Dear Reader,
Aayan Hirsi Ali is famous for her critique of Muslim, but did you know she has considered conversation to Judaism? That's what she told a crowd at the Israeli consulate, including Editor and Publisher Gary Rosenblatt.
SHORT TAKES
Hirsi Ali Still Defiant Against Islam; IsJudaism In Her Future?
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a supporter of atheism who rejected her Muslim faith as anti-women and anti-tolerance, told a group of guests at the home of Israeli Consul General Ido Aharoni last Thursday evening, “One day I hope to convert to Judaism.”
“I tried it but it was very difficult,” she said at the outset of an hour-long discussion at an “Intellectual Salon,” part of a series of programs hosted by Aharoni and his wife, Julie.
It was difficult to tell if Hirsi Ali, 45, the Somali-born free speech activist, writer and former politician, was serious about converting. (Later in the evening she raised the topic again, laughingly noting that life as a Jew could be “a permanent quarrel” because of the many points of view Judaism encompasses.)
But the author of a new book, “Heretic: Why Islam Needs A Reformation Now,” was quite serious in asserting that Islamic extremists need to be defeated rather than engaged in dialogue aimed at reconciliation. She said President Obama was naïve in his approach to Iran over nuclear arms, failing to recognize that in the Islamic mindset, compromise equals shame. “Their minds are frozen in the Middle Ages,” she said. “Change will only come from the heretics.”
Interviewed by legal expert and author Thane Rosenbaum at the salon, Hirsi Ali criticized Obama for calling Islam a religion of peace. “Why, Mr. President, do you insist on [speaking of] what Islam should be instead of what it is?”
Asked her reaction to being disinvited as a speaker at last spring’s Brandeis Universitygraduation, charged by some faculty and students as being an “Islamaphobe,” she said, “Brandeis didn’t do me wrong, they did themselves wrong.” She added that she would never let herself be characterized as a victim.
Hirsi Ali became a household name in 2004 when, having immigrated to the Netherlands, death threats were made against her and Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, for the short film they collaborated on, called “Submission,” which was critical of Islam. After van Gogh was murdered by a Dutch Muslim, she fled to the U.S., and works at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. She remains outspoken, despite her belief that she is still on an Islamic “hit list” because, she says, she is “a woman, an apostate, a lover of Israel, and a lover of Zion,” admiring the Jewish state for asserting and fighting for its right to exist.
“I hope and pray I die in bed of old age at 100,” she told her admiring audience. “But if they get me before then, please, I beg of you, do not give in.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Passover is really almost here. We've got an archive of great recipes on our homepage and our Food & Wine section. If you think you hate matzah, you might want to try it rolled into Manischewitz-glazed chocolate truffles.
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http://www.thejewishweek.com/Food & Wine
http://jwfoodandwine.com/article/2015/02/25/drink-wine-hitchcock
The Remix: Tackling Matzah
Don't like matzah? You probably will when it's rolled into these dark chocolate truffles.
This is the second installment of our new series "The Remix" in which we seek to gently tweak the more challenging dishes in the Jewish culinary cannon. With a little bit of love, we’re convinced we can make even these dishes delicious, even the ones that seem bizarre to the modern palate.
Matzah, of course, is a cracker, but a strange one. When I ask my non-Jewish friends if they like matzah, the answer is a resounding yes. But my Jewish friends are more divided. Responses from an informal Facebook poll ranged from “I love it! I eat it all year long!” to “Yes, with butter, egg salad, charoset, lox or honey,” to, ahem, “My digestive system hates it. I prefer to be regular.” Alrighty then! More than one respondent called matzah out for being crumbly, hard to digest, bland, and messy.
But maybe the bread of affliction is supposed to afflict you. After all, we eat matzah because when Moses and theIsraelites fled slavery in Egypt, they left so fast they didn’t have time for their bread to rise. The matzah is a symbol of struggle; its unappealing qualities remind us of our hardship.
For years, matzah was carefully crafted by hand, with Rabbis closely monitoring it to make sure it went from dough to cracker in no more than 18 minutes, when the leavening process is thought to start.
Then, in 1888, Lithuanian immigrant Dov Behr, founder of Manischewitz, opened the first matzah factory in Cincinnati. The company’s ads even bragged, “No human hand touches these matzos!” Matzah went from round and bumpy to square and uniform. The factories brought matzah to the mass market and made it more affordable.
Julie Sperling, co-founder of the handmade matzah brand Vermatzah, is trying to bring an artisanal touch back into matzah making. She believes that all that automation has hurt the flavor.
“Most matzah is made using industrially produced wheat, which leaves it tasting bland,” she said. She prefers local ingredients, which give the matzah a more interesting flavor.
But even your big-box matzah is better as part of a recipe, most agree. Lots of us love matzah brei, chocolate-covered matzah and, of course, matzah balls, which open up the whole sinkers versus swimmers argument. (Team sinker!) We also chew over whether one should add seltzer water for lightness (I say nay), and if we should put in tons of vegetables or leave the broth plain. As a people, we may never reach one conclusion.
But we do know that chocolate improves everything, even matzah balls. Of course, the only thing these truffles have in common with traditional savory matzah balls is their shape, and the matzah. They’ve also got rich, dark chocolate with crunchy matzah, a touch of sea salt and a sweet glaze made with Manischewitz wine. Your seders may never be the same.
Slideshow
2 / 6
HideServings & Times
Yield:
24 ballsActive Time:
15 minTotal Time:
1 hr 15 minHideIngredients
1/3 cup heavy cream
5 ounces (about ¾ cup) dark chocolate, roughly chopped
¼ cup butter, at room temperature
1 piece matzah, finely chopped1 ½ cups kosher for Passover powdered sugar
3 tablespoons Manischewitz (or to taste)
Sea salt
HideSteps
Put heavy whipping cream in a small saucepan over low heat. Bring to a simmer and add chocolate. Remove the saucepan from the heat and whisk until smooth. Whisk in butter until smooth. Stir in matzah pieces and chill for 1 hour or until mixture hardens. Can be made up to one day in advance.
While chocolate is hardening, make glaze by mixing powdered sugar and Manischewitz. The glaze should be loose enough to drizzle but thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Remove chocolate mixture from refrigerator and use a teaspoon or melon baller to create round truffles. Drizzle each truffle with glaze, then sprinkle with a few grains of salt. Let glaze harden and serve. Can be made one day in advance and stored in the refrigerator, or up to three days if you drizzle the glaze a day before serving.Sadly, the most well-read story on our website this week was our coverage of the tragic house fire in Midwood that killed seven Orthodox children last Friday night. Staff writers Amy Clark and Steve Lipman talked to many of the community's mourners.
NEW YORK
After Midwood Fire Tragedy, Stocking Up and Taking Stock
Residents buy up smoke detectors and try to come to terms with the loss of seven children in Shabbat blaze.
Steve Lipman and Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writers
Four days after seven children died in a fire in a Midwood home, area Jews were grappling with the loss while stocking up on fire safety equipment to keep their families safe.
The fire was caused by a faulty hot plate left on to keep food warm over Shabbat, and a lack of smoke detectors on the first and second floors of the Bedford Avenue house allowed it to spread to the stairwell before anyone woke up, separating the mother from her children, sleeping on the other side of the stairs.
Area residents said the fire served as a wake-up call that brought residents to neighborhood hardware stores in droves.
“Half of our community, the first thing we did was check the fire alarms,” said Israel Shmaya, a 27-year-old yeshiva student who studies hospitality management at night. He came to the site of the fire Tuesday morning to pray for the family.
“Everybody’s taking more precautions. ... That way another tragedy doesn’t happen,” he said.
