The Jewish Week ~ Connecting the World to Jewish, News, Culture, Features, and Opinions ~ Wednesday, 19 February 2014

The Jewish Week ~ Connecting the World to Jewish, News, Culture, Features, and Opinions ~ Wednesday, 19 February 2014

Dear Reader,

A popular self-awareness group called Call of the Shofar has stirred controversy, particularly in the Chabad community, some of whose leaders claim it has cult-like qualities. Assistant Managing Editor Adam Dickter reports on the situation, and profiles the group's leader.

NEW YORK

Chabad Leaders Clamp Down On Unorthodox Group Therapy Sessions

Lubavitch elders ban popular Call of the Shofar workshops, which they claim mix Judaism and Eastern thought; self-taught guru seen as threat.

Adam Dickter

Assistant Managing Editor

Late last year, 2,000 people gathered at a Crown Heights yeshiva in answer to a call for an asifa, or emergency meeting. Speakers came from within the Chabad Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, from nearby Borough Park and from as far away as Los Angeles to issue dire warnings of a serious threat to the souls of Orthodox men and women.

The cause of the Dec. 24 meeting at Yeshiva Oholei Torah was the increasing popularity of Call of the Shofar, a self-awareness group that runs three-day workshops promising to help its mostly male participants “wake up from the slumber of day-to-day distractions and reconnect with your deeper essence.”

Critics, of which there are a growing number, call the program a heretical, cult-like, even dangerous phenomenon that stands not only to alienate participants from Judaism but also to cause emotional harm and rifts within the close-knit chasidic community.

“People are searching and searching is a good thing, but you need to know where to search,” said Rabbi Yoel Kahn at the asifa, as reported by the website COLLive, which covers Crown Heights Jewish life.

Speaking in Yiddish, Rabbi Kahn — an expert on the teachings of the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died nearly 20 years ago — told the men gathered that they could continue to find the answers to life’s challenges in the rebbe’s wisdom.

“People said [Call of the Shofar] had to be shut down … that we have to kill it before it takes root,” said Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, who was in the audience at the emergency meeting. He told The Jewish Week that the asifa crystallized months of criticism and concern in Crown Heights about the group founded 12 years ago by Simcha Frischling.

Part of the concern stems from the fact that Frischling, 61, has neither a license to conduct therapy nor any formal training in psychology or social work, and appears to be  an adherent of the controversial movement of large group awareness training (LGAT), which is often linked to cults.

Frischling, who mostly makes his living repairing antique furniture, has only one official credential: semicha from an online rabbinical school — and that was recently revoked.

‘A Feeding Frenzy’

Now, with bans from several Crown Heights rabbinical boards, and others sounding alarms, Call of the Shofar’s programs have been suspended and its future is in doubt. Frischling, now living in Sydney, Australia, says he is unsure of his next move.

“It’s been a feeding frenzy,” he said in a phone interview last week. “I’m going to regroup and see where I want to go with it, but right now I don’t know. People are scraping around looking for reasons to shut this down, [such as] I’m not so frum looking.”

A low-budget operation with a small staff, Call of the Shofar had an equally low profile until it started to attract large numbers of Chabad-associated chasidim to seminars on the grounds of a Vallevue Estate in Morristown, N.J., the town that is home to Chabad’s rabbinical college. Previously its activities had revolved around the Baltimore area, where Frischling lived at the time.

Organizers say about 2,000 people have now participated in (Call of The Shofar) COTS workshops, and in recent years, 90 percent have been affiliated with Chabad, which prides itself on outreach toward unaffiliated Jews.

Critics cite offbeat rituals like blindfolded dancing and “carpet work” bonding sessions that explore hidden pain, and others that ask men to hold hands and stare at each other. They describe sessions where communication between participants is severely limited, especially during meals, and where cellphone use is banned, except for a pre-Shabbat call home.

Supporters of COTS say the workshops, with sessions based on Jewish-holiday themes, have helped them improve their self-esteem, overcome fears and gain the understanding that they are not necessarily to blame for troubling incidents of the past or their feelings of alienation.

To aid with recruiting, Frischling hired Pinchas Lew, a man with a checkered past; he drove the getaway car in a 1991 armed robbery while he was working as a mashgiach (certifier) at the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in Postville, Iowa. In a plea agreement he served time briefly and was given probation. Lew was later accused by a maid of indecent exposure while working as a Chabad emissary in North Carolina, JTA reported in 2001, though a judge eventually threw out the charges. He has since stayed out of trouble and says he has benefited from COTS.

Also on board for the recruiting was Moshe Lieblich, founder of a Brooklyn yeshiva high school and owner of a kosher catering business. Word of the COTS workshops spread quickly, and participants were strongly encouraged to refer friends; if they did so successfully, they were offered a discount on future programs. Among those Lieblich recruited were his parents, Asher and Chaya, both of whom continue to strongly defend the program.

But the growth of COTS — its revenue jumped from $130,989 in 2011 to $241,981 in 2012, according to IRS documents — hit a snag after Frischling granted a Dec. 11 video interview with DovBer “Berry” Schwartz, whose website, Healthy Judaism, strives to “rectify the toxicity that has seeped into the way many of us were taught Judaism.”

In the interview, Frischling, who grew up in Washington Heights, discussed the difference between choosing to do mitzvot and being obligated to do them.

In the course of Schwartz’s interview, Frischling spoke of healthy and unhealthy ways to be religious and seemed to criticize a person who observes mitzvot because of peer pressure as opposed to one who is“coming down the pike from a place of well-being, because he has faith in this system and has a responsibility to the greater klal that he’s choosing to belong to.”

The interview was a first public exposure to Frischling’s mindset, says Yehuda Ceitlin, editor of COLLive.com, and therefore prompted more discussion in the community. “He seemed to be saying there were alternatives to chasidus and you can be happy with that,” said Ceitlin.

Asked by Schwartz why it was necessary for participants to make themselves “vulnerable” in a group setting, a central part of the program, Frischling said, “The ikar [essence] is that we get in touch with our fundamental desire, we get in touch with that which we really want, and that is best done in the container of a group setting. ”

As concern about COTS grew, Rabbi Abraham Twerski, a prominent haredi psychiatrist and expert on the treatment of addiction, convened a meeting in Brooklyn to investigate the group, apparently because he had been asked to endorse COTS and wanted to hear all sides of the argument.

And so on Jan. 15, Frischling and two followers found themselves making their case before a kind of halachic inquest at the home of Rabbi David Cohen of Gvul Yavetz in Midwood, Brooklyn, who is a widely respected halachic decisor.

Also present, in the role of prosecutor, was Rabbi Shea Hecht, the well-connected scion of a prominent Chabad family who wrote a book about his work fighting cults and helping people ensnared in them. The rabbi, who with his brother, Shulem Ber, run the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education, has never attended a COTS workshop but went to a recruitment meeting at which he questioned Frischling and later decided to oppose the group.

