Dear Reader,
The reaction to the framework agreement to curtail Iran's nuclear program, both here and in Israel, is our focus this week. Stewart Ain reports on the White House's full-court press to win Jewish support for the deal amid widespread skepticism in the Jewish community. Editor Gary Rosenblatt looks at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy in light of the deal and his relationship with President Obama. Sources are telling Rosenblatt that Bibi is working to form a unity government, which might relieve some pressure with Washington.INTERNATIONAL
White House Presses For Jewish OK On Iran Deal
Meeting with Kerry amid skepticism on nuke pact.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Secretary of State John Kerry was slated to meet with American Jewish leaders in Washington on Wednesday to convince them to support the administration’s preliminary Iran nuclear deal.
It was the latest attempt by the White House to build support in the Jewish community for the framework agreement reached last week between Iran, the U.S. and five other world powers. Just a day after its completion, Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to President Obama, held a conference call with members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to assure them that the proposed agreement is the best that could be achieved.
The White House outreach to Jewish leaders was launched after some major Jewish groups expressed skepticism if not outright opposition to the tentative deal, which negotiators are seeking to finalize by June 30.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said initially that he was concerned about the “many unanswered questions” the proposal raised.
He argued that “Iran simply cannot be trusted” given its “history of covert activity, noncompliance and never owning up to that history. ... The apparent rush to remove sanctions gives Iran an incentive to comply with the terms of the agreement, but once sanctions are removed, then what? … We do not expect a change in its behavior.”
Michael Salberg, the ADL’s director of international affairs, said Tuesday that even after hearing Obama’s comments that included assurances for Israel in weekend interviews and the comments of other White House officials, there remain a “lot of details that need to be worked out.”
“Israel is worried and the president in the interviews acknowledged the concerns — not just those of the prime minister and the intelligence minister but of Israeli [civilians] regarding Iran’s intentions and behavior,” Salberg said.
That concern was apparent at a play area in a Jerusalem mall Monday as Grazia Mizrachi watched her granddaughter. Although the mood in the mall was especially festive due to the Passover holiday, she said she felt weighted down by the Iran framework agreement.
“If I could tell the American president one thing,” she said, “it would be: ‘Don’t do it; it will endanger Israel.’ Unless you live in Israel, you can’t comprehend our fears.”
And then, glancing at the children at play, Mizrachi added: “I’m more fearful for my granddaughter and her generation than I am for myself. They’re growing up in a world where war is more likely than peace.”
But Davida Chazan, a research development writer visiting the mall, wants to give the deal a chance to succeed.
“I think Iran is more of a barking dog than people think, and I think the Israeli government has done everything in its power to make it sound more dangerous than it actually is,” she said. “I’m sure there is some danger there, but anything that says `let’s put down our weapons and give peace a chance’ is the right direction.”
Salberg of the ADL pointed out that in one of his weekend interviews, Obama tried to reassure Israelis by saying, in essence, that if Israel were in trouble, America would have its back.
“If anybody messes with Israel, America will be there,” Obama vowed.
Salberg said it is “important for Israel and the U.S. to figure out precisely what that means.”
On Monday, Israel’s minister of intelligence, Yuval Steinitz, produced a list of 10 suggested changes to the proposed nuclear deal that he believes would make the agreement “more reasonable.”
Among the items: close the Fordo site, halt all research and development into advanced centrifuges and ship out of the country the entire stockpile of enriched uranium.
Binyamin Huga, whose Jerusalem store sells flat screen TVs, said he would add one more stipulation to the agreement: that Iran recognize Israel as a “legitimate” country with the right to exist.
“If Iran wants concessions from the Western world it needs to make concessions,” he argued. “It’s time Iran stopped calling for our destruction.”
How Much Time?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had voiced similar sentiment, but Obama told an interviewer that such a stipulation is out of the question.
“The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won’t sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms,” Obama said. “And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment.”
In that same interview, Obama acknowledged that Iran’s breakout time – the time in which it could quickly develop a nuclear weapon -- would increase from the current two or three months to one year, and then to almost zero in years 13 to 15 of the agreement. But at that point, he said, the U.S. would have “much better ideas about what it is their program involves.”
Gary Samore, executive director for research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former senior official in the Obama administration, cautioned in a conference call with the Israel Policy Forum that the breakout period refers only to the time it would take to “produce enough fissile material for a bomb — not the bomb itself.”
He said it would take about another year to “fashion it into a nuclear weapon, including all of the parts of a nuclear bomb… Now all of this is very theoretical because I don’t know anybody who thinks that Iran would run the risk of trying to break out at its declared nuclear facilities because … the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] would detect it within days, certainly weeks. And that would leave plenty of time for the U.S. or Israel to destroy those facilities.”
Although the wording of the proposed agreement is unclear, Samore said he understood that it requires Iran to disclose information related to its “previous research and development of a nuclear weapon — the so-called possible military dimension. If we had a better understanding of how far Iran got before they suspended the program in 2003, we could make a better judgment about how long it would take for them to actually make a nuclear device after they have the raw material.”
The IAEA has requested that information in the past, but Iran has consistently refused to provide it.
David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, cited that refusal in questioning whether Iran could be trusted to abide by any agreement it signs and if inspections would be sufficient to monitor compliance.
“We know that once sanctions are lifted, and that is supposed to happen in response to specific steps taken by Iran, they will be difficult to put back in place” should Iran violate the agreement, he said in a statement.
Harris added that the AJC would continue to support congressional review of the agreement. The White House is opposed to any legislation that would permit Congress to cancel or modify any deal that is reached.
A Surprise From Schumer
But legislation proposed by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is slated to be voted on by the committee next Tuesday. It would require any agreement to receive congressional approval. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the leading contender to be the next Senate minority leader and a strong ally of Obama, surprised many this week when he said he supports the bill, which would put him at odds with Obama.
“I strongly believe Congress should have the right to disapprove any agreement and I support the Corker bill which would allow that to occur,” he said in a statement.
But Lara Friedman, who handles policy and government relations for Americans for Peace Now, said her organization opposes the bill because among other things it would require the U.S. to certify that Iran is not supporting or engaging in terrorism against the U.S. or Americans anyplace in the world. Such a provision, she said, is nothing but a pretext “to scuttle the deal.”
“There is an argument being made that if the proposal does not deal with Iran’s behavior, it should not happen,” Friedman said. “But we spent 20 years talking of Iran as an existential threat — and this deal focuses on that. We should now take a step back and wait to see what they can achieve” in the coming talks.
Alan Eisner, a vice president at J Street, a lobby group that bills itself as a pro-Israel group that lobbies for a two-state solution, agreed that the agreement should cover only Iran’s nuclear program.
“There is a difference between what is a desirable agreement and what is a realistic agreement,” he explained. “Israel has put forth conditions we all wish could be achieved in this agreement, but in reality won’t be. And the history of arms control agreements going back to the days of the Soviet Union is that they don’t cover the whole gamut of relations.”
Gideon Aranoff, CEO of Ameinu, a progressive Zionist membership organization in the U.S., echoed those views.
“We encourage dialogue between Israel and the U.S. to help develop the strongest agreement possible,” he said. “We will be working with our partners in the Jewish community and the administration to push back against threats to Israel from Iran, but believe nuclear negotiations are not the place to address every bad action of Iran.”
Israel correspondent Michele Chabin contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
GARY ROSENBLATT
Israel Unity Gov’t Re-emerging As Pragmatic Option
Netanyahu, given the Iran deal and relationship with Obama, hoping to bring in Herzog.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Hang on, folks, the formation of the next Israeli government is getting a lot more intriguing and complicated than we thought, made even more so by the proposed Iran nuclear deal.
Remember when, a week before the elections last month, it seemed likely the results would lead to a national unity government including right-of-center Likud, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the left-of-center Zionist Union, headed by Isaac Herzog of Labor and Tzipi Livni of Tnuah?
The Zionist Union was ahead in the polls, and it looked like the two major political blocs needed each other to create a coalition of more than half of the Knesset’s 120 seats.
And remember when, in a surprise upset, Likud pulled ahead and won the election handily — 30 seats for Likud to 24 seats for the Zionist Union? That put an end to the “unity coalition” talk, given that Netanyahu seemed poised to put together a more natural grouping of Likud along with several right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, a new center-right party led by former Likud member Moshe Kahlon. That would give Netanyahu 67 seats — not a huge majority but a comfortable one, it seemed. End of story?
Not quite.
There has been little public discussion or media coverage of the coalition-building process, in part because of the Passover holiday, in part because the behind-closed-doors discussions can take another month, and because of the assumption that this was a done deal.
But nothing is that simple in Israeli politics. According to well-placed sources I have spoken to, here and in Israel, there is now a very good chance that Netanyahu, who publicly insisted he would not seek to form a unity government with Herzog, appears to be trying to do just that.
There are several factors pushing the prime minister in that direction, and they have little to do with altruistic exhortations from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to help unify the society. Rather, they involve some shrewd calculations on the part of Netanyahu based on shoring up his political power, and a new and urgent Iran-based dynamic driving the prime minister to patch up his relationship with President Obama now.
Kahlon Is Key
For starters, if Netanyahu went with the narrow Option A — the right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, with 67 votes in all — he would be vulnerable to Kahlon, who controls 10 seats.
Kahlon is not a typical Israeli politician. He is said to be a man of strong principles whose primary objective in running in this election was to effect real change in dealing with social and economic issues such as housing, jobs and addressing income inequality in Israeli society.
Netanyahu’s election campaign, bolstered by sophisticated polling, found that when the issues before the public were domestic concerns, his numbers went down. When he focused on security and the threat of Iran and its proxies in the neighborhood, he fared far better.
One of the first things Netanyahu did after winning the election was to make sure Kahlon would join the coalition by offering him the cabinet post of finance minister. But the prime minister is concerned that if the Kulanu leader does not get his way in pushing his socioeconomic agenda, he could walk away and leave Netanyahu without a government.
Then there is the fact that the two most obvious coalition partners on the right, Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi (eight seats) and Avigdor Lieberman (six seats), will insist on increased settlement growth and revive the controversial nationality bill that seems to place the Jewish character of the state above its democratic nature.
While Netanyahu may well personally prefer this more narrow Option A coalition, he is all too aware of the political and diplomatic fallout with Europe and Washington, not to mention American Jewry, if he goes that route. Although he expected criticism for his decision to speak before Congress on the invitation of the Republican leadership, my sources say he was surprised and shaken by the depth and public nature of Obama’s visceral response.
‘The Perfect Alibi’
The prime minister is well aware that if he forms Option A coalition, the crisis in relations with the White House will only deepen. And now that the U.S. and other Western powers have signed a preliminary deal with Iran, it is all the more reason for him to be able to work with Obama in the hopes of toughening up the final agreement in the next three months — and, if all else fails, getting tacit permission from the White House to strike out at Iran if it violates the deal.
“Netanyahu may well decide to use the high demands of Bennett, Lieberman and their ilk as the perfect alibi while he pursues the option of a unity government, the only option that may help him avoid such a problematic scenario,” writes Ilan Jonas, a highly respected Israeli political analyst, in his Prime Source newsletter.
And an American Jewish businessman close to Netanyahu confided that the prime minister has been “planning for months” to bring Herzog into the coalition if the circumstances were right because “it would help him deal with Washington — and that was before things got so bad” [between the prime minister and Obama].
In a unity government, Herzog most likely would serve as foreign minister, presenting a friendly face to the world in his international role. It should be noted, though, that his views on the dangers of the Iran deal and the unwillingness of the Palestinians to make compromises are not unlike those of Netanyahu. The big question within Israeli politics is whether Labor would be willing to join a government with a prime minister the party greatly distrusts.
On the larger stage, for all the bad blood between the prime minister and the American president, it is in both of their best interests to patch up their troubled relationship, and the sooner the better. Already in recent days, as he begins his campaign to sell his Iran deal to the American people and keep a skeptical Congress from undoing the work of American and world powers’ negotiators, Obama has gone out of his way to assure Israel of America’s protection. And he has softened his language about Netanyahu, acknowledging that the Israeli leader is looking out for his country’s security. Obama knows well that Netanyahu can have a positive or negative impact on Congress regarding the Iran pact and he wants to keep the Israeli leader as satisfied as possible.