At Corner Hardware & Paint, an Ace Hardware franchise with a large number of Orthodox customers in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, there was “panic” as soon as the doors opened on Sunday morning, a manager said. Customers were buying batteries for smoke detectors and ladders for reaching out-of-the-way detectors, and asking questions about fire extinguishers and safe ways to heat food on Shabbat.
On Tuesday morning, two of the four shelves holding smoke detectors were bare. “There aren’t many left,” an employee said. “People have been buying them.” In front of the register a display of crock-pots and hot plates remained.
Rabbi Yosef Rapaport, a spokesman for Agudath Israel of America, said a small Borough Park housewares store told him it sold more than 20 smoke detectors in one day.
“If we multiply that to other similar establishments in Orthodox areas, it could be considered sort of a buying spree,” he said via email.
At the Flatbush Minyan, a prominent Orthodox congregation less than a mile away from the site of the fatal fire, Rabbi Meir Fund said he will devote part of his sermon this Saturday to matters of fire safety.
“Everyone was jolted by this,” he said.
There have been other fatal fires in Brooklyn’s Orthodox communities in recent years, but never of this magnitude. In 2000, a Shavuot fire in Williamsburg killed two people and two fires in Borough Park in 2002 killed three. In 2011, 13 people in Teaneck, N.J., were hospitalized for symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning after a defective stove was left on for two days during Shavuot.
But seven deaths in a single family in a single fire are unprecedented here.
“Never, these type of numbers,” said Louis Welz, CEO of Flatbush’s Council of Jewish Organizations. “When do you hear these types of numbers?” he asked, leaving the rhetorical question unanswered.
In the wake of the fire, several local Jewish organizations have begun fire safety education efforts.
Rabbi Yosef Rapaport, a spokesman for Agudath Israel of America, said a small Borough Park housewares store told him it sold more than 20 smoke detectors in one day.
“If we multiply that to other similar establishments in Orthodox areas, it could be considered sort of a buying spree,” he said via email.
At the Flatbush Minyan, a prominent Orthodox congregation less than a mile away from the site of the fatal fire, Rabbi Meir Fund said he will devote part of his sermon this Saturday to matters of fire safety.
“Everyone was jolted by this,” he said.
There have been other fatal fires in Brooklyn’s Orthodox communities in recent years, but never of this magnitude. In 2000, a Shavuot fire in Williamsburg killed two people and two fires in Borough Park in 2002 killed three. In 2011, 13 people in Teaneck, N.J., were hospitalized for symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning after a defective stove was left on for two days during Shavuot.
But seven deaths in a single family in a single fire are unprecedented here.
“Never, these type of numbers,” said Louis Welz, CEO of Flatbush’s Council of Jewish Organizations. “When do you hear these types of numbers?” he asked, leaving the rhetorical question unanswered.
In the wake of the fire, several local Jewish organizations have begun fire safety education efforts.
The Flatbush COJO, in partnership with City Councilmember Chaim Deutsch, this week began an extensive fire safety campaign in the neighborhood, including a community-wide educational program, and the distribution of free carbon monoxide detectors.
The Jewish Community Relations Council is reaching out to day schools to encourage fire safety education in the classrooms and the New York Board of Rabbis is urging member congregations to distribute pre-Passover fire safety guidelines. And about 100 leaders of local Jewish organizations attended the annual FDNY safety briefing at the Department’s Brooklyn headquarters on Monday.
“This tragedy has taken the matter [of fire safety] to a new level. There is going to be a collective response,” said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the board’s executive vice president and the Fire Department’s Jewish chaplain.
Over the weekend, the New York Fire Department took to the streets of Brooklyn, distributing 200 smoke alarms, 16,000 batteries and hundreds of fire safety pamphlets in English and Yiddish.
Chai Lifeline organized a community gathering called “Making Sense of the Midwood Tragedy: Talking to Your Children, Understanding it Yourself,” launched a 24-hour helpline ([718] 855-3274) and posted guidelines for how parents could talk to their children about the tragedy on its website.
Agudath Israel’s Rabbi Rapaport said via email that the city needs to find new ways to get safety information to charedi families who “avoid general secular media, such as TV and secular mass circulation newspapers.”
In such charedi enclaves as Rockland County’s Monsey, and Lakewood and Passaic, N.J., rabbis were encouraging their members to install fire safety equipment in their homes and drill family members on fire safety procedures.
In the week before Passover, when many families conduct a pre-holiday burning of chometz items, and when large numbers of holiday candles are often lit in the home during the first days and last days of the holiday, these warning are especially timely, Jewish leaders said.
During Shabbat and major holidays, observant Jews, in accordance with the prohibition against turning on an oven or electrical device, will keep food warm using a “blech,” a metal sheet that covers a low-burning stove burner, or appliances such as crockpots and hot plates that are kept on throughout the period or switched on by a pre-set timer. These devices usually function without a problem; but when they don’t, the result can be fatal. Sparks from overloaded electrical outlets have also caused fires.
Members of the Orthodox community “are not going to change their operations” but they “are going to be a little more careful,” said Rabbi Hertz Frankel, a longtime administrator in the Satmar chasidic school system and frequent spokesman for the wider charedi community.
Several Midwood women interviewed Tuesday morning in front of the burned home agreed that hot plates and crockpots are not going away.
The Jewish Community Relations Council is reaching out to day schools to encourage fire safety education in the classrooms and the New York Board of Rabbis is urging member congregations to distribute pre-Passover fire safety guidelines. And about 100 leaders of local Jewish organizations attended the annual FDNY safety briefing at the Department’s Brooklyn headquarters on Monday.
“This tragedy has taken the matter [of fire safety] to a new level. There is going to be a collective response,” said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the board’s executive vice president and the Fire Department’s Jewish chaplain.
Over the weekend, the New York Fire Department took to the streets of Brooklyn, distributing 200 smoke alarms, 16,000 batteries and hundreds of fire safety pamphlets in English and Yiddish.
Chai Lifeline organized a community gathering called “Making Sense of the Midwood Tragedy: Talking to Your Children, Understanding it Yourself,” launched a 24-hour helpline ([718] 855-3274) and posted guidelines for how parents could talk to their children about the tragedy on its website.
Agudath Israel’s Rabbi Rapaport said via email that the city needs to find new ways to get safety information to charedi families who “avoid general secular media, such as TV and secular mass circulation newspapers.”
In such charedi enclaves as Rockland County’s Monsey, and Lakewood and Passaic, N.J., rabbis were encouraging their members to install fire safety equipment in their homes and drill family members on fire safety procedures.
In the week before Passover, when many families conduct a pre-holiday burning of chometz items, and when large numbers of holiday candles are often lit in the home during the first days and last days of the holiday, these warning are especially timely, Jewish leaders said.
During Shabbat and major holidays, observant Jews, in accordance with the prohibition against turning on an oven or electrical device, will keep food warm using a “blech,” a metal sheet that covers a low-burning stove burner, or appliances such as crockpots and hot plates that are kept on throughout the period or switched on by a pre-set timer. These devices usually function without a problem; but when they don’t, the result can be fatal. Sparks from overloaded electrical outlets have also caused fires.
Members of the Orthodox community “are not going to change their operations” but they “are going to be a little more careful,” said Rabbi Hertz Frankel, a longtime administrator in the Satmar chasidic school system and frequent spokesman for the wider charedi community.
Several Midwood women interviewed Tuesday morning in front of the burned home agreed that hot plates and crockpots are not going away.
“Using hot plates, I don’t think this it’s going to stop, but I do think people are going to look into safer alternatives,” said Chana Kramer, who came to pray and write a note of condolence outside the boarded up two-story house at 3371 Bedford Ave. near Avenue L.