“Based on what the director himself has said about his background and the roots of his methods, some of the fundamental COTS techniques are based on Buddhist practices,” Rabbi Hecht wrote in a public statement after his first meeting with Frischling. In the same statement, he instructs people who may have encouraged others to participate in COTS to “go back to that person and apologize, using whatever influence you have to inform him that there are pagan practices used by this group.”

At the hearing at Rabbi Cohen’s home, when Rabbi Hecht felt he did not have ample time to make his case against COTS, and facing pushback from COTS supporters, Rabbi Hecht asked for and was granted a second meeting one week later. This time he brought reinforcements: Rabbi Shlomo Segal, a member of the rabbinical court of Crown Heights, and Rabbi Dr. Chaim David Kagan, director of a Chabad high school in Monsey.

According to an account of the rabbinic proceedings at the latter meeting on the website Crownheights.info, written by Robin Garbose, a California-based anti-cult activist and filmmaker, the lengthy questioning of Frischling and two associates dwelled less on the programs of COTS, but more on Frischling’s religious beliefs and habits, or what is known as hashgafot in Orthodox vernacular.

For example, Rabbi Cohen asked if Frischling prays three times daily and whether he believes in the concept of Moshiach, a mortal Jew who will emerge as a savior of his people. Another person present at the meeting, speaking to The Jewish Week off the record because it was not a public gathering, confirmed this account. The source also said Frischling gave a lengthy answer that ultimately revealed that his view of a messiah was more conceptual than the traditional Orthodox view. He also said that he did not regularly daven, but that he believed prayer was a personal matter.

The meeting, according to Garbose, ended with Rabbi Cohen declaring that Frischling was a person whose teachings should be shunned, and he would say so to anyone who asked his advice. But in a brief phone conversation with The Jewish Week, the rabbi would not confirm or deny this, saying only that he does not grant interviews.

Rabbi Twerski was also non-committal about COTS, saying Monday that he had heard “pros and cons” about the group, but “I don’t feel that I can make a statement.” Asked if his reluctance had to do with the fact that his brother, Rabbi Michel Twerski, was an early endorser of COTS, Rabbi Abraham Twerski, in a very hesitant and seemingly perplexed tone, said “not really.”

‘Intense Ramifications’

Concern about COTS has spread beyond Crown Heights. Jews for Judaism, the national organization founded to fight Hebrew Christian missionaries and other cultic influences competing for Jewish souls, has received about 25 calls about Frischling’s program, mostly from the Baltimore area, according to the group’s East Coast director Ruth Guggenheim.

“Groups like Call of the Shofar often take individuals who don’t always know what they’re getting into, and they are not equipped to handle psychological ramifications of the intensity they are exposed to,” Guggenheim told The Jewish Week.

“Some families we dealt with fear that their loved ones may have chosen to question their level of observance. That’s [their] premise: be true to yourself.”

One COTS participant, who asked to be identified only as Mendy (not his real name), said he believed Chabad elders were troubled by COTS’ emphasis on people thinking for themselves and questioning the underpinnings of chasidus.

The elders, he said, realized that “a lot of young Chabad guys were coming and the guy running it didn’t have a beard and never really learned Tanya [Chasidic mysticism] — and that seemed to be of concern. They were scared that by going to this program it was going to undermine chasidus as a whole.”

While the central rabbinical boards of Crown Heights and Chabad have now come out against COTS, it’s clear the group, at least initially, caused a rift within the sect, at a time when Chabad is seeing its first generation come of age without any personal memory of the late rebbe, and there is no successor in sight.

“[Chabad leaders] would like a monopoly on doing outreach and defining what is popularly Jewish, and along comes this group that says we are independent and can do what we want,” said Queens College sociology professor Samuel Heilman, who has written extensively about contemporary ultra-Orthodox life.

Defenders of COTS say many of the critics have never attended its workshops.

One critic who did is Shmuel Pollen, 32, a Chabadnik who was at first so impressed with the seminars that he signed on as a staff member at another COTS programs in Morristown, at his own expense and later went to an advanced seminar. Initially feeling that the workshops would help him train to be a life coach, Pollen said a discussion with a respected community elder led him to question the group.

A turning point, he says, was when participants were encouraged to dance together, and one reluctant person stood at the sidelines with his hands in his pockets. Frischling, he claimed, screamed at the wallflower until the man joined in the revelry. During a period of heavy breathing exercises, which can lead to a sense of euphoria, Pollen saw one participant strip off his clothes, while he himself purposely slammed into a wall.

“I think COTS goes way over the line into the realm of unlicensed therapy,” said Pollen, a San Diego native who lives in Morristown and has his own marketing business.

But, Frischling countered, “We are not doing therapy, we’re doing principles of well-being and doing it in an experiential way.” He said cellphones were banned during the weekends to maximize participants’ engagement. “I don’t want people checking baseball scores.”

Frischling said criticism of the group has been based on lies.

“We are not a cult, we’re not doing brainwashing, we’re not making a fortune,” he said. “All these things are not true.”

To those who gathered in December to warn the community about COTS, he countered, “How about an asifa to deal with all the [child] abuse? I’m helping people that were being abused and neglected, and we were doing it within a Torah context. Is that such a crime? Is that such a terrible thing to do?”

In Part Two: Inside perspectives on the Call of the Shofar workshops. 

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NEW YORK

The Man Behind Call Of The Shofar

Steven Frischling insists his workshops are ‘profoundly positive.’

Adam Dickter

Steven Frischling doesn’t have an epic, inspiring story to tell. He didn’t go from rags to riches or survive a crisis or transformative experience, he says. As motivational speakers go, he comes across low-key, even boring, in a phone interview.

“I was just searching,” he says of the journey that led him from a secular Jewish home in Washington Heights — where his father owned a small grocery — to Torah study and greater observance and, for the past years, a would-be guru to Orthodox men who are yearning for more meaning in their lives.

“It grew out of a group of people meeting together once a week, all Orthodox guys,” he said of Call of the Shofar’s origins in the Baltimore area. “We really helped each other be better fathers and husbands.”

A graduate of Stuyvesant High School who briefly attended Beloit College in Wisconsin, Frischling doesn’t recall precisely what made him become religious in his 30s. But he said at one point a friend convinced him to see “the Torah as more than just the history of going from Mitzrayim [Egypt] to Israel, but as more of a personal journey.”

Frischling, 61, studied for a time at Ohr Sameach Yeshiva in Monsey in the late 1980s, and then later went to Israel to look for a study program there; he came back instead with a wife, Ruth, a native of Sydney, Australia. The couple settled in Baltimore and raised four children as Frischling, now using the Hebrew name Simcha, which means happiness, made his living repairing antique furniture. Ruth has a master’s degree in education with a major in guidance counseling from the University of Sydney, according to her LinkedIn profile.