Likewise, Netanyahu realizes that the Iran deal is now a reality and his military option is gone, at least for now. Further, he realizes that it is more fruitful to focus on how best to beef up the deal’s contents, still being worked out, rather than rant about what a mistake it was in the first place. Already he has shown his accommodating side, unfreezing Palestinian Authority tax money. And though he gets little or no credit for it from the White House, he continues his quiet policy of suspending settlement growth outside of Jerusalem and areas that will be part of Israel in any final agreement with the Palestinians.
All of which suggests that Netanyahu would feel more confident going forward with a government that presents itself to the U.S. and the international community as strong, centrist and pragmatic rather than narrow, ideological and focused on maintaining and expanding settlements. The next Israeli government must be able to navigate the rough seas of a transformed Mideast with a now more powerful and emboldened Iran on the march. Israel’s leader needs all the help he can get in dealing with this new reality, and a national unity government may well be his best place to start.
Gary@jewishweek.org
On the eve of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, we feature several stories. Steve Lipman looks at a new battle over "Mein Kampf" as the German copyright ban on the book expires after 70 years; theater critic Ted Merwin interviews two playwrights on their one-woman shows about the effects of the Holocaust on parent-child relationships; and World Jewish Restitution Organization official Gideon Taylor has a moving essay on the Irish cousins he never had.
SHORT TAKESBridging The Shoah Divide — On Stage
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Janice Nova in “Janka,” in “Do This One Thing.” Raymond Reilly
To many children of Holocaust survivors, bridging the gulf between their own lives and their parents’ horrific wartime experiences seems virtually impossible. But opening in New York next week are two one-person plays that attempt to do just that by both elucidating and strengthening the bond between the playwrights and the memories of their parents.
Coincidentally running on different floors of the Abingdon Theatre Complex in Midtown, both plays are being staged around the time of Yom HaShoah and run through the first weekend in May.
In Oscar Speace’s “Janka,” the dramatist’s mother, Janka Festinger (performed by his wife, Janice Noga) describes the horrors of Auschwitz. After the war she married a non-Jewish soldier and moved to New Jersey (June Havoc Theatre, 312 W. 36th St.,theatermania.com). In Jane Elias’ “Do This One Thing For Me,” performed by the playwright, a daughter grapples, despite being unmarried and childless, with her Greek-Jewish father’s fondest wish: to be able to dance at her wedding (TBG Arts Center, 312 W. 36th St., brownpapertickets.com).
Directed by James Philip Gates, “Janka,” was inspired by a 60-page handwritten letter that Speace and his twin brother, David, discovered after their mother’s death in 1994. Penned in 1945 to an uncle in Cleveland, the letter revealed an aspect of her past that she was to keep hidden for more than half a century. “Do This One Thing for Me,” directed by Tracy Bersley, is based on testimony of his time in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belson that Elias’ father, Beni, gave to Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, along with written recollections that he asked his daughter to transcribe.
In an interview with The Jewish Week, Speace said he was “always frustrated” by his mother’s refusal to discuss her past. “We didn’t understand why we couldn’t have friends over, why she didn’t think that it was safe. But anyone outside the family was a stranger to her.” Writing the play linked him to “what I’m made of” as well as to his mother’s roots, he said.
Elias went on the March of the Living in order to connect to her father’s story. “It was such a moment of discovery,” she told The Jewish Week, “being in that place where my father had been, and sending him footage of the ceremony in which we read the names of the relatives whom we had lost.” Honoring her father (who died six months later) in this way gave Elias, she said, “the greatest sense of accomplishment in my life, even bigger than the opportunity to walk down the aisle.”
editor@jewishweek.org
FIRST PERSON
The Cousins I Never Had
Gideon Taylor
Special To The Jewish Week
Gideon Taylor
On a trip back home to Ireland where I grew up, I was thinking less about the modern bustling country of today and more about some letters of 77 years ago that recently turned up in my childhood family home.
The modern gleaming Dublin airport that I walked through seemed very distant from those times, although the televisions in the arrival area were blaring out stories of a Europe where Jews once again are in danger because they are Jews. The coverage included news of the families shopping in a kosher supermarket in a suburb of Paris.
My grandfather came to Ireland in the 1920s, fleeing oppression and poverty in Poland. His sister and her family remained behind in a small shtetl called Janow in northeastern Poland. A faded photograph shows him on a return visit he made in 1938. There he is in his smart city suit (he was a tailor, after all) surrounded by his mother, sister, nephew and nieces. In the background, next to a wooden house, the camera captured the outline of a man chopping wood amidst the village setting. Most prominent in the photo, however, staring into the camera with intensity, her hands resting lightly on the shoulders of my grandfather, is the oldest of the nieces, by then already a young woman. Her name was Mottel. She was about 23 years old.
That year my grandfather, who already owned two tailor shops and was an Irish citizen, pleaded with the authorities of his new homeland for permission to bring her to Ireland.
“I will keep her in my own house and will give her all necessities and will not send her to work,” he stressed in a letter to the Irish Ministry of Justice, desperately searching for arguments that would convince them. He went on to describe her plight: “Her father is dead and her mother has three girls and one boy, and is not in very good circumstances. She will not become a responsibility of the State,” he wanted to make absolutely clear.
The response, dated just three days after the request, was terse. The minister of justice “does not see his way to grant permission to you to bring your niece to this country.” A cold, uncaring letter.
Postcards from Janow kept the connection. “Mottel hopes that with the help of God she will come to you. Abe, if you could see her you would not recognize her. What a beautiful girl she is,” my grandfather’s father wrote to him in a tiny cramped Yiddish script. The last postcard was dated January 1941, six months before the Nazis swept through eastern Poland.
In my mind, she surely would have lived around the corner from my grandparents. She would have had children and grandchildren, a raft of cousins with whom we would have played every weekend. Some would today be scattered around the world like much of the Irish-Jewish diaspora while others might still be living there, helping to keep the dwindling Jewish community alive.
But it was not to be. The gates to Ireland, like those of so many other countries, were kept firmly shut and Mottel never came to him. In 1942, the Jews of the shtetl were rounded up. The testimony from 1946 of a survivor from the village described the conditions in which the Jews of Janow were held: “Prisoners were living in basements and cellars which were so overcrowded that the prisoners could not lie down to sleep, they had to sit or stand. They received 15 grams of bread daily and one liter of soup made from unpeeled potatoes. A few persons were shot for peeling potatoes.” Six weeks later they were transported to Treblinka where virtually all of them, presumably including Mottel, were killed.
There was no country to take them and no Israel to provide sanctuary.
This Yom HaShoah, amidst all the ceremonies and gatherings, I will think about what a different family I might have had and what a different world we might live in had governments and countries in 1938 seen what lay ahead and acted with foresight and humanity instead of blindness and bureaucracy. And, while the times are very different, we will all dwell on what it means for us that today, once again, Jews in Paris going out to buy food for Shabbat may be living in fear. And about what it means to have a Jewish state.
Gideon Taylor is chair of operations of the World Jewish Restitution Organization.Also in this issue, Israel columnist Nathan Jeffay asks whether the Joint List of Arab parties in the Knesset can work with the system to promote change. Staff writer Steve Lipman reports from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., where a second-night seder put southern slavery in the spotlight. And staff writer Hannah Dreyfus reports on the trend of synagogues moving to flexible dues models, and whether they can work in New York.LETTER FROM ISRAEL
Can Arab Parties Be Part Of The System?
With electoral showing, they’re now in position to constructively solve problems.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
Nathan Jeffay
Opportunity knocks in Israel’s parliament, where an Arab alliance is now the third biggest faction. But only if Arab and Jewish lawmakers can each adopt some fresh thinking.
The Joint List, a federation of several Arab parties, garnered 13 of the Knesset’s 120 seats at the swearing-in ceremony last week, following its triumph in motivating an often apathetic Arab electorate on Election Day.
As of press time, it’s still possible that the two largest parties will form a unity government, which would mean that the Joint List leads the opposition — a position that involves meeting most foreign dignitaries who visit Israel. And if this doesn’t happen, the Arab parties will still be a major force to be reckoned with.
It’s understandable that many Jewish Israelis receive this information with trepidation. The Joint List includes politicians who have taken delight in riling the Jewish public and showing contempt towards the state.
The best known is Haneen Zoabi, who said that the kidnappers of three Jewish teenagers last summer were not terrorists, and that she encouraged Palestinians to place a “siege” on Israel instead of negotiating with it.
Even the criticisms of the most moderate player in the Joint List, namely the Hadash party, which has a Jewish politician among its five lawmakers, often cuts close to the bone as far as the Jewish public is concerned. What is more, it is infuriating in its echoing of Palestinian claims and automatic rejection of contrasting arguments by Israel.
However, the time when Arab politicians can get away with standing on the sidelines and yelling may have just come to an end. They are now in a position to act constructively, to tackle the problems faced by their voters, and to do so as part of the system rather than by raging against the system.
There are very real difficulties facing Arabs in Israel, including poverty, the lack of infrastructure in neighborhoods and a problem highlighted by the likes of the economic ministry and the Bank of Israel, namely discrimination in employment opportunities.
Dealing with such problems is good for Jews as well as for Arabs for all sorts of reasons. Economic improvement for the Arab minority benefits the entire national economy. And the fewer the grievances from Arab citizens towards the state, the better the country’s social fabric and the less chance of violent tensions.
If Jewish lawmakers cooperate with the Joint List and enable it to be an agent of change in the day-to-day lives of Arab citizens, this Knesset session could prove highly productive. In short, Jewish lawmakers have a part to play in pushing the Joint List to become constructive rather than a destructive force.
This is far easier said than done. They will need to restrict sparring with Joint List lawmakers on abstract ideological issues to a minimum and focus on practical matters. And the same goes for Jewish lawmakers on the political right, for whom raging against the Arab parties and proposing legislation aimed against the Arab minority (much of which doesn’t stand a chance of passing but just makes noise and raises tensions) has become the default way for some easy political point-scoring.
But however well Jewish lawmakers conduct themselves, much is in the hands of the Joint List’s lawmakers. Will they capitalize wisely on their Knesset strength? What will the alliance of Arab groupings from a broad spectrum mean — will the Islamists pull it in an extreme direction, or will the moderates be able to show the entire faction the value of constructive engagement?
And here lies the greatest opportunity of the Arab electoral success. It’s a chance for Arab politicians to end the disconnect between them and their voters. They expend huge amounts of energy taking the Palestinian side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some view their Knesset job as a tool in this. “We are part of the national project,” said Zoabi of the Joint List before the election. “We don’t rely on any Israeli government to recognize our rights.” The Arab public sees things very differently.
It overwhelmingly feels that its leaders should deal more with settling daily problems and less with Israel’s dispute with the Palestinians. In the last major survey of Israeli-Arabs conducted by the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute, released a year-and-a-half ago, 76 percent of respondents held this opinion.
In the same IDI study, Israel’s Arabs emerge as a group with lots of misgivings and worries about the country they live in, but which wants to change its lot by working within the system. A staggering 73 percent of Arabs even wanted Arab parties to make the ultimate commitment to constructive politics and join coalition governments. This underscores the gulf that exists — the Arab public overwhelmingly favors working inside a government, but to politicians it’s an absolute no-no. A government role isn’t in the cards any time soon, but the party should take seriously the sentiment that went into this statistic.
There is, today, a rare coincidence between what is good for the State of Israel as a whole, for the Arab public, and for Arab politicians in the light of its voters’ expectations. It remains to be seen whether the relevant people will have the resolve and good sense to seize on this.
Nathan Jeffay’s column appears twice a month.
NATIONAL
At Virginia Seder, A Unique Flavor of Slavery
Historic university reinforces students’ understanding of Passover theme
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
The Wren Building on the campus of William and Mary, which was built by slaves in the 17th century. media Commons
Williamsburg, Va. — The students at the second-night seder here at the College of William and Mary this week didn’t have to go far for a reminder of slavery, one of the ritual meal’s main themes.
They just had to cross the street.
Across Jamestown Road on the eastern border of the second-oldest university in the United States lies the Wren Building, the oldest extant college building in the country. The three-story brick structure was built by slaves in the final years of the 17th century, and slaves worked there in subsequent years.
I mentioned the site during the seder I led for two dozen members of the school’s Hillel chapter.
