The New York Jewish Week: Connecting the World with Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opnions for Wednesday, 31 December 2014
Dear Reader,
The Jewish Week introduces "The Jewish GDP Project: Beyond the Dollars," an effort to track and analyze the financial health of the Jewish nonprofit sector over time. Our initial report, sponsored by The Jewish Week Investigative Journalism Fund, shows that Jewish nonprofits, still struggling long after the recession, were down $1 billion from 2007 to 2012.
Nonprofits Still Seen Struggling Long After Recession
‘The Jewish GDP’ down 11 percent from 2007 to 2012; $1 billion in losses for range of causes, new study says.
Special To The Jewish Week
The Jewish nonprofit sector fared far worse than the overall U.S. nonprofit sector and the U.S. economy.
One billion dollars lost.
With the U.S. economy digging itself out of a deep hole, the $1 billion figure represents the collective revenue loss to Jewish nonprofits from 2007, the start of the Great Recession, to 2012, according to a new study.
That’s an 11 percent drop in money that could have gone to care for the Jewish elderly in nursing homes, combat anti-Israel activity on college campuses, seed Jewish startups, curate cultural programs and help parents of day school students facing rising tuitions.
The wallop taken by the Jewish nonprofit economy — one that has reached into every corner of the Jewish community — was worse than the one absorbed by American nonprofits overall during the Great Recession and its aftermath, the study suggests. And the economic hit to the Jewish community was far worse than that to the American economy as a whole.
“We might try to forget the fiscal trauma,” said business strategist and report co-author Mark Pearlman, “but the full force of this economic crisis still affects the American Jewish community every day. We have not yet fully recovered from the economic fallout.”
The figures about the community’s financial health are part of an in-depth analysis, a collaborative effort of Pearlman and Yale management professor Edieal Pinker supported by The Jewish Week Investigative Journalism Fund.
The compilation of “The Jewish GDP” (Gross Domestic Product) is an update of an earlier study by Pearlman, published in The Jewish Week in 2009. The project aims to track the financial health of the Jewish nonprofit sector over time, and to foster productive discussions about transparency, efficiency and accountability.
“It’s important to assess the basic economics of the Jewish community on a regular basis,” Pearlman said. “The Jewish GDP Project can help organize and frame an intelligent/informed discussion on our community’s finances and performance.”
Pearlman and Pinker analyzed financial data from the years 2007 and 2012 (the latest data available at the time of the analysis), from Jewish nonprofit organizations, using the GuideStar database of public financial disclosure forms that nonprofit organizations are legally required to file. (Organizations with exclusively religious missions, such as churches and synagogues, are exempt from this requirement, a point to which we will return.) The total revenue that all those Jewish organizations collected is “The Jewish GDP.”
They focused on revenues rather than expenditures, Pinker noted, because “the revenues better reflected the amount of money going in to the Jewish community, the resources available to the institutions in a particular year.”
Pearlman and Pinker split the revenue total into two separate numbers — one for “service providers” (that’s most Jewish organizations) and one for “financial intermediaries” (Jewish foundations and federations) — in order to avoid double-counting any dollars that were first raised by the foundations and federations and then given out as grants to the service providers, thus counting toward the total revenues of both.
The results show an American Jewish communal sector still struggling to recover from the recession, three years after the downturn officially ended. The Jewish GDP for service providers dropped by over $1 billion, a setback in income equivalent to losing more than one dollar in every 10. As for financial intermediaries — the Jewish federations and foundations that fund so much of the work performed by the Jewish service providers — revenues fell by a larger amount and in larger proportion: a $1.29 billion difference equal to almost one-third of 2007 revenues. (For clarity all dollar amounts are adjusted for inflation and expressed in 2012 dollars.)
That drop in Jewish GDP between 2007 and 2012 represents missing social services that might have helped people in need, missing cultural and educational programs that might have enriched lives, and missing endowment income that might have grown the capacity of American Jewish organizations to sustain their work in the future.
The broader economic context does not paint an encouraging picture of how the Jewish nonprofit sector weathered the Great Recession and the first years of the subsequent recovery. The overall American economy (as measured by GDP) stopped declining in June 2009, and by December 2012 it was 3 percent higher than it had been in December 2007. Revenues for American nonprofits still hadn’t recovered by that time; according to Giving USA Foundation, charitable revenues in 2012 were 8 percent lower than they had been five years before.
But those overall nonprofit revenues were still in better shape than Jewish service provider revenues, which remained 11 percent lower than their pre-recession levels. Investors were also still playing catch-up in 2012; the S&P 500 index, a broad-based measure of stock prices, was 1.5 percent lower than its 2007 value (adjusted for dividends and splits). Revenues for the big institutional investors in Jewish communal life — that is, Jewish federations and foundations — lagged far behind, proportionally, with revenues still almost one-third lower than their 2007 levels, even after three years of economic recovery.
Biggest Hits
Which Jewish organizations took the biggest hit?
To find out, Pearlman and Pinker separated Jewish organizations that operate primarily in the U.S. into six categories, by mission: Advocacy, Art/Culture, Communal (JCCs, Camps, etc.), Education, Religious and Social Welfare. They found that Communal, Social Welfare, and Education organizations suffered modestly in proportion to their share of the total Jewish GDP, with drops in revenue of less than 5 percent.
Religiously oriented organizations didn’t seem to suffer at all, collecting 3 percent more in 2012 than they had in 2007, but since this category is exempt from legal disclosure requirements, this category’s numbers are less reliable than others.
Advocacy organization revenues fell by one-fifth, and Art/Culture organization revenues dropped by more than one-third.
Damaging as those large-percentage drops in revenue must have been for American Jewish advocacy, arts, and cultural organizations, the setbacks were only large as percentages of relatively low amounts to begin with; those categories account for less than 14 percent of the billion-dollar drop in Jewish GDP from 2012 to 2007. Indeed, drops in revenue for all U.S.-focused organizations, of all mission categories, accounted for less than one-third of that gap.
The more severe blow fell on American Jewish organizations whose programs operate primarily in Israel and other foreign countries. (“American Friends of” various Israeli organizations are a primary example.) Revenues for those organizations dropped by nearly $700 million between 2007 and 2012. The difference is even starker considering that the harder-hit foreign category receives a much smaller share of the total Jewish GDP than domestically oriented organizations do. The $326 million shortfall for U.S.-focused organizations in 2012 amounts to just a 5 percent drop from their 2007 levels, while the $700 million gap for foreign-focused organizations amounts to a 28 percent drop.
Like the actual GDP for which it is named, The Jewish GDP as a measure of the sector’s financial health is subject to real limitations. Pearlman and Pinker are the first to acknowledge the problems, the most important of which is the lack of truly comprehensive financial data for the Jewish nonprofit world. Since there is no central, official list of American Jewish organizations, there is no way to be sure that every Jewish institution is included in the analysis.
More importantly, since synagogues and other organizations with primarily religious missions are exempt from the legal requirement to file IRS Form 990 (the nonprofit financial public disclosure form that was the source of Pearlman and Pinker’s data), the current Jewish GDP numbers fail to reflect synagogues altogether.
And not only synagogues fall through the cracks; some in other Jewish organizational categories are internally divided about whether to take the religious exemption. Many Jewish camps and day schools, for example, claim a primarily religious mission and decline to disclose their basic financial data, even as many other Jewish camps and day schools do file Form 990, defining themselves as primarily educational.
These data gaps don’t invalidate the Jewish GDP as a useful tool for tracking the sector over time, but they do make certain kinds of analysis more appropriate than others. “Without being confident that we have equally exhaustive data from all the different mission categories of service providers, we can’t make definitive statements about how money is allocated across those categories,” Pinker said. “On the other hand, analyses over time, and within each category, are more likely to be valid.”
Other limitations arise from the complicated structure of the Jewish communal economy itself. Some communal leaders feel that tabulating grand totals of Jewish communal revenue is inherently misleading because these totals include not only private donations and grants that fund specifically Jewish programs, but also government revenues that fund nonsectarian human service programs which happen to be operated by Jewish organizations. These are “really public utilities,” said one prominent leader, “and to lump them all together with others that rely substantially on Jewish philanthropic dollars is substantially misleading.”
