogues, or shuls, or temples.
Schwab: Right, ‘Hebrew congregations’ is a nice catch-all.
Yael: And it includes what we’d now call Orthodox synagogues alongside Reform synagogues. Wise wanted it to be for everyone — I think he believed that, over time, everyone would meet in the middle at a lowercase-r reformed traditional Judaism. So Hebrew Union College wasn’t founded as a denominational rabbinical school — it was founded to train rabbis for American Judaism broadly.
Yael: In 1883, the celebration marks ten years of that organization and the first graduating class of Hebrew Union College, and Jews from all over the country, of all types — though denominations as we think of them today didn’t exist yet — descend on Cincinnati for the occasion. The ordination happens during the day and goes really well. There were more traditional rabbis there and less traditional rabbis there, including Rabbi Benjamin Szold, the father of Henrietta Szold. Henrietta was actually in attendance.
Yael: Many felt there could or should be a unifying force in American Judaism, and this was a wonderful occasion to celebrate that and use as a springboard for building a more integrated Jewish community. Cincinnati was a growing city with many financially successful Jews, and some of the lay leaders decided to sponsor a lavish banquet. So the whole community takes the funicular up to Highland House — a real Gilded Age affair, eight or nine courses, planned by lay leaders and catered by a Jewish caterer named Gus Lindemann. All the rabbis gather, and the first course is clams.
Schwab: Was there a kosher option at all?
Yael: There was — well, was it kosher? Does kashrut matter? All these huge questions erupt, both in the moment and for years after, up to today.
Yael: Professor Jonathan Sarna, the dean of American Jewish history, wrote the book American Judaism — excellent book — and he feels, probably correctly, that none of this was intentional. There was no statement being made. It wasn’t that we just ordained new American rabbis, and by the way, American rabbis think it’s cool to eat frog’s legs in cream.
Schwab: It wasn’t a political statement of the faith — it was the lay leaders, Gilded Age business people in Cincinnati, saying, this is what a lavish banquet looks like.
Yael: Right. So today we call it the Trefa Banquet — trefa meaning non-kosher, the epitome of non-kosher. It’s famous because of what ensued, but it’s not as if guests were invited to the ordination and then separately to a banquet explicitly celebrating a violation of Jewish dietary law. That’s not what happened. I think most people who do know about this event assume it was intentional — before I did this research, I thought so too.
Schwab: So the serving of clams wasn’t, say, being passed around during the ordination ceremony itself — they’re not the same event.
Yael: Yes and no — what happens in the aftermath makes it unclear.
Schwab: Right. I assume there’s no apology and retraction, then.
Yael: A few things happen. A few rabbis run from the room in horror. A few stay and don’t eat. And a few partake happily — probably what would happen if this happened today. But it’s Rabbi Wise’s response that makes this the historical event it became. He could have simply said: this was a terrible error, we’re sorry, we didn’t mean to offend anyone or take a stance on dietary law, it was a caterer’s mistake. That didn’t happen.
Yael: A second possibility is that the lay people and the caterer actually thought they were preparing a kosher meal — that the only requirement they understood was to leave out pork.
Schwab: Right, and the caterer was Jewish.
Yael: One theory is that Wise or the seminary’s administration told them the dinner should be kosher, and they took that to mean simply: no pork. One reason people believe this is that, of all things, they didn’t serve pork.
Schwab: Of all the things they served.
Yael: They did also serve ice cream, I should note — so there was both the bivalves and frog’s legs in cream, and then ice cream and cheese as well.
Schwab: Because the ice cream and cheese is dairy mixed in — interesting. From my observance of kosher law, which is Orthodox, I was actually wondering whether clams, which aren’t kosher anyway, would even count as meat you can’t mix with dairy. Side point. But they did not serve pork.
Yael: Right — there was this sense, as observance was shifting among American Jews, that a kosher meal just meant no pork.
Schwab: I’ve encountered that understanding before — no pork, and maybe something needs to be blessed or overseen by a rabbi.
Yael: Keep that in mind for later. But part of why people think Lindemann and the other laymen may have believed this was a kosher meal is that Cincinnati, at that point in American history, was known as ‘Porkopolis’ — a huge center of pork business and consumption.
Schwab: So leaving pork off the menu has to be an intentional statement.
Yael: Right — it’s a city where everyone eats pork constantly, the pork capital. It would be like not serving cheese in Green Bay, Wisconsin. They left off pork for a reason, because otherwise it would have been everywhere. I hadn’t known this about Cincinnati’s pork industry, but the word ‘Porkopolis’ came up repeatedly in my research. That’s why many think the caterer was told to make it kosher and understood that to mean simply omitting pork — something Wise could easily have apologized for by saying he hadn’t been clear that there was more to Jewish dietary law than that, and that he never meant to offend anyone. That didn’t happen either.
