The (New York) Jewish Week . . .Connecting the World to Jewish
News, Culture, Features, and Opinions – Thursday, 26 December 2013
Dear Reader,
A 10-member task force is being formed to help determine the
rightful owners of a large stash of recently found paintings in Munich, with
ties to Hitler. It will include three art experts chosen by the Jewish
community, Staff Writer Stewart Ain reports.
Groups Urge Full Review Of Nazi Art Trove
Jewish representatives on German task force to help determine
rightful heirs of works found in Munich.
Stewart Ain, Staff Writer
The Jewish community is appointing three art experts to a
10-member task force being established to learn the rightful owners of a vast
trove of paintings found in the Munich home of Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father
helped Adolf Hitler sell looted art, The Jewish Week has learned.
The State of Israel has been asked to
send one expert and theConference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (known as the Claims Conference) is
appointing two others.
The task force was created amid
international pressure after authorities last month revealed the Gurlitt
seizure. It marks the first time the Jewish community has become involved in
the matter. Among the paintings in the collection were works by Pablo Picasso,
Henri Matisse and Pierre-August Renoir.
Bobby Brown, director of Project
HEART, the Israeli
government’s effort to deal with restitution of Jewish property seized during
the Holocaust, said his office, in conjunction with the Jewish Agency for
Israel, would be selecting a representative shortly. He said they requested a
presence on the task force, and German authorities “understood that it is
legitimate to have an Israeli expert there.”
“Two things are extremely important,”
he told The Jewish Week. “That Holocaust-looted art is identified, and that we
do everything we can to make sure there is a simple process for determining
ownership. … The law has to be clarified, but if art has been looted there will
be a large degree of sympathy for not returning it to Gurlitt.”
He noted that the Washington
Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets in 1998 established principles regarding
Nazi-confiscated art that were endorsed by 44 nations, including Germany. They
pertained to art in the possession of governments — not individuals — and
called for the identification of looted art through a transparent process.
“The Claims Conference is also
insisting on transparency of the research process and on publication of the
results,” said Wesley Fisher, director of research for the Claims Conference.
“I believe it would also be good if there was an appeals process whereby
claimants could appeal decisions of the task force. And we are also interested
in a non-bureaucratic, easy process for the owners and heirs to get back their
property.”
“So far as the Claims Conference is
concerned, this is not a legal matter but a moral one,” he added.
Rolf Jessewitsch, director of the
Kunstmuseums Solingen, about 200 miles from Hamburg, agreed, saying in an
e-mail: “It’s too late to wait for solutions by law only. International
relations and friendships are the foundations to solve these problems in a
moral way. Germany has to fulfill the Washington treaty. “International experts
have to be involved to examine these cases. … Then all this robbed art has to
be restituted to the former owners or their heirs. There can be no ‘roll-back’
of the unbelievable crimes done by the Nazis.”
Fisher said the Claims Conference
asked to be on the task force because “we have been the legal representative of
world Jewry in Germany for these purposes since 1952.”
There were 1,406 works of art found in
the Gurlitt’s apartment by authorities in February 2012 as part of a tax
investigation. Bavarian officials immediately confiscated the art, reportedly
valued at $1.4 billion. Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand, was one of four art
dealers authorized by the Nazis to trade in art during the war, and this art
trove is the largest private collection discovered since the end of the war.
For 18 months, authorities held the
art without publicly announcing the seizure. A cursory examination made by one
art historian to determine ownership of the artwork found that 590 of the
pieces might have been taken from Jews during the Holocaust.
But Fisher said the Claims Conference
wants “all of the artwork to be examined, not just the 590 suspect pieces.”
He pointed out that the Gurlitt
collection contains 380 works of modern art — the Nazis considered it
“degenerate art” — that were taken from museums.
“We think those should be reviewed too
because some may have been taken in forced sales from Jews,” he said.
Rachel Stern, an art historian who
heads an effort to organize exhibitions of the late German artist Fritz Ascher,
explained that Jews living under the Nazi regime were not able to freely sell
works of art they owned.
“If you were Jewish living in
Nazi-occupied France and selling an artwork, there is no way you had a regular
sale,” she said. “Once the Nazis came to power, you were not allowed to sell.
You were either forced to sell or it was just taken from you. Or if you were
trying to escape, you tried to get for it whatever you could. But there were
few dealers able to sell artwork and the possibility of you as a Jew selling
artwork for market value was nonexistent. And if you gave a buyer a really good
deal, did you really want to give him such a good deal? All I can say is that
these were not regular sales.”
Fisher said he believes the 590
artworks deemed suspect may have been found on a website created by the Claims
Conference that lists 22,000 items stolen in Paris by the Nazis, many of them
works of art. More than half are still missing.
“It is a searchable database with
information on the original owners and photographs in many cases,” he said.
He said Germany has now posted more
than 440 suspect works of art from the Gurlitt collection, 50 of which are oil
paintings at the website,www.lostart.de/Webs/EN/Datenbank/KunstfundMuenchen.html.
Gurlitt has been quoted as saying that
he has no plans to “voluntarily give back” any of the artwork.
“They have to come back to me,” he
told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
He insisted that his father,
Hildebrand who died in 1956, was never involved in Nazi looting, and all the
artwork he inherited was bought legally from German museums and art dealers,
never from individuals, something he would have found “unsavory.”
“I’ve never committed a crime, and
even if I had, it would fall under the statute of limitations,” he said. “If I
were guilty, they would put in me prison.”
But a spokesman for the task force,
Matthias Henkel, said in a translated e-mail to The Jewish Week that the
Bavarian Justice Minister has announced proposed legislation to get around the
statute of limitations.
Henkel said the task force would be
asked to do “extensive provenance research” on the artwork. Asked if it would
be given a deadline to complete its work, Henkel quoted the task force’s
leader, Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel, as saying: “Thoroughness comes before
speed.”
But he went on to say that the
government is “conscious of the expressed need for a fair and rapid procedure,”
and that the length of time it would take to verify the provenance of the
artwork will “vary from picture to picture.”
Both Fisher and Halie Geller, founding
attorney for the New York office of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm
devoted to art, cultural heritage and museum law, said they believe that
searching the provenance of more than 1,400 pieces of art could take a long time.
“Provenance research, especially with
respect to art work sold or transferred during the Nazi-era, is an inherently
slow and difficult process made even more challenging by missing
documentation,” Geller said. “This process will surely take years and may not
necessarily yield conclusive results.”
Nevertheless, Charles Goldstein,
president and counsel to the Commission on Art Recovery of the World Jewish
Congress, said the task force should be able to begin gleaning results
relatively quickly.
“Most of the cases should be cleared
out through months of hard work by people who know what they are doing,” he
said. “Once they have narrowed it down, the hard cases may take years.”
Goldstein said he understood that the
proposed law would not permit “a thief to plead [that he was holding the
artwork] in good faith” if there was evidence to the contrary.
He said there were reports that
Gurlitt’s late mother made comments suggesting she knew some of the art was
suspect. Gurlitt’s father reportedly told authorities after the war that all of
his business papers were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. But when
authorities raided the son’s apartment last year, they are said to have found
the documents — some of which would help in determining the provenance of artwork
— packed in crates.
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Edgar Bronfman, the heir to the Seagram liquor empire who became
increasingly involved in Jewish life as an adult, is remembered in personal
essays by Rabbi David Ellenson, outgoing president of Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and Yeshiva University president Richard
Joel. And our Editorial pays tribute to the man described as "the prince
of the Jews."
