The New York Jewish Week: Connecting the World with Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opnions "Hogwarts, Flatbush, Babka" for Friday, 19 December 2014
Dear Reader, One of the most popular articles on our website this week was inspired by Harry Potter J.K. Rowling's statement over Twitter that there are Jewish students at Hogwarts. Jewish Week staff writer Hannah Dreyfus and graphics expert Chuck Rosenthal ran with it, creating a series of portraits imagining what Harry Potter's world would look like, a bit more Jewish. Read more...
For Jewish wizards attending Hogwarts, these will be right up your Diagon alley.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
After J.K. Rowling's announcement yesterday on Twitter that Hogwarts' Jewish student population is alive and well, we've created a couple of memes that only a true Jewish wizard would understand. Anthony Goldstein--these are for you.
Readers have also been interested in staff writer Steve Lipman's celebration of the East Midwood Jewish Center, a Conservative shul in the fervently Orthodox Flatbush section of Brooklyn. EMJC has a new rabbi and a group of young members determined to grow their synagogue. Read more...
East Midwood Jewish Center, a demographic anomaly, marks 90 years, and a change on the pulpit.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Members of the East Midwood Jewish Center celebrated the synagogue’s 90th anniversary Sunday in the sanctuary. Jeremy Gordon
Last Sundy was a big day for one synagogue in Flatbush.
In the Regency Room of the East Midwood Jewish Center was a family Chanukah party that more than 100 people attended. Afterwards, in the elegant and soaring sanctuary, more than 200 people celebrated the installation of the congregation’s new rabbi and celebrated the shul’s 90th anniversary. There were speeches and singing, prayers and members’ reminiscences, and a cocktail reception in the ballroom.
Sunday was also a symbolic day for the East Midwood Jewish Center, or EMJC, the only remaining Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, and one of the few in the entire borough.
In recent decades, Flatbush’s Jewish community has become increasingly Orthodox, and several Conservative congregations have closed their doors. Others have merged in an effort to save money and preserve their denominational identity.
“We’re still operating,” said Rabbi Alvin Kass, who became EMJC’s emeritus spiritual leader earlier this year after serving there for 36 years. (At 78, Rabbi Kass is still chief chaplain of the New York City Police Department. “Retirement? I don’t know of such a word,” he said).
He can list several nearby Conservative synagogues that have folded during his tenure while EMJC has stayed open — albeit with a diminishing membership.
“What we have accomplished is in a way extraordinary,” Rabbi Kass said.
EMJC now has some 250 households on its membership roster, about a quarter of its peak about two generations ago. But the members and supporters who came Sunday saw the results of extensive renovations throughout the 85-year-old domed Renaissance Revival building, and heard the success of synagogue leaders who have mounted an effort in recent years to enter the social media era.
To balance the budget, the congregation rents out space to karate and gymnastic programs, an independent day school and a Protestant church, which holds services there. The onsite gym and swimming pool also bring in money. “We have people in all the time,” said Toby Sanchez, EMJC’s co-president and historian.
She noted that each merger brought in both new members and active, often younger, leaders.
To attract young, progressive-minded people, two decades ago the congregation opened its worship services to women in the egalitarian fashion that now characterizes most of Conservative Judaism, and subsequently has added activities like Room J, a program for families with young children, and a monthly “Shabbat-a-Bim-Bom,” a musical, participatory service aimed at young families. To spread the word, the congregation uses Facebook, various listservs and weekly email blasts.
“We have younger members who are working very hard at that. We inherited the spirit of the founders,” a handful of residents of the then-undeveloped area of Brooklyn who established a congregation that was part of the synagogue-center movement of the 1920s, said Sanchez. “They were go-getters.”
Rabbi Matt Carl, who was installed as the synagogue’s spiritual leader on Sunday, said the online efforts are a means to an end.
“Social media is a tool,” he said.
