The New York Jewish Week - connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Wednesday, 12 February 2014

The New York Jewish Week - connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Wednesday, 12 February  2014
Dear Reader,
Amid talk of boycotts against Israel and John Kerry's peacemaking efforts, we take a minute this week to reflect on four lads from Liverpool who arrived on these shores 50 years ago. In fact, it was an unlikely Jewish friendship between Beatles manager Brian Epstein and concert promoter Sid Bernstein that brought the Fab Four to America, and pop culture was never the same again. Jonathan Mark tells the tale.
INTERNATIONAL
Hungary’s Jewish Umbrella Boycotts State Holocaust Commemorations
The main Jewish umbrella group in Hungary voted to boycott the state-sponsored Holocaust memorial program unless the government makes changes to redress distortions of history.
Representatives of Mazsihisz, the Association of Hungarian Jewish Communities, at a special assembly on Sunday voted 76-2 to “distance” the organization from the government’s program marking the 70th anniversary of the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz “under the present circumstances.”
Its resolution said the government plans “do not take into consideration the sensitiveness of those who went though the horror of the Holocaust.”
Mazsihisz, the resolution said, can take part in the Holocaust 2014 program and will use the grants it received from the government’s Civil Fund for memorial events “only if the Hungarian Government changes its attitude toward the memory and research of the Holocaust.”
Prime Minister Viktor Orban must take action on three specific issues, the resolution said: halt the erection of a memorial in downtown Budapest to the German occupation of Hungary; dismiss Sandor Szakaly as the director of a new government historical institute; and suspend the creation of a Holocaust memorial museum in a former Budapest train station.
The resolution said the monument’s “symbolic message promotes the shifting away of national responsibility” in the Holocaust. It also noted that Szakaly recently characterized as “a police action against aliens” the 1941 roundup and deportation of about 18,000 foreign-born Jews to Kamenets-Podolsk, Ukraine, where they were massacred.
As to the museum, Mazsihisz experts still do not know what the museum’s ”take on history” will be, the resolution said, and the head of the museum project, Maria Schmidt, “does not cooperate with Mazsihisz.”
Representatives of Jewish organizations raised their concerns Thursday at a meeting with Orban’s chief of staff, Janos Lazar, who heads the state’s Holocaust memorial year program. At the meeting, Lazar said Orban would address the concerns this week.
Orban already wrote to Jewish leaders last month defending the German occupation monument, saying it would commemorate all Nazi victims.
Meanwhile, several synagogues and other Jewish institutions have unilaterally announced that they will decline funding from the Holocaust memorial year Civil Fund.
“We are sad to have witnessed how in recent weeks the remembrance initiatives have become unworthy pawns in governmental political games as Hungary approaches its parliamentary elections,” a statement from the Bet Orim Reform congregation said Sunday announcing that it would not accept the Civil Fund grant. “Bet Orim does not wish to be part of this kind of political strategy.”

editor@jewishwee,org
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NEW YORK
All Those Years Ago
An unlikely Jewish friendship brought the Beatles to America.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
When fate would bring him back to Liverpool, Sid Bernstein would go to the Kirkdale Jewish Cemetery, placing a pebble atop the black granite gravestone. Here lay Shmuel son of Tzvi, who died on 21 Menachem Av, 1967 — Shmuel, better known as Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles, though there is no mention of the Beatles on his stone. That the Beatles came to America 50 years ago, an anniversary celebrated this week across the land, is because of a phone call Bernstein made to Epstein 51 years ago, in 1963, to book the Beatles one year later, Feb. 12, in Carnegie Hall—their first booking in America. A show in Washington, D.C., and the Ed Sullivan shows, were booked later, sandwiched around Sid Bernstein’s shows in Carnegie.
“I go to visit Brian,” Bernstein told us before he died in 2012, “To the shul where his funeral was, to visit his family, just to say, ‘Thank you, Brian, thank you. I’ll never forget you.’ He turned my life around.”
Epstein was slender, lonely, a closeted English homosexual at a time when that would have been scandalous for the Beatles, let alone a crime. Bernstein, married with six children, was a hearty “hail fellow, well met” from the East Bronx. But they were two Jewish guys in an uncertain world, and their Yiddishkeit mattered to each of them. Years later, Bernstein told me that in 1966, when Bernstein tried his hand at managing bands, including future Rock n’ Roll Hall of Famers the Rascals and Laura Nyro, he found himself one night at the Olympia Theater in Paris, where the Rascals were kicking off their first European tour. Epstein flew from London to Paris, to surprise Bernstein backstage, to wish him well. Epstein was once a new manager, too, bringing a band over the ocean, and Bernstein was there for him.
