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The most highly read story on our website this week is about Daniel Mael, the outspoken Israel advocate whose activism has necessitated special security arrangements at Brandeis, where he goes to school. Read more...
Amid Threats, Jewish Blogger Returns
Did Brandeis student Daniel Mael’s right-wing, pro-Israel politics play a role in backlash against him?
Daniel Mael defends his right to free speech. Courtesy of Daniel Mael
When Daniel Mael, a 22-year-old Brandeis senior, returned to campus for his final semester last week, he was advised by university police not to walk anywhere alone.
 “My lifestyle on campus has to be altered to ensure my safety,” said Mael, a Jewish student originally from Newton, Mass., who met with Brandeis security officials over winter break to discuss details. “We’re still figuring out the specifics.”
These added security precautions were set in motion after an article Mael wrote shortly before winter break sparked outrage among the Brandeis student body and beyond. According to Mael, he and his family have received threats of physical violence since.
The article, published on the conservative news website Truth Revolt, criticized fellow Brandeis student Khadijah Lynch’s inflammatory tweets after the funeral of two slain New York police officers.
“I have no sympathy for the nypd officers who were murdered today,” tweeted Lynch, a junior who served in a student leadership position in the African and Afro-American studies department. Lynch has since stepped down from the role and made her previously public twitter account private.
Lynch’s tweets went on to lambast America (“F--- this f---ing country,” read one) and talk about violence (“i need to get my gun license. asap” and “amerikkka needs an intifada. enough is enough”).
As the controversy grew, some students pushed for Lynch to be expelled while others backed her, defending her right to free speech and criticizing Mael for placing her in danger by publicizing her tweets.
In an email to the student body, Michael Piccione, a member of the 2014-15 student conduct board, accused Mael of violating several codes of student conduct and compromising Lynch’s safety by “exposing” her tweets to Mael’s “largely white supremacist following.” He called on the Brandeis community to “condemn the threatening and hateful comments she [Lynch] has received and stand up for the principle of social justice on which Brandeis was founded.”
Piccione also requested a “no contact order” against Mael on Dec. 28, which was briefly put into effect and prevented Mael from being in the same room with Piccione. The order has since been lifted.
Though the immediate heat following the article’s publication has subsided, the incident caused some to speculate that Mael’s staunchly pro-Israel stance played a role in backlash he received from fellow students.
“Mael getting death threats makes sense — he puts himself in the spotlight,” said Rebecca Sternberg, a junior on campus who is on the board of the Brandeis Zionist Alliance, a student group that celebrates the apolitical aspects of Israel, including art and culture.
Though Sternberg sympathizes with Mael’s pro-Israel stance, she disagreed with his “tactics.” “I have less sympathy for Mael than for Khadijah,” she said. “Khadijah didn’t try and put herself in the spotlight, she was forced into it.”
David Eden, chief administrative officer at Hillel International and a veteran editor and columnist, said, “There’s no doubt that as a high-profile Israel activist on campus, Daniel was a target on and off campus.”
Eden, who taught journalism at John Carroll University in Ohio and at the United Arab Emirates University in Abu Dhabi said “Mael did his job as a journalist” and “used his First Amendment rights” to report on a student leader’s controversial public statements. “The larger pro-Israel community has been shocked and amazed by the activity against Mael on campus,” he said.
Daniel Kasdan, a recent Brandeis graduate, said his Facebook newsfeed was “exploding” about the incident over winter break, as Brandeis students weighed in.
Kasdan agreed that Mael is somewhat of a marked man on campus because of his strong conservative standpoints. “Mael is consistently a vocal supporter of conservative causes,” he said. “People who either agree with him politically or find his views objectionable are using this case as a rallying point, either for or against,” he said.
Mael is viewed as a “challenge” to Bradeis’ more “liberal crowd,” said Kasdan. “Mael is viewed as the last refuge for the pro-Israel camp.”