Rabbi Carl, who earlier served at the Battery Park Synagogue and as director of community development and engagement at Hazon, called his decision to come to the Flatbush congregation a vote of confidence in its future. “The shul is growing. Slowly, but it is growing,” he said in an email interview. “We’re growing larger and younger.”
The latter was reflected in the dozens of children at Sunday’s Chanukah party.
Sanchez agreed that the synagogue is up the upswing. “We’re not a dying shul,” she said. “Our neighborhood is 50 percent Orthodox. But it’s 50 percent non-Orthodox,” potential members who are not interested in an Orthodox lifestyle.
According to UJA-Federation’s 2011 Jewish Community Study, the Flatbush/Midwood/Kensington area, with a Jewish population of 111,100, “contains one of the highest concentrations of Orthodox Jews (58 percent) alongside the borough’s two largest Orthodox areas, Borough Park (80 percent Orthodox) and Williamsburg (82 percent Orthodox).”
“On a one-to-one level, there is a warm relationship between our members and their Orthodox neighbors,” Rabbi Kass said.” “There are many Orthodox Jews who use our physical facilities.”
“They would swim with us, but they wouldn’t daven with us,” he said.
Over the last three-plus decades, three local Conservative congregations have merged into the EMJC.
“We benefited from the influx of cash and new members from each merger,” Sanchez added later via email. “These mergers took place in 1980 (Shaare Torah), 1990 (Progressive Shaare Zedek), 2000 (Jewish Communal Center of Flatbush
To finance expensive repairs on the building’s dome, stained-glass windows and other out-of-repair features, the synagogue has launched fundraising campaigns, receiving money from the New York Landmarks Conservatory and the state’s Environmental Protection Fund.
The congregation is an example of a forward-thinking Conservative synagogue, which has presented a vision of involvement with the wider Jewish community outside the synagogue’s walls, said Rabbi Steven Wernick, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
Members have participated in the movement’s leadership training programs, and the shul has offered job-finding programs for the unemployed and under-employed. “This is an example of a synagogue that has good leadership. This is a synagogue that seems to be thinking strategically, asking the right questions” about members’ “personal journeys,” he said.
While the old Jewish Center model has not served as a draw to many young Jews, in the opinion of Jeffrey Gurock, professor of American Jewish history at Yeshiva University, EMJC is an example of a congregation that creatively presents a 2014-style version of the nine-decades-old, everything-under-one-roof philosophy.
In an effort to attract increasingly disenchanted Jewish youth then, synagogues offered athletic facilities and social events that buttressed a congregation’s spiritual activities. The so-called “shul with a pool.”
In addition to its pool, EMJC has a gymnasium and kitchens.
“In 1875 … the American synagogue was little more than a worship hall with a few dark and dingy classrooms in its basement,” David Kaufman notes in “Shul with a Pool: The ‘Synagogue-Center’ in American Jewish History” (University Press of New England, 1999). “By 1925, the complex synagogue-center had become the leading trend in modern Jewish life.”
This was especially evident in Brooklyn, then home to the city’s largest Jewish population. “The very act of settling a new area gave rise to the synagogue-center concept. The first Jews in such a new neighborhood soon felt the need for either a religious congregation (as in the case of the Ocean Parkway Jewish Center) or a Hebrew school for their children (as in the case of the East Midwood Jewish Center).”
Over the years, the synagogue ranks have included such notables as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (member), author-talk show host Dennis Prager (Hebrew school teacher), and composer Sholom Secunda (music director and choir conductor).
Rabbi Kass said he is optimistic for the congregation’s future — the population of Brooklyn is growing, but in-demand neighborhoods like Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights are rapidly becoming too expensive for young families. Rents and home prices are less expensive in the synagogue’s area, he said. Flatbush “will be rediscovered.”
Sunday’s celebrations will not be the last at the East Midwood Jewish Center, Sanchez said. “We have not disappeared. We are not going to disappear.”
We're in the heart of Chanukah, typically a time of indulgence, and we have an article that will help you. A group of devoted eaters gathered together to taste test the city's babka's. Tough work, but ... Read more...