Pearlman and Pinker clarify that government revenues are indeed included in The Jewish GDP total revenue figures. But these funds, too, affect the financial health of the Jewish nonprofit sector, even when they fund nonsectarian programs. “Shifts in the Jewish communal economy pivot to the individuals and ultimately to management,” said Pinker.
“If federations reduce their support to service providers because of poor stock market returns, then individuals must pick up the slack in higher fees or contributions. If contributions are shifting from financial intermediaries to direct contributions, it reflects a change of individual giving behavior. If there is still a shortfall, then management needs to make appropriate decisions on service priorities and funding.” Government funds likewise affect the choices donors and managers must make, Pearlman and Pinker maintain, and so they should be included in a complete reckoning of the Jewish communal economy.
Pearlman and Pinker’s ongoing analysis also addresses the daunting complexity of the Jewish communal economy by covering territory broader than just the initial findings discussed in this article, which focus on changes in total revenues.
In the coming months, The Jewish Week will present more of their findings from Jewish economic data in the years 2007 and 2012: Pearlman and Pinker have also examined the field’s net assets over time (a measure of overall financial resources, rather than just income); the important role of federations and their efficiency in fundraising; and trends taking shape in the economy of Jewish education.
Despite inevitable challenges and imperfections, Pearlman hopes that his efforts with Pinker to measure and track The Jewish GDP can galvanize the Jewish community to find new ways of comprehensively collecting basic financial data from Jewish organizations voluntarily, regardless of the legal disclosure loophole for religious organizations.
“We deserve a more transparent marketplace,” Pearlman said. “The community needs to better collect and organize critical, baseline information on the financials, best practices, strategies and performance of our Jewish nonprofit organizations. For religious organizations, once you set aside separation of church and state, there seems to be no compelling rationale to perpetuate a veil of secrecy.”
For now, The Jewish GDP project remains in its early stages. Its future success will depend on how many funder organizations, individual philanthropists and Jewish thought leaders will take up the banner of financial disclosure, and how persistently they will make the issue a requirement, and central item on the Jewish communal agenda.
Seth Chalmer is assistant director at the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU Wagner. This article was made possible by a grant from The Jewish Week Investigative Journalism Fund, a tax-deductible fund that supports enterprise reporting on issues of vital Jewish interest.
The U.S. did not have to use its veto as a Palestinian resolution at the UN failed in its attempt to establish a 12-month deadline for a peace deal with Israel. Staff Writer Stewart Ain reports.
Path Ahead No Clearer After UN Vote
‘Ill-timed’ Palestinian resolution fails as supporters of two-state solution slam Abbas.
The UN Arab resolution was seen as one-sided. Getty Images
Even after the UN Security Council rejected an Arab resolution Tuesday that would have established a 12-month deadline for a Palestinian-Israeli peace accord and given Israel three years to return to its pre-1967 borders, Arab states said they would continue to look to the UN to resolve the conflict.
The U.S. and many other supporters of a two-state solution had called the Arab resolution — which in an unusual move was voted upon without debate — ill-timed, counterproductive, one-sided and drawn up without sufficient consultation.
It needed nine votes of the 15-member Security Council to pass and received eight: China, France, Russia, Argentina, Chad, Chile, Jordan and Luxembourg. Two countries voted no: the United States and Australia. Five countries abstained: the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Nigeria, Korea, Rwanda.
“The right resolution at the UN could be helpful in restarting the peace process after the Israeli election [March 17],” said Alan Elsner, a spokesman for J Street, a nonprofit U.S.-based group that promotes a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “This resolution is not the right resolution. There won’t be negotiations before the election — that is clear.”
He said the U.S. should be “working with its partners in Europe and with the Israelis on their own resolution with a timetable that is acceptable to all.”
The American Jewish Committee welcomed the resolution’s defeat. David Harris, its executive director, said that had Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas “devoted as much time and energy to the peace talks with Israel as he has to the UN Security Council, there might have been real progress in achieving a negotiated two-state solution. But, alas, he proves once again that the Palestinian leadership would rather grandstand for its constituency than move the peace process forward.”
Jeff Rathke, a State Department spokesman, said simply: “We don’t think this resolution is constructive. We don’t believe this resolution ... advances the goal of a two-state solution.”
He later explained that the U.S. objects to the resolution setting “arbitrary deadlines” that it believes would not be helpful in any negotiations.
“We have concerns about Israel’s legitimate security needs, and so we think this has been rushed,” Rathke said, stressing that the U.S. opposes it both because of its substance and timing.
He added that “even among countries that are longstanding supporters of the Palestinians and that have indicated they would vote in favor of the resolution, many of them have also acknowledged that it is an unconstructive and poorly timed resolution.”
Secretary of State John Kerry spoke by phone Sunday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and reportedly told him that the U.S. was prepared to veto an initial draft resolution that had been presented Dec. 17.
A new resolution submitted shortly before midnight Monday was described by observers as even tougher, and the U.S. vowed to veto it if necessary. It called for the creation of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital (the earlier draft mentioned Jerusalem only as a shared capital) and said security arrangements would include “a third-party presence.”
Dore Gold, a former Israeli UN ambassador and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said such a provision is a non-starter because the “doctrine of Israel is to defend itself by itself.”
He told The Jewish Week that the Palestinian effort to gain statehood through a vote of the UN Security Council “is a very serious development because the entire process negates the signed agreements with Israel that go back to the ’90s.”
“It prejudges the outcome of negotiations, like borders and the future of Jerusalem that are supposed to be part of the negotiations,” he said. “And the whole process makes the chances of serious negotiations in the future far more difficult. And the reference to an Israeli withdrawal to 1967 lines — even with minor land swaps — negates Israel’s defensible borders.”
And at time when ISIS is waging war in Syria and Iraq and Iran is “on the verge of gaining nuclear capability,” it would be “insane for Israel to withdraw from the Jordan Valley,” Gold said.
Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University, said the Palestinians knew the U.S. was going to veto the resolution and their decision to proceed anyway was “all symbolic.”
“This is not a substantive new step that will lead to substantial changes,” he said. “The Palestinians are attempting to gain recognition as an independent state without an agreement with Israel and knowing it would be vetoed.”
But what it does represent is Abbas’ “swan song,” Steinberg said.
Asked if he believes Abbas will be replaced by a new Palestinian leader in 2015, Steinberg said it depends on a number of factors, including Abbas’ health. And he pointed out that Hamas — the Palestinian group labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. and Israel that controls the Gaza Strip — continues to make inroads in the West Bank at the expense of Abbas’ Fatah organization.
“Palestinians in the West Bank are doing quite well economically and don’t want to be like Gaza,” he said. “The status quo is not a disaster for now.”
Despite a threatened U.S. veto of the Arab resolution, Abbas pressed ahead with a Security Council vote believing he would have achieved something simply by getting this issue before the Security Council, Steinberg said. And he noted that Abbas did it “without giving up anything that [his predecessor, Yasir Arafat] did not give up — no borders have been set, there is no Palestinian recognition of a Jewish state or any compromise on Palestinian refugee claims.”
Moshe Maoz, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said Abbas had turned to the UN in the belief “Israel is not serious in negotiating” a settlement.
“Most of the international community — especially Europe — supports their goals and so wants to force Israel to accept the Security Council resolution,” he said. “They are using diplomatic tactics against Israel because they believe Israel will not do much at the bargaining table.”
The U.S. and some in Europe had argued that the timing was not right for such a resolution because it could be perceived as putting pressure on Israel, something that would help rightwing parties in the March election, Maoz observed.
“Whether that is correct or not I don’t know,” he said.
Maoz agreed with Steinberg that Abbas decided to press this issue now because he needed to be seen as achieving a victory.
“Many young people don’t listen to him, so he believed the time was right to launch a fight ... to gain legitimacy among the Palestinian people.”
Abbas had set the stage for the UN vote over the past several months by convincing several European parliaments to take symbolic votes in support of a Palestinian state. Sweden was the first European Union nation to recognize Palestine’s independence; the parliaments of Britain, France, Spain and Ireland passed symbolic motions. The European Parliament voted to recognize a Palestinian state in principle, but did not back immediate recognition.
Gold said many of those “European initiatives were intended to try to get negotiations back on track. But they are completely mistaken because rather than incentivize the Palestinians to return to the peace talks with Israel, the European initiatives will have the exact opposite effect. The Palestinians will conclude that Israel can be delivered on a silver platter and that all they have to do is sit back and let the European parliaments work. … All these initiatives do is undermine the peace process they claim to be advancing.”