“Sid,” said Epstein, as he slung his arm around Bernstein’s shoulders, “What are two Jewish boys doing here, in a theater surrounded by four goyim [the Rascals] and all these French people?”
That Epstein, always physically cautious, could publically swing an arm around another man was indicative of how safe he felt with Bernstein. They were like two Jews doing deals in the Diamond District; everything was trust, never a written contract, not even for that first trip to America, not even when the financial stakes were big, such as booking the Beatles into Shea Stadium. “Brian gave me his word,” recalled Bernstein, “all I needed. That was the beauty of Brian Epstein. The most wonderful, decent, honorable man.”
Over the years, around other Beatles anniversaries, we’d sometimes visit Bernstein in his Manhattan home. “It’s easy to remember my apartment,” the spirited Bernstein would say: “9-H, for happy.” More than 40 years after his last call to Epstein before Epstein died of an overdose, Bernstein said it was as easy as 9-H to remember Epstein’s home phone in Liverpool: “Chilwall 6-518.”
The first time Bernstein called that number, Queenie, Brian’s mother, answered. Queenie’s real name was Malka (“queen” in Hebrew). Queenie was worried about how much the long-distance call from New York was costing Bernstein. Elliott Gordon, a friend of Bernstein’s, and a talent agent himself, tells us that in that first conversation between Bernstein and Queenie, she mentioned that she loved The New York Times Sunday Book Review section but rarely could see it. Bernstein mailed it to her later that week and every week for the rest of her life.
Bernstein understood the pleasure of an out-of-town newspaper in those pre-Internet days. It was how he discovered the Beatles.
He had some success as a promoter, but in 1963 he was close to broke. He had lost his shirt, $18,000 to be exact, promoting the 1961 Newport Jazz Festival.
He was in a jam. “I had to get away from the meshugas of the music business,” he told me, years later. So he signed up for a class about democracy at the New School, and part of the homework was to read the British papers, to see how that other democracy works. Bernstein was less interested in the parliamentary news than the entertainment news. He missed the meshugas after all. There were all these acts he never heard of. The Atlantic was much wider in those days. One day he sees a story, “about four or five lines,” he held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, “about four kids from Liverpool.”
The next week, maybe 10 lines. The week after that, a photo. Like all broke men at the racetrack, Bernstein still thought he could trust his hunch. He’d make the long-distance call. If only he had a number to call.
Bernstein’s friend Gordon says, “Remember Schrafft’s ice cream parlor? Sid knew and loved his ice cream. So he’s having ice cream in Schrafft’s and an agent, Bud Seligwell, walks in, ‘Sid, how ya doin’?’ Sid says, ‘I’m frustrated. I’m hot on a British band, kids named the Beatles, but I can’t find their representation.’ Bud says, ‘I just got back from England. I was working with a guy named Brian Epstein. But Sid, this is very local action. It’s not nearly as big as you think.’ Sid says, ‘Bud, I feel it in my bones.’”
Everything is “bashert,” fate, Bernstein would say. He gets Epstein’s number from Seligwell over ice cream, and calls Epstein, offering $6,500 for two shows in Carnegie (the most expensive ticket was $5.50). He offered Carnegie although the hall had a policy of not allowing rock n’ roll. The Carnegie Hall contract asked the promoter to describe his act. A “British quartet,” wrote Bernstein.
He booked Feb. 12, a Wednesday, because it was Lincoln’s birthday, a holiday at the time, when kids would be out of school.
Bernstein kept reading the London papers, discovering another band, the Rolling Stones. He brought them to Carnegie Hall for the Stones’ first trip to America. After that, Bernstein didn’t have to call; the bands called him: The Kinks, Manfred Mann, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, the Moody Blues and the band he was managing, the Rascals, took off, too.
Maybe Mark Baker, 16, wasn’t screaming, that was for the girls, mostly, but Baker was as happy as anyone in Carnegie Hall for the Beatles first show. He not only had a ticket, he had a seat on the stage, right next to his father and right behind the Beatles, where Bernstein placed additional seating to placate the wild demand. “Paul bumped into me as he was running off.” Baker, a junior at Hi-Li (as the Hebrew Institute of Long Island was known) got his tickets through his uncle, manager of Freddy Cannon, who had a big hit with “Palisades Park.”
