Yonit Caplow, 1L

Contributor

Kosher pizza is an odd phenomenon that many students hadn’t even considered before coming to Cardozo. And yet, this unique cuisine is now the mainstay foodstuff for most students. In fact, not only the pizza, but every free meal gleaned from an on-campus event—all the wine, cheese and desserts—is kosher. While eating kosher pizza at Cardozo is an everyday fact of life that students take for granted, along with cold calling in class and long waits for the elevator, the source of Cardozo’s kosher requirement and the manner in which it’s applied, has recently been questioned.

To supplement free pizza, many Cardozo students bring their own brown bag lunches to school, which is evidenced by the difficulty encountered when trying to distinguish your lunch from the other 200 seemingly identical white plastic bags surrounding it in the cafeteria refrigerator. Cardozo does not require that this food be kosher; in fact, the student handbook explicitly states that “since Cardozo is a non-sectarian school, you may bring in any kind of food that you wish for your own consumption.”

This ability to bring non-kosher food onto the premises is unique to Cardozo amongst all the schools under the Yeshiva University (YU) umbrella. According to Bruce Jacobs, Director of Dining Services at YU, more flexibility is shown at Cardozo because the majority of students who attend school there are either not Jewish or not observant. Nevertheless, the cafeteria itself only sells pre-packaged kosher food and precautions are taken to ensure that the microwaves designated as kosher remain so. Although no one monitors the microwaves, Jacobs has not heard of any issues in his three years overseeing the facilities. “Students as a whole tend to be very respectful of the fact that it is communal property, and everyone is trying to do their best with it,” expains Jamie Carnes, Director of Special Events at Cardozo.

Not only is kosher food the only type of fare sold at the school cafeteria, but it is also a requirement for all school events. According to Cardozo’s catering policy guidelines, which are provided in the student handbook that is posted on Angel and discussed during orientation for the various SBA groups, “all catering must be strictly OU [Orthodox Union] Kosher and ordered through the office of Special Events.” Additionally, the school requires that any pre-packaged food brought onto the premises for school events be kosher and certified with one of six pre-approved symbols such as an OU symbol, or a Star-K (which is depicted with the letter ‘K’ inside a star).

The word kosher, which literally means “fit, proper or correct,” is used to describe foods acceptable to be eaten under Jewish dietary laws. The rules are quite elaborate and extensive. A few of the more widely known ones include instructions on which animals cannot be eaten at all (e.g., pigs) and prohibitions against mixing milk and meat products. Numerous other rules govern Jewish dietary requirements, many of which trace their roots back to the Bible. For example, the ban on eating meat and milk together is said to be derived from the biblical phrase “you shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” (Ex. 23:19; Ex. 34:26; Deut. 14:21).

Presently, food is authenticated as kosher by certification organizations. There are over 50 types of kosher certifications in the United States alone that symbolize various degrees of strictness along the kosher spectrum and each organization has a different standard for evaluation. These symbols, which are registered trademarks of various kosher certification organizations, can usually be found either by the product name or ingredients.

Despite common misconceptions about kosher food being blessed by rabbis, the process of obtaining a heksher (a kosher certification represented by a symbol on a food package) requires that a rabbi inspect the ingredients of the food in question, check how the food is prepared, and periodically supervise the facilities where the food is cooked.

This Rabbinical supervision to ensure that food is prepared with the correct ingredients and in an appropriate manner tends to make kosher food, especially freshly prepared food, more expensive. Many SBA funded groups find that $300 can only buy so many expensive—even by New York standards—kosher pizza pies. While a regular large pie at Ray’s Pizza can be obtained for $13, a comparable pie at Jerusalem II will cost $24. However, according to Carnes, “Pricing, as the object of switching over to non-kosher catering, is never something that is approved.”

Not surprisingly, many groups that are already on tight budgets and looking for creative ways to stretch their money, try to come up with exceptions to Cardozo’s catering rule. Some request an exemption from the kosher requirement if they can get the food donated or sponsored. However, Carnes explains “that line is a very slippery slope. At what point do we call it someone sponsoring it? If you pay for it out of your pocket, couldn’t you argue that you’re technically sponsoring the event and that Cardozo isn’t paying for it? And if you started on that road, it could just go on forever, and you could end up with all sorts of situations with people trying to backpedal around the rules.”

There have been a couple of rare exceptions to the rule requiring kosher catering at Cardozo events. However, these events have specifically been approved because of their cultural nature. In these instances, the limitations of kosher food couldn’t suffice to replicate the specific ethnic cuisine authentically. Additionally, there was always a kosher option available for attendees and everything is clearly and meticulously labeled.

Dave Johnston, 3L, envisioned a unique feast consisting of Patsy’s pepperoni pizza and Corner Bistro’s bacon cheeseburgers, a menu which is clearly not kosher. Defending his position, Johnston said, “I believe a man should stand for something. I stand for flavor.” Johnston was willing to pay money out of his own pocket to bring in lunch and feels strongly that he should be able to buy whatever he wants with his own money. Johnston explains, “I’m not a big fan of imposing this kosher policy when I believe that most of the students don’t keep kosher… I don’t like how they are telling me how I can spend my money.”

The administration of Cardozo feels differently. After a closed door meeting to discuss Johnston’s proposed event, which included Dean Diller, Dean Mender, Vice Dean Stein and Jamie Carnes, and to which Johnston was not invited, Johnston received an email from Carnes which stated: “I met with several of the Deans today to discuss this event again in detail. You are welcome to host this event along side of KALSA (The Korean American Law Student Association), if they are interested in supporting it. However, the event will still need to remain Kosher.”

Johnston took issue with this. “None of this is written law,” he said. “The administration is deciding this on a case by case basis…. We keep studying this written, constitutional democracy in school. Meanwhile, we are subject to some sort of arbitrary oligarchy. The students should have some say in this.”

Written or not, it does appear that some element of this school law is open to interpretation, or at least exception. Could Johnston position his lunch as an ethnic event for non-observant Jewry, or for pepperoni aficionados? Regardless of how he proposed it, Johnston paid out of pocket for his October 5th event, which was unrecognized by the administration, and for which he was unable to advertise through Cardozo media.

However, most students, although perhaps unaware that Cardozo was a kosher school before coming, do not take issue with the policy. Both Jacobs and Carnes, who have worked at Cardozo for the past couple of years, said that students always seem ac
commodating and respectful of the kosher rules and neither of them has heard of any issues

arising.