Slavery is not an entirely abstract concept for them, as it is not for many of the participants in the seders I have led in the past dozen years, mostly in former communist countries. The people attending my seders, or their parents or grandparents, have memories of slavery conditions under Nazism and Communism.
For most young Jews in this country, slavery is foreign.
For the students at the William and Mary seder, most of whom are from Northern Virginia, tales of slavery are very familiar.
The school is home to the Lemon Project, an initiative that documents the role that slavery played on campus; and to the Middle Passage Project, which researches the slave trade that brought millions of black Africans across the Atlantic Ocean from the Old World to slavery in the New World.
At times during my seder, students discussed Harriet Tubman, the “Black Moses” conductor on the antebellum Underground Railroad who led Southern slaves to freedom in the North; they discussed the education about Southern slavery that began in their elementary schools; they discussed how the subject of slavery in the South inevitably would be mentioned during their family seders.
“Passover is a time of remembrance,” said Maia Mandel, president of the W&M Hillel chapter. A seder on a campus where slaves and slave owners — including a teenaged Thomas Jefferson — once walked was a “natural connection,” she said.
In the 19th century, William and Mary was known as the leading intellectual proponent of Southern causes, an unabashed supporter of slavery and of restrictive post-Civil War Jim Crow legislation and social practice. Thomas Roderick Dew, president of the school in 1836-46, “was considered the chief ideologue for the defense of slavery,” according to Jody Allen, a visiting assistant professor of history who serves as co-chair of the Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation, which was established here six years ago.
The school, established in 1693 by King William III and Queen Mary II, did in its early days own at least dozens of slaves, cotton fields and a tobacco plantation where the slaves worked.
The Lemon Project (wm.edu/lemonproject), named for one of the school’s slaves (a worker in the school’s cotton fields who died in 1817; his last name is not known), grew out of student and faculty resolutions in 2009 that called for a full investigation of the college’s past. The school’s Board of Visitors (its trustees) acknowledged that the institution, which in early decades was affiliated with the Anglican and Episcopal churches, had “owned and exploited slave labor from its founding to the Civil War, and that it had failed to take a stand against segregation during the Jim Crow era.”
While William and Mary, now a public university with no religious affiliation, began admitting its first black students as early as 1951, several years ahead of many Southern institutions, blacks were not allowed to live on campus until 1967. In recent years the school has increased its recruiting of black students (an estimated 7 percent of the school’s 8,400 students) and faculty, and has created an African Studies Department.
The school also offers a Jewish Studies minor; some 500 Jewish students attend the school.
The Lemon Project supports oral histories of black alumni, as well as on-campus archaeological excavations that have uncovered the remains of an early 18th-century building that may have housed slaves who worked at the school; other archaeological research here is looking for evidence that one campus building was used for the education of free and enslaved black children in the 1700s.
The project is part of a recent movement among several prominent universities across the country — both in the South, and at such northern schools as Harvard, Yale, Brown and Columbia — that have made a belated effort to investigate and admit to the institutions’ support of slavery centuries ago.
Craig Steven Wilder, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of “’Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities” (Bloomsbury, 2014), calls the Lemon Project “one of the earlier attempts to address the history of slavery at American colleges. Southern schools have been more active in these efforts than their northern peer institutions.
“This research, public programming, and campus dialogue creates the opportunity for colleges/universities to do outreach beyond their campuses to repair and improve their relationships with black and brown communities with whom they share histories,” Wilder, a first-generation college graduate (Fordham and Columbia) who grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, told The Jewish Week in an email interview.
While many African-Americans, descendants of slaves, continue to be reluctant to discuss the history and legacy of slavery, today more “eyes are being opened,” said Allen, a 2007 graduate of William and Mary (doctorate, history), who specializes in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and school desegregation.
She has lobbied for the inclusion of the school’s past involvement with slavery in W&M’s history curriculum, and for the admissions office to include newly uncovered stories in prospective students’ tours of the campus.
Allen said The Lemon Project, a form of communal remembrance and repentance, shares parallels with the seder, which has kept the memory of ancient slavery alive for centuries in the Jewish community.
For the students at my seder, who came dressed in modest skirts and blouses, casual shirts and slacks, the connection was obvious.
I cited one recent connection: a column in the Chicago Tribune by a Jewish writer who declared that he had “no idea” how to make the experience of deliverance 3,300 years ago relevant at this year’s seder. Then he decided to join last month’s mass march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., marking the 50th anniversary of one of the seminal events in civil rights history.
The commemorative march, I said, was an American version of the seder — re-enacting in words and actions, steps that led to freedom.
The students at my seder understood.
Mounted at the front of Trinkle Hall, where the seder took place, was a royal coat-of-arms with the motto, in French, “God is my Right” — a fitting reminder at a seder; the ancient Pharaohs also believed that they ruled by appointment of the gods.
At the end of the seder, some of the students at my table discussed the similarities between the Jewish experience in ancient Egypt and the African experience in the antebellum United States.
“There was one big difference,” one young woman said. “We had an exodus.”
One more overlap of the two communities’ background in slavery: on Friday and Saturday this week, the last days of Passover, which commemorate the Israelites’ crossing the Red Sea, the Lemon Project will sponsor its annual spring symposium here. The theme: “Ghosts of Slavery.”
Staff writer Steve Lipman traveled to Williamsburg under the sponsorship of the College of William and Mary’s Hillel chapter. He led the second-night seder using supplies donated by Daniel Levine of J. Levine Books and Judaica, Chanan Furman of B2B Supply, and friends Lisa Levy, Shulamis Blokh, Debby Caplan, Michael and Rebecca Wittert and Simi Eisenstat.
steve@jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
Synagogues In NYC Too Big To Lose Dues
Is New York too big for the increasingly popular voluntary dues model? Local congregations weigh in.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Beth Abraham Rabbi David Holtz and synagogue president Herb Baer look at plans for new Tarrytown building. Michael Datikash/JW
At the beginning of January, board members of Congregation Beth Abraham, a Reform synagogue in Tarrytown, met in the president’s living room to discuss a hot topic these days: synagogue dues.
Previously, the 400-family Westchester synagogue had operated under the conventional system of mandatory annual dues: congregants were required to pay a certain amount each year in order to retain their membership. Different membership categories — families, singles, seniors — dictated different rates, and those who couldn’t pay the full amount petitioned for dues relief.
But the board started to sense that the method was outdated.
“Inflexible membership doesn’t feel good to millennials,” said Allison Fine, president of Beth Abraham, referring to the demographic prize of luring 20- and 30-somethings into the synagogue. “The older generation might consider synagogue membership a part of life, but the younger generation doesn’t operate under those assumptions. Younger congregants want the freedom to come and go as they please,” she said.
So, beginning in June, Beth Abraham will for the first time implement a flexible dues model; it will suggest an annual membership fee of $3,300, but the synagogue won’t enforce payment. Congregants will be encouraged to pay more “according to their means,” but will not be turned away for declining, said Fine. The “dues relief process” protocol for congregants who can’t afford full membership will be eliminated completely.
“The new model taps into the fundamental desire to feel good about synagogue life,” she said. “This is less of a spreadsheet issue and more of an emotional issue.”
Beth Abraham’s decision to switch dues models follows on the heels of UJA-Federation of New York’s first comprehensive study of voluntary pledging, released last month. The study, which collected data from 26 small- to medium-sized Reform, Conservative and Independent synagogues across the U.S. — but none in New York City, Long Island or Westchester — questioned the importance of a formal dues model (see box).
Flexible dues represents “a cultural shift,” said Rabbi Dan Judson, one of the co-authors of the study, “Are Voluntary Dues Right For Your Synagogue?”
“People will be more engaged in their synagogue if they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility,” he said. Those who don’t or can’t pay won’t feel like “lesser members,” the rabbi said.
The move by some synagogues to an alternative dues model is the latest in a series of steps taken by mostly non-Orthodox congregations to try to stay relevant in a changing demographic landscape. Some have merged with nearby congregations, some have added Zumba, yoga or other exercise-related programming, and still others, in the teeth of the Great Recession, have brought in social workers and employment counselors to meet congregants’ changing needs.
While Beth Abraham has high hopes for the new model, other New York synagogues are wary of making dues voluntary.
The Community Synagogue, a large Reform congregation in Port Washington on Long Island, adopted a voluntary dues system in 2006 called a “fair share model,” in which congregants are asked to pay a base fee of $2,950 after which additional giving depends upon income. However, the synagogue is considering a return to the mandatory dues model because revenue has plateaued since 2008.
“Voluntary dues assume that people’s goodwill sustains the community — it won’t,” said Rabbi Irwin Zeplowitz, senior rabbi of the Community Synagogue. Though the congregation is expanding rapidly, surpassing 710 families last year and housing a Hebrew school that is “bursting at the seams,” the experiment is paying fewer dividends than anticipated.
“People are preoccupied with a ‘what will I get out of it,’ attitude,” said Rabbi Zeplowitz. Orthodox Jews consider membership dues to be part of the mitzvah, the religious commandment, to support one’s congregation, he said. “In the non-Orthodox, non-mitzvah oriented world, it’s very difficult to create a sense of mutual responsibility.”
The synagogue’s large size might play a role in the voluntary model’s failure, suggested Judson, who said the “sweet spot” for congregations using this model is 400 member households.
“Communication is simply easier in a smaller congregation,” said Judson, adding that diffused sense of financial responsibility is much more likely to develop in a large synagogue.
The feeling that “we can always go somewhere else” exacerbated the problem at Community, said Rabbi Zeplowitz. “Sense of loyalty in New York is a tricky thing,” he said. “Why should members commit themselves to one synagogue when there’s another a few blocks over?”
Beth Abraham’s Fine expressed concern about the competition factor, even as her synagogue gears up for the change. However, she’s hoping the new voluntary model will give Beth Abraham the necessary edge.
“It’s not like we’re in Vermont, where’s there’s no competition,” she said. “The new model will allow us to reimagine our relationship with congregants.”
Still, size and competition aren’t the only factors that influence the collection of dues.
Congregation Ohel Yitzhack, a small Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, has relied on a voluntary dues system since 1973. According to the congregation’s rabbi, the expectation of commitment among Orthodox congregants makes all the difference.
“In a more rigidly Orthodox group, there’s an immutable sense of responsibility,” said Rabbi Leib Kelman, leader of the congregation. “There needs to be a minyan all year round, so people do what they have to — no compromises,” he said.
During the High Holidays, the synagogue, located in a rapidly gentrifying area of Brooklyn, opens its doors to newcomers and non-Orthodox Jews looking for services.
“Jews who only visit the synagogue once or twice a year have no interest in paying for the privilege,” said Rabbi Kelman. “The voluntary model works for us because our congregants can’t go a week without shul.”
In the UJA-Federation study, no Orthodox synagogues were included. Judson agreed that Orthodox congregants expect to pay dues in a way other denominations do not.
“In many interfaith and Reform families, people aren’t used to fees,” he said, explaining that they are more accustomed to the “voluntary commitment system” found in Christian churches. For Orthodox congregations, dues remain a “living” idea, and since the voluntary system seems to work, there’s no impetus for change, he said.
Temple Beth-El, a small Reform congregation in Jersey City that was part of the UJA-Federation study, felt an acute need for change when people started to leave the community a few years back. The synagogue has since adopted a system in which members are asked to make an annual pledge of $1,900, but people are not turned away if they can’t commit. Since the model’s implementation in 2011, the 165-member congregation has seen a growth of five to 10 members a year.
“There are no lines you have to cross to be part of our community,” said Rabbi Debby Hachen, the synagogue’s leader. “We needed people to feel welcome because our numbers were hurting.”
Though Beth-El’s community remains “porous” in nature, the attitude that the synagogue is there for all of it, and not just for card-carrying members, has revitalized the congregation.
“We’ll accept you as you are — that’s the message we want to send,” said Rabbi Hachen. “If the temple is filled, dues will follow.”
Paying Their Dues,Only Less So
Below are the key findings in UJA-Federation’s study of alternative synagogue dues. Eighty-eight percent of the synagogues using the voluntary commitment model are in or around large cities, and 81 percent have fewer than 500 members.