Bronfman Left Large Legacy
Philanthropist led Swiss bank effort as World Jewish Congress
head, funded major programs for youth.
JTA Staff
Edgar Bronfman, the billionaire former beverage magnate and
leading Jewish philanthropist, died last Saturday at the age of 84.
As the longtime president of theWorld
Jewish Congress, Bronfman fought for Jewish rights worldwide and led
the successful fight to secure more than a billion dollars in restitution from
Swiss banks for Holocaust victims and their heirs. As a philanthropist,
Bronfman took the lead in creating and funding many efforts to strengthen
Jewish identity among young people.
According to a statement, he died
peacefully at his home in New York, surrounded by family.
Bronfman spent the 1950s and 1960s
working with his father, Samuel, at Seagram Ltd., the family’s beverage
business. He became chairman of the company in 1971, the year of his father’s
death.
Just a year earlier, in 1970, Bronfman
took part in a delegation to Russia to lobby the Kremlin for greater rights for
Jews in the Soviet Union. He would later credit the trip with inspiring his
increasing interest in Judaism.
“It was on those trips to Russia that
my curiosity was piqued,” Bronfman said. “What is it about Judaism, I asked
myself, that has kept it alive through so much adversity while so many other
traditions have disappeared. Curiosity soon turned into something more, and
that ‘something more’ has since turned into a lifelong passion.”
In 1981, Bronfman became the president
of the World Jewish Congress, stepping up the organization’s activism on behalf
of Jewish communities around the world. From his perch at the WJC, in addition
to battling with the Swiss banks, he continued the fight for Soviet Jewry, took
the lead in exposing the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim and worked to improve
Jewish relations with the Vatican. In 1991, he lobbied President George H.W.
Bush to push for the rescission of the United Nations resolution equating
Zionism and racism.
“In terms of defending Jews, I’m a
Jew,” Bronfman told JTA in a 2008 interview. “And I was in a position to do so,
so I did so.”
Bronfman’s final years as president of
WJC were marred by allegations of financial irregularities revolving around his
most influential adviser on Jewish political affairs, the organization’s
secretary general, Rabbi Israel Singer. Bronfman was never implicated in any of
the financial allegations, but the controversy and feuding surrounding his top
aide dominated the final years of his decades-long stint as WJC president.
The office of then-New York Attorney
General Eliot Spitzer issued a report in 2006 that found no criminal offense,
but criticized the WJC’s financial management, and it ordered that Singer be
prohibited from making financial decisions in the organization. Bronfman
initially stood by Singer before ultimately firing him in 2007. Several months
later Bronfman stepped down.
But Bronfman did not disappear from
the public stage. A staunch supporter of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,
he continued to be a vocal and public backer of liberal politicians in the
United States and Israel. And as president of the Samuel Bronfman Foundation,
he dedicated most of his final years to his Jewish philanthropic causes.
He founded the Bronfman Youth Fellowship in 1987, a young leadership program
that brings together Jewish high school students from Israel and North America.
In the 1990s he worked to revive Hillel, serving as the founding chair of the
campus organization’s board of governors. In 2002, he provided the funding to
launch MyJewishLearning, a digital media entity that now also includes the
Jewish parenting site Kveller and boasts 1 million visitors per month.
Bronfman and his first wife, Ann Loeb,
had five children: Sam, Edgar Jr., Matthew, Holly and Adam. He and his second
wife, Georgiana Webb, had two daughters, Sara and Clare. In 1994, he married
the artist Jan Aronson. He is survived by Aronson, his seven children, 24
grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, as well as a brother, Charles, and a
sister, Phyllis Lambert.
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Edgar M. Bronfman, 1929-2013
Born to a life of luxury, with admittedly little knowledge of
Judaism growing up, Edgar Bronfman could have achieved success and adulation
simply as the successor to his father, Samuel Bronfman, chairman of Seagram
Ltd. The fact that in addition he became increasingly interested and involved
in Jewish life as an adult — not only as president of the World
Jewish Congress but as
a student of Jewish text and issues — is a tribute to his capacity to both lead
and learn.
On his death this week at the age of
84, Bronfman is being hailed as “the prince of Jews,” a man of regal stature
who took it upon himself to help his people in a variety of meaningful ways. He
made a profound impact on the lives of Holocaust survivors, who benefited from
the large funds he helped secure through tough negotiations with Swiss banks;
on Jews in the Soviet Union, whose emigration he promoted; and on many hundreds
of young people in the U.S. and Israel, who were given intense Jewish
educational experiences through the Bronfman Youth
Fellowship program he
established.
We are proud to offer personal
remembrances on these pages from two major Jewish leaders who knew Bronfman
well and had great affection for him as well as for his work. The fact that
Richard Joel is president of Yeshiva University and Rabbi David Ellenson is outgoing
president of Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion says volumes about Bronfman’s love for
all Jews, across denominational lines, and his commitment to better their lives
and deepen their Jewish identities.
Rabbi Ellenson writes that “the
enduring legacy of Edgar Bronfman — as his deeds testify — is that he invested
in souls.” And Richard Joel recalls Bronfman telling him, on becoming the lay
leader of Hillel, that the key to success was “hope, not fear,” which became
their mantra.
Much is being written this week about
Edgar Bronfman the billionaire businessman and philanthropist, and deservedly
so. What is most noteworthy, though, is that his contributions to the Jewish
people he was so passionate about will endure, making it possible for future
generations to explore and come to love their Jewish identity, as he did.
May his memory be a blessing.
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Israeli university officials are deeply concerned about more
boycotts of Israeli academics. Israel Correspondent Michele Chabin has the story.
Also, Stewart Ain interviews Hebrew University president Menahem Ben-Sasson on
the subject, and columnist Gil Troy explains why he's boycotting the American
Studies Association.
Academics Brace For More Boycotts
Fear in Israel that ASA vote is ‘tipping point’ in BDS wars
Michele Chabin, Israel Correspondent
Jerusalem — Israeli university officials say the American
Studies Association boycott
of Israeli academic institutions is unlikely in the short-term to exacerbate
the decade-long “soft” boycott already being felt by many Israeli professors.
But they fear that larger, more influential groups will decide to join the
boycott bandwagon, with possibly devastating results.
While the officials acknowledge that
the ASA, with just 5,000 members (only 1,200 voted on the matter), has
relatively little clout, they view its boycott in the context of the larger
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that likens Israel to
apartheid-era South Africa.
Professor Boaz Golany, vice president
for external relations and resource development at the Technion Institute of Technology, told The
Jewish Week that he anticipates “no immediate impact” from the ASA boycott on
the Technion or other Israeli universities. But he said he worries that the BDS
movement, emboldened by the ASA vote, will work even harder to “tarnish the
image of Israel in general and in particular its academic institutions.”
Golany emphasized that Israel’s
universities “don’t view the ACA boycott as a stand-alone event. We view it as
part of a concentrated campaign by people trying to delegitimize Israel.”
The administrator ticked off a list of
recent boycott attempts by universities in Australia and England, and on
several college campuses in California. Though largely unsuccessful, he said,
the campaigns helped fuel anti-Israel sentiments.
If the boycotters are ultimately
successful, many of the Technion’s 560 tenure-track professors could be
affected, Golany acknowledged. “Every one of them has several collaborators,
co-authors of scientific papers and research proposals from outside Israel, and
many of them are in the U.S.”
A large percentage of Technion
students do their doctoral and post-doctoral work in North America, and form
lasting professional relationships as a result.
