Based on the bestselling book by Jonathan Safran Foer, the film Eating Animals is an urgent, eye-opening look at the environmental, economic, and public health consequences of factory farming. Eating Animals offers attainable, commonsense solutions to a growing crisis while making the case that ethical farming is not only an animal rights issue but one that affects every aspect of our lives.

Hazon encourages organizations to host screenings of the film in their Jewish communities. Hazon created this discussion guide to be used by Jewish communities after screenings to explore the intersection of Judaism, food, and animal welfare, and start a conversation about, well, eating animals.

To arrange a screening of Eating Animals in your community, visit eatinganimalsmovie.com and click on “education.”

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Home for Dinner: Hazon’s Family Meals Initiative is a synagogue-based pilot program for late elementary to early middle school students and their parents.

Ty looked at the text and said he didn’t know what it was about. But he just needed to talk it through. Once he did, he was able to express on his own that food is important to survive, but meals are important to be together.

American family life, including American Jewish family life, has spun more and more out of control, with overscheduled kids and under-connected families. Dinnertime is a time when adults and children can come together after being apart throughout the day, a unique time for families to break bread, interact and reconnect.

Home for Dinner engages families in their home, students in the classroom, and the families as a community together at the synagogue. This multi-faceted approach seeks to re-connect children, parents, and their synagogue community as they explore together the dynamic interplay of Jews, food, and our complex family lives.

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Home for Dinner Family Program Launch allows families to engage with the big idea that Jewish tradition, food, and family life are woven together. The program allows other big Jewish ideas like brachot: gratitude for what we have, not taking things for granted; L’Dor va Dor: Generation to generation: passing down of recipes, their stories; Shmirat haGuf: caring for your body, health, nutrition; Shmirat haAdama: taking care of the earth, sustainability; G’milut hasadim: acts of loving kindness like feeding the hungry to surface. These ideas will be further explored in subsequent Home for Dinner Family Programs. The Launch also introduces the idea that family meals can be the vehicle for transferring values and ethics and concludes with families signing a Family Meals Pledge to eat together one more meal a week than they currently do.

Download the Home for Dinner Learning Lab Curriculum.

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Home for Dinner was a pilot program in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boulder, Denver, and New York. For more information about bringing Home for Dinner to your community, email foodeducation@hazon.org or download the Home for Dinner Learning Lab Curriculum.

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As a part of the Home for Dinner curriculum, we send a monthly email to Home for Dinner parents with program updates from across the country, recipe ideas, and local events in the programs’ communities. To see an archive of these emails, click below.

December 2013 Parent Email
January 2014 Parent Email

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We are thrilled to have the following schools in the 2013-2014 cohort: Nevei Kodesh (Boulder, CO); Congregation Har Hashem (Boulder, CO); Congregation Bonai Shalom (Boulder, CO); Beth Evergreen (Denver, CO); B’nai Havurah (Denver, CO); Rodef Shalom (Denver, CO); Congregation Rodef Sholom (San Rafael, CA); Congregation Beth El (Berkeley, CA); Congregation Kol Shofar (Tiburon, CA); Congregation Beth Jacob (Redwood, CA); Temple Sinai (Oakland, CA); Congregation Etz Chayim (Palo Alto, CA); Edah Community (Berkeley, CA); Temple Beth Shalom (Mahopac, NY); Park Slope Jewish Center (Brooklyn, NY); Reform Temple of Forest Hills (Forest Hills, NY)

Past participating school: Netivot Shalom (Berkeley, CA)

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The Covenant Foundation has provided generous support for the creation and implementation of Home for Dinner: Hazon’s Family Meals Initiative.

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Starting a family commences a period of change. Expectant parents very quickly transition from thinking for themselves to providing for a new life, and the preparation and anticipation can be overwhelming. Especially when thinking about how we want to feed our new families.

Setting the Table is designed to help couples think through these challenges with a Jewish lens. Participants learn essential tips and cooking techniques that will help them prepare meals for their growing families, highlighting seasonal and local ingredients. Following the cooking portion of the evening, participants gather around the table to enjoy the fruit of their labor and to learn from and grapple with ancient and contemporary texts focused on the experience of a family dinner table. The discussions lead the participants to think about how they wanted to frame their family’s experience around the table.

Setting the Table bridged the gap between sacred preparation and material details, just as food seems to do in Jewish tradition. For our family, it was an opportunity to think about how we would bring intention to our families’ eating habits, even just for the two of us until our son takes to dining at the table.

Rachel G., Brooklyn, NY

Setting the Table can be run as a one-time program, as a series of programs, or given directly to new parents as a helpful resource. In addition to yummy, simple recipes, this resource includes a Leader’s Guide for educators with sample programs for holidays like Passover and Shabbat, and also for everyday eating. It also features ancient and contemporary Jewish texts with guiding thought questions. [myspacer]

• The Recipes section features dozens of family-friendly recipes designed with new parents in mind.
• The Thought Texts section incorporates modern and ancient Jewish texts that focus on the experience of a family dinner table.
• Tips for Kids in the Kitchen offers a variety of fun ideas to increase children’s participation in the kitchen and in Jewish ritual for an early start on a healthy lifelong relationship to food and Jewish tradition.

UJA-Federation of New York has provided generous support for the creation and implementation of Setting the Table.

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Food for Thought is designed to encourage participants to think critically about the food that they eat and the ways their food choices affect the health of their community and the planet.

Food for Thought is is a 130-page sourcebook that draws on a range of texts from within and beyond Jewish traditions to explore a range of topics relating to Jews and food. It includes traditional Jewish texts, in Hebrew and English, and a range of contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish texts.  It is designed to be accessible to people with little Jewish background as well as rigorous and challenging for someone with more extensive Jewish learning.

Written by Nigel Savage and Anna Hanau

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