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Got To Get Ourselves Back to the Garden

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
August 19, 2011

The practice of a few ultra-Orthodox Jews leaving their enclaves behind for wide open land and the opportunity to farm it may seem like a relatively new phenomenon, one eerily in keeping with the more yuppie locavore, farm-to-table zeitgeist. But actually, as Leah Koenig reports today in Tablet Magazine, there is a long, storied, and interesting history of Jewish farming in America (it includes Max Yasgur, for example). The population of Jewish farmers was robust, then lay fallow, and only now is starting to be seeded again.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.