Golany said he and other university
officials appreciate “the strong support” for Israel they receive from their
American counterparts.
“Many professors from the rank and
file have written us e-mails of support. But I am worried that if we don’t
stand up and fight against the campaign, it will eventually hurt us.”
The best way to do this, Golany said
“is to expand, strengthen and deepen the collaborations with our partners
overseas. Our way isn’t to fight or complain or argue with these [pro-boycott]
people. Our way is to show the world there is so much to benefit from
partnering with Israeli universities. Such collaboration yields synergetic
effects that are for the benefit everyone involved and humanity at large.”
To emphasize Israeli universities’
contributions to the world, the U.S.-based “Friends” organizations of Technion, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, Haifa
University, the Weizmann
Institute, Ben-Gurion University and the Open University sponsored a
New York Times ad that appeared last Friday.
The ad opens with the words “Boycott a
Cure for Cancer? Stop Drip Irrigation in Africa? Prevent Scientific Cooperation
Between Nations?” and ends with examples of the scientific contributions
Israeli universities have made to the world, including technology being used to
clean oil spills and drugs to fight cancer and Alzheimer’s.
The ad congratulates the 40,000 member
American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “which has proclaimed
that the ASA ‘vote represents a setback for the cause of academic freedom.’”
Like Golany, Gerald Steinberg, a
political science professor at Bar-Ilan University, which, after the ad ran in
the Times, added its name to the ad for future publication, predicted little
practical short-term fallout from the ASA boycott because it is “a marginal
organization.”
Steinberg, the founder of NGO Monitor,
an organization that tracks human rights-related non-governmental groups, said
that “people with an anti-Israel orientation don’t wait for organizations to
issue boycotts.”
Almost since the inception of the BDS
movement a dozen years ago, and especially since the British academic boycott
movement began flexing its muscles in 2002, individual academics in Europe and
elsewhere have tried to impose a “soft” or “silent” boycott of Israeli
academics, especially those in the natural sciences, Steinberg said.
“It’s harder for Israelis who are not
of the ‘proper’ political persuasion to get published in many journals, and
there are many examples of Israelis not invited to conferences, or in some
cases are uninvited,” Steinberg said. “There’s a sinister process going on and
I don’t think the ASA will change that, one way or the other.”
Steinberg would like to see Israeli
academics do much more to fight these attempts to marginalize Israel.
“The Israeli academic community has
been far too silent and ostrich-like to expect political warfare to disappear,”
he said. If it were up to Steinberg, the Israeli government would confront
European governments, “and especially the EU,” over the “20 million Euros”
these governments give to organizations “that use a disproportionate amount of
that money to promote BDS.
“The government should tell these
governments that if their funding promotes BDS, that takes Europe out of the
peace process,” Steinberg asserted.
Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, worries that the ASA vote represents “a tipping point”
in favor of the BDS movement. For years “there have been anti-Israel sentiments
on campuses abroad. It’s come to the point where you can talk openly about
boycotts, and I’m concerned this will turn into something serious.”
Carmi said that “every now and then”
her university’s professors, including leaders in their fields, complain they
have been excluded from a conference or from contributing to a journal because
they are Israeli.
“It’s subtle and not something they
can prove, but it’s been happening during the past year or two.”
The BGU administrator fears that the
ASA boycott, which in theory targets universities rather than individuals
(unless they receive government sponsorship) will encourage or force overseas
universities to cancel Israeli study-abroad programs, joint degree programs and
funding from abroad.
“I’m very concerned on an
institutional level,” Carmi said. “The boycott gives people moral permission to
exercise their [anti-Israel] positions.”
Carmi noted that BGU has “close to
1,000” Arab students out of a student population of 18,000, and that last year,
18 Jordanian students completed a three-year degree in emergency medicine. They
are now back in Jordan “creating the country’s emergency medicine
infrastructure.”
The school also has Palestinian and
Jordanian students learning about water and energy use.
“If there is a boycott,” Carmi said,
“those will be the first ones to suffer.”
editor@jewishweek.org
editor@jewishweek.org
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Why I’m Boycotting The American Studies Association
Gil Troy
The
American Studies Associationhas voted to boycott Israeli academic
institutions. As an American historian who worked closely with American studies
colleagues in graduate school and then for two years while teaching at
Harvard’s History and Literature program, I am not surprised by this
“politically correct” assault on academic freedom, basic logic, and democratic
decency. Nevertheless, I feel betrayed. I will now boycott the ASA. I will not
sit on a panel, review a manuscript or deal professionally with any ASA member
— to broadcast my contempt for this decision and demonstrate the deleterious
effect of academics boycotting one another: one bad boycott provokes others.
In graduate school, we historians
joked that we ate red meat, while our fey, literary, American studies’
colleagues were the “quiche-eaters.” I remember at my first Hist and Lit
meeting, being shocked at my new colleagues’ self-righteousness,
superciliousness and plain silliness. Many — not all — were walking tweedy
stereotypes, with overly-earnest airs, impenetrable academic prose laden with
$10 words — even when trying to banter — and their prejudice against “DWM”s
(Dead White Males”), an overly broad, intellectually sloppy category that
assumes you can unite in any serious way Socrates, Ernest Hemingway, David
Ben-Gurion and Joe the Plumber.
So I know not to take seriously
anything political the ASA members would endorse. Most are political outliers
who probably would vote for the Communist Manifesto, too. Most are Blame
America First fanatics, caricaturing the U.S. as only racist, sexist and (their
word) “classist,” easily Blaming Israel First. These radicals erred so
egregiously, starting in the 1960s, “not merely by criticizing particular
government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases the
very idea of America itself, by burning flags; [and] by blaming America for all
that was wrong with the world,” as Barack Obama noted in July, 2008 warning
“that there’s nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for
America’s traditions and institutions.” These people are so PC they could
tolerate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s calls to exterminate America and Israel, but
went ballistic when he denied there were gays in Iran.
Still, the boycott decision rankles.
Predictably, it became a front-page story in The New York Times and elsewhere,
thus helping to mainstream the odious attempt to ostracize the Jewish state,
singling out democratic Israel while so many universities collaborate with
repressive China, cash big checks from sexist Saudi Arabia and try to
“deconstruct” sympathetically lethal outlaws like Iran.
This boycott continues the
anti-Zionist war on academia. Most academics seek intellectual precision — yet
calling Israel an apartheid state sloppily makes apartheid mean “apartness,”
separation, sanitizing its ugly racial distinctions while falsely making the
national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians seem racial. Most scholars
recognize the world’s complexity — yet regarding Israel, simplistic
sloganeering and one-sided finger pointing prevail. Most intellectuals defend
ideas’ permeability — yet boycotts impose harsh borders in what should be a
seamless cerebral world. Most teachers applaud diversity, yet boycotts shut down
debate. And most professors aspire toward scholarly objectivity, yet targeting
Israel — especially given Palestinian terrorism, extremism, and
authoritarianism, along with so many other countries’ crimes — reeks of bias
and a particular, historic prejudice, anti-Semitism.
I hate making this argument. But how
else can we explain this disproportionate, one-sided, pile-on against this one
country that is also the world’s only Jewish state?
The boycott call is also politically
counter-productive. It emboldens Palestinian rejectionists, enrages the Israeli
right, demoralizes the center and undermines the left. Compromise cannot occur
in the lynch mob atmosphere the ASA endorsed.