Rose, a Midwood mother of four who preferred that we only use her first name, stopped by the house a few minutes later. She said that while people are all for adding smoke detectors and other early warning systems, serving their families warm food over Shabbat was a must.
“Fire alarms, maybe, but calls [saying] ‘don’t use your hot plate’ — if it’s working properly, how else [can you keep food warm]? I think the hot plate is safer than the blech. ... I never knew this could happen with a hot plate,” she said.
The fire was also marked in the wider community. The Brooklyn Nets basketball team had a moment of silence before the team’s game Monday night and a makeshift memorial in front of the Sassoon home included offerings from both Jewish and non-Jewish residents.
Tony, who owns several apartment buildings in the area and asked that we only use his first name, brought over a bouquet of seven white roses on Sunday, and then returned to the home again to pay his respects on Tuesday. “It’s a tragedy. I can’t fathom it,” he said.
The tragedy galvanized the Orthodox community, both in Borough Park, where a funeral ceremony took place on Sunday at Borough Park’s Shomrei Hadas Chapels, and on Monday at Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot cemetery, where the Sassoon children were buried.
Hundreds of mourners crowded into the Brooklyn chapel, and into the surrounding streets, as Gabriel Sassoon, an Israeli who had come to the United States two years ago, eulogized his children — Elaine, 16; David, 12; Rivkah, 11; Yeshua, 10; Moshe, 8; Sara, 6; and Yaakob, 5.
Similarly, hundreds of people (thousands, according to some estimates) attended the Jerusalem burial in which Mayor Nir Barkat and Chief Rabbi David Lau participated. In his graveside eulogy, Gabriel Sassoon asked God why one korban, or sacrifice, from his family was not sufficient. Why, asked Sassoon, did He take seven?
Gabriel Sassoon was away from home at a religious conference when the fire took place. The two survivors of the blaze, Gayle Sassoon, Gabriel’s wife, and Siporah, the couple’s 15-year-old daughter were in critical condition early this week in area hospitals, being treated for burns and smoke inhalation.
The people who came for solitary prayer in front of the Bedford Avenue home Tuesday Morning said the tragedy affected them deeply.
“It wasn’t easy to come. I’m a mother, a fairly new mother. It’s shocking. It kind of hits you with a certain reality about what can happen,” said Kramer.
Rose, a Midwood mother of four who preferred that we only use her first name, stopped by the house a few minutes later. She said that while people are all for adding smoke detectors and other early warning systems, serving their families warm food over Shabbat was a must.
“Fire alarms, maybe, but calls [saying] ‘don’t use your hot plate’ — if it’s working properly, how else [can you keep food warm]? I think the hot plate is safer than the blech. ... I never knew this could happen with a hot plate,” she said.
The fire was also marked in the wider community. The Brooklyn Nets basketball team had a moment of silence before the team’s game Monday night and a makeshift memorial in front of the Sassoon home included offerings from both Jewish and non-Jewish residents.
Tony, who owns several apartment buildings in the area and asked that we only use his first name, brought over a bouquet of seven white roses on Sunday, and then returned to the home again to pay his respects on Tuesday. “It’s a tragedy. I can’t fathom it,” he said.
The tragedy galvanized the Orthodox community, both in Borough Park, where a funeral ceremony took place on Sunday at Borough Park’s Shomrei Hadas Chapels, and on Monday at Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot cemetery, where the Sassoon children were buried.
Hundreds of mourners crowded into the Brooklyn chapel, and into the surrounding streets, as Gabriel Sassoon, an Israeli who had come to the United States two years ago, eulogized his children — Elaine, 16; David, 12; Rivkah, 11; Yeshua, 10; Moshe, 8; Sara, 6; and Yaakob, 5.
Similarly, hundreds of people (thousands, according to some estimates) attended the Jerusalem burial in which Mayor Nir Barkat and Chief Rabbi David Lau participated. In his graveside eulogy, Gabriel Sassoon asked God why one korban, or sacrifice, from his family was not sufficient. Why, asked Sassoon, did He take seven?
Gabriel Sassoon was away from home at a religious conference when the fire took place. The two survivors of the blaze, Gayle Sassoon, Gabriel’s wife, and Siporah, the couple’s 15-year-old daughter were in critical condition early this week in area hospitals, being treated for burns and smoke inhalation.
The people who came for solitary prayer in front of the Bedford Avenue home Tuesday Morning said the tragedy affected them deeply.
“It wasn’t easy to come. I’m a mother, a fairly new mother. It’s shocking. It kind of hits you with a certain reality about what can happen,” said Kramer.
Shmaya, the 27-year-old yeshiva student, said he came to the house Tuesday morning to say Tehillim “for the people who are still alive, that they should have a bit of peace” and Mishnayot, “for the souls who are already passed away.”
“It just shook the community,” he said. “It shook us to a point where: We can’t do anything about it, they’re gone. So the only thing we could do is do good things in the name of their souls, so that way they rest in heaven in a good place.”
Rose also stood in front of the boarded up house, still smelling faintly of smoke, and prayed.
"The hardest part of all of this is what they [the family] may be going through. When one person in Am Yisrael is suffering, we're all suffering,” she said.
She said 10-year-old Yeshua was her son’s bus monitor. When he learned of the tragedy, the 6-year-old said, “Did his mommy know he was my bus monitor? He was such a good bus monitor, he always used to give me candy. I want to tell her that,” she said.
And on Sunday her daughter wouldn’t let her out of sight. “It’s just so scary," she said. "For the first two nights. I brought my kids into my room.
“You appreciate your kids [more],” she added. “Even when they’re driving you crazy, you’re like, ‘thank God, they’re alive, they’re here and they’re breathing.”
After the fire, a friend in Israel told her about going to the Sassoon family for a Shabbat dinner.
“The mother was such a aishet chayil [woman of valor],” the friend told Rose. “She was in the kitchen serving, the kids were helping, the table was filled with zemirot [Shabbat songs] and divrei Torah [Torah discussions]. They were such a happy, nice family. Everyone used to go to them for Shabbat.”
Miriam Lichtenberg contributed to this report from Israel.
steve@jewishweek.com, amyclark@jewishweek.com
Shabbat Shalom,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
FILM
“It just shook the community,” he said. “It shook us to a point where: We can’t do anything about it, they’re gone. So the only thing we could do is do good things in the name of their souls, so that way they rest in heaven in a good place.”
Rose also stood in front of the boarded up house, still smelling faintly of smoke, and prayed.
"The hardest part of all of this is what they [the family] may be going through. When one person in Am Yisrael is suffering, we're all suffering,” she said.
She said 10-year-old Yeshua was her son’s bus monitor. When he learned of the tragedy, the 6-year-old said, “Did his mommy know he was my bus monitor? He was such a good bus monitor, he always used to give me candy. I want to tell her that,” she said.
Her nephew, who was in the same class with 8-year-old Moshe, “was crying all day Shabbos — he was crying his eyes out,” she said.
“You appreciate your kids [more],” she added. “Even when they’re driving you crazy, you’re like, ‘thank God, they’re alive, they’re here and they’re breathing.”
After the fire, a friend in Israel told her about going to the Sassoon family for a Shabbat dinner.
“The mother was such a aishet chayil [woman of valor],” the friend told Rose. “She was in the kitchen serving, the kids were helping, the table was filled with zemirot [Shabbat songs] and divrei Torah [Torah discussions]. They were such a happy, nice family. Everyone used to go to them for Shabbat.”
