New York, New York, United States - The Jewish New York Weekly-Connecting the World to the Jewish News, Culture, Feature, and opinions for Friday, 18 April 2014
Dear Reader,
The tragedy that unfolded last Sunday in Overland Park, Kan., and the ramifications for the New York area, are a big part of our coverage this week. Stewart Ain reports on stepped-up security around Jewish institutions here in the wake of the attack on a JCC and a Jewish assisted-living facility in the suburbs of Kansas City.
NEW YORK
Security Tightens Here
Stepped-up Passover patrols after three killed in Jewish facilities in Overland Park, Kan.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
An Overland Park, Kan., police vehicle in front of the Jewish Community Campus of Greater Kansas City. Getty Images
David Pollock, associate executive director of the JCRC, said authorities believe the gunman “acted alone” but that there is always the danger of copycat incidents.
Rabbi Herbert Mandl, a volunteer with the Overland Park police, told The Jewish Week Monday that the gunman killed two people outside the Jewish Community Campus of Greater Kansas City and the third about a mile away at a Jewish assisted-living facility in Leawood.
The gunman shot at two other people but missed, Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass said.
Fourteen-year-old Reat Griffin Underwood and his grandfather, Dr. William Lewis Corporon were in the JCC’s parking lot on their way to auditions for an American Idol-style singing contest for teens. Both were members of United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, police said.
Terri LaManno, a Catholic mother of two, was killed in the parking lot of Village Shalom, where her mother is a resident.
Police identified Frazier Glenn Miller, 73, of Aurora, Mo., as the suspect in the shootings and said he used a shotgun. He was arrested at the nearby Valley Park Elementary School. Once in the back of the police car, news footage showed him yell, “Heil Hitler” at reporters.
The Secure Community Network, the security affiliate of national Jewish groups, asked communities nationwide to increase security measures, but urged Jews to attend services and other Passover-related events as they had planned before the shooting.
“They need to review secure plans and reach out to police partners to ensure that they work closely with the Jewish community over the next couple of days — review, test and exercise their response plans,” SCN director Paul Goldenberg told JTA. “They need to trust their instincts and err on the side of caution.”
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Miller is well known for his three-decade long “career in hatred and white supremacy.” He began as a neo-Nazi and then became involved with the Ku Klux Klan, serving as the “grand dragon” of the Carolina Knights of the KKK in the 1980s. He was one of America’s most notorious white supremacists.
Miller served three years in prison on weapons charges and for plotting the assassination of Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But he had a falling out with other white supremacists after he agreed to testify against some of them in 1988. Throughout the 2000s he promoted racist and anti-Semitic views online but remained shunned by other white supremacists, the ADL said.
Rabbi Mandl pointed out that the gunman never entered either Jewish facility.
“There is a guard at every entrance” of the JCC, he noted.
After the parking lot shooting, the JCC went into lockdown mode. The building was closed Monday because of Sunday’s shooting and Jacob Schreiber, its executive director, could not be reached.
Pollock said the lockdown after the shooting was the right move.
“Anytime you can keep a bad guy outside the building, it is likely to be a better day,” he said. “Better than guards, it is best to have locked doors and to make sure everyone is screened … . Once someone is in the building, it is very difficult to subdue him without casualties.”
Pollock stressed that all Jewish institutions “should have a solid risk assessment done by their local police, the Department of Homeland Security, the New York State Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services. The JCRC has facilitated hundreds of such assessments.”
He noted that applications for Homeland Security grants are being accepted until May 9 and that groups can receive as much as $75,000 to help them make the physical improvements needed to make their institutions secure.
President Barack Obama issued a statement in which he “pledged the full support of the federal government” in the investigation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent condolences to the families of those killed and in a statement condemned the murders “that by all the signs was done out of hatred of Jews.”
“The state of Israel, as one with all civilized people, is obligated to struggle against this blight,” he said.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations said in a statement that the shooting is “a reminder of the dangers of homegrown terrorism and the threat posed by extremist organizations or individuals.”
“Coming on the eve of Passover, it is particularly important that all community institutions take the proper steps to maximize security. … During the Passover service, we are reminded that there are those who arise in every generation who are motivated by violent, baseless hatred, extremist ideologies and radical philosophies. While Jews may be targeted, all people become victims,” the statement said.
Locally, Rabbi Joy Levitt, executive director of the JCC of Manhattan, sent an e-mail expressing shock and sadness at the shootings and asking that members and visitors to “continue be patient with our security guards so they may do their best to keep us safe.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
We also look at the life and legacy of Yaakov Birnbaum, widely considered the founding father of the Soviet Jewry movement in the United States. Birnbaum, remembered as "a hero of biblical proportions" for his tireless work on behalf of Jews locked behind the Iron Curtain, died April 9 at 87. Yossi Klein Halevi has a moving personal remembrance of Birnbaum, a man who mentored a generation of communal leaders. And associate editor Jonathan Mark puts Birnbaum's life's work into perspective.
NEW YORK
A ‘Klal Yisrael’ Jew
In leading the fight for Soviet Jewry, Yaakov Birnbaum inspired a generation that revitalized Judaism in America.
Yossi Klein Halevi
Special To The Jewish Week
Yaakov Birnbaum, the man who launched the Soviet Jewry grassroots movement that retrieved three million lost Jews, and who died last week at age 87, was my first rebbe, my first spiritual teacher.
I met him sometime in 1965. He was the elder visionary, all of 38 years old, and I was his disciple, age 12. Yaakov, a big, bold, passionate man with a Van Dyke and a Russian fur hat, spoke a language of redemption that I’d never heard before and that Jews in the years after the Shoah evoked only in bitter irony. Yaakov insisted that, even after decades of enforced assimilation, Soviet Jews weren’t lost to the Jewish people, and that the “Jews of Silence,” as they were known then, would one day publicly reclaim their Jewish identity.
He not only insisted that it was possible to save Soviet Jewry: He had a plan. The Soviet Union’s economic plight, he predicted, would cause it turn to the U.S. for aid, and that would allow Congress to pressure the Kremlin to open the gates to Jewish emigration.
The effort to free Soviet Jews, Yaakov predicted when he founded the Soviet Jewry movement in 1964, would take 25 years.
Yaakov’s grand predictions all came true. The Kremlin did in fact seek trade credits from the U.S., and the Jackson Amendment placed the Soviet Jewry issue at the heart of the Soviet-American relationship. And when the gates opened in 1989, it was 25 years to the founding of the Soviet Jewry movement.