The Jewish community should use this
ASA boycott as a wake-up call to challenge leftist anti-Semitism rather than
further scrutinizing Israel. Daniel Patrick Moynihan taught that such outrages
should spotlight the unfair accusers, not the unfairly accused. Our professors,
thinkers and rabbis must confront the anti-Semitism festering on the
politically correct left that is starting to infect the Democratic Party.
Otherwise, they risk enabling the latest form of one of the world’s oldest
afflictions — Jew-bashing.
Unfortunately, this anti-Zionist war
against academia is part of a broader attempt to transform academics from
educators to activists, and make the universities centers of a highly
politicized radical universe. Scholars, along with tuition-paying parents and
students, should oppose the boycott as part of a broader fight for truth, for
scholarly integrity, and for the rigorous, open-minded, knowledge-based,
skill-honing, soul-stretching, higher education system America built — and
still
needs.
Gil Troy is professor of
history at McGill University. His latest book, “Moynihan’s Moment: America’s
Fight Against Zionism-as-Racism,” was recently published by Oxford University
Press. His next book is on Bill Clinton and the 1990s.
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Also this week, Staff Writer Steve Lipman reports on how mosques
in Jewish neighborhoods around the country are faring; Gabriela Geselowitz on
"Handle With Care," a new Off-Broadway romantic comedy with strong
Israeli ties; and our special supplement, "2013/2014: The Year Gone
By...The Year Ahead," offers reports and reflections on the biggest
stories of the past year and ones to watch in the new one.
The Mosque Next Door
As the Muslim population of the U.S. grows, Jewish communities
will increasingly find mosques in their midst. Will the faiths coexist
peacefully?
Steve Lipman, Staff Writer
Baltimore — Like other members of this city’s tight-knit and
closely packed Jewish community, attorney Phil Abraham heard a rumor last year
about the fate of an empty building that recently had served as the site of an
assisted-living facility: a mosque was moving into the Slade Mansion, right
across the street from Baltimore Hebrew
Congregation, a prominent Reform temple which Abraham serves as
president.
Convinced that the Ahmadiyya sect, with
which the mosque is affiliated, is “peaceful,” an often-persecuted reformist
movement within the Muslim world, Abraham left a phone message on the mosque’s
answering machine, concluding with “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Since the Ahmadiyya Islamic Center
opened its doors a year ago — the first mosque in Baltimore’s heavily Jewish
Park Heights neighborhood — the Jews and Muslims have established the typical
relationship of any urban neighbors whose paths do not frequently cross, said
Abraham. The mosque’s worshippers, he told The Jewish Week on a recent visit,
have proven to be congenial and largely inconspicuous; there is no call to
prayer and no star and crescent marking the center as a Muslim house of
worship.
In Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, however,
the large Russian émigré community, which is heavily Jewish, has waged a bitter
battle against a planned mosque/Islamic community center, affiliated with the
Muslim American Society. The group fighting the center, which will cater to a
growing Muslim community in south Brooklyn, cites quality-of-life issues like
traffic and noise. But it has also speculated that the mosque may be aligned
with radical Islamic organizations like the Islamic Brotherhood.
After a temporary halt in construction
because of a court challenge, building recently resumed, and the mosque will
open soon.
Given the rising standard of living
and upward mobility among many American Muslims — both native-born and
immigrant — the Jewish community in this country will likely be encountering
scenarios like these with greater frequency in coming years. As mosques
establish themselves in heretofore largely Jewish neighborhoods, the model that
prevails — Baltimore or Sheepshead Bay or something else entirely — is up for
grabs. But the close proximity between the faiths, observers say, holds out the
promise for better understanding and dialogue between Jews and Muslims.
“It’s in our interest to build ties
[so] Jews do not see [Muslims] as the enemy,” said Walter Ruby, who coordinates
Muslim-Jewish programming for the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic
Understanding (ffeu.org),
which works to promote Jewish-Muslim ties and sponsors the annual Twinning
Weekend, which brings together synagogues and mosques in the U.S. and around
the world. throughout December.
The rapid growth of the Muslim
community in the U.S. (2.6 million, up from 1 million in 2000, according to the
2010 U.S. Religion Census) seems to give Ruby’s statement added urgency.
An upcoming test case is now beginning
to play out in Skokie, Ill., the well-known Jewish suburb near Chicago. That
community, home to many Holocaust survivors, recently approved a special use
permit for a mosque that will occupy the former site of the Illinois Holocaust
Museum, which has moved to larger quarters. Members of the Skokie Jewish
community, Holocaust survivors among them, spoke in favor of the mosque’s
approval at public hearings.
And in Devon, Pa., a Philadelphia
suburb, a Chabad center moved next door to an existing mosque a decade ago.
Although the two institutions don’t have joint programming, the relationship
over the years, say leaders of both institutions, has been a warm one.
In Baltimore, Phil Abraham said,
representatives of the mosque have spoken at meetings of several Baltimore
Hebrew Congregation groups, and the wife of a mosque leader has come to the
synagogue’s Sisterhood meetings. Rabbi Andrew Busch, the congregation’s
spiritual leader, said he was invited to the wedding reception for the son of a
prominent mosque leader. “I hope that he will join us for my son’s bar
mitzvah.”
Abraham said the concerns he heard raised about the Ahmadiyya
mosque by a few members of the Jewish community — Would they build a minaret
atop the building? Would there be traffic congestion? What would the people be
like? — were “assuaged” by a series of meetings Dr. Agha Khan, a neurosurgeon
and prominent member of the mosque, conducted with local Jewish and civic
organizations. (There is no minaret and no call to prayer, similar to the
mosque in Devon.)
Kahn “was very forthcoming” at the
community meetings, answering the suspicious questions asked by local
residents, many of them Jewish, said Art Abramson, executive director of the
Baltimore Jewish Council. “It wasn’t an angry conversation.”
What about the elephant in the room —
Israel and the ubiquitous Middle East situation? “We are going to have
differences,” Abramson said — that’s a given. “We agree to disagree and move
on.”
On a table in the front lobby of the
Baltimore mosque’s is a brochure, “What does Islam say about terrorism?” “Even
in a state of war, Islam enjoins that one deals with the enemy nobly on the
battlefield,” the brochure answers. “As far as the non-combatant population is
concerned such as women, children, the old and the infirm, etc., the
instructions of the Prophet are as follows: ‘Do not kill any old person, any
child or any woman.’”
Omar Binabbas, who regularly
participates in worship services at the mosque, says fellow Muslims opposed the
congregation’s move to the neighborhood because the new site is several miles
from the old one in northwest Baltimore. “That was the biggest issue,” he said.
Few friendships have developed so far
between members of the shul and mosque, Abraham and Baltimore Hebrew’s Rabbi Andrew
Busch say, because of conflicting schedules — the mosque’s primary prayer
service is Friday afternoon, when members of the shul are at work.
But, Rabbi Busch said, the fears that
some Jews have expressed when a mosque appears in their neighborhood have
proven to be baseless. “Relationships will develop over time.”
“It’s very important that we develop
relationships with all of our neighbors, that we understand all of them,” says
Rabbi Robert Kaplan, who coordinates intergroup work for the Jewish Community
Relations Council of New York. “That’s not overnight work.”
The situation in Sheepshead Bay proves
the point.
When members of southern Brooklyn’s growing Muslim community
announced three years ago that they were planning to build a mosque/Islamic
community center affiliated with the Muslim American Society, on a double lot
on Voorhies Avenue, a residential side street, neighbors were angry.