Miriam Lichtenberg contributed to this report from Israel.
steve@jewishweek.com, amyclark@jewishweek.com
Shabbat Shalom,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
FILM
THE ARTS
Sephardic Culture, Through The Generations
Three diverse films at annual festival worthy of theatrical releases.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
A look at the program for this year’s New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, which opens on March 12, should serve as a vivid reminder of that basic reality. The musical traditions of Algeria on display in the opening-night screening of “El Gusto” are utterly unlike the musical culture outlined in the program of shorts on the Bukharian Jews of Queens, or the Moroccan music of “Khoya: Jewish Morocco Sound Party,” another festival event.
The musical connections always seem to come to the fore in this series, but gradually the festival has also risen in stature to the point where it usually screens several films that will be theatrically released. Three of this year’s films are particularly worthy of mention.
With the 1995 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires back in the news, this is a fortuitous moment for the release of “God’s Slave,” a taut thriller directed by Joel Novoa Schneider. The film is a Venezuelan-Argentine co-production, which is appropriate because one of its central characters is a sleeper agent working in Caracas who will be sent to Argentina on a terrorist mission. Novoa, himself a Venezuelan, offers a pair of protagonists: Ahmed (Mohammed Alkhaldi), a Muslim militant whose parents were assassinated during the Lebanese Civil War, and David (VandoVillamil), a Mossad operative who saw his older brother killed in a suicide bombing in 1967.
Novoa keeps the two apart for almost 50 minutes, with Ahmed building a life for himself as a doctor, husband and father in Caracas before being called to Buenos Aires by his controller, while the bulk of David’s screen time is spent trackingterrorist threats against the Jewish community of the Argentine capital. Novoa interweaves their activities quite deftly, thanks in no small part to a terse but evocative screenplay by Fernando Butazzoni. When their paths finally do cross, it is a collision with ramifications that echo for several minutes. Not surprisingly, the second and last time they come together is the film’s impressively staged climax, a modest, efficient gunfight that is the culmination of a series of betrayals.
By its very nature, “God’s Slave” is a bit schematic and it never messes up its plot points or reversals. But there is some awkward signposting that reaches a particularly egregious apex in the film’s last shot with rather blunt visualization of the idea of revenge being passed down the generations. Despite that, the film is an effective and compulsively watchable genre piece.
Both “Orange People,” the directorial debut of actress Hanna Azoulay Hasfari, and “The Dove Flyer,” Nissim Dayan’s adaptation of Eli Amir’s novel, also revolve around issues of heritage and generational transmission of cultures and attitudes. In that regard they fit quite nicely with the documentaries in this year’s festival.
The Hasfari film is a particularly pointed illustration of these issues, with the director (and writer) herself playing one of a pair of sisters whose lives have been buffeted by the manipulations of their mother Zohara (Rita Shukrun), who wants to pass on her apparent psychic powers to Simone (Esti Yerushalmi). In her zeal to ensure that line of succession, she drove a wedge between Simone and her beloved sister Fanny (Hasfari), but now that Fanny has returned to Jaffa after a 16-year absence, things are starting to percolate again.
The pivot points for this devious triangle are the sisters’ shared love of Simone’s husband and their love of cooking. The idea of people bonding in the kitchen is becoming one of the leading clichés of recent film, and while Hasfari has little to add to this already creaking trope, the scenes in which the two sisters engage in culinary arts are quite charming.
Otherwise it’s a bit hard to know what to make of “Orange People.” It has a complicated plot reminiscent of old Warner Brothers chestnuts like “The Old Maid” and “The Great Lie,’ poised a bit uneasily between screwball comedy and family melodrama. And it has definite, undoubtedly intentional echoes of “Sh’Chur,” the 1994 film that Hasfari wrote and her husband Shmuel Hasfari directed. That was also a film about the adaptations necessary for Moroccan Jews to adjust to Israeli society and modernity, and it even included Hasfari and Yerushalmi in its cast. But “Sh’Chur” was a rigorous and unsentimental film, while “Orange People” looks at similar situations through candy-colored spectacles.
Which certainly couldn’t be said of “The Dove Flyer,” which examines how one family is affected by the disintegration of the Iraqi Jewish community in the early 1950s, when virtually all of its members fled to the newly formed Jewish state. Kabi (Daniel Gad) is a handsome and talented high schooler whose father and uncle are involved to varying degrees with the Zionist underground in Baghdad. When Hazkel (Eli Dor Haim), the uncle, is arrested by the secret police, it falls to Kabi and his dad Salman (Igal Naor) to try to secure his release and to reassure Hazkel’s much younger and very beautiful wife Rachelle (Yasmin Ayun).
This drama is played out against a series of other, interlocking conflicts — the Zionists and Communists jockeying for position in the Jewish community, Kabi dealing with adolescent hormones and a growing infatuation with his aunt, and the deteriorating situation for Iraqi Jews. Dayan manages to interweave these disparate elements convincingly; a smartly fragmented mise-en-scene suggests the dilemma of people trying to find their way in a world in which their vision is invariably limited by circumstance (often literally), forcing them to act on rumor and supposition with frequently disastrous results. As the historical forces at play close off options for action, the impaired perceptions of the film’s characters have increasingly ominous consequences. In the film’s first half, in particular, Dayan works these themes out quite beautifully, if the second half is a bit less satisfying as he must move things to their inevitable conclusion. Overall, “The Dove Flyer” is ambitious, intelligent and largely successful as a rumination on how history trumps personal need.
The 18th annual New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, presented by the American Sephardi Foundation, will take place March 12-19 at the Center for Jewish History (15 W. 16th St.). For information, go to www.nysephardifilmfestival.org or call (212) 868-4444.
FOOD & WINE
You'll like matzah more when it's rolled into thesedark chocolate truffles.
Amy Kritzer
Jewish Week Online ColumnistThis is the second installment of our new series "The Remix" in which we seek to gently tweak the more challenging dishes in the Jewish culinary cannon. With a little bit of love, we’re convinced we can make even these dishes delicious, even the ones that seem bizarre to the modern palate.
Matzah, of course, is a cracker, but a strange one. When I ask my non-Jewish friends if they like matzah, the answer is a resounding yes. But my Jewish friends are more divided. Responses from an informal Facebook poll ranged from “I love it! I eat it all year long!” to “Yes, with butter, egg salad, charoset, lox or honey,” to, ahem, “My digestive system hates it. I prefer to be regular.” Alrighty then! More than one respondent called matzah out for being crumbly, hard to digest, bland, and messy.
But maybe the bread of affliction is supposed to afflict you. After all, we eat matzah because when Moses and the Israelites fled slavery in Egypt, they left so fast they didn’t have time for their bread to rise. The matzah is a symbol of struggle; its unappealing qualities remind us of our hardship.
For years, matzah was carefully crafted by hand, with Rabbis closely monitoring it to make sure it went from dough to cracker in no more than 18 minutes, when the leavening process is thought to start.
Then, in 1888, Lithuanian immigrant Dov Behr, founder of Manischewitz, opened the first matzah factory in Cincinnati. The company’s ads even bragged, “No human hand touches these matzos!” Matzah went from round and bumpy to square and uniform. The factories brought matzah to the mass market and made it more affordable.
Julie Sperling, co-founder of the handmade matzah brand Vermatzah, is trying to bring an artisanal touch back into matzah making. She believes that all that automation has hurt the flavor.
“Most matzah is made using industrially produced wheat, which leaves it tasting bland,” she said. She prefers local ingredients, which give the matzah a more interesting flavor.
But even your big-box matzah is better as part of a recipe, most agree. Lots of us love matzah brei, chocolate-covered matzah and, of course, matzah balls, which open up the whole sinkers versus swimmers argument. (Team sinker!) We also chew over whether one should add seltzer water for lightness (I say nay), and if we should put in tons of vegetables or leave the broth plain. As a people, we may never reach one conclusion.