Yaakov’s prophetic intuition came from a total identification with the Jewish people. I had never met someone more authentically Jewish, and by that I mean that he had a connection with all parts of the Jewish people. Nothing Jewish was alien to him. He was a Yiddishist and a lover of Sephardi culture, at home in a chasidic shteibel and in an egalitarian minyan. After the Shoah, Yaakov, who’d fled Nazi Germany as a boy, volunteered to work with survivors in the displaced persons camps. And when the great Jewish communities of North Africa were coming undone in the 1950s, Yaakov went to Morocco, and then to France, to work with young Sephardim.
Jewish eclecticism was an inheritance from his grandfather, Nathan Birnbaum, who was, at different stages of his life, a Zionist leader (he coined the term “Zionism”), an activist in a spiritual movement of what today might be called Jewish renewal, and a founder of the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Yisrael. Grandfather Nathan’s wanderings across the Jewish spectrum were reconciled in Yaakov, who accommodated rival Jewish camps in his own being. A klal Yisrael Jew, as he liked to call himself, a Jew who identitied with the totality of his people.
Et tsara hi l’Yaakov: It is a time of trouble for Jacob. Yaakov took those words from the Torah as a personal imperative to help Jews wherever the trouble was coming from next.
I once attended a meeting with him of the umbrella group created by Jewish establishment organizations to support Soviet Jewry. It was the fall of 1970, and a group of Soviet Jews had recently been arrested for attempting to a hijack a plane to Israel. Though refuseniks had sent a letter addressed to world Jewry warning that a show trial was being prepared, establishment groups were slow to respond. Yaakov pounded on the table and shouted, “Jews! A trial is being prepared!”
There was embarrassed silence in the room. There he goes again, you could almost hear people thinking, this nudnik who thinks he’s the only one who cares about the Jewish people. But Yaakov couldn’t bear complacency. He felt as if he himself were about to stand trial.
When Yaakov first launched the protest movement, much of the Jewish community regarded him as a fantasist, if not a dangerous meddler who would only “make things worse.” The organization that Yaakov founded — the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) — was always broke. The “movement” was a few dozen kids in New York, along with a handful of independent groups around the country that later banded together to form the Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry. The indispensible coordinator was Glenn Richter, who ran the SSSJ office and organized the demonstrations and kept in active contact with other grassroots groups and with refuseniks in the Soviet Union.
The refuseniks emerged in response to the Six-Day War. Suddenly the Jews of Silence were leading the movement — from within the Soviet Union. Yaakov and Glenn insisted that American Jews learn the name of each refusenik. At one demonstration in a nearly-empty Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the UN, Yaakov led us in a chant for a Riga Jewish woman arrested a week before her wedding: “Free Ruth Alexandrovich! Free Ruth Alexandrovich!” The clumsiness of the chant didn’t matter: Yaakov wanted Ruth to become a part of our being.
Yaakov’s vision — that the protest movement would be led ultimately not by a small group of students but by the organized Jewish community — was fulfilled following the Leningrad Trial of late 1970, when Jewish establishment organizations committed their resources to a sustained campaign. The Greater New York Conference for Soviet Jewry initiated the annual Solidarity Day demonstrations, which, for the first time, brought hundreds of thousands into the streets. The Conference was led by Malcolm Hoenlein, an early SSSJ activist.
It’s not surprising that Yaakov’s soul departed just before Passover — and as we are about to mark the 50th anniversary of his founding of the Soviet Jewry movement. Yaakov was the first to insist on the slogan “Let my people go” — that the aim of the protest movement wasn’t only the betterment of Jewish life in the Soviet Union but mass emigration, which in the 1960s seemed inconceivable. Our early demonstrations were led by a mural showing split waters with the words, “As the Red Sea Parted for the Israelites, So Will the Iron Curtain Divide for Soviet Jewry.”
The movement Yaakov began transformed the Jewish world beyond recognition. Its impact on Jewish history goes beyond the rescue of Soviet Jewry.
The Soviet aliyah of the early 1990s helped transform Israel into an economic power. And through the Soviet Jewry protest movement, American Jewry became a self-confident community able to defend Jewish interests in the public space.
The most creative rabbis emerged from Yaakov’s circle: Shlomo Carlebach and Yitz Greenberg and Art Green and Avi Weiss and Shlomo Riskin — rabbis who reimagined American Jewish life. That too was part of Yaakov’s prophetic intuition: In saving Soviet Jewry, a revitalized American Jewry would save itself.
And all these years Yaakov lived in obscurity, with his beloved Freda, in the same apartment on Cabrini Boulevard in Washington Heights, from which he ran the movement in its early days. With a few precious exceptions, he received little honor from the Jewish community. Gratitude isn’t always our strong point.
Maybe the best way to say thank you is to honor Yaakov’s last campaign — to establish a Day of Liberation for Soviet Jewry. At a time of demoralization and divisiveness within the Jewish people, Soviet Jewry Liberation Day would remind us to never lose faith in the possibility of redemption.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His book, “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation,” won the Jewish Book Council’s Jewish Book of the Year award.
INTERNATIONAL
Yaakov Birnbaum: ‘A Hero Of Biblical Proportions’
Remembering the man who launched the Soviet Jewry movement here.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Yaakov Birnbaum, “never got the credit, recognition or thanks he deserved,” said Rabbi Yitz Greenberg. Michael Datikash/JWJacob Yaakov Birnbaum, widely recognized as the founder of the Soviet Jewry movement in the United States, was remembered last week as a “hero of biblical proportions,” someone who “put his life on the line in this struggle.”
Birnbaum, from his apartment in Washington Heights, led the grassroots effort that helped win freedom for millions of Jews locked behind the Iron Curtain, and mentored a generation of young American Jews who would become prominent communal leaders.
He died April 9 in New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center after an extended illness. He was 87.
At his funeral the next day at Lincoln Square Synagogue, Rabbi Saul Berman, of Columbia University’s School of Law, said of Birnbaum: “Since the time of Yetziat Mitzraim [the leaving of Egypt], I don’t think that I can conceive of anyone who, upon his appearance before HaKadosh Baruch Hu [God] after his death, would be able to say that he has saved the bodies and spiritual identities of three million Jews.”
Birnbaum died a few days shy of the 50th anniversary of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), the group he founded on April 27, 1964. For seven years, until 1971, SSSJ (known as “Triple-S-J”) was the only full-time operation working to free Soviet Jewry.
In his eulogy at the April 10 event, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg said, “Jacob never got the credit, recognition or the thanks he deserved. When the establishment finally responded and set up a National Conference on Soviet Jewry, he was offered neither a job or even support for SSSJ.”
