On this day in vegan history · July 24, 1991
Isaac Bashevis Singer Dies
The Nobel laureate who gave up meat for the health of the chickens died in Florida at 87.
The facts
- Died
- July 24, 1991, Surfside, Florida, aged 87
- Born
- November 11, 1903, Leoncin, Poland
- Honor
- Nobel Prize in Literature, 1978
- Vegetarian
- For the last 35 years of his life; a recurring theme in his work
Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish-language writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, died in Surfside, Florida, on July 24, 1991. He had been a vegetarian for the last thirty-five years of his life, and he wrote the ethics of eating animals straight into his fiction, from a ritual slaughterer sick with guilt to Holocaust survivors arguing about God and meat. Asked whether he had given up meat for his own health, he gave the reply that outlived him: he did it for the health of the chickens. He also made a far heavier comparison, between the human slaughterhouse and atrocity, that remains one of the most quoted and most argued-over lines in animal ethics.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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I did it for the health of the chickens.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, asked whether he became a vegetarian for his health
Source: Wikipedia -
How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood?
Isaac Bashevis Singer, on why he stopped eating meat
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Singer gave the animal question a home in serious literature and a wit that carried it far beyond the vegetarian press. He argued the case through characters rather than sermons, which is part of why it still lands.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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