Lewin: Herzfeld assertions are fallacious
Nat Lewin, the Washington attorney representing Agriprocessors, just sent us a response to Shmuel Herfzeld's New York Times op-ed last week.
Read the response after the jump.
REPLY TO RABBI SHMUEL HERZFELDby Nathan Lewin
In a front-page article asserting that minors had been hired to work in an Iowa kosher meat-packing plant and in an editorial calling the plant the modern equivalent of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," the New York Times joined the media frenzy that has, over the past two months, with very little basis in fact, pilloried AgriProcessors, the country's leading kosher slaughterer and packer of beef, and driven federal and local law-enforcement personnel to threaten dire consequences to its owner and employees. Insult was heaped on injury when an Orthodox rabbi in Washington, D.C., joined the vigilantes and published an Op-Ed piece in the Times of August 6, claiming that the news accounts "call into question whether the food processed in the plant qualifies as kosher."
This nationally published challenge to the kashruth of the AgriProcessor product contradicts the unanimous opinion of highly respected and universally recognized kashruth-certifying agencies that have repeatedly endorsed – even while the media attack was ongoing – the ritual acceptability of AgriProcessors' product. Nonetheless, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom Synagogue in Washington (where the author of this response has been a member for the past 40 years) – a young rabbi who has achieved great success in reviving, for Jewish residents, a neighborhood that had been abandoned by its Jewish population and has electrified the entire Washington Jewish community with innovative programs – raised "questions" about AgriProcessors' kashruth in this widely read forum.
Rabbi Herzfeld's column cites the following three grounds for questioning the religious suitability of AgriProcessors' meat: First, he says that "there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated." The precedent he cites is that Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, the highly respected 19th century founder of the "Mussar" movement, is, according to Rabbi Herzfeld, "famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly." Rabbi Yisroel Salanter is as gold-plated an authority as one can imagine. If he actually said that unfair treatment of workers renders a product non-kosher, one would have to give that ruling great weight.
Second, Rabbi Herzfeld cites allegations in an affidavit filed by the immigration authorities who raided the AgriProcessor plant in Iowa on May 12 to arrest illegal aliens employed there. He says that the affidavit alleges "that an employee was physically abused by a rabbi on the floor of the plant." Rabbi Herzfeld says that "this calls into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher." If, in fact, the "rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher" did assault an AgriProcessors employee, I would share Rabbi Herzfeld's doubts regarding that rabbi's "reliability and judgment" on issues relating to kashruth.
Third, Rabbi Herzfeld points to the arrest of "two workers who oversaw the poultry and beef division" for "helping illegal immigrants falsify documents." He says that if these supervisors "were willing to break immigration laws, one could reasonably ask whether they would be likely to show the same lack of concern for Jewish dietary laws." This is a reasonable question if, as one might assume from Rabbi Herzfeld's description of the arrests, the arrested supervisors had any responsibility whatever for AgriProcessors' compliance with "Jewish dietary laws."
But it takes a little digging beneath the surface of Rabbi Herzfeld's assertions to demonstrate how fallacious they are.
First, the Reb Yisroel Salanter story that he describes as "famous" does not appear in any biography of Rabbi Salanter that I have been able to find. Rabbi Hillel Goldberg's marvelous history of the Mussar Movement titled "The Fire Within," which has a comprehensive section on Rabbi Salanter, tells only of his having advised his students that, when they were preparing matzos for Passover, they should not overwork or make excessive demands of the female workers who were kneading the dough and otherwise preparing for the matzo baking. That same account appears in a Hebrew volume titled "Bikkurei Shai," written by the Chief Rabbi of Givatayim, Israel.
I e-mailed Rabbi Hillel Goldberg to ask him whether he had ever heard that Rabbi Salanter had refused to certify the kashruth of a matzo factory because it was unfair to its workers. He replied that the only story on this subject that he knew of was the one that had appeared in his book. He added that it was not likely that Rabbi Salanter would ever have given a certification ("hashgacha") on matzo because he "famously" avoided acting as a community rabbi. And I myself wonder whether it is not an anachronism for Rabbi Herzfeld to ascribe to the mid-19th century the community practices of today. At a time when all matzos were being hand-baked (and the rabbinic controversy over the kashruth of machine-made matzos was still several decades in the future), what "matzo factory" was seeking the "certification" of Rabbi Salanter?
