Kosher vegetarian dining hall at CofC
Posted on May 12, 2015 by Administrator
I’m about to leave Charleston after a wonderful semester as the Distinguished Visiting Chair in Jewish Studies.
Here’s my JTA story about the new kosher vegetarian vegan dining hall that’s under construction.
CHARLESTON, S.C. (JTA) – Renowned for its gracious architecture and signature Southern charm, Charleston is increasingly celebrated as a foodie heaven.
The trouble is, in a city whose culinary specialties embrace (and glorify) oysters, she-crab soup, and shrimp and grits, the burgeoning restaurant scene is nearly off limits to those who keep kosher.
But things are set to improve for the kosher-observant later this year, when the College of Charleston opens a $1 million kosher vegetarian dining hall in a new wing of its Sylvia Vlosky Yaschik Jewish Studies Center, home to the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program.
The dining hall, funded by several private donors, is an integral part of the college’s comprehensive $10 million fundraising campaign for the Jewish studies program. The three-story brick wing will double the size of the Jewish studies center, which is in the city’s historic peninsula district. The dining hall, set to begin operations around Hanukkah, will occupy the ground floor, with an open-plan design featuring curved ceiling details, cool pastel colors, an entry wall of Jerusalem stone and seating options for up to 75 people.
Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the dining hall will be run by the college’s dining services and cater to students on the school’s dining plans. But it will also be open to the public for a la carte meals, with an eclectic menu using organic and local ingredients. One of the aims, according to the dining hall’s vision statement, will be to attract “an eager and emergent audience of student and community members by sourcing ethical, sustainable and local food in an energized, hip facility that will utilize recycled and local materials.”
All the food will be kosher and vegetarian, and some will be vegan (containing no eggs or dairy). Mark Swick, the Jewish studies program’s community liaison, said the food will be certified by Charleston’s Kosher Commission, which is comprised of local Orthodox rabbis.
Some 800 Jewish students attend the 12,000-student school, and the college is using the new dining facility as a recruiting tool to attract more.
“A lot of students are looking for kosher possibilities,” Jewish student recruitment counselor Helen Slucki said. “For some it is a need – they keep kosher and couldn’t come here without it. But for a lot of them it is a symbol. They don’t keep kosher, but like the Jewish studies program, it is a symbol that the college is welcoming to Jews.”
Dara Rosenblatt, the college’s Jewish student life program coordinator, said the new dining hall is “already making waves” among students. Buzz has also begun to build outside the college — Charleston’s City Paper placed the dining hall on its list of 20 new eateries set to open in town this year.
But Paige Lincenberg, a Jewish studies major from Atlanta, said she wasn’t sure yet what impact the new facility would have on her eating experience. She already eats “kosher style,” separating meat and dairy and avoiding pork and shellfish.
For the strictly kosher observant, she said, finding kosher meat tends to be more of a challenge than finding vegetarian food.
“It’s possible to buy vegetables and cook them,” she said.
Jewish history in Charleston dates back more than 300 years, and the city, which in 1800 had more Jewish residents than New York, was a cradle of Reform Judaism in the United States. Charleston’s first organized congregation, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, was founded in 1749, and its current synagogue, a graceful Greek revival building dedicated in 1841, is the second-oldest synagogue building in the United States. Today, approximately 6,500 Jews live in the Charleston area.
The college’s Jewish studies program, established in 1984, offers majors and minors in Jewish studies, but outreach to the Jewish community at large is also a priority. The program hosts numerous events open to both students and the public, including film screenings and lectures. Many local senior citizens audit academic courses.
Swick said that in designing the new dining facility, “We paid close attention to what other colleges across the country have done in offering kosher and vegetarian options.” (It is not known how many Charleston students are vegetarians, but the school hosts a vegan student group.) A model, Swick said, is Grins Vegetarian Cafe at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Opened more than a decade ago in the Shulman Center for Jewish Life, Grins offers kosher vegetarian meals both on student dining plans and to the community at large, and is consistently ranked as one of Nashville’s top vegetarian restaurants.
The intention in Charleston, according to the dining hall’s vision statement, is to “help create an environment in which diversity is represented, not only by appealing to the observant Jewish (Muslim and Hindu) students, but reaching out to a constituency that sees eating choices as a manifestation of deeply held ethical and environmental values.”
Ghazi Abuhakema, director of the Asian studies and Arabic programs at the college, said the dining hall, which would meet the standards of most halal-observant Muslims, is “a very good project,” and that the local Muslim community is likely to patronize the facility if it is advertised “properly and adequately.”
The new dining hall will be named in honor of philosophy professor Martin Perlmutter, who has been director of the Jewish studies department since 1991 and who helped develop the idea for the dining hall. His championing the dining hall as a way to promote ethical eating and “coming together through food” led the city’s Charlie Magazine to name Perlmutter last year one of Charleston’s “50 most progressive people.”