Yael: What happened instead is that Wise got defensive. At first he may have been slightly apologetic, but he went on to argue that oysters are ‘vegetables of the sea’ and therefore not actually non-kosher. Oysters were apparently beloved at the time — a staple of the Gilded Age.
Schwab: I think people would have been asking, where are the oysters?
Yael: Apparently, at the time — this may have changed due to demand and environmental factors — billions of bushels of oysters were being harvested from the Chesapeake Bay. So Wise reached a point of arguing that oysters were essentially vegetables, though the majority Orthodox position is that oysters are not kosher. But the menu also included shrimp, clams, frog’s legs, ice cream, cheese, and wine pairings.
Yael: Wise realized early that he could use the press to spread ideas quickly, which was part of what made him successful. He published two papers, one in English and one in German, and was always more candid in the German one. There, he suggested that people making a big deal of the banquet were being provincial — which connects to a concept called ‘kitchen Judaism.’ Have you heard of it?
Schwab: No.
Yael: In responding to what he considered the real issue, Wise soon abandoned all talk of a caterer’s oversight and transformed the Highland House dinner first into a test case of liberal convictions, and gradually into an assertion of the new Judaism. In his German paper, Die Deborah, on November 2, 1883, Wise insisted that further explanation was unnecessary, because the vast majority of American Jews were indifferent to dietary law, and because Orthodox customs, in his view, cheapened Judaism before the public.
Yael: Because he didn’t go into further explanation, we don’t have much written record of how he or others in his circle actually felt, or what exactly happened — and we don’t know if that’s because it really was an error and people considered it resolved, or for other reasons.
Schwab: Also, if the error was made by the very wealthy lay leaders, you might not want to sell those people out — they’re important partners.
Yael: That’s a good point, though I didn’t see that mentioned anywhere. But also, maybe there was simply no need to comment further, because most people didn’t care — the ones who ran out of the room were back in New York or wherever they’d come from.
Schwab: Right. And you said he really knew how to use the press — that’s a smart political move. If the conversation is about what Judaism represents, and the more traditional rabbis are complaining about the menu, Wise gets to reframe it as: those people want to keep debating the menu, while I’m talking about the big ideas and the future of American Judaism.
Yael: Those big ideas get spelled out two years later, in 1885, in what’s known as the Pittsburgh Platform — a hugely important statement of Reform Judaism’s ideals. But before we get there, I want to talk about the concept of ‘kitchen Judaism,’ which is an extremely demeaning phrase. It’s demeaning both to strictly observant people and, I’d argue, misogynistic — it treats the Judaism of the kitchen, which for so many centuries and to so many people is sacred, as small and unimportant: the Judaism of women preparing kosher meals, preparing for Shabbat, lighting candles, teaching children.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: One of Wise’s followers, a Dr. Schreiber in Denver, wrote in a Denver paper describing Wise’s critics as ‘ignorant fanatics,’ and called the moment a fitting occasion to relegate ‘kitchen Judaism’ to the antique cabinet where it belongs. He went on to say that the dietary laws — his word — ‘the humbug of the dietary laws’ must go, because they promote clannishness, Jewish exclusiveness, even fanaticism, and make Judaism ‘ridiculous, Lilliputian, and demeaning.’
Schwab: Oof.
Yael: He specifically says ‘clannishness’ — which connects back to what we discussed at the start: Jews wanting to be part of the wider society. Clannishness runs against that. So an ethos takes hold among the reformers that these household-based dietary restrictions — ‘kitchen Judaism,’ as they dismissively call it, though I’d call it ‘household Judaism’ — aren’t important, and that Judaism should move specifically to the synagogue, or as they’d say, the temple. Candle lighting and Kiddush move to the temple — things that had been core parts of Jewish practice at home now become ceremonial and communal, part of a once-a-week tradition, the way Christian friends go to church. Nothing about being Jewish at home, or on the street, makes them different from anyone else.
Schwab: Interesting. This reminds me of the crypto-Jews of Portugal we’ve talked about — people who converted, in name, to Catholicism but secretly kept Jewish practices for generations, under threat of danger. One detail was this elaborate process for making a dish that looked like pork, so neighbors wouldn’t suspect them, but wasn’t actually pork. I see both sides here — the argument that this is what Jewish religious practice is, something being kept alive for centuries, not some small thing isolated to the kitchen; but I also hear the argument that we don’t have to think in those terms anymore, that we can think about Jewishness more broadly. There’s something appealing about that too.