Rabbi Kaplan said opposition to the
Sheepshead Bay mosque was exacerbated by the controversy three years ago over
the planned 13-story Islamic center — Park 51, the so-called Ground Zero
Mosque, in Lower Manhattan. “There was a tremendous angst” about any new mosque
“in the [Jewish] community,” he said.
Members of the Jewish community, under
the aegis of the ad hoc Bay People organization, were among the most vocal
opponents of the planned mosque. Jewish residents there oppose the mosque
because it will bring “a lot of traffic and noise,” Victor Benari, an
electrical technician who is an active member of Bay People, told The Jewish
Week. “It will change the fabric of the community.”
Benari says he also fears the mosque
is aligned with radical Islamic organizations like the Islamic Brotherhood.
“The neighborhood residents are mostly
of Italian/Russian/Jewish/Irish decent and will not benefit from having a
mosque and a Muslim community center,” the organization’s website,
baypeople.org, states.
Several leaders of the Sheepshead Bay
mosque did not respond to several requests for comment.
Rabbi Kaplan said the neighborhood’s
émigré Jews, who in recent decades had become the predominant part of the
Sheepshead Bay Jewish community, had a “fear of more demographic change.”
Leonard Petlakh, executive director of
the neighborhood’s Kings Bay
Y, which has established close ties with Brooklyn’s Turkish Muslim
population, said he is disturbed by Sheepshead Bay residents who ask him, “What
right do they” — Muslims — “have to build a mosque in our neighborhood?”
“They don’t belong here,” Petlakh said
émigré Jews in Sheepshead Bay tell him.
The situation is very different,
however, not far away in the Flatbush-Midwood neighborhood. Over the last
century, when hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims moved to this country,
they usually settled in separate towns or neighborhoods, and there was little
daily interaction between them. But the Flatbush-Midwood area is a demographic
outlier — it’s home to a sizable, mostly Orthodox community, and a growing
Muslim population. With the two communities living cheek by jowl, it’s
commonplace to see shuls and mosques, or kosher and halal restaurants, next
door to one another.
Residents there typically report that
they infrequently socialize with members of the others’ religious groups, but
day-to-day encounters, such as Jews and Muslims passing each other on the way
to worship services, proceed witout hostility.
The area is “a role model,” said Rabbi
Kaplan. “The two communities coexist. Communities can coexist.”
Ten years ago, in Devon, 20 miles
northwest of Philadelphia, Rabbi Yossi Kaplan opened his Chabad center, Chabad-Lubavitch
of Chester County in a
renovated house on a rural road. Next door, across a shared parking lot, was
the all-American sounding Islamic Center of Greater Valley Forge, a Sunni
Muslim institution. Over the years, Rabbi Kaplan said, he and his wife Tickey
and their Chabad congregants have established warm bonds with the imam and
members of the Islamic Center.
“It’s a misnomer that the Jewish and Islamic population can not
get along,” Rabbi Kaplan said. “We don’t need ‘dialogue’ here.”
Mohammad Aziz, a leader of the Devon
mosque, told The Jewish Week that a few members of his congregation were
nervous about the reception they would receive from their new Jewish neighbors.
Such questions, say Jews and Muslims
both in Baltimore and Devon, faded as members of both groups have grown to know
each other. They report no vandalism, no graffiti, no physical attacks. And in
fact the State Department brings groups of international dignitaries to Devon —
along a stretch of North Valley Forge Road — to demonstrate interfaith harmony.
One recent afternoon, Rabbi Kaplan
spent an hour at a table in his Chabad center next to Aziz, an information
technology consultant, bantering with him like an old friend, sharing some
stories and kosher snacks.
Jews and Muslims share a status as
members of a minority religion in the U.S., Rabbi Kaplan pointed out.
Especially in suburban, WASPy Pennsylvania. “We’re both outsiders,” the rabbi
said. Aziz added that he and the rabbi point to the Golden Age of Spain, in the
15th to 17th centuries, when members of both faiths flourished in the same
society. “We have a beautiful precedent of living together.”
From the Chabad building, the pair
walked across the parking lot to inspect some recent renovations on the mosque.
With brochures for various religious causes displayed in the building’s lobby,
and a mechitza separating the men’s and women’s sections in the prayer halls,
the mosque looks like a synagogue, the rabbi observed — except for the absence
of seats or pews in the prayer room.
When the mosque was seeking a variance
a few years ago to add an additional building on its property, a local group of
opponents asked Rabbi Kaplan to sign a petition blocking the expansion.
The Chabad rabbi said he refused to
sign it. He said he told the mosque opponents, “Are you crazy? They’re our
neighbors.”
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Gained In Translation?
The new romantic comedy ‘Handle With Care’ turns on questions of
language and miscommunication
Gabriela Geselowitz, Jewish Week Correspondent
The husband-and-wife team behind the new play “Handle With Care”
forged new connections with each other working on a script about, of all
things, how difficult it can be for people to forge a connection.
“I basically turned to her one day and
said, I’m sick of acting; I want to start writing,” the play’s creator, Jason
Odell Williams, told The Jewish Week. He was referring to a conversation he had
with his wife, the actor Charlotte Cohn, who stars in the play. “I might as
well write a play for you because you’re awesome and amazing,” Williams
recalled saying.
Williams asked his wife what type of
role she would want to play, and her answer was something with themes of
language and disconnect.
“I’m really fascinated by
miscommunication,” said Cohn. “The core of the play is about miscommunication
and faith and fate,” themes she says, that are universal.
“Handle With Care,” which marks the
New York return of theatrical legend Carol Lawrence (best known as Maria in the
original Broadway production of “West Side Story”), is actually a romantic
comedy built around a “lost in translation” theme that mirrors Cohn’s own
upbringing.
The play tells the story of an elderly
Israeli woman (Lawrence) who brings her granddaughter, Ayelet (Cohn), with her
on a trip to the United States. Ayelet, who speaks only Hebrew, is in her late
30s and still single (“In Israel that’s like a death sentence,” said Cohn). She
ends up stuck and alone in a small, goyishe, Virginia town on, of all nights,
Christmas Eve, desperate to claim the body of her grandmother, who died the
previous night.
The local deliveryman, who lost the
casket en route to Israel, calls in his friend Josh (Jonathan Sale), the only
Jew he knows, to try to communicate with the Hebrew-speaker. Unfortunately,
Josh only knows what he describes as “shul Hebrew” and a sexually explicit
phrase. Nevertheless, Josh and Ayelet begin to establish a connection despite
their language barriers, bonding over an impromptu Shabbat dinner and
half-remembered Hebrew phrases.
“The connection Ayelet has with this
American man happens to be their shared religion, even though they don’t really
share the same experience of faith,” said Williams.
The plot loosely tracks some of Cohn’s
experiences being raised in two cultures. She was born in Copenhagen and raised
in Jerusalem, where she served in the army, eventually as a lieutenant. With a
childhood and adolescence spent in Israel, and adulthood in America, Cohn has
learned firsthand the struggles of adjusting to new cultures and languages. She
eventually met Williams when they were both students at the Actors’ Studio in
New York. Today, the Manhattan-based couple has a daughter in the third grade.
Although the play is not based on a
true story, Williams admitted that he put parts of himself in it as well. “I’m
a little bit like Josh,” he said. The child of a Protestant and Catholic,
Williams was “raised in between nothingness… Then when I met and married my
wife, she sort of reintroduced me to her traditions, and I had a real sort of
fondness and respect for them,” he said.
