Word: foer
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...rare today that a novel grapples with the several thousand years of Jewish history and heritage that preceded America, rather than only addressing the issues surrounding modern Jewish life. Mainstream Jewish authors such as Philip Roth or Jonathan Safran Foer are writing about Jews, but not so much about Judaism. Less common is the Chaim Potok or the Milton Steinberg who attempts to bring the vast Jewish past into dialogue with the Jewish present...
...concocting cruel experiments to prove far-fetched points, both then and now, has its critics. "I think often our conversations about animals tend to go to these weird extremes and act to conceal what we are doing to them every day," says Jonathan Safran Foer, whose new book, Eating Animals, relates his attempt to understand how animals become food. "Should we swat flies, is it possible that plants like it when we play classical music, can dogs commit suicide - all of these things may be interesting, but they have nothing to do with how we regularly interact with animals...
...Foer says he recently watched The Cove and, like others, found the references to animal suicide fishy. "We don't need to make animals like humans in order to treat them with decency," he says. "If we just treated pigs like pigs and cows like cows, that would be sufficient...
Good News: Hopefully, with the help of energy-saving light bulbs and vegetarian followers of Jonathon Safran-Foer, we can hold it off until we’ve invented cute robots like Wall-E who will eventually help us repopulate our destitute planet...
...conception of himself as a concerned citizen rather than a journalist is silly and pedantic, it is a necessary one in the context that he provides. The decision to eat meat is central, though perhaps more banal, in a way that other moral dilemmas are not. As Foer notes, culture is expressed in eating practices, and to change what we eat is to fundamentally change our identity. But change can also mean progress, and although diehard carnivores looking for reasons not to give up meat will find holes in Foer’s argument, it is more compelling and accessible...