Birnbaum’s early tactics were to appropriate the images and jargon of the left; he used words like “struggle,” “the movement,” “the establishment,” and SSSJ held its first rally on May Day, the Soviet workers’ holiday. Birnbaum, a deeply religious man, also invoked the spiritual power of traditional Judaism, speaking of “redemption,” “Let My People Go,” “Let My People Know” (for Jewish education for Russian Jews), while using liturgical phrases such as “Leil Shimurim” (the Passover “Night of Watching”) and “I Am My Brother’s Keeper.” Birnbaum used the images of prophetic inevitability — such as circling the Soviet embassy in a “Jericho March” culminating with the blowing of shofars — certain that he was on the right side of history.
At a time when the Soviet Union was a Cold War totalitarian colossus, Birnbaum feared that after 50 years of Communist repression, Soviet Jewry was on the verge of extinction. He believed that persistent demonstrations would force Soviet Jewry onto the American political agenda. In 1974, his efforts led to the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that denied “most favored nation” status for trade to countries that restricted emigration and human rights. Birnbaum’s work inspired Soviet Jewish dissidents; their defiance inspired non-Jewish dissidents, and pressured Soviet leaders.
Years later, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said that President Reagan raised the plight of Soviet Jewry in every meeting the two held.
Birnbaum’s followers were so immersed in the struggle that they were able to identify Jewish prisoners in the gulag by face and name. Placards with their names and photos were “seated” in empty chairs at Passover seders, and carried in every demonstration.
Two of the most famous prisoners, Natan Sharansky (now head of the Jewish agency), and Yosef Mendelevich (now a leading rabbi in Jerusalem), sent messages from Israel to Birnbaum’s funeral.
Rabbi Mendelevich e-mailed, “I am crying. My brother Jacob Birnbaum passed away. My dear brother, the flaming Jewish heart! … This special man, the giant of spirit and love who couldn’t rest while his brethren in Russia were in danger. … He rose and he appealed to the Jewish nation. He was the first. He started the offensive.”
Rabbi Greenberg described Birnbaum as a “hero of biblical proportions.” He said he received a call from Sharansky that morning comparing Birnbaum to Nachshon, the legendary Israelite who was the first to jump into the Red Sea, daring the sea to drown him, forcing God’s hand, so to speak. From that one leap of faith, said Sharansky, everything followed.
From the beginning, Birnbaum had no problem attracting the loyalty of young people, even pre-teens, although Birnbaum, at 37 in 1964, was two or three times their age, an austere Theodor Herzl look-alike with a British accent and a beard when no one else had one.
Other organizations had “young leadership” divisions, but none like Birnbaum’s. Among the future leaders he mentored at SSSJ, while all were still in college or at the dawn of their careers, were Shlomo Riskin, SSSJ’s first chairman, Malcolm Hoenlein, Charles Sheer; Dennis Prager, Joseph Telushkin and Avi Weiss, later SSSJ’s national chairman.
Glenn Richter, recruited out of law school, was a veteran of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or “Snick”) before becoming SSSJ’s national coordinator. Yitz Greenberg was a young Fulbright Scholar when he met Birnbaum in 1962, and joined SSSJ in 1964. It was Birnbaum who suggested to a rising singer, Shlomo Carlebach (their grandfathers were friends in Europe) that he compose music to Am Yisroel Chai for a SSSJ rally. Another early SSSJ activist was Art Green, who went on to lead the Reconstructionist seminary.
Rabbi Telushkin told The Jewish Week at the funeral that when he was co-chair of SSSJ at Yeshiva University in the mid-60s, “Yaakov insisted that we install a telephone (when almost no one had one) in our dorm room, so he could speak to us almost every night about what we were doing. To Yaakov, nothing was minor. Everything that had to happen, relative to the movement, was always major.
“In 1975, when Dennis [Prager] and I wrote ‘Eight Questions People Ask About Judaism,’” said Rabbi Teluskin, “we referred to Yaakov and Glen Richter as two modern-day saints. Nothing has happened since then to cause us to re-evaluate that.”
Rabbi Greenberg pointed out, “Once people got turned on by Yaakov, they kept moving into other areas of activism on all sorts of other issues.”
Hoenlein, now executive vice-chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said in his eulogy how he remembered his first meeting with Birnbaum in 1964: “I went to his apartment in Washington Heights as a college student living and studying in Philadelphia. That meeting changed me and my life. … He gave me materials, ideas and instructions.”
A few years later, Hoenlein was leading the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry. “Our mutual respect, my appreciation for his unique status, including his saving refugee children in World War II, and my recognition of him being the true father of the Soviet Jewry movement,” always kept the two men close, he said.
Birnbaum once said, “Malcolm had a hard time because the establishment really hated me. Malcolm had to disassociate himself, somewhat, from us wild guys, but we remained good friends.”
Birnbaum, said Hoenlein at the funeral, was “a single-minded defender of Jews and Jewish interests.” He taught a generation “to protest, to speak up, but always with Jewish dignity and self-respect.”
Born in Germany in 1926, Birnbaum was only 6 when the Nazis came to power and he escaped with his family to England. Starting at age 19, he worked with young Eastern European Jews during and after the war, and then with North African Jews. Birnbaum would speak of those dramatic years with British nonchalance: “I brought out many young people when bombs were going off, and all that, you see.” He later became a community leader in Manchester. Those were the days, Birnbaum once told The Jewish Week, when his worldview was taking shape. “I was looking for signs of renaissance, among Jews, among Christians, whomever. My philosophy was that all patterns of living were disintegrating, and disintegration would come to the Soviet Union, too. You couldn’t do anything but plant points of ferment,” said Birnbaum, “and you hope the ferment spreads.” “He was our hero,” Rabbi Greenberg said in his eulogy. “He led the fight. He put his life on the line in this struggle. He was the hero of the second greatest Jewish victory in the last century — in the last 2,000 years — after the State of Israel, the redemption of Soviet Jewry.”
In 1971, Birnbaum met the woman he was to marry, Freda Bluestone, when he recruited her to help with photography for a demonstration.
Birnbaum is survived by his wife, a sister, Eva Guttentag, and brothers Eleazar and David Birnbaum.