Asked about concerns that a failure to restart peace talks could hurt Israel economically, Gold replied: “I think European leaders made clear that they oppose economic boycotts.”
Steinberg said that even though there “had been concern about an economic slowdown, it never happened and the economy is still booming.”
“I don’t think an economic boycott is a serious issue,” he said. “Israel is not vulnerable. It has a lot of protection against serious economic warfare because the cost of boycotting Israeli products for Europeans would be very high. And Israel has alternative markets like India, China, Korea and Japan if the Europeans decide to pursue economic limitation. It is for that reason Europeans realize such a move would be costly. … An effective boycott against Israel does not seem realistic.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
Speculating on the future of the Jews of Cuba, Cuban Jewish scholar Ruth Behar suggests a number of possibilities, and hopes for the restoration of Havana's oldest synagogue.
What Now For The Jews Of Cuba?
A Cuban Jewish scholar suggests some possibilities, and longs for a good pastrami sandwich — if the Moishe Pipik deli reopens.
Ruth Behar
Special To The Jewish Week
Purim. Photo by Ruth Behar
When I began traveling to Cuba in 1991, hanging out in the ruined synagogues of Havana to learn the stories of the Jews who remained after Fidel Castro came to power, I suffered from attacks of vertigo.
I was born in Cuba, but left as a child, and growing up in New York in the 1960s I absorbed my family’s nostalgia about Cuba, the tropical island that offered my Ashkenazi and Sephardic grandparents refuge from anti-Semitism and hope for a new beginning. But I was told never to go back, not while communism and Castro remained.
The panic that overcame me when I went to see Cuba with my own eyes was brought on by the emotional weight of returning against my parents’ will. The weight of an internalized embargo.
With time I normalized my relationship with Cuba, even while the American and Cuban governments continued their abnormal relationship. My panic attacks stopped. I studied the Jews of Cuba seriously, getting to know them as individuals who led lives as meaningful as my own.
I often coincided with American Jews on mitzvah trips to help the Jews of Cuba, a people they found endlessly fascinating. A Cuban Jew myself, I had never thought of Cuban Jews as exotic creatures. But American Jews found the idea of tropical Jews magical. Whether it was memories of Jews dancing mambo in the Catskills, knowledge of Meyer Lansky’s role in Cuba’s corruption, guilt at the U.S. embargo, a desire for rum, cigars, and joy not found on Shoah trips, sorrow at the thought of Jewish life vanishing in a place so close to home, a need for a worthwhile mitzvah destination, or all of the above, American Jews felt passionate about the Jews in Cuba.
The Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) was the first to offer assistance to rebuild the Jewish community. This was in 1991, a time of hunger and uncertainty after Soviet subsidies ended. Fearing political, economic, and moral collapse, the Cuban government opened the door to capitalism and tourism and allowed God back in, permitting Cubans to practice religion after years of enforced atheism.
Cuba didn’t (and doesn’t) have a rabbi. The JDC sent Rabbi Shmuel Szteinhendler from Argentina to reach out to Jews who’d lost touch with their roots in the dogmatic years of the revolution. Young Jewish leaders came from Argentina for two-year stints, teaching Hebrew, liturgy, and Jewish history. The Canadian Jewish Congress had always sent annual Passover packages, but the JDC now paid for weekly Shabbat chicken dinners to create conviviality and compensate for reduced government food subsidies. People came out of the Jewish closet, laying claim to Jewish ancestors as they still do today. The JDC supported conversions of those with Jewish fathers or partners. Over the next two decades, a Jewish community of about a thousand people was created, as multiculturally and multiracially diverse as is Cuba itself.
The U.S. government, interested in promoting free religious expression, encouraged Americans to travel on religious missions despite the embargo. Thousands of American Jews have gone to Cuba legally in groups organized by B’nai Brith, synagogues, Hillels, JCCs and museums. They bring medicine, food, clothing, Jewish prayer books and literary works. Each group rediscovers the miracle of Jewish life in Cuba and returns laden with exhilarating stories and photographs that are shared in the media and beyond, creating hype and more calls for solidarity.
The Jews of Cuba are now part of American Jewish consciousness, just as American Jews are now a fixture of Jewish Cuban life on the island.
So, will anything really change following President Obama’s announcement of an opening toward Cuba?
More American Jewish groups will certainly travel to Cuba. Groups already fill the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Havana during Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat services in the peak tourist season between December and April.
The groups always want to meet personally with Adela Dworin, the charming president of Cuba’s Jewish community. Fluent in Yiddish and English, Adela is refreshingly low-key, presiding over the community from her desk at the Jewish library, which she guarded zealously for years when no one cared about the Jewish legacy.
Other leaders are stepping in to assist Adela at Beth Shalom, including its vice president, David Prinstein, and his wife, Marlen Fernandez Barroto, who heads up the Israeli folk dance program. Different Jewish voices are emerging in Havana, including Mayra Levy at the Centro SefaradÃ, who has fundraised to create a lively center for Jewish elders, and Jacob Berezniak at Adath Israel, the only Orthodox religious leader in the country. Outside Havana, David Tacher in Santa Clara has built a new synagogue with American Jewish support. Rebeca Langus in Cienfuegos, Daisy Esther Bernal in Sancti Spiritus, Enma FarÃn Levy in Santiago de Cuba, and Rodolfo Mizrahi in Guantanamo lead tiny, hopeful Jewish communities out of pure devotion. The importance of women in maintaining Jewish life reflects the egalitarian orientation of the community in Cuba.
Their biggest challenge is that they train talented Jewish youth as leaders only to see them leave for more prosperous horizons. If economic prospects improve, young Jews might be motivated to stay rather than make aliyah to Israel or dream of Miami.
Perhaps those best positioned to help the community are Cuban-American Jews, or “Jubans.” While many Jubans remain staunchly anti-communist and anti-Castro and won’t set foot in Cuba, several have been involved in restoring Beth Shalom, known as the Patronato to insiders. One prominent Miami Juban businessman recently chartered a plane and took his entire family and three rabbis to Havana to celebrate his grandson’s bar mitzvah at the Patronato. He and other Jubans are eager to invest in Cuba and help rebuild the island's infrastructure. Unlike American Jews, they speak Spanish and understand the culture of Cuba. Should they choose to become active in the city they left decades ago but never forgot, they might guarantee the future of a living Jewish legacy there.
Expanding Jewish opportunities and Jewish education on the island will be the first priority. Jews in Cuba, like Cubans in general, are not passive recipients of change but active shapers of their futures. When a Lubavitch leader offered to run a summer camp for Jewish children in Cuba, the community was supportive. But when he stipulated that only kids who were Jewish on their maternal side could participate, the community refused to go along. The rule would have excluded most Jewish children of the island. The Lubavitcher had to leave.
In a country where most people, including doctors and engineers, earn only $20 to $40 monthly, the Jewish community needs economic support to sustain itself. But there is now an educated group of Jewish leaders teaching Jewish religious traditions to both children and adults. The lack of a full-time rabbi gives the community a stubborn pride in its independence. They organize communal Passover seders and put on lively Purim parties, where they serve hamantaschen stuffed with guava jelly, a recipe my mother has passed on to me.
What remains less available is Jewish education in a broader sense—knowledge of Jewish history, literature, music, and art. There is hardly any Jewish outreach to the Cuban mainstream. This hopefully will change, as Cubans are deeply curious about Jewish culture. Schindler’s List has been shown on Cuban television many times and is a reference point for all discussions of the Holocaust. But average Cubans have few venues to learn about Jews. University of Havana students interested in Jewish history find books at the Patronato library. No courses are offered on Jewish literature or Jewish thought, none on the writings of Kafka or Freud or for that matter even Marx from a Jewish perspective. The secular humanist tradition of Judaism, which would meld so well with the utopian ideals of the revolution, goes unrecognized in Cuba.
It remains to be seen if relations between Israel and Cuba will thaw. After the Yom Kippur War, the positive relations between Cuba and Israel fostered by Castro’s admiration of the kibbutz movement deteriorated and the two countries severed diplomatic ties. Israel is the only country that votes in support of the Cuba embargo in the United Nations. Nevertheless, Israelis work in Cuba’s banking and citrus industries. Perhaps opening the American door will allow for closer exchanges.