But we do know that chocolate improves everything, even matzah balls. Of course, the only thing these truffles have in common with traditional savory matzah balls is their shape, and the matzah. They’ve also got rich, dark chocolate with crunchy matzah, a touch of sea salt and a sweet glaze made with Manischewitz wine. Your seders may never be the same.
Ingredients:
1/3 cup heavy cream
5 ounces (about ¾ cup) dark chocolate, roughly chopped
¼ cup butter, at room temperature
1 piece matzah, finely chopped
1 ½ cups kosher for Passover powdered sugar
3 tablespoons Manischewitz (or to taste)
Sea salt
Recipe Steps:
Put heavy whipping cream in a small saucepan over low heat. Bring to a simmer and add chocolate. Remove the saucepan from the heat and whisk until smooth. Whisk in butter until smooth. Stir in matzah pieces and chill for 1 hour or until mixture hardens. Can be made up to one day in advance.
While chocolate is hardening, make glaze by mixing powdered sugar and Manischewitz. The glaze should be loose enough to drizzle but thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Remove chocolate mixture from refrigerator and use a teaspoon or melon baller to create round truffles. Drizzle each truffle with glaze, then sprinkle with a few grains of salt. Let glaze harden and serve. Can be made one day in advance and stored in the refrigerator, or up to three days if you drizzle the glaze a day before serving.
Sephardic Culture, Through The Generations
Three diverse films at annual festival worthy of theatrical releases.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
Daniel Gad as Kabi in Nissim Dayan’s “The Dove Flyer.” Courtesy of Sephardic Film Festival
It is an absurd mistake to think there is such a thing as “Sephardic” culture. On the contrary, there are many Sephardic cultures, almost as distinct from one another as fingerprints, certainly as different as the similarly variegated Ashkenazi cultures.A look at the program for this year’s New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, which opens on March 12, should serve as a vivid reminder of that basic reality. The musical traditions of Algeria on display in the opening-night screening of “El Gusto” are utterly unlike the musical culture outlined in the program of shorts on the Bukharian Jews of Queens, or the Moroccan music of “Khoya: Jewish Morocco Sound Party,” another festival event.
The musical connections always seem to come to the fore in this series, but gradually the festival has also risen in stature to the point where it usually screens several films that will be theatrically released. Three of this year’s films are particularly worthy of mention.
With the 1995 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires back in the news, this is a fortuitous moment for the release of “God’s Slave,” a taut thriller directed by Joel Novoa Schneider. The film is a Venezuelan-Argentine co-production, which is appropriate because one of its central characters is a sleeper agent working in Caracas who will be sent to Argentina on a terrorist mission. Novoa, himself a Venezuelan, offers a pair of protagonists: Ahmed (Mohammed Alkhaldi), a Muslim militant whose parents were assassinated during the Lebanese Civil War, and David (VandoVillamil), a Mossad operative who saw his older brother killed in a suicide bombing in 1967.
Novoa keeps the two apart for almost 50 minutes, with Ahmed building a life for himself as a doctor, husband and father in Caracas before being called to Buenos Aires by his controller, while the bulk of David’s screen time is spent trackingterrorist threats against the Jewish community of the Argentine capital. Novoa interweaves their activities quite deftly, thanks in no small part to a terse but evocative screenplay by Fernando Butazzoni. When their paths finally do cross, it is a collision with ramifications that echo for several minutes. Not surprisingly, the second and last time they come together is the film’s impressively staged climax, a modest, efficient gunfight that is the culmination of a series of betrayals.
By its very nature, “God’s Slave” is a bit schematic and it never messes up its plot points or reversals. But there is some awkward signposting that reaches a particularly egregious apex in the film’s last shot with rather blunt visualization of the idea of revenge being passed down the generations. Despite that, the film is an effective and compulsively watchable genre piece.
Both “Orange People,” the directorial debut of actress Hanna Azoulay Hasfari, and “The Dove Flyer,” Nissim Dayan’s adaptation of Eli Amir’s novel, also revolve around issues of heritage and generational transmission of cultures and attitudes. In that regard they fit quite nicely with the documentaries in this year’s festival.
The Hasfari film is a particularly pointed illustration of these issues, with the director (and writer) herself playing one of a pair of sisters whose lives have been buffeted by the manipulations of their mother Zohara (Rita Shukrun), who wants to pass on her apparent psychic powers to Simone (Esti Yerushalmi). In her zeal to ensure that line of succession, she drove a wedge between Simone and her beloved sister Fanny (Hasfari), but now that Fanny has returned to Jaffa after a 16-year absence, things are starting to percolate again.
The pivot points for this devious triangle are the sisters’ shared love of Simone’s husband and their love of cooking. The idea of people bonding in the kitchen is becoming one of the leading clichés of recent film, and while Hasfari has little to add to this already creaking trope, the scenes in which the two sisters engage in culinary arts are quite charming.
Otherwise it’s a bit hard to know what to make of “Orange People.” It has a complicated plot reminiscent of old Warner Brothers chestnuts like “The Old Maid” and “The Great Lie,’ poised a bit uneasily between screwball comedy and family melodrama. And it has definite, undoubtedly intentional echoes of “Sh’Chur,” the 1994 film that Hasfari wrote and her husband Shmuel Hasfari directed. That was also a film about the adaptations necessary for Moroccan Jews to adjust to Israeli society and modernity, and it even included Hasfari and Yerushalmi in its cast. But “Sh’Chur” was a rigorous and unsentimental film, while “Orange People” looks at similar situations through candy-colored spectacles.
Which certainly couldn’t be said of “The Dove Flyer,” which examines how one family is affected by the disintegration of the Iraqi Jewish community in the early 1950s, when virtually all of its members fled to the newly formed Jewish state. Kabi (Daniel Gad) is a handsome and talented high schooler whose father and uncle are involved to varying degrees with the Zionist underground in Baghdad. When Hazkel (Eli Dor Haim), the uncle, is arrested by the secret police, it falls to Kabi and his dad Salman (Igal Naor) to try to secure his release and to reassure Hazkel’s much younger and very beautiful wife Rachelle (Yasmin Ayun).
This drama is played out against a series of other, interlocking conflicts — the Zionists and Communists jockeying for position in the Jewish community, Kabi dealing with adolescent hormones and a growing infatuation with his aunt, and the deteriorating situation for Iraqi Jews. Dayan manages to interweave these disparate elements convincingly; a smartly fragmented mise-en-scene suggests the dilemma of people trying to find their way in a world in which their vision is invariably limited by circumstance (often literally), forcing them to act on rumor and supposition with frequently disastrous results. As the historical forces at play close off options for action, the impaired perceptions of the film’s characters have increasingly ominous consequences. In the film’s first half, in particular, Dayan works these themes out quite beautifully, if the second half is a bit less satisfying as he must move things to their inevitable conclusion. Overall, “The Dove Flyer” is ambitious, intelligent and largely successful as a rumination on how history trumps personal need.
The 18th annual New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, presented by the American Sephardi Foundation, will take place March 12-19 at the Center for Jewish History (15 W. 16th St.). For information, go to www.nysephardifilmfestival.org or call (212) 868-4444.
FOOD & WINE
Manischewitz-Glazed Matzah Truffles
Manischewitz-Glazed Matzah TrufflesYou'll like matzah more when it's rolled into thesedark chocolate truffles.
Amy Kritzer
Jewish Week Online ColumnistThis is the second installment of our new series "The Remix" in which we seek to gently tweak the more challenging dishes in the Jewish culinary cannon. With a little bit of love, we’re convinced we can make even these dishes delicious, even the ones that seem bizarre to the modern palate.