Baker remembers the screams were “thunderous. I thought the tiers were going to collapse. It was so loud, you couldn’t tell when the Beatles were finishing a song or starting a new one.”
Baker, now 66, a criminal lawyer who has represented John Gotti, Rabbi Meir Kahane, Bernie Goetz and Jonathan Pollard’s wife Anne, recalls that after that first Beatles’ week, “We all let our hair grow. We started a rock band,” singing Beatles’ songs, even “close your eyes and I’ll kiss you,” in French, for Baker’s French class and school assembly. “We lived, ate, breathed the Beatles. They were ubiquitous, on radio, television, the movies.”
And to think it all started with a phone call to Liverpool from a Jewish guy who was broke. Looking back, Bernstein would laugh. “All I did, I dialed the right number,” the way love so often begins. 
jonathan@jewishweek.org

Brian Epstein, carnegie hall, music
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Amy Sara Clark gets reaction from sociologists this week about the new book by Tiger Mom Amy Chua and her Jewish husband, Jed Rubenfeld. "The Triple Package" tries to explain why certain immigrant groups, Jews among them, achieve big things, and others don't. Their findings, not surprisingly, are controversial.
NATIONAL
Tiger Mom Brings Jews Into The Fold
But sociologists say ‘Triple Package’ argument ignores real reasons for Jewish success.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
Stuyvesant High School, that bastion of hyper-competitiveness that regularly sends students off to Harvard and Yale, is thought by many to be the best public high school in New York City. The most recent student-body figures show that nearly three out of four students there are Asian.
So much for Jewish superiority, at least in New York. (OK, but we still have three members of the Supreme Court — all three from New York — and a slew of Nobel Prize winners.)
That sense of superiority is one part of what Tiger Mom Amy Chua and her Jewish husband, Jed Rubenfeld, dub the “triple package” — a trifecta of traits that help define why certain cultural groups achieve great things.
Coming on the heels of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which ignited a cultural firestorm about Chua’s extreme parenting, the new book is getting roundly criticized for positing an argument that seems a generation or two out of date, at least where the Jews are concerned.
In “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America” (Penguin), the Yale professor power couple argue that their success — as well as that of America’s Cubans, Indians, Nigerians, Mormons, Iranians and Lebanese — is due to three shared characteristics, which, in addition to a group superiority complex, are a personal feeling of inferiority and a heavy dose of self-discipline.
The book “resurrects discredited theories of why some groups make it and others don’t,” said CUNY professor Stephen Steinberg, author of the seminal 1981 work, “The Ethnic Myth.”
“Despite all their caveats and against their intentions, they end up casting cultural blame on the groups left behind,” he said.
Steinberg and other sociologists who focus on immigration also criticized the authors’ methodology.
“They didn’t do research, they picked and chose things that agreed with their premise,” said Hunter College sociologist Nancy Foner, author of “From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration.”
In an interview with The Jewish Week last week, Chua and Rubenfeld argued that they’re not trying to compare groups or attribute a group’s success to innate qualities.
“We’re saying that we can all learn from what they’re doing,” Chua said.
They say that they didn’t cherry-pick their examples but rather worked with a “team of research assistants” to “systematically determine the most strikingly successful groups” and “empirically examining census data and other economic data.”
“We did the opposite of cherry-pick; we were so incredibly rigorous in this,” Chua said. “We pretty much went straight down the ancestry group income table produced by the U.S. Census and we gave the reasons that we excluded the groups that we did.”
But Duke sociologist Lisa Keister says that it doesn’t matter how Chua and Rubenfeld determined their groups. “You cannot say anything about a group if you do not have a general sample to compare to. … I don’t care if a team of experienced statisticians did the cherry-picking, it is still not going to tell you anything. … This is statistics 101. It is a lousy way to draw a sample, and there is no serious academic in the world who would believe a word they say from it,” she said.
  The other major criticism is that their premise is based on “selecting on the dependent variable.”
“You take these people who are successful and look at what they have in common. What’s wrong with that is what if you have unsuccessful people who have the same characteristics?” said Hunter College sociologist Philip Kasinitz, author of “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age.” 
