Matthew Alice: I found this newspaper stuck under my windshield wiper. I went to the supermarket to verify some of the allegations made. Indeed, I did find the “K” and the “U" symbols on many products, but other than that, I can't really accept or reject what is stated in this propaganda. — Ray Geltser, Loma Portal

I certainly appreciate your inquisitive, open-minded attitude, Ray, but you deserve a more worthy subject. So my advice is to forget most of what you read and get on with real life.

Ray found under his windshield a four-page tabloid called The Truth at Last. (Right away I have trouble with it. Smacks faintly of those books that claim to be the absolute, final, guaranteed, no-doubt-about-it, forget-all-the-others diet plan.) The masthead declares it to be “America’s Oldest Patriot’s Newspaper” (uh-oh, more trouble signs—“patriot”? Like Ollie North, maybe?). It’s published in Marietta, Georgia, Newt Gingrich country, by a white supremacist, former Klansman Edward R. Fields. He exercises his freedoms of speech and press by keeping us dimbulbs out here in Boobville hip to the latest Jewish and black conspiracies against our glorious republic. (Say, Ed, is that a Pulitzer in your pocket, or are you just proud to be an American?)

This particular issue rehashes the musty old anti-Semitic scaremongering about something they call the “secret Kosher food tax.” First of all, it’s not’a secret and it’s not a tax. But the word “tax” is guaranteed to get us rubes all het up and in a fighting mood, so Ed favors it, I guess.

Those quibbles aside, there is some truth in what Ed’s telling us. Yes, food processors who choose to can have their ingredients and processing methods supervised by a rabbi to ensure they conform to the complex Jewish dietary laws. This entitles the processor to mark his product with a symbol indicating it is kosher. And yes, food processors pass along all their costs to us consumers. Using Ed-logic, then, we’re all forced to pay a kosher food tax that is making a few rabbis wealthy beyond our meager Christian imaginations. Ed helpfully includes a photo of a “Rabbi Levy” stamping a produce box with his kosher symbol, “which has made him untold millions of dollars.” The millions are “untold,” I guess, because Ed supplies no proof of the rabbi’s net worth. But if he really is rolling in dough, he probably didn’t make it inspecting green beans.

Ed supplies us with reams of dollar figures and quotations, all couched in slightly inflammatory prose. The net effect is the picture of a huge rabbinical conspiracy to intimidate America’s food processors into paying this “kosher tax,” all the while keeping the news from us unwitting consumers. Some of Ed’s quotes even come from articles written by rabbis. The problem here is that there is not universal agreement among Jewish groups about all the details of dietary laws, and some rabbis have objected to what they see as the artificially high cost of kosher meats. Ed exploits these disagreements to his own advantage.

A second thing that works in Ed’s favor is the reluctance of a manufacturer of any product, food or non-food, kosher or not, to reveal its cost of doing business, as if the competition would reduce the company to kindling if they found out. Paranoia in the extreme. So the fees paid to rabbis for inspection services are rarely revealed. The closest I could come was a report in the New York Times that said kosher certification contributes 6.5 millionths of a cent to the price of an individual package of General Foods’ Bird’s Eye-brand frozen food. But Ed takes the manufacturers’ silence as a conspiracy. He ignores the fact that if you asked a company how much the cost of its advertising or packaging contributes to the price of its products, you’d get the same answer — “Buzz off, Bubba.”