Marissa Brostoff
By Marissa Brostoff
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News Store Owners Shift Gears as Meat Prices Rise
As kosher meat prices climb in the wake of the mid-May raid on the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse, at least one purveyor, the online supermarket Kosher.com, is trying to make the best of tough times by getting creative: The store now offers high-end specialty meats in addition to more traditional fare. If consumers balk at higher prices…
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News Ethical Guidelines for Kosher Food Released
A group of Conservative rabbis has released long-awaited guidelines for a program that aims to monitor and certify working conditions in kosher food production. The guidelines for the Hekhsher Tzedek program, as it is known, are wide-ranging, with sections devoted to labor standards, the treatment of animals, corporate transparency and environmental impact. In order to…
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News Public Relations Firm Criticized
Is all fair in love and PR? Some public relations industry observers say that 5WPR, the firm that represents the embattled kosher meat company Agriprocessors, crossed an ethical line when an employee apparently impersonated Agriprocessors critics online. The controversy over 5WPR is, in the context of Jewish affairs, an odd spin-off of the ongoing saga…
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News Not Your Average Schlub — A Memoir
Max Gross, by his own admission, used to be your average schlub: He sported an unkempt Jewfro, the bottoms of his jeans were tattered and he’d gamely put a good burger before a diet. In Gross’s first book, “From Schlub to Stud: How To Embrace Your Inner Mensch and Conquer the Big City” (Skyhorse Publishing),…
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News David vs. Goliath on Lower East Side: Yiddishist Challenges N.Y. Powerbroker
This September, residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the cradle of Yiddish culture in America, will be able to choose between not one but two Yiddish-speaking candidates for political office. In one corner is one of the three most powerful politicians in New York state. In the other is a 33-year-old former employee of the…
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News In Heated Meeting, Orthodox Activists Spar With Kosher Meat Company
When two progressively minded Orthodox rabbinical students sat down last week at a Manhattan kosher dairy restaurant with four Lubavitch businessmen, radically different segments of the Orthodox world collided, and sparks flew. The rabbinical students and a young rabbi who accompanied them were from Uri L’Tzedek, a liberal Orthodox activist group organizing a boycott of…
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News Protest Outside Hotel Decries ‘Shonde’
At a protest marking five years since the outset of an ongoing strike at a major Chicago hotel, a crowd of some 1,100 striking workers and their allies got a surprise Yiddish lesson. Among the placards being brandished by protesters was one that read “What a shonde!” — Yiddish for “shame.” The protesters had come…
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News Americana: The Story of Grossinger’s
Tania Grossinger’s childhood was the stuff of modern fairytales. Like a version of Kay Thomson’s Plaza Hotel-dwelling Eloise by way of “Dirty Dancing,” Grossinger grew up largely unsupervised at the famed Catskills hotel that shares her family’s name. She catalogs her exploits, many of which involve some combination of mischief and Borscht Belt celebrities, in…
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