‘The Whole World is a Slaughterhouse!’: Eating Animals and Jewish Vegetarianism

Paper delivered as a workshop item for the module 'Animals, Humans, Writing' convened by Dr Kaori Nagai at the University of Kent. This paper offers a comparative reading of Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Eating Animals' (2009) alongside the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer with particular attention to Singer's short stories 'The Slaughterer' and 'The Letter Writer'. I place both writers within streams of Jewish vegetarian thought, drawing out tensions between welfarist and liberationist tendencies.