TRAIF restaurant, which has just opened in the ultra-Orthodox Williamsburg enclave of New York, is nothing if not provocative – and Hasidic Jewish leaders are advising their flock to give it a wide berth.
In Yiddish traif means non-kosher – the equivalent of Islam’s haram – but its owner, Jason Marcus, 30, believes that there are enough bacon- ‘n shrimp-lovin’ Jews out there for him to make a success of the new venture.
Jason Marcus pictured at his new restaurant (click on image to view video)
Marcus said Traif is for people who “like bacon with everything” and wish that their “bowls of moules-frites would never end”.
The pork and shellfish eatery is located at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.
Marcus said:
I figured most people would not know what it [Traif] meant and be curious.
He added
I love to eat bacon and shellfish.
According to this report, the naughty noshery has riled rabbis in the area. But at least one Hasidic activist, Isaac Abraham, said he was actually happy with the restaurant’s name.
It’s the red blinking light to not enter.
The hog haven attracted more than 50 people at its opening night on Tuesday – including a group of Hasidic Jews.
Claimed Marcus:
They said they were upset with God for forbidding them to eat pork cheeks.
In this report, Marcus is described as:
A nice Jewish boy from Randolph, New Jersey, who was bar mitzvahed at a reform synagogue.
In the report Marcus is quoted as saying:
Traif represents who I am, [and] I’m proud of who I am. I don’t see a contradiction between eating bacon and all the other [religious] things I don’t do.
Commenting over at Beliefnet, Rod Dreher huffed:
OK, fine. I get the joke. But even as a non-Jew, this rubs me the wrong way. Call me superstitious, but I have a bad feeling about a restaurant whose concept is based on defying religious law. In the same way, even though I don’t believe The Book of Mormon or the Koran are divinely inspired, I would treat those books with extra respect, just because they are sacred to somebody.
Anyway, though I obviously am not Jewish and don’t keep kosher, I wouldn’t eat at Traif simply because even if I don’t believe in a particular religion, and even though I’m pleased that Jason Marcus has the liberty to open this kind of restaurant, I don’t find blasphemy, or quasi-blasphemy, cute.
Williamsburg last hit the headlines when ultra-Orthodox Jews outraged cyclists when they demanded the closing of a cycle lane through the area.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
April 22nd, 2010 at 1:26 pm
I’m sure the profits will speak louder than the prophets.
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:11 pm
I love my bacon and eggs, which was often a meal my family enjoyed. One of my friends said that I should not eat bacon as I was Jewish. From that moment I did not believe in religion as who could tell me not to have my delicious bacon.
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:19 pm
“I don’t find blasphemy, or quasi-blasphemy, cute.”
Traif is just truth in advertising. What kind of a paranoid loony does one have to be to find “blasphemy” in it? This is just too ridiculous. Still, I guess I should never be surprised at the bullcrap that shows up on beliefnet. Oh and yes, I will call Dreher superstitious.
April 22nd, 2010 at 3:14 pm
I think Rod needs to get a life.
April 22nd, 2010 at 4:37 pm
It’s all a bunch of crap, anyway. A Hindu friend of mine confided that he knew the reason why Hindus do not eat cows, and Jews and Muslims don’t eat pigs. It’s because they had tapeworms and had no medicine to expel them from people, and no firewood in those places of the world to kill the tapeworm in the meat. I asked him why he did not eat beef, and he said it was a mixture of tradition and peer pressure. I used to like bacon and ham a lot more than I do now, but nobody had best come between me and my steak.
April 22nd, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Elainek123, you’ve just reminded me of an hilarious incident. When I was kid, our devout, elderly Orthodox Jewish neighbours took in a lodger, accepting him only after his Jewish credentials had thoroughly been checked out. Two days after he moved in, I heard an almighty commotion coming from next door, and saw the lodger being chased down the garden path by Mrs Kiloff, who was lashing out at him with a broom. Later we learned that he had gone into to kitchen to make himself a big fry-up – pork sausages, bacon, black pudding, the whole nine yards. The Kiloffs then had to bury all the utensils he used in the garden for 40 days (I think) in order to rekosherise them. The lodger was never seen again.
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Williamsburg Brooklyn is a hilarious mix of super hipsters and UO Jews. And I mean Williamsburg has been hipster heaven for a couple decades now. Often, their landlords are UO, and for many years there’s been a peaceful, if odd, coexistence. But now things are starting to change. Rising real estate values brought an influx of new residents, and there have been resulting cultural tensions in what was once an undesirable isolated neighborhood. (The same thing happened in the area surrounding the JW’s Watchtower building, which is fairly close by).
Here’s a 39 minute radio story from This American Life, which takes place in the same neighborhood in 2004, and examines the uneasy peace.
http://www.thisamericanlife.or.....ntal-Phase
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:13 pm
There seems to be a certain brand of religiot who find it impossible to just get on with their own life and leave everyone else to get on with theirs. No one is forcing these objectors to eat in this restaurant or support it in any way but they still insist on having a problem with it anyway.