In an interview with The Jewish Week, Frischling speaks slowly and affably, even when he discusses his detractors and the people in Brooklyn who have effectively derailed his career as a self-help guru.

On his personal blog, Frischling, who is mostly self-educated, lists under “training” his studies at Ohr Sameyach, the Orthodox outreach organization primarily for ba’al teshuvahs (returnees to the faith), as well as instruction in the ManKind Project, which is known for its outdoor New Warrior Training programs intended to build masculinity. He also lists Landmark Education, a program focused on personal development, and that he has studied under the wing of Richard Moss, an Ojai, Calif., doctor who holds retreats focused on “conscious living and inner transformation,” according to his web site.

Moss told The Jewish Week Tuesday he mentored Frischling as part of a three-year program during which he met with him on a regular basis.

“He’s a very bright and thoughtful man,” sad Moss. “He is an Orthodox Jew who is very open-minded, very bright, very capable of translating new ideas framed from different traditions into his own tradition.”

Frischling received ordination from Pirchei Shoshanim, a distance-learning yeshiva founded by Rabbi Fishel Todd, a tax lawyer in  New Jersey who has also founded the Shema Yisrael Movement. Pirchei Shoshanim coordinates lessons via email but requires exams in person. Frischling says he recently heard from Rabbi Todd that the ordination was revoked because of Call of the Shofar’s activities.

Rabbi Todd declined to comment on the matter when contacted by The Jewish Week Tuesday.

Responding to the uproar over COTS, Frischling insisted his workshops are “profoundly positive,” and said they are successful because no one else is running similar workshops.

Frischling said he is unsure how he will support himself now that the organization is on the verge of collapse.

On paper, Frischling appears to have been a noble servant of the COTS cause. In 2011 his compensation listed on the organization’s IRS disclosure was $37,253. In 2012, although revenue went up considerably, his reportable pay dropped to $18,000 as the only paid member of the board of directors. Frischling says he makes most of his income as a “world-class antique restorer.”

Shmuel Pollen, a former facilitator with COTS who has now become one of its leading critics, said he never believed Frischling was in it for the money and says he is a “very deep believer in his philosophy … a missionary who wants to convert people to a new belief system.” But, he adds, “I don’t think he is nearly as concerned as he should be with the well-being of people who go to his workshops."

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Reporting from Beersheva, our Israel Correspondent Josh Mitnick explains why this Negev city is becoming what Bibi Netanyahu calls "the cyber capital of Israel."

ISRAEL NEWS

Beersheva’s Big Tech Break

Uptick in cyber threats and IDF’s move south has the potential to remake Negev city.

Joshua Mitnick

Israel Correspondent

Beersheva, Israel — Ehud Barak was still prime minister when the foundation stone for Beersheva’s high-tech office park here was laid just across the street from Ben-Gurion University. 

Some 14 years later, tenants of the first office building of the “Advanced Technology Park” include a startup incubator, a university cyber-laboratory overseen by Deutsche Telekom and multinational computer company EMC Corp. The second of 16 planned buildings is under construction, and the giant frame of a bridge is being readied to give pedestrians easy access to the adjacent train station. 

Thanks to a boom in cyber threats and the planned relocation of the IDF southward, the technology park, the university and Beersheva itself are playing starring roles in the speeches by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the next hub of cyber security research on par with Tel Aviv.

“Beersheva will be the new cyber capital of Israel,” Netanyahu declared on Monday.

That’s a grandiose promise for a region still known to most Israelis as the rural periphery — a legacy of the unfulfilled original vision of founding Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to settle the Negev desert. 

On the hour-long train ride from Tel Aviv, one passenger described Beersheva as the “city of shopping malls.” On a railway platform flanked by construction cranes that rise above the university campus on one side and the technology park on the other, the first sensation is a wisp of desert sand that gets in the eye. The suspension bridge that connects the terminal to the university is empty at 9:30 in the morning (the university is on semester break). Looking out at the gigantic land tract that is still to be developed, it still takes a leap of the imagination to envision this as a tech center.

The game changer, however, is the scheduled move in about five years of the Israeli army’s vaunted technological units to a future tech campus alongside the technology park. The move is expected to bring thousands of the army’s computer whizzes from metropolitan Tel Aviv to the south. Multinational companies seem to be following suit: earlier this month, IBM said it plans to open an office in the technology park.

“We’re beyond the point of no return. This is happening,” said professor Dan Blumberg, BGU’s vice dean for research, who added that the university expects it will need more researchers and more students to meet the demand. “The military is moving, that’s going to make a huge difference. Industry is coming here … Everything is coming together, and I think that we have the critical mass to bring more companies here.”

Beersheva is expected to be the home of all of the army’s leading tech units, from the Air Force’s computer units, to military intelligence’s “8-200,” to the cyber defense units under Computing Corps. The government’s cyber emergency response center is also slated to move down here, allowing some army programmers to move from Ottoman-era building to modern digs.  

An officer in the computer unit said building is expected to begin in two years — a campus estimated at $2 billion that will include training facilities, dorms and an athletic center. The officer said that even though the army will move out of central Israel, the proximity to Ben-Gurion University and the high-tech park make Beersheva an attractive location that will allow collaboration with academics and the private sector. 

“We are going to build infrastructure that will allow our engineers to work in a suitable environment, similar to what is accepted in high-tech parks,” said Lt. Col. Dror Meirech, the army  officer responsible for the move. “It’s a good tiding for our tech staff.”

As cyber warfare has gotten increasing attention worldwide as a threat to critical infrastructure and big businesses, Israel’s government has sought to position the country at the leading edge of civilian research and development. The prime minister is touting cyber security as Israeli know-how that can help secure the world over.  

At least one Israeli venture capital fund, Jerusalem Venture Partners is targeting cyber security as a major area for investment: it is devoting a major portion of a new $120 million fund backed by Cisco to cyber, and is locating its cyber incubator in Beersheva. Yoav Tzruya, a partner in the JVP cyber labs, told The Jewish Week that the venture fund wants to be situated to benefit from the know-how of veteran soldiers with experience in cyber-ware and cyber security.

“There is nowhere else in the world where you have a full ecosystem for cyber security in such close location, where you have a defense organization, top-notch academics, multinationals, startup culture and financing,” he said. “If you look at the Silicon Valley, Washington, or Boston areas, they are always lacking one of those components. We’ve identified this area as an opportunity, and this is why we are in Beersheva,” Tzruya said. 

For decades, communities in southern Israel were used as locations where the government settled immigrants from non-Western countries with meager financial means. In Beersheva, too, the university was built alongside the apartment block neighborhoods housing Israel’s most impoverished. In recent years, however, university students have begun a process of gentrification. 

The idea of establishing a technology center in Israel’s economically neglected south was viewed as a pipe dream by many when former BGU President Avishay Braverman first floated the idea back in the 1990s. Inspired by his alma mater Stanford University and Silicon Valley, Braverman began lobbying the government for a train station and office park next to the university campus. He also knocked on the doors of the army. Much of the money for the train station was paid for independently by the university, with donors from the U.S.  

