Five Minutes With...

‘Five minutes with…’ is an exciting collaboration between the Big Green Jewish Website and film-maker Lara Smallman. For the past six months, Lara has been using the medium of film to explore climate change. She has interviewed 10:10, the Environmental Justice Foundation and even fired a question or two at Boris Johnson.

The documentary strand ‘Five minutes with…’ is your chance to hear about the many different ways in which people are going green. If you’ve got someone in mind you would like us to feature, don’t be shy let us know.

Lara can be contacted for commissions, as well as events via info@larasmallman.com.

Five Minutes with...UJIA

UJIA is the largest Jewish charity investing in young people and education in Israel and the UK. UJIA have been working for many months of their environment policy, to read the case study click here. In June last year, the charity made a momentous move, not just in re-locating to Camden Town, but in transitioning to an altogether green practice. Film-maker Lara Smallman went to see how the new building has enabled UJIA to realise its green ambitions, and educate others on the importance of environmentalism.

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Eating Animals

A new work of nonfiction from Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything about factory farming is illuminated in Foer’s first major work of nonfiction, which attempts to help us make more informed choices about what we eat. Motivated by the question of what to teach his first son about food, Foer set out on a three year journey to learn where the meat on our plate comes from. His findings are startling.

The author feeds us the gory details of the lives of factory-farmed animals. His first hand descriptions are vivid and striking in their gruesomeness. But this book is about much more than the gore that surrounds our meals. Foer explores the environmental impact of factory farming (“animal agriculture...is the number one cause of climate change”), he describes the way in which large-scale health threats are linked to factory farming (H1N1 aka swine flu), he probes into the waste, the humanitarian violations, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding the process by which many of us fill our dinner plates. He also debunks the myth of “free-range” and tells us exactly what is in our chicken...and it’s not just chicken.

Foer is a fiction writer and portions of the book come to life the way his novels do. Beautiful passages describe the social and even ritualistic aspects of sharing meals (Passover seders). He begins the book with a powerful story of his grandmother turning down a piece of pork even while she was starving during the war. “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save,” she told him. He ends the book with these very words, and the chapters in between tell us what, exactly, we are choosing when we choose to eat certain meats, and why it matters.

Foer uses some of his trademark literary devices in this book—long lists (chapter 3, Words/Meaning), changes in narrative voice (he uses transcripts from his interviews with farmers without indicating who is speaking). These gimmicky devices make for a disjointed and sometimes tiresome reading experience, but they are well-worth the effort. Whatever is said of this book’s style, there is no question that it is a terribly important work—well-researched, heartfelt, and above all filled with facts that anyone who eats should know. 

Review by Ada Brunstein

Ten Tips for an Environmentally-Friendly Purim

Purim celebrates unity and community. We give one another gifts of food and distribute money to the poor to remember how we were rescued from Haman’s plot to destroy the Jewish people by pulling together in three days of communal fasting, prayer and self reflection. Sadly, in today’s consumer-oriented society, our community spirit is being smothered in layers of cellophane, excessive packaging, a surplus of junk food and expensive costumes. This needless glitter is not only damaging to our pocket and our health, but to our environment as well.

Sviva Israel offers the following suggestions for creating a
more environmentally-friendly Purim:

1) Trash the Baskets – What can you do with so many straw baskets and gift bags? Package your Mishloach Manot in useful, reusable containers such as storage containers, glasses, mugs and pasta drainers for year-round usability.

2) Wrap it Up – For the more creative, wrap your food items up in a pretty hand-towel, apron, cloth table napkins, oven mitts or other useful fabric item.

3) Sustainable Stuffing – Instead of padding out your package with shredded cellophane or colored paper, use banana chips, sunflower seeds or popcorn (only for recipients over 3-years –old).

4) Bag It – Follow the fashion trend and give your gifts in eco-friendly cloth bags that your friends can reuse for shopping.

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Hebrew School Goes Green for Purim

While Purim costumes weren’t hard to come by across North America, this year one Jewish community in suburban Detroit looked to its trash for inspiration.

Ever since the holiday Tu B’Shevat, children at the Chabad-Lubavitch Hebrew School in West Bloomfield’s The Shul have been learning about the environment and recycling, even making their own costumes out of brown paper bags.

At the “Green Purim” fair where guest speaker Rabbi Shmuel Simenowitz, an attorney turned organic maple farmer in southern Vermont and executive director of Project Ya’aleh V’Yavo, spoke about the Torah and environmental sensibilities, the students made noise-makers out of cardboard and plastic items they salvaged from home.