Second, a closer look is warranted at Rabbi Herzfeld's assertion regarding the case of the abusive "rabbi." Nowhere in the government's affidavit is any accusation reported against any rabbi whose job was "making sure the food was kosher." The term "rabbi" is used interchangeably throughout the affidavit with the term "Hasidic Jew." Obviously, any employee on the floor of the AgriProcessors plant who had a beard and wore a yarmulke was described by the government's Guatemalan informant as a "rabbi" or "Hasidic Jew." If one such Jewish employee – with no responsibility for kashruth – abused an employee, it does not "call into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher."
Third is Rabbi Herzfeld's reliance on the arrest of two supervisors. Would the arrested supervisors – who, one assumes from Rabbi Herzfeld's question, are either certifying rabbis or, at least, Hasidic Jews responsible in some manner for kashruth –show the same disdain for Jewish dietary laws as for American immigration law? Rabbi Herzfeld does not tell us that the two arrested supervisors were named Juan Carlos Guerrero-Espinoza and Martin De La Rosa-Loera – supervisors at AgriProcessors whose concern or lack of concern for Jewish dietary laws is as irrelevant as one can imagine. At a time of the year when we recall that vicious reports to authorities led to the destruction of the Temple, Rabbi Herzfeld might take a more careful look at the grounds for his public allegations.
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Swapping old Jewish swim records for new ones
Jewish-American swimmers Garret Weber-Gale and Jason Lezak, along with Cullen Jones and the unstoppable Olympic champion Michael Phelps, made history in the pool on Monday, August 11. The US relay team won the Men's 4 x 100m Freestyle Relay and smashed the world record by nearly four seconds on their way to the gold.
In a strange Jewish sports irony, the gold for this half-Jewish team may come at a price to the legacy of an iconic Jewish sports figure. Phelps needed this gold medal to help him on his quest to break legendary Jewish swimmer Mark Spitz's 36- year-old record of seven gold medals in one Olympics. With the relay gold under his cap, Phelps is on his way to eight in '08.
But at least a new Jewish name can be added to the annals of Olympic swim glory, for the sports world will be talking about Lezak's outstanding anchor leg to edge out Alain Bernard and the French team for a long time.
"Going out in the first 50 (meters), I was breathing on my right side," Lezak said after the race. "I saw him (competitor Bernard) a little bit. I knew where he was. I knew I had to swim my mind out. I had more adrenaline going than I ever had in my life."
As JTA's Marc Brodsky reported in a feature about Lezak, the 32-year-old is competing in his third Olympics and has garnered four medals on relay teams, including a gold in the 4x100 medley in '04.
A third Jewish-American swimmer actually took home a gold for this team, even though he wasn't in the pool for the historic win. Ben Wildman-Tobriner, the other member of the self-described "hyphenated Jew crew," is among the seven swimmers on the 4x100 relay team who received a gold medal.
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This Week in Postville: New documents emerge, child labor investigations and more
Lots of new developments out of Postville over the weekend, most notably the release by the American Civil Liberties Union of a script used by judges and attorneys in the "fast-tracked" legal proceedings that followed the May 12 raid at Agriprocessors.
I saw these scripts in use at the Waterloo fairgrounds and they didn't seem particularly sinister at the time. But now it seems the scripts amounted to an entire blueprint for how the prosecutions should unfold and suggest to some experts that they were prepared in overly close cooperation between federal judges and the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Prosecutors say the scripts were not binding and were meant to help swamped defense counsel. But some legal experts say the documents suggest the court had endorsed the plea agreements in advance, before a single immigrant had appeared in court, prompting at least one defense attorney presented with the script to walk out "in disgust."
The script is likely to provide ammunition to skeptics in Congress investigating the possible denial of constitutional protections to the illegal immigrants arrested in Postville.