“People laughed at us,” Braverman said. “Some people [in the army] said, ‘How will you persuade people in Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan to move?’ But others said, ‘We have to do this. This is an idea whose time has come.’”

Indeed, Ben-Gurion University’s profile in the cyber security got a major boost in recent weeks, when its student researchers working in the labs that are run jointly with Deutsch Telekom said they found a security vulnerability in a new operating system for Samsung phones, and then a second in the Android operating system — a discovery that attracted considerable media attention as well as denials by Samsung and Google.

Dudu Mimran, the university’s chief technology officer, said the laboratory focuses on the security infrastructure of cellular networks and mobile devices, and helps evaluate security products for companies. He said that in the relatively new area of mobile communications, vulnerability is common.

“We have the best guys: they come either from the army, special organizations, or guys that are hackers by nature — people that can think like a hacker but are with the good guys,” he said. Looking out to the industrial park and the university across the train line, he said, “We are the pioneers in that respect. Everything is still being built around us.”

Outside the laboratory near the construction site of the second building, Benny Ben Simon oversees the installation of fountains for the industrial zones public area. Ben Simon moved to the city as a child when it was made up of immigrant tent neighborhoods, and endured years of neglect. But now it seems to him the city is turning the corner. 

“It’s turning into a city, which is taken into consideration,” he said. “They’ve talked for about this park for many years, but finally we’re seeing this pearl in the middle of the desert. The truth is, it was hard to believe, but we’ve realized the vision of Ben-Gurion.” 

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Evangelical Christians have long been among the most outspoken and dedicated of Zionists. But Associate Editor Jonathan Mark writes that a younger generation of Evangelicals is increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

NATIONAL

Evangelicals At The Crossroads

A younger generation is pushing a more nuanced analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; should Jews be worried?

Jonathan Mark

Associate Editor

Last December, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas sent Christmas greetings recalling the ancient birth of a holy child, a Palestinian child: Jesus, the “Palestinian messenger” of hope. Some in the West surely thought Abbas’ words as meaningless as a popular Arab song referring to Tel Aviv as a Palestinian city, or claims that a Jewish Temple was never on the Temple Mount. But in the little town of Bethlehem, the Bethlehem Bible College, an Evangelical institution, is preparing for “Christ at the Checkpoint,” a four-day conference that begins on March 10.

The conference will address, says its website, “the injustices in the Palestinian territories.” The previous conference, in 2012, issued a “manifesto” that turned Evangelical support for Israel on its head: “Any exclusive claim to land of the Bible in the name of God is not in line with the teaching of Scripture,” it read. The statement continued, “[The] suffering of the Palestinian people can no longer be ignored,” and “Christians must understand the global context for the rise of extremist Islam.”

For those asking, “What would Jesus do?” the answer, according to the conference website, is that Jesus would be alongside the “oppressed” Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints, and that’s where Evangelical support should be, as well.

This is not just the talk in Bethlehem. A December 2011 article in Relevant, a Florida-based magazine aimed at young American Evangelicals, gave a similar twist to the Gospel: There’d be no Three Wise Men if you “place an eight-meter-high wall between the Magi and Baby Jesus. … He’d be without citizenship. …  Considered to be a security threat from birth, he’d receive his green Palestinian ID at the age of 16. ... He would be prohibited from crossing the wall into Jerusalem only 15 minutes away.”

And yet the lineup for the “Checkpoint” in March is attracting some of the most influential Evangelicals in the West: William Wilson, president of Oral Roberts University; Geoff Tunnicliffe, secretary-general of the World Evangelical Alliance; and Joseph Cumming of Yale University’s Center for Faith and Culture.

What happened to all that unquestioning Evangelical Zionism we thought we knew so much about? With the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement gathering steam, it’s a question that takes on added urgency as Israel becomes increasingly isolated on the world stage.

Evangelical Zionism, the political and spiritual heart of U.S. support for Israel, may have peaked, with an internal schism threatening to erode Israel’s most important foreign alliance, observers are beginning to say. Though Christian Zionists are still the dominant majority among America’s 50 million Evangelicals, a new wave of Evangelicals, the “millennials,” more interested in “social justice” than geopolitics. And they are advocating an “even-handed” approach to the Israel-Palestinian problem, with some more sympathetic to the Palestinians.

David Brog, executive director of Christians United For Israel (CUFI), an Evangelical Zionist group known for being enthusiastically supportive of Israel, told The Jewish Week that he sensed the left’s growing strength. “The last three or four years I’ve started to get that sinking feeling, they were making inroads …. influencing Evangelicals well beyond the extreme left. ...  They are finding an interested audience" among the young. The “anti-Israel" message, said Brog, “is resonating. This generation is in play.” (CUFI, chaired by Pastor John Hagee, has ruffled some feathers in parts of the Jewish community for at times staking out positions to the right of Israeli and U.S. policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)

Jews, said Robert W. Nicholson, an Evangelical writer, should know that what drives traditional Christian Zionism is not messianism or conversion but Scripture, “belief in the truth of God’s eternal covenant” with Israel; that God will “bless those who bless” Israel and “curse those who curse.”

However, younger Evangelicals are reportedly less “text-oriented” than their elders, so Israel — whose Evangelical support is driven by biblical text, with past and future promises — is at a disadvantage when juxtaposed with the Palestinian claims for social justice in the here and now.

In Mosaic, the Tikvah Fund’s online journal of Jewish ideas, Nicholson warns that some at the “Checkpoint” conference may express a concern for “peace, justice, and reconciliation.” But what this actually translates to, he says, “is unceasing criticism of perceived Israeli injustice, racism and occupation, peppered with special disdain for Evangelical Zionists who allegedly exacerbate the conflict” by supporting Israel.

The 2010 inaugural “Checkpoint” conference (held every two years) featured Palestinian Rev. Naim Ateek, who once sent out the Easter message, “Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him. ... The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily. Palestine has become the place of the skull.”

Rev. Joel Hunter is among the more centrist leaders in the “Checkpoint” camp. Pastor of an Evangelical megachurch called Northland, with 20,000 congregants at several locations in and around Orlando, Fla., he serves on the board of the World Evangelical Alliance (representing 600 million) and the National Association of Evangelicals (representing 30 million). Indicative of those Evangelicals who don’t want to be considered interchangeable with Republicans, he is the author of “A New Kind of Conservative,” advocating a nonpartisan approach.

A speaker at the 2012 “Checkpoint,” Rev. Hunter told The Jewish Week, “I’m well aware and regret the insecurities that this conference has brought about, some of it justifiable because of some of the participants, and we all get that. But the point of the conference is to identify and hear from Arab Christians. While I was there [at the last conference] I spoke to many people and did not hear one word about Israel as an enemy.” (Ateek didn’t speak at the 2012 conference.)