Babka Love Is Blind, In This Taste Test
Babka love is blind. Rabbi Debbie Prinz/JW
Ha shanah ha'baah, b'babka. Say it, sister.
Rabbi Debbie Prinz
Special To The Jewish Week
Six babkas. Eight people. On November 2, while New York City marathoners ran off loads of calories, a group of eight babka-minded foodies gathered in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, to mount a counter-marathon, a chocolate babka tasting. The participants timed the contest to give themselves sufficient lead time to base their Chanukah babka purchase decisions on the results, and now you can, too.
Just as the NYC Marathan encompassed the city, the samplers gathered loaves from the Upper East Side (Eli’s & Fairway at 86th), from Union Square (Breads Bakery), from the East Village (Zucker Bakery), from Gowanus (Lily’s Bake Shoppe brand at Whole Foods) and from Williamsburg (Oneg Heimishe Bakery). The scouts collected the loaves fresh that morning, squeezing in a bit of exercise before the real contest. Master planner Amy Rothberger prepared for the contest throughout the prior year, tracking babka bakeshops and reviews in a zaftig spread sheet.
“Babka is labor intensive to make yourself. In a city with so many notable babka bakeries, all purporting to be the best, a babka tasting seemed inevitable,” she explained. Only chocolate could qualify, since that would be the most delicious; cinnamon and other fillings just didn't make the cut. Contest categories included: Chocolatey-ness, Gooey-ness, Appearance, Texture, Slice-ability and Overall.
The top three:
1. Oneg Heimishe Bakery: The best traditional and most chocolatey (sold at $6.99 a pound). As one taster noted, “Everything a babka should be.” The babka is certified pareve by the Central Rabbinical Congress of the U.S.A. and Canada.
2. Breads Bakery: The best “new school artisanal babka.” Can be shipped nationwide. Baked three times a day. ($12.99 a loaf) Breads is not under kosher supervision.
3. Lily’s Bake Shoppe: The best “dark horse” budget babka at $6.99 a loaf. Certified OU Pareve.
Along the way we learned the differences between babka, kokosh, krantz, all variations on a theme. The flatter version, kokosh, which means chocolate in Hungarian, is not braided. If you shop around for babka in Israel, it is best to ask for krantz, which means crown. My husband, Rabbi Mark Hurvitz, reminds me that in his family this treat was called “rotten cake’ and the more “rotten” or full of chocolate, the better. In Tokyo, babka is sold from closed museum cases. Should you wish to try baking your own version, many recipes may be found on line.
Full disclosure: I sampled as well. Between mouthfuls people mused: “Do you think raisins are ok?” “Hmm, this seems to be barely babka.” “I think this one is a waste of calories.” “Look at that pretty braiding.” “That one’s a monster.” Asked how she felt after the tasting, Rothberger confessed to being extremely full and wanted to drink only seltzer. The six critics hit the wall at the end and could not finish the eight babkas. Leftovers were shared with friends, some of whom had never tasted babka before. Rothberger still has a babka bounty in her freezer waiting its reincarnation as French toast.
Master chef and author, Yotam Ottolenghi, spoke about food of the diaspora not long ago in terms of “survival of the fittest,” meaning only the best dishes from each cultural background in Israel survive. He also commanded us to, "Keep the babka." We will, Yotam, we will.
Ha shanah, ha'baah, b'babka, or, next year, in babka. It's impossible to gather a sample of each babka available in New York City, so we will have to schedule Babka Tasting: The Sequel.
Further fun babka facts:
1. Many of the city's babkas are baked by Green’s Bakery, then repackaged and distributed. Owned by Joseph Ackerman, Green’s supplies Dean & Deluca, Katz’s, Russ and Daughters, Wegmans, Whole Foods and others.
2. Over 3,000 pareve, handbraided babkas pop out of the ovens at Green's each day, based on the recipe from Hungary that Ackerman’s mother-in-law, Chana Green, used.
