Dear Reader,Michael Bloomberg heads to Israel in a couple of weeks to receive the first annual $1 million Genesis Prize for "values and achievements [that] will inspire the next generation of Jews." My column highlights the increasing interest in what the former mayor has to say about his Jewish identity.
GARY ROSENBLATT
Spotlight On Bloomberg's Jewish Identity
As recipient of first Genesis Prize, ex-mayor expected to open up about his heritage.
Gary Rosenblatt
Last October when Michael Bloomberg was named the first recipient of the Genesis Prize, billed as “the Jewish Nobel Prize,” more than a few eyebrows were raised at the choice of the then-New York mayor.The annual award was created in partnership with the Israeli government through a foundation established by several Russian Jewish oligarchs to honor “exceptional people whose values and achievements will inspire the next generation of Jews.”
Critics questioned why a group of Russian billionaires would choose to give a $1 million award to an American billionaire. Not only did he not need the money (which he announced he was donating to charity), but why choose a 72-year-old man with virtually no public Jewish identity to inspire young Jews?
Bloomberg himself may have had similar reservations. When he was first approached after being chosen from among more than 200 nominees by a blue-ribbon panel of international Jewish leaders, as the result of a sophisticated selection process, he took about a month before agreeing to accept the prize. It called for him to come to Israel in the spring for the award ceremony and agree to a series of outreach meetings in the months ahead with Jewish young people around the world.
Even those most closely associated with the prize are uncertain about the extent and substance of Bloomberg’s involvement as the May 22 date for the award ceremony approaches. It will be held at the Jerusalem Theater, with some 300 prominent guests expected, including Jewish and business leaders from around the world, and a number of Israeli public officials. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present the $1 million award, which Bloomberg has pledged to donate to a cause promoting good works.
Mikhail Fridman, 50, the Ukrainian-Russian businessman whose fortune was assessed recently at more than $17 billion, is a founder of the Russian Jewish Congress as well as of the Genesis Philanthropy Group, which seeks to “develop and enhance a sense of Jewish identity among Russian-speaking Jews worldwide,” according to its website. The group created the Genesis Prize Foundation through an endowment of $100 million.
During a recent visit to New York, Fridman and his associate, Stan Polovets, chair of the prize, spoke about their hopes and goals for the award, and explained the choice of the first recipient. They defended the selection of Bloomberg despite the fact that neither his former wife nor current partner are Jewish, that his children were not raised as Jews and that he does not speak publicly about his Jewish values.
Like many Jews, Fridman said, the former mayor is “not traditional [in religious observance], but very proud of his Jewish roots and, most importantly, consistently seeking ways to become more engaged with those roots. His Jewish heritage is very much a part of his multifaceted identity, and many Jews around the world can relate to that.”
Polovets noted that Bloomberg is widely admired, by young people and others, as a remarkably successful entrepreneur. “We’re not celebrating his wealth but what he is doing with it,” as a major philanthropist “seeking to improve the world” in the areas of health, innovation and social justice, and serving as mayor of New York for 12 years at a salary of $1 a year.
Bloomberg, in his statement on being named winner of the prize last fall, said his parents instilled in him “Jewish values and ethics that I have carried with me throughout my life, and which have guided my work in business, government and philanthropy.” He said the Genesis Prize “embraces and promotes those same values — a common thread among Jewish people worldwide that has helped move humankind forward for centuries.”
He is expected to elaborate on those and other Jewish connections in his acceptance speech later this month and in a variety of subsequent appearances in connection with the award.
Fridman was not directly involved in the election process that chose Bloomberg. The selection and prize committees included such luminaries as Elie Wiesel, Lord Jonathan Sacks, Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein and former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Meir Shamgar. But it seems clear that Fridman identifies with someone like Bloomberg since he himself is a self-made businessman of great wealth who, though far from Jewish observance — he grew up in Lvov with little knowledge of his faith, and neither of his two wives is Jewish — is proud of his heritage.
He spoke with personal conviction of how his two daughters have accompanied him on a trip to Auschwitz, and noted that one of them in particular has become increasingly interested in Jewish life.
“I want them to make their own choice,” he said, “and I firmly believe that Jewishness is not just about blood but is a mindset.” Fridman stressed the importance of making a conscious decision about one’s Jewishness, based on an understanding of Judaism’s “philosophy, tradition and principles before saying ‘I am a Jew.’”
He said the findings of the Pew Research Center report on American Jewish identity were “awful, and confirmed what I felt, that assimilation is our No. 1 challenge.”
That’s especially true, he said, for Russian-speaking Jews, many of whom grew up without a Jewish education or feeling of connection to their heritage. The Genesis programs — through the foundation and the prize — are focused on instilling pride as well as Jewish knowledge in the next generation of Jews around the world, he emphasized.
“This is not just about wealthy people giving $1 million to another wealthy person,” Fridman said of the prize. “We would like Mayor Bloomberg to widely promote the message” on his Jewish connections and values, “and we don’t expect his engagement to end after a year.”
Fridman said he hopes that a decade from now, there will be 10 “exceptional people” named prize laureates, committed in their support for Israel and having publicly “defined their relationship to Jewish values — modern-day Jewish heroes.”
For now, though, attention will focus on the first laureate and how he transmits his Jewish beliefs as he navigates the new course of his post-political life.
Gary@jewishweek.org
Israel Correspondent Josh Mitnick reports on reactions to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's empathetic statement this week about the Holocaust, prompted by a request from local Rabbi Marc Schneier.
Israel New
Abbas’ Comments Suggest Tangled Holocaust Politics
Sympathetic remarks follow Palestinian professor’s visit to Auschwitz.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Rabbi Marc Schneier, left, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last week in Ramallah. Mahmoud Alian
But now it seems there may be seeds of change afoot among Palestinians: On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas published a declaration — unprecedented for an Arab head of state — calling the Holocaust against the Jews the most “heinous crime” against humanity in modern history.
The statement followed a trip to Auschwitz in March by a prominent Palestinian professor and a group of students. But that gesture received a rocky response. The academic, Mohammed Adjani of Al Quds University in Jerusalem, was inundated with criticism for “normalizing” ties with Israel and branded a collaborator.
Abbas’ statement was immediately dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “damage control” for an earlier reconciliation deal with Hamas.
“What President Abbas is trying to do is to placate Western public opinion that understands that he delivered a terrible blow to the peace process by embracing these Hamas terrorists,” he told CNN, referring to the formation of a Palestinian unity government. “And I think he’s trying to wiggle his way out of it.”
But, in an interview with The Jewish Week, the New York rabbi who convinced Abbas to publicize the remarks suggested that Netanyahu’s criticism was off base.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, spiritual leader of The Hampton Synagogue and a president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which tries to forge stronger Jewish-Muslim ties, said Abbas’ original remarks were made in private to him when he visited the Palestinian president in Ramallah several days before the Palestinian unity deal. Rabbi Schneier added that Abbas published the remarks at the rabbi’s request. He praised the Palestinian president for being “clear and unequivocal in describing the magnitude of the Holocaust.”
“I found his words to be genuine and heartfelt,” Rabbi Schneier said. “It takes a certain degree of courage and fortitude to make a statement about the Holocaust in his world, where many people deny that the Holocaust ever took place.
“We should embrace these sentiments as planting seeds for peace and understanding. I’m not going to sit here and say we have reached the Promised Land of Muslim-Jewish reconciliation, but it’s an important milestone along the way.”