“What you’re missing is the guy that had all of the same traits as Mark Zuckerberg but didn’t have his success,” agreed Duke’s Keister, author of “Faith and Money: How Religious Belief Contributes to Wealth and Poverty.”
“Maybe it’s luck that explains all of this,” she added. “There’s absolutely no way to know what’s right if you eliminate all the failures along the way.”
Chua and Rubenfeld argue that their book does examine “unsuccessful groups,” such as African Americans, Appalachians and the Amish, and determines that they lack the “triple package.”
But sociologists aren’t buying it.
“They do indeed make some very partial references to other groups — non-successful groups (they are not stupid, after all) but I find those references to be partial, perfunctory and unconvincing,” Kasinitz said via e-mail. “They never systematically measure whether the triple package leads to success … and assume the absence of those traits explains the lack of success of other groups. The world is much more complex than that.”
“They mention race but they don’t really seriously take it into account how race operates,” said Foner. “If you look in New York City at Caribbean groups, their achievements are not that soaring — not higher rates than the Chinese. They come with very, very strong attitudes towards achievement, but I think they face a lot of discrimination.”
So what does explain why some immigrant groups do better than others? It has to do with a myriad of other factors such as when they arrived, what skills and resources they brought with them, and how much discrimination they faced when they got here, researchers say.
Chua and Rubenfeld say that race is not a major factor when it comes to an immigrant group’s success by pointing to Nigerians; they make up a quarter of Harvard Business School’s black students, and one in four Nigerians in America have a graduate or professional degree.
But such an argument fails to take into account that the Nigerians who come to the United States come from the upper ranks of Nigerian society, and that some colleges and universities opt to accept African, rather than African-American students to meet diversity requirements.
“A lot of them come in through affirmative-action programs, so the son of the Nigerian ambassador gets the space,” said Kasinitz.
“These Nigerians were part of an educated elite,” agreed Steinberg. “If anything, this status was just transferred from one country to another. You’re comparing apples and oranges in terms of social class.”
“There’s a large cannon of studies on the culture of poverty that locate the anchorage of poverty in conditions of social class and racial barriers,” said Steinberg. “The whole black middle class is testament to what happens when opportunity for African Americans opens up.”
As for Jewish success, there are a series of factors, none of which have to do with feelings of superiority or inferiority, researchers say.
One thing is timing: Jews arrived in America with a vast array of skills, especially in the garment trades, just as this industry was taking off. The thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi Europe also arrived at a good time.
“Between 1945 and 1970 it was tough not to be economically successful in America because the economy was doing so well,” said Kasinitz. 
There are also the resources Jews brought with them, especially compared to groups, such as Italians and the Irish, who were mostly farmers, said Kasinitz.
“They tended to have more experience in industrial cities, they were more urban, they had more skills, they were almost all literate and they very often had small business or artisanal skills,” said Kasinitz.
“The second thing is that Jews sent very little money back home. Compared to Italians, Irish and Poles, these Jews, they weren’t going back. … Jews were committed to being in America almost from the minute they got here,” he said.
Other factors that helped the Jews as well as most of the other groups Chua and Rubenfeld examine are their tight-knit communities and a strong value placed on mutual support, he said.
Plus Jews (as well as most of the other groups on the list) had a diversity of classes in the U.S. “Even though most of the immigrants were poor, there were artisans, a middle class and wealthy Jewish employers who could hire Jewish employees. Jews could get loans from Jewish financial institutions,” he said. “That is much, much harder to do if you don’t have that entrepreneurial class.”
But Chua and Rubenfeld never get into any of those explanations in any depth, observers say.
“The key factor in explaining success is the education and social background of the parents. They really underplay the importance of that,” said Foner. “Even some of the examples they give — they kind of tout the number of people at a certain institutions — but that’s not how social scientists do it. Just looking at how many Supreme Court justices are Jewish isn’t a way to measure success.” 
amy.jewishweek@gmail.com
Our Israel Travel section this week has stories on the luxury hotel boom, the rise in "marathon tourism" and the politicization of Jerusalem tours.
Enjoy the issue,
Rob Goldblum
Managing Editor
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NEWS and FEATURES
Pentagon Said To Hustle On Kosher Rations Mess
Jewish groups assured bids would go out to avert looming shortage. 