Love the lodger story although in this instance I would say that the lodger was well out of order and must have known that he would get thrown out. Black pudding must be about as un-kosher as you can get. I also love the truly pointless ritual with the utensils and the word rekosherise.
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:29 pm
As it seems that it’s not possible to go anywhere in London these days without being accosted by halal signs everywhere, I’ve thought for a while now how good it would be to see a food shop with a ‘guaranteed NON-halal/kosher’ sign. I’d buy all my meat there.
I love my bacon and my shellfish. More power to Jason Marcus!
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:05 pm
halal and kosher – are both idiotic, evil, cruel, inhumane treatment of animals at slaughter.
The lodger who cooked his food in a kitchen? Fine by me. If some lunatic religiot attacked me with a broom for cooking something he didn’t like, he’d be in A&E getting it removed from his asshole.
These utter fucking wankers need to be educated – that their evil perverse superstitions, both sick and disturbing in the modern world, are ultimately motivated by baseless barbarity.
There should be no excuse for the inhumane suffering of cattle for meat, and no excuse to physically attack another human being just because they aren’t a sociopathic non-educated savage.
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Personally, I find blasphemy to be, not only cute, but hillarious!!!!
But, I am reminded of history. Even though Israel is a secular state, the ultra orthodox Jews are an extreme thorn in their side. They believe that all of Palestine is their god given heritage, and they are constantly stirring up shit, like the “tea party movement”. In 1995 one of the shitwit members of their group assassinated their own prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, for giving away too much to the Palestinians in the hope of peace. Religion, it’s the same where ever you go.
NeoWolfe
April 23rd, 2010 at 1:57 am
The owner is not Blasphemous in any way.
The only blasphemy is any idiot jew who eats there.
The smart jews will enjoy some good bacon.
NO ONE is forcing any one into the eatery.
Once again proof that some silly cult cannot resist any temptation to their ridiculous beliefs.
April 23rd, 2010 at 8:54 am
Fucking two-fridgers. Fuck ‘em. Judaism causes global warming, and that’s a fact.
Janstince –
You may want to check out chapter 3 of Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, subtitled ‘Or Why Heaven Hates Ham’. This tapeworm / trichosomiasis excuse is always trotted out to give some sort of justification to these absurd beliefs.
You’d really have to ask yourself whether lobsters or oysters get tapeworms. Hitchens’ hypothesis (don’t know if I buy it) suggests an altogether darker reason, buried deep in the human psyche.
And it’s not difficult to see why one of the most sex-obsessed religions on the planet would have problems with oysters and mussels ;0)
April 23rd, 2010 at 6:54 pm
The delusion that Jews do not eat pork and Hindus do not eat beef because of tapeworms is a retroactive attempt to justify a taboo invented at a time when such a suspicion did not exist. The Jews banned the eating of pork because Babylonians ate the “Body of the Sow Goddess” sacramentally as an act of worship, and anything permitted for non-Jews was banned for Jews for the purpose of stressing the difference between them and making intermarriage hateful to both.
Hinduism is outside of my field of expertise, so any guess about why cows were virtually deified would be just that–a guess. But it was certainly not based on any medical reality that they did not learn until centuries later.
April 24th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
@William Harwood
You are spot on. The prohibition against eating meat and milk together in Judaism, based on the verse about not seething the kid-goat in its mother’s milk, goes back to the time that pagans in the Levant had a sacred meal of kid-goat boiled in goat’s milk. Different forms of Dionysus were worshipped all over as a goat and this was a sacrament to that god.
The word tragedy comes from trag-odia, song of the goat, which depicted the life and death of Dionysus.
The same goes for the pig which was sacred all over, with swine being driven into clefts in the Earth as part of a ritual celebrating the return of Persephone from the underworld.
Shellfish was sacred to the goddesses of Love, and considered an aphrodisiac.
All the prohibited animals of the Jews can be found to be sacred to the surrounding pagans, and these animal were sacrificed in the temples of the pagan deities.
Even the anti-homosexual Bible verses came from the fact that homosexual male priests served the goddesses as temple prostitutes, just like the female priestesses.
Thus the verse about not bringing the price of a harlot or a dog as an offering to Jehovah. The harlots were the female sacred prostitutes and the male prostitures were called dogs.
Ancient pagan religion was more concerned with magic ritual that was supposed to have power to affect nature. Lust was sacramental because of the belief that plenty of sex made the land fertile and it didn’t matter what kind of sex it was.
Animals that were thought to have sex indiscriminately were especially highly regarded.
One of the exceptions to this rule of pagan symbols being ruled as abominations was the dove, known for its lascivious nature with the males mounting each other as well as the females. It was sacred to the Love goddess and sacrificed to her in her temples. It became a symbol of the Holy Spirit.
To this day in Hinduism the dove or pigeon is still seen as lustful, symbolizing female sexuality especially, with the name of an Indian dove-goddess meaning lust.
The attempts by people to explain away these prohibitions with post hoc rationalisations about trichinosis etc. stem from ignorance of the historical context of the rise of the religions we are left with today.