For Palestinians, acknowledging the Jewish genocide in the Holocaust was tantamount to a political affirmation of Israel’s national narrative, so people either avoided it, denied its existence, or equated the Jewish genocide with the Naqba, or “disaster,” of Israel’s birth. Indeed, the Palestinian president has an infamous reputation with Israelis in part because of a 1983 doctoral thesis, “The Secret Relationship Between Zionism and Nazism” in which he suggested the two conspired against European Jewry. The dissertation also suggested that the number of Jewish victims could be less than 1 million.
That probably contributed to the somewhat cool response that Abbas got elsewhere in Israel. A statement from Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem, said that the remarks “might signal a change… we expect it will be reflected in PA websites, curricula and discourse.”
Yossi Klein Halevi, an Israeli author who has focused on inter-religious dialogue, said that in addition to Holocaust denial throughout the Arab world, there’s also a tendency to draw comparisons with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Halevi portrayed it as a missed opportunity.
“I would celebrate Abbas’ statement as a crucial contribution to Muslim-Jewish relations if it hadn’t come immediately after signing a deal with Hamas, which is one of the Arab world’s leading purveyors of Holocaust denial. … Abbas lost his moral authority by making a deal with Hamas.”
Several years ago, the Hamas government in Gaza blocked a plan to teach about the Holocaust in United Nations schools. In 2003, Hamas leader Abdel Azziz Rantisi wrote in the organization’s newspaper about the “false Holocaust” propagated by “Zionist” supporters.
The bad blood between Jews and Palestinians over the Holocaust reaches back to Haj Amin al Husaini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and the top Palestinian leader during World War II; he reached out to Hitler to oppose establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine and to make common cause against a common enemy, the English, the Jews and the Communists.
Ben-Gurion University historian Hana Yablonka said there’s a “complete politicization of the Holocaust” in Israel, potentially dooming Abbas’ comments from the start. “Yesterday, something [meaningful] occurred,” she said. “The story with Abu Mazen [Abbas’ nom du guerre], on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, saying what he said … that’s something that should have made waves. It should have received some sort of outreach from our side.”
The politicization reaches to both sides. If the Palestinian leader’s Holocaust remarks prompted barbs from Israelis, the comments “are likely to be seen by Palestinians as bending over backwards to speak to Israeli sensibilities,” said Khaled Elgindy, a former staffer of the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department and a fellow at the Brookings Institute. “There’s going to naturally be resistance from his own constituents when it’s the Palestinians who are dispossessed and occupied. That’s the Palestinian mindset: ‘It’s they who should be allaying our concerns.’”
Adjani, the political science professor from Al Quds University who visited Auschwitz, concurred. “It’s because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, politics dominate, and it takes over regarding humanitarian issues. Because of the occupation Israel practices every day, Arab leaders will not make such a statement to antagonize people who are suffering under the Israeli occupation.”
Adjani said that Abbas’ remarks should be viewed as “groundbreaking” and courageous, despite the potential criticism. Adjani knows personally about that criticism after having recently led a group of Palestinian students to Auschwitz. One participant named Jameel told the Israeli news agency The Media Line that the group was accused of being spies. Al Quds University refused to endorse the trip.
Adjani, who tried to establish a movement of moderate Islamists, explained that most Palestinians don’t understand that embracing the Holocaust can be done for purely humanitarian motivations, as a show of compassion for the victims and their families.
The same conclusions have trickled down to his students on the trip. Jameel said that without seeing the concentration camps in person, it’s impossible to understand the scope of the disaster.
“I told my brother to tell everyone he knows that we visited the Auschwitz camp and we saw the tremendous suffering of what happened during the Holocaust,” he told The Media Line. “And we, as Palestinians, know the meaning of what it means to suffer.”
editor@Jewishweek.org
THE JW Q&A
Abbas’ Shoah Statement Is ‘Significant Benchmark’
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Rabbi Marc Schneier and PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. Mahmoud Alian
Rabbi Marc Schneier, spiritual leader of the Hampton Synagogue on Long Island and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, was in Israel for Passover when he was invited to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.
As a result of the meeting, Abbas issued a statement calling the Holocaust the “the most heinous crime against humanity in modern history.” He also extended condolences to the “families of the victims and the innocent people who were killed by the Nazis, including the Jews and others.”
Q: Had you planned to discuss Holocaust Remembrance Day?
I wasn’t even thinking about it. My work is to try to offer a new paradigm of Muslim-Jewish relations around the world. Since March we have been in the forefront in combating the recent ban by the government of Denmark on ritual slaughtering by both Jews and Muslims. I wanted to ask Abbas to lend his voice to this effort.
I have had an ongoing conversation with Abbas for the past five years, and remind him how he has a responsibility to develop a sense of empathy for the other. … Then I had this epiphany on the spot. I said the three of us [Rabbi Schneier and two friends accompanying him] are children of Holocaust survivors and a week from tonight the Jewish people will be observing probably the darkest day on our calendar, Holocaust Remembrance Day. How meaningful and significant it would be for you to express your sympathy, your condolences to world Jewry on the anniversary of this terrible tragedy and the loss of so many innocent lives.
Before I could complete my sentence, he said: “Rabbi, let me tell you how I feel. … I see the Shoah as the greatest tragedy of humankind in the modern-day era.”
Was he equivocal in any way?
He was unequivocal in describing the magnitude of the tragedy, and he did not link the Holocaust to the suffering and persecution and oppression of other peoples or nations. He spoke of it as being the greatest single tragedy of the modern era and of the millions of lives lost.
He then turned to his cabinet secretary and said that as a response to Rabbi Schneier, I will offer a message of condolence and sympathy and solidarity with the Jewish people before Yom HaShoah. He is the first Palestinian leader ever to acknowledge and recognize the Holocaust. Hopefully his words will inspire other Palestinians and other Arab leaders to follow suit.
What is the import of his words?
I’m not going to represent to you that we have reached the Promised Land in Muslim-Jewish reconciliation, but I remind you it took 40 years to get here. We have made significant strides in the seven years since the foundation started this international campaign of Muslim-Jewish reconciliation. President Abbas’ statement is a significant benchmark along that journey.
Were you aware that in his doctoral dissertation Abbas minimized the scope of the Holocaust?
In my line of work I have to believe that people evolve, that an individual can grow and develop and broaden his or her horizons and expand his sympathies. I also know that a tenet of Judaism is that it is human nature to change human actions, so I do not look back.
Are you satisfied with his statement?
I’m satisfied that there was an acknowledgment and recognition of the Holocaust, which has become the subject of concern in many Palestinian and Arab circles because of those who are engaged in Holocaust denial. I think it took some courage on his part to speak about the Holocaust within his own circle — even at the possible risk of his own safety and security.
How do you explain that just a few hours after Abbas’ statement, the Palestinian Central Council issued a hardline statement on the renewal of peace talks with Israel?
In my own experience that day I witnessed the internal conflict within the Palestinian camp. As we were leaving Abbas’ office, one of his deputies said, “This is the compound where we greeted President Obama.” Another then said, “This is where the Israelis held Arafat.” The first then said, “Let’s not look back; let’s look forward.”
How do you see your role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
When the Palestinians and Israelis arrive at an agreement, how will it be executed when a majority of Israelis and Muslims don’t trust each other? I believe the underlying reasons for that mistrust are misunderstandings and misperceptions about our respective texts, traditions and historical experiences. … Abbas and I discussed this. That is why I said it is so critical to have an empathetic imagination and to put oneself in the place of the other, and understand their fears and concerns. It was in this spirit that Abbas responded so sensitively to my request.
stewart@jewishweek.org
And Culture Editor Sandee Brawarsky describes the remarkably ambitious project of photographer Frederic Brenner, convincing 11 world-renowned colleagues to spend extended time in Israel and capture the land and people beyond the conflict through their lenses.