On long walks with her husband-to-be, Freda would tell him that she liked “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” “Ah!” he replied. “You would have liked Jabotinsky!”
editor@jewishweek.org
Also this week: Gary Rosenblatt catches up with comedian David Steinberg, whose yeshiva background gave him his early comic material; culture editor Sandee Brawarsky takes in the lyrical photographs of Judah Passow, who chronicles the Scottish Jewish community; and Rabbi Jerome Epstein, the former head of the Conservative movement's congregational arm, suggests a fix for the embattled middle movement; and Israel correspondent Joshua Mitnick reports on a new round of soul searching in Israel in the wake of a crackdown by the IDF against West Bank setters who assaulted an army encampment.
GARY ROSENBLATT
My Tea With ‘Dudi’
Meeting up — again — with comedian David Steinberg.
Gary Rosenblatt
Gary Rosenblatt
Called “Quality Balls,” the 75-minute film traces his career from the mid-1960s, when he left his academic studies at the University of Chicago to join Second City, the legendary improvisational troupe; to his infamous “sermon” about Jonah and the whale on “The Smothers Brothers” show in October 1968 that resulted in CBS banning Dick and Tommy Smothers for five years (even though their show was No. 1 in the ratings); to Steinberg’s current role as host of the popular weekly program, “Inside Comedy,” closing out its third season on Showtime.
When I learned my favorite comic would be in New York for a few days, I wrote to request an interview and asked if he remembered the night I first saw him perform — 46 years ago.
He said he definitely did — it was pretty memorable — and agreed to meet.
I was referring to a warm spring night in 1968 that kind of changed my life.
I had traveled down from Washington Heights to the Bitter End coffeehouse in Greenwich Village with some Yeshiva University classmates, one of whom spent the subway ride telling us that Steinberg, then an unknown stand-up comic, would be particularly appealing to us because he was from an Orthodox rabbinic home in Winnipeg. Known to family and friends as “Dudi,” he went to Camp Moshava, a religious Zionist summer camp in Wildrose, Wis., attended a yeshiva in Chicago and used biblical material in his act.
We were intrigued.
When we arrived only a handful of people were in the dingy club. We sat down in the front row, and within a minute of Steinberg appearing on stage and getting into his routine, he looked at us — we were wearing kippot — stopped short in mid-sentence, and asked us, “Are you guys frum [observant]?”
Before we could answer, he asked, “Do you tear toilet paper on Shabbos?”
We were laughing hard, and he was having fun, all toothy grin and wavy dark hair, bounding around the little stage.
He asked the rest of the audience, “How many of you are Jewish?”
There was no clear response from the seven or eight other people in the small room, and Steinberg said, “F--- you, I’m doing my act for these guys.”
Which he proceeded to do with great energy and flare, calling on his knowledge of the Torah to crack us up. He occasionally would point to us while telling the others in the room, “now watch these guys,” before riffing on Moses at the Burning Bush or calling out the Hebrew letters God etched into Cain’s forehead — ending with “mem sofit!”
When Steinberg asked us to stump him with any reference to an Old Testament character, one friend, who was a Torah and megillah reader, asked the comic to name the seven chamberlains of King Achashveros in the Book of Esther. Without missing a beat Steinberg asked my friend, “Do you speak Hebrew?”
My friend nodded yes.
“Mah zeh schmuck?” the comic asked. (“What does ‘schmuck’ mean?”)
♦After the show we chatted for a few minutes with Steinberg. He seemed happy to compare notes about life in the Orthodox community, one he was moving away from at 25, already an emerging star at Second City.
He was about to become one of the most popular comics in the country, praised for his intellectual observations and his gift for storytelling — a counterpoint to jokes and one-liners.
Within days after I saw him perform, a rave review of his Bitter End act was published in The New York Times — just when he was about to close due to lack of an audience — and launched him on a successful career that is closing in on a half-century.
Within a few months of that spring evening Steinberg would appear on the Smothers Brothers’ top-rated variety show, doing his biblical sermons. It was one particular line that got him — but mostly them — in trouble.
Telling the story of Jonah, in deep rabbinical tones, Steinberg said, “There are Old Testament scholars who say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. And there are New Testament scholars who say, ‘No, Jonah was not swallowed by a whale. They literally grabbed the Jews by the Old Testament,’” he said, cupping his hands to make his meaning clear.
While the Smothers Brothers were then banned — they later sued CBS and won — Steinberg soon went on to host his own short-lived ABC show, “The Music Scene.”
But it was “The Tonight Show” that made him a star. He would crack up host Johnny Carson, and much of the country, with his edgy Jewish material — “I was taught that Jews are smart and gentiles sell their children for whiskey.” By 1969 he was guest host of the show, the youngest ever. In all, Steinberg appeared on “The Tonight Show” more than 130 times, second only to Bob Hope, according to people who keep track of such things. He hosted several network shows and appeared in a few movies before making a smooth transition into directing with such sitcom staples as “Mad About You,” “Friends,” “Designing Women,” “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
My brief encounter with Steinberg at the Bitter End that night, seeing him spin his yeshiva-based material into comic gold, inspired me to give comedy a try. After all, I, too, was a rabbi’s son from a small town, spent years in yeshiva and shared a belief, at least sometimes, that, as Steinberg has said, “Comedy is what yeshiva is all about. You cannot survive there without a sense of humor.”
Amen.
Fortunately I never gave up my day job. ♦At 71, despite the gray hair, Steinberg looks remarkably youthful, with that famous boyish grin. We meet at the Hotel Carlyle Tea Room on a weekday afternoon and spend more than an hour and a half sharing stories about our Orthodox upbringing, yeshiva experiences, and love of comedians. He wanted to know just what material he used that night at the Bitter End all those years ago, and laughed when I reminded him.
He animatedly discussed his happy childhood going to Talmud Torah, learning Yiddish and Hebrew. His feelings, looking back, are “affectionate, not rebellious,” he said, though he has long been more devoted to meditation than traditional prayer. (He did have high praise for Rabbi Sharon Brous and Ikar, the popular non-denominational congregation in Los Angeles where he enjoys praying on the High Holy Days.)
Steinberg acknowledged that the satirical sermons that made him famous began with Purim shpiels (skits) he performed at his yeshiva high school in Skokie, Ill. He marveled at “the complete irreverence” students could get away with on that one day of the year, turning the Torah’s logic inside out and even imitating the rebbes to their faces.
“You could say anything, and I thought, ‘I’m going to have a Purim Torah for the rest of my life.’ It’s not a bad way to go.”
In his professional career he pictured his sermons as coming from Reform rabbis — “a natural target,” he says. “It’s in the DNA of a comedian to do what you know, and that’s what I knew,” referring to his Old Testament spoofs.
“I was outrageous,” he admits. “Irreverent.”