Everyone agrees, said Rev. Hunter, about the need for “the security and ongoing prosperity of Israel, which is our very good friend and important to our scriptures. But there has been a long theological strand that has been predominant in the loudest voice of the Evangelical movement, identifying the modern-day State of Israel with the [prophecies of the] Hebrew Scriptures. … Anything that would present a more balanced, more compassionate view for all those living in the land, and telling all of their stories was seen as a threat, as a heresy. As we learn more and more about the complications of the peace process, and of the legitimate and significant sufferings of those who have been limited for the sake of security, we want to include them. It doesn’t at all diminish our loyalty to Israel, but it does help us see the other side of the story.”

However, after the 2012 conference defended by Rev. Hunter, the Evangelical magazine Charisma magazine had its doubts, and headlined: “Did Christ at the Checkpoint Conference Undermine Israel?”

The home page for next month’s “Checkpoint” features a graphic depicting Israel’s security wall as a high, dark and foreboding prison wall. Dwarfed by the wall, a Palestinian is planting an olive tree, symbol of peace.

Lee Smith, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, feared the negativity. He warned in Tablet, “If the ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’ camp wins out, the pro-Israel Jewish community that once looked warily upon evangelical support may come to regard that movement with nostalgia.”

And “bitter regret,” adds Nicholson; regret for the way Jews have been dismissive of Evangelical Zionists. “Christian Zionism cannot be taken for granted.”

Other than Orthodox Jews, American Evangelicals are still the leading supporters of Israel. A 2013 Pew survey found that 82 percent of Evangelicals believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, but 18 percent are no longer certain; 42 percent of Evangelicals now believe that Israel and a Palestinian state can coexist peacefully; a minority opinion but a substantial one.

♦

Among the advocacy groups linked to the new Evangelicals is the Telos Group, founded in 2009 by Todd Deatherage and Gregory Khalil. Deatherage, an Evangelical Republican, worked as chief of staff for Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.) and later for the George W. Bush state department; Khalil, a Christian Palestinian, is, according to the Telos website, a “longtime Democrat and a former adviser to Palestinian leaders on peace negotiations.”

Telos, on its website, states that peace would be more likely if Evangelicals were to “pursue the common good for everyone in the Holy Land,” Palestinians as well as Israelis.

Telos’ Deatherage told The Jewish Week, “People try to put us — and the whole situation — in a box, that you can’t be pro-Israel if you’re pro-Palestinian. I do think there can be another way that could encourage a positive difference, as long as it doesn’t devolve into a zero-sum approach. I see that as a dead end — for both peoples.”

Trips to Israel, sponsored by Evangelicals on both sides of the divide, underline the different narratives that have taken hold. The Evangelical Zionists, for example, promote the idea that the Israeli Christian population is the only one in the Middle East that is growing, whereas the Christian population in the Islamic-dominated Gaza and West Bank is shrinking.

On the other end, one of the “new Evangelicals,” who asked not to be named, told The Jewish Week, “I have met with a lot of Palestinian Christians through the years and I have never met a Palestinian Christian who said, ‘My family left here because of Muslim pressure or persecution. Never once. I’ve heard many of them say, ‘We left because it’s too hard to live here. I can’t get from here to there without going through checkpoints. I don’t have educational or economic opportunities. We only have water once a week in our home. That is the reason that Palestinian Christians have stated to me why they’ve left. Christians are not fleeing Bethlehem because of Muslim persecution.”

Yes, polls show that the Evangelicals, as a whole, are still very pro-Israel, but CUFI’s Brog warns, “I’m worried that what we’re seeing could translate, in a generation, to a real shift in the community.” 

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Also this week, the  Knaidlach Controversy at Limmud NY; YU's basketball coach is dismissed after 42 years; and our Spring Arts Preview provides an advanced look at theater, film, music, visual arts and books.

SHORT TAKES

… And, Of Course, A Knaidlach Controversy

Lauren Rothman

Special To The Jewish Week

Yes, there was guided meditation and bluegrass music and late-night improv at the 10th annual Limmud NY conference last weekend in Stamford, Conn. But, in a sign of the artisanal times, there were, along with the rabbis, scholars and historians, plenty of Jewish foodies.

The Limmud program schedule this year was an attractive one for passionate cooks and eaters: it included a Friday-night cocktail-making tutorial; a discussion of the kosher meat marketplace; and a cupcake-decorating competition.

On Sunday morning, the weekend’s food-centric activities were capped off by a discussion between three prominent Jewish foodies of diverse backgrounds. “The Food Panel: Fusion Foodies Talk” brought together Shannon Sarna, the Italian-American author of the blog The Nosher; Michael Twitty, the African-American author of the blog Afroculinaria; and Rabbi Mary Zamore, the editor of the 2011 book “The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic.”

In a chat moderated by Limmud NY board member and Jewish educator Jennifer Altman, the three writers reflected on their personal dietary practices; cherished family recipes; and the validity of the traif-iest matzah ball ever to float in a bowl of chicken broth.

“To me that is very cool,” said Sarna in defense of the dish served by “Top Chef” season two winner Ilan Hall at his L.A. restaurant The Gorbals (pork braised in Manischewitz has also made an appearance on the menu there). The knaidlach has been stirring up controversy ever since its debut in 2011, but to Sarna, the dish is less about a blatant flouting of tradition and more about the fun that experimentation can bring to a kitchen.

“This is about letting go of fear,” she said.

Twitty, too, could see the good in a dish like a bacon-wrapped matzah ball, which, although strictly not traditional, still has the power to attract non-Jews to Jewish cuisine and get them interested in it.

“Take Mile End Deli,” he said, referencing Noah Bernamoff’s ever-popular Jewish-by-way-of-Montreal-style Brooklyn restaurant. The restaurant’s “smoked meat”-style pastrami, its house-made pickles and its chopped liver are far from kosher. But, Twitty said, these dishes’ presence on a hot Brooklyn restaurant’s menu keeps the Jewish tradition alive and well — and even trendy.

“And that’s still important,” Twitty said.

Differing from her somewhat younger peers, Rabbi Zamore said she wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of a bacon-wrapped matzah ball — wondering, even, if such and idea could be considered anti-Semitic. But after listening to Sarna’s and Twitty’s arguments, she conceded that the difference of opinion could be “a generational thing.”

“Whereas I might call a bacon-wrapped matzah ball ‘inappropriate,’ the younger generation might be more inclined to simply deem it ‘awkward,’” she said.

But there was one point on which the three very different panelists agreed: When it comes to Jewish food, there’s no such thing as “authentic.”

Take the speakers’ home recipes as an example: Sarna makes a craft cocktail with gin, prosecco and Manischewitz syrup; Twitty likes his hummus made with black-eyed peas; and Zamore, whose husband is Norwegian, eats kransekake, a Norwegian almond cake, each Chanukah.