He spoke of his first trip to Israel
and understanding his wife’s past struggles adjusting to other cultures as her
family rambled on in Hebrew around him. “It was an eye-opening experience, a
culture shock in some ways,” he said. He recalled thinking, “People don’t
understand me. I’m the one who has to sort of gesture and learn tiny bits of
Hebrew.”
Williams wrote “Handle With Care,”
with its own wild gesticulations and cultural barriers, in 2008, originally
titling it “At a Loss.” That version first premiered in 2011, in Ithaca, and
then again in Florida, where the “snowbirds” from the metropolitan New York
area advised him that the work could run in the city.
Although Williams maintains the sole
writing credit, his wife has served as a consultant of sorts, writing the
Hebrew lines of the play. As the only Jewish actor in the cast, she has also
served as the spokesperson for Israel and Judaism. This ranges from telling the
props mistress what “looks” Israeli, to offering other actors insight into the
text by opening up to them about her personal relationship to God and religious
tradition (while fairly secular now, Cohn was raised more Orthodox).
Williams has since written other
plays, even continuing to utilize Jewish themes. But “Handle With Care” is his
first work to make it to New York City.
“I think it’s the same and different,”
said Cohn’s of the play’s New York run. “Off-Broadway is sort of like the
mountain.”
“It’s been a long journey,” said
Williams. “But also doing any play Off-Broadway is sort of a leap of faith.”
True, but this show has the advantage
of having Lawrence’s name in the Playbill.
“She’s such a mensch!” gushed Cohn of
the 81-year-old Lawrence. He even admits to serenading the Broadway legend with
“I Feel Pretty” during breaks in rehearsal.
In a step away from the Puerto Rican
accent she used as Maria, the stage veteran adopted a rough Israeli voice to
indicate Hebrew while speaking in English. As Ayelet, Cohn speaks in Hebrew,
accented English, and non-accented English (to indicate Hebrew) in the play.
And she can pull it off.
“I have a lot that I bring to the
table in terms of that character and where she’s coming from,” said Cohn.
“She’s absolutely phenomenal and
completely right for the part, and I can’t imagine anybody else doing it,”
raved Williams of his wife. Still, the play is also set to open in as many as
seven more productions around North America, with other women in the role of
Ayelet, “So it can be done,” he admitted.
With the Jewish holiday season more or
less over, but Christmastime in full swing, “Handle With Care” hopes to dip
into different audiences.
“It’s not just for Jews,” insisted
Cohn. “The show just makes people fall in love with [the show].”
“Handle With Care” runs through
Sunday, Feb. 23 at the Westside Theatre, 407 W. 43rd St., Manhattan. For
tickets, call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200.
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Enjoy the read and Shabbat shalom,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Our website is there for you any time of the day or night
with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, op-eds, features and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
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Between the Lines - Gary Rosenblatt
Israel Outreach: Broad Vs Deep
New public relations effort is clever, but superficial.
Gary Rosenblatt
Did you know that Israel is the first country to ban underweight
models? A recent law prohibits the use of ultra-skinny young women and of altering
images in photos and ads.
And a new technology developed in Israel allows people to use
Wi-Fi hot spots at 80 outdoor areas in Tel Aviv, including beaches.
You might also be interested in knowing that Kobi Levi, a
popular Israel designer, has created wearable art for Lady Gaga, who wore his
work in her “Born This Way” video. And that Miss Israel is an Ethiopian Jew.
This information, and lots more like it, is being made available
on popular websites, targeted to reach 18- to 24- year-olds in the U.S., thanks
to “reThink Israel,” the latest entry in the Israel hasbarah (or, public
relations) effort. Its early results have me impressed and depressed all at
once.
I’ll explain why, but first a little background.
For years one of the few things that pro-Israel supporters from
the left and right seemed to agree on was that Israel did a poor job of telling
its story and promoting itself to the world. There has long been frustration
that the lone democracy in the Middle East, the one country championing human
dignity, freedom of speech and women’s and minority rights, is the target of
Western liberals who ignore the lack of those same freedoms among Arab states
in the region.
Rather than call attention to the fact that Arab citizens have
been ruled by despots and can be jailed and even executed for violating laws
that, for example, ban homosexual behavior, these critics of Israel focus
almost exclusively on the occupation of the West Bank, ignoring the history and
complexity of the situation in seeking to delegitimize the Jewish state.
Any number of attempts have been made to highlight this double
standard applied to Israel and the hypocrisy of the international community
through the United Nations, which has condemned Israel as the chief violator of
human rights — while remaining silent on the far more serious abuses of human
rights by countries like Iran, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Some supporters of Israel debate whether to attribute this
outrageous behavior to anti-Israel sentiment or outright anti-Semitism. Others
have chosen to focus on the positive accomplishments of the Jewish state that
benefit the entire world. Israel 21c and NoCamels.com, for example, are
nonprofit groups that provide news about the country’s advances in technology,
health, environment, travel and culture. But who cares?
Jewish organizations here have spent years and significant funds
to find out what Americans think about Israel, and what to do to improve
perceptions of the country. A recent major study that has not been made public
found that most Americans know little about Israel and care less. About 22
percent strongly support the Jewish state, about 8 percent are hard-core
critics, leaving about 70 percent in the middle, vulnerable to anti-Israel
propaganda, and the target of pro-Israel efforts. Supporters of Israel tend to
be older, white and conservative politically, the study found. Reaching young
liberals, particularly among minorities, is an uphill struggle.
To help meet that challenge Gerry Ostrov, a successful
advertising exec for many years at Johnson and Johnson, was recruited by
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations. Ostrov, whose work for reThink Israel is
pro bono, was chairman and CEO of Bausch & Lomb, and he believes that the
tools needed to promote Israel are not unlike those used to promote contact
lenses. “You engage the consumer from
the heart, not the head,” he told me during a recent interview.
The key to success is to find relevant information, surprise
people with it, and in that way engage them, said Ostrov, who has put together
a team for the independent nonprofit that is made up of a few top ad
specialists and consultants, and about three dozen donors, including Las Vegas
businessman and hawkish pro-Israel philanthropist Sheldon Adelson.
Their initial objective is to reach 20 million young Americans
over the next 16 months, largely through social media like Facebook, Instagram
and Twitter. The goal “is to make sure Americans know Israel, because to know
Israel is to love Israel,” Ostrov says.
The news items being posted by reThink Israel range from fluff,
like “From Israel: 3 Dating Apps That Get The Job Done” and “5 Things You
Should Know About Israel’s Nightlife Poster Boy/Girl Uriel Yekutiel,” to
Israeli scientific and medical innovations that comfort people with autism or
help paralyzed people walk.
The material is apolitical and does not deal with religious
issues. “We don’t touch the conflict,” Ostrov says. The results in the early
going of the project are notable, with 300,000 views and 30,000 Facebook
“likes” for the news items posted in the first four weeks. What’s more, much of
it is passed on to friends — heightening exposure and credibility — and can
hold the reader’s interest for about 30 seconds, which is a good sign,
according to Ostrov.
He says he is not worried that young people will respond
negatively if, for example, there is a front-page story in The New York Times that
casts Israel in a negative light. That’s because his target audience doesn’t
read The Times or other mainstream media, he says, and is not so interested in
international news.
That may be a depressing reality for me to get my head around.
But the folks at reThink Israel are onto something with their short-term
objective of providing relevant, interesting and positive information about the
Jewish state, and they have the numbers to prove it.