You can download the documents here. The New York Times report on the documents is here.
The Des Moines Register continues its probing coverage of the raid with a story on the child labor allegations investigated by the Iowa Labor Commissioner's Office. The report covers a lot of familiar territory – many interviews have been published with accounts by former child laborers, including one interview by yours truly – but none get at the essential question of the company's culpability.
Agri says the kids provided fake IDs and that they terminated employees who were found to have lied about their ages. The kids say their ages were never questioned, which isn't surprising considering that the documentation they provided – fake or not – includes date of birth. If the company didn't challenge the legality of the documents themselves, even though a large majority of its workers were apparently illegal immigrants, why would they have specifically checked ages? This is what the state attorney general will have to sort out.
In other news, the Orthodox Union's Menachem Genack was interviewed on NPR alongside Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, who wrote an Op-Ed last week in The New York Times calling for a serious rabbinic investigation of Agriprocessors. Genack repeats the OU's longstanding position on Agri – that it's up to the government to determine if workers are being treated properly – and takes credit for forcing out Sholom Rubashkin as plant manager and getting a compliance officer hired. Not a lot that's new here, but still an interesting exchange. Listen here.
Finally, my colleague, Fundermentalist Jacob Berkman, reports from the CAJE conference in Burlington, Vt., that Agri meat was ordered off the menu. We'll have more on that shortly.
UPDATE: The Fundermentalist reports: Using meat from a plant that may not be up to ethical par "was just not in the spirit of CAJE," the organization's executive director, Jeffrey Lasday told me Sunday afternoon. He said he made the decision not to use Agri shortly after the plant was raided in a large-scale immigration bust in May.
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A.B. Yehoshua’s Tisha B’Av lament
Photo by Daniel Sieradski
Israeli literary giant A.B. Yehoshua writes that he is stupefied by the scale of today's corruption and multiplying investigations in Israel.
In his lament, published in the U.K. Guardian on Tisha B'Av, Yehoshua writes that the corruption points to unprecedented moral decay in Israeli society and government:
Police investigations, commissions of inquiry examining the errors committed during the Lebanon war of 2006, repugnance at former president Moshe Katsav's alleged sex crimes, and now prime minister Ehud Olmert's announcement that, with charges of corruption swirling about him, he will resign in September: all of this suggests profound wounds in Israel's moral tissue.Old Israelis like myself are stupefied by the scope and scale of today's corruption and the multiplying investigations. Is corruption something that has always existed here but was somehow hidden until now? Are we learning of it because our prosecutor and police are bolder and better equipped nowadays?
I do not believe that corruption is coming to light just because law enforcement is somehow better, or because citizens, like the presidential staff who accused President Katsav of sexual crimes and harassment, are more courageous. What is coming to light is a much deeper evil, a loss of values within Israeli society and its government, such as never existed before.
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Jews fit to print
The New York Times had a number of interesting Jewish-related stories in recent days:
- Jennifer Bleyer reports from the front line of the American Orthodox Jewish dating scene: Manhattan's Upper West Side – or, more specifically, the Westmont building on 96th and Columbus.
- Jake Mooney reports from the Sephardic Jewish enclave of Gravesend, Brooklyn, where a difference of just a block or two can make for significant fluctuation in real estate values.
- After four years in an Iranian jail, an Iranian-born American Jewish octogenarian who was lured back to Tehran four years ago by former business partners only to be arrested, lashed and imprisoned, is coming home.
- Three of the elder statesmen of comic books have joined forces to help Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who survived two years at Auschwitz by painting watercolor portraits for Mengele, get her artwork back from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, which refuses to return it. Babbitt is now 85 and living in California.
- Andrew Martin visits Israel's Negev Desert and Golan Heights to report on how Israel is trying to cope with a four-year drought that the country's agriculture minister is calling a "deep water crisis." Israel's growing population, rising incomes and falling rainfall have combined to produce the crisis, which has prompted farmers like Roni Kedar to rip the apples off his trees and leave them to rot.
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