Much of Cuba’s infrastructure needs fixing, including synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, monuments, and other heritage sites. Architectural conservationists are awed by the restoration of Old Havana, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where the first Jewish immigrants to Havana settled around 1900. Eusebio Leal, the Havana urban historian behind the creation of the Jewish-themed Hotel Raquel, has long hoped to restore old Jewish homes and stores. There is talk of reviving the Moishe Pipik restaurant, a popular kosher deli in Old Havana once owned by American Jews.
Personally, I hope to see Cuba’s oldest synagogue, Chevet Ahim, repaired. Founded in 1914 by Sephardic Jews from Turkey, ironically on the Street of the Inquisitor, and dear to me as the site of my father’s bar mitzvah, it has been shut down for the last 15 years. I was allowed in when I made my film, “Adio Kerida: A Cuban Sephardic Journey.” The site of moldy prayer shawls and soggy prayer books haunts me still. A restored Chevet Ahim could be a museum of the Jewish presence in Cuba, or a Jewish library and gallery and theater, open to Jews and non-Jews alike. Is it too idealistic to dream of a space where Cuban Jews can share their history with the world?
If American Jews throng to Cuba in coming years, I suspect a funder will come along sooner to rebuild the Moishe Pipik restaurant than the Chevet Ahim. A good pastrami sandwich is hard to find in Cuba.
Ruth Behar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, is the author of “An Island Called Home” and “Traveling Heavy,” which chronicles her return journey to Cuba.
Also this week, will a federal probe affect State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's political clout? Survivor's heirs now cleared for SSI payments; Israel Correspondent Josh Mitnick examines disarray on the political right; Culture Editor Sandee Brawarsky on 10 books from 2014 that deserved more attention; and columnist Erica Brown makes thecase against videoing bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies.
Will Federal Probe Tarnish Silver?
Analysts believe the powerful Assembly speaker will remain unscathed.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver
It was front-page news this week that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is the subject of a federal investigation, but unless he is indicted, news of the probe is unlikely to affect his hold on power in Albany, political analysts said.
Silver’s two decades leading the Assembly and the solid relationships he’s developed make his re-election as speaker nearly assured.
“The speaker is not vulnerable,” said Gerald Benjamin, a political scientist at SUNY New Paltz who closely follows state government. “The risks of voting against him on the basis of this [New York Times] article are just too great,” he said.
“It’s a long way between investigation and indictment — a long way,” agreed political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “If you had a buck for every politician who is supposed to be indicted we’d all be able to retire.”
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the FBI was working with the office of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to investigate “substantial” payments made to Silver over the past decade that he failed to include on federal financial disclosure forms, according to their sources. The payments came from Goldberg & Iryami, P.C., a law firm specializing in obtaining real estate tax reductions. Spokespersons for Bharara and Silver declined to comment.
In addition to Silver’s state salary of $121,000, he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from a private legal practice, including from the personal injury firm Weitz & Luxemberg. On his 2013 financial disclosure form, he said he made more than $650,000 from outside legal work, but he has never said exactly what he does for his clients, according to the Times.
Bharara’s probe of the payments from Goldberg & Iryami came out of a more general investigation of supplemental income earned by Albany lawmakers by the Moreland Commission, according to the Times. When Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo shut the anticorruption panel down last March, Bharara vowed to continue its work.
“The prosecutor has taken on the task of what he calls cleaning up Albany and he is obviously focused on the speaker,” said Benjamin, the SUNY New Paltz professor.
Several commentators suggested that the timing of the leak of the investigation likely stemmed from a political agenda to weaken Silver’s power in Albany.
“It’s clear that the federal prosecutor would like to find some reason to bring charges against the speaker, and it’s significant that the matter has been leaked to the Times and that the Times put it on the front page,” said Benjamin.
But others disagreed. “Anything that attacks the speaker in any way is news,” Sheinkopf said. “It’s not unusual for an investigation of such a powerful person to be leaked. It would be unusual if it were not leaked.”
Silver, an Orthodox Jew, is known for his adept accumulation of power during his two decades as speaker. It has long been said that in Albany, decisions are made by “three men in a room”: Silver and whomever happens to be governor and Senate leader at the time. The 70-year-old Democrat has represented Lower Manhattan since 1978. Over the past decade and a half Sliver has withstood plenty of controversy, including an attempted coup of the speakership in 2000 (for which he punished his opponents dearly) and criticism of his handling of sexual harassment allegations of Albany officials including one of his top aides in 2001 and Brooklyn Assemblyman Vito Lopez in 2012.
But what if the investigation were to cause Silver’s political demise? According to Sheinkopf, it wouldn’t have much effect on the legions of Jewish nonprofits Silver has backed over the years.
“Demographics are destiny and the Jewish population — whether it grows or declines, whether it votes or doesn’t vote — determines its power,” he said. “Its power will increase or decrease regardless of who the speaker is.”
Survivors’ Heirs Now Cleared For SSI Payments
Social Security Administration clarifies eligibility rules for needs-based federal programs.
The son of Holocaust survivors living in his deceased parents’ Washington Heights apartment had his monthly Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payment reinstated last month after a new federal directive excludes inherited Nazi reparation payments in determining SSI eligibility.
The directive, published by the Social Security Administration Dec. 16 as an “emergency message,” is designed to clarify who can benefit from the Victim of Nazi Persecution Act of 1994. That law provides that any payments made to victims of Nazi persecution must be disregarded in determining eligibility for and the amount of benefits provided under any needs-based federal program. Those programs include SSI, Medicaid and Food Stamps. But until this directive, it was unclear whether the law applied to those who inherited the payments.
“The statute’s lack of clarity on this issue had been recently used by the Social Security Administration to deny the continuing beneficial treatment of inherited restitution benefits to a child of Holocaust survivors,” according to attorney Michael Lissner of Manhattan, whose practice focuses on representing Holocaust survivors and is himself a child of survivors.
The man, whom Lissner did not identify, had been receiving $264 a month until the government learned he had inherited $35,000 his mother had received in Nazi reparations.
Lissner said he and his law partner, his wife, Barbara Urbach Lissner, sued to reverse that determination. The administrative law judge who heard the case, Jerome Hornblass, ruled in their favor. But while the matter was on appeal, they along with other lawyers dealing with Holocaust-related matters, including Sam Dubbin of Miami, met with top Social Security administrators and convinced them that the judge was correct.
Lissner stressed that the directive applies only to needy heirs of Holocaust victims who have inherited identifiable Nazi reparations. Those reparations are no longer to be included as either available income or resources in determining eligibility for federally funded needs based programs. Lissner said he did not know how many people this directive would affect.
In a statement, Dubbin said it was “noteworthy that the government was willing to correct an erroneous position that had been in place for over 20 years.”
Elihu Kover, vice president of Nazi-victim services at Selfhelp Community Services, noted that there are 60,000 Holocaust survivors in the city and that half are poor or near poor. But he said he has no way of knowing the financial condition of their children or others who might inherit the Nazi reparations.
He said the government’s new directive is “recognition that these funds were given not as a payment but rather as a moral payment. If it is passed on to a survivor’s children [or others], it is saying that this money it is sacrosanct and that the U.S. wants to treat it in a special way.”
As election season picks up steam, scandal and infighting gripping Likud, Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu.
Both Likud, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and Yisrael Beiteinu headed by Avigdor Lieberman, right, are struggling. Getty Imag
Tel Aviv — For most of the last decade, politicians on Israel’s center-left have been handicapped at the ballot box by infighting and party fragmentation.
But as the current election season gathers steam with a string of primary elections starting this week, it appears that it is parties on Israel’s right that are the ones headed toward potential implosion as they struggle with personal grudge matches, scandal and factionalism.
“There is disarray on the right,” said Stephan Miller, an Israeli American public opinion expert. “We’re in this internal [party politics] campaign mode, and what we’re seeing is not just controlled chaos. It’s just chaos.”
Shas, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party that has been a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has split into two factions over the inability of two of its party leaders to work together. The crisis reached a peak on Tuesday when party leader Ariyeh Deri tendered a resignation after a years-old recording surfaced in which Shas’ former spiritual mentor, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, criticizes Deri for corruption and disloyalty.
Yisrael Beitenu, the party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, has become embroiled in a wide-ranging corruption scandal as the police investigate senior party politicians for alleged schemes of bribe taking and kickbacks.
