….[Rabbi Tuvia Geffen] of the long beard and wire-rim glasses and Yiddish-inflected English, a man by all outward appearances belonging to the Old World… was the person who by geographical coincidence and unexpected perspicacity adapted Coca-Cola\u2019s secret formula to make the iconic soft drink kosher in one version for Passover and in another for the rest of the year. To this day, his 1935 rabbinical ruling, known in Hebrew as a teshuva, remains the standard.<\/p>\n
That ruling, in turn, did much more than solve a dietary problem. A generation after Frank\u2019s lynching, a decade after Congress barred the Golden Door, amid the early stages of Hitler\u2019s genocide, kosher Coke formed a powerful symbol of American Jewry\u2019s place in the mainstream.<\/p>\n
\u201cRabbi Geffen really got the importance of it,\u201d\u009d said Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina, who specializes in Jewish life in the South. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t live in any better place than the South to get it. To not drink Coca-Cola was certainly to be considered un-American.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n