JEWS AND PIZZA -- A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION

I have yet to comprehend the American Jew’s love affair with pizza. You can’t drive through a Jewish neighborhood without passing a dozen pizzerias, three or four of them strictly kosher. I have long wondered why Orthodox Jews routinely order fauz-treife vegetarian sausage on their kosher pizzas, the quintessence of chazerai.

I assume that our obsession with pizza originated in the Hillel sandwich that we eat at the night of the Seder. Think of all the kids who demand “matzo pizza” on Pesach, a flat of matzo schemered with tomato sauce and cheese, to forestall a week without the genuine stuff. Ah, but was pesto indigenous to the Sinai Peninsula?

In Atlanta, one of the world’s finest pizzerias, Mellow Mushroom, is located right at the heart of the Judengasse. The family and I know this, because we do indulge in questionably-kosher cheese and are a little lax about items baked in a blazing-hot oven. It’s no surprise that we bump into many of our “metro-kosher” friends there. But, sometimes I also catch a glimpse of someone “really Orthodox” sneaking out with a pie, albeit with tzitzis tucked in, and women with hair shoved under a baseball cap.

Once upon a time, I enjoyed genuinely kosher pizza in Detroit. So what made this pizza “genuinely” kosher? It was all in the toppings: crumbles of gefilte fish, potato kugel, matzo balls, falafel, even cholent. No embarrassment about Jewish ethnicity here. After all, God don’t make no junk. I have yet to see a pizza crowned with blobs of pareve pitcha, and aren’t we the better for it? Oh, you’ve never had pitcha? Just think of Jell-O extracted from a calf’s foot, studded with shards of garlic and hard-boiled egg. Nummy.

To what extent will a Jew go to eat pizza? When I was a rabbi in Charlotte, the schule was situated a block away from a pizzeria. Right about Yizkor-time on Yom Kippur, half the teenagers would flee the sanctuary and congregate at the pizzeria for a slice of lunch. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself and confronted the miscreants.

“Well, Rabbi,” one of them eventually responded, “at least we didn’t have the sausage. You’re not allowed to have milk with meat, right?”