Stewart Ain, Staff Writer
Alarm bells went off last week when a major Jewish organization learned that the Pentagon had awarded a contract for halal field rations for Muslim soldiers but had not even solicited bids for kosher field rations.
In a letter to Maj. Gen. Donald Rutherford, chief chaplain of the Army, Rabbi Abba Cohen, a vice president of Agudath Israel, wrote that “no kosher MRE’s [field rations known as Meals Ready to Eat] are being produced and, as previous stock has become depleted, there is essentially nothing available for Jewish members of the Armed Forces who require rations that meet their religious dietary needs.”
Rabbi Cohen said that when he first inquired about the issue, he was told that kosher MREs would continue to be made and that a solicitation for bids would be issued in coming weeks. But when he asked why a solicitation last April for kosher MREs had been withdrawn, “they told me they couldn’t tell me because of agency confidentiality.”
But late Tuesday after both The Jewish Week and the JWB Jewish Chaplains Council also began asking questions, Rabbi Cohen said he received a phone call from Brig. Gen. Steven Shapiro, the Defense Logistics Support commander, who told him a solicitation for kosher MREs was being made to food manufacturers that very day.
“He said there would be a four-to-six-week period and then a contract would be awarded,” Rabbi Cohen recalled. “We are very pleased by this expedited schedule. It shows they are sensitive to the concerns we raised.”
In the coming weeks, he said Shapiro told him, the military would be working with each of the applicants to make sure their product meets the military’s requirements for a kosher MRE.
“The testing and demonstration process is to be condensed a great deal,” Rabbi Cohen said. “They feel they have had enough experience with kosher food to be able to do that.”
Mary Anne Jackson, the president and founder of My Own Meals in Chicago, which has been making kosher MREs for the military since they were created in 1996, said she was not bidding on the new contract and questioned what observant Jewish soldiers would eat until kosher MREs are again produced.
“The last rations in theater had a best use date of January 14,” she said in an interview. “There are none out there now. And there are no reserves because they are not bought for reserve use but for current consumption.”
But Rabbi Cohen said Shapiro told him that there are some 2,000 kosher MREs now being stored in the United Arab Emirates and that “this is enough for that theater of operations.”
“When I asked about troops in the U.S. and elsewhere, he said that if there is a need the MREs would be taken from that supply,” he said.
Rabbi Cohen noted that his organization is “familiar with the kosher food industry, and if we could be helpful, we would be happy to be. … We are very pleased with the recent broadening of religious accommodation in the military and we have every reason to believe this issue is being addressed.”
Jan Channon of Chicago, whose 22-year-old son is now in the ROTC, told The Jewish Week that she was distressed to hear initial reports of a delay in procuring new kosher MREs.
“When my son entered the ROTC he was not promised kosher MREs, but he benefited greatly from them while in a basic training program in Washington State,” she said. “We have a kosher home and there was a chaplain who had reached out to my son [before basic training]. The chaplain knew he was Jewish and he told him that kosher MREs were available. My son said he was glad the chaplain had reached out to him. He told me that he has a colleague who is an Arab soldier and that he was getting halal meals.”
“If the army can support people’s religious observances, and if a company is able to provide the food, it should be done,” Channon added. “The fact that the military was willing to make the effort to provide kosher food had a huge impact on my son’s feelings about keeping the kosher diet.”
Shapiro said he is aware of the expiration date on the MRE’s, Rabbi Cohen said, but the MREs “sometimes can be extended” based upon the assessment of medical personnel.
“He said that if it can’t be extended, it would be thrown out,” Rabbi Cohen said, adding that he was pleased that Shapiro had addressed his concerns.
Rabbi Harold Robinson, director of the JWB Jewish Chaplains Council, one of the organizations that recruits, vets and endorses rabbis to serve as military chaplains, said his sources in the Defense Department told him that the amount of kosher MREs in the system would last months.
“They are assuring me that they are not going to run out of kosher food, period,” he said. “There are about 30 Jewish chaplains and about 100 Jewish lay leaders out there and if there was a shortage, they would be chattering about it. …. I do not believe there will be a systemic shortage in the field.”
Rabbi Sanford Dresin, director of military programs for the Aleph Institute, which also recruits, vets and endorses rabbis as chaplains for the military, said for observant Jews who are deployed in the field kosher MREs are crucial.
“For those who are downrange or in basic training, kosher MREs are a must because they can’t live on peanuts and tuna fish,” he said. “They need to have a high number of calories to provide the energy that soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines need.”