Among synagogues that changed to the new model:
♦The average annual membership increase was 4 percent. Two synagogues saw the dramatic increases of 25 percent and 15 percent;
♦The level of membership engagement and involvement increased: on a 1-5 scale, level of engagement increased from an average of 3.5 to an average of 4.1;
♦The average total revenue increased by 4.4 percent;
♦Perceived value of membership on a 1-5 scale went from an average of 3.3 to 4.1;
♦None of the synagogues reported “free rider” problems.
hannah@jewishweek.org
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The Editors.
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The Cousins I Never Had
Gideon Taylor
Special To The Jewish Week
Gideon Taylor
On a trip back home to Ireland where I grew up, I was thinking less about the modern bustling country of today and more about some letters of 77 years ago that recently turned up in my childhood family home.
The modern gleaming Dublin airport that I walked through seemed very distant from those times, although the televisions in the arrival area were blaring out stories of a Europe where Jews once again are in danger because they are Jews. The coverage included news of the families shopping in a kosher supermarket in a suburb of Paris.
My grandfather came to Ireland in the 1920s, fleeing oppression and poverty in Poland. His sister and her family remained behind in a small shtetl called Janow in northeastern Poland. A faded photograph shows him on a return visit he made in 1938. There he is in his smart city suit (he was a tailor, after all) surrounded by his mother, sister, nephew and nieces. In the background, next to a wooden house, the camera captured the outline of a man chopping wood amidst the village setting. Most prominent in the photo, however, staring into the camera with intensity, her hands resting lightly on the shoulders of my grandfather, is the oldest of the nieces, by then already a young woman. Her name was Mottel. She was about 23 years old.
That year my grandfather, who already owned two tailor shops and was an Irish citizen, pleaded with the authorities of his new homeland for permission to bring her to Ireland.
“I will keep her in my own house and will give her all necessities and will not send her to work,” he stressed in a letter to the Irish Ministry of Justice, desperately searching for arguments that would convince them. He went on to describe her plight: “Her father is dead and her mother has three girls and one boy, and is not in very good circumstances. She will not become a responsibility of the State,” he wanted to make absolutely clear.
The response, dated just three days after the request, was terse. The minister of justice “does not see his way to grant permission to you to bring your niece to this country.” A cold, uncaring letter.
Postcards from Janow kept the connection. “Mottel hopes that with the help of God she will come to you. Abe, if you could see her you would not recognize her. What a beautiful girl she is,” my grandfather’s father wrote to him in a tiny cramped Yiddish script. The last postcard was dated January 1941, six months before the Nazis swept through eastern Poland.
In my mind, she surely would have lived around the corner from my grandparents. She would have had children and grandchildren, a raft of cousins with whom we would have played every weekend. Some would today be scattered around the world like much of the Irish-Jewish diaspora while others might still be living there, helping to keep the dwindling Jewish community alive.
But it was not to be. The gates to Ireland, like those of so many other countries, were kept firmly shut and Mottel never came to him. In 1942, the Jews of the shtetl were rounded up. The testimony from 1946 of a survivor from the village described the conditions in which the Jews of Janow were held: “Prisoners were living in basements and cellars which were so overcrowded that the prisoners could not lie down to sleep, they had to sit or stand. They received 15 grams of bread daily and one liter of soup made from unpeeled potatoes. A few persons were shot for peeling potatoes.” Six weeks later they were transported to Treblinka where virtually all of them, presumably including Mottel, were killed.
There was no country to take them and no Israel to provide sanctuary.
This Yom HaShoah, amidst all the ceremonies and gatherings, I will think about what a different family I might have had and what a different world we might live in had governments and countries in 1938 seen what lay ahead and acted with foresight and humanity instead of blindness and bureaucracy. And, while the times are very different, we will all dwell on what it means for us that today, once again, Jews in Paris going out to buy food for Shabbat may be living in fear. And about what it means to have a Jewish state.
Gideon Taylor is chair of operations of the World Jewish Restitution Organization.Also in this issue, Israel columnist Nathan Jeffay asks whether the Joint List of Arab parties in the Knesset can work with the system to promote change. Staff writer Steve Lipman reports from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., where a second-night seder put southern slavery in the spotlight. And staff writer Hannah Dreyfus reports on the trend of synagogues moving to flexible dues models, and whether they can work in New York.LETTER FROM ISRAEL
Can Arab Parties Be Part Of The System?
With electoral showing, they’re now in position to constructively solve problems.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
Nathan Jeffay
Opportunity knocks in Israel’s parliament, where an Arab alliance is now the third biggest faction. But only if Arab and Jewish lawmakers can each adopt some fresh thinking.
The Joint List, a federation of several Arab parties, garnered 13 of the Knesset’s 120 seats at the swearing-in ceremony last week, following its triumph in motivating an often apathetic Arab electorate on Election Day.
As of press time, it’s still possible that the two largest parties will form a unity government, which would mean that the Joint List leads the opposition — a position that involves meeting most foreign dignitaries who visit Israel. And if this doesn’t happen, the Arab parties will still be a major force to be reckoned with.
It’s understandable that many Jewish Israelis receive this information with trepidation. The Joint List includes politicians who have taken delight in riling the Jewish public and showing contempt towards the state.
The best known is Haneen Zoabi, who said that the kidnappers of three Jewish teenagers last summer were not terrorists, and that she encouraged Palestinians to place a “siege” on Israel instead of negotiating with it.
Even the criticisms of the most moderate player in the Joint List, namely the Hadash party, which has a Jewish politician among its five lawmakers, often cuts close to the bone as far as the Jewish public is concerned. What is more, it is infuriating in its echoing of Palestinian claims and automatic rejection of contrasting arguments by Israel.
However, the time when Arab politicians can get away with standing on the sidelines and yelling may have just come to an end. They are now in a position to act constructively, to tackle the problems faced by their voters, and to do so as part of the system rather than by raging against the system.
There are very real difficulties facing Arabs in Israel, including poverty, the lack of infrastructure in neighborhoods and a problem highlighted by the likes of the economic ministry and the Bank of Israel, namely discrimination in employment opportunities.
Dealing with such problems is good for Jews as well as for Arabs for all sorts of reasons. Economic improvement for the Arab minority benefits the entire national economy. And the fewer the grievances from Arab citizens towards the state, the better the country’s social fabric and the less chance of violent tensions.
If Jewish lawmakers cooperate with the Joint List and enable it to be an agent of change in the day-to-day lives of Arab citizens, this Knesset session could prove highly productive. In short, Jewish lawmakers have a part to play in pushing the Joint List to become constructive rather than a destructive force.
This is far easier said than done. They will need to restrict sparring with Joint List lawmakers on abstract ideological issues to a minimum and focus on practical matters. And the same goes for Jewish lawmakers on the political right, for whom raging against the Arab parties and proposing legislation aimed against the Arab minority (much of which doesn’t stand a chance of passing but just makes noise and raises tensions) has become the default way for some easy political point-scoring.
But however well Jewish lawmakers conduct themselves, much is in the hands of the Joint List’s lawmakers. Will they capitalize wisely on their Knesset strength? What will the alliance of Arab groupings from a broad spectrum mean — will the Islamists pull it in an extreme direction, or will the moderates be able to show the entire faction the value of constructive engagement?
And here lies the greatest opportunity of the Arab electoral success. It’s a chance for Arab politicians to end the disconnect between them and their voters. They expend huge amounts of energy taking the Palestinian side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some view their Knesset job as a tool in this. “We are part of the national project,” said Zoabi of the Joint List before the election. “We don’t rely on any Israeli government to recognize our rights.” The Arab public sees things very differently.
It overwhelmingly feels that its leaders should deal more with settling daily problems and less with Israel’s dispute with the Palestinians. In the last major survey of Israeli-Arabs conducted by the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute, released a year-and-a-half ago, 76 percent of respondents held this opinion.
In the same IDI study, Israel’s Arabs emerge as a group with lots of misgivings and worries about the country they live in, but which wants to change its lot by working within the system. A staggering 73 percent of Arabs even wanted Arab parties to make the ultimate commitment to constructive politics and join coalition governments. This underscores the gulf that exists — the Arab public overwhelmingly favors working inside a government, but to politicians it’s an absolute no-no. A government role isn’t in the cards any time soon, but the party should take seriously the sentiment that went into this statistic.
There is, today, a rare coincidence between what is good for the State of Israel as a whole, for the Arab public, and for Arab politicians in the light of its voters’ expectations. It remains to be seen whether the relevant people will have the resolve and good sense to seize on this.
Nathan Jeffay’s column appears twice a month.
NATIONAL
At Virginia Seder, A Unique Flavor of Slavery
Historic university reinforces students’ understanding of Passover theme
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
The Wren Building on the campus of William and Mary, which was built by slaves in the 17th century. media Commons
Williamsburg, Va. — The students at the second-night seder here at the College of William and Mary this week didn’t have to go far for a reminder of slavery, one of the ritual meal’s main themes.
They just had to cross the street.
Across Jamestown Road on the eastern border of the second-oldest university in the United States lies the Wren Building, the oldest extant college building in the country. The three-story brick structure was built by slaves in the final years of the 17th century, and slaves worked there in subsequent years.
I mentioned the site during the seder I led for two dozen members of the school’s Hillel chapter.
Slavery is not an entirely abstract concept for them, as it is not for many of the participants in the seders I have led in the past dozen years, mostly in former communist countries. The people attending my seders, or their parents or grandparents, have memories of slavery conditions under Nazism and Communism.
For most young Jews in this country, slavery is foreign.
For the students at the William and Mary seder, most of whom are from Northern Virginia, tales of slavery are very familiar.
The school is home to the Lemon Project, an initiative that documents the role that slavery played on campus; and to the Middle Passage Project, which researches the slave trade that brought millions of black Africans across the Atlantic Ocean from the Old World to slavery in the New World.
At times during my seder, students discussed Harriet Tubman, the “Black Moses” conductor on the antebellum Underground Railroad who led Southern slaves to freedom in the North; they discussed the education about Southern slavery that began in their elementary schools; they discussed how the subject of slavery in the South inevitably would be mentioned during their family seders.
“Passover is a time of remembrance,” said Maia Mandel, president of the W&M Hillel chapter. A seder on a campus where slaves and slave owners — including a teenaged Thomas Jefferson — once walked was a “natural connection,” she said.
In the 19th century, William and Mary was known as the leading intellectual proponent of Southern causes, an unabashed supporter of slavery and of restrictive post-Civil War Jim Crow legislation and social practice. Thomas Roderick Dew, president of the school in 1836-46, “was considered the chief ideologue for the defense of slavery,” according to Jody Allen, a visiting assistant professor of history who serves as co-chair of the Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation, which was established here six years ago.
The school, established in 1693 by King William III and Queen Mary II, did in its early days own at least dozens of slaves, cotton fields and a tobacco plantation where the slaves worked.
The Lemon Project (wm.edu/lemonproject), named for one of the school’s slaves (a worker in the school’s cotton fields who died in 1817; his last name is not known), grew out of student and faculty resolutions in 2009 that called for a full investigation of the college’s past. The school’s Board of Visitors (its trustees) acknowledged that the institution, which in early decades was affiliated with the Anglican and Episcopal churches, had “owned and exploited slave labor from its founding to the Civil War, and that it had failed to take a stand against segregation during the Jim Crow era.”
While William and Mary, now a public university with no religious affiliation, began admitting its first black students as early as 1951, several years ahead of many Southern institutions, blacks were not allowed to live on campus until 1967. In recent years the school has increased its recruiting of black students (an estimated 7 percent of the school’s 8,400 students) and faculty, and has created an African Studies Department.
The school also offers a Jewish Studies minor; some 500 Jewish students attend the school.
The Lemon Project supports oral histories of black alumni, as well as on-campus archaeological excavations that have uncovered the remains of an early 18th-century building that may have housed slaves who worked at the school; other archaeological research here is looking for evidence that one campus building was used for the education of free and enslaved black children in the 1700s.
The project is part of a recent movement among several prominent universities across the country — both in the South, and at such northern schools as Harvard, Yale, Brown and Columbia — that have made a belated effort to investigate and admit to the institutions’ support of slavery centuries ago.
Craig Steven Wilder, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of “’Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities” (Bloomsbury, 2014), calls the Lemon Project “one of the earlier attempts to address the history of slavery at American colleges. Southern schools have been more active in these efforts than their northern peer institutions.