Matzah, of course, is a cracker, but a strange one. When I ask my non-Jewish friends if they like matzah, the answer is a resounding yes. But my Jewish friends are more divided. Responses from an informal Facebook poll ranged from “I love it! I eat it all year long!” to “Yes, with butter, egg salad, charoset, lox or honey,” to, ahem, “My digestive system hates it. I prefer to be regular.” Alrighty then! More than one respondent called matzah out for being crumbly, hard to digest, bland, and messy.
But maybe the bread of affliction is supposed to afflict you. After all, we eat matzah because when Moses and the Israelites fled slavery in Egypt, they left so fast they didn’t have time for their bread to rise. The matzah is a symbol of struggle; its unappealing qualities remind us of our hardship.
For years, matzah was carefully crafted by hand, with Rabbis closely monitoring it to make sure it went from dough to cracker in no more than 18 minutes, when the leavening process is thought to start.
Then, in 1888, Lithuanian immigrant Dov Behr, founder of Manischewitz, opened the first matzah factory in Cincinnati. The company’s ads even bragged, “No human hand touches these matzos!” Matzah went from round and bumpy to square and uniform. The factories brought matzah to the mass market and made it more affordable.
Julie Sperling, co-founder of the handmade matzah brand Vermatzah, is trying to bring an artisanal touch back into matzah making. She believes that all that automation has hurt the flavor.
“Most matzah is made using industrially produced wheat, which leaves it tasting bland,” she said. She prefers local ingredients, which give the matzah a more interesting flavor.
But even your big-box matzah is better as part of a recipe, most agree. Lots of us love matzah brei, chocolate-covered matzah and, of course, matzah balls, which open up the whole sinkers versus swimmers argument. (Team sinker!) We also chew over whether one should add seltzer water for lightness (I say nay), and if we should put in tons of vegetables or leave the broth plain. As a people, we may never reach one conclusion.
But we do know that chocolate improves everything, even matzah balls. Of course, the only thing these truffles have in common with traditional savory matzah balls is their shape, and the matzah. They’ve also got rich, dark chocolate with crunchy matzah, a touch of sea salt and a sweet glaze made with Manischewitz wine. Your seders may never be the same.
Ingredients:
1/3 cup heavy cream
5 ounces (about ¾ cup) dark chocolate, roughly chopped
¼ cup butter, at room temperature
1 piece matzah, finely chopped
1 ½ cups kosher for Passover powdered sugar
3 tablespoons Manischewitz (or to taste)
Sea salt
Recipe Steps:
Put heavy whipping cream in a small saucepan over low heat. Bring to a simmer and add chocolate. Remove the saucepan from the heat and whisk until smooth. Whisk in butter until smooth. Stir in matzah pieces and chill for 1 hour or until mixture hardens. Can be made up to one day in advance.
While chocolate is hardening, make glaze by mixing powdered sugar and Manischewitz. The glaze should be loose enough to drizzle but thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Remove chocolate mixture from refrigerator and use a teaspoon or melon baller to create round truffles. Drizzle each truffle with glaze, then sprinkle with a few grains of salt. Let glaze harden and serve. Can be made one day in advance and stored in the refrigerator, or up to three days if you drizzle the glaze a day before serving.
TRAVEL
South By Southwest
Hilary Larson
Travel Writer
It was a question I kept asking myself as Oggi and I drove across the southern U.S. on Interstate 10, stopping alternately at charming, historic tourist towns and sterile, chain-blighted commercial zones off the highway.
We spent hours navigating the sprawl east of Los Angeles — a vast, car-choked landscape of drive-thru fast food and strip malls — and then reveled in the aesthetic oasis of Palm Springs, where the affluent saunter through an attractive city center. From Santa Monica to New Orleans to La Mesilla, people love cities with walkable cores and a genuine, singular sense of place — and they love them so much that they are now rare, pricey commodities. So I wondered: Have human-scale towns and cities become just another luxury item?
The answer around Las Cruces, N.M. — at the intersection of the Texan and Mexican borders — was, apparently, yes. Occupying a scenic plain in the shadow of the Doña Ana Mountains, the greater Las Cruces metro area is a sad wasteland of downscale outlets and broad, faceless boulevards.
But La Mesilla, on its southern outskirts, is a picturesque glimpse of a pretty town of the Old West could have looked like — and a worthwhile stop just off I-10.
Centered around a 19th-century plaza, where the Basilica of San Albino was first erected in 1855, La Mesilla is a pueblo of low-scale adobe dwellings, tiny local shopsand cafés along narrow, dusty streets. We browsed in stores selling colorfully painted Día de los Muertos masks, piñon coffee and fiery New Mexican chilies.
Las Cruces has a Reform congregation and a Chabad center, but La Mesilla positively breathes Spanish Catholicism — from plaques outside the basilica commemorating papal visits to monuments proclaiming against abortion. Still, the atmosphere here is diverse, a cultural mash-up of Mexican, Native American and Western American influences. Men wandered by wearing sombreros or ten-gallon hats; Mexican guitar players crooned and strummed by the gazebo on the square.
As I surveyed the scene, I wondered why La Mesilla couldn’t have simply expanded outward, incorporating more walkable lanes into nearby neighborhoods, instead of ending up as a marginalized tourist attraction. But when we continued on to El Paso — the biggest city in Texas that nobody has ever been to — we saw how a well-organized downtown can starve from neglect.
The entrance to El Paso from the I-10 is visually dramatic, cutting along the hilly Mexican border; across from Texas, the peaks and valleys of Ciudad Juárez sprawl in what appears to be a vast, endless metropolis of jumbled pastel dwellings. It’s a panorama at once stunning and disquieting in its sweep and evident poverty.
I learned that El Paso and Ciudad Juárez — among the continent’s safest and most dangerous large cities, respectively — together represent the largest bilingual, binational work force in the Western Hemisphere. The fluidity of this exchange over the Rio Grande Rift, which constitutes a natural division through the city, is evident in the many signs in Spanish and in the arrows pointing to foot crossings.
With its hilltop perch and neighborhoods of pretty 1920s houses, El Paso is an attractive city. Historic brick buildings and tidy sidewalks lend the city center a feeling of solidity. So I thought it rather a shame to encounter here yet another American urban downtown so badly in need of revitalization: those sidewalks were empty, and many central blocks had no evident commerce at street level.
But downtown is worth a stop for its museum district, where city planners have organized an ambitious array of cultural institutions. I was impressed at the breadth and quality of exhibitions at the El Paso Museum of Art, which, predictably, has strong collections in Western, Mexican and Native American art dating back a half-millennium. When we stopped by, a show of works by Kandinsky and Franz Marc onloan from the Guggenheim Foundation were on view, as well as paintings from the “Migrant Series” by Don Coen, an artist whose work casts an engaging spotlight on the quotidian reality of America’s farm laborers.
And I was hardly surprised to stumble upon the National Border Control Museum. What I did not expect to find was the nearby El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center, prominently occupying a nearby corner.
We learned that the museum was founded in the 1980s by local survivor Henry Kellen, opening first near the Jewish Community Center on the city’s West Side, and then, after a fire in the early 2000s, moving into its current home. With 5,000 square feet of permanent exhibition space, El Paso’s is one of just 13 freestanding Holocaust museums in the U.S. and the first in the Lone Star State.
As we left El Paso, we watched the sun set over the mountains of Ciudad Juárez, reflected on what a strange and fascinating corner of the country this is, and set off for the Texas Hill Country.
editor@jewishweek.org
LENSStreit Into Lower East Side History
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
A pound of kosher-for-Passover matzah sells for $15-$18 today, the Jewish population of the neighborhood is down to about 30,000, up from the low-water mark of 18,000 two decades ago — and the Streit’s matzah factory will soon be a thing of the past.
