Arguably, the only type of burger completely cruelty free is the 'meatless' burger

By Andrew Harris

It was only a few days ago, but it feels like it was in another life, on another planet, that I was watching Go Back to Where You Came From on SBS, marvelling that such a morality tale about the rights of asylum seekers and the gift of multiculturalism could only have been made in such a forward thinking, rational country as Australia. And then I unwrapped this morning’s Sunday Age.

The front-page headline of ‘Outrage grows on ritual killing’; the editorial pull quote of ‘religious freedom has its limits’– taking aim at kosher and halal slaughter is nothing new in contemporary newsmedia, but replete with a cartoon that could well have been reproduced from a lovingly thumbed back issue of Der Stürmer, today’s Sunday Age has raised the bar to terrifying new heights.

In the poorly researched Peter Munro feature, or in the sanctimonious editorial, you would have noticed a familiar line of inquisition – the apparently casual mention of ‘genital mutilation’ (read: circumcision, as practiced by Jews and Muslims since the beginning of Judaism and Islam); and of schechita as ‘profit-driven’; we can assemble the familiar picture of a bloodthirsty, money-hungry Jew who consistently fails to abide by the laws and morality of the land. The undertones read not dissimilarly for Muslims.

The real issue remains that if the The Sunday Age must throw journalistic integrity to the wind in place of attempting to a buoy rapidly sinking paper at a rapidly destabilising publisher, at least it should be done with the pretence of factual argument, and some sense of context.

Not long ago, across the Tasman, the New Zealand government put a halt on schechita. The New Zealand Jewish community’s meat supply ran empty, and it was only after it was revealed that the New Zealand Agriculture Minister had a conflict of interest that the ban was overturned.

In addition, it was found that the basis of the ban, a government-funded Massey University study, was fundamentally flawed. This was demonstrated by none other than animal ethics expert and animal rights champion Colorado State University’s Dr Temple Grandin, who is an advocate of kosher slaughter when it is  performed to the standards she has specified. Her paper, titled ‘Discussion of research that shows that Kosher or Halal Slaughter without stunning causes pain’, can be found here.

Closer to home, Australian food law expert Joe Lederman says that the assumption that penetrative captive bolt stunning reduces the pain of the animal is a myth. “Often the bolt misses the mark,” he says. “That would be the case even more so with a sheep. The bolt misses the skull, might go in the eye, and can be done again and again.”

Lederman says that there’s always been kosher slaughter in Australia, and legally enshrined recognition of kosher slaughter as a special slaughter method in Victoria and New South Wales. “It has always been accepted,” he says. There was examination and improvement in the methodology in the 1950s under the supervision of Jewish lay leadership and rabbinical leadership. “There has been continuous improvement and refinement. And there have been specific improvements to ensure that the animal is held completely immobile.”

Meanwhile, The Age has entirely missed the economic implication of its argument. Sure, Jews and Muslims may have to do without a local meat supply, but what about the jobs that would be lost in the process of this denial of religious freedom?

Daniel Lewis, general manager of Continental Kosher Butchers, a paying member of the Australian Meat Industry Council, whose chairman Terry Nolan made the inflammatory ‘profit-driven’ quote in the front-page article, utilises no fewer than three abattoirs in Victoria, and also directly employs more than 50 staff.

“You’re talking close to 120 people in Victoria,” Lewis says of the potential job losses if kosher slaughter were to be outlawed. And it’s not just the direct employees; it’s also the flow-on employment in delicatessens and supermarket meat departments, and the staff of the kashrut authority that oversees the process. If halal slaughter were to be banned, many more jobs would be lost; there are three times as many Muslims as Jews in Australia.

Lewis tells me that Western Australian abattoirs have already stopped facilitating schechita. There it was a ‘profit-driven’ issue – the kosher market is too small to argue with the publicity-sensitive meat industry.

In Victoria, he says, schechita constitutes a major proportion of a number of abattoirs’ income. The numbers of Jews are greater, and so are the numbers of Muslims. If we were going to unite to fight anything, this is it – otherwise, first they’ll take our meat, and then they’ll make us keep our foreskins. In the end, it’s all a matter of blood and knives, and that’s nothing new. Neither is the price of complacency.

Andrew Harris is a writer, editor and photographer based in Melbourne.

