Now that Justin Lipschik is a seven-year veteran of the High Point Market in High Point, North Carolina, he knows precisely how to prepare for the largest home furnishings trade show in the world. But when the Teaneck, New Jersey furniture salesman was new to the ballyhoo, he did his best to foresee every contingency. He studied his company’s product line, reviewed attendee rosters, and filled out his suitcase with foil pouches of tuna fish.
“That’s energy,” explained Lipschik, an observant Orthodox Jew who feared he would otherwise wilt in a Piedmont city roughly 208 miles from the nearest full-service kosher restaurant.
As it turned out, Lipschik could have shortened his packing list. Since 2012, the nearby Chabad Jewish Center of Greensboro has run a kosher canteen in a vacant showroom on the upper level of the International Home Furnishings Center, an anchor of the biannual expo. Bagels, whitefish, and cream cheese are set out on folding tables by 7 a.m., followed by a midday deli lunch, and dinner of baked chicken or roasted fish, accompanied by grilled vegetables and rice.
Center executive director Yosef Plotkin, who calls himself “the most-known rabbi in furniture,” describes the ad hoc dining space—furnished with castoff sofas and chairs left behind by exhibitors disinclined to lug the samples home—as “a kosher oasis in a Southern town.”
Or, as Lipschik puts it, “Without him, we starve.”
In some ways, the challenges posed by High Point are unique. High Point is the rare city with a population so small that it could hold a community meeting at the Cotton Bowl, but convention capacity to rival Las Vegas.
For most of the year, those 11 million square feet linger unused. As John Joe Schlichtman, author of “Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World,” writes of High Pointers, “They live with the barrenness of Disneyworld after hours, without the cast, lighting, and music.” Then, 80,000 marketgoers accustomed to the amenities of New York City and Atlanta show up for a five-day stretch, wondering how they’ll ever maintain their at-home routines.
But there’s nothing unusual about the search for kosher food in the South, a region home to fewer than 6% of the nation’s 7.6 million Jews.
While restaurants have increasingly modified their menus to accommodate various diets, there is no such thing as being kosher for one customer. The rules of kashrut (and arguments over them) make up a startlingly sizable portion of the Talmud, but the basics of the dietary code include no pork, no shellfish, and no mixing of milk and meat, a dictum interpreted broadly. For example, if a restaurant used a plate to serve a cheeseburger, a strict adherent of Jewish dietary laws can’t eat off it once it’s rinsed.
Consequently, centuries after the first Jews immigrated to the American colonies, Orthodox Jews who head South in search of professional advancement—whether at a rural college campus or the biggest furniture expo in the galaxy—are still often compelled to eat together and apart from non-Jews. Scholars say that’s just how the ancient sages intended it.
When coffee came to Europe in the 1600s, it made some rabbis very jittery. According to Robert Liberles’ “Jews Welcome Coffee: Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany,” they took one look at the intermingling in cafes, and suggested coffee belonged on the verboten list. They worried the beverage could undo Jewish bonds, thereby threatening Jewish survival, which sits at the heart of kosher practice.
Hasia Diner cited Liberles’ research in her 2016 article, “Road Food: Jewish Peddlers During the Great Jewish Migration and Their New World Customers,” which examined the “food crisis” that sellers who kept kosher faced in the nineteenth-century South.
For those entrepreneurs, eating within a Jewish community was an impossibility. They’d frequently go weeks without seeing another Jewish person, or anyone familiar with the strictures of their religion. By contrast, according to Diner, whereas traveling Jews in the old country had to contend with anti-Semitic legal restrictions and taxes, they could count on tavernkeepers to have cooking vessels reserved for kosher food and marked accordingly.
It didn’t work that way in the state of Georgia, where a peddler named Yampolsky refused breakfast in a home where he’d spent the night. His host, taking offense, insisted on knowing why Yampolsky didn’t believe in Jesus Christ. Although it’s unknown how the peddler responded, it’s a safe bet that he would have rather been talking about the quality of poplin or price of spectacles.
Sometimes, though, conversations incited by culinary confusion were productive, gesturing toward cross-cultural understanding—or something that more closely resembled understanding than whatever went through the mind of a woman who in 1863 served ham and eggs to a Jewish peddler. Not wanting to lose a sale, the man accepted the dish, then threw his food in the hearth while his hostess was out of the room, sparking a dramatic grease fire.
To avoid such scenarios, peddlers carried the antebellum version of tuna snack packs: They stockpiled dried meat, bread, and preserved fruit. Many also consented to eat hard-boiled eggs, reasoning that only their shells touched non-kosher surfaces.
Other peddlers, swayed by hunger and changing attitudes toward customs within the faith, went further. Diner recounts the story of a peddler who ate his share of fried bacon, potlikker, and side meat at a boardinghouse. “Mr. Schwarz, I thought Moses commanded the Jews not to eat hog,” the cook said. To which Schwarz responded, “Ah, Madam, if Moses had traveled through Perry County, Alabama, he would never have issued such an order.”
Possibly apocryphal, sure. But it’s consistent with leading Jewish food historian Marcie Cohen Ferris’ finding that Southern Jews have been redefining what it means to “eat Jewish” from the start. In “Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South,” she quotes a Memphis joke about an Orthodox Jew with three sets of dishes: One for milk, one for meat, and one for barbecue.
Those adaptations are revealing, if not side-splittingly funny. But they presume prolonged exposure to the region, along with complex internal negotiations involving desperation, deliciousness, and identity. In other words, what made sense for an itinerant dry goods guy in the 1800s isn’t wholly applicable to someone who’s in North Carolina for five days to sell barstools and pool tables.
Until Plotkin and his wife intervened, Jewish exhibitors at the High Point Market usually subsisted on apples, bananas, and Oreos. “You could get a can of tuna and mayonnaise, if you had time,” recalled Usher Parnes of Lakewood, New Jersey.
Also, coffee, which was classified as kosher over the German rabbis’ objections. But Parnes contends you can only sell so much on caffeine.
“You feel fatigued; you suffer,” he said. With proper sustenance, “I can make money. I can function.”
Aware of the visiting exhibitors’ needs, the Plotkins in 2008 began preparing kosher meals in their Greensboro kitchen. They bagged each meal individually and delivered it to the requestor’s hotel. Before long, though, their delivery route included close to a dozen different hotels, so they decided to consolidate their operation.
“Originally, it was around food, but it became a hub,” Plotkin said. Outside of designated mealtimes, Orthodox Jews drop by the converted showroom to network, or nap on one of the hand-me-down couches. It’s easier for them to pray there than on the bustling sales floor, where they might have to carve out space between a shelving importer and dealer of Ganesha statues. They can stash their luggage in a storage closet, and their drinks in the cooler.
By the final day of the market in October, Parnes had only one complaint about the short-term café.
“If not for the rabbi,” he said, “I would have lost weight.”
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