Sternberg agreed that Mael’s proudly conservative viewpoints, most of which are not largely shared by his fellow students, are at the issue’s core. “Brandeis is a super-liberal school, and people will automatically take the liberal side,” she said.
The “liberal side” of the issue became increasingly murky, as articles on free speech and its limitations abounded. In one particularly well-circulated response, Alan Dershowitz, the noted former Harvard Law School professor known for his staunch defense of Israel defended Mael’s freedom of expression.
“So welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the academic hard left, where bigoted speech by fellow hard leftists is protected, but counter-expression is labeled as ‘embarrassment,’ ‘incitement’ and ‘bullying,’” wrote Dershowitz.
Still, even Brandeis students sympathetic with Mael’s viewpoint defended Lynch’s freedom of expression.
“I personally don’t agree with anything Khadijah said but I do think she has the right to express herself,” wrote Rachel Dobkin, a member of the the Brandeis Orthodox Organization, in an online correspondence. “No one agrees with her that I know of, and I think as an institution that values dialogue about important societal issues, it’s revolting that people wanted her expelled.”
Another Jewish student, who requested anonymity because he was “scared Daniel will come after me next,” said that Mael’s “polarizing” positions have driven a wedge between different segments of the Jewish community on campus.
“He’s created two camps,” he said, the “J Street folks,” a reference to the dovish pro-Israel lobby group, “and the Hillel folks,” The student, a junior, said he’s “personally intrigued” by J Street’s mission, but afraid to get more involved lest his friends at Hillel feel “betrayed.”
“I feel very guilty about not taking a public stand for Daniel, but he keeps antagonizing people,” he said.
To be sure, Mael is no stranger to taking a public stance against another student. On Jan. 2, the Wall Street Journal published an article headlined “How to Fight the Campus Speech Police: Get a Good Lawyer” detailing Mael’s yearlong dispute with Eli Philip, the head of Brandeis J Street U, the organization’s campus arm. The article describes how Mael hired a lawyer to defend himself against harassment claims brought against him by Philip.
J Street officials declined to comment on the incident. They also declined to comment on the Lynch incident. Philip declined to comment as well.
Mael was also involved in a kerfuffle with Brandeis J Street U board member Talia Lepson, who Mael accused of verbally harassing him. According to Mael, Lepson responded to his “Shabbat shalom” with “Jews hate you.” Mael reported the case to university police. Though the case went no further, there was a sprinkling of media coverage.
“These repeated incidents make Brandeis look really bad, and students resent that,” said Sarah, a Brandeis senior who preferred only to use her first name to avoid getting involved in the politics of the situation. Sarah, who is an actively pro-Israel student on campus, said she feels that Brandeis is a “comfortable place” to be an Israel supporter.
Andrew Flagel, senior vice president for students and enrollment at Brandeis, encouraged further dialogue, which he called “the best disinfectant.” He added that “Brandeis welcomes its students to express different viewpoints, even those with which people radically disagree.”
Regarding the “no contact order” briefly issued against Mael, Flagel said, “It’s not unusual to ask students for timeouts in communication with one another.”
Still, after all that has happened, Mael feels abandoned by his fellow students.
“I’m deeply disappointed by the reaction of the Brandeis community,” said Mael, who chose to attend Brandeis because his grandfather had been a member of the 1955 graduating class. “Some students have reached out to me privately with support. Some even made fake email accounts to communicate with me. The intimidation that many students feel on their college campus is chilling.”
Tal Fortgang, a sophomore at Princeton University, sympathizes deeply with Mael. He encountered a similarly overwhelming response when his article, “Checking My Privilege,” went viral last year. In the article Fortgang, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, defended his perceived “privilege” as a well-educated white male, attributing his opportunities to the sacrifices of his grandparents. The piece, which touched upon “firebrand racial issues,” incited high emotions. The article was even called “an act of violence” by some students, Fortgang said.
“Daniel is going through what I went through, only a far more severe and prolonged version,” said Fortgang, who is originally from New Rochelle. “There is no accounting for people not rushing to his defense.”