The company’s 11 owners, descendants of founder Aron Streit, announced recently that the antiquated production facility is closing; matzah-making willresume at a yet-unnamed site in New Jersey at a yet-unnamed date.
The last kosher l’Pesach matzah probably rolled off the production line in the weeks before this year’s first seder (pending a last-minute order for the holiday item), and the last matzah for year-round use will be baked sometime after Passover.
Streit’s is the last family-owned matzah factory in the U.S.
A Streit’s baker, above, places some freshly baked matzahs on a rack, and Rabbi Mayer Kirshner, who supervises kashrut at the facility, displays some of the company’s line of matzahs.
This year, as in the past, the company made “millions of pounds” of matzahs, said co-owner Alan Adler, who declined to offer specific production figures.
The move from the Lower East Side was necessary, he said, because the old equipment has slowed down the rate of matzah production and becausereplacement parts are not available.
“Our men are like family,” Adler said of the site’s 50 workers, many of them immigrants who have worked there for several decades. “They understand why we had to make the move.” Streit’s has offered jobs at its new factory to its current workers, and is trying to line up jobs for those who don’t want to make the commute to New Jersey.
The company will host a farewell party on its last day on the Lower East Side, Adler said.steve@jewishweek.org
WELL VERSED
Painting The Seder Table
Gloria Kestenbaum
Nicole Eisenman, Seder, 2010, oil on canvas. Courtesy The Jewish Museum
With apologies to Shelley, “If winter comes, can Passover be far behind?” And despite the never-ending snow and winter-like cold, Passover is indeed coming soon -- which makes this a great time to drop by The Jewish Museum for a view of Nicole Eisenman’s Seder (2010), the featured work in the Museum’s Masterpieces & Curiosities exhibition series.
In a painting style reminiscent of George Grosz or Max Beckmann and with a nod to Renoir’s and Bonnard’s luncheon scenes, Eisenman’s group portrait takes a humorous, loving if somewhat ironic look at the Seder in its current American incarnation. This 21st Century Seder includes nine participants of varied ages and levels of involvement, from interested and engaged to bored or even asleep, whose faces are portrayed in painting styles ranging from the realistic to the grotesque. Amusingly, the artist places the viewer in the role of seder “leader” and narrator—it is our enlarged, cartoonish hands that seem to break the afikomen in half. The painting offers up a familiar prospect, the traditional Seder plate, with its Romaine leaf and other symbolic items, flanked by a bottle of Gold’s red horseradish, cups of red wine and iconic red, yellow and black Hagaddahs at hand. But who are the almost monstrous figures portrayed in the foreground? Are they family members? Friends? Or are they the strangers whom we’ve been commanded to let join the proceedings? Part caricature, part horror movie, part sympathetic family portrait, Eisenman’s canvas offers us a look at a recurring scenario we both recognize and dread.
To help illuminate Eisenman’s subject matter and style, the Museum has gathered together 25 other portraits from their vast collection, some of them seldom seen. Highlighting the Passover theme, on display is Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s 1867 well-known painting of a German-Jewish family Seder, along with photographs by Arnold Eagle capturing the American Seder of the 1930s, and a nostalgic view of the Eastern-European Seder by self-taught artist Meichel Pressman (1950). Included in the collection, as well, are two paintings by Eisenman’s great-grandmother, Esther Harriman. Also shown is a selection of lesser-known Seder plates from the 18th to the 21st century, chosen by curator Joanna Montoya Robotham “to complement and highlight the centerpiece painting.” Robotham notes that the current exhibit demonstrates how “we take a contemporary work and contextualize it from the past…by surrounding it with other artworks, documents and source materials.” Before you embark on your own Seder, it might be worth your while to prepare yourself for this annual rite of spring with Eisenman’s discerning snapshot.
“Seder” by Nicole Eisenman will be on view through August 9, 2015 at The Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street.
Gloria Kestenbaum is a corporate communications consultant and freelance writer.
Where Are The Birthers Now?
Douglas Bloomfield
Ted Cruz and Barack Obama may be poles apart politically, but they actually have a lot in common.
Both are smart, articulate, ambitious Harvard Law graduates who decided to run for president after only two years in their first term in the U.S. Senate.
They also have foreign-born fathers and white American mothers.
Ted's father was born in Cuba and Ted himself was born in Canada.
Obama's father was born in Kenya but Barack was born in Hawaii.
Cruz was a dual citizen until last year when he made a show of giving up hisCanadian citizenship in preparation for his presidential run – announced this week -- but there was never a peep from his fellow Tea Baggers, conservatives and Republicans who continue to insist Obama is not eligible because of his foreign born father.
By the way, both men are U.S. citizens and eligible to run for president because their mothers were born in the United States. It didn't matter where either man was born any more than it made John McCain ineligible because he was born in Panama (both of his parents were American citizens).
So why aren't Donald Trump and the birthers having their usual hissy fits about foreign born Ted Cruz but still trying to delegitimize Barack Obama who was born in Honolulu almost two years to the day after Hawaii became a state?Could it be Cruz shares their far right views or is it the color of his skin?
The Jewish Week
South By Southwest
Hilary Larson
Travel Writer
View over Cuidad Juarez from El Paso, above. Hilary Larson/JW
Strolling around the pretty Spanish plaza at the heart of Old La Mesilla, Texas, watching children play and families chat in the public square, I thought: Why aren’t there more places like this in the U.S.?It was a question I kept asking myself as Oggi and I drove across the southern U.S. on Interstate 10, stopping alternately at charming, historic tourist towns and sterile, chain-blighted commercial zones off the highway.
We spent hours navigating the sprawl east of Los Angeles — a vast, car-choked landscape of drive-thru fast food and strip malls — and then reveled in the aesthetic oasis of Palm Springs, where the affluent saunter through an attractive city center. From Santa Monica to New Orleans to La Mesilla, people love cities with walkable cores and a genuine, singular sense of place — and they love them so much that they are now rare, pricey commodities. So I wondered: Have human-scale towns and cities become just another luxury item?
The answer around Las Cruces, N.M. — at the intersection of the Texan and Mexican borders — was, apparently, yes. Occupying a scenic plain in the shadow of the Doña Ana Mountains, the greater Las Cruces metro area is a sad wasteland of downscale outlets and broad, faceless boulevards.
But La Mesilla, on its southern outskirts, is a picturesque glimpse of a pretty town of the Old West could have looked like — and a worthwhile stop just off I-10.
Centered around a 19th-century plaza, where the Basilica of San Albino was first erected in 1855, La Mesilla is a pueblo of low-scale adobe dwellings, tiny local shopsand cafés along narrow, dusty streets. We browsed in stores selling colorfully painted Día de los Muertos masks, piñon coffee and fiery New Mexican chilies.
Las Cruces has a Reform congregation and a Chabad center, but La Mesilla positively breathes Spanish Catholicism — from plaques outside the basilica commemorating papal visits to monuments proclaiming against abortion. Still, the atmosphere here is diverse, a cultural mash-up of Mexican, Native American and Western American influences. Men wandered by wearing sombreros or ten-gallon hats; Mexican guitar players crooned and strummed by the gazebo on the square.
As I surveyed the scene, I wondered why La Mesilla couldn’t have simply expanded outward, incorporating more walkable lanes into nearby neighborhoods, instead of ending up as a marginalized tourist attraction. But when we continued on to El Paso — the biggest city in Texas that nobody has ever been to — we saw how a well-organized downtown can starve from neglect.