“The less we can say ‘this is authentically Jewish,’ the better off we are,” said Sarna.

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NEW YORK

‘To End This Way Makes No Sense’

YU officials mum on firing of hoops coach Jonathan Halpert after 42 years.

Jonathan Mark

Associate Editor

In January, Yeshiva University’s basketball coach Jonathan Halpert published his memoirs, “Are You Still Coaching?” In February, the answer is “no,” with Halpert fired after 42 years and more than 400 victories (seventh most in the history of New York men’s basketball).

An official statement by YU didn’t say Halpert was fired, only that he “will conclude his service” after Yeshiva’s final game (Feb. 22), but the coach emailed friends that this was just “the corporate way of telling me that I have been fired.” Halpert said the school never told him why.

Since 1972 Halpert has commanded Yeshiva’s sidelines and the respect of the city’s basketball mavens. This week, all he has left is that respect, with the coach reporting more than 350 emails from former players, opposing coaches, referees and the Yeshiva community, where the consensus reaction was “shocked.”

Halpert admitted to sadness, disappointment. “It rips your heart out,” he told The Jewish Week Tuesday. “To end this way makes no sense. Everyone asks me, why? As if the onus is on me to explain. It’s not fair. I have no basis even for speculation.”

YU President Richard Joel issued a statement praising “Dr. Halpert’s caring commitment, as both mentor and coach, to his players and the YU community has made a difference for more than four decades. His legacy and lasting contribution to the university will be remembered each time our student athletes step onto the court that carries his name.” Just two years ago, YU honored Halpert, who has a doctorate in special education, by adding his “signature” to the home court at Yeshiva’s Max Stern Athletic Center on West 185th Street.

Looking to reconcile Joel’s praise and Halpert’s pain, Joel was given the chance to elaborate, but he told The Jewish Week that he wouldn’t comment further. Requests for comment from officials in athletic department were referred to an official spokesman who wouldn’t comment on personnel issues.

Halpert said, “I got called to [Joel’s] office, last May. We’re not best friends but we had a nice relationship. He says, ‘I’ll let you coach this year (2013-14) but after that I want you to retire.’ I asked why? He said, ‘You’ve been here 41 years. It’s enough.’ I asked, were there were any complaints about me? I don’t understand. A year ago, I was fine. If I’m so bad, why are you letting me coach this year? He said, ‘I’ll give you a victory lap. I’ll make you a party.’ He said, ‘I’m not going to be here 41 years, why should you be?’”

Halpert added, “You named the [court] floor for me, raised $250,000 in my name, made a speech that I was the greatest thing since chopped liver, and now, a year later you fire me?”

In an email to friends, Halpert said Joel “demanded that I announce my retirement…  and sign a non-disclosure agreement. In November I informed the President that I was not prepared to make a decision about retirement at that time and under no circumstances would I sign a non-disclosure agreement. In December I received a termination letter stating that my services were ‘deeply appreciated’ just not wanted any more. … Although I am obviously very disappointed by his decision I will never allow one decision made by one person in one moment of time to negate the wonderful experiences and associations that I have enjoyed over the past 42 years. My love and admiration for Yeshiva University, its administrators, faculty and students remain as strong as ever.”

Some wondered if the firing was about YU needing to save money. “Oh, it can’t be about money,” said Halpert. “I won’t tell you my salary because I’m embarrassed. No, not embarrassed, but people too often value you by how much money you make. When I started at Yeshiva I made $1,000, OK? Then I made $3,000 for many years. I never complained because I had another job.” In 2012, The New York Times reported that over the duration of his career he often earned less than $25,000. Halpert told us, “I always thought of my coaching job as my way of giving back to Yeshiva, giving back to the community.”

He added, “There’s nobody who wanted to see me leave. Nobody.” Even the athletic director wanted you to stay? “OK, very good. Let’s put it this way. We didn’t have the closest relationship. Cordial. About two or three years ago, we had a pretty serious difference but it was resolved and from that point forward everything was fine. This decision was way beyond the athletic director. This decision was made by the president.”

The YU Maccabees have a 4-12 record in the Skyline Conference (Division III) and 6-17 overall, but making the playoffs three times in the last six years. At one point, Halpert had 15 consecutive winning seasons. He coached more than 300 players, including Dave Kufeld, drafted by the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers in 1980.

Kufeld told The Jewish Week that the Halpert’s influence on his players extended “way beyond the end lines of the court.” The coach had “a fierce devotion towards faithfully representing everything Yeshiva University has historically stood for, and for maintaining the proper perspective and attitude when experiencing either victory or defeat. … Hundreds of former and current players see him as a friend and mentor in all matters of life, basketball and even religious observance. We are greatly saddened and troubled by the impending end of the Halpert era at YU, and we are encouraging everyone whose lives he has touched to attend the team’s final game, next Saturday night [Feb. 22, 8:30 p.m. versus Maritime at Yeshiva’s Washington Heights campus] to accord him a measure of hakarat hatov — grateful thanks.”

Few coaches can say their whole life has been spent at one school, but Halpert can say it perhaps more than anyone. His father worked there, and Halpert went to Yeshiva University’s high school, then Yeshiva College where he was captain of the basketball team, then Yeshiva’s Ferkauf Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, before his first coaching job at Yeshiva’s high school.

Not only did Halpert’s players have to balance a dual Jewish-secular curriculum, but for more than a decade, before the Stern Center opened in 1985, Halpert’s teams didn’t have a home court and often had often to travel to “home” games at Brooklyn College, or in high school gyms, sometimes practicing in a school near the Whitestone Bridge. YU’s only gym, in those days, was of limited use, with too low of a ceiling to contain the high arc of some shots.

Halpert was twice named coach of the year in the Skyline Conference, and received the National Association of Basketball Coaches “Guardians of the Game” honor in 2003-04. The Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association awarded him its “Good Guy” award in 1997-98. In 1997, the New York Times included Halpert in “a look at some of the best coaching performances in the metropolitan New York area this season.” In a recent game against St. Joseph’s, Halpert was honored and St. Joseph’s offered to play Hatikvah played before the game, but St. Joseph’s didn’t have a recording.

Yeshiva’s former athletic director, Richard Zerneck, once told the Times: “Jonny is of the old school, of people like Nat Holman and Red Holtzman and our old great coach, Red Sarachek. They run the backdoor cuts and emphasize ‘see the ball’ …. No one knows the game better than Jonny.”