INTERNATIONAL
Shooting The ‘Promise’ Of ‘This Place’
Photographer Frederic Brenner’s massive Israel project seeks to see beyond the conflict.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
A young family of shepherds in Brenner’s “Judean Hills." Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
“These are seers who ask difficult questions,” Brenner says of the photographers, who include Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall. He didn’t expect them to find answers. “I wanted to expose them to the complexity and dissonance of the place — to get them totally confused on a high level.”
The photographers each spent around six months in Israel over a four-year period. Their styles, formats and areas of interests varied greatly, and Brenner suggests that their art looks far beyond political perspectives. Rather, it’s about exploring the human condition.
“This Place,” to be introduced in stages, includes an exhibition of more than 500 images slated to open in the fall in Prague at DOX: Centre Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall. He didn’t expect them to find answers. “I wanted to expose them to the complexity and dissonance of the place — to get them totally confused on a high level.”
The photographers each spent around six months in Israel over a four-year period. Their styles, formats and areas of interests varied greatly, and Brenner suggests that their art looks far beyond political perspectives. Rather, it’s about exploring the human condition.
“This Place,” to be introduced in stages, includes an exhibition of more than 500 images slated to open in the fall in Prague at DOX: Centre for Contemporary Art and to travel to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in February 2016, and then to other venues. Additional plans include books by each of the 12 photographers and an exhibition catalogue; international public programs; campus initiatives and a strong social media presence. The first books in the series are available, including Brenner’s “An Archeology of Fear and Desire” (MACK, 2014).
In Brenner’s own photography, as well as in “This Place,” he’s interested in examining Israel as place and metaphor. “What fascinates me is at the edge of the particular and the universal,” Brenner says. “It’s not just this piece of land, the place where three major narratives have been in conflict.” He adds, “I look at it as the theater of the world.”
In a series of conversations here, Brenner explains the themes that drive his work and his love of Israel, easily shifting between art and philosophy. “Everything starts with the idea that there’s a promise attached to the land, for all people, for all three narratives,” he says, referring to those of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths. “What have we done with this promise?”
He alludes to longing, otherness, belonging and exclusion; tenderness and violence; redemption and intimacy; and shadows and fault lines in the promise. For him, Israel is a place of wrestling and embrace. “I build a scaffold,” he says. “I play with ideas. Those ideas come from fieldwork. I let things erupt.”
Brenner, 55, grew up in a secular Jewish home in Paris; his grandparents came from Algeria on his mother’s side, and Russia and Romania on his father’s. The Six-Day War aroused his parents’ interest in Judaism and Israel, and Brenner finished his studies in a Jewish school before going on to study social anthropology and French literature at the Sorbonne. His camera became a tool of his studies. In 1978, he traveled to Israel for the first time. Mea Shearim — to him a pocket of the diaspora in the heart of Israel — left him speechless, and he kept returning. He photographed the neighborhood, its rabbis and residents, and later published his first book.
But it was the diaspora that really drew him, and he traveled to 40 countries in the next 25 years, photographing Jews, many in communities that are no more. “I was trying to reclaim a history that I had been deprived of,” he says. The result was his epic book of black-and-white photographs, “Diaspora,” also an international exhibition.
“The genesis of this project,” he says about “This Place” (http://this-place.org), is those 25 years of exploration of what I call the complex of multiple and dissonant identities. I spent those years gathering my fragments, my own puzzle. I look on it as an initiatic journey.”
Now he’s a self-described “embodiment of portable identity,” dividing his time between New York, Amsterdam and Israel.
For “An Archeology of Fear and Desire,” his photographic contribution to “This Place,” Brenner shot in color. His palette, in his words, is delicate. For all of his eloquence in conversation, the book has few words. Captions are spare.
Brenner speaks of how he had to find the “scaffolding” of the project, and perhaps the frontispiece photo suggests those metaphorical and complicated details that captivate him. “Palace Hotel, 2009” shows a decaying grand slice of Roman and Ottoman architecture — this façade, supported by metal beams, is all that remained then of a historic structure. Here’s a building exposed as though it’s inside out, mysterious, silent, its beauty not always evident.
Brenner doesn’t give any clues, but a quick glance at the history of this curved pile reveals that its 1928-29 construction, under the auspices of the Mufti of Jerusalem, was completed quickly by Arab workers, supervised by a Jewish engineer secretly working for the Haganah. Its last guests checked out in 1935, and it was subsequently used as administrative offices for the British Mandate and later as headquarters for Israel’s Ministry of Trade before being abandoned to the city’s homeless. But just weeks ago, it reopened in a rebuilt version as Jerusalem’s Waldorf Astoria, with this façade maintained.
Most of the other photographs involve collaborative encounters with people. Often, his subjects lead him to tell stories other than the ones he intended. In his portraits, the eyes are full of emotion. Viewers are challenged to meet their gaze.
In “Judean Hills,” he photographs a young family of shepherds, the straggly-bearded father in a large white kipa, three children, the seated mother with hair covered in the style of Orthodox women, a sheepdog at her feet. Their beautiful, unsmiling faces are inscrutable. Behind them, lots of sheep separate them from the ancient rocky hills.
Brenner also includes his daughter Elior, seated in woods the color of the army uniform she wears; a couch full of women kibbutzniks, a portrait labeled “Identity Undisclosed” of a man with a scar forming a line down his face, above and below his dark eye; “Shlomi and Oren,” a pair of handsome male lovers embracing amidst tall cacti; and “Ben Gurion Airport,” a trio of chasidic men standing with their wheeled suitcases in what looks like an empty terminal. Each has black fabric attached to his hat pulled over his eyes to shield him from things he might inadvertently see.
The book’s final photo, “Tel Aviv,” offers a view of the highway with all cars stopped and drivers standing outside in stillness. Time itself was stopped when this photo was taken, with a siren marking a moment of silence for a national day of remembrance.
There’s a somber beauty to these photographs. In some of his work in “Diaspora,” there’s more joy and humor, even amid the complex range of feelings of displacement and longing, as in the photos of the Jewish barbers and their Tajik customers in Tajikistan (“Barbershop”) in 1989, and the same group posed in the Dead Sea, with their Israeli customers in 1992.
According to project director Matthew Brogan, the budget for “This Place” is about $6 million, with $4 million for the photographers’ residencies and over $2 million to support the dissemination of the project, with its ambitious digital media campaign intended to trigger conversations.
When Brenner first approached the Charles H. Revson Foundation for support in 2008, as senior program officer Nessa Rapoport explains, she and Julie Sandorf, Revson’s president, saw the project as “an audacious idea. But we knew Frederic could pull it off because of his track record with ‘Diaspora.’
“We are looking for ways to showcase Israel beyond the black-and-white shouting match of the conflict,” she says. “We believe in the power of art to change consciousness. These enduring images will always be in the world. And so we were not afraid to be among the first funders.”
Other major funders include The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Righteous Persons Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Brenner organized a two-week informal think tank for the photographers on their arrival, with trips and meetings with Israelis like philosopher Moshe Halbertal, Bedouin expert Clinton Bailey and feminist and peace activist Leah Shakdiel. He also arranged for each visiting photographer to have a Hebrew-speaking assistant, selected from the Bezalel Academy. For all the photographers, Brenner says, the program was “a profound transformative experience.”