“This research, public programming, and campus dialogue creates the opportunity for colleges/universities to do outreach beyond their campuses to repair and improve their relationships with black and brown communities with whom they share histories,” Wilder, a first-generation college graduate (Fordham and Columbia) who grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, told The Jewish Week in an email interview.
While many African-Americans, descendants of slaves, continue to be reluctant to discuss the history and legacy of slavery, today more “eyes are being opened,” said Allen, a 2007 graduate of William and Mary (doctorate, history), who specializes in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and school desegregation.
She has lobbied for the inclusion of the school’s past involvement with slavery in W&M’s history curriculum, and for the admissions office to include newly uncovered stories in prospective students’ tours of the campus.
Allen said The Lemon Project, a form of communal remembrance and repentance, shares parallels with the seder, which has kept the memory of ancient slavery alive for centuries in the Jewish community.
For the students at my seder, who came dressed in modest skirts and blouses, casual shirts and slacks, the connection was obvious.
I cited one recent connection: a column in the Chicago Tribune by a Jewish writer who declared that he had “no idea” how to make the experience of deliverance 3,300 years ago relevant at this year’s seder. Then he decided to join last month’s mass march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., marking the 50th anniversary of one of the seminal events in civil rights history.
The commemorative march, I said, was an American version of the seder — re-enacting in words and actions, steps that led to freedom.
The students at my seder understood.
Mounted at the front of Trinkle Hall, where the seder took place, was a royal coat-of-arms with the motto, in French, “God is my Right” — a fitting reminder at a seder; the ancient Pharaohs also believed that they ruled by appointment of the gods.
At the end of the seder, some of the students at my table discussed the similarities between the Jewish experience in ancient Egypt and the African experience in the antebellum United States.
“There was one big difference,” one young woman said. “We had an exodus.”
One more overlap of the two communities’ background in slavery: on Friday and Saturday this week, the last days of Passover, which commemorate the Israelites’ crossing the Red Sea, the Lemon Project will sponsor its annual spring symposium here. The theme: “Ghosts of Slavery.”
Staff writer Steve Lipman traveled to Williamsburg under the sponsorship of the College of William and Mary’s Hillel chapter. He led the second-night seder using supplies donated by Daniel Levine of J. Levine Books and Judaica, Chanan Furman of B2B Supply, and friends Lisa Levy, Shulamis Blokh, Debby Caplan, Michael and Rebecca Wittert and Simi Eisenstat.
steve@jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
Synagogues In NYC Too Big To Lose Dues
Is New York too big for the increasingly popular voluntary dues model? Local congregations weigh in.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Beth Abraham Rabbi David Holtz and synagogue president Herb Baer look at plans for new Tarrytown building. Michael Datikash/JW
At the beginning of January, board members of Congregation Beth Abraham, a Reform synagogue in Tarrytown, met in the president’s living room to discuss a hot topic these days: synagogue dues.
Previously, the 400-family Westchester synagogue had operated under the conventional system of mandatory annual dues: congregants were required to pay a certain amount each year in order to retain their membership. Different membership categories — families, singles, seniors — dictated different rates, and those who couldn’t pay the full amount petitioned for dues relief.
But the board started to sense that the method was outdated.
“Inflexible membership doesn’t feel good to millennials,” said Allison Fine, president of Beth Abraham, referring to the demographic prize of luring 20- and 30-somethings into the synagogue. “The older generation might consider synagogue membership a part of life, but the younger generation doesn’t operate under those assumptions. Younger congregants want the freedom to come and go as they please,” she said.
So, beginning in June, Beth Abraham will for the first time implement a flexible dues model; it will suggest an annual membership fee of $3,300, but the synagogue won’t enforce payment. Congregants will be encouraged to pay more “according to their means,” but will not be turned away for declining, said Fine. The “dues relief process” protocol for congregants who can’t afford full membership will be eliminated completely.
“The new model taps into the fundamental desire to feel good about synagogue life,” she said. “This is less of a spreadsheet issue and more of an emotional issue.”
Beth Abraham’s decision to switch dues models follows on the heels of UJA-Federation of New York’s first comprehensive study of voluntary pledging, released last month. The study, which collected data from 26 small- to medium-sized Reform, Conservative and Independent synagogues across the U.S. — but none in New York City, Long Island or Westchester — questioned the importance of a formal dues model (see box).
Flexible dues represents “a cultural shift,” said Rabbi Dan Judson, one of the co-authors of the study, “Are Voluntary Dues Right For Your Synagogue?”
“People will be more engaged in their synagogue if they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility,” he said. Those who don’t or can’t pay won’t feel like “lesser members,” the rabbi said.
The move by some synagogues to an alternative dues model is the latest in a series of steps taken by mostly non-Orthodox congregations to try to stay relevant in a changing demographic landscape. Some have merged with nearby congregations, some have added Zumba, yoga or other exercise-related programming, and still others, in the teeth of the Great Recession, have brought in social workers and employment counselors to meet congregants’ changing needs.
While Beth Abraham has high hopes for the new model, other New York synagogues are wary of making dues voluntary.
The Community Synagogue, a large Reform congregation in Port Washington on Long Island, adopted a voluntary dues system in 2006 called a “fair share model,” in which congregants are asked to pay a base fee of $2,950 after which additional giving depends upon income. However, the synagogue is considering a return to the mandatory dues model because revenue has plateaued since 2008.
“Voluntary dues assume that people’s goodwill sustains the community — it won’t,” said Rabbi Irwin Zeplowitz, senior rabbi of the Community Synagogue. Though the congregation is expanding rapidly, surpassing 710 families last year and housing a Hebrew school that is “bursting at the seams,” the experiment is paying fewer dividends than anticipated.
“People are preoccupied with a ‘what will I get out of it,’ attitude,” said Rabbi Zeplowitz. Orthodox Jews consider membership dues to be part of the mitzvah, the religious commandment, to support one’s congregation, he said. “In the non-Orthodox, non-mitzvah oriented world, it’s very difficult to create a sense of mutual responsibility.”
The synagogue’s large size might play a role in the voluntary model’s failure, suggested Judson, who said the “sweet spot” for congregations using this model is 400 member households.
“Communication is simply easier in a smaller congregation,” said Judson, adding that diffused sense of financial responsibility is much more likely to develop in a large synagogue.
The feeling that “we can always go somewhere else” exacerbated the problem at Community, said Rabbi Zeplowitz. “Sense of loyalty in New York is a tricky thing,” he said. “Why should members commit themselves to one synagogue when there’s another a few blocks over?”
Beth Abraham’s Fine expressed concern about the competition factor, even as her synagogue gears up for the change. However, she’s hoping the new voluntary model will give Beth Abraham the necessary edge.
“It’s not like we’re in Vermont, where’s there’s no competition,” she said. “The new model will allow us to reimagine our relationship with congregants.”
Still, size and competition aren’t the only factors that influence the collection of dues.
Congregation Ohel Yitzhack, a small Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, has relied on a voluntary dues system since 1973. According to the congregation’s rabbi, the expectation of commitment among Orthodox congregants makes all the difference.
“In a more rigidly Orthodox group, there’s an immutable sense of responsibility,” said Rabbi Leib Kelman, leader of the congregation. “There needs to be a minyan all year round, so people do what they have to — no compromises,” he said.
During the High Holidays, the synagogue, located in a rapidly gentrifying area of Brooklyn, opens its doors to newcomers and non-Orthodox Jews looking for services.
“Jews who only visit the synagogue once or twice a year have no interest in paying for the privilege,” said Rabbi Kelman. “The voluntary model works for us because our congregants can’t go a week without shul.”
In the UJA-Federation study, no Orthodox synagogues were included. Judson agreed that Orthodox congregants expect to pay dues in a way other denominations do not.
“In many interfaith and Reform families, people aren’t used to fees,” he said, explaining that they are more accustomed to the “voluntary commitment system” found in Christian churches. For Orthodox congregations, dues remain a “living” idea, and since the voluntary system seems to work, there’s no impetus for change, he said.
Temple Beth-El, a small Reform congregation in Jersey City that was part of the UJA-Federation study, felt an acute need for change when people started to leave the community a few years back. The synagogue has since adopted a system in which members are asked to make an annual pledge of $1,900, but people are not turned away if they can’t commit. Since the model’s implementation in 2011, the 165-member congregation has seen a growth of five to 10 members a year.
“There are no lines you have to cross to be part of our community,” said Rabbi Debby Hachen, the synagogue’s leader. “We needed people to feel welcome because our numbers were hurting.”
Though Beth-El’s community remains “porous” in nature, the attitude that the synagogue is there for all of it, and not just for card-carrying members, has revitalized the congregation.
“We’ll accept you as you are — that’s the message we want to send,” said Rabbi Hachen. “If the temple is filled, dues will follow.”
Paying Their Dues,Only Less So
Below are the key findings in UJA-Federation’s study of alternative synagogue dues. Eighty-eight percent of the synagogues using the voluntary commitment model are in or around large cities, and 81 percent have fewer than 500 members.
Among synagogues that changed to the new model:
♦The average annual membership increase was 4 percent. Two synagogues saw the dramatic increases of 25 percent and 15 percent;
♦The level of membership engagement and involvement increased: on a 1-5 scale, level of engagement increased from an average of 3.5 to an average of 4.1;
♦The average total revenue increased by 4.4 percent;
♦Perceived value of membership on a 1-5 scale went from an average of 3.3 to 4.1;
♦None of the synagogues reported “free rider” problems.
hannah@jewishweek.org
Enjoy the issue.
The Editors.
P.S. Remember that our website is the place to go for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, features, op-eds, advice columns, and more. Check it out.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
Gary Rosenblatt
Gary Rosenblatt
Between the Lines
Gary Rosenblatt
Remember when, a week before the elections last month, it seemed likely the results would lead to a national unity government including right-of-center Likud, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the left-of-center Zionist Union, headed by Isaac Herzog of Labor and Tzipi Livni of Tnuah?
The Zionist Union was ahead in the polls, and it looked like the two major political blocs needed each other to create a coalition of more than half of the Knesset’s 120 seats.
And remember when, in a surprise upset, Likud pulled ahead and won the election handily — 30 seats for Likud to 24 seats for the Zionist Union? That put an end to the “unity coalition” talk, given that Netanyahu seemed poised to put together a more natural grouping of Likud along with several right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, a new center-right party led by former Likud member Moshe Kahlon. That would give Netanyahu 67 seats — not a huge majority but a comfortable one, it seemed. End of story?
Not quite.
There has been little public discussion or media coverage of the coalition-building process, in part because of the Passover holiday, in part because the behind-closed-doors discussions can take another month, and because of the assumption that this was a done deal.
But nothing is that simple in Israeli politics. According to well-placed sources I have spoken to, here and in Israel, there is now a very good chance that Netanyahu, who publicly insisted he would not seek to form a unity government with Herzog, appears to be trying to do just that.
There are several factors pushing the prime minister in that direction, and they have little to do with altruistic exhortations from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to help unify the society. Rather, they involve some shrewd calculations on the part of Netanyahu based on shoring up his political power, and a new and urgent Iran-based dynamic driving the prime minister to patch up his relationship with President Obama now.
Kahlon Is Key
For starters, if Netanyahu went with the narrow Option A — the right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, with 67 votes in all — he would be vulnerable to Kahlon, who controls 10 seats.
Kahlon is not a typical Israeli politician. He is said to be a man of strong principles whose primary objective in running in this election was to effect real change in dealing with social and economic issues such as housing, jobs and addressing income inequality in Israeli society.
Netanyahu’s election campaign, bolstered by sophisticated polling, found that when the issues before the public were domestic concerns, his numbers went down. When he focused on security and the threat of Iran and its proxies in the neighborhood, he fared far better.
One of the first things Netanyahu did after winning the election was to make sure Kahlon would join the coalition by offering him the cabinet post of finance minister. But the prime minister is concerned that if the Kulanu leader does not get his way in pushing his socioeconomic agenda, he could walk away and leave Netanyahu without a government.
Then there is the fact that the two most obvious coalition partners on the right, Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi (eight seats) and Avigdor Lieberman (six seats), will insist on increased settlement growth and revive the controversial nationality bill that seems to place the Jewish character of the state above its democratic nature.