Still, even from an outsider’s perspective, Fortgang agreed that there is more to the situation than meets the eye.
“Daniel’s hawkish, unwavering support of Israel is not tangential in this case. There is a strange alliance between certain political views and other causes,” he said. “Clearly Daniel is a man of great integrity. I hope he stands strong.”
Also a popular story: Rabbi Riskin of Efrat has named a female spiritual leader who will take on rabbinic roles in the Modern Orthodox community there. Local experts agree that progress there means progress here. Read more...
Riskin Names Female Spiritual Leader In Efrat
Ex-New Yorker to take on rabbinic roles in Modern Orthodox community; local experts agree that ‘progress there means progress here.’
New York City native Jennie Rosenfeld. Courtesy of Kruter Photography
At age 11, Jennie Rosenfeld, originally from Riverdale, decided to attend daily prayer services, an obligation only for men according to traditional Jewish law. She was often the only girl there.
“There were times I prayed in the kitchen,” said Rosenfeld, a student in a five-year ordination program in Jerusalem, in a phone interview with The Jewish Week from Jerusalem. “The community has come a long way since then.”
Today, Rosenfeld serves as the first female spiritual leader to jointly lead an Orthodox community in Israel. Though not assigned the title rabbi, Rosenfeld works alongside Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, Efrat’s municipal chief rabbi, providing guidance, expertise in Jewish law and a voice of religious authority to community members. Rabbi Riskin led Lincoln Square Synagogue in New York to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s. His community in Efrat is seen as fashioned in Rabbi Riskin’s Modern Orthodox image.
Though appointed in the fall, Rosenfeld’s post was officially announced last week. She will be giving her inaugural lecture on Feb. 2.
According to Rabbi Riskin, there has been no prior appointment of this nature in Israel to date. “There’s a strong need for women’s halachic and spiritual leadership,” said Rabbi Riskin, who handpicked Rosenfeld for the role. “Frankly, I jumped at the opportunity to work with her.”
Rosenfeld is being referred to as a manhiga ruchanit, or spiritual adviser.
In the U.S., feminist Jewish leaders agree that the appointment marks an important turning point for Orthodox ritual life.
Blu Greenberg, founder of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance referred to Rosenfeld’s appointment as “another milestone in the historic journey of Orthodox Israeli women to full communal religious leadership.”
“Over the course of that journey, American and Israeli Orthodoxy have marched in tandem, and each step forward enlarges and enriches the entire enterprise,” she wrote in an email.
“The reality of women’s leadership in America mirrors what happens in Israel,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Fox, head of Yeshivat Maharat, the first Orthodox program in America to ordain women as clergy. He refereed to the mutual influence between Israel and America as “cross pollination.”
“Progress there means progress here,” he said.
Rabbi Fox noted that last year, Yeshivat Maharat graduates had more job offers than they could fill.
“These women can do the job no matter what they’re called,” he said, referring to the touchy question of what title to use for female spiritual leaders, if not rabbi. “We’ve stayed away from the issue over the last couple years. As long as they’re getting jobs, it doesn’t matter what they’re called,” he said.
The phenomenon of female Orthodox representation is not relegated to the religious level, said Rabbi Asher Lopatin, president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the only rabbinical school in the U.S. that is Open Orthodox, a liberal offshoot of the wider Modern Orthodox movement. Rabbi Lopatin was a recent panelist on the topic of women’s roles and rabbinic authority at JOFA’s annual conference.
“This shift is also happening on a lay level within the chief rabbinate,” said Rabbi Lopatin — earlier this year several women were appointed to the board of the Beis Din of America, the largest Orthodox rabbinical court. “If half of the congregants are women, clergymen should be women,” he said.
Rabba Sara Hurwitz, the first female member of the clergy to receive Orthodox ordination in the U.S., regards the appointment as the “natural next step” in a shifting communal landscape.