Martin Kollar of the Slovak Republic, said, “Some of the places I had the impression that I was on a film set, and I tried to bring this to the images. You don’t really know when the reality and the fiction somehow stops and starts.” American Wendy Ewald shared cameras with 14 groups of people from different regions and cultures to record themselves, to help her to create a map from within. Canadian Jeff Wall devoted his time to making a single large-scale photo, “Sleeping Olive Harvest Workers,” taken near the town of Mitzpe Ramon, with Bedouin olive pickers and a prison seen beyond the farm. Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, who grew up behind the Soviet Iron Curtain, was drawn to photograph the separation barrier.
Brenner also uses the Hebrew and Arabic words for This Place as part of the title. In Hebrew, makom, place, is an attribute of God.
“Will we dare not to understand this place? Will we dare to not connect the dots?” Brenner asks.
“Will we dare to open our hearts unconditionally?”
editor@jewishweek.org
Also this issue, Justin Timberlake and a mission to Israel to counter the BDS; Upper West Side to celebrate Israel for three days; actor Danny Burstein on making a Jewish character in "Cabaret" his own; and Erica Brown encourages her fellow Jews to listen to each other - good luck to that.
SHORT TAKES
Timberlake Concert Headlines New Israel Trip To Fight BDS
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Singer-actor Justin Timberlake’s first performance in Israel later this month. Getty Images
But a mission to counter the cultural boycott of Israel?
When Aaron Herman, who plans Jewish community trips to Israel as director of missions and development at Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), learned a few months ago that singer-actor Justin Timberlake would perform this spring in Israel, he thought of scheduling a mission around the performance.
Timberlake, like other superstars who include Israel on their international performance itineraries, has come under pressure, which he has resisted, from the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions) movement to drop Israel from his schedule. His performance, his first in Israel, will take place May 28 in Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park.
Herman calls Timberlake, who first made his reputation in the ‘N Sync boy band, apolitical and therefore a good fit for participants in an Israeli mission. “He doesn’t have the baggage of other celebrities.” He’s “clean cut,” a philanthropist.
Herman, partnering with JFNA’s boycott-fighting arm, Israel Action Network, and the Los Angeles-based, pro-Israel Creative Community for Peace organization, created the mission on short notice; it takes place May 25-29 during the week of Memorial Day, and will include “decent” tickets to the Timberlake concert as well as meetings with a wide range of “up-and-coming” Israelis artists.
“It’s a strictly cultural mission,” Herman said, and the first of its kind for JFNA. It will be limited to 15 participants; registration deadline is the end of next week.
Herman, who also is a video blogger for The Jewish Week and has served as a leader of a dozen Birthright Israel trips, calls “Backstage Israel” the first-such mission with an exclusive focus on the Israeli arts scene. It will take place entirely in Tel Aviv and won’t feature the usual staples of visits to Israel — no Jerusalem, no Masada, no dinner in a Bedouin tent.
By staying only in Tel Aviv, the mission is steering clear of the controversy over the new performance center at Ariel, on the West Bank, which many prominent artists — most notably, singer-actor Theodore Bikel — are boycotting. “The focus of Backstage Israel is connecting participants to Israel and its people through music, culture, arts and education,” Herman said. “We’re not diving into Israeli politics in that way.”
With a leadership development emphasis, Herman hopes it will be an eclectic strike against the BDS movement; it is likely, he said, to attract members of the arts community who are not active members of the pro-Israel advocacy network. Artists and musicians have typically ranked as sympathetic to the BDS movement.
The schedule will include a Jerusalem Day concert, a drum circle, a visit to the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music and to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, a meeting with a graffiti artist, get-togethers with dancers from the Batsheva Dance Company and young Israeli artists in their studios.
If the mission generates sufficient interest, JFNA may consider future ones that will coincide with Israeli performances of other superstars, Herman said. Beyonce, he said, is said to be coming to Israel this summer, but in a sign of how fraught these performances can be, the website Electronic Intifada cites a tweet from the singer’s representative saying the rumors are false.
The cost of Backstage Israel is $2,089, single supplement $2,634. For information: (212)284-6991; aaron.herman@jewishfederations.org.
NEW YORK
Upper West Side To Celebrate Israel
Three days of programming this week with wide communal cooperation.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Arts and crafts with Israeli flavor are part of Israel celebration at Upper West Side locations. Courtesy of JCC in Manhattan
Following up on last year’s inaugural success, 35 synagogues, schools and Jewish organizations are sponsoring a variety of events on the Upper West Side this Sunday, May 4 through Tuesday, May 6, culminating with a party by the shore of the Hudson River from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday at the West 79th Street Boat Basin Café at Riverside Park.
Tuesday is Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, and the idea is to transform the Hudson Shore into a kind of Tel Aviv Tayelet, or promenade, where Israelis come to celebrate Shabbat, festivals and other happy occasions.
In all, more than 30 programs are planned, and include song, dance and storytelling for children, an indoor cycling ride, films, lectures, a culinary demonstration, a street fair and a scavenger hunt. They are being convened by the JCC in Manhattan in collaboration with and funded by UJA-Federation of New York.
The Sunday and Monday events are free and open to the public, though pre-registration is strongly encouraged (www.uwsisrael.org for registration and details on programs).
Ayelet Cohen, the lead programmer at the JCC in Manhattan for this event, said she has been “inspired” by the level of cooperation among the synagogues (of every denomination) and other groups, who have been working on this project for months.
“The people involved are coming to this with great openness and a great sense of community participation,” she said, adding that the projects “explore different aspects of Israel intellectually, spiritually and pure fun.”
Cohen said the concept for the event came from Rabbi Rolando Matalon of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, who grew up in Argentina, where the Jewish community marked Yom Ha’Atzmaut as a major holiday.
UJA-Federation here offered $150,000 in grants to the participating groups, encouraging them to “dream big,” Cohen said. She noted that “too often in Jewish institutions we have to do the opposite,” cutting back on plans to stay within budget.
“The idea was to come up with projects they couldn’t do on their own,” without the additional financing or manpower provided, she said.
While the planners envision expanding the Israeli Independence Day celebration someday into a citywide event, the Upper West Side was chosen because of its Jewish demographic density, including synagogues, day schools and other institutions based there.
The biggest challenge, Cohen said, was in “dealing with so many partners and wanting everyone to feel invested. These were very different populations with very different relations to Israel.”
She said she realized how few opportunities there are for the whole Jewish community to come together in celebration. (The popular street celebrations on the Upper West Side on the evening of Simchat Torah ended after 9/11 due in part to security concerns.)
More than 5,000 people took part in last year’s celebration. Cohen noted that with more groups participating, and if the weather holds up, she is hopeful the numbers could increase this year.
Gary@jewishweek.org
THEATER
Creating A New, Old Herr Schultz
In Broadway revival of ‘Cabaret,’ veteran actor Danny Burstein ponders the latest iteration of the show’s Jewish character.
Lonnie Firestone
Special To The Jewish Week
Danny Burstein, Linda Emond and Alan Cumming in scene from “Cabaret.” Joan Marcus
The iconic musical, created by Kander and Ebb with book writer Joe Masteroff, offers an intoxicating glimpse into Weimar decadence. The Kit Kat Club’s star performer, Sally Bowles, and her paramour, an American novelist named Cliff, appear to be almost fantastical, offering each other — and the audience — a taste of wish fulfillment. But there is a second narrative in “Cabaret,” a subtler presence that is equally essential to the work. It is the story of a Jewish character, the show’s only one, who personally experiences Germany’s shifting tide.
Herr Schultz, a humble Jewish fruit vendor who quietly and sweetly woos the owner of his boardinghouse, Fraulein Schneider, is a supporting role, yet one could argue that the show’s themes rest on his shoulders. As anti-Semitism builds throughout the narrative, Herr Schultz’s relationship to Fraulein Schneider, a gentile, is increasingly at risk, as is his own security. Carrying this role in the current revival of the musical, which opened last week at Studio 54, is theater veteran Danny Burstein who takes on his 15th Broadway role with this performance.