While Netanyahu may well personally prefer this more narrow Option A coalition, he is all too aware of the political and diplomatic fallout with Europe and Washington, not to mention American Jewry, if he goes that route. Although he expected criticism for his decision to speak before Congress on the invitation of the Republican leadership, my sources say he was surprised and shaken by the depth and public nature of Obama’s visceral response.
‘The Perfect Alibi’
The prime minister is well aware that if he forms Option A coalition, the crisis in relations with the White House will only deepen. And now that the U.S. and other Western powers have signed a preliminary deal with Iran, it is all the more reason for him to be able to work with Obama in the hopes of toughening up the final agreement in the next three months — and, if all else fails, getting tacit permission from the White House to strike out at Iran if it violates the deal.
“Netanyahu may well decide to use the high demands of Bennett, Lieberman and their ilk as the perfect alibi while he pursues the option of a unity government, the only option that may help him avoid such a problematic scenario,” writes Ilan Jonas, a highly respected Israeli political analyst, in his Prime Source newsletter.
And an American Jewish businessman close to Netanyahu confided that the prime minister has been “planning for months” to bring Herzog into the coalition if the circumstances were right because “it would help him deal with Washington — and that was before things got so bad” [between the prime minister and Obama].
In a unity government, Herzog most likely would serve as foreign minister, presenting a friendly face to the world in his international role. It should be noted, though, that his views on the dangers of the Iran deal and the unwillingness of the Palestinians to make compromises are not unlike those of Netanyahu. The big question within Israeli politics is whether Labor would be willing to join a government with a prime minister the party greatly distrusts.
On the larger stage, for all the bad blood between the prime minister and the American president, it is in both of their best interests to patch up their troubled relationship, and the sooner the better. Already in recent days, as he begins his campaign to sell his Iran deal to the American people and keep a skeptical Congress from undoing the work of American and world powers’ negotiators, Obama has gone out of his way to assure Israel of America’s protection. And he has softened his language about Netanyahu, acknowledging that the Israeli leader is looking out for his country’s security. Obama knows well that Netanyahu can have a positive or negative impact on Congress regarding the Iran pact and he wants to keep the Israeli leader as satisfied as possible.
Likewise, Netanyahu realizes that the Iran deal is now a reality and his military option is gone, at least for now. Further, he realizes that it is more fruitful to focus on how best to beef up the deal’s contents, still being worked out, rather than rant about what a mistake it was in the first place. Already he has shown his accommodating side, unfreezing Palestinian Authority tax money. And though he gets little or no credit for it from the White House, he continues his quiet policy of suspending settlement growth outside of Jerusalem and areas that will be part of Israel in any final agreement with the Palestinians.
All of which suggests that Netanyahu would feel more confident going forward with a government that presents itself to the U.S. and the international community as strong, centrist and pragmatic rather than narrow, ideological and focused on maintaining and expanding settlements. The next Israeli government must be able to navigate the rough seas of a transformed Mideast with a now more powerful and emboldened Iran on the march. Israel’s leader needs all the help he can get in dealing with this new reality, and a national unity government may well be his best place to start.
Gary@jewishweek.org
Musings
Rabbi David Wolpe
Fully FreeWhy is the Torah compared by our sages to a marriage contract, to a ketubah?
One might suppose that they both limit freedom. Each constrains what a person may do, imposing obligations and restricting choices. But to see it this way is to misunderstand freedom. Freedom is the expansion of opportunity not the absence of obligation.
As an Eastern poet once put it, a violin string is free. But it cannot make music unless it is tied to a bow. A man alone in the desert is free. But the same person standing in the midst of a city, with appointments and obligations, is in fact freer, because there are more things he can do with his time and with his life.
Both the Torah and the ketubah are extensions of freedom. By enabling people to live lives of connection and of meaning, they do not cut off possibilities, but expand them. Sinai, the sages remind us, was like a chuppah. Under each we can become more fully who we were meant to be. Passover was the first step. Not until Sinai were the Jews fully free.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.
The Jewish Q&A
Jeffrey GurockThe genre of alternative or counter history — where historians pose tantalizing ‘what if’ questions — is an increasingly fertile one. The Pulitzer-winning author MacKinlay Kantor’s “If the South Had Won the Civil War” (MacMillan) and Jeff Greenfield’s “If Kennedy Lived” (Penguin Group) are two prime examples. Now, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, comes Yeshiva University professor Jeffrey Gurock’s “The Holocaust Averted” (Rutgers), which imagines an American Jewish community without the Shoah. The Jewish Week spoke with Gurock via email.
Q: How would the American Jewish community have been different had the Holocaust not happened?
A: As a Jew, the horrific destruction of our people during the Shoah — which must be remembered and commemorated — is seared in my consciousness. As a historian, however, I recognize that the years 1941-45, where America fought in WWII, were a turning point in the history of American Jews.
American Jews came out of the war not only angry at what had happened in Europe but also were imbued with a sense of empowerment and that they belonged to America. And they found — over time — that their fellow citizens increasingly accepted them. One of my main points is that without that wartime experience, where they contributed mightily to the effort to defeat Nazism, American Jews would have well remained skittish and marginalized in America. Significantly, the fearful attitude that I envisioned among American Jews would have affected their degree of support towards the rise of the State of Israel, which comes into existence as the American government — worried over the availability of Arab oil — is not overly concerned about the plight of displaced Jews. This scenario serves as a springboard for my readers’ contemplation of the roots and depths of Jewish activism towards Zionism.
What accounts for the popularity of this genre?
Readers and scholars are fascinated by turning points in their lives and in history. Increasingly, academicians use the device of what might have happened as a way of identifying central moments in time and for delving into the actual implications of real events. In my book, at the end of each chapter, I offer a synopsis of what really happened as a teaching mechanism where students can see the close calls that often determine the crucial events in history.
What sources did you draw on to make your conclusions?
I often used the actual statements and proposals of historical actors but changed the results of their arguments and positions. For example, Churchill offered some pro-Zionist ideas for Palestine in the late 1930s as London considered the future of its mandate, which tragically were not followed by the appeasing Chamberlain government. In my book, when the British stand up to Hitler, they follow Churchill’s plan. Also, I use the abundant secondary material on themes like FDR’s decision to run for a third term as a basis for imagining what the 1940 presidential election might have been like. Only in my book, he does not run. By the way, there is a body of Japanese historiography that suggests that Tokyo had almost decided not to bomb Pearl Harbor. In my book, on Dec. 7, 1941, American sailors are sunning themselves on the deck of the USS Arizona..
Were you worried about offending Holocaust survivors, and is there a danger that people will come away thinking that the Holocaust was actually a good thing for American Jews, in terms of their acceptance here?
I would never say that the Shoah was a good thing for American Jews. If anything, my book argues that in real history, greater acceptance brought with it profound issues of identity maintenance, which we grapple with now in the 21st century.
Is there an echo here of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” which presented a WWII counter-history?
I read his novel with great interest when it came out. But my work is informed by history not fiction — and, of course, Roth’s works starts in a very dark place, Nazi victory. I deal with the implications of Hitler’s downfall in 1944.
robert@jewishweek.org
A sidewalk on Magazine Street in the Garden District. Hilary Larson
TRAVEL
A Walker In The Garden District
Gary RosenblattBetween the Lines
Gary Rosenblatt
Israel Unity Gov’t Re-emerging As Pragmatic Option
Netanyahu, given the Iran deal and relationship with Obama, hoping to bring in Herzog.
Hang on, folks, the formation of the next Israeli government is getting a lot more intriguing and complicated than we thought, made even more so by the proposed Iran nuclear deal.Remember when, a week before the elections last month, it seemed likely the results would lead to a national unity government including right-of-center Likud, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the left-of-center Zionist Union, headed by Isaac Herzog of Labor and Tzipi Livni of Tnuah?
The Zionist Union was ahead in the polls, and it looked like the two major political blocs needed each other to create a coalition of more than half of the Knesset’s 120 seats.
And remember when, in a surprise upset, Likud pulled ahead and won the election handily — 30 seats for Likud to 24 seats for the Zionist Union? That put an end to the “unity coalition” talk, given that Netanyahu seemed poised to put together a more natural grouping of Likud along with several right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, a new center-right party led by former Likud member Moshe Kahlon. That would give Netanyahu 67 seats — not a huge majority but a comfortable one, it seemed. End of story?
Not quite.
There has been little public discussion or media coverage of the coalition-building process, in part because of the Passover holiday, in part because the behind-closed-doors discussions can take another month, and because of the assumption that this was a done deal.
But nothing is that simple in Israeli politics. According to well-placed sources I have spoken to, here and in Israel, there is now a very good chance that Netanyahu, who publicly insisted he would not seek to form a unity government with Herzog, appears to be trying to do just that.
There are several factors pushing the prime minister in that direction, and they have little to do with altruistic exhortations from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to help unify the society. Rather, they involve some shrewd calculations on the part of Netanyahu based on shoring up his political power, and a new and urgent Iran-based dynamic driving the prime minister to patch up his relationship with President Obama now.
Kahlon Is Key
For starters, if Netanyahu went with the narrow Option A — the right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, with 67 votes in all — he would be vulnerable to Kahlon, who controls 10 seats.
Kahlon is not a typical Israeli politician. He is said to be a man of strong principles whose primary objective in running in this election was to effect real change in dealing with social and economic issues such as housing, jobs and addressing income inequality in Israeli society.
Netanyahu’s election campaign, bolstered by sophisticated polling, found that when the issues before the public were domestic concerns, his numbers went down. When he focused on security and the threat of Iran and its proxies in the neighborhood, he fared far better.
One of the first things Netanyahu did after winning the election was to make sure Kahlon would join the coalition by offering him the cabinet post of finance minister. But the prime minister is concerned that if the Kulanu leader does not get his way in pushing his socioeconomic agenda, he could walk away and leave Netanyahu without a government.
Then there is the fact that the two most obvious coalition partners on the right, Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi (eight seats) and Avigdor Lieberman (six seats), will insist on increased settlement growth and revive the controversial nationality bill that seems to place the Jewish character of the state above its democratic nature.
While Netanyahu may well personally prefer this more narrow Option A coalition, he is all too aware of the political and diplomatic fallout with Europe and Washington, not to mention American Jewry, if he goes that route. Although he expected criticism for his decision to speak before Congress on the invitation of the Republican leadership, my sources say he was surprised and shaken by the depth and public nature of Obama’s visceral response.
‘The Perfect Alibi’
The prime minister is well aware that if he forms Option A coalition, the crisis in relations with the White House will only deepen. And now that the U.S. and other Western powers have signed a preliminary deal with Iran, it is all the more reason for him to be able to work with Obama in the hopes of toughening up the final agreement in the next three months — and, if all else fails, getting tacit permission from the White House to strike out at Iran if it violates the deal.
“Netanyahu may well decide to use the high demands of Bennett, Lieberman and their ilk as the perfect alibi while he pursues the option of a unity government, the only option that may help him avoid such a problematic scenario,” writes Ilan Jonas, a highly respected Israeli political analyst, in his Prime Source newsletter.
And an American Jewish businessman close to Netanyahu confided that the prime minister has been “planning for months” to bring Herzog into the coalition if the circumstances were right because “it would help him deal with Washington — and that was before things got so bad” [between the prime minister and Obama].
In a unity government, Herzog most likely would serve as foreign minister, presenting a friendly face to the world in his international role. It should be noted, though, that his views on the dangers of the Iran deal and the unwillingness of the Palestinians to make compromises are not unlike those of Netanyahu. The big question within Israeli politics is whether Labor would be willing to join a government with a prime minister the party greatly distrusts.
On the larger stage, for all the bad blood between the prime minister and the American president, it is in both of their best interests to patch up their troubled relationship, and the sooner the better. Already in recent days, as he begins his campaign to sell his Iran deal to the American people and keep a skeptical Congress from undoing the work of American and world powers’ negotiators, Obama has gone out of his way to assure Israel of America’s protection. And he has softened his language about Netanyahu, acknowledging that the Israeli leader is looking out for his country’s security. Obama knows well that Netanyahu can have a positive or negative impact on Congress regarding the Iran pact and he wants to keep the Israeli leader as satisfied as possible.