In part he was inspired by the legendary Lenny Bruce, the first stand-up comic he ever saw perform. “He was a major influence for me. A cool guy on the stage, nice looking. It was his ideas that were incendiary, not his language.
“I remember not laughing at all,” he recalled, more in awe than in stitches.
“He had this level of storytelling, of intelligence, of boldness.”
Steinberg turned his natural ability to make people laugh into a profession when he joined Second City, relying on his “sermons” and a bit that became his trademark, where he plays a nutty psychiatrist who taunts people by yelling “booga booga” at them.
When he landed his own show with ABC, there was talk of having Steinberg change his name. Actually, he said, the idea came not from network bigwigs but from his Jewish agent.
“Could you just see my name up there in lights on the marquee? DAVID STEINBERG. You’d think it was an accountant.”
He said he never considered changing his name and is proud his old friends still call him “Dudi.”
These days he is performing an hour-long one-man show he has developed, a cross between a stand-up routine and a play. It’s basically a set piece, with some improvisation, about his life and career, with plenty of anecdotes about Johnny Carson, who became a good friend, and other celebrities.
Looking out into the audience in venues including La Jolla, Calif., and Bucks County, Pa., Steinberg says the age of the people in the seats is close to his, for the most part, and he’s comfortable with that.
Maybe he himself has mellowed, but his humor is still fresh, and he likes to keep it edgy.
The golden age of Jewish comedians has given way to other minorities, he observed. “It’s only natural. Being a persecuted minority doesn’t hurt for comedy. The danger is to be complacent.”
As we get up to leave, he recalls what George Carlin one said: “A comedian’s job is to find the line. And then cross over.
“I do. Sometimes,” he grinned.
Gary@jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
A Time For Tartan
Photography exhibit documents the lives of Scottish Jews.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
A chemist at a whiskey distillery in Fife. Judah Passow
Like most of the photos in Judah Passow’s exhibition at the Weill Art Gallery at the 92nd Street Y, the subject is decidedly both Scottish and Jewish. Passow spent two years traveling all over Scotland, including the outlying islands, to document the lives of Scottish Jews. He presents a Jewish kilt maker, a young woman celebrating her bat mitzvah at a liberal synagogue, an Orthodox wedding, a sheep farmer in the Highlands, college students at their annual Matzah Ball charity event and women making kosher haggis, the traditional Scottish dish, to be served at a Burns supper.
In an interview at the gallery, Passow compares haggis, made of sheep organs and a mash of ingredients, to kishka. “The world is divided into two types of people: those who eat haggis and those who will not,” he jokes.
The opening of the exhibition last week was timed to coincide with Tartan Week, a celebration of all things Scot in New York City. In fact, the marshal of this year’s annual Tartan Day Parade held earlier this month along Sixth Avenue, was Jewish kilt maker Howard Nicholsby, whose portrait is on the wall. Linda Fabiani, a member of the Scottish Parliament, told The Jewish Week that there’s a “quiet awareness” in Scotland of its Jewish community. She began her public remarks at the Y with a line from a Burns poem, “And would some Power the small gift give us/To see ourselves as others see us!” (from “To A Louse,” here translated into contemporary English).
Passow was born in Israel, grew up in New York and Philadelphia and now lives in London. His black-and-white photographs have an honesty and intimacy about them, with a strong sense of composition. He doesn’t pose his photos; rather, he takes the time to establish a comfortable relationship with his subject. “Sooner or later, I become invisible to them. They’ll be free to be themselves and I’ll be free to be myself as a photographer. That’s when the picture comes.”
“It’s about waiting for the moment to happen,” he says.
To photograph the shepherdess in Lochgilphead, he spent a week with her, living in her home and accompanying her and her sheep.
“This is the photo I wanted,” he says. He catches her in profile, with the flock of sheep behind her, under a painterly late afternoon sky. Her Star of David is around her neck.
Passow lets his subjects speak for themselves; his captions provide basic information. One wonders about the life of the shepherdess, with her rugged, wiry beauty,
“I keep asking questions with my photographs,” he says.
His work finding subjects was helped considerably by a recent communal study by the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities (SCoJeC). It estimates a total of 7,000 Scottish Jews, most in Glasgow.
In fact, the SCoJeC census identified a number of Jews in places like Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, where each one thought he was the last and only Jew; the small group now gets together regularly. Passow captures a man framed by the light of the Shabbat candlesticks that were brought to Lerwick by his observant mother in the early 1900s. For this Shabbat, he has dinner guests.
Passow’s photographs are “revelatory and familiar at once,” says Robert Gilson, director of the Y School of the Arts and curator of the gallery.
Some of the photographs — like a young woman on the morning of her bat mitzvah sitting in the front row of the synagogue rehearsing her speech before services begin, with her kipa at an angle and high heels kicked off, or the great kiss at a Jewish society party at St. Andrew’s University, or the caretaker of a synagogue in Aberdeen, the northernmost synagogue in the British Isles, setting up for Kiddush — have a universal quality about them. But the photos of a traditional Orthodox wedding, with the groom being hoisted in a chair and holding his kilt down, are unmistakably Scottish.
When asked what is distinctive about the Scottish Jewish community, Passow points to its independent spirit coupled with the responsibility its members feel towards each other.
“This is a community that despite its small size has a rich quality of Jewish life,” he says. “There’s a feeling in Scotland that ‘we are on our own up here, and we want it that way. Our survival depends on our own ability to keep our identity as Jews alive.’” He adds, “In England there are all kinds of national organizations and bodies and boards that regularly issue dictates. There’s none of that in Scotland. They reject that.”
“There is a real spirit of anarchy in Scottish Judaism. That’s what makes them Scots. They are taking control of how they express their Judaism.”
As the Scottish people are facing a referendum in September about whether Scotland should be an independent country, “They are consumed with the question of identity,” Passow says. “I walked in on that conversation. The timing was perfect.”
Michael Mail, who produced the exhibit, was born and raised in Glasgow and now lives in London. He explains that he wanted to do a project to recognize and celebrate the Scottish Jewish story. When Mail saw Passow’s exhibition about British Jewry — “No Place Like Home” — he was inspired to have him document Scottish Jewry. Mail, who works as director of development for the British Friends of the Hebrew University, raised funds from private philanthropy and from Creative Scotland, the national development agency for the arts. A book is coming out in the fall, with an essay by Mail.