While this production features the same director, Sam Mendes, and the same co-director/choreographer, Rob Marshall, as the award-sweeping 1998 revival, Burstein asserts that he and his fellow actors have been given ample freedom to explore new dimensions to their characters. “Sam and Rob are genius guys who keep adding new things,” Burstein tells The Jewish Week in a recent phone interview.
Much of the musical’s aesthetic does follow the 1998 version, including a transformation of Studio 54 into the decadent Kit Kat Club, complete with cabaret tables and colored fringed lamps. But there are new elements to this version, most notably an entirely new cast, save for the emcee, reprised by Alan Cumming.
As Burstein began to envision the character of Herr Schultz, he found himself picturing the Jewish European photographer Roman Vishniac, whom Burstein had met once as a teenager. “I thought about the look I wanted,” he says, “I shaved my hair back and grew a mustache [like Vishniac]. And I wanted Herr Shultz to walk differently. He’s older than I am. I wanted that feel. It’s a guy who works 14 hours a day, so he has a different walk. I like discovering all those little nuances.”
Burstein also found personal resonance in portraying a Jew living in Germany during those turbulent years. Burstein “knew a lot about this particular time anyway” but spent additional time doing research about European Jewry and the ascent of Nazism. “I think anybody who’s Jewish has a natural curiosity and a responsibility to know about it.”
Though, at a certain point, he adds, “I had to stop doing my research because my character is absolutely sure that this will all pass. He can’t know that all that tragedy is going to happen. In fact, he’s positive it’s not going to.”
The narrative of “Cabaret,” based on the play, “I Am a Camera,” which itself was based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel, “Goodbye to Berlin,” shows Herr Schultz’s relationship with Fraulein Schneider blossom until the mounting animosity against Jews threatens his business and his prospects for marrying the woman he loves. Sally Bowles — played in this production by film actress Michelle Williams — may get the heartbreaking musical number near the show’s end, but it is Herr Schultz who experiences Berlin’s dismantling most acutely.
This isn’t the first time Burstein has taken on characters that are guided by their Jewish identity: just last year he played Matt Friedman in Lanford Wilson’s “Talley’s Folly.” The actor admits that what excites him most are characters that are entirely new to him and that “terrify” him when he takes them on. Now a four-time Tony nominee, he has played such varied roles on Broadway as Aldolpho in “The Drowsy Chaperone,” Buddy Plummer in Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies,” the boxing trainer Tokio in Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, and, most famously, Luther Billis in Lincoln Center Theater’s 2008 revival of “South Pacific.”
This past theater season has also provided Burstein with an immersive experience in German characters and their accents. “This has been my German year,” he says. “I had to have a German accent for ‘The Snow Geese’ earlier this season with Mary Louise Parker, and then I went right into ‘Die Fledermaus’ at the Met. And each vocal coach that you work with has a slightly different attitude toward what the German accent should be. Your biggest fear is that you sound like one of the bad characters from ‘Hogan’s Heroes.’”
Beyond the accent and physical characteristics, Burstein, the son of a Jewish father and Costa Rican mother who identifies strongly as a Jew, has worked on illuminating Herr Schultz’s experience as a Jew in the presence of prejudice. A particularly dramatic moment for his character occurs at a party hosted by Herr Schultz and Fraulein Schneider in honor of their engagement. A guest of theirs arrives, and as he removes his overcoat, a Nazi armband is visible on his sleeve.
“Sam [Mendes] is very smart,” Burstein observes. “He doesn’t need big swastikas everywhere to let you know, ‘This is bad.’ It’s just a guy who takes off his overcoat. It’s so smartly written. And so simple. He takes off his coat and he’s wearing that damn armband, and then everything you thought and everything you knew has changed.”
Reflecting on the musical as a whole, Burstein says, “Ultimately, it’s a cautionary tale. Don’t be naïve to the evils around you. Participate and take part in what is going on in your government. Don’t be silent.”
As Burstein sees it, what makes Cabaret, or any show for that matter, a “Jewish” musical is more about the emotions that ripple outward. “It’s the humor,” he says. “It’s the minor keys. It’s just a sound. It’s a longing, a pathos.”
“Cabaret” is playing at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St. For tickets, call (212) 719-1300 or go to cabaretmusical.com.
JEW BY VOICE
Listen Up, Jews
Erica Brown
Erica Brown
We just finished the Maggid, the story of our exodus in the Haggadah. The infinitive “le-hagid” in Hebrew is to tell a story in expository style. Delve into it and speak it from one generation to the next. Three times in Exodus and one time in Deuteronomy do we find the command to tell the story to our children. The sages of the Talmud contrived from this repetition the notion of the “four sons” of our Haggadah. The unnecessary repetition signals the obligation to engage in differentiated learning. Tell it so that no matter whom you are telling it to, the story will feel fresh and relevant. This, of course, demands that we become master storytellers.
This year, reflecting on Passover, I began to think of storytelling a little bit differently. I thought a lot about the noise level of the average seder. It’s great to have a mitzvah to talk because that is a field where Jews excel. Jews love to talk. We can talk until the cows — or the paschal lambs — come home. But the transmission of a story from one generation to the next is more complicated than speaking alone. It requires expert listening. If we do too much talking and don’t pay careful enough attention to what is being said, we won’t have much to offer the next generation in terms of a great story. We’ll end up talking only to ourselves.
Despite the fact that our central prayer, the Shema, translates as “Hear O Israel,” hearing has never been a strong suit for us. Maybe that’s why the prayer reinforces the listening aspect. Just ask professor Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of many well-known books on how we talk. She has written an academic paper on how we talk called “New York Conversational Style,” that, while not limited to the way Jews speak, gives us a lot of attention. Friends, it ain’t pretty.
Tannen uses a clutch phrase to describe Jews interrupting each other in conversation. We’re not being rude. We’re merely engaged in “high-involvement cooperative overlapping.” Talking while others continue to speak is common to our use of language. We also use a fast rate of speech and “the avoidance of inter-turn pauses.” This is coupled with abrupt shifts of topic, sudden introduction of new topics and reintroducing a topic with stubborn persistence if others don’t pay attention to it. Oy.
Tannen shows how well intentioned we are when we do this. We are showing interest and enthusiasm in the conversation and demonstrating warmth and engagement. Really? It sounds rude to me. In fact, I’ve been using the Tannen filter for a few weeks now as I observe myself and others in conversation, and I think Tannen was being too nice. What I observe is how often we engage in the Jewish suffering Olympics; your difficulty is just a springboard for me to “see you and raise you” in intensity. You went to the dentist for a cavity? Well, I had a root canal. You had a root canal? Well, I had an infected root canal.
I can never have appropriate compassion for you when I use you to tell you about me. Some people tell me that this describes every date they’ve ever been on.
Tannen says that this form of in-speak works when we speak to others with the same conversational style but can be perceived as pushy and hostile to outsiders. Research on intermarriage also shows that more than spiritual differences, ethnic differences like conversational style can create fissures between couples. In-speak doesn’t really work if we tolerate it only because we don’t know any better. Maybe it’s time to develop greater intolerance for constant interruptions and face the fact that it is just plain rude to speak when someone else is talking. It hurts when we don’t let someone else finish a sentence or a thought. It is a blemish in our own capacity for grace and compassion.