Yael: In the immediate wake of the Trefa Banquet, or the Highland House Affair as some call it, some rabbis who had been part of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, or of Wise’s attempt to unify American Jewry, and who had been fine with certain reforms, decided this had gone too far. They eventually helped start the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York — a lowercase-c conservative seminary as opposed to Hebrew Union. Today, JTS is the flagship institution of capital-C Conservative Judaism, though that wasn’t the case at the time.
Yael: Before we get to the Pittsburgh Platform, I want to talk about two important rabbis whose dialogue helped shape it: one considered a reformer, and one a radical reformer — Rabbi Alexander Kohut and Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler. Kohler was the son-in-law of Rabbi David Einhorn, the more radical reformer I mentioned earlier. Kohler and Kohut engaged in public debates that played out in the press, and The New York Times actually covered this. The headline was ‘Rabbi Kohut Censures the Practices of Jewish Reformers,’ in response to the Pittsburgh Platform. Kohut said, in part: many priests today do not represent the symbol of the Maccabees, which is light and warmth; they should not be modern Greeks and hail all that is foreign to them; when I speak of foreign elements, I mean Sunday services, which are an imitation of Christian customs; and while I hold the highest regard for all religions, my aim is to preserve Judaism pure and undefiled. He argued that although Judaism teaches moral lessons every day, it goes against the spirit of Judaism to single out the day that belongs to another religion — ‘let us not be called usurpers.’
Yael: He raises a concern I hadn’t really considered before: at what point does imitating Christian practice provoke antisemitism rather than alleviate it? At what point do Christians say, you’re not Christians, you’re the antithesis of Christians, you haven’t accepted Jesus — stop pretending?
Schwab: Interesting. And his image of the Maccabees versus the Hellenists gets at one of the fundamental questions here: as Judaism evolves, takes on new practices, adapts to new environments — how far do you go?
Yael: One of the first things capital-R Reform Jews changed was dropping the second day of Yom Tov outside of Israel, because it didn’t feel practical — much like kashrut. A huge theological underpinning of all of this is that Judaism should be about morality, and everything not directly about morality should fall away — which evolved, eventually, into tikkun olam and social justice becoming the central pillar of Reform Judaism.
Schwab: Right — that’s actually something I was going to bring up. Tikkun olam is a beautiful idea, rooted in tradition, but it’s sometimes used derogatorily too — as such a broad concept that it can become almost meaningless. Sometimes people use it in ways that flip its original meaning. It’s kind of the opposite pole from ‘kitchen Judaism’: on one end, does this seem ethical and moral, and if so, that’s the right thing to do regardless of other context; on the other end, there’s this intricate legal tradition that, for some, no longer has personal or communal meaning and is kept only as rote practice.
Yael: To use a culinary metaphor: is it watered-down Judaism, or a reduction, where only the core flavor and most important element remains? There are outsiders to Reform Judaism who call it watered down, and advocates who’d say no — it’s distilled to its holiest level.
Schwab: Right — not artificial flavoring, but something more like a concentrated stock.
Yael: Exactly, a concentrate.
Schwab: What’s being debated here is really what American Judaism will look like — and in retrospect, we can see this was hugely consequential, because this is the center of what Judaism evolves into over the next hundred and fifty years.
Yael: A thousand percent. I want to tie this back to something we discussed regarding religious liberty. Along with dropping the second day of Yom Tov, they made changes to the liturgy — removing sections about Temple sacrifices, and language about chosenness, since they viewed Judaism as the highest expression of devotion to God while still respecting other paths. And we’ll see that in the Pittsburgh Platform too.
Yael: One thing that went back and forth over whether it was included in the Reform liturgy, but was removed in these early prayer books, is Kol Nidre. We talked about this before, in the context of whether Jews could be trusted to take oaths in court — the concern that Jews annually absolve themselves of oaths on Yom Kippur made them seem less trustworthy. Some Reform factions argued: we can’t keep this, we’re now part of a larger society, how can we do business with our Christian neighbors while seeming to say upfront that we don’t stand behind our promises?
Schwab: I’m a little confused — the concern is about not fulfilling commitments you’ve made?
Yael: You can still fulfill your commitments and still say Kol Nidre — it doesn’t actually mean you’re being dishonest in business. But I found it interesting that something once used as a charge against Jews in court was then cited by reformers as a reason to remove Kol Nidre from the liturgy, because they wanted to be seen as trustworthy members of the citizenry, the Rotary Club, the business community — not as people who don’t stand behind their word.