At times getting choked-up, Halpert said, “Everything’s for the best. That’s what we’re supposed to believe. I know who I am. I know what I’ve done. The single most important thing that a coach has, or any leader has, is integrity. Treating players, treating people with respect. What does ‘no comment’ mean? I’m not going to walk around saying I retired when I know I didn’t. Sooner or later it had to end. I understand, but to end this way…”

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Spring Arts Preview February 2014

The new season in theater, film, music, the visual arts and books.

http://www.thejewishweek.com/special-sections/arts-preview/spring-arts-preview-february-2014

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Enjoy the read and Shabbat shalom,

Gary Rosenblatt

P.S. Remember that our website is always there for you with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, Opinion essays and advice columns. Check it out.

http://www.thejewishweek.com/

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Between the Lines - Gary Rosenblatt

Reclaiming Anne Frank's Jewishness

'We can never be just Dutch or just English or whatever, we will always be Jews as well. And we'll have to keep on being Jews, but then, we'll want to be.'

Los Angeles — Anne Frank is the most universally known of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Her diary has been read by millions of people around the world, and her tragic story of living in fear, hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam with her family and others for more than two years, has been told in a Broadway play, Hollywood movie, television dramas and in countless other ways. Is there anything more to be known about this precocious young girl with a gift for writing, a poignant faith in humanity, and maturity far beyond her years?

Until now I thought not, having been deeply affected by her diary when I read it as a teenager, as so many others still do, and having imagined the terror she felt on being discovered by the Nazis.

But on visiting the major Anne Frank exhibit at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance here last week — it opened in October and will remain in place for 10 years — I came away with a deeper understanding of Anne’s story as both an intimate personal tragedy and one that provides historical context in understanding how Hitler’s hatred of Jews could dehumanize a people and lead to their decimation.

Our guide, Matthew Boger, explained at the outset of our tour that the intention of the museum was not to make Anne “a poster child of the Holocaust,” but rather to tell her unique story as one of 1.5 million Jewish children who perished at the hands of the Nazis. Other exhibits at the museum educate tens of thousands of visitors each year about how the Holocaust came to be and its tragic results.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of the center who accompanied us during our visit, noted that when the Museum of Tolerance opened in 1993, many thought its exhibits would be viewed primarily by the Jewish population of Los Angeles. Instead, he noted with pride, 95 percent of its visitors each year are not Jewish. The vast majority of the 150,000 who came last year were public school students, primarily from seventh through 12th grade.

The new exhibit, titled simply “Anne,” is described in its publicity as “a special 60-minute experience” utilizing “immersive environments, unique artifacts, multimedia presentations and exciting interactive elements.” They include a video interview with a cousin of Anne’s who survived the war and recalls her as “a lively child … a little explosion,” and correspondence between Anne’s father, Otto, and a wealthy American friend who tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain visas for the Frank family.

But the most poignant power of the exhibit is in its use of Anne’s own words — some spoken by an actress and others featured on the walls or reproduced as diary entries — drawing you into her world, her thoughts, her dreams and fears.

Her early “Dear Kitty” entries in the diary, given as a present to her on her 13th birthday in 1942, describe the typical musings of a child Anne’s age, including her desire to be a movie star. (How ironic that she yearned for Hollywood, only a few miles from the site that memorializes her short life.) Over the next 26 months, until the diary abruptly ends just before the annex was discovered in August 1944, Anne’s writings grow more thoughtful and self-reflective as she describes her ever-shrinking world while the war rages around her.

The designers of the exhibit subtly convey that confining reality by gradually narrowing the passageway as visitors move through the exhibit. Those visitors include not only groups of school children but also adults, including about 7,500 law enforcement officials from the Los Angeles Police Department each year who come to the museum for one or two-day training sessions in dealing with prejudice and minorities.

A group of about 20 commanders in the force toured the “Anne” exhibit while we were there and appeared raptly attentive as they moved along in silence.

As we accompanied them, reading passages that emphasized Anne’s Jewishness, including an essay on chesed called “Giving,” I was reminded of the author Meyer Levin’s futile struggle to preserve the Jewish content of her words in the 1956 Broadway play based on her diary. I interviewed Levin several years before his death in 1981, and he was by then an angry and bitter man who acknowledged his “obsession” with the universalization of Anne’s story ever since his original script for the play was rejected by the producers as “too Jewish.”

Here at the “Anne” exhibit Levin would take satisfaction in reading Anne’s thoughts on God and being Jewish, including this passage, written April 11, 1944, which was omitted in early editions of the diary: “Who knows, maybe our religion will teach the world and all the people in it about goodness, and that’s the reason, the only reason, we have to suffer. We can never be just Dutch or just English or whatever, we will always be Jews as well. And we’ll have to keep on being Jews, but then, we’ll want to be.”

Liebe Geft, the director of the Museum of Tolerance, explained that a primary purpose of the exhibit was “to reclaim Anne Frank as a Jewish child of the Holocaust.” (Eleanor Roosevelt’s introduction to the American publication of the diary, in its rendering of Anne as a generic victim of war, does not mention the Holocaust or that Anne was Jewish.)

“To a large extent,” Geft noted, Anne’s story has been “romanticized, mythologized and universalized,” with some educators suggesting the diary is all one needs to know of the Holocaust. “But this,” she said motioning to the walls of the exhibit, “is about Jewish continuity” and the message that “anti-Semitism did not die with Hitler.”

Before leaving the exhibit, visitors are invited to participate in an interactive activity that asks for their reactions and encourages them to share their thoughts in a tweet or e-mail to friends. The idea, indicative of the Wiesenthal Center approach, is to promote action, not just reflection.

It was only before parting ways at the end of our tour that Matthew Boger, our guide, told us his remarkable personal story of reconciliation with a former skinhead who as part of a street gang in the early 1980s assaulted Boger, then a teenager, because he was gay, and left him for dead.

A 23-minute film, “From Hate to Hope,” is based on how the two men met 28 years later through their work at the Museum of Tolerance. They now lecture together on their experience, and the film is up for an Academy Award next month in the short documentary category.

That film, and the “Anne” exhibit, underscore how the Wiesenthal Center has carved out a niche in melding Hollywood and humanity in a way that may offend purists but continues to have a powerful impact on the masses. As Rabbi Hier told me, “We’re not afraid of using technology” in a proper way to get an important message across.

Anne Frank wrote: “I want to go on living after my death.” This exhibit helps fulfill a young girl’s wish far beyond her imagination.

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Food and Wine

Debating Bacon Matzo Balls

Jewish foodies talk authenticity at Limmud NY food panel.

Lauren Rothman - Food and Wine Editor

There was something for everyone at the tenth annual Limmud NY conference last weekend: from guided meditation to bluegrass music to late-night improv, this year’s three-day gathering devoted to Jewish learning in all its facets filled the Stamford, Conn. Hilton Hotel with rabbis, scholars, historians, and… foodies.

Of course, no discussion of Jewish-ness is ever complete without at least a passing reference to — and ideally a more in-depth conversation about — food: after all, we love our nosh. The Limmud program schedule this year was an attractive one for passionate cooks and eaters: It included a Friday night cocktail-making tutorial; a discussion of the kosher meat marketplace; and a cupcake-decorating competition.