Likewise, Netanyahu realizes that the Iran deal is now a reality and his military option is gone, at least for now. Further, he realizes that it is more fruitful to focus on how best to beef up the deal’s contents, still being worked out, rather than rant about what a mistake it was in the first place. Already he has shown his accommodating side, unfreezing Palestinian Authority tax money. And though he gets little or no credit for it from the White House, he continues his quiet policy of suspending settlement growth outside of Jerusalem and areas that will be part of Israel in any final agreement with the Palestinians.
All of which suggests that Netanyahu would feel more confident going forward with a government that presents itself to the U.S. and the international community as strong, centrist and pragmatic rather than narrow, ideological and focused on maintaining and expanding settlements. The next Israeli government must be able to navigate the rough seas of a transformed Mideast with a now more powerful and emboldened Iran on the march. Israel’s leader needs all the help he can get in dealing with this new reality, and a national unity government may well be his best place to start.
Gary@jewishweek.org
Musings
Rabbi David Wolpe
Fully FreeWhy is the Torah compared by our sages to a marriage contract, to a ketubah?
One might suppose that they both limit freedom. Each constrains what a person may do, imposing obligations and restricting choices. But to see it this way is to misunderstand freedom. Freedom is the expansion of opportunity not the absence of obligation.
As an Eastern poet once put it, a violin string is free. But it cannot make music unless it is tied to a bow. A man alone in the desert is free. But the same person standing in the midst of a city, with appointments and obligations, is in fact freer, because there are more things he can do with his time and with his life.
Both the Torah and the ketubah are extensions of freedom. By enabling people to live lives of connection and of meaning, they do not cut off possibilities, but expand them. Sinai, the sages remind us, was like a chuppah. Under each we can become more fully who we were meant to be. Passover was the first step. Not until Sinai were the Jews fully free.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.
The Jewish Q&A
Jeffrey GurockThe genre of alternative or counter history — where historians pose tantalizing ‘what if’ questions — is an increasingly fertile one. The Pulitzer-winning author MacKinlay Kantor’s “If the South Had Won the Civil War” (MacMillan) and Jeff Greenfield’s “If Kennedy Lived” (Penguin Group) are two prime examples. Now, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, comes Yeshiva University professor Jeffrey Gurock’s “The Holocaust Averted” (Rutgers), which imagines an American Jewish community without the Shoah. The Jewish Week spoke with Gurock via email.
Q: How would the American Jewish community have been different had the Holocaust not happened?
A: As a Jew, the horrific destruction of our people during the Shoah — which must be remembered and commemorated — is seared in my consciousness. As a historian, however, I recognize that the years 1941-45, where America fought in WWII, were a turning point in the history of American Jews.
American Jews came out of the war not only angry at what had happened in Europe but also were imbued with a sense of empowerment and that they belonged to America. And they found — over time — that their fellow citizens increasingly accepted them. One of my main points is that without that wartime experience, where they contributed mightily to the effort to defeat Nazism, American Jews would have well remained skittish and marginalized in America. Significantly, the fearful attitude that I envisioned among American Jews would have affected their degree of support towards the rise of the State of Israel, which comes into existence as the American government — worried over the availability of Arab oil — is not overly concerned about the plight of displaced Jews. This scenario serves as a springboard for my readers’ contemplation of the roots and depths of Jewish activism towards Zionism.
What accounts for the popularity of this genre?
Readers and scholars are fascinated by turning points in their lives and in history. Increasingly, academicians use the device of what might have happened as a way of identifying central moments in time and for delving into the actual implications of real events. In my book, at the end of each chapter, I offer a synopsis of what really happened as a teaching mechanism where students can see the close calls that often determine the crucial events in history.
What sources did you draw on to make your conclusions?
I often used the actual statements and proposals of historical actors but changed the results of their arguments and positions. For example, Churchill offered some pro-Zionist ideas for Palestine in the late 1930s as London considered the future of its mandate, which tragically were not followed by the appeasing Chamberlain government. In my book, when the British stand up to Hitler, they follow Churchill’s plan. Also, I use the abundant secondary material on themes like FDR’s decision to run for a third term as a basis for imagining what the 1940 presidential election might have been like. Only in my book, he does not run. By the way, there is a body of Japanese historiography that suggests that Tokyo had almost decided not to bomb Pearl Harbor. In my book, on Dec. 7, 1941, American sailors are sunning themselves on the deck of the USS Arizona..
Were you worried about offending Holocaust survivors, and is there a danger that people will come away thinking that the Holocaust was actually a good thing for American Jews, in terms of their acceptance here?
I would never say that the Shoah was a good thing for American Jews. If anything, my book argues that in real history, greater acceptance brought with it profound issues of identity maintenance, which we grapple with now in the 21st century.
Is there an echo here of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” which presented a WWII counter-history?
I read his novel with great interest when it came out. But my work is informed by history not fiction — and, of course, Roth’s works starts in a very dark place, Nazi victory. I deal with the implications of Hitler’s downfall in 1944.
robert@jewishweek.org
A sidewalk on Magazine Street in the Garden District. Hilary Larson
TRAVEL
A Walker In The Garden District
Hilary Larson
Travel Writer
It was drizzling as I strolled down Magazine Street in New Orleans’ Lower Garden District. In this city without a major art museum, the architecture and storefront displays are art in and of themselves, and the window in front of me was no exception — a dazzlingly colorful, sparkly arrangement of chic umbrellas.And that may be New Orleans in a nutshell. The place is below sea level, plagued by mosquitoes and battered by storms — but it remains one of the liveliest, most seductive cities in America today. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina all but destroyed the place, New Orleans is a defiant example of how, if life gives you drizzle, you respond with the world’s prettiest umbrella store.
Stopping in the Big Easy wasn’t a hard sell for Oggi, my husband. Like most foreigners who had never visited, he was curious to see the Cajun capital of jazz and insisted we include New Orleans on our cross-country road trip. Hunting for a fresh slant, we consulted our good friend Daryn, a Southerner who visits regularly and can be relied upon for authoritative advice.
“Go to the Lower Garden District and walk around Magazine and Louisiana streets,” Daryn declared. “That’s this year’s up-and-coming area. You’ll certainly enjoy it more than the French Quarter. You might look for lunch in the Warehouse District, which was last year’s up-and-coming area.”
Well, I wouldn’t be caught dead in last year’s up-and-coming area. Unless it was to see the National World War II Museum, a powerhouse institution dedicated to the History Channel’s favorite war, and a logical stop for those seeking to inject a sobering dose of history into their good times. Occupying a long block where the Central Business District meets the Warehouse zone, this national tribute to American involvement in World War II is fun and immersive — full of tanks, multimedia exhibits and dramatic re-recreations.
From the museum, we simply worked our way south on Magazine, whose shifting architecture tells a story of urban evolution. The northern stretch is full of 19th-century brick warehouses repurposed as a galleries and studios for painters and sculptors — a revitalization that dates to the 1980s, but picked up steam after Katrina.
As the street wended southward, industrial lofts gave way to a residential zone of large pastel mansions with graceful, columned porches. The landscape softened from urban bricks into a verdant fantasy of palmettos, moss-draped oaks and vivid crepe myrtle, and I knew we had found the Lower Garden District. Even the street names were harmonious: Terpsichore, Melpomene, Polymnia, Thalia, echoes of the Greek muses of aesthetics.
With its sidewalks full of bicyclists and its colorful murals, the Lower Garden has an authentic neighborhood feel. Magazine Street is the commercial heart — thick with outdoor cafés, Vietnamese take-out joints that reflect the French colonial legacy, and one-of-a-kind boutiques showcasing local designers. Facades are painted in violet, turquoise and emerald; the wares within are similarly quirky, from decorative perfume bottles to hand-sewn parasols and fishnet burlesque gloves.
Jewish life is more evident in other parts of the city — most notably Uptown and the well-to-do suburb of Metairie — but you might, as I did, run into a few Jewish hipsters sipping coffee with smoked pecan sugar at Mojo, an upscale roaster on a picturesque block of Magazine Street.
And you are very likely to find bagel-and-lox nostalgists and New York transplants atStein’s Deli, an outpost of New York-style noshing on lower Magazine Street. Stein’s, owned by an East Coast ex-pat, imports its bagels and rugelach from Brooklyn and serves up matzah ball soup and kosher salamis. But in a fusion-style homage to New York, Stein’s also has a lineup of Italian classics — from prosciutto to panini — and a selection of imported cheeses and craft beers to satisfy the most discerning urban foodie.
As we doubled back along the port toward the French Quarter, the wail of trumpets and the thumping of drums filled the humid air. Roving outdoor ensembles provided a soundtrack, and crowds of dancers responded by gyrating in the streets, oblivious to the worsening rain. Here in New Orleans, jazz is everywhere: at the upcoming New Orleans Jazz Fest, a 10-day tribute to Louisiana culture in late April and early May, and even at local synagogues, where a perusal of the calendars turned up a jazz Shabbat at the historic Touro Synagogue and a jazz brunch at Congregation Beth Israel in Metairie.
Perhaps it’s natural that Jewish life has flowered here along Lake Ponchartrain, where the twin passions are good food and a lively beat. Sure, the living here isn’t always easy, but it’s hard to resist the pull of a culture so uniquely festive. Which is why Oggi and I lingered, savoring the Old-meets-New-World ambience on the pastel back streets of the French Quarter, as the sky finally darkened over the Mississippi.
editor@jewishweek.org
TOP STORIES:
Israel Unity Gov't Re-emerging As Pragmatic Option
Netanyahu, given the Iran deal and relationship with Obama, hoping to bring in Herzog.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Hang on, folks, the formation of the next Israeli government is getting a lot more intriguing and complicated than we thought, made even more so by the proposed Iran nuclear deal.
Remember when, a week before the elections last month, it seemed likely the results would lead to a national unity government including right-of-center Likud, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the left-of-center Zionist Union, headed by Isaac Herzog of Labor and Tzipi Livni of Tnuah?
The Zionist Union was ahead in the polls, and it looked like the two major political blocs needed each other to create a coalition of more than half of the Knesset’s 120 seats.
And remember when, in a surprise upset, Likud pulled ahead and won the election handily — 30 seats for Likud to 24 seats for the Zionist Union? That put an end to the “unity coalition” talk, given that Netanyahu seemed poised to put together a more natural grouping of Likud along with several right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, a new center-right party led by former Likud member Moshe Kahlon. That would give Netanyahu 67 seats — not a huge majority but a comfortable one, it seemed. End of story?
Not quite.
There has been little public discussion or media coverage of the coalition-building process, in part because of the Passover holiday, in part because the behind-closed-doors discussions can take another month, and because of the assumption that this was a done deal.
But nothing is that simple in Israeli politics. According to well-placed sources I have spoken to, here and in Israel, there is now a very good chance that Netanyahu, who publicly insisted he would not seek to form a unity government with Herzog, appears to be trying to do just that.
There are several factors pushing the prime minister in that direction, and they have little to do with altruistic exhortations from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to help unify the society. Rather, they involve some shrewd calculations on the part of Netanyahu based on shoring up his political power, and a new and urgent Iran-based dynamic driving the prime minister to patch up his relationship with President Obama now.
Kahlon Is Key
For starters, if Netanyahu went with the narrow Option A — the right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, with 67 votes in all — he would be vulnerable to Kahlon, who controls 10 seats.
Kahlon is not a typical Israeli politician. He is said to be a man of strong principles whose primary objective in running in this election was to effect real change in dealing with social and economic issues such as housing, jobs and addressing income inequality in Israeli society.
Netanyahu’s election campaign, bolstered by sophisticated polling, found that when the issues before the public were domestic concerns, his numbers went down. When he focused on security and the threat of Iran and its proxies in the neighborhood, he fared far better.
One of the first things Netanyahu did after winning the election was to make sure Kahlon would join the coalition by offering him the cabinet post of finance minister. But the prime minister is concerned that if the Kulanu leader does not get his way in pushing his socioeconomic agenda, he could walk away and leave Netanyahu without a government.
Then there is the fact that the two most obvious coalition partners on the right, Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi (eight seats) and Avigdor Lieberman (six seats), will insist on increased settlement growth and revive the controversial nationality bill that seems to place the Jewish character of the state above its democratic nature.
