KEEPING KOSHER: On May 12 federal agents conducted the largest workplace immigration raid in US history at a kosher meat-processing factory in Postville, Iowa, where they detained more than 300 undocumented Latino workers and threw most of them in jail on dubious criminal charges. The raid received some coverage in the mainstream press but has gained serious traction within the Jewish news media, which have been focusing attention on workplace abuses and animal cruelty at the Postville plant since at least 2004. While the New York Times has written eleven articles on the raid, the Forward and the Jewish Week (both weekly publications) have run twelve and fourteen, respectively, and the JTA-- an international Jewish wire service--has posted twenty-five.

Rosalind Spiegel of the Jewish Labor Committee attributes the unusual level of interest on the part of Jewish papers mostly to the size and brutality of the Postville raid, but she says there are other factors to consider. The bust has mobilized people in the Jewish community who don't often take public action--from rabbinical students to summer campers--to ask the question, "What does it mean to keep kosher in this century?" To that end, Jewish groups are developing ways to combine the ritual requirements of keeping kosher with ethical concerns about worker treatment and environmental standards, including community-supported agriculture groups, meat-buying co-ops and a new labeling system, Hekhsher Tzedek, to certify products as both kosher and produced in accordance with fair labor practices.

Leah Koenig, editor of the Jewish food and politics blog The Jew & The Carrot, points to this "tradition of doing social justice work from a place rooted in Jewish values" to explain why the raid "struck a nerve" in the Jewish community. "This is who's representing us and making the meat that we eat!" says Koenig.   NAOMI SOBEL

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