Between Passover and Shavuot, we count the Omer: 49 days from one holiday to the next. Mystics use each day as an opportunity for character development. It is a sacred practice and perhaps one that we can adapt in light of Jewish conversational style. Let’s use this time to redeem ourselves as listeners, to make a personal commitment to let others finish a sentence or two.
I pondered with a friend what would happen if we combined a Passover program at a hotel with a silent retreat. The story of our exodus would not be less meaningful in a whisper. Maybe it would help us really hear it for the first time.
Erica Brown’s most recent book is “Happier Endings: A Meditation on Life and Death” (Simon and Schuster). Subscribe to her weekly Internet essays at ericabrown.com.
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Please check out the newest version of our website ¬ faster and easier to navigate and read ¬ for breaking stories, videos and exclusive blogs, op-eds and features.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
Between the Lines - Gary Rosenblatt
Spotlight On Bloomberg's Jewish Identity
As recipient of first Genesis Prize, ex-mayor expected to open up about his heritage.
Gary Rosenblatt
Gary Rosenblatt
The annual award was created in partnership with the Israeli government through a foundation established by several Russian Jewish oligarchs to honor “exceptional people whose values and achievements will inspire the next generation of Jews.”
Critics questioned why a group of Russian billionaires would choose to give a $1 million award to an American billionaire. Not only did he not need the money (which he announced he was donating to charity), but why choose a 72-year-old man with virtually no public Jewish identity to inspire young Jews?
Bloomberg himself may have had similar reservations. When he was first approached after being chosen from among more than 200 nominees by a blue-ribbon panel of international Jewish leaders, as the result of a sophisticated selection process, he took about a month before agreeing to accept the prize. It called for him to come to Israel in the spring for the award ceremony and agree to a series of outreach meetings in the months ahead with Jewish young people around the world.
Even those most closely associated with the prize are uncertain about the extent and substance of Bloomberg’s involvement as the May 22 date for the award ceremony approaches. It will be held at the Jerusalem Theater, with some 300 prominent guests expected, including Jewish and business leaders from around the world, and a number of Israeli public officials. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present the $1 million award, which Bloomberg has pledged to donate to a cause promoting good works.
Mikhail Fridman, 50, the Ukrainian-Russian businessman whose fortune was assessed recently at more than $17 billion, is a founder of the Russian Jewish Congress as well as of the Genesis Philanthropy Group, which seeks to “develop and enhance a sense of Jewish identity among Russian-speaking Jews worldwide,” according to its website. The group created the Genesis Prize Foundation through an endowment of $100 million.
During a recent visit to New York, Fridman and his associate, Stan Polovets, chair of the prize, spoke about their hopes and goals for the award, and explained the choice of the first recipient. They defended the selection of Bloomberg despite the fact that neither his former wife nor current partner are Jewish, that his children were not raised as Jews and that he does not speak publicly about his Jewish values.
Like many Jews, Fridman said, the former mayor is “not traditional [in religious observance], but very proud of his Jewish roots and, most importantly, consistently seeking ways to become more engaged with those roots. His Jewish heritage is very much a part of his multifaceted identity, and many Jews around the world can relate to that.”
Polovets noted that Bloomberg is widely admired, by young people and others, as a remarkably successful entrepreneur. “We’re not celebrating his wealth but what he is doing with it,” as a major philanthropist “seeking to improve the world” in the areas of health, innovation and social justice, and serving as mayor of New York for 12 years at a salary of $1 a year.
Bloomberg, in his statement on being named winner of the prize last fall, said his parents instilled in him “Jewish values and ethics that I have carried with me throughout my life, and which have guided my work in business, government and philanthropy.” He said the Genesis Prize “embraces and promotes those same values — a common thread among Jewish people worldwide that has helped move humankind forward for centuries.”
He is expected to elaborate on those and other Jewish connections in his acceptance speech later this month and in a variety of subsequent appearances in connection with the award.
Fridman was not directly involved in the election process that chose Bloomberg. The selection and prize committees included such luminaries as Elie Wiesel, Lord Jonathan Sacks, Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein and former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Meir Shamgar. But it seems clear that Fridman identifies with someone like Bloomberg since he himself is a self-made businessman of great wealth who, though far from Jewish observance — he grew up in Lvov with little knowledge of his faith, and neither of his two wives is Jewish — is proud of his heritage.
He spoke with personal conviction of how his two daughters have accompanied him on a trip to Auschwitz, and noted that one of them in particular has become increasingly interested in Jewish life.
“I want them to make their own choice,” he said, “and I firmly believe that Jewishness is not just about blood but is a mindset.” Fridman stressed the importance of making a conscious decision about one’s Jewishness, based on an understanding of Judaism’s “philosophy, tradition and principles before saying ‘I am a Jew.’”
He said the findings of the Pew Research Center report on American Jewish identity were “awful, and confirmed what I felt, that assimilation is our No. 1 challenge.”
That’s especially true, he said, for Russian-speaking Jews, many of whom grew up without a Jewish education or feeling of connection to their heritage. The Genesis programs — through the foundation and the prize — are focused on instilling pride as well as Jewish knowledge in the next generation of Jews around the world, he emphasized.
“This is not just about wealthy people giving $1 million to another wealthy person,” Fridman said of the prize. “We would like Mayor Bloomberg to widely promote the message” on his Jewish connections and values, “and we don’t expect his engagement to end after a year.”
Fridman said he hopes that a decade from now, there will be 10 “exceptional people” named prize laureates, committed in their support for Israel and having publicly “defined their relationship to Jewish values — modern-day Jewish heroes.”
For now, though, attention will focus on the first laureate and how he transmits his Jewish beliefs as he navigates the new course of his post-political life.
Gary@jewishweek.org
NEWS and FEATURES
More than 2,000 students at Palladium woke up to find fake eviction notices. Miriam Lichtenberg/JW
NYU Calls For Probe Following 'Flier-Gate'
Process of 'restorative justice' in wake of fake 'eviction' notices distributed by Palestinian students.
Amy Sara Clark and Miriam Lichtenberg
More than 2,000 students at Palladium woke up to find fake eviction notices. Miriam Lichtenberg/JW
Now dubbed “Flier-Gate,” the middle-of-the-night stealth action on April 23 consisted of members of the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine slipping more than 2,000 fliers under students’ doors at Palladium and Lafayette halls to draw attention to “one of the many horrific aspects of the occupation that Palestinians face daily.”
“We regret to inform you that your suite is scheduled for demolition in three days,” the flyer reads. “If you do not vacate the premise by midnight on 25 April, 2014 we reserve the right to destroy all remaining belongings. … Charges for demolition will be applied to your student accounts.
“Eviction notices are routinely given to Palestinian families living under Israeli occupation for no other reason than their ethnicity. … Palestinian homes are destroyed as part of the state of Israel’s ongoing attempts to ethnically cleanse the region of its Arab inhabitants and maintain an exclusively ‘Jewish’ character of the state. By destroying Palestinian homes, the state makes room for illegal Israeli settlements. The Israeli government itself describes the process as ‘Judaization,’ it continues.
It concludes, “This is not a real eviction notice. This is intended to draw attention to the reality that Palestinians confront on a regular basis.”
NYU SPJ did not put its name on the fliers, but posted a statement on its website the following day accepting responsibility and calling the action a protest that “addresses only one of the many horrific aspects of the occupation that Palestinians face daily.
In response TorchPAC, NYU’s pro-Israel advocacy group, started a Charge.org petition asking NYU President John Sexton to “take firm action” to the school’s chapter of SPJ for “incitement on campus.” As of Tuesday morning, the petition had 361 signatures.
In parallel, SJP started two petitions of its own. One, on Change.org asks for support of the group’s mission. As of 3:20 Wednesday it had 1,046 signatures.