3. Oneg Heimeshe Bakery in Williamsburg recipe is also Hungarian; they use a Dutch chocolate mixed with sugar to fold into its mammoth babka. Lines get longer closer to Shabbat, so time your visit carefully.
4. Don’t try to buy Heimsche's babka in the summertime since the bakery closes and relocates to Monticello, New York.
5. In 2013, New York Magazine named Breads Bakery the “Best Chocolate Babka” in New York. Israeli-born chef Uri Scheft, whose parents emigrated from Denmark, opened his first Tel Aviv bakery over 10 years ago.
6. To learn how to make the best babka, Scheft hired a retired baker to train him. His ingredients in the shop on 16th Street include cultured butter from France and Cacao Barry chocolate mixed with Nutella in a brioche dough. He crusts the top with sugar syrup.
And if you're a theater buff, consider this revival of a fin-de-siecle English version of a Yiddish play about a young girl's violent, difficult coming of age. It's closing on Sunday.Read more...
Jane Cortney as Mir’l. Courtesy New Worlds Theater Project. Hunter Canning
“On the Other Side of the River” opens promisingly: eerie bell-like music plays softly, and the set, three flats covered with stiffened, rippling gray gauze, seems to suggest a cave receding in the distance – until the lights come up, transforming them into a river, in a beautiful union of lighting and scenic design.
Peretz Hirshbein wrote his first play in Yiddish around 1906. It is translated into English by Ellen Perecman for New Worlds Theater Project, a company devoted to bringing new life to neglected Yiddish plays of the 20th century.
It’s night. A grandfather and his granddaughter, Mir’l, listen to the river rising in a storm – the same river that carried away Mir’l’s father the night that she was born, the night on which her mother died. With this many parents lost in one night, one begins to worry. Mir’l wears a protective amulet, but it’s lost in the flood. Their little house is flooded, and they seek higher ground. At the end of the first act, the grandfather has frozen to death.
The second act shows Mir’l’s meeting with a handsome stranger who clasps her to him for warmth, saving both their lives. He tells her tales of palaces covered with jewels, and disappears in the morning. In the third act, Mir’l is alienated from her grandmother; she has been given another amulet which she tears off herself. She moans about seeing her grandfather’s blind eyes and missing the handsome stranger. When the river threatens to flood again she seems to hear him, and, expecting to be reunited with him, she throws herself in the river.
Obviously this play frustrates any wish for coherent narrative. The largest element is the river, and its first audience in Odessa in 1908 would have remembered overwhelming surges of violence: the pogroms of 1905 and 1906 had killed as many as 1000 Jewish Odessans. Perhaps, then, there is an element of recollection in the river’s force. Mir’l, however, though she is tossed about by the river, manages her own destruction, and throws her life away with a spooky joyfulness that is both irritating and frustrating. Like the young bride in S. An-Sky’s “Dybbuk” of six years later, she seems haunted; but if there is symbolism here, it’s entirely opaque.
She is played with heartfelt conviction by Jane Cortney; David Greenspan is the rather stately blind grandfather, who moves like a mime or a tai-chi instructor; David Arkemagives the Stranger a warm and energetic performance; and Christine Siracusa is the underwritten grandmother. Patrick Rizzotti, Nick Solyom, and Erik T. Lawson designed and composed the scenery, lighting, and sound, the most effective elements of the production.
“On the Other Side of the River” is being performed at New Worlds Theatre Project, at HERE, 145 Sixth Avenue (enter at Dominick Street). The final performance is Sunday, December 21st.
Elizabeth Denlinger curates a collection of rare books and manuscripts at the New York Public Library and is at work on a novel about a boarding school in 1955.