Some Jewish women from Yemen

This article is part of the Hineni journal, Partition, which will be distributed in synagogues around Australia on the 63rd anniversary of the UN’s adoption of the Partition Plan for Palestine. We will be publishing a selection of articles from the journal.

By Andrew Harris

You’ve found space in the lunchtime crush, and you can barely hear the clink of your plate on the table above the din and distraction. Clatter and shouting from the kitchen. Seething, impossible traffic hooting and oozing into the horse-wide alley outside. Ruckus from the heaving market, beyond view. Guttural linguistic mishmash from the other eaters, who somehow manage to eat while gesticulating wildly, laughing, yelling. But above it all hangs the smell, a sort of sweet spicy tomato turmeric, a wheaty oily familial scent; timeless, displaced and yet at home here; neatly encapsulated by the mince-filled bulgur ball before you, swimming in a rich red sea. You pick up your spoon, and slowly push its point through the kibbe’s dense mantle, into its fluffy core. A puff of meaty steam escapes. You scoop up some soup with your kubbe fragment. You bring it to your mouth. Iraqi ecstacy.

When I think of Israel, I think of that experience. In one mouthful, it sums up everything Israel means to me. Yet, when the Iraqi Jews in the kitchen, or their forebears, first camped in flyblown ma’abara, tent-city transit camps in what is now Talpiot, or elsewhere, there was every pressure for them to replace the Tigris with the Yarkon and assimilate to the new, predominately Ashkenazi Israeli culture. I could just have easily been eating kneidlach.

For me, Israel is about intermingling microstates of food, language and culture, where the lingua franca might be hummus and Hebrew, but where imma is just as likely to make kibbe as kneidlach. It’s about everywhere else; sitting in that Iraqi restaurant in MachaneYehuda, in an island of Judaeo-Iraqi Arabic and Hebrew, and ingesting what it means for them to be Jewish. It’s about all those many fragments of peoples and cultures transported, dispossessed, exiled there, enticed and welcomed, who have come together, cohesively or otherwise, to puzzle out a polyglot nation (of over 50 living languages) at the centre of the world.

And Israel isn’t only about the Jewish puzzle pieces. It’s about riding a bike through the cobbled lanes of Kfar Kama, snatches of Adyghe from stone to stone, my stomach full of Circassian sheep’s cheese, marvellous flat bread and golden, freshly pressed olive oil. Israel is about finding out that this tiny national minority of people (3000 in Israel), Sunni Muslim, serve in the IDF. It’s about Israelis making weekly pilgramages to Druze falafel makers in the north, where the humble fried chickpea ball is at its hallowed best. It’s about reading Syed Kashua’s latest account of trying to rent a flat in Jerusalem. It’s about tiptoeing around the Ethiopian Church in Me’a Sharim, trying not to wake the wizened priest dozing in a dusty shaft of sunlight.

For me, Israel is not about a Jewish monoculture, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Orthodox, Reform, secular, or otherwise. It’s not about blending together the white robes of the Beta Israel with the black hats of the Hasidim to form a nationalistic grey, or the first generation of sabras forgetting Amharic, Arabic, Ladino or Judeo-Malayalam to speak only Hebrew. In order to form a unified whole, we all have to be ourselves first. The value of the Jewish people as a whole lies more in the sum of its parts. The pain of exile has been separation, excision, but the gift of exile has been diversity, multiculturalism. And one of the miracles of the ingathering is much of what has died out in the Diaspora thrives in Israel.

In Istanbul, you can still find a kosher butcher wedged into the crowded streets of Galata, and he’ll order you some strong, sweet tea to sip at a tiny table by the counter. You can go out on a Saturday night and gorge yourself at a stylish, exceptional kosher restaurant, and eat Turkish-Jewish food at its best. Although many Synagogues are empty week to week, many aren’t. Either way you look at it, shrinking as it might be, the Jewish community in Turkey has a palpable, accessible presence, with a robust Chief Rabbinate, and a highly functional social security infrastructure. Depending on who you speak to, they’re largely staying put. But if they were to move, en masse (and there are only around 20,000 left, it wouldn’t take much to get everyone to Israel), would they be able to take their culture with them? I’d like to think so.

