Mendelsohn, Kosher Vestiges

by Stephan Kinsella on December 6, 2025

Steve Mendelsohn, a patent attorney friend from my days in Philadelphia, sent me the essay below about his kosher eating habits (posted with permission). As I may have recounted somewhere before, ¹ when I moved to Philly in 1994 Steve, as a slightly more experienced patent attorney at my firm, befriended and mentored me. I remember when he took me to get my first Philly cheesesteak at Charlie’s Waterwheel below ground on Sansom. But they were just called “steak” sandwiches; I asked where’s the cheese, and Steve said, oh, it’s kosher.

We would go to lunch on occasion and since he was a fellow atheist, I didn’t understand why he kept kosher. He explained that Jews need to stick to these idiosyncratic eating habits in part to make it harder for them to associate with goyim, intermarry, and so on. In other words, it’s to make it more difficult to assimilate, to dissuade themselves from consorting with people like me. I recall I was mildly offended by this; here we are eating lunch…. are you doing it reluctantly, or under protest? Sort of wishing you had the mental fortitude to refuse to associate at all with goyim like me? Better not introduce me to your sister, I suppose! I found it kind of rude and irrational. I got over it, but never forgot it.

I don’t get this adoption of pointless habits like this, especially by the non-religious, but maybe that explains why he’s also a Democrat (one of my very few Democrat friends).

VESTIGES

Steve Mendelsohn (undated)

Yesterday, I went to a local diner for breakfast. Since I had had an omelette the day before and since I am still avoiding pancakes and French toast in a losing (and unfortunately not losing) eﬀort to re-lose 10 of the 20 pounds I had previously lost (and then slowly regained) in an attempt to lower my A1C below the pre-diabetic range, I decided to ask what the quiche of the day was.

It turns out that there were two quiches of the day: one with roasted red peppers, onions, feta, and bacon and the other with broccoli. The ﬁrst one sounded really good; I love roasted red peppers, onions, and feta cheese. Broccoli is, well, broccoli. I ordered the broccoli.

You see, I used to keep strict kosher observing essentially all of the dietary laws of Judaism, including – and especially – the prohibition against eating pork. I grew up in a kosher home. You know, one of those Conservative (but not conservative) Jewish homes where the family keeps kosher in the home, but eats traif (i.e., unkosher food) in restaurants. When I was a kid, I kept kosher inside the home because that was what my mom served us and pretty much kept kosher in restaurants as well, but that was more about being a picky eater than about keeping kosher.

In my teens and early twenties, I came to keep kosher both inside and outside my home.

And not just kosher; I also became shomer shabbat, observing the laws (i.e., primarily prohibitions) of the Jewish Sabbath.

Over the last four decades or so, my observance of Jewish laws and rituals has slowly but inexorably waned. I’m no longer shomer shabbat as evidenced by the fact that I am writing this essay on Saturday morning. I still don’t eat cheeseburgers, which are forbidden as a violation of the prohibition against eating meat and dairy together. But I do eat chicken enchiladas and chicken tikka masala since my son convinced me that the biblical prohibition of not “seething thy kid in its mother’s milk” from which the law of not mixing milk and meat is derived, cannot possibly apply to chicken since chickens do not lactate.

And I still do not eat pork or shellﬁsh, both of which are not kosher. Pork because pigs do not chew cud, and shellﬁsh because shrimp, lobsters, mussels, scallops, oysters, clams, crabs, etc., have neither ﬁns nor scales, as prescribed and proscribed in the Torah (i.e., the Five Books of Moses of the Old Testament). (By the way, one of the beneﬁts of not eating pork or shellﬁsh is that it is a lot easier to decide what to eat at a restaurant when you have only one or two available choices.)

But I do not believe that the Torah – and its dietary prohibitions – were given to Moses on Mt. Sinai by God. I’m not sure whether Moses ever existed, but I deﬁnitely don’t believe that God ever existed. I am today a devout atheist.

And, yet, I still don’t eat pork or seafood … although I have pretty much stopped bothering to ask hot dog vendors what their hot dogs are made of before ordering a hot dog at a stadium or golf course.

So, yesterday morning, I ordered the broccoli quiche because it was the one without bacon. It was only so-so, which is as much as you can expect from a broccoli quiche.

Last night, for some unknown reason, I had a dream in which I had recently switched from being a patent attorney (which I have been for the last 35 years) to being a policeman in France (which I am not and pretty likely never will be). I’m not positive right now, but I believe that the late, great Christopher Hitchens was one of the other French policemen. I really have no idea where that all came from.

In any case, in my dream, I went to dinner with one of my new French colleagues, who might even have been Christopher Hitchens. The menu had only three items on it. Two of them had pork or seafood in them; the third was tuna. I ordered the tuna – even though it was a little pricey at 40 Euros. Tuna, which has both ﬁns and scales (when it is swimming in the seas, not when it is served at a French restaurant, even in France), is kosher.

I remember thinking, in my dream, that, if the tuna should arrive with a piece of (ﬁnless and scaleless) shrimp resting on it, I would simply remove it from the tuna and perhaps oﬀer it to my colleague. I would not have refused to eat the tuna as being completely contaminated by the traif shrimp as I would have done in the past. I would not even have carefully trimmed oﬀ the top layer of the tuna as I might have done in recent years. No, I would simply remove the shrimp without making a big fuss and eat the tuna as is. That’s how far my kashrut has waned of late.

When the salad arrived, it had a nice pile of fresh greens at the far side of the plate and something that was not green at the near side. As I looked closer, I saw that the item was a small lobster claw.

In my dream, I remembered that, many years ago, when I was backpacking through Europe after ﬁnishing grad school and before starting my brand new career as an engineer, I met a man from Liverpool who advised me that I then had a precious opportunity to redeﬁne who I was, that I could discard aspects of me that I didn’t like and adopt new ones. That conversation, which really did happen, undoubtedly led to the beginning of the gradual decades-long abandonment of most of my Jewish ritual practices.

In my dream, I thought that this dinner, too, could be another precious moment in my life when I could make a fresh start. As a newly minted French policeman, I could shed the last vestiges of my kashrut and eat that lobster claw.

I have thought about shedding the last vestiges of my kashrut even when I am not asleep and dreaming. I have thought about eating seafood and maybe even pork. Among my usual circle of dining companions, be they family or friends, Jewish or not, I am the only one who refrains from eating pork and seafood. Other than my few vegetarian and vegan dining companions that is. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t done it.

In my dream last night, I decided that I could even adopt a practice analogous to my childhood family’s practice of keeping kosher inside the home, but not out at restaurants. Here, I could continue to refrain from eating pork and seafood with my current family and friends, while allowing myself to eat pork and seafood with my new French law enforcement colleagues.

As I looked down at my plate, I was about to decide whether to use my fork to extract a piece of lobster from the claw or just pick it up and bite oﬀ a piece as I have seen my wife and kids do many times … when I realized that I … just … couldn’t … do it. And, at that moment, I woke up.