And Netanyahu’s Likud, which holds a primary vote for party leader and the parliamentary slate this week, has been struggling with spats over procedural issues for the election, an exodus of party stars and a lackluster preliminary campaign with no new candidates.
To be sure, recent political polls suggest that much of Israeli public’s sentiment lies on the center-right, and Netanyahu could still find himself re-elected to a fourth term at the helm of a coalition with right-wing and religious parties. But dominance of government by Likud and the right has left those parties with few fresh ideas and too much corruption, said Tal Schneider, an Israeli political blogger and analyst.
“It happens to everyone who is in government too long,” Schneider said. Earlier, she wrote in a Facebook post, “At this stage, you get the impression that all [Labor party leader] Isaac Herzog has to do is to hope that things will continue this way until March 17. The more splintering, disputes, anger and attrition there is among the span of right-wing parties — and he can allow his strategists to go home. ‘Laissez-faire’ might clash with [Labor’s] economic doctrine, but it might fit the party’s campaign now.”
In two separate messages urging Likud members to vote in the primary, the party looked and sounded tired. “The March 17 elections are a critical moment for the State of Israel. It’s important that we arrive, united as one person. Amid all of the challenges faced by the state, there’s only one force that can lead the country: One large Likud, against all of the left.”
But Likud has been hemorrhaging prominent politicians. Moshe Kahlon, a party star who served as communications minister in the previous government, fled the party, established his own, and started attacking Netanyahu on both the economy and foreign policy. Gideon Saar resigned from the Interior Ministry and is sitting out the election. And Danny Dayan, a former leader of the settler’s council, has joined Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Party.
“I am very worried that we are liable to collapse in this election,” said Shlomo Madmon, a longtime Likud Central Committee member who complained that the party has become too “extremist” and “messianic.”
“We are in the gas stations, in the malls, in the schools, and we hear the sentiment of the people,” he continued. “They are depressed. What will Bibi sell? That kids are moving abroad. That housing prices are in the sky and kids are moving back in with their parents.”
The party has spent the last few weeks wrangling over the date of the primaries, allegations that Netanyahu misused party money, and over his control over the party list.
Many observers contend that the party leadership has moved to the right of Netanyahu. Public opinion expert Miller said the percentage of votes received by Danny Danon, who is challenging the prime minister for the party leadership, and the success of Netanyahu’s allies in the party primaries, will serve as a litmus test of Likud enthusiasm for the prime minister’s leadership. Turnout, which was 60 percent in 2013, will be another indicator.
“The Likud has become very stale; there’s nothing fresh about it,” said Mitchell Barak, the head of Kivun Global Research. “It’s become a second-class party to that of Bennett. Bennett has outsmarted Netanyahu in building a [candidate] list. He’s just as extreme, but he’s able to attract talent who are just as desirable to the right-of-center public.”
Meanwhile, Shas looks like it is in worse condition than Likud. Several weeks ago, former party leader Eli Yishai resigned because of a personal spat with Deri, who resumed control over the party after being sentenced to jail for corruption. The spat apparently led to the leak of a recording of Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef in which the deceased Shas leader criticizes Deri.
The recording prompted Deri and the entire Shas parliament faction to resign from the Knesset, while Yishai, who wants to establish a rival party, denied responsibility for the leak. The split in Shas means that both Sephardic ultra-Orthodox parties (the other being Ha’am Itanu) are in danger of not securing the minimum votes required for a seat in parliament; if that occurred hundreds of thousand of votes for right-wing parties could be squandered. Its factionalism also threatens low voter turnout by demoralizing Shas’ constituency, said Roei Lachmanovich, a former political aide to Yishai.
“No one is dealing with the election campaign. We haven’t heard anything about the economy, medicine or foreign policy. They’re involved in internal fights,” he said, noting that a Shas party led by Deri could sit in a coalition led by dovish parties. “The person that needs to be worried about this is Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Though Yisrael Beiteinu isn’t suffering from infighting, the party of Avigdor Lieberman got hit with a corruption investigation revealed last week that covers a deputy minister, a former cabinet minister, mayors and a former Jerusalem mayoral candidate. Lieberman is currently not under investigation.
The police investigation sounds like a replay of the 2009 campaign, when it was revealed that authorities had launched an inquiry into Lieberman’s dealings. Lieberman was cleared, though he was able to use the investigation five years ago as a rallying cry for supporters. The foreign minister is trying to do the same now, alleging a conspiracy against the party.
“This is very well-timed and well-conceived move,” he said of the probe. “This is an investigation that is completely coordinated with the election campaign.”
Analysts believe that even though he hasn’t been named, the inquiry could threaten the party in the vote.
“This is a corruption scandal that the party has yet to see: it’s widespread,” Miller said. “The police have multiple state witnesses. I imagine that they are not stopping with just a parliament member or a minister. If there’s enough witnesses, this could be the downfall of Lieberman,” said Miller. “This is a difficult story to overcome. In the past, victimhood helped him to gain votes, but there’s no indication that’s the case now.”
Ten books from 2014 that didn’t get the attention they deserved.
At this time of looking back and looking ahead, we’d like to point to some titles published over this past year that have been overlooked and are worthy of attention. Many relate to exile and memory, and one novel even speaks of a black market in memory.
George Prochnik’s excellent biography, “The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World” (Other Press) is an intimate look at the Viennese Jewish writer’s life and career, as seen through his experience of exile and displacement. In 1934, Zweig left Vienna, where he had been a true cosmopolitan, a wealthy and complicated humanist as well as a celebrated and serious writer — the most widely translated living author — who enjoyed connecting others in the literary and intellectual forefront of the day. Among his friends were Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse and Arturo Toscanini.
Always perfectly dressed, Zweig wrote his novels, short stories and biographies in violet ink. While he is still widely read in Europe, his works had fallen into obscurity in English, although now he is becoming more widely known again.
Prochnik, who has written several previous books and taught literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, laces his own family’s story of exile through his understanding of Zweig, all impressively researched. Prochnik’s father’s family escaped from Austria in 1938.
For Zweig, as Prochnik explains, exile wasn’t a static condition but, rather, a process. Regaining freedom didn’t end his challenges. A “restless wandering Jew,” he had sojourns in London and Ossining, New York, among other places, and then a small Brazilian town in the hills above Rio de Janeiro, where he and his wife lived simply, far from Europe, “away from all that was formerly my life, books, concerts friends, conversation.” He described the lush landscape as having been “translated from the Austrian into a tropical language.” There, in 1942, he killed himself; both he and his wife took lethal doses of poison. Much admired in the town of Petropolis, he was given their version of a state funeral, with a rabbi granted special dispensation to deliver blessings in the town’s Catholic cemetery.
In his autobiography, Zweig wrote, “My todays and each of my yesterdays, my rises and falls, are so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not one, but several existences.” The recent acclaimed film, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” is inspired by Zweig’s stories.
Another author who hasn’t received the acclaim he deserved in his lifetime is H.G. Adler. His novel, “The Wall” (Random House), translated into English for the first time by Peter Filkins, is the third book in a trilogy about the Shoah that he began in 1948. The novels are based on his own experience during the Holocaust and afterwards. Like Zweig, Adler’s life was a story of exile. Born in Prague, he survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and later moved to London. His first wife was murdered in Auschwitz.
Adler is the author of 26 books, among them works of fiction, philosophy, sociology and poetry. “The Wall” — an epic novel of more than 600 pages — which he considered his crowning achievement as a novelist, was published posthumously in German, after his death in 1988. As Filkins explains in an introduction, the struggle to remain alive to the present, rather than weighted down by the past, is at the heart of the novel.
“The Wall” is an unforgettable portrait of a survivor who returns to his hometown after the war, learns the tragic fate of his family and leaves his homeland for good, later trying to publish studies of the war. When he meets the woman who becomes his second wife, the novel takes on qualities of a life story, mixing stream-of-conscious elements with memories, dreams and nightmares. The plot is nonlinear, and Adler’s writing has been compared to James Joyce.
Filkins, a translator, poet and professor of languages and literature at Bard College of Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass., and an acclaimed translator and poet, first came across H.G. Adler’s work in 2001 and was immediately captivated by the writing. He notes that the wall of the title represents the past. The main character realizes, “I don’t belong to human society. I and the wall, we are alone, we belong together; there is nothing else that I belong to.”