The gallery at the Y was filled with Scottish-Jewish stories. In conversation, Rabbi Shaul Robinson of Lincoln Square Synagogue, who grew up in Glasgow, mentioned the “small but proud diaspora.” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue pointed to the photographs of the large Glasgow synagogue, Garnethill (where the wedding took place), where his grandfather served as rabbi. Rabbi Cosgrove’s aunt, Lady Hazel Cosgrove, was the first woman appointed a judge on the Scottish equivalent of the Supreme Court.
Two men dressed in matching tartan pants, Rod McIntosh and Frank Metzstein, came from London for the opening. Metzstein was one of the exhibition funders. His father arrived in Scotland in 1939 after leaving Berlin for London on one of the last Kindertransport trains; his mother’s parents moved from Odessa to Glasgow decades earlier.
McIntosh explained that they wear the tartan on “high days and holidays.” On the occasion of their civil partnership six years ago, McIntosh queried the chief of the McIntosh clan to see if his Scottish Jewish male partner could also wear the McIntosh tartan — permission is needed for any outsider to wear the plaid — and permission was granted. “As long as you accept him, we accept him,”
Guests at the opening were offered glasses of kosher single malt scotch from Tominantoul, a distillery in the Highlands. Jerry Dixon, a Scottish-Irish-Italian bagpiper who serves as pipe major for the Fraternal Order of Police, played in the gallery and on the sidewalk in front of the Y. Dressed in traditional attire, he told The Jewish Week that he has studied Jewish texts with rabbis in Crown Heights and feels “a spiritual connection to the Jewish community.”
“Scots Jews: Identity, Belonging and the Future: Photography by Judah Passow” runs through Sunday, April 27 at the Weill Art Gallery at the 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue.
ISRAEL NEWS
New Crackdown Against Settlers In Outpost Fueling Tensions
Unprecedented closing of West Bank yeshiva in Yitzhar follows attack on IDF.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Hillel Malachi stands alongside a mobile home demolished by the army in the Yitzhar outpost of Shaked Farm. Joshua Mitnick/JW
Hours earlier, Israeli security forces seized the Ode Yosef Hai yeshiva and encircled it in barbed wire, escalating an Israeli government attempt to crack down on pro-settler activists engaged in the so-called “price-tag” campaign, which aims to send a message that there’s a price for actions against settlements.
Friday’s unprecedented step reflected public outrage and soul searching over an assault last Tuesday morning by dozens of settlers against an army encampment situated as a buffer between residents of Yitzhar’s outpost and a Palestinian village.
With Torahs and texts of the yeshiva placed under lockdown, settlers at Yitzhar complained that the army was treating them as if they were Palestinian militants, and accused the security services of “collective punishment” against Jewish residents. “Cowards, go take care of the Arabs,” read a banner hung from a mobile home located on the access road to the yeshiva.
A statement by the Yitzhar settlement council called the move an “historic and hysterical” response that “crossed a line.”
“This is a desecration and a disgrace,” said Eli Weissblum, a Yitzhar resident. “A seminary and a synagogue can’t be used for any other purpose other than studying or praying.”
The Israeli army said in a statement that occupying the yeshiva was necessary because of its alleged role in rising acts of vandalism against Israeli forces and the surrounding Palestinian villages.
The move came amid rising criticism against the government for failing to snuff out the years-long “price-tag” campaign — acts of vengeance for Palestinian attacks on settlers or government efforts to curtail settlement activity. Though this most recent assault by dozens of price taggers targeted equipment on an encampment of reservist soldiers, the attackers have more often cut down Palestinian olive trees and sprayed hate graffiti on buildings and mosques. Occasionally there have been incidents of arson.
The attack on the Israel Defense Force base prompted high-profile security figures to call on the state to get tough with the price-tag activists, and on Sunday Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon reportedly said that he supported holding activists without trial in “administrative detention” — a practice used commonly against Palestinians suspected of fomenting violence against Israel.
“What is going on in the territories is Jewish terror,” said Ami Ayalon, one of six former Shin Bet directors who called for tougher tactics in a joint interview with the Yediot Ahronot newspaper. “All of the other definitions coming from the prime minister, from the ministers, or the president — ‘hate crime,’ ‘bad weeds’ and such — are meaningless. Laundered words. And until they do this [enact tougher tactics], they won’t solve the problem.”
Former interior security minister Avi Dicther said that even though the acts have not been lethal, like those of Palestinian terrorists, the goal is similar: to influence the government through illegal destruction and intimidation.
It’s not the first time that top-ranking security officials have used words like terror to describe the price taggers. Israel’s security cabinet debated the term last year, and a former chief of the army central command used the term.
The broader fear is that a deadly attack on Palestinians could ignite a new intifada.
Just a few weeks ago, the army released statistics indicating a 33 percent rise in monthly price-tag incidents during January and February compared to the average for 2013. The conventional wisdom among Israeli commentators is that the vigilantism is being spearheaded by small, closed groups of youths, making it harder for the security forces to infiltrate and foil the plans.
“There’s years of efforts and hardly anyone was caught. You have to ask yourself why it’s not successful,” said Yedidia Stern, the vice president of research at the Israel Democracy Institute.
Closing the yeshiva is “a lesser infraction of human rights than putting someone in jail,” Stern said. “I hope the army will be able to prove it in court. Freedom of religion is obviously very important, but when it’s being used to incite young people to violence — and you can prove it — it can’t be above the law.”
However, Evri Tubi, a spokesman for Yitzhar, said the closure will only unite the residents there against the state. Residents of Yitzhar’s illegal outposts see mobile-home demolitions ordered by the military as disproportionate acts of revenge by authorities for acts of vandalism, such as puncturing the tires of army command cars.
This isn’t the first time the government has taken punitive actions against Yitzhar. Several years ago, Israel’s Education Ministry withdrew its funding of Ode Yosef Hai study programs, arguing that rabbis there were promoting violence against Palestinians.
In addition to allegedly promoting violence against non-Jews, rabbis at the yeshiva have portrayed Israel’s government as morally decrepit for not following halacha, Jewish law. The same message was repeated in the yeshiva’s response to the army seizure.
An Ode Yosef Hai rabbi accused authorities of committing a criminal act and likened Israel’s government to King Ahaz, “the worst of the Judean kings,” who shuttered the holy Temple. “[Ahaz] said you can’t study Torah. Is that what the state authorities want? That this will be the first step of closing yeshivas? Our answer should be: multiply and break out.”
On a short drive to an outpost where mobile homes were demolished this week, residents point out boulders and blacked debris from burned tires — signs of efforts by settlers to block the army demolitions.