The entrance to El Paso from the I-10 is visually dramatic, cutting along the hilly Mexican border; across from Texas, the peaks and valleys of Ciudad Juárez sprawl in what appears to be a vast, endless metropolis of jumbled pastel dwellings. It’s a panorama at once stunning and disquieting in its sweep and evident poverty.
I learned that El Paso and Ciudad Juárez — among the continent’s safest and most dangerous large cities, respectively — together represent the largest bilingual, binational work force in the Western Hemisphere. The fluidity of this exchange over the Rio Grande Rift, which constitutes a natural division through the city, is evident in the many signs in Spanish and in the arrows pointing to foot crossings.
With its hilltop perch and neighborhoods of pretty 1920s houses, El Paso is an attractive city. Historic brick buildings and tidy sidewalks lend the city center a feeling of solidity. So I thought it rather a shame to encounter here yet another American urban downtown so badly in need of revitalization: those sidewalks were empty, and many central blocks had no evident commerce at street level.
But downtown is worth a stop for its museum district, where city planners have organized an ambitious array of cultural institutions. I was impressed at the breadth and quality of exhibitions at the El Paso Museum of Art, which, predictably, has strong collections in Western, Mexican and Native American art dating back a half-millennium. When we stopped by, a show of works by Kandinsky and Franz Marc onloan from the Guggenheim Foundation were on view, as well as paintings from the “Migrant Series” by Don Coen, an artist whose work casts an engaging spotlight on the quotidian reality of America’s farm laborers.
And I was hardly surprised to stumble upon the National Border Control Museum. What I did not expect to find was the nearby El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center, prominently occupying a nearby corner.
We learned that the museum was founded in the 1980s by local survivor Henry Kellen, opening first near the Jewish Community Center on the city’s West Side, and then, after a fire in the early 2000s, moving into its current home. With 5,000 square feet of permanent exhibition space, El Paso’s is one of just 13 freestanding Holocaust museums in the U.S. and the first in the Lone Star State.
As we left El Paso, we watched the sun set over the mountains of Ciudad Juárez, reflected on what a strange and fascinating corner of the country this is, and set off for the Texas Hill Country.
editor@jewishweek.org
LENSStreit Into Lower East Side History
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Photo by Michael Datikash
A carton of matzahs cost a dollar or less, and the already-declining Jewish population of the Lower East Side still stood at a few hundred thousand when the Streit’s kosher food companyopened a matzah factory in four converted tenement buildings on Rivington Street 90 years ago.A pound of kosher-for-Passover matzah sells for $15-$18 today, the Jewish population of the neighborhood is down to about 30,000, up from the low-water mark of 18,000 two decades ago — and the Streit’s matzah factory will soon be a thing of the past.
The company’s 11 owners, descendants of founder Aron Streit, announced recently that the antiquated production facility is closing; matzah-making willresume at a yet-unnamed site in New Jersey at a yet-unnamed date.
The last kosher l’Pesach matzah probably rolled off the production line in the weeks before this year’s first seder (pending a last-minute order for the holiday item), and the last matzah for year-round use will be baked sometime after Passover.
Streit’s is the last family-owned matzah factory in the U.S.
A Streit’s baker, above, places some freshly baked matzahs on a rack, and Rabbi Mayer Kirshner, who supervises kashrut at the facility, displays some of the company’s line of matzahs.
This year, as in the past, the company made “millions of pounds” of matzahs, said co-owner Alan Adler, who declined to offer specific production figures.
The move from the Lower East Side was necessary, he said, because the old equipment has slowed down the rate of matzah production and becausereplacement parts are not available.
“Our men are like family,” Adler said of the site’s 50 workers, many of them immigrants who have worked there for several decades. “They understand why we had to make the move.” Streit’s has offered jobs at its new factory to its current workers, and is trying to line up jobs for those who don’t want to make the commute to New Jersey.
The company will host a farewell party on its last day on the Lower East Side, Adler said.steve@jewishweek.org
WELL VERSED
Painting The Seder Table
Gloria Kestenbaum
With apologies to Shelley, “If winter comes, can Passover be far behind?” And despite the never-ending snow and winter-like cold, Passover is indeed coming soon -- which makes this a great time to drop by The Jewish Museum for a view of Nicole Eisenman’s Seder (2010), the featured work in the Museum’s Masterpieces & Curiosities exhibition series.
In a painting style reminiscent of George Grosz or Max Beckmann and with a nod to Renoir’s and Bonnard’s luncheon scenes, Eisenman’s group portrait takes a humorous, loving if somewhat ironic look at the Seder in its current American incarnation. This 21st Century Seder includes nine participants of varied ages and levels of involvement, from interested and engaged to bored or even asleep, whose faces are portrayed in painting styles ranging from the realistic to the grotesque. Amusingly, the artist places the viewer in the role of seder “leader” and narrator—it is our enlarged, cartoonish hands that seem to break the afikomen in half. The painting offers up a familiar prospect, the traditional Seder plate, with its Romaine leaf and other symbolic items, flanked by a bottle of Gold’s red horseradish, cups of red wine and iconic red, yellow and black Hagaddahs at hand. But who are the almost monstrous figures portrayed in the foreground? Are they family members? Friends? Or are they the strangers whom we’ve been commanded to let join the proceedings? Part caricature, part horror movie, part sympathetic family portrait, Eisenman’s canvas offers us a look at a recurring scenario we both recognize and dread.
To help illuminate Eisenman’s subject matter and style, the Museum has gathered together 25 other portraits from their vast collection, some of them seldom seen. Highlighting the Passover theme, on display is Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s 1867 well-known painting of a German-Jewish family Seder, along with photographs by Arnold Eagle capturing the American Seder of the 1930s, and a nostalgic view of the Eastern-European Seder by self-taught artist Meichel Pressman (1950). Included in the collection, as well, are two paintings by Eisenman’s great-grandmother, Esther Harriman. Also shown is a selection of lesser-known Seder plates from the 18th to the 21st century, chosen by curator Joanna Montoya Robotham “to complement and highlight the centerpiece painting.” Robotham notes that the current exhibit demonstrates how “we take a contemporary work and contextualize it from the past…by surrounding it with other artworks, documents and source materials.” Before you embark on your own Seder, it might be worth your while to prepare yourself for this annual rite of spring with Eisenman’s discerning snapshot.
“Seder” by Nicole Eisenman will be on view through August 9, 2015 at The Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street.
Gloria Kestenbaum is a corporate communications consultant and freelance writer.
Douglas Bloomfield
Ted Cruz and Barack Obama may be poles apart politically, but they actually have a lot in common.
Both are smart, articulate, ambitious Harvard Law graduates who decided to run for president after only two years in their first term in the U.S. Senate.
They also have foreign-born fathers and white American mothers.
Ted's father was born in Cuba and Ted himself was born in Canada.
Obama's father was born in Kenya but Barack was born in Hawaii.
Cruz was a dual citizen until last year when he made a show of giving up hisCanadian citizenship in preparation for his presidential run – announced this week -- but there was never a peep from his fellow Tea Baggers, conservatives and Republicans who continue to insist Obama is not eligible because of his foreign born father.
By the way, both men are U.S. citizens and eligible to run for president because their mothers were born in the United States. It didn't matter where either man was born any more than it made John McCain ineligible because he was born in Panama (both of his parents were American citizens).
So why aren't Donald Trump and the birthers having their usual hissy fits about foreign born Ted Cruz but still trying to delegitimize Barack Obama who was born in Honolulu almost two years to the day after Hawaii became a state?Could it be Cruz shares their far right views or is it the color of his skin?
The Jewish Week
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