Howard Jacobson is widely read in his native England; his latest book, “J” (Hogarth) was shortlisted by the Man Booker Prize, and his novel, “The Finkler Question,” did win the prize in 2010. Yet the 72-year-old author is not yet well known in the U.S. “J” is a serious novel after a number of more comic works; it’s a dystopian love story set in an invented world, after a catastrophe referred to as “WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED.” The middle word in the name of this newspaper is not mentioned, although there are many allusions. Here, the past exists so that it may be forgotten — history books are hard to come by, and libraries “put gentle obstacles in the way of research.” Here, there’s a black market in memory. The letter J is crossed out whenever it appears in reference to Kevern Cohen’s father, who put two fingers in front of his lips as if to stifle the sound.
In “My Grandfather’s Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War” (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), French journalist Anne Sinclair pieces together the life story of her grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who founded an important Parisian gallery. In 1940, he fled France to escape the Nazis, saving his family but abandoning his great collection of art. Sinclair found a box of his correspondence, with letters from Picasso, Matisse and others, and creates a captivating and elegantly written story of art provenance and exile.
“But Today is Different” by Sarah Stern (Resource Publications) is a collection of 60 eloquent poems. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the poet’s mother, and many of the poems evoke presence and memory, loss and death, elevating ordinary moments into holiness and beauty.
Ronna Wineberg’s “On Bittersweet Place” (Relegation Books) is a familiar story told with new rhythms. A first novel, this is an immigrant tale of a young Russian Jew who flees Ukraine with her family as a 10-year old and grows up in Chicago in the jazz age 1920s. The writing is compelling, the story universal. Wineberg is the founding fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review.
The title of Zachary Katz’s debut novel “Century Village” (CreateSpace) refers to a condominium community in Pompano Beach Florida, and Katz gets many of the details of retirement life just right, as he spins a story about a vanishing wife.
A New York City story, “The Book of Zev” by Marilyn Ida Horowitz (Koehlerbooks) is a lively dark comedy and mystery featuring an earnest dropout from religious life who becomes a taxi driver (the title character, Zev), and a divorced kosher chef named Sarah who is angry at God and favors yoga and red wine. These two get entwined in an international terrorist plot and with each other. The author, who teaches screenwriting at NYU, creates characters on the borders of Jewish life with uncommon abilities to predict the future, all the while grappling with questions of faith and purpose.
For Civil War buffs, fans of American Jewish history and naval history and readers of historical fiction, “Commodore Levy: A Novel of Early America in the Age of Sail” by Irving Litvig (Texas Tech University Press) is an intriguing novel based on the life of Uriah Phillips Levy, who rose to the highest rank in the pre-Civil War U.S. Navy. The book is published posthumously; Litvag completed the book shortly before his death in 2005.
“A Life Not With Standing” by Chava Willig Levy (CreateSpace) is a memoir that explores, with warmth and intimacy, the experience of growing up with polio. Willig has lived with roadblocks physical and societal, but she has maintained deep faith, good humor, a poetic sensibility and strong determination. Her love of family is pervasive, as she is strengthened by the support of those close to her, and her gift is to share her strength and insight. The author is an editor, advocate and motivational speaker on issues related to disability as well as music, parenthood and Judaism. Full disclosure: My name appears in this book, for introducing the author to her husband.
Not Another Video, Please
Special To The Jewish Week
As we start a new calendar year, we mark off dates that will require our presence: school dinners, graduations, weddings, family reunions and birthdays. Let’s circle one such occasion and offer the challenge of 2015: changing the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony.
There are interesting articles and responsa that raise questions about aspects of the ceremony: Should a Jewish celebration of accepting mitzvot be non-kosher and the cause for Sabbath desecration? Is anyone an adult at 12 or 13? What happens when this ceremony becomes a farewell party to Judaism?
These questions are meaningful for me as well. But I want to focus on a standard feature of these events: the video. I long for the days before Power Point, when a few foam boards with a photo montage was all you needed to make the kid happy. Now I am regularly subjected to half-hour biopics that tell the story of … well, what story is it exactly?
It is basically the narration of the child’s life as a toddler, kindergartener, elementary schooler and awkward middle schooler. The child’s friends will clap wildly when an image of one of them appears. There will be the great aunt who will give a smaller check because she did not show up in one slide. There will definitely be one girl sobbing in the ladies’ room stalls because she’s been left out.
There will, of course, be the mandatory slide of the bar mitzvah in diapers, and everyone will laugh. There will be the child on a grandparent’s knee, and everyone will kvell. There will be painful family vacation photos where the child in question is the blurry one in the red bathing suit three people in from the left. People, we don’t want to see your family in bathing suits. Ever. Even if you are all candidates for the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. TMI, I say.
Let’s face it, pre-adolescent children just aren’t that interesting. They don’t yet have a story. And a simcha is not a time to subject a captive audience to today’s equivalent of your home videos. Do that on your own time, even if you are paying for the meal.
I don’t mean to say that bar/bat mitzvah videos are boring. Of course they’re boring. Everyone knows that. So are most of the speeches and poems. As part of our social reciprocity in the collective we call community, we are willing to subject ourselves to your boredom so that you will tolerate ours. It’s a well-known deal. The problem with simcha videos is not tedium but messaging.
The story that is important — the narrative that a child joins on this occasion — is the story of the Jewish people. That’s the exciting, meaningful story. A bar/bat mitzvah is not a celebration of a child, in which case the photos of said youngster would be totally appropriate. The bar/bat mitzvah is arguably not a celebration at all. It is a marker of a major transition in the life of a Jewish person: when he or she takes on the adult responsibilities incumbent upon being a member of the Jewish community. These include visiting the sick, giving a tenth of one’s income to charity (yes, this includes bar/bat mitzvah checks), participating in collective prayer services, observing Shabbat and holidays, studying texts of Jewish meaning, attuning oneself to the grammar of compassion that is foundational to our faith. The list goes on.
If you want to make a video of that, go around taking pictures of people in need, of a pair of tefillin, of a soldier in Israel fighting on our borders and of an old woman praying at the Wall. Create a picture of Jewish life during the days of the Talmud, the Spanish Inquisition, the Renaissance and Poland in the 18th century. In that video put in a passage from the Bible and maybe a medieval commentator or two. Don’t forget to show an image of Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir and some obscure everyday heroes of Jewish life.
Make this video aspirational because that’s what the bar/bat mitzvah is all about. It’s not about the child. It’s about our Jewish story. If we keep telling kids through videos and speeches how wonderful they are but forget to tell them how wonderful Jewish life is, then we will have failed them at this transitional time. Our job as Jewish adults is to welcome and inspire a new crop of Jewish adults to take their place in this majestic story. Don’t tell them that they are fabulous the way they are but just how fabulous they could be if they took one great meaningful leap into their own Jewish future.
Mazal tov!
Erica Brown’s column appears the first week of the month. Subscribe to her weekly Internet essays at ericabrown.com.
Enjoy the read, Happy New Year and Shabbat shalom,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Our website is always there for you with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, advice columns, op-eds and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
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| Between the Lines - Gary Rosenblatt |
How An Extremist Changed His Ways
Talk about bad timing.
Yossi Klein Halevi’s re-released book, “Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: The Story of a Transformation,” was first published 19 years ago, two days after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated. It should have become a best seller for at least two reasons.
First, its clear, perceptive writing offers up a remarkable self-portrait of a teenage Jewish Defense League activist in the mid-1960s through the early ’70s. Halevi at first is captivated by the militancy of the group’s charismatic leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane. But his admiration eventually turns to disillusionment and he comes to repudiate both the movement and its leader.
Second, its understanding of Jewish rage and violence sheds eerie light on tragedies, then and now. Rabin’s murderer, who was influenced by Rabbi Kahane, was an Orthodox Jew who believed he was saving Israel by killing its prime minister. Almost two decades later Israeli society was shocked to learn that Jews were responsible for what Halevi calls an “unthinkable” act, burning alive an innocent Palestinian teenager in revenge for the murder of three Jewish boys this past June.
Halevi’s book shows the link between these violent acts and how “self-righteous violence,” in his words, is the source of all terrorism; that self-righteousness promotes the false notion that there are no innocents among one’s enemies.