“We had to break with old modes of thinking” to “staunch our
losses,” said Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents. His organization is
associated with reThink Israel and several other projects to improve the image
of Israel, which is seen by more than half of those surveyed (by a study the
Conference helped conduct) as an apartheid state. “The traditional ways of
reaching people are not going to work with this new generation. This is the way
to engage them,” Hoenlein said.
I appreciate that, but I worry about the shallow aspect of much
of the material, not to mention of the audience — our future leaders. From a
marketing perspective, yes, you can’t engage people in Israel until you have
their attention. But can reThink Israel succeed if it steers clear of the
conflict completely? At least let it provide readers with links to more
substantive information about Israel’s history, society and context on current
issues. Otherwise they may never make the leap from “hey, cool,” to “tell me
more.”
Gary@jewishweek.org
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New York News
Rapper Joins Fight Against BDS
With the help of a hip hop beat, Ari Lesser strikes a chord for
Israel by putting the boycott movement in perspective.
Alan Zeitlin. Special To The Jewish Week
Ari Lesser would relish the chance to perform his song “Boycott
Israel” at the headquarters of the United Nations, where the world body
routinely churns out anti-Israel resolutions. Or at the next meeting of the
American Studies Association, whose members voted last week in favor of an
academic boycott of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank.
The 27-year-old hip-hop and spoken word artist writes in his
song, which has garnered more than 140,000 hits on YouTube since it launched
two months ago, that people can “boycott Israel if you think it’s just/ but
unless you have a double standard you must/also boycott the rest of the
nations/ with allegations of human rights violations.”
“If you judge Israel, judge others too,” Lesser said in an
interview with Jewish Week, pointing out what pro-Israel supporters believe is
the fundamental unfairness and hypocrisy of efforts to boycott Israel: that the
Jewish state, above all other countries, is being singled out. In the song, he
includes 40 countries whose human rights records leave much to be desired,
including North Korea, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and even the United States.
“Don’t pick and choose to pick on the Jews,” Lesser raps in the catchy chorus,
“just pick up the newspaper and read the news.”
“I could have included probably every country, but there’s a
limit,” Lesser said after he opened for Moshav late last month at Congregation
B’nai Jacob in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “My point is that everyone is entitled to
their opinion. But you have to be consistent if you are sincere. And Israel
isn’t perfect. But there are many countries doing things that are much worse,
and where are the UN resolutions against them?”
Lesser was commissioned by the pro-Israel advocacy organization
Here Is Israel to write the song as a way to help counter the BDS (Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions) movement, which is especially strong on college
campuses around the country. He related a telling story about an experience he
had while he was attending the University of Oregon. A teacher said he was
changing the name of the course from “Israel-Palestine” to simply “Palestine.”
“Every Jewish student dropped the class but me,” Lesser said in
a subsequent phone interview. “I knew if I left, the class would be completely
one-sided. The thing is that the issue isn’t black and white. It’s a complex
one. If you’re Jewish, that doesn’t mean that you should think everything
Israel does is right. You should challenge everything.”
As for those involved in the BDS movement, Lesser said, “I think
the majority of the people are good people who think they are doing something
that will make the world a better place. But those behind it are not fair and
balanced and it is often driven by anti-Semitism.”
In a song about Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
who often ranted that he wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the earth,
Lesser rhymes that we should “fear God, not Ahmadinejad.”
Lesser says his views about the coarseness of some hip-hop
artists’ work have changed. About Eminem he said: “He’s a great storyteller.
But there’s a lot of profanity. I used to think it was really funny. But now
it’s a little grotesque. I try not to curse anymore, but it’s OK, if it’s used
properly. If they’re sprinkled in for no reason, it’s a waste.”
Lesser, a baal teshuvah, said he became religious about seven
years ago after studying psalms in Safed, the city in northern Israel known for
its connections to Jewish mysticism. He is also a vegetarian. “It grosses me
out to eat the flesh of other creatures,” he said. “Since I was little, I
didn’t like to kill things. Even a spider, I would catch it and let it go outside.”
As a musician, observing the Sabbath is difficult, he said,
because his main source of income is weekend music festivals.
“It wasn’t like giving up one day out of seven,” he said. “It
was more like one day out for three. I was nervous, but soon I saw that I was
making more money observing the Sabbath than I was before.”
Lesser said while he looks chasidic, he doesn’t like labels and
considers himself “a child of Israel.”
He said it is hypocritical of America to criticize Israel in
terms of its treatment of Palestinians, when America massacred Native
Americans. He includes America in the “Boycott Israel” song, and cites its ill
treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Lesser said he’s been influenced by
Bob Dylan, who is known for his socially conscious lyrics and whose 1983 song
“Neighborhood Bully” is a strong defense of Israel.
Lesser, who is based in Cleveland, has a humorous streak, which
he comes by honestly as his family runs a monthly humor magazine called The Funny Times. The humor comes out in
songs like “The Hippie Song,” which includes the rap, “I was taught to love and
not to hate/learned Republicans are bad and God is great.” He also has a catchy
song called “Kosher Rap,” which lists forbidden animals he doesn’t eat, like
scorpions and snails.
While he said he loves music, Lesser stresses that his priority
is Torah study. And the questions he most frequently gets have nothing to with
Israel, politics, his long hair or his wildly energetic dance moves.
“After shows, people ask me how I am able to memorize all the
lyrics,” he said. “I even have one song that is 15 minutes long. Baruch Hashem
[Thank God], memorization is not something I ever had to worry about.”
Ari Lesser’s music is available at his website arithemc.bandcamp.com.
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Food and Wine
Pastrami On Rye Potstickers
Holy night! Fried and served with a spicy mustard, these are the
perfect Jewish Chinese Christmas treat.
Amy Kritzer, Jewish Week Online Columnist
I’m a Jew who likes Christmas. Though not for the traditional
reasons. I mean mistletoe, eggnog and sparkly lights are great and all, but I’m
in it for the Chinese food. Like other Chosen People on this lonely day, I
indulge in whatever action flick is in the theaters, and as much moo shu and
fried rice as I can handle.
Why is it Jews love Chinese food so much? For one, there isn’t
much else open on Christmas. But there are other theories. The Chinese takeout
menu is pretty much the same wherever you go, a comforting thought. Likewise,
Jews love eating at home. And if Chinese food isn’t the quintessential take-out
food I don’t know what is! And besides the pork and shrimp, the dairy-free menu
is easy to adapt to a kosher lifestyle.
Growing up, it was all about Cheng Du take out, but these days I
make my own. This year I made some pot stickers with a nod to my favorite
sandwich: pastrami on rye! Fried and served with a spicy mustard, these are
seriously addictive. And the best part is when you are hungry again an hour
later, all you have to do is fry a few more!
Amy Kritzer is a food writer and recipe developer in Austin, TX
who enjoys cooking, theme parties and cowboys. She challenges herself to put a
spin on her Bubbe’s traditional Jewish recipes and blogs about her endeavors at
What Jew Wanna Eat. Her recipes have been featured on Bon Appetit, Daily Candy,
The Today Show Blog and more. You can follow her on Twitter, Pinterest and
Facebook.
Ingredients:
1 cup rye flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 - 3/4 cup water
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon peanut oil or schmaltz
1/2 cup red onion, small diced
2 tablespoons kosher dill pickles, small diced
1/2 pound pastrami, rough chopped
Peanut oil, vegetable oil or schmaltz
2 tablespoons dry mustard
2 tablespoons hot water
Recipe Steps:
Make your dough by mixing the flours, 1/2 cup water, caraway
seeds and salt until you get a dough that is soft and not too sticky or too
dry. Add more water, up to 3/4 cup, in order to get the right consistency.
