NEW YORK (RNS) — When pop artist Andy Warhol set out to turn ordinary consumer goods into art, he got all the details right.
The familiar red-and-white color scheme of Campbell’s Soup cans. The wooden crates once used to transport Cola-Cola bottles. The stamped letters on a box of Mott’s Apple Juice.
The logo of the Orthodox Union, a letter U embedded within a larger O, displayed on the label of a box of Brillo pads.
Brillo pads, it turns out, are one of more than a million products certified as kosher by the OU, the major worldwide umbrella organization for Orthodox Jews.
Warhol’s Brillo boxes with the OU symbol — currently on display in New York in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again” — reflects how ubiquitous kashrut, the Hebrew word for the laws of kosher, has become in the United States, according to Rabbi Menachem Genack, CEO of OU Kosher.
“It is quite remarkable that kosher is so accepted very broadly in American society,” Genack said.