In the wake of the Rabin murder few people wanted to buy “Memoirs,” a book that appeared to justify extremism. It soon went out of print, and Halevi, an American-born journalist, author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, never thought it would have another chance. But after the success of his most recent book, “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation,” which won high critical praise and the National Jewish Book Council’s Jewish Book of the Year award, HarperCollins has brought out paperback editions of “Memoirs” as well as Halevi’s second book, “At The Entrance To The Garden of Eden.” (Also ill fated, its personal account of the author’s efforts to search for spiritual connections with Christians and Muslims came out the day after 9/11, and quickly disappeared.)
“This is an account of the inner life of an angry American Jew,” Halevi told me the other day in reference to his “Memoirs.”
“And I want this generation to hear that voice and understand it.”
Us vs. Them
It begins as the voice of a teenage son of a Holocaust survivor living in the self-imposed Orthodox ghetto of Brooklyn’s Borough Park. The young Halevi is bright and rebellious, deeply influenced by his survivor father who sees the world as divided between us and them, Jewish victims and the murderous goyim. At the age of 14, Yossi Klein — he added “Halevi” when he moved to Israel years later — channeled his fear of and anger toward the non-Jewish world into activism for the fledgling Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) organization. Soviet Jewry became the noble cause for a new generation of American Jews who felt both post-Holocaust guilt and post-Six-Day War pride as they sought to save the three million Jews of the Soviet Union from spiritual destruction.
Although the Soviet Jewry movement became the greatest post-Holocaust success for American Jewry, Halevi believes it remains “the lost chapter in Jewish history,” in Israel as well as America. And in those early days he was frustrated with SSSJ’s idealistic, and often ignored, rallies and other efforts to stir interfaith and American Jewish establishment support. He became increasingly intrigued by and enamored with the swagger and success of Rabbi Kahane, the founder of the JDL, who fed on the turbulent anger of the times — black nationalism, the anti-Vietnam movement, student protests and feminist activities. Kahane and his “boys,” often thuggish yeshiva students, attracted media attention and communal outrage with their violent protests and actions — first against black threats toward Jews and later for the Soviet Jewry cause.
Halevi recounts how he became a JDL activist and hero when he and several others traveled to Russia and were arrested for their sit-in on behalf of Soviet Jews. But over time his initial admiration for Kahane faded. He came to see the JDL leader as more brute than liberator, abandoning his followers when they were in trouble, and not the protector of Jews he made himself out to be.
“No Jewish leader spoke so incessantly of love for the Jewish people as he did, and none so despised his fellow Jews,” Halevi writes. To Kahane, the Orthodox Jews who didn’t follow him weren’t really religious; secular Israelis were “Hebrew-speaking Gentiles,” and Israelis on the left were “worse than anti-Semites.”
“Kahane became my teacher in ahavat Yisrael [love of the Jewish people] in reverse,” Halevi told me. After going to Israel in 1973 and helping the rabbi’s run for the Knesset, which was based in part on the “transfer” of Arabs out of the country, he broke with him for good. He was 20.
Halevi returned to New York and tried to find himself through journalism and his studies. It was in a graduate course at City College on creative writing where he met the young woman who would become his wife. She was not Jewish. Through her, though, he learned to let go of his anger and narrow, distrustful vision of the world. Theirs was not only a personal love story but also a tale of falling in love with Israel. The couple made aliyah, she converted, they married, changed their names to Hebrew ones, and raised a new generation of sabras in Jerusalem.
Writing For Two Audiences
In his new Introduction to “Memoirs,” recounting its “strange history,” Halevi writes of his transition “from the heart of Jewish self-ghettoization to an attempt to make peace with the world, embracing not only my Jewish identity but also my place within humanity.” He added that “for many Holocaust survivors and their children, being part of humanity was by no means a given.”
Halevi says he has two audiences in mind for his book. One is the Orthodox world in which he was raised, “and my hope is to put on the agenda the question of our relationship with the non-Jewish world.” He seeks to challenge “a certain smugness” among the Orthodox, and “an extreme response, an understandable but destructive response to the Shoah — to cut oneself off from the rest of the world.”
He hopes liberal Jews will come to understand that “it’s OK to get angry about anti-Semitism.” He recalled speaking to a group of American Jewish college students soon after the brutal murder in November of rabbis at prayer in a synagogue in Jerusalem. Halevi asked the students to describe, in a word, their response to the massacre. “It was a long list of words like ‘sadness’ and ‘disappointment,’ but what was missing were words that showed emotion and anger,” he said.
“Why is that so many young American Jews seem incapable of outrage at attacks against Jews?” Halevi asks rhetorically, noting that “there is more anguish about the occupation than atrocities against Jews.”
He says the great internal problem in Jewish life today is a lack of balance. One extreme is “xenophobic, with no connection to the world, and the other is so open to the rest of the world that they [the universalists] risk fading out of the Jewish story altogether.”
“Memoirs,” Halevi said, is an attempt to describe the transition from the black-and-white clarity of his father’s generation, one of good vs. evil, to the “unbearable ambiguity” of today, between the moral burden of occupation and the moral imperative of protecting one’s own people. For Halevi, the story of his struggle to move from a sense of Jewish isolationism and to heal himself from Jewish rage, makes the book more relevant now, with Jewish extremism seemingly increasing, than when it was first published.
All extremists, he says, hate complexity. “But that’s exactly the discourse we need today.”
gary@jewishweek.org |
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| NEWS and FEATURES |
Amid Vigils For Police, Calls For Healing
Doug Chandler - Jewish Week Correspondent
As New Yorkers mourned two fallen police officers ambushed Saturday as they sat in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and as tensions escalated between police unions and city officials, a 12-year veteran of the police force and four local teens sat around a table in another section of Brooklyn Monday night and drew pictures.
Officer Mathew Pierre and the four children — Emily, two Anthonys and Soshil — also viewed artwork by Israeli children, toured a replica of an Israeli bomb shelter and discussed what it means for them to feel angry or happy, emotions they depicted in their drawings.
One of the youngsters, 18-year-old Anthony, said it was a “shame” that children in southern Israel “have to live through” the trauma of rocket fire, while Pierre, 42, likened the experience to what urban police officers face every day.
The Israeli kids and cops begin each day without “knowing whether it might be your last,” said Pierre, a native of Haiti whose younger brother, also a policeman, serves in the same precinct as one of the murdered officers, Rafael Ramos. “A week earlier, he was sitting in the very same patrol car in the very same location.”
Pierre and the four children are all involved in the New York Police Department’s Law Enforcement Explorers, a program aimed at building trust between the NYPD and members of the community, and the bonds they’ve created offer a counterpoint to the troubles around them.
But just as noteworthy from a Jewish perspective is that the organization hosting them, The Bridge, is closely associated with the Jewish community. Founded by Mark Meyer Appel, a prominent Orthodox activist, the center is aimed at bringing together members of different racial, religious and ethnic groups in Midwood, where it’s based, and other parts of Brooklyn.
Moreover, the workshop in which the officer and teens participated is designed by Artists 4 Israel, a group that sends art therapists to Israel to work with children traumatized by rocket attacks. The group is now planning to conduct similar workshops in local schools to help inner-city children cope with the trauma in their lives, said Michelle Rousseau Laytner, an art therapist who has partnered with the program.
Monday’s workshop came as members of the Jewish community responded to last weekend’s killings, which were carried out by an emotionally disturbed man, Ismail Brinsley, who posted a comment on Facebook before the ambush, saying he would murder two cops to revenge the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
Garner and Brown were both black men killed by police in different localities — Garner on Staten Island, Brown in Ferguson, Mo. — under what many people believe were questionable circumstances. But grand juries in both cases decided not to issue any indictments, sparking days of protests and riots.
Even before Saturday’s tragedy, rhetoric over the Garner case heated up considerably, with Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, calling on members to request that Mayor Bill de Blasio stay away from their funeral in case they are killed in the line of duty. Among the NYPD’s critics, some protesters — including some at a march organized by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice — chanted about “racist police.” On Saturday, after the ambush, Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said in a statement that “the blood of these two officers” was on the mayor’s hands.
The rhetoric spurred one religious leader, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, to write an op-ed for the Daily News saying that calling all police officers bigots is akin to “pouring kerosene on the fire” and that it’s “equally unfair and counterproductive to dismiss our mayor and other leaders as enemies of the police.” Meanwhile, the mayor has implored protesters to refrain from holding any marches or rallies until after the two funerals, the first of which is this Saturday.