On Sunday morning, the weekend’s food-centric activities were capped off by a discussion between three prominent Jewish foodies of diverse backgrounds. “The Food Panel: Fusion Foodies Talk” brought together Shannon Sarna, the Italian-American author of the blog The Nosher; Michael Twitty, the African-American author of the blog Afroculinaria and Rabbi Mary Zamore, the editor of the 2011 book The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic. In a chat moderated by Limmud NY board member and Jewish educator Jennifer Altman, the three writers reflected on their personal dietary practices; cherished family recipes; and the validity of the traif-iest matzo ball ever to float in a bowl of chicken broth.

“To me that is very cool,” said Sarna in defense of the dish served by “Top Chef” season two winner Ilan Hall at his L.A. restaurant The Gorbals (pork braised in Manischewitz has also made an appearance on the menu there). The knaidlach has been stirring up controversy ever since its debut in 2011, but to Sarna, the dish is less about a blatant flouting of tradition and more about the fun that experimentation can bring to a kitchen.

“This is about letting go of fear,” she said.

Twitty, too, could see the good in a dish like a bacon-wrapped matzo ball, which, although strictly not traditional, still has the power to attract non-Jews to Jewish cuisine and get them interested in it.

“Take Mile End Deli,” he said, referencing Noah Bernamoff’s ever-popular Jewish-by-way-of-Montreal-style Brooklyn restaurant. The restaurant’s “smoked meat”-style pastrami; its housemade pickles; its chopped liver: though far from kosher, Twitty said, these dishes’ presence on a hot Brooklyn restaurant’s menu keeps the Jewish tradition alive and well—and even trendy.

“And that’s still important,” Twitty said.

Differing from her somewhat younger peers, Rabbi Zamore said she wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of a bacon-wrapped matzo ball—wondering, even, if such an idea could be considered anti-Semitic. But after listening to Sarna’s and Twitty’s arguments, she conceded that the difference of opinion could be “a generational thing.”

“Whereas I might call a bacon-wrapped matzo ball ‘inappropriate,’ the younger generation might be more inclined to simply deem it ‘awkward,’” she said.

But there was one point that the three very different panelists agreed on: when it comes to Jewish food, there’s no such thing as “authentic.” Take the speakers’ home recipes as an example: Sarna makes a craft cocktail with gin, prosecco, and Manischewitz syrup; Twitty likes his hummus made with black-eyed peas; and Zamore, whose husband is Norwegian, eats kransekake, a Norwegian almond cake, each Chanukah.

“The less we can say ‘this is authentically Jewish,’ the better off we are,” said Sarna.

editor@jewishweek.org

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Travel - Cleveland, OH

Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Amy Larson

Second Renaissance Taking Hold 

Hilary Larson - Travel Writer

It may be the heart of the beleaguered Rust Belt, but don’t underestimate Cleveland. A recent visit to Ohio’s Jewish and cultural capital revealed a downtown in its second renaissance of recent decades, with enough urban energy to warrant exploration even during these freezing months.

As throughout the Northeast this winter, there is no shortage of snow in this city on the shores of Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River. But there are more and more reasons to brave the chill and head downtown to neighborhoods like University Circle and Little Italy, where new coffee bars and revitalized institutions are drawing an influx of young professionals. Many of them are Jews who in past generations might have settled in Shaker Heights or another suburb to the city’s east; Cleveland’s synagogues still cluster there.

On a recent weekend, young families were gliding around the winter-only outdoor ice rink at Wade Oval; crowding MacLaren strollers into the industrial-chic Fuel coffee bar for shade-grown lattes; and checking out the couture at “Dior and More,” a show at the Western Reserve Historical Society.

Many young professionals work in healthcare, an industry that animates contemporary Cleveland. My brother-in-law, who grew up here and takes pride in the city’s evolution, talks of an urban revitalization that has been gathering steam since the 1990s, when — as he tells it — the sidewalks filled with people out strolling and dining into the evening.

The downturn of the early 2000s put things on pause for another decade or so. But when MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, reopened in late 2012 in a new downtown location, it was a visible symbol of the latest renaissance. The eye-catching black steel and glass building, designed by London architect Farshid Moussavi, is a glittering triangular abstraction and the latest institution to make its home in the University Circle neighborhood.

Named for the presence of Case Western Reserve University, University Circle is the East Side cultural hub. Within walking distance of each other are the Historical Society, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the Cleveland Botanical Garden, the University Hospital complex and Lakeview Cemetery — the last resting place for numerous prominent Jewish Clevelandites, along with President Garfield.

Nearby are the grand neoclassical pillars of Severance Hall, home to the legendary Cleveland Orchestra — one of America’s so-called “Big Five” orchestras and still a major draw under music director Franz Welser-Most.

Of course, with thousands of Case Western students and an army of medical residents, the area has a lively youth presence to balance all those grand old institutions. Boutiques and bookstores dot the streets around MOCA; inevitably, the museum’s sprawling plaza has become a student hangout.

The museum itself is one of a new breed of collectionless galleries, where rotating exhibitions offer works in various media. As with many boldly designed “starchitect” museums, the actual content on view at MOCA can be its least impressive part. But that doesn’t mean a trip inside isn’t worthwhile. From the soaring light-filled atrium to the monumental staircase to the top-floor café with extensive city views, MOCA is a refreshingly modern addition to a city (and neighborhood) dominated by prewar and prewar-style architecture.

With its own lovely new atrium and glass-covered modern wing, the Cleveland Museum of Art is also noted for its edifice, but its collection is arguably the finest in Ohio. As spring brings two blockbuster shows to the galleries — one highlighting Van Gogh, another Japanese art — the outdoor gardens on Lake Erie invite visitors to stroll, picnic or contemplate man’s existence along with a Rodin-supervised enlarged casting of his iconic sculpture “The “Thinker.”

The Western Reserve Historical Society is another Cleveland gem — but with a locally-focused mission, as the society puts it, “to discover the American experience by exploring the tangible history of Northeast Ohio.” With an emphasis on tangible, this museum is far more engaging than you might imagine.

There’s the stunning collection of classic cars, for example; did you even realize that Cleveland is a historical center of U.S. auto production? And for fashionistas, “Dior and More” is only the latest show to highlight the society’s collection of vintage costumes from movies, galas and bygone eras.

If I make University Circle sound like a parade of museums, well, it certainly is that. But it’s also a place to indulge the other senses. A new crop of artisan roasters like Fuel, Dewey’s and Phoenix Coffee provides a jolt of hipster caffeine for the student crowd. And just east of the museums, Cleveland’s Little Italy is centered around the cafés and pizzerias of Mayfield Avenue, where bakeries fill cannolis to order, and upscale wine bars like Vino Veritas now emphasize varietals, not the straw-adorned jugs of yesteryear.

With its low-scale joints and old-school trattorias, Little Italy still really feels like a neighborhood. It hits that perfect sweet spot where history and novelty come together — something that can be said of Cleveland itself. 

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The Jewish Week

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