The second asks NYU faculty to support SJP’s distribution of mock eviction notices as an act of free speech and says there’s no evidence of “hate speech” or that the group targeted “a specific religious group.” It asks the NYU administration not to take “disciplinary action” and to “respond vigorously to the tendentious allegations” that the action targeted Jewish students.
An SJP member said the group collected these signatures via e-mail and a post on SJP’s website lists 91 professors as signing on.
Asked what action the university planned to take, NYU spokesman John Beckman told The Jewish Week via email that the action violated the school’s rules and would be investigated.
“NYU encourages free speech and the free exchange of ideas, but our hope is that the discourse — including debate on controversial issues — will be conducted maturely and in a way meant to elicit thoughtful discussion rather than simply provoke,” the email said.
“Leafleting of the type that took place last week — anonymously slipping a flyer titled ‘eviction notice’ under doors at night — is against our rules, is an intrusion into privacy of students’ rooms, and is inconsistent with our expectations for how discourse should be conducted here, as it does not allow for any real exchange of ideas.”
Beckman said that the school’s “Student Affairs Division is looking into this as a judicial matter — determining whether the focus should be on individuals, on the student organization, or both — and will be following up appropriately.
“Additionally, NYU is unusual, we believe, in recognizing years ago that a culture of meaningful dialogue on Middle East politics cannot simply be expected, but it can be fostered. Therefore, among other steps, through the process known as ‘restorative justice,’ we will bring together the parties to work together under the direction of our Muslim and Jewish chaplains, as well as trained moderators, to reverse the cycle from negative to affirmative exchanges.”
Originally the media, including this publication, erroneously reported that the flyering took place only at Palladium Hall and that the dorm was known for having a large Jewish population. But NYU officials refuted the claim, saying in a statement that they “don’t believe there is perception of this dorm as having an a high percentage of Jewish students.” They said Palladium Hall’s Shabbat elevator was there not because of a large concentration of Jewish students, but because there is no stairway accessible on Shabbat for the observant students who do live there. NYU’s kosher cafeteria is located in Weinstein Hall.
Jewish students responded to the flyering with a wide range of responses that included “afraid, outraged and mildly annoyed,” Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, executive director of the Skirball Center, NYU’s Hillel told The Jewish Week in an interview.
A Jewish student who fell into the mildly annoyed category, texted a Jewish Week reporter that he had “heard of things like this happening at other schools, but I guess I never imagined seeing it under my own door. I was more surprised than anything. Although I was also irritated because I feel like what is being stated is dramatically generalized and mostly erroneous.”
An NYU alumna, whose daughter is planning to live in Palladium Hall in the fall, said the action had made her and other parents both angry and afraid.
“We are scared for our children’s safety. … I’m livid. This was done in the middle of the night, the cowards. This is NYU, NYU. It’s unbelievable,” she told The Jewish Week, asking to remain anonymous to protect her daughter’s privacy.
Sarna fell into the outraged group “I was very upset by the content of the flier,” he told the Jewish Week in an interview this week. “Three days before Yom HaShoah, to accuse the only Jewish state in the world of ethnic cleaning is an outrage.”
He also contested SPJ’s tactics, saying the group shouldn’t “take it out on students in their own living space, but to find a substantive way to address it.
“In order for a university to function there must be spaces that are nonpoliticized and that includes where students live and where they eat. … To take something important and reduce it to a move like this, I think it does the issue injustice,” he said.
Rabbi Sarna will be one of the moderators of the restorative justice process. He has a long history of building bridges between Jews and Muslims and founded the Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership with Imam Khalid Latif, NYU’s Muslim chaplain (and Chelsea Clinton).
He remembers the 2002 “Netanyahu riot,” at Concordia University, which happened while his brother was president of the campus Hillel there. A protest against a speech by the Israeli leader disintegrated into melee that included a Holocaust survivor being kicked in the groin and a rabbi being spat and riot police dousing the crowd with pepper spray.
“I know what it’s like for a campus to descend to total chaos,” he said.
“Anytime there is a conflict like this there can either be a spiral up or a spiral downwards,” he said. “What we want students to do is rather than resorting to stunts and slogans is to be able to hear each other out and hear each other’s views substantively. To me it’s about controlling the spiral.”
Neither SPJ’s national organization or local chapter responded to requests for interviews.
This story was updated April 30 to include SJP's two petitions.
Food and Wine
"Recipes Remembered" by June Feiss Hersh.
Recipes With A Dark Past
Holocaust-related cookbooks tell tragic stories through food.
Amy Spiro - Jewish Week Online Columnists
Tabrys doesn’t often talk about her experiences during the Holocaust, but she spoke to June Feiss Hersh about her memories for the 2011 book “Recipes Remembered: A Celebration of Survival.”
“One of the things that kept me going during the war were memories of my family, and so many of those revolved around family gatherings and food,” Tabrys told Hersh. “We would remind ourselves of the simplest things that we ate at home, especially during the holidays…I can still taste the sweet blintzes that my mother would make. Those memories came with me to America and those are the recipes I still lovingly prepare today.”
Tabrys also shared her recipe for sweet and creamy cheese blintzes in the book, which includes the stories of more than 80 survivors and more than 170 of their recipes. Hersh published the book in conjunction with The Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan, which also receives all the proceeds from sales.
It is a somewhat jarring juxtaposition—recipes alongside stories of starvation and terror—but Hersh is not alone with her project. There are now a handful of books that seek to retell the stories of the darkest chapter in Jewish history through the common bond of food. Joanne Caras published the “Holocaust Survivor Cookbook” in 2007, and followed it up with a second volume, “Miracles and Meals,” in 2012. And in 1996 Cara de Silva edited “In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin,” a collection of handwritten notes and recipes written down by women in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The books are all remarkably different, with unique backstories, compositions and tones. Hersh’s is undeniably a cookbook, with tested recipes ready for any kitchen. “In Memory’s Kitchen” is a jarring historical document, revealing more about the lives of the women in Theresienstadt than it does any culinary heritage. And Joanne Caras skirts that line, offering ostensibly workable recipes from survivors that she did not edit or change.
But what all three books have in common are the memories of better times with family and community, cherished dishes passed down from generation to generation, and almost wiped out by Nazis.
“It’s not a Holocaust cookbook, it’s a cookbook about those who have survived the Holocaust,” Hersh said of “Recipes Remembered.” “These are people who lived through a tragic time, but they are not tragic people and so their food is joyful and it’s uplifting…it’s the ultimate comfort food. This is an effort to preserve the food memories of a community.”
Even the women of Theresienstadt, deprived not only of food but also the ability to provide for themselves and their families, wrote down their recipes “as a form of psychological resistance,” de Silva said. “The whole book is an amazing testament to the power of food to sustain people, not just physically, but also spiritually.”
Today, the recipes from those lost communities sustain so many more.
“I’m not the child or grandchild of survivors,” Hersh told The Jewish Week, “but I do feel like I gained 80 additional grandparents—that their traditions, their foods and their heritages have become a part of my personal history.”
Hersh spent a year interviewing survivors and learning their stories before requesting a treasured family recipe to print alongside. The author tested all the recipes so that they would be “easy to replicate, clear, concise and representative of what they wanted to convey.”
The book is organized by geographical region. Lily Margules, a concentration camp survivor from Poland who lost both her father and her aunt in the Holocaust, shared a recipe for Tsimmes Chicken with Prunes. Evelyn Pike Rubin, who escaped Germany for Shanghai in 1939, gave Hersh her recipe for Sweet Summer Peach Cake.