Yael: Let’s move to the Pittsburgh Platform, drafted at a Reform conference in Pittsburgh in 1885, technically chaired by Rabbi Wise, I think mostly as a figurehead. It was convened at the instigation of Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, the more radical reformer I mentioned. These principles, adopted in 1885, remained the basic tenets of institutionalized Reform Judaism until a revision in Columbus, Ohio in 1937.
Yael: There are eight tenets in the Pittsburgh Platform. I’ll read the first, because it connects to what we discussed about differing from your fellow citizens: ‘We recognize in every religion an attempt to grasp the infinite, and in every mode, source, or book of revelation held sacred in any religious system, the consciousness of the indwelling of God in man. We hold that Judaism presents the highest conception of the God-idea as taught in our holy scriptures and developed and spiritualized by the Jewish teachers.’ There’s more, but I wanted to highlight that even though it does claim Judaism as the highest conception of God, the very first sentence of this founding text takes care to say: we recognize in every religion an attempt to grasp the infinite.
Schwab: I’m sure people have dissected this — to me, that reads like a new way of talking about a replacement for chosenness: we respect everyone, we see this as one expression among many of a universal search for God. It’s such an interesting bargain to strike. It’s funny — I hear the first part and think, that’s actually very much how even Orthodox Jews might frame things publicly today, that we recognize the value of all religions. But then the claim that Judaism is ‘the highest’ — I don’t think Orthodox voices in public spaces would go that far today.
Yael: Right — it says one of the highest conceptions. The rest of the tenets are largely about tikkun olam and social justice: that Judaism is a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with reason; that Christianity and Islam, as daughter religions of Judaism, help spread monotheistic moral truth; that all of humanity is our ally in extending the hand of fellowship to those working toward truth and righteousness. The seventh tenet rejects belief in heaven and hell — the soul is immortal, but there’s no bodily resurrection or damnation.
Schwab: You know what this also reminds me of — and it feels intentional — Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. It’s almost a point-by-point counter to them.
Yael: And that connects to the eighth tenet, the purest distillation of the tikkun olam idea: ‘In full accordance with the spirit of Mosaic legislation, which strives to regulate the relations between rich and poor, we deem it our duty to participate in the great task of modern times: to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.’ Beyond the refutation of the Thirteen Principles, this whole document reads to me like a ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ moment for Reform Judaism — a declaration of independence. Wise himself actually described it that way.
Yael: Which leads to a question we probably won’t have time to fully explore: could Reform Judaism, which started in Germany, have flourished the way it has anywhere but the United States?
Schwab: Right — I think not. This took place in America, and America then becomes, in many ways, the center of Jewish practice, at least until the founding of the State of Israel, and arguably still represents a hugely important center of Jewish life — because of what’s unique about this country, the shared overlap between traditional Jewish ideas and American ideas, and how open a place America was to this kind of development.
Yael: It goes to show that when you create a pluralistic Judaism, one shaped by outside influences beyond just the Five Books of Moses, or the Talmud, or Talmudic commentary depending on your community, conflicts will arise — and whose voice wins out really matters. The Trefa Banquet brought that out. We don’t have time to get into it fully, but there was something called Trefa Banquet 2.0 in San Francisco in 2018, which, to me, ended up doing exactly what it claimed it wasn’t trying to do.
Schwab: Interesting.
Yael: It was billed as simply celebrating the food culture of the local Jewish community, which by and large wasn’t kosher — just getting together to eat food that community prepares, not meant to insult anyone. But the more I read, the more it seemed like it actually was making a statement — because you can get a group of Jews together, eat as much bacon as you want, and not call it a ‘trefa banquet.’ You could just say we don’t subscribe to dietary rules. If you call it ‘trefa,’ there’s a reason — otherwise there’s no such thing as kosher, and also no such thing as trefa. That event was also hotly debated. I’ll leave it here: Dr. Jonathan Sarna wrote an article responding to the 2018 event, closing by saying he hoped this Trefa Banquet 2.0 wouldn’t create the same kind of division the original one caused.
Yael: So that’s its legacy — and it’s not an accident. It was a huge turning point in American Jewish history, even though the way it started was simply a catering error.
Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds, brought to you by Unpacked, an Open Door Media brand.
If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please give us a rating and review. It really helps new listeners find the show.
Check out Unpacked.media for everything Unpacked-related, and go to Spotify or YouTube to watch our latest videos.
Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds@ unpacked.media. We really love to hear from you.
Jewish History Nerds is hosted by me, Yael Steiner, and by me, Jonathan Schwab.
Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson, and our editors are Rob Perra and Ari Schlacht.
We’re produced by Jenny Falcon. Thanks for listening.