In Yemen, 150 or so Jews live under constant state protection in Sana’a, following the 2008 murder, by a non-Jewish Yemeni, of a Jewish father of nine. The Yemeni state sentenced the murderer to death by firing squad, and the Jews are still there, but they’re only one plane load; in a puff of jet exhaust, the ancient Jewish community of Yemen would cease to exist. It’s just as well that the Yemenites maintain very distinct cultural practises within the Israeli milieu; schug is a ubiquitous Israeli condiment, and Yemenite traditions continue in moshavim and in private homes and institutions around the country.

Meanwhile, the Iraqis’ connection to their mother country is largely intangible. Millennia of Jewish presence has been effectively erased from Iraq, where now eight Jews remain. The last eligible Jewish couple married in Amman, with an Israeli Rabbi, was in 2005. They spent their honeymoon in Jordan, and returned to Baghdad for Rosh Hashanah. A few days later, the bridegroom was kidnapped. After years of silence from the kidnappers, he is assumed dead.

Despite early struggles to maintain their unique identity, the Iraqi Jews have transposed their culture to Israel. These days, the music of Kuwaiti-Jewish brothers Salah and Daoud Al-Kuwaiti is played all over the Arab world, but it’s in a small hall in Ramat Gan where you’ll hear some of Iraq’s finest musicians play their hit Hadri Chai Hadri, many now in their eighties; and, of course, it’s at Machane Yehuda where you’ll find the best kubbe.

I’ve chosen only to use a couple of prominent examples here, but the point I’m making is that a few short decades of nationhood has benefited beyond measure from millennia of Diaspora communities, and now is not the time to forget. While many Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora are on the brink of collapse, with one Jew (Asmara or Penang), a handful of Jews (Calcutta or Karachi), or ten handfuls (Bulawayo or Beirut), the tragedy is substantially mitigated by the knowledge that Israel can be as fertile a field for the sowing of Zionist seeds, as for the transplantation of the fruits of exile.

Andrew was a madrich for year 6 Hineni Melboune in 2002 and has been a devout Hinenite since its second-ever Melbourne meeting. Andrew is a writer and photographer with an abiding interest in Jews from random places.

The following parties helped make the journal possible:

Frank Levy, JNF, Unger Catering, JMC Corporate Real Estate Consultants, Caulfield Hebrew Congregation, Hagshama Melbourne, Antique Silver Company, shaundesign.com, Danielle Blumberg (editing), Mervyn Chait (formatting)

Andrew Harris

After his stellar Australian debut with Y-Love earlier this year, Diwon’s been a busy, busy boy. Apart from his unenviable, gruelling tour schedule, and keeping up with Y-Love and his roster of Shemspeed artists, the DJ of diverse influences has been working on two very different projects – the cinematic Serene Poetic as Dreams in Static, with guitarist co-conspirator Dugans, and the super-cool Sabra Sessions, the sort of mixtape that plays in Diwon’s head.

ELSEWHERE: Serene Poetic is a major departure from your previous work – it’s more loungey, it’s relaxed and ethereal – but it still retains an essential Diwon sort of a beat: what have you and Dugans achieved with the record?

DIWON: The Diwon element is the consistency of layered drums and percussion, which finds its way through most of my work. The idea was to compose instrumental music that stands strong without sung melody lines, and release that as its own cinematic instrumental masterpiece and get the music placed in movies and such, but all along we wanted to also record the songs, reconstructed or as is, depending on which song, with various singers that we love and have this great melodic song with music underneath that is more layered and complex than what would normally be played with a singer, but also have the music be catchy and not too experimental…

ELSEWHERE: Could you tell us a bit about Dugans, like where you know him from, what else he does apart from Dreams in Static?

DIWON: Dugans is an amazing guitarist who comes from Austin, Texas, where the rock scene is really big. He played there for ten years, mostly every night in different groups. He also had a band called ‘Raliss’, which he was making some noise with in the rock scene. Now he lives down the block from me in Crown Heights, New York. We have a production team called ‘Dreams in Static’, we also produced Shir HaShirim, mixing heartfelt Moroccan song with hypnotic hip-hop, rock, and Middle Eastern beats, and next up is a project called ‘Levi Mordechai’, which is reminiscent of early Israeli records such as Shalom Chanoch and is very live, but also has some beat elements to it.

ELSEWHERE: What pushed you in the direction of Dreams in Static?