“Communities in America have already discovered that they can’t function without female spiritual leadership in partnership with the rabbi,” said Rabba Hurwitz, who serves at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale alongside Rabbi Avi Weiss. “There is a gradual understanding that this is becoming necessary. Other communities in Israel and in America will follow suit.”
Rabba Hurwitz said she knew Rosenfeld personally from her days as a congregant at HIR. Rosenfeld lived in New York until 2008, during which time she completed a doctorate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. A Wexner fellow, she wrote her dissertation on finding a Modern Orthodox sexual ethic within the Talmud. Rosenfeld also cofounded and directed Tzelem, a project at Yeshiva University that made resources on sexuality available to the Orthodox community. She also co-wrote a sex manual for Orthodox Jewish couples. She was named one of the 36 under 36 by The Jewish Week in 2008.
Rosenfeld admitted that she never foresaw the path of communal leadership for herself.
“Growing up, I didn’t envision this. My work on issues of sexuality in the Orthodox community led me to where I am. I realized that while I could give advice on these issues, I was missing a voice of halachic authority,” she said.
In order to gain this authority, Rosenfeld has embarked on 15 years of formal training. She is currently in her second year of a five-year ordination program at Midreshet Lindenbaum in Jerusalem, which will gain her the title heter horaah, literally “permission to rule,” upon completion.
After that, she plans to pursue a 10-year program at Lindenbaum to become a formal female dayaan, or religious judge. Only four women are enrolled in this track.
Though she does anticipate some opposition to her new role, Rosenfeld is confident that her goals fall in line with Orthodox tradition.
“This idea might be new, but I hope to be taking the age-old principles of Jewish learning and texts with me,” she said. “I’m driven by a void in female leadership that needs to be filled, and a voice that needs to be heard. I’m not yet sure where the road will lead.”
It's persimmon season in Israel, and we here can reap the delicious benefits and buy Israel at the same time. Food writer Ronnie Fein gives you a primer on the sweet fruit, as well as a recipe for a persimmon-infused coffee cake. Read more...
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Special To The Jewish Week
Ben Rimalower stars in one-man show about his abusive relationship with money. Allison Michael Orenstein
Money is such a taboo subject that discussing our sex lives is more comfortable for many of us than revealing our income. For playwright Ben Rimalower, who performs his own one-man show, “Bad With Money,” spending money is a way to avoid dealing with debilitating emotional problems. Jenna Scherer of Time Out New York raves that Rimalower “exorcises his financial demons” in a “purgative hour-long monologue in which he entertainingly (and excruciatingly) itemizes his monetary sins.” The show continues through the end of February in the West Village.
Rimalower is best known for his first one-man show, “Patti Issues,” which chronicled his obsession with Broadway star Patti LuPone. Rimalower, who watched his parents’ marriage dissolve because of his father’s latent homosexuality, has struggled throughout his life to maintain a healthy sense of self-esteem. While “Patti Issues” was originally conceived to embrace his financial problems — an earlier title was “Patti, Daddy, Money” — Rimalower ultimately decided to save the final category for another show, which became “Bad With Money.”
Directed by Aaron Mark, the play begins with Rimalower singing John Meyer’s “I’d Like to Hate Myself in the Morning” as Judy Garland, who performed the song in 1969 as her debts mounted sky-high toward the end of her troubled life. Rimalower, who is openly gay, then describes becoming a male prostitute while at Berkeley, and then, after college, stealing from his boss at the record company where he worked. The actor recalls how he engaged in a ceaseless cycle of borrowing just to keep his creditors at bay.
“My parents were raised to work hard, make money and buy a Cadillac,” Rimalower told The Jewish Week. “Such expectations [messed up] a lot of people in my generation. We have expensive tastes but we can’t color in between the lines.” While many of his non-Jewish friends have a “struggling artist thing,” for a Jewish actor, not having money is shameful — it is the “ultimate rejection of, or failure to live up to, the Jewish American ideal.”