“In its heart it’s a cookbook, but in its soul it’s a storybook,” Hersh said.
The book is now in its fifth printing and has sold more than 20,000 copies. With each printing, Hersh said, she updated the pages of those survivors who have passed away since the book’s publication.
Joanne Caras with her two books.
When she returned to the U.S., gung-ho about her project, Caras asked the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to send out an email requesting submissions, and sent notes to Jewish publications around the country.
“Six months went by and I didn’t get one story,” Caras recalled. She said she was close to giving up, and felt that “people don’t want to talk about food and the Holocaust.” But her mother convinced her to stick with it, “so I kept asking and asking and eventually they started to come in the mail in handwritten letters, and then they started to come via email, and then we’d get phone calls.”
Eventually, Caras self-published the first book with 129 stories and 250 recipes contributed by survivors and their families from the U.S., Israel, Canada and even New Zealand, South Africa and South America. To date the books have raised $275,000 for Carmei Ha’ir, and Caras has traveled to more than 250 cities around the world to talk about it.
The recipes range widely, from traditional eastern European dishes like mandelbread, chicken paprikash and gefilte fish to more modern takes, including those with ingredients like onion soup mix, pareve cream and store-bought piecrusts.
“I did ask them for family recipes if they had them,” said Caras, “but some of these young children” left their native countries at such a young age that they had few recipes from their parents and grandparents. So Caras also accepted recipes that spoke to the survivors’ newly adopted countries, or those they loved to make for their children and grandchildren, she said.
Caras didn’t edit or test any of the recipes, which garnered some criticism from readers, but she stands by the decision.
“We took these recipes exactly how they were given to us,” she said. “Some of them say gefilte fish—put it in a bathtub. Some will say a bissel of this [Yiddish for a little]. I didn’t want to change them because this was our history, this was the way this recipe was given from a parent or grandparent to the child.”
"In Memory's Kitchen" by Cara De Silva.
“To alter the recipes would be to violate history and to misrepresent the experiences of the women who produced them,” she wrote in the introduction to the book.
Female prisoners in Theresienstadt concentration camp wrote the original manuscript in the 1940s. Its primary author, Mina Pachter, died there in 1944, but not before she gave the handwritten manuscript to a friend, and asked him to get it to her daughter in Palestine. It took 25 years and changed many hands before it arrived on the doorstep of her daughter, Anny Stern, in New York. And it was many years after that before the book came into the public eye, when it was published in 1996 in a volume edited by de Silva, a journalist and food historian. Even close to 20 years later, de Silva said, the book is “eternally on my mind.”
Although the women wrote down their cherished recipes, this “was not a manuscript that was really meant for cooking, it was not a regular cookbook—no matter what the women thought,” de Silva said. If one were to cook from the book, she said, “it would have to be done with profound understanding of the circumstances under which these [recipes] were recorded.”
After the book was first published, de Silva held a gathering to commemorate it, featuring adaptations of the book’s recipes cooked by chef Rozanne Gold.
“The feeling that I was tasting the food of their dreams was profoundly overwhelming and moving,” de Silva said, “because it was the materialization of something they could only dream and remember. We were celebrating them by celebrating their food.”
For a recipe for cheese blintzes from "Recipes Remembered," click here. For a recipe for sweet and sour tongue from "The Holocaust Survivor Cookbook," click here.
Travel - Travel Strategies
Exchanges with fellow travelers are among the more indelible imprints of travel. Wikimedia Commons
In The Hot Seat
Hilary Larson - Travel Writer
Exchanges with fellow travelers are among the more indelible imprints of travel. Wikimedia Commons
“
“Are you Jewish?” my seatmate asked me about five minutes into the Amtrak ride from New York to Philadelphia.The question might strike some as unnervingly direct, but New Yorkers are famous for that. And it was far from the most personal question I’ve been asked by someone I’ve known for less time than it takes to make coffee — someone with whom the only apparent connection is a passenger fare.
But that’s the magic of travel: It creates a kind of spontaneous intimacy between erstwhile strangers. You could call it false intimacy, but that isn’t exactly right. The experience of moving from one environment to another is intense in a way that heightens one’s awareness, amplifying fears and sensations: loss, yearning, anticipation. It isn’t your everyday reality, but it’s real nonetheless.
Anyone who has traveled can recall at least one or two particularly memorable seatmates on a train, airplane or subway car — perhaps a conversation that lingers. To the cliché that the journey is an end in itself, I would add that exchanges with fellow travelers are among the more indelible imprints of travel.
The woman on Amtrak confessed all the shopping she’d done while in New York for a three-day conference. She had shopped the Friends & Family sale at Lord & Taylor, Friends & Family at Bloomingdales, and was now headed to Philadelphia to take her daughter to — you guessed it — Friends & Family at Saks.
“I have an awful lot of friends and family,” she said, gesturing ruefully at her overstuffed suitcases.
And so I attempted to assuage her feelings by sharing my own retail-therapy story. How, while I was undergoing hypnosis for a painful medical condition, and the hypnotist would talk me through a visualization exercise in which I would peacefully descend a long, long flight of stairs, I would, every time, imagine myself descending the escalator at Bloomingdale’s, down to the old Forty Carrots. That, apparently, is Jewish hypnosis.
On a cross-country bus trip 20 years ago, I sat through Indiana next to a man who was traveling from Terre Haute. I was fresh off a high school French education (at what other age would a cross-country bus trip be tolerable?), so I was fascinated by his drawling Americanized pronunciation of Terre Haute, with the emphatic H, and by his rationale for leaving home. “Too much partyin’,” he explained, again and again. “Too much partyin’.”
It took a bit more growing up before I figured out what kind of parties (ok, those with questionable sustances) might prompt a one-way bus ride out of Terre Haute. In the years since, chance conversations with seatmates have frequently eased the journey with a shared cab ride, a hotel tip or a serendipitous recommendation. On a ferry to Rhode Island once, I got the name of what turned out to be a terrific immigration lawyer.
Even those who are otherwise disinclined to chat with strangers might succumb to the lure of conversation after hours trapped in a vessel, generally without Internet access. The magazine gets tiresome; the in-flight movie, predictable. Far more exciting is the reality that each traveler has a unique story, a unique reason for landing on the vehicle in question, and therefore a built-in premise for starting up a conversation.
Some, like my recent seatmates returning from a week of camping at the Grand Canyon, were en route from a new place. Others, like my companion from Terre Haute, are en route to a new life.
On a 10-person flight from London to Aberdeen years ago, I confided in my neighbors about how nervous I was to meet a man who was waiting for me. They learned how we’d met, how our correspondence had unfolded, how I had anxiety about what to wear for our reunion. By the time I stepped off the plane to where he waited with a rose, a planeful of friendly strangers watched, cheering, from the windows.
It’s not uncommon, while traveling, to hear a person’s life story and still not know his first name. Sometimes we exchange contact information, though more often than not this is a pretense, an acknowledgement of the pleasure we’ve shared rather than the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
On a flight to Barcelona, I sat next to two poet brothers from Madrid and the Latin American wife of one of them, a lively, restless spirit clearly starved for female companionship. The discussion went from Borges to Garcia Lorca to Cervantes over rounds of red wine.
“We hold literary salons in Madrid every weekend,” my new friend announced, passing me a card with their address. “Come stay on our sofa. After all, we Americans have to stick together.”
I lost the card along with my wallet two weeks later. In all honesty I probably wouldn’t have called; it would have felt weird to show up on their sofa out of the blue, picking up a conversation that had run its course aloft.
Still, years later, I remember those Spanish poets and that restless Argentine bride, souvenirs of an otherwise routine passage.
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