DIWON: I had started making these really cinematic beats, playin’ keys and synths over beats I was putting together and thought it would be great to send to Dugans to lay some guitar, and cut that up as if it were sampled and just keep cutting it up and rearranging it so that it would be a mix of a live band, a hip-hop producer, but beyond the loop-driven hip-hop that’s played on the radio. Something that big music enthusiasts could really listen to on repeat and find new elements with each listen…

ELSEWHERE: How did you arrive at the duo name and the album name?

DIWON: ‘Dreams in Static’ just came to me. It sounded cool and seemed the perfect name for such a project. The album name, ‘Serene Poetic’ came from back in college when I was really into poetry and spoken word, I was going to put together my work and call it ‘Serene Poetic Cacophony’ I remember telling [poet, hip-hop artist and actor] Saul Williams about it and he seemed stoked on the name – fast forward a slew of years and I just cut off the cacophonous part, even the music, at times, probably warrants the adjective.

ELSEWHERE: Most people might not know, but you do a lot of your own artwork – what’s the story behind the two latest covers in your catalogue?

DIWON: I direct everything for my label [Shemspeed] and I do seventy-five percent of the designing. The Dreams cover was something I always had in my head, and then, once, stumbled on this French artist who was creating work similar to what I had in mind. Just very surreal situations, scenes that look real and could be possible, but at the same time visually don’t make sense. I collaborated on the cover with a designer who does work for the ultra-ortho[dox] labels in Brooklyn. He is great at extraction, something I am really bad at. Anyway, we finally got all the elements and he layered ’em in as per what I saw in my head. It was pretty fun. The Sabra Sessions is basically a play on designs I have been messing with for a while. Sort of the collage, cut and paste; retro, but new-school, fresh style; I wanted it to look like it could be a record cover from the 60s or from right now. I put the cover in a Polaroid-simulator-type thing to get the edges to look like that, and bam!

ELSEWHERE: What other side projects are you working on?

DIWON: my Others album which is a bunch of my different style songs with singers from around the world as well as this Diwon Riddim, record which is where singers in all languages get down to one of my Riddims, making club music in French, Jamaican English, Hebrew, German, Russian, English and so on. On the side of that, I am producing for a bunch of the Shemspeed artists, including Y-Love and DeScribe.

ELSEWHERE: Can we look forward to more Yemenite action from Diwon?

DIWON: The Yemeniteness will always be in some of my music. I still haven’t found a Yemenite singer or rapper to fit what I am going for, but I will always sneak Arabic and Yemenite styles into my hip hop beats.

ELSEWHERE: Are you and Dugans going to tour Serene Poetic?

DIWON: I doubt it. I want to be home in case Tarantino calls us to score his next film! We are workin’ on the vocal version next and a kids’ album as well, with [singer-songwriter] Jill Sobule.

ELSEWHERE: The Sabra Sessions is a little closer to what most listeners would know you for – it sounds like a funky Tel Aviv rooftop party – how did you end up putting it together?

DIWON: It’s sort of music that I have been enjoying, but the mix is how it’s always been played in my head, remixed, chopped, sped up. Sort of the style of Baltimore and Miami club music, which I haven’t found in Israel, so I tried my best to mix it up in a way that the Hebrew songs fit the style and tempo. I threw in some throwback tunes like ‘Funky Town’ because no-one ever DJs that in a hi- hop set for some reason, but it’s the most amazing track!

ELSEWHERE: What’s the next big thing in Jewish music – what’s turning you on right now?

DIWON: Middle Eastern Hip Hop in English, like Benyamin Brody (who features on Shir HaShirim) and Ephryme.

ELSEWHERE: Any parting words?

DIWON: It was such a blessing touring with you all in Melbourne, looking forward to the next thing!

No release dates as yet for Serene Poetic or The Sabra Sessions. For musical delights in the meantime, check out www.shemspeed.com, www.myspace.com/eprhyme and www.myspace.com/benyaminbrody

Annnddddd….. (drum roll!): You can download free music samples here and here.

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This interview was first published here.

Andrew Harris is a freelance scribbler and snapper and is one third of the three-headed beast that is elsewhere promotions, who brought Diwon and multilingual rapper Y-Love to Melbourne’s East Brunswick Club in June.