Yonatan Malachi, an outpost resident with two brothers who saw their mobile homes destroyed by the army, described himself as part of the “moderate” camp who still supports the military. Yet he also portrayed the destruction of the mobile homes as a “political act” meant to punish Yitzhar and prove to the international community that the government supports peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
“All of the homes out here have demolition orders against them,” he said. “I think they came to destroy the newest buildings.”
A video uploaded to YouTube by the more extreme groups in Yitzhar shows hilltop youths dancing as speakers justified the assault as residents “not wanting to stay quiet” following the demolitions.
“These guys believe that Zionism as we know it has died and finished, and they believe that now it’s time for a state of Torah rules,” said Oren Rosenfeld, an Israeli film producer who has spent years documenting the price-tag activists.
Ironically, the Israeli left-wing human rights group Yesh Din condemned the army’s seizure of the yeshiva. Though a virulent critic of settler attacks on Palestinians, a Yesh Din statement said the closure was “undemocratic” and a public relations stunt.
Yesh Din spokeswoman Reut Mor argued that Israeli law enforcement officials have ample means of reining in the price taggers. She said that Yesh Din and other human rights groups have documented incidents in which Israeli soldiers have stood by as settlers attack Palestinians.
She said that 97 percent of police investigations based on complaints filed by Palestinians against settlers ended with no results. At root of the conflict, Mor said, is a battle for control of the land, a shared goal between the IDF and the most hardline settlers.
“The fact IDF doesn’t enforce the law encourages the law breakers,” she said. “This was a monster that was created and fed with their own hands, and now it went and bit the army.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Managing Editor
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The Arts
NYU chaplains Imam Khalid Latif, left, and Rabbi Yehuda Sarna in "Of Many." Samuel Adiv Cohen
Humor In Unexpected Places
Polanski's dark wit and a bleakly funny IDF tale on tap at this year's Tribeca festival.
George Robison - Special To The Jewish Week
Note: This is the first of two stories on this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
There are many ways to be a Jewish filmmaker, just as there are many ways to be a Jew. If there is one thing that would seem to unite most Jewish directors working in the field (and some non-Jews who frequently visit Jewish themes) it might be humor. The humor may pop up in unexpected places or come from unlikely artists, but it’s there just the same. Consider some of the new films on offer in the first week of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
Although he has made comedies before, Roman Polanski is not someone whose name jumps into your head when you’re looking for a laugh. His films are usually characterized by the dark paranoia of a director whose childhood was shredded by the Nazis, whose adult life has been blighted by the murder of his wife and his problems with the law. But there is an underlying sardonic wit at play in even his darkest work. After all, Polanski is a guy who made a thriller about an actor who gives his first-born child to Satan in exchange for better roles. So it is not really a shock to find Polanski partnering with American playwright David Ives, a free-flowing fountain of wit, for the film version of Ives’ play “Venus in Fur.”
In structure, “Venus” is a follow-up to Polanski’s previous feature film, “God of Carnage” (2011), which treated Yasmina Reza’s play with surprising fidelity, leaving its focus on four characters intact and resisting the urge to open up the piece in the interests of a decrepit idea of “the cinematic.” Like its predecessor (and Polanski’s earlier film of Ariel Dorfman’s play “Death and the Maiden”), the new film leaves the minimalist elements of the play unchanged, with only two characters, a theater director and writer Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) and Vanda, an actress (Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski’s wife) meeting in a deserted theater where she has come to audition for his new production based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel.
Although Sacher-Masoch was a Catholic, he was also a vocal and ardent philo-Semite and he edited two collections of Jewish stories as well as his better-remembered ode to the sexual relationship that bears his name, masochism. One suspects that for a Jew like Polanski who grew up in Poland between in the late 1930s and the early 1960s, the tangled skeins of association between Sacher-Masoch’s religious upbringing, his ardent championing of Jewish causes and his chosen minority sexual identity all may have had some resonance. Certainly the passionate push-pull dialectic of dominance and submission at the heart of both the novel and Ives’ play have strange echoes of Jewish phrases like “the yoke of the mitzvot,” and of the tension between obedience to the Divine Will and the exercise of human choice that runs through Jewish thought.
Whatever their significance for Polanski, he has great fun playing with Ives’ richly wrought dialogue with its intricate shifts in register between 1880s decadence and 21st-century cool, between the sculpted theatricality of the play-within-the-film and the deliciously self-conscious natterings of his no-less-theatrical protagonists. Polanski stages the film as a cunning, often formally elegant jeux d’esprit, a technically ravishing series of extended jokes in which his two characters often circle one another like two planets held stubbornly in check by their gravitational fields. The result may be a minor work for the director, but it is great fun.
One might say the same of “Zero Motivation,” a first feature by Israeli writer-director Talya Lavie. Although its setting in a dead-end military post that is a graveyard for undistinguished careers and an unintended spur to highly original forms of goldbricking, recalls “Sergeant Bilko,” the film is a bleakly funny service comedy that owes more to “Catch-22” or “M*A*S*H.”
Zohar (Dana Ivgy) and Daffi (Nelly Tagar) are best friends, NCOs assigned to the administrative office of this professional cul-de-sac, who spend most of their time playing Minesweeper on the office computers and scheming how to get transferred to someplace more appealing. Their superior officer, Rama (Shani Klein), has genuine aspirations to rise in the officer corps, but her deadbeat office staff is unlikely to be the wind that will lift her upward.
The film is structured as a series of three episodes focusing on Daffi’s increasingly desperate attempts to be sent to Tel Aviv, Zohar’s no-less-desperate search for someone to deflower her, and the ongoing collision between Zohar and the rest of the IDF, a battle that the army is bound to lose. Lavie depicts the base as a degrading cross between high school and a particularly dire summer camp, and her eye for the power of caste and the social slight is unerring. The film’s shape is actually more intricate than the tripartite structure might suggest, and the way in which the narrative loops in on itself is quite satisfying.
“70 Hester Street,” written and directed by Casimir Nozkowski, is one of the more appealing short films of the year thus far. Nozkowski’s parents are both artists and he grew up in the building whose address is the film’s title, home, in succession, to a synagogue, a bootlegger’s distillery and a raincoat factory. Now, after nearly a half-century, the family is leaving, and that radical departure engenders a rumination on the changing fortunes of the Lower East Side, the constant demographic shifts and their impact on the lives of ordinary New Yorkers. The film is charming, witty and quite handsome to look at and, like Nozkowski’s erstwhile home, redolent of the air of a long-since departed Jewish community.