Rabbi Dresin said he was aware of the supply of aging kosher MREs that had been prepositioned in the Middle East, but he wondered why the Department of Defense waited so long to solicit for a new supply.
“Why did they order halal MREs and not kosher ones?” he asked. 
stewart@jewishweek.org
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New York News
Ooops! They Did It Again?
B'nai Jeshurun rabbis' comments on Israel trigger a second angry petition from congregants.
Helen Chernikoff, Web Editor
Congregants of the Upper West Side synagogue B’nai Jeshurun, known worldwide for its spirited services, have for the second time in about a year condemned two of their rabbis’ most recent public statements on Israel, this time in an e-mail petition.
The rabbis spoke out in late January, when Rolando Matalon and Felicia Sol signed a letter criticizing Mayor Bill DeBlasio for offering the lobbying group AIPAC an open door at City Hall and stating that AIPAC speaks for Israel's hard-line government and right-wing supporters, but not for all Jews, including them.
That letter, said the displeased group of congregants in their petition, "paints AIPAC into an ideological corner."
“Please understand that your words, besides being factually incorrect, are offensive to many of your congregants,” the congregants wrote in their response, dated Feb. 7, adding that, “You should be standing with Israel.”
The synagogue did not respond to repeated quests for comment.
Forty-eight congregants, about half of whom shared a surname with at least one other signer, signed the letter. B'nai Jeshurun, known as a "mega-synagogue" has thousands of congregants that make its size more comparable to massive churches than to most other synagogues.
"We are a diverse synagogue," said Gil Kulick, 72, a retired diplomat whose has been a member of the synagogue for 11 years and who is an active volunteer with both BJ and JStreet, the lobbying organization known as a left-leaning AIPAC alternative. "I have no doubt that the vast majority of the community support the rabbis' freedom to speak their consciences."
The group that sent the petition is a vocal minority, said Kulick, who signed the letter criticizing the mayor. He believes that many congregants likely agree with the sentiments expressed in the DeBlasio letter, he said.
Last year, the rabbis apologized to their congregants for an e-mail that praised the UN’s vote in favor of Palestinian statehood.
That e-mail, the rabbis said, was sent prematurely, “through an unfortunately series of internal errors.”
"Whether intentional or not," the signers of the current petition stated, "your reckless signing of the Mayor's letter has, once again, deeply offended many of your memberes, and provoked turmoil within our congregation."
Fifty-eight people signed the message to DeBlasio, including feminist Gloria Steinem, writer Erica Jong and musician Emmanuel Ax. Those signatories included at least two married couples.
helenatjewishweek@gmail.com
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Food and Wine
Blending Grape Varietals
Judean winery Barkan experiments, with delicious results.
Joshua E. London and Lou Marmon, Special to the Jewish Week
One of the more difficult aspects of winemaking is creating a blend. It requires the ability to predict how a very young wine will evolve, as well as knowing which additional varietals will enhance the finished product. Since the bottle might not be ready to drink for years after the vintage is harvested, a finely crafted blended wine is a true testimony to a winemaker’s skill and experience.
Strict rules abound in many winemaking regions regarding which varietals of grapes can be grown where, as well as, in some instances, which varietals can be blended together. The grapes grown in France’s Bordeaux region are blended to create some of the world’s most desirable—and expensive—wines. But a blended wine does not necessarily imply a quality wine: Burgundies are made from a single grape, and also command both respect and high prices.
There are a few more liberal winemaking regions in the world, places where winemakers are limited by only the quality of the grapes and their access to technology. In Australia, the U.S. and Israel, these winemakers are free to choose to mix whichever varietals they choose. Some producers attempt to recreate some of the classic flavor profiles found in Europe, while others allow their creativity free reign and develop remarkably unique compositions.
The markedly floral Barkan Assemblage Tzafit 2010 is blends two unusual grapes, Marselan and Caladoc, adding dashes of the better known Pinotage and Carignan. This red tastes of dark fruit, savory spices, raspberry, anise, and tobacco that linger on the finish. Marselan is a relatively new varietal, a cross between Cabernet Sauvignon and Grenache, while Caladoc is derived from Grenache and Malbec. The resulting blend is an attention-grabbing display of inventiveness that speaks well to the growing confidence of Israeli winemaking.