Roll the dough into two cylinders about 1 inch in diameter.
Cover them with wet paper towels and set aside while you make the filling.
To make your filling, heat 1 tablespoon peanut oil or schmaltz
in a medium sauté pan. Add onions and pickles and sauté until tender, about 3
minutes. Be careful as the pickle juices may splatter the oil. Then add
pastrami and sauté until pastrami is warm, slightly crispy, and the fat has
melted, about 5 more minutes.
To make the pot stickers, cut the dough into 1 inch pieces and
roll them out into circles that are about 2 inches in diameter.
Put a dollop of filling into each pot sticker and secure each
one. I used a fork to seal mine.
Heat some oil in a medium sauté pan over medium heat. Arrange 8
pot stickers on the pan. Pan-fry the pot stickers until the bottom turns light
brown, about 2 to 3 minutes.
Add 2 tablespoons water to the pan and turn the heat to high.
Cover the pan with a lid and let steam. Once the water evaporates, turn the
heat back up to medium, flip the pot stickers, and fry until they are crispy
and cooked through, about 3 more minutes, adding more oil if needed. Repeat for
other pot stickers. Makes 16.
To make dipping sauce, whisk together dried mustard and water.
Serve with pot stickers- be careful, it’s spicy!
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Travel
Miami Beach: Return Engagement
After an absence of more than 30 years, a traveler confronts a
changed, but still very Jewish, city.
Uriel Heilman, JTA
Miami Beach, Fla. — Everyone knows that Jews and Miami Beach go
together like horseradish and gefilte fish. Matzah balls and chicken soup.
Corned beef and rye. Chopped liver and … you get the picture.
But not having been to the Miami area for more than 30 years, I
was still in for a bit of a shock when I arrived on the shore of this sunny
isle in winter. Sure, I expected some Jews, a synagogue here or there, a kosher
restaurant or two.
What I did not expect was to see stocking-wearing Holocaust
survivors hobbling on the boardwalk amid bikini-clad joggers and tattooed men
in too-short shorts. Or a hotel with a daily minyan populated largely by
chasidic Jews with long black coats and side curls.
Fortunately, I was also lucky enough to get what I expected when
I booked my ticket to Florida for January: Warm weather, sunny skies and sandy
beaches.
There’s a reason Miami Beach has become a mecca — er, Jerusalem
— for Orthodox vacationers. First, there are the elements that appeal to all
pleasure seekers: sand, surf and sun.
But because there’s also a vibrant local Orthodox community
here, there also are a dozen or so kosher eateries — from a hot dogs and beer
place called House of Dog to Chinese restaurants, pizza shops, sushi bars,
Mideast grills and steakhouses. Beachside hotels accommodate Sabbath observers
with old-fashioned house keys in place of electronic key cards. And there are a
plethora of synagogues within walking distance.
The eruv enclosure, which enables Sabbath observers to push
strollers and carry keys on Shabbat, runs far enough east to include the
boardwalk along the beach (though not the beach itself).
The strip feels almost like Tel Aviv — except with more
synagogues, more kosher food and more observant Jews.
What distinguishes Florida from Israel is the live-and-let-live
spirit that reigns here. In Miami Beach, haredi Orthodox Jewish women lounge by
the pool alongside Spanish tourists dressed in Speedo bathing suits. That kind
of coexistence is hard to come by in Israel.
It wasn’t always like this.
Until Spain traded Florida to Britain in exchange for Havana in
1763, Florida was subject to the laws of the Spanish Inquisition, and Jewish
residents were forbidden. When Jews began settling in the area in the 19th
century, landlords and business owners routinely posted “Gentiles Only” signs
on their properties. Such discrimination persisted into the 1950s.
“Always a view, never a Jew,” read one hotel advertisement from
the 1930s. Another, from the Coronado Hotel, read: “Air-conditioned rooms
available. Oceanfront luxury at low cost. Gentile clientele.” Others made do
with the somewhat subtler “Restricted Clientele.”
The first synagogue in Miami Beach, Beth Jacob, was built in
1929 on Washington Avenue between 3rd and 4th streets, because at the time Jews
were not allowed to live north of 5th. The building, which operated as a
synagogue until 1986, has since been turned into the Jewish Museum of Florida.
It’s worth a visit just to see the beautiful sanctuary where Jewish gangster
Meyer Lansky used to pray, but the real treasures are the exhibits offering a
fascinating glimpse into the history of this uniquely American Jewish
community. Plus, the museum is in the heart of South Beach, the storied
neighborhood that is itself worth a trip for its nightlife, beaches and art
deco architecture.
Perhaps the saddest event in the city’s Jewish history came in
1939, when the S.S. St. Louis, after being turned away from Cuba, dropped
anchor in the ocean close enough to Miami Beach that the ship, filled with
German Jewish refugees, was within view of the synagogue. But President
Franklin Roosevelt refused entry to the hundreds of passengers trying to flee
the Nazi onslaught, and the ship sailed back to Europe. About half its
passengers would die during the Holocaust.
Today, Miami Beach doesn’t just welcome Jews, it seeks them out.
The Eden Roc Miami Beach, an art deco gem located on Collins
Avenue in the 46th Street area, is one of two Miami Beach hotels with an
in-house kosher kitchen. The idea behind the $1 million kitchen — which opens
for bar mitzvahs, weddings and, of course, Passover — isn’t just to offer better
food but to send a message.
“We want you to know that kosher or not, your food and your
experience is valuable to us,” said David Siguaw, Eden Roc’s director of sales
and marketing.
The food isn’t the only reason to stay at the Eden Roc (the
hotel hosted my visit). The 631-room hotel underwent a $240 million renovation
in 2009 that added a new tower and gave a fresh feel to its expansive rooms,
multiple pools and hot tubs, spa, and bars and restaurants. The prize, however,
is the view. From the wicker lounge chairs on your balcony, you can take in the
azure water, the golden beach and the hotel towers that line the island.
Both the Eden Roc and its next-door neighbor, the Fontainebleau,
were designed by architect Morris Lapidus, the Russian Jewish immigrant perhaps
most associated with the Miami Beach hotels that went up in the 1950s.
The Fontainebleau, which underwent its own $1 billion renovation
in 2008, is like a flotilla of cruise ships. Spread out over 22 acres — the
largest single property in Miami Beach — the landmark hotel has 1,504 rooms in
four towers; six restaurants, including its own butchery, pastry shop, fishery
and chocolatier; a dozen pools and hot tubs, the biggest of which has 325,000
gallons of water in the hotel’s signature bow-tie shape; and one of Florida’s
most popular nightclubs, Liv, which on Christmas Eve played host to Miami
Beach’s popular “Matzo Ball.”
On Passover, the Fontainebleau clientele is about two-thirds
kosher, with 1,200-1,500 kosher-observing guests. Joseph Gerbino, the hotel’s
public relations director, says part of what makes the holiday at the hotel
unique is seeing tattooed non-Jewish guests sharing poolside lounges with
visibly Orthodox Jews.
Staying at the hotels does not come cheap. In winter it’s tough
to find rooms for less than $300 a night at either the Eden Roc or the
Fontainebleau. But there are plenty of acceptable alternatives up and down the
strip, some in the $200 range (not including exorbitant overnight parking fees
of $30 or more).
Or you can just stay on the pullout couch at your Uncle Morty’s
condo in Boca.
editor@jewishweek.org
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The Jewish Week
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New York, NY 10036 United States
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