Agreeing with the cardinal, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive director of the New York Board of Rabbis, told The Jewish Week that everyone needs “to stop our verbal assaults on one another.” Moreover, he continued, “We need to listen to each other. More discourse and no more diatribes. This city needs to heal, and that won’t happen without talking to each other.”
The rabbi, who also serves as the Jewish chaplain of the city’s Fire Department, said he paid a visit Sunday to the 84th Police Precinct, where the two officers were killed. Everyone was “devastated,” he recalled, “but what they said is, ‘We’re family in the NYPD, and we’ll get through this because we’re family.”
Rabbi Potasnik also said that he and other interfaith leaders are planning an observance at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Thursday, Jan. 15, to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. The ceremony will include the mayor, as well as police officials, he said, adding that it’s bound to be “a unifying moment in the City of New York. People need to see us together.”
Elsewhere around the city, at least two vigils took place Monday under Jewish auspices to express solidarity with local police officers.
In the Bronx, about 100 people gathered at a precinct in Kingsbridge, near Riverdale, for a vigil organized by synagogues across the denominational spectrum and two Jewish day schools, according to Rabbi Ari Hart, associate rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale.
The rabbi said that many of the people at the vigil are concerned about “how the justice system works in New York,” but he added that everyone has to remember that the NYPD is a diverse force whose members risk their lives every day “to protect us.”
What happened in the Garner case is a terrible injustice, Rabbi Hart continued, adding that “some cops respond too aggressively or with excessive force” and that some cops are racist. Those issues need to be addressed, he said, but the solution rests with proposals like those offered by State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that would allow his office, rather than county prosecutors, to handle cases like Eric Garner’s.
“To me,” he said, “that’s the solution. White people marching through the streets and calling black and Hispanic police officers racist is not the solution.”
The other vigil took place in Midtown Manhattan, where Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum led members of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah to NYPD’s Traffic Control Division, located next door to the congregation’s future home.
Rabbi Kleinbaum said she sent a condolence letter to the division’s commander before the vigil, asking if congregants could gather in front of the building with a menorah and candles, and received a welcoming response.
The rabbi said she believes the vigil and her earlier participation in a protest against racial injustice are both connected. The lives of young blacks matter, she added, so, too, do the lives of police, who should be treated with dignity and respect.
As the vigils took place, organizations and leaders associated with the protests deplored the loss of life and said that violence against police officers is not what anyone had in mind.
“No one was calling for the murder of police officers, God forbid,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, a national group that seeks to involve rabbis in calls for social justice. She added that the one “consistent message” throughout the movement is that demonstrations have to be peaceful and that all lives matter.
But Marjorie Dove Kent, executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, said the tragedy hasn’t caused any change in strategy on the part of her group.
JFREJ is now engaged in conversations over the best strategy for mobilizing and for pushing its message, Kent said. But the tragedy won’t affect “our longtime work to achieve justice for people of color,” she said. That strategy will continue to include civil disobedience, she said, calling it “a tool that could really keep this issue up front for white communities.”
Asked about the chants that have disturbed many people, including some who’ve attended the protests, Kent said that the movement has to continue pushing “the analysis that [bias] is part of the racist system as a whole. … It’s not about whether this cop or that cop is racist.”
One program that may contribute to healing the city is the NYPD Law Enforcement Explorers, which has close to 4,000 participants throughout the city.
Pierre, the program’s coordinator in his precinct, said he’s grown to love working with the children he’s advised and befriended through the program. Some, he said, are now studying to become police officers themselves, while others have entered the army or one of the helping professions.
Being involved in the program “stops the clock,” getting his mind off of whatever troubles are plaguing the city or world at the time, he said.
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| Food and Wine |
Day 1 Brunch
All it really needs to make it shakshuka is eggs, yo.
Ronnie Fein - JW Food & Wine Contributer
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| Travel |
Where Sephardic History Abounds
Hilary Larson - Travel Writer
Every day will be a little bit lighter now, but this week is still among the darkest of the year, and the chilliest. So it’s the perfect moment to take a closer look at the sunny Mediterranean shores of Djerba, Tunisia, one of my recommendations for Jewish travel in 2015.
Djerba has long been popular among vacationing French and Italians who come for its wide, sandy beaches, pretty whitewashed villages and exquisite sunsets — all at a fraction of European prices. But for the culturally discerning traveler, Djerba is more than just a beach vacation; it also offers a window onto a historic Jewish culture and a front-row seat to North Africa in transition.
Tunisia is an oasis of calm in a region that, while blessed with stunning beauty, has been plagued with chaos. But in the country where the Arab Spring began, a fragile democracy is taking shape with last month’s first free presidential election. The violence of recent years — including attacks on Jewish institutions — prompted an exodus of Djerbian Jews to Israel, but the 1,000 or so who remain are looking to the new president, Beji Caid Essebsi, to tamp down extremism, restore Tunisia’s economy and maintain the relative stability that has allowed Tunisian tourism to flourish.
At nearly 200 square miles, Djerba — which lies about 300 miles south of the capital city of Tunis, just offshore in the Gulf of Gabes — is Tunisia’s largest island, surrounded by pale-aqua sea that looks almost unreal. Sea breezes moderate a near-perfect climate, sparing Djerba from the dramatic day-to-night temperature drops that characterize most of this desert region. From late April into November, temperatures linger in the 70s, and winter rarely dips below the 50s, even at night.
Malta and Sicily are Djerba’s nearest Mediterranean neighbors; like both of those islands, Djerba combines ancient culture with the cosmopolitan feel of a historic crossroads. (Given how picturesque Djerba is, it’s no coincidence that George Lucas chose the island for those souk scenes in the original “Star Wars” movie.) Where Romans once built fortresses, today you find a mélange of Berbers, French, Greeks, Catholics, Arabs, Maltese and Sephardic Jews, whose Djerbian community is the most prominent in Tunisia.
It’s unusual to find such an important Jewish community outside a capital city, but Sephardic Jewry has an outsize cultural presence on Djerba that dates back to ancient times. The landmark El Ghriba Synagogue — the oldest Jewish temple in Africa — is arguably the island’s top attraction, and the spicy Djerbian cuisine is heavily influenced by Sephardic tradition.
More than a half-dozen synagogues and numerous Jewish institutions flourish in the Jewish districts, where Jews live a traditional, close-knit existence in relative harmony with their multiethnic neighbors. As in many majority-Muslim lands, the Jewish culture here is rather traditional, with an insularity augmented by island life. Many Jews work as goldsmiths, and are part of a distinctive Djerbian legacy of intricate, filigreed metalworking.
That intricacy can be seen in the graceful tile work and delicate turquoise arches of El Ghriba Synagogue. Tunisians say a synagogue has stood on this spot since the sixth century; in the cool silence of El Ghriba’s interior, ancient Torah scrolls and other ritual vestiges are preserved alongside gold-leaf Hebrew inscriptions, colorful stained glass and a ceiling of glittering chandeliers.
Apart from El Ghriba, there are few must-see attractions on Djerba; for the cultural tourist, Djerba is a place to explore in its entirety rather than a collection of discrete sights.
One can happily get lost amid the narrow streets and whitewashed buildings of Houmt Souk, the capital city on the island’s northern coast. Some neighborhoods are defined by views over the blue Mediterranean, where boats glide in and out of the port; others, by a jumbled assortment of Roman ruins, mosques and synagogues.
In the mornings, browse the fruits, vegetables, dried peppers and local spices at Djerba’s many outdoor markets. Markets are also where you’ll find handcrafted jewelry and metalwork, along with a wide selection of local pottery; it is tempting to bring home a tagine or other earthenware memento.
But Djerba isn’t all about tradition. The most intriguing cultural development of recent times may be the newly unveiled open-air museum called Djerbahood, a project involving artists from 30 nations whose bold public statements — straddling the line between murals and graffiti — have transformed a modest, dusty village south of Houmt Souk.
More than 100 mostly young, globally conscious artists have been living and working on these streets of stone dwellings and olive trees. The results are striking: many of the murals incorporate scrolled motifs reminiscent of Arabic calligraphy and Moorish tile work, while others are portraits or provocative scenes of war.
Djerbahood’s long-term future is uncertain. But in its juxtaposition of tradition and modernity, the project seems to symbolize the optimism and cultural syncretism that makes Djerba such a compelling place to visit.
editor@jewishweek.org |
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