Have a wonderful weekend, readers. Best, Helen Chernikoff Web Editor
The Arts
Christian Bale as Moses in "Exodus: God and Kings. 20TH CENTURY FOX
Freedom Has Its Costs
Ridley Scott's theologically tentative and sluggish 'Exodus: Gods and Kings.' George Robinson - Special To the Jewish Week It is unlikely that anyone could have made a satisfying film out of “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” the Ridley Scott-directed biblical epic that opened last weekend. The script, by four different writers including Steve Zaillian of “Schindler’s List” fame, is a sluggish, unbalanced mess; the first third of the film is an entertaining irrelevance and the most important part of the story is relegated to the last 10 minutes of a long two-and-a-half hours. Despite that, Scott, who made the film in 3-D, keeps the action moving. And make no mistake, this is mainly an action film with a little oddball theology thrown in for respite; the result is brisk enough that one is never bored. But interested? Barely. Engaged? Hardly. Intellectually challenged? C’mon. But never bored. Inevitably, the filmmakers put their own spin on the Exodus-from-Egypt backstory, which is their privilege. When the rabbis do it, we call it midrash. The Torah isn’t a 19th-century novel; it’s not long on psychological motivation or introspection, and for modern readers/viewers the desire to fill in those gaps is probably inevitable. While most people, when told that Scott would be making the film, might have thought he was a logical choice because of his practiced hand with big set-piece period films like “Gladiator,” “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Robin Hood,” the really interesting element of the match of director and subject is Scott’s affinity for deracinated, dispossessed and homeless protagonists, buffeted by historical (and trans-historical) forces that they cannot understand. From Ripley in “Alien” to Moses in the new film, Scott’s central characters are either rootless wanderers or will be within a few minutes of the film’s opening. As played by the perpetually dour Christian Bale, Moses is another in this long line; he’s a prince of Egypt sort of by adoption, a man who has risen through his prowess, perspicacity and appetite for battle. But he is a man whose past is obscured and whose ostensible family ties turn out to be spurious. Bale does best with the early part of the film, bringing a certain dry wit and undeniable swagger to the princely Moses. Unfortunately, as he becomes increasingly entangled in the struggles of the Hebrews, the actor reverts to his tried-and-true scowling self and, regrettably, the audience must experience the transition as a loss rather than an elevation. By contrast, Joel Edgerton’s Pharaoh Ramses is perpetually uncertain, hounded by self-doubt and an almost palpable loathing for fleshly things. When the plagues hit Egypt, Ramses clearly becomes a man appalled by the sheer ickiness of things like boils, frogs and locusts. If you’re going to make a film that follows the source material even minimally, the Exodus story presents a massive structural problem: the supposed hero, Moses, is more the bearer of really bad tidings than an active cause of the downfall of the Egyptians. With an actor as iconic as Charlton Heston (and a script as reverentially linear as Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”) that presents little problem. Heston’s Moses is like a leg-breaker for a loan shark. He makes painful things happen to people who don’t follow the rules. By contrast, Scott’s Moses, despite a certain strange echoing of narrative tropes from the western film, is a veritable sleepwalker, a reluctant servant of a God by whom he is utterly baffled. A lot of the abuse heaped on “Exodus: Gods and Kings” has fallen on the decision of Scott and the writers to represent God as a small, rather petulant boy. It is an oddly inspired choice. In a film that is obsessed with the generational transmission of community values, the idea of a mysterious youngster as Supreme Being actually makes a certain thematic sense. There are a million ways to depict the Ineffable, and all of them are wrong. This one at least has the minor benefit of being original. The way that Scott and Co. handle God’s appearance to Moses is indicative of the theological tentativeness of the film. Moses is caught in a rockslide while chasing some straying livestock, struck on the head and buried in geological sludge except for his face. When he comes to, there’s that burning bush and the boy. After that, whenever Moses is seen arguing with the phenomenon, an eavesdropping Joshua (Aaron Paul) sees him seemingly talking to empty air. If not for Bale’s earnestness, the result would feel like “Topper in Egypt,” but it has a cynical logic. Viewers are offered two versions of events and can pick and choose for their own philosophical comfort. The treatment of the plagues is similar. The script sets in motion a chain of ecological catastrophes that wreck Egypt, and there seems to be an at least superficially plausible explanation until things escalate beyond any scientific interpretation. Scott treats the big set pieces like a mixture of action choreography and horror-film imagery, with the result that it seems all too familiar to a jaded moviegoer. The film’s use of 3-D is no help. Indirectly, it merely points a large neon arrow at what is really wrong with this film. Whether you are DeMille or Ridley Scott, you are enslaved to the dominant narrative paradigms in which you work. If the only tool you have is a hammer, the world is filled with nails; if the stories you are used to telling are genre stories with a strong line in narrative convention, you will make everything into a western/science fiction thriller/detective film/historical epic. Which is what Scott has done. It would take a very different kind of film sensibility to look at the last four books of the Torah and see a story about nation-building, lawgiving and developing a relationship to 613 commandments, however you conceive that relationship. If you see the story as a duel between “Gods and Kings,” between slaveholders and slaves, good guys and bad guys, the result is always going to be a film like this one. “Exodus: Gods and Kings” is in wide release.