Rimalower admitted that he found it easier to stop abusing alcohol and drugs than to stop shopping excessively. “You can quit gambling or drinking,” he reflected. “But spending is like eating” — you can’t simply cease doing it, even if you’ve developed a disorder. “You need to develop a healthy, balanced relationship to it. It’s important for me to face my problem so that other people aren’t collateral damage.”
“Bad With Money” runs at The Duplex, 61 Christopher St. Weekly performances are on Wednesday nights at 7 p.m. through the end of January, and on Thursday nights at 9:30 p.m. in February. For tickets, $25, call (800) 316-8559 or visitpurplepass.com/badwithmoney. There is a two-drink minimum per person, and patrons must be at least 21.
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The ‘Deli Man’ Cometh To Times Square
Special To The Jewish Week
Ziggy Gruber of Houston’s popular Kenny and Ziggy’s deli, at Ben’s this week. Michael Datikash
This is a busman’s holiday for Ziggy Gruber. The round-faced restaurateur from Houston (Texas, not Street), is sitting in Ben’s Kosher Delicatessen Restaurant, an enormous and bustling kosher deli near Times Square, talking Jewish food and chatting about his movie debut in the new documentary film “Deli Man.”
As the film, directed by Erik Greenberg Anjou, entertainingly shows, these are troubled times for the Jewish deli as an institution and as a working business. (“Deli Man,” which is currently playing in the New York Jewish Film Festival, will open theatrically on Feb. 27.) Gruber’s place, Kenny and Ziggy’s, is doing quite well, thank you, but the era in which New York City alone hosted some 1,500 delis is ancient history. There are approximately 150 Jewish delis in North America today.
“That was a different time,” Gruber says with a sigh. “It has been a process of attrition.”
He attributes the disappearance of the deli to numerous factors. The demographic shifts in the Jewish population have certainly affected the location of the restaurants, but one of the prime culprits, ironically, has been the success with which Jewish-Americans have become a part of the mainstream culture. The changing understanding of what constitutes “healthy” eating has hurt the delicatessen world, but the passage of time is an underrated factor.
“Most of the delis are owned by older people,” Gruber says. He’s a fourth-generation deli man himself. “It is a family-driven business.”
But if you push your kids to become doctors and lawyers, they won’t want or need to work the 90-hour week of a restaurateur.
Economic realities have worked against the deli, too, he notes.
“Rents go up and if you don’t own your own real estate, that will kill you,” Gruber says. “And it’s expensive to build a new deli from scratch; you’re looking at $1.5 million, $2 million, maybe even more.”
He adds, “Overheads keep going up, too. Food prices have risen at least 30 percent every single year in the last three years.”
The deli faces some obstacles that don’t have the same impact on purveyors of other cuisines.
“There’s a shortage of pastrami and brisket,” Gruber says. “We’ve had a serious [problem with] drought and there has been a lack of cattle production. The cattle market has changed, with the U.S. exporting 30 to 40 percent of its beef to Asia. It’s ending up as shabu-shabu instead of pastrami.”
There is one unexpected benefit of the thinning out of the deli herd: an atmosphere of fraternal feeling and cooperation between the surviving restaurants.
“There’s a problem getting pastrami,” says David Czegledi, the assistant general manager at Ben’s. “Our normal suppliers have been having trouble getting it; we borrowed from the Second Avenue Deli.”
Czegledi readily acknowledges that when there were “delis every two feet” in Manhattan, that kind of cooperation would not have been possible.
Ziggy Gruber, who grew up in the New York deli world, agrees.
“It was cutthroat back then,” he recalls. “Now you don’t have everybody on top of each other.”
Gruber is not pessimistic about the future of the deli.
“Just because things are different doesn’t mean there’s no light at the end of the tunnel,” he says. “You have to be innovative, you have to appeal to a multigenerational clientele. If you run the business right, you will prosper.”
