For my wife and I, it’s a real day off. I’m off from work, my wife doesn’t have work and my kids are in school. 
Zev Steinhardt
One summer when my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp we learned the just that. Except instead of “Wiccan” they used the term “enviromentalist”.
I had a sunday school teacher who was the laughingstock of all the kids. Mrs. Buford was the classic southern country matron with the red beehive hairdo and matching accent. This was suburban DC, so you can imagine how we supposedly urbane, sophisticated city kids looked down at her. It was surely an unfair point of view, but she did not help her case when she told us how “Satan and the democrats would turn us from God.” Several of the kids were politically active Democrats and got a real kick out of that. The real kicker was the time she revealed the scandalous way that “Them Romans was worshipping Afro-ditty!” Yes, that’s how she pronounced it: Afro-ditty.
I remember a kosher Chinese restaurant in Cleveland Heights… its fliers said “Peking Palace” or something like that in pseudo-Hebrew lettering. That got me to wondering about the vast majority of Chinese restaurants that aren’t kosher: Chinese food is often made with pork. Even if you order something vegetarian like Buddha Delight, it’s cooked in the same wok that just had pork in it and wasn’t scrubbed in between. How do Jews eating Chinese deal with this? Did a rabbi issue a dispensation for Chinese food? Or do they just try not to think about it?
And for the especially religiously strict, does the invocation of Buddha pose a problem?
The ones who don’t keep kosher don’t care. The ones who do make sure to eat at kosher Chinese restaurants that don’t have pork or seafood on the menu. Here’s a menu from a kosher Chinese restaurant.
See, no pork.
Here’s another one:
http://www.lin-kosher.com/take-out.shtml
One thing I’ve noticed is that most kosher Chinese restaurants use veal where non-kosher ones use pork.
Turkeys aren’t kosher? Since they’re a new world species, they can’t have been addressed specifically when the rules for kosher were laid down. So when and why was this decided?
Pretty much everybody recognizes turkey as kosher nowadays.
There are a whole bunch of different ways of keeping kosher- for many Jews, “do you keep kosher” isn’t a simple yes-or-no question. It goes all the way from “Biblical kosher”- which means avoiding meats that are labelled as non-kosher in the Bible (and possibly even that only at home, not when eating out)- to only eating food prepared under rabbinic supervision. Most Jews are somewhere between those two, though there are a number who don’t keep kosher at all. A lot of people are stricter about observance of the kosher laws at home than they are when eating out or eating at someone else’s home.
We have two sets of dishes (milk and meat) at home and eat only kosher meat. But when we eat out, we’ll order vegetarian or kosher fish dishes and not worry about them being cooked with the same equipment that was used for non-kosher food. That’s our level of observance of the kosher laws.
There’s more to kosher than whether an animal is OK to eat or not (though that’s not true for fish- just land animals). There are two issues:
-
The kosher laws mandate that animals be slaughtered in a certain way, and prohibit eating blood. To make sure we don’t eat any blood, kosher meat is soaked and salted before you buy it. I’ll only eat meat or poultry that is certified kosher. That’s not easy to get in a lot of places- my folks, living in Western Maryland, would probably have trouble finding a kosher turkey (they’d probably have to go to Baltimore to get one, or mail-order one, and I wouldn’t expect them to do either). It’s also more expensive than non-kosher meat. Basically, turkeys can be kosher, but not just any turkey is kosher. Same goes for other kosher poultry and meat.
-
The kosher laws say that you can’t have any milk products with meat or poultry. Since my family doesn’t observe the kosher laws, their stuffing might contain (for example) butter, which I couldn’t have with turkey. So even if they did get a kosher turkey, I’d have a choice of eating side dishes or eating turkey and nothing else. I’d rather have the side dishes. I’d have to make sure those don’t have meat in them, but since my sister is vegetarian, they’re used to making vegetarian side dishes.
There would be an additional issue of dishes and pots and pans that had been used for both meat and milk products for some people, but as I mentioned earlier, I don’t worry about that except at home.
Some Jews might have an issue about the fact that my family would say Christian prayers at the table. These people might also have an issue with Chinese restaurants with Buddha statues, or eating Buddha’s Delight. I don’t have a problem with any of that, as long as I’m not expected to participate in any prayers or ceremonies that go against my beliefs. So I’d be willing to sit quietly in a church during a Christian wedding or baptism, but I wouldn’t say any of the prayers or take communion. I’d even be willing to take a part in the ceremony as long as it didn’t require me to do anything religious- being a bridesmaid in a Christian wedding, for example (I did that last year at my sister’s Catholic wedding). I wouldn’t be a godparent at a baptism, though, unless it was a purely ceremonial thing- I’m not Christian, so I can’t set an example of living a Christian life for the kid, or raise the kid Christian if something happened to the parents. So I wouldn’t promise to do any of those things.