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POLITICAL INSIDERA Chanukah Miracle For Allan Gross Douglas Bloomfield"Hag sameach." Those were the first words of the newly freed Alan Gross at his Washington press conference Wednesday afternoon. After five years in a Cuban prison for trying to smuggle Internet equipment to the communist country's tiny Jewish community, he was freed as part of a dramatic change in relations between Havana and Washington.. Gross gave special thanks to the Greater Washington Jewish Community Relations Council and its executive director, Ron Halber, for their ongoing campaign for his freedom. Gross also paid tribute to his lawyer, Scott Gilbert, who he called "my personal Moses." "I guess so far it's the best Chanukah that I'll be celebrating for a long time," the 65-year-old said. "What a blessing it is to be a citizen of this country, and thank you, President Obama, for everything you have done today and leading up to today." I had a chance to visit the Cuban Jewish community a couple of years ago. Community groups wanted some rudimentary computer equipment so they could be in touch with each other and with the rest of the world. Gross was in prison by the time I was there but community figures we met said there had been no fallout from his arrest. Gross, a contract worker for the U.S. Agency for International Development, had been smuggling in pieces during several trips until finally apprehended. An official of a major Jewish organization who has led several Jewish missions to Cuba told me he knew Gross well from when Gross accompanied the groups on their flights, but not on their ground programs. Gross, my source said, would ask various participants to put a small package in their luggage and return it to him after they'd cleared customs in Havana. Gross wasn't a spy. He had broken minor import regulations, but that’s not why he got a 15-year sentence. He was a convenient hostage in Cuban efforts to win the release of some real spies in American prisons. That was the deal struck in negotiations over the past year and a half and announced Wednesday by President Barack Obama and President Raul Castro. Members of the Jewish community I met throughout Cuba told me that while their government pursues a stridently anti-Israel foreign policy, the country has no history of anti-Semitism officially or otherwise. Congregants at Havana's Patranato synagogue told me Fidel Castro had visited and expressed warm feelings toward the Jewish community, telling them he may be descended from conversos who left Spain in the 15th century. While it has been difficult for most Cubans to leave their country, Fidel did not interfere with Jews who want to make aliyah, because he considered that returning to their homeland, not fleeing their country. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), was one of many members of Congress who campaigned for Gross' freedom, was at Joint Base Andrews to welcome his constituent from Rockville, MD, a Washington suburb. It was appropriate that Gross's freedom come on the first day of Chanukah, Cardin, who is also Jewish, noted, because it is a holiday "which celebrates great miracles." At a White House Chanukah party later in the day for what the President called "a few friends" -- about 550 people-- Obama said it was especially appropriate for a prisoner to be set free on Chanukah. "After being unjustly held..Alan Gross is free," he said. “We never gave up.” The official jet sent to pick up Gross brought his wife and a special treat: a corned beef sandwich and latkes to eat on the ride home.