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Diaspora Encounters To Cherish
A corner in Paris’ heavily Jewish Marais neighborhood.
What does it mean for Jewish travel if everyone makes aliyah?
I ask this question rhetorically, of course. No matter how charged the rhetoric or how tense the security situation, some Jews will always feel a stronger pull to their native or adopted territory — to the brilliance of South African sunshine or, yes, the warm, crisp baguettes and tidy green parks of the Paris Marais. And the solidity of our American Jewish community is reassuring.
But the furor over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s suggestion that French Jews, in the wake of the recent Paris terror attacks, ought to consider relocating to the Jewish homeland prompted me to consider anew the value of diaspora Jewish communities — and our role, as Jewish travelers, in supporting and appreciating them.
In a lot of places, you have to look hard for the Jews. You don’t have to look very hard at all for the anti-Semitism, though; it is sprayed upon walls in blood-red graffiti paint, sputtered from the mouths of bus drivers and casual acquaintances who assume their interlocutors are not Jewish, promulgated on Facebook pages and even in magazines at a corner kiosk.
But the Jews are there — still. While vast majorities have emigrated to America, Canada or Israel, Jewish communities maintain their distinctive presences around the globe.
These days, I usually have to call in advance if I want to visit the local synagogue, where pews are typically less than half-full even on holidays. But there is usually a warmly proffered Shabbat meal, and a proud group of locals eager to share what makes their tiny corner of the Jewish diaspora unique — be it guava cake for the Jamaican Kiddush or chicken baked with olives in a Catalan village.
The Jewish story, as of the 21st century, is in no small part a tortuous narrative of displacement and exile. To be sure, it is also a story of joyous rebirth, of hardscrabble success on pioneer shores, of achievement and integration and cultural triumph.
But to write about Jewish travel means to revisit — over and over again, from Thessaloniki to Samarkand — the sites of Jewish suffering, persecution and demise. Jewish travel is far more than an itinerary of loss, just as travel is much more than the accumulated detritus of human history.
Still, in large European cities and small North African islands, Central Asian villages and Latin American capitals, a similar narrative emerges. Here there was a ghetto, where Jews were herded. Over there was a mikvah, but the site has grown over with weeds since the last Jews fled. In this century, the Jews were expelled; in that era, there was an exodus to a more favorable regime; at one time, there were nearly a dozen working synagogues. Now there is one, or maybe none, only a mournful cemetery or — in the best case — a small museum to mark where Jews once lived.
So much of Jewish travel is heritage travel. And this is important, not only for the preservation of memory and deepening of primal connections, but also for the way such travel brings a visible Jewish presence — in the form of tourists — to places that rarely encounter Jews. In a world of virtual realities, live human contact is a powerful thing.
But it is infinitely more satisfying to visit a living Jewish community, however small and tenuous, than to bear witness to the vestiges of a dead one. France is a particularly rich example: In the heart of Europe, Jews are a towering intellectual and cultural presence, an integral part of the historical fabric, both in the arrondissements of Paris and the outposts of empire.
None of this is to deny the value of having a Jewish homeland to settle in; the critical importance of immigration for Israel; nor the very real compromises — in quality of life, opportunity and security — that Jews who live in small, relatively remote communities often make. And whether by tradition or necessity, Jews are resourceful and migratory enough that we will continue to encounter each other in some of the world’s far-flung places.
For the traveler, these are encounters to be cherished. Most of Bulgaria’s Jews immigrated to Israel after World War II — but not everybody, and the Chanukah candles flickering from windows were a lovely sight on my recent visit to Sofia.
And amid the ubiquity of Catholicism in the Spanish urban landscape, it was heartening to walk into a Barcelona café where the windows were lettered in Hebrew, and to share the New World stories that had brought a generation of Venezuelan Jews back to Iberia.
Like the bakeries and butcheries of Paris’ Marais quarter, each of these communities offers flavors, traditions and stories that cannot be found elsewhere. They are the stories that keep this Jewish traveler on the move.
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