“A vegan diet is a statement about values and lifestyle, whether it is because of concern for the environment, interest in one’s health or caring about the well-being of animals,” Perlmutter said. “So, too, keeping kosher or observing halal requirements is a commitment to traditions of religion and culture. Representing that diversity in a vegan/vegetarian kosher/halal dining hall is a physical way for the College of Charleston to become more diverse and progressive.”
In post-Holocaust Europe you could often find the grooves or scars where mezuzahs had been removed or painted over during or after the Shoah—thus forming symbolic mezuzahs that indicated a house where Jews once lived. In my book, I extrapolated further, suggesting that the surviving physical relics of pre-war Jewish life—synagogue buildings, Jewish cemeteries, even if abandoned, in ruined condition or transformed for other use, also served as symbolic mezuzahs to mark towns, villages, cities, and even countries where Jews once lived and do not live now.
My intent was to show how buildings and other physical sites can be talismans and touchstones, opening the way into memory and history.
George McDaniel made this same idea explicit in his introduction to the panel of Drayton Hall descendants. “History did not happen to someone, somewhere else, but to you,” he said. “You grow up a product of history. Preserving buildings means also preserving the story behind the buildings, making a connection with people. Why is a place important? How do you feel connected?”
From the Jewish perspective, visiting Jewish historical sites in post-Holocaust, post-Communist Europe can be a very positive experience, emphasizing Jewish life, history and culture; but the experience also falls under what is now known as Dark Tourism—tourism to sites of what we can call “negative” history, “negative” experience: death, destruction, war.
Sites of slavery also fall under Dark Tourism, though this aspect of a historic site (such as a plantation or genteel antebellum home) often becomes masked, elided, or simply footnoted in the presentation of beautiful buildings and gardens for tourist consumption.
Much of this boils down to “who controls the narrative”—and to whom is the narrative directed: issues that we have been dealing with in the class I have been teaching, “Memory, Heritage, Renewal.” Although the main focus of our class is Jewish heritage and memory and their role and representation in Europe, we have been able to draw parallels with the way that African American heritage, history, and culture are presented here in Charleston and the Lowcountry.
I was delighted that students from my class were in attendance at the panel presentation featuring the descendants of Drayton Hall, as the discussion clearly demonstrated the parallels we have been dealing with, touching on issues such as the point of view of interpretation and interpreters; messages and signage; how the same place can have different symbolic meanings and generate different memories for different people.
Drayton is not alone in trying to present a more inclusive past in the plantation context. Boone Hall has installed an extensive presentation on slavery and African American history centered on the nine preserved slave cabins there. Magnolia Gardens features special programs to bring to life its recently renovated row of cabins. And Middleton Place, which I have not yet visited, presents a permanent exhibit titled “Beyond the Fields” in a two-family tenant residence called Eliza’s House, in memory of Eliza Leach, a South Carolina African American born in 1891, and the last person to live in the building. The much less elaborate Hampton Plantation also incorporates the site’s slave history in well researched text panels, both in the Big House and along the path leading to it.
After the Drayton Hall panel, I was excited to visit McLeod Plantation with Mary Battle, public historian at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, and her class. McLeod, which served as local headquarters of the Freedman’s Bureau following the Civil War, has the potential to interpret not only slave life but the postwar experience of the newly freed men and women. McLeod’s signage uses a phrase that could be the site’s “slogan”—describing it as a place of both “tragedy and transcendence.” I found it interesting that this formulation echoes what we sometimes call sites of Jewish heritage in Europe—“sites of tragedy and sites of triumph.”
Posted in Articles, Charleston, Jewish Heritage, Publications
Charleston, Charleston
I arrived last week in Charleston, South Carolina to begin a semester teaching as the Arnold Distinguished Visiting Chair in Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston.
It will be an adventure, as I have never taught a course before…. I’ve taught my first two classes and so far, it seems to be going well: engaged students (a mix of undergraduates and community auditors), interesting discussion.
Meanwhile, I’ve been exploring Charleston — where I have never been before. So far, I have not been off the Peninsula, or old town; but I’ve spent hours walking around the streets. And, of course, stopping off in some of the excellent restaurants….today I had my first “she-crab soup” and “shrimp and grits.”
As it happens, I love grits. I often bring them back from the states to Europe with with me. Oddly enough, the first time I remember eating grits was not in the south — but on the French Line ocean liner the SS Liberté, sailing from New York to France, when I was about 12. We had them for breakfast; it seemed a rather exotic dish.
Today, I visited the Slave Mart Museum, whose small exhibition space was quite crowded with visitors (I’ll be writing about this more); also I made a second visit to the central market, a sort of covered crafts market non unreminiscent of the Sukiennice in the main market square of Krakow, though of course with different merch.
And I took pictures of the paving.
Posted in Architecture, Charleston
Much of my writing, research and photography deals with what I have come to call "new authenticies" and "real imaginary spaces" -- sites, experiences and even mind sets evoked by the past or another culture that through study, yearnings and even fantasies are transformed into something else that is quite different but often just as "real" as the original.