By contrast, Linda G. Mills’ half-hour documentary “Of Many” is rooted in the turbulent present but offers a small ray of light and hope. Imam Khalid Latif and Rabbi Yehuda Sarna are both chaplains at NYU. The university has 2,000 Muslim students and 5,000 Jewish ones (the largest Jewish student population of any private university in the U.S., incidentally). One might imagine that this conjunction would be a recipe for open hostility and, in the wake of 9/11 it might well have become such. But Sarna and Latif came together to seek a way to ease tensions in the university community, creating with Mills and her executive producer Chelsea Clinton the Of Many Institute at NYU, a vehicle for developing multi-faith leadership on the campus and beyond. Focusing their efforts on disaster relief in the U.S., and directly involving their students in the work, the two chaplains have been effective bridge-builders. The film also is rife with unexpected humor, an outgrowth of the warm friendship of its two central figures.
The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival opens Wednesday, April 16, and runs through Sunday, April 27, all over the city. For more information, go to www.tribecafilm.com.
MUSINGS - Rabbi David Wolpe
Pharaoh's Paradox
Rabbi David Wolpe
Part of the answer is Pharaoh’s ego, that he could contain and handle this “dangerous” people. Yet part of it is surely a subconscious awareness that Jews contribute far more than they endanger the lands in which they live. History shows a clear pattern: From Inquisition Spain to modern Europe, the loss of a nation’s Jews is a catalyst for decline. Alternately, as we see in the U.S., welcoming Jews is a boon for any nation seeking to flourish.
God may have hardened Pharaoh’s heart, but it was one more case of the Talmudic dictum that God leads a person where he already wishes to go. Pharaoh was a rigid personality, not flexible enough to free the Jews inside Egypt, or to let them go. Rather he held on until catastrophe struck him and the nation he led. Too many tyrants in the ages that followed were slow to learn Pharaoh’s lesson, to their own sadness and that of the Jewish people.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe.
Blogs
THE POLITICAL INSIDER | THE ROSENBLOG | THE NEW NORMAL | A COMIC'S JOURNEY | WELL VERSED
THE NEW NORMAL
Can Autism Acceptance and Autism Recovery Coexist?
Lisa Friedman
In learning about him, however, I began to grapple with the question of whether there's a tension between the concepts of autism acceptance and autism recovery, and now I'd like to share that question with the New Normal community.
Here is one of Scott’s most recent poems:
Acceptance of Autism
Wanting to be free
Wanting to be me
Trying to make people see
And accept the real me
Some people think my voice is too loud
And that my mannerisms strike them as being odd
This perception of me by others keeps me feeling blue
But there are plenty of struggles in life that I must get through
I am determined to show my critics my true personality
Hoping that people move away from their narrow-minded mentalities
I want them to know that I am a bright young man
Who is willing to take on as many challenges in life as I can
I want to make new friends and create a new start
Like to develop new relationships with an open heart
I hope to be accepted for the person that I am
So people can understand a true autistic man
Scott’s poetry is gaining recognition. Recently, he was interviewed by Autism Live, a web-based show providing support, resources and entertainment to parents and professionals working with people, like Scott, on the autism spectrum.
Yet on the site's “About” page, the first two lines of show host Shannon Penrod’s bio reads: “Shannon Penrod is the proud mother of a nine-year old who is recovering from Autism. Her son Jem was diagnosed at the age of two and a half after having lost virtually all of his language and social skills.”
Does this raise an uncomfortable flag for anyone? It does for me. My advocacy does not stem from a place of “curing” or “eliminating” one’s disability; rather, I recognize that each of us is unique and special, with gifts to be shared and challenges to overcome. So this left me feeling more than a little unsettled.
I do not in any way seek to diminish the value of this web show or Scott’s experience. I continue to be impressed by his writing and I am so pleased that he has gained the recognition of this program.
But let’s have the conversation. Can autism acceptance and autism recovery coexist?
Lisa Friedman is the Education Co-Director at Temple Beth-El in Hillsborough, New Jersey. She oversees an extensive special needs program within the religious school, with programs designed to help students learn about their Jewish heritage, feel connected to their Jewish community and successfully learn Hebrew. Additionally, Lisa facilitates conversations about inclusion throughout the synagogue as whole and helps the congregation to shape its best practices. Lisa writes a blog about her experiences in Jewish special education: http://jewishspecialneeds.blogspot.com/
Food & Wine
Courtesy of Domaine Lafond-Roc Epine
For Spring, Rosés
Light, refreshing wines perfect for sipping on warm nights.
Joshua E. London and Lou Marmon - Special to the Jewish Week
When the weather (finally!) turns warm, we start to think about—and drink—rosé. Combining the refreshing qualities of a white wine with the fruity flavors found in red wine, rosés are remarkably food friendly, typically pairing well with spring and summer fare. Most rosés are light and easy drinking, best served when young and very chilled. But when we’re in the mood for a more complex and richer rosé, we often reach for one from Tavel.
Located in France’s southern Rhone valley, Tavel is the only appellation that produces exclusively rosé wines. A favorite of kings, popes and Ernest Hemingway, among other famed writers, the rosés from Tavel are blends of Grenache, Cinsault, Syrah and Mouvedre, with a few other grapes often being added for additional support.
Rosés are usually made by allowing the pressed juice to have only minimal contact with the skins: the longer the contact between the juice and the skins, the deeper the color of the wine. Saignee, the French word for “bleeding,” is another technique whereby some of the lighter juice is poured off to make a rosé allowing the remaining juice to become more concentrated.
Tavel rosés derive their intensity by keeping some of the juice in contact with skins longer and then blending that with lighter juice. In contrast to other rosés, their flavors are more intense and complex, their alcohol content is higher, and they can be aged for several years.
One of Rhone’s finest wine producers is Domaine Lafond-Roc Epine, an organic winery whose portfolio includes a kosher Tavel Rosé. Their kosher Tavel Rosé 2010 ($25) has currant and raspberry aromas with deep red fruit flavors and noticeable minerality on a medium frame with terrific balance, complexity and length. Not a rosé for the meek nor to sip solo, this beauty should be paired with grilled foods. It's available at New York Wine Warehouse.
Another very nice kosher rosé to consider is the Israeli Galil Mountain Rose 2012 ($15): An enticing rose petal pink-colored blend of 82 percent Sangiovese, 10 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 8 percent Barbera, it is somewhat heavier than most, with dry to off-dry notes of strawberry, raspberry, citrus and spices, and with just enough acidity to remain refreshing; charming fruity aftertaste, to be sipped with grilled fish. It's available at Vines on Pine.
editor@jewishweek.org
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