Jane Cortney as Mir’l. Courtesy New Worlds Theater Project. Hunter Canning
“On the Other Side of the River” opens promisingly: eerie bell-like music plays softly, and the set, three flats covered with stiffened, rippling gray gauze, seems to suggest a cave receding in the distance – until the lights come up, transforming them into a river, in a beautiful union of lighting and scenic design.
Peretz Hirshbein wrote his first play in Yiddish around 1906. It is translated into English by Ellen Perecman for New Worlds Theater Project, a company devoted to bringing new life to neglected Yiddish plays of the 20th century.
It’s night. A grandfather and his granddaughter, Mir’l, listen to the river rising in a storm – the same river that carried away Mir’l’s father the night that she was born, the night on which her mother died. With this many parents lost in one night, one begins to worry. Mir’l wears a protective amulet, but it’s lost in the flood. Their little house is flooded, and they seek higher ground. At the end of the first act, the grandfather has frozen to death.
The second act shows Mir’l’s meeting with a handsome stranger who clasps her to him for warmth, saving both their lives. He tells her tales of palaces covered with jewels, and disappears in the morning. In the third act, Mir’l is alienated from her grandmother; she has been given another amulet which she tears off herself. She moans about seeing her grandfather’s blind eyes and missing the handsome stranger. When the river threatens to flood again she seems to hear him, and, expecting to be reunited with him, she throws herself in the river.
Obviously this play frustrates any wish for coherent narrative. The largest element is the river, and its first audience in Odessa in 1908 would have remembered overwhelming surges of violence: the pogroms of 1905 and 1906 had killed as many as 1000 Jewish Odessans. Perhaps, then, there is an element of recollection in the river’s force. Mir’l, however, though she is tossed about by the river, manages her own destruction, and throws her life away with a spooky joyfulness that is both irritating and frustrating. Like the young bride in S. An-Sky’s “Dybbuk” of six years later, she seems haunted; but if there is symbolism here, it’s entirely opaque.
She is played with heartfelt conviction by Jane Cortney; David Greenspan is the rather stately blind grandfather, who moves like a mime or a tai-chi instructor; David Arkemagives the Stranger a warm and energetic performance; and Christine Siracusa is the underwritten grandmother. Patrick Rizzotti, Nick Solyom, and Erik T. Lawson designed and composed the scenery, lighting, and sound, the most effective elements of the production.
“On the Other Side of the River” is being performed at New Worlds Theatre Project, at HERE, 145 Sixth Avenue (enter at Dominick Street). The final performance is Sunday, December 21st.
Elizabeth Denlinger curates a collection of rare books and manuscripts at the New York Public Library and is at work on a novel about a boarding school in 1955.
Food & Wine
Olive oil, grapefruit, the perfect combo. Amy Spiro
A Healthier Chanukah
Keep the spirit of the Chanukah holiday with a slightly healthier treat.
Amy Spiro - Jewish Week Online Columnist
Sure, deep fried is all the rage on Chanukah, and I indulged last week with my homemade cronut recipe. But even among the once-a-year celebration, there's room to be a little bit more healthy while still celebrating the story of the holiday. After all, what is Chanukah all about? The miracle of the olive oil lasting for eight days. And I don't recommend olive oil for deep frying, and I can pretty much guarantee that any doughnut you're buying from a bakery is not cooked in olive oil either.
But these muffins put olive oil front and center, using its mellow, fruity taste as a perfect balance to the bite of citrus from grapefruits. Honestly, these muffins surpassed even my expectations with their tastiness - they were soft and tender, with gentle but harmonious flavors and occasional bursts of citrusy goodness. Perfect for the Festival of Lights, and all year round.
Amy Spiro is a journalist and writer based in Jerusalem. She is a graduate of the Jerusalem Culinary Institute's baking and pastry track, a regular writer for The Jerusalem Post and blogs at bakingandmistaking.com. She also holds a BA in Journalism and Politics from NYU.
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