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Travel
Jewish Diversity And Warm Breezes
Hilary Larson, Travel Writer
It’s safe to say that 20 years ago, your odds of seeing a band of mariachis playing klezmer-style Chanukah music in a Mexican resort were slim to none.
But that’s exactly what the holidaycrowds saw in the fabled party town of Cabo San Lucas this past December, when the tony resort town at the southern tip of the Mexican state of Baja California played host to a Chanukah menorah-lighting spectacle.
Los Cabos, the municipality composed of San José del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, has come of age in a major way over the last two decades, it now boasts a booming eco-tourism scene, a crop of new hotels and the kind of celebrity presence that once defined Pacific paradises like Acapulco. In a country with well-publicized security problems, Los Cabos is an oasis of calm, peace and the good life — for those who can afford it.
Mexico may be full of bargain destinations, but Los Cabos isn’t one of them. In exchange for international prices, however, visitors here can expect easy and frequent air connections; the largest concentration of luxury spas in all of Mexico; a world-class resort infrastructure, from golf courses to water taxis; and an English-speaking environment.
You’ll even find plenty of kosher food, which is sold at numerous local supermarkets and delivered directly to tourist lodgings via a synagogue catering service. Kosher meat and cheese are flown in from the U.S. and Mexico City, while kosher milk comes from a rabbinically supervised local dairy farm; there’s even a kosher bakery service that provides challah and cake.
The Chabad-run Cabo Jewish Center is the hub of Jewish activity in Los Cabos, bringing together a disparate community of Argentines, Israelis, Southern Europeans and North Americans. Varying languages and worship traditions — not to mention the transience of many visitors — meant that there was little in the way of organized Jewish life here until roughly a decade ago.
But nowadays in wintertime, it’s not uncommon for 50 people to show up for Shabbat services. According to Sonia Hershcovich, a spokesperson for the Jewish Center, the year-round Jewish population numbers about 70; that population swells by several hundred retirees during the winter months.
And diversity is now seen as “our greatest quality,” Hershcovich said. Holidayprograms draw dozens of families; a small Hebrew school is gaining traction. From time to time, the Jewish Center sponsors tourist dinners that give visitors a chance to mingle with locals and each other in a heimishe, kosher ambiance.
Jewish weddings are an increasingly common sight along the beaches of Los Cabos, adding to a tourism boom that shows no signs of stopping. A half-dozen new hotels and resorts are slated to open or have recently opened, vying with each other to offer hipper activities or artisanal luxuries such as organic, farm-to-table restaurants and indigenous spa ingredients.
Typical of the new crop is the boutique hotel El Ganzo, just outside of artsy, historic San José on the Sea of Cortez; a rooftop pool, underground recording studio (for many of the live acts featured at its lounge) and a weekly film club are just part of a culture-heavy program that the hotel hopes will set it apart.
A Tiger Woods-designed golf course is under construction and expected to open this fall at the new Diamante Cabo San Lucas, an oceanfront complex of timeshares, condos and villas. And sometime next year, a Ritz Carlton resort is slated to open on a secluded part of the Cabos coast.
In addition to ever-posher lodgings, ecotourism is another trend sweeping through Los Cabos. If you rent a car here, as most people do, the appeal is obvious: this is no cookie-cutter tropical getaway, but rather a dramatic, arid panorama of mountains, cactus and undulating red sands. A growing number of operators offer day excursions, hikes, and bike tours that explore this distinctive natural landscape.
But with average winter temperatures in the balmy 70s and 80s, beachgoing remains the most popular activity — and in Los Cabos, there’s a beach for every mood. In fact, there are no fewer than 20 beaches between San José and Cabo San Lucas.
Many of these feature the soaring rock formations and jagged cliffs for which the region is famous; as picturesque as they are, these rocky stretches of coast can have treacherous waves and rip currents.
The best-known beach — and a must-see for first-time visitors — is the Playa del Amor, or Lovers’ Beach, near the iconic rock arches that are most people’s enduring image of Los Cabos. To get here, most take a water taxi across the surf to a secluded spit of sand. It’s a romantic spot, though better suited to strolling and photography than to actual swimming.
Fortunately, there are also plenty of gentle bay beaches with turquoise waters and nary a swell. The best of these are widely considered to be Santa María Beach — where snorkeling is popular amid the tide-pools and coral — and Playa Chileno, a well-kept public beach. 
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