While Netanyahu may well personally prefer this more narrow Option A coalition, he is all too aware of the political and diplomatic fallout with Europe and Washington, not to mention American Jewry, if he goes that route. Although he expected criticism for his decision to speak before Congress on the invitation of the Republican leadership, my sources say he was surprised and shaken by the depth and public nature of Obama’s visceral response.
‘The Perfect Alibi’
The prime minister is well aware that if he forms Option A coalition, the crisis in relations with the White House will only deepen. And now that the U.S. and other Western powers have signed a preliminary deal with Iran, it is all the more reason for him to be able to work with Obama in the hopes of toughening up the final agreement in the next three months — and, if all else fails, getting tacit permission from the White House to strike out at Iran if it violates the deal.
“Netanyahu may well decide to use the high demands of Bennett, Lieberman and their ilk as the perfect alibi while he pursues the option of a unity government, the only option that may help him avoid such a problematic scenario,” writes Ilan Jonas, a highly respected Israeli political analyst, in his Prime Source newsletter.
And an American Jewish businessman close to Netanyahu confided that the prime minister has been “planning for months” to bring Herzog into the coalition if the circumstances were right because “it would help him deal with Washington — and that was before things got so bad” [between the prime minister and Obama].
In a unity government, Herzog most likely would serve as foreign minister, presenting a friendly face to the world in his international role. It should be noted, though, that his views on the dangers of the Iran deal and the unwillingness of the Palestinians to make compromises are not unlike those of Netanyahu. The big question within Israeli politics is whether Labor would be willing to join a government with a prime minister the party greatly distrusts.
On the larger stage, for all the bad blood between the prime minister and the American president, it is in both of their best interests to patch up their troubled relationship, and the sooner the better. Already in recent days, as he begins his campaign to sell his Iran deal to the American people and keep a skeptical Congress from undoing the work of American and world powers’ negotiators, Obama has gone out of his way to assure Israel of America’s protection. And he has softened his language about Netanyahu, acknowledging that the Israeli leader is looking out for his country’s security. Obama knows well that Netanyahu can have a positive or negative impact on Congress regarding the Iran pact and he wants to keep the Israeli leader as satisfied as possible.
Likewise, Netanyahu realizes that the Iran deal is now a reality and his military option is gone, at least for now. Further, he realizes that it is more fruitful to focus on how best to beef up the deal’s contents, still being worked out, rather than rant about what a mistake it was in the first place. Already he has shown his accommodating side, unfreezing Palestinian Authority tax money. And though he gets little or no credit for it from the White House, he continues his quiet policy of suspending settlement growth outside of Jerusalem and areas that will be part of Israel in any final agreement with the Palestinians.
All of which suggests that Netanyahu would feel more confident going forward with a government that presents itself to the U.S. and the international community as strong, centrist and pragmatic rather than narrow, ideological and focused on maintaining and expanding settlements. The next Israeli government must be able to navigate the rough seas of a transformed Mideast with a now more powerful and emboldened Iran on the march. Israel’s leader needs all the help he can get in dealing with this new reality, and a national unity government may well be his best place to start.
Gary@jewishweek.org
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Hang on, folks, the formation of the next Israeli government is getting a lot more intriguing and complicated than we thought, made even more so by the proposed Iran nuclear deal.
Remember when, a week before the elections last month, it seemed likely the results would lead to a national unity government including right-of-center Likud, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the left-of-center Zionist Union, headed by Isaac Herzog of Labor and Tzipi Livni of Tnuah?
The Zionist Union was ahead in the polls, and it looked like the two major political blocs needed each other to create a coalition of more than half of the Knesset’s 120 seats.
And remember when, in a surprise upset, Likud pulled ahead and won the election handily — 30 seats for Likud to 24 seats for the Zionist Union? That put an end to the “unity coalition” talk, given that Netanyahu seemed poised to put together a more natural grouping of Likud along with several right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, a new center-right party led by former Likud member Moshe Kahlon. That would give Netanyahu 67 seats — not a huge majority but a comfortable one, it seemed. End of story?
Not quite.
There has been little public discussion or media coverage of the coalition-building process, in part because of the Passover holiday, in part because the behind-closed-doors discussions can take another month, and because of the assumption that this was a done deal.
But nothing is that simple in Israeli politics. According to well-placed sources I have spoken to, here and in Israel, there is now a very good chance that Netanyahu, who publicly insisted he would not seek to form a unity government with Herzog, appears to be trying to do just that.
There are several factors pushing the prime minister in that direction, and they have little to do with altruistic exhortations from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to help unify the society. Rather, they involve some shrewd calculations on the part of Netanyahu based on shoring up his political power, and a new and urgent Iran-based dynamic driving the prime minister to patch up his relationship with President Obama now.
Kahlon Is Key
For starters, if Netanyahu went with the narrow Option A — the right-wing and charedi parties and Kulanu, with 67 votes in all — he would be vulnerable to Kahlon, who controls 10 seats.
Kahlon is not a typical Israeli politician. He is said to be a man of strong principles whose primary objective in running in this election was to effect real change in dealing with social and economic issues such as housing, jobs and addressing income inequality in Israeli society.
Netanyahu’s election campaign, bolstered by sophisticated polling, found that when the issues before the public were domestic concerns, his numbers went down. When he focused on security and the threat of Iran and its proxies in the neighborhood, he fared far better.
One of the first things Netanyahu did after winning the election was to make sure Kahlon would join the coalition by offering him the cabinet post of finance minister. But the prime minister is concerned that if the Kulanu leader does not get his way in pushing his socioeconomic agenda, he could walk away and leave Netanyahu without a government.
Then there is the fact that the two most obvious coalition partners on the right, Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi (eight seats) and Avigdor Lieberman (six seats), will insist on increased settlement growth and revive the controversial nationality bill that seems to place the Jewish character of the state above its democratic nature.
While Netanyahu may well personally prefer this more narrow Option A coalition, he is all too aware of the political and diplomatic fallout with Europe and Washington, not to mention American Jewry, if he goes that route. Although he expected criticism for his decision to speak before Congress on the invitation of the Republican leadership, my sources say he was surprised and shaken by the depth and public nature of Obama’s visceral response.
‘The Perfect Alibi’
The prime minister is well aware that if he forms Option A coalition, the crisis in relations with the White House will only deepen. And now that the U.S. and other Western powers have signed a preliminary deal with Iran, it is all the more reason for him to be able to work with Obama in the hopes of toughening up the final agreement in the next three months — and, if all else fails, getting tacit permission from the White House to strike out at Iran if it violates the deal.
“Netanyahu may well decide to use the high demands of Bennett, Lieberman and their ilk as the perfect alibi while he pursues the option of a unity government, the only option that may help him avoid such a problematic scenario,” writes Ilan Jonas, a highly respected Israeli political analyst, in his Prime Source newsletter.
And an American Jewish businessman close to Netanyahu confided that the prime minister has been “planning for months” to bring Herzog into the coalition if the circumstances were right because “it would help him deal with Washington — and that was before things got so bad” [between the prime minister and Obama].
In a unity government, Herzog most likely would serve as foreign minister, presenting a friendly face to the world in his international role. It should be noted, though, that his views on the dangers of the Iran deal and the unwillingness of the Palestinians to make compromises are not unlike those of Netanyahu. The big question within Israeli politics is whether Labor would be willing to join a government with a prime minister the party greatly distrusts.
On the larger stage, for all the bad blood between the prime minister and the American president, it is in both of their best interests to patch up their troubled relationship, and the sooner the better. Already in recent days, as he begins his campaign to sell his Iran deal to the American people and keep a skeptical Congress from undoing the work of American and world powers’ negotiators, Obama has gone out of his way to assure Israel of America’s protection. And he has softened his language about Netanyahu, acknowledging that the Israeli leader is looking out for his country’s security. Obama knows well that Netanyahu can have a positive or negative impact on Congress regarding the Iran pact and he wants to keep the Israeli leader as satisfied as possible.
Likewise, Netanyahu realizes that the Iran deal is now a reality and his military option is gone, at least for now. Further, he realizes that it is more fruitful to focus on how best to beef up the deal’s contents, still being worked out, rather than rant about what a mistake it was in the first place. Already he has shown his accommodating side, unfreezing Palestinian Authority tax money. And though he gets little or no credit for it from the White House, he continues his quiet policy of suspending settlement growth outside of Jerusalem and areas that will be part of Israel in any final agreement with the Palestinians.
All of which suggests that Netanyahu would feel more confident going forward with a government that presents itself to the U.S. and the international community as strong, centrist and pragmatic rather than narrow, ideological and focused on maintaining and expanding settlements. The next Israeli government must be able to navigate the rough seas of a transformed Mideast with a now more powerful and emboldened Iran on the march. Israel’s leader needs all the help he can get in dealing with this new reality, and a national unity government may well be his best place to start.
Gary@jewishweek.org
INTERNATIONAL
White House Presses For Jewish OK On Iran Deal
Meeting with Kerry amid skepticism on nuke pact.
White House Presses For Jewish OK On Iran Deal
Meeting with Kerry amid skepticism on nuke pact.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Secretary of State John Kerry was slated to meet with American Jewish leaders in Washington on Wednesday to convince them to support the administration’s preliminary Iran nuclear deal.
It was the latest attempt by the White House to build support in the Jewish community for the framework agreement reached last week between Iran, the U.S. and five other world powers. Just a day after its completion, Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to President Obama, held a conference call with members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to assure them that the proposed agreement is the best that could be achieved.
The White House outreach to Jewish leaders was launched after some major Jewish groups expressed skepticism if not outright opposition to the tentative deal, which negotiators are seeking to finalize by June 30.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said initially that he was concerned about the “many unanswered questions” the proposal raised.
He argued that “Iran simply cannot be trusted” given its “history of covert activity, noncompliance and never owning up to that history. ... The apparent rush to remove sanctions gives Iran an incentive to comply with the terms of the agreement, but once sanctions are removed, then what? … We do not expect a change in its behavior.”
Michael Salberg, the ADL’s director of international affairs, said Tuesday that even after hearing Obama’s comments that included assurances for Israel in weekend interviews and the comments of other White House officials, there remain a “lot of details that need to be worked out.”
“Israel is worried and the president in the interviews acknowledged the concerns — not just those of the prime minister and the intelligence minister but of Israeli [civilians] regarding Iran’s intentions and behavior,” Salberg said.
That concern was apparent at a play area in a Jerusalem mall Monday as Grazia Mizrachi watched her granddaughter. Although the mood in the mall was especially festive due to the Passover holiday, she said she felt weighted down by the Iran framework agreement.
“If I could tell the American president one thing,” she said, “it would be: ‘Don’t do it; it will endanger Israel.’ Unless you live in Israel, you can’t comprehend our fears.”
And then, glancing at the children at play, Mizrachi added: “I’m more fearful for my granddaughter and her generation than I am for myself. They’re growing up in a world where war is more likely than peace.”
But Davida Chazan, a research development writer visiting the mall, wants to give the deal a chance to succeed.
“I think Iran is more of a barking dog than people think, and I think the Israeli government has done everything in its power to make it sound more dangerous than it actually is,” she said. “I’m sure there is some danger there, but anything that says `let’s put down our weapons and give peace a chance’ is the right direction.”
Salberg of the ADL pointed out that in one of his weekend interviews, Obama tried to reassure Israelis by saying, in essence, that if Israel were in trouble, America would have its back.
“If anybody messes with Israel, America will be there,” Obama vowed.
Salberg said it is “important for Israel and the U.S. to figure out precisely what that means.”
On Monday, Israel’s minister of intelligence, Yuval Steinitz, produced a list of 10 suggested changes to the proposed nuclear deal that he believes would make the agreement “more reasonable.”
Among the items: close the Fordo site, halt all research and development into advanced centrifuges and ship out of the country the entire stockpile of enriched uranium.
Binyamin Huga, whose Jerusalem store sells flat screen TVs, said he would add one more stipulation to the agreement: that Iran recognize Israel as a “legitimate” country with the right to exist.
“If Iran wants concessions from the Western world it needs to make concessions,” he argued. “It’s time Iran stopped calling for our destruction.”
How Much Time?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had voiced similar sentiment, but Obama told an interviewer that such a stipulation is out of the question.
“The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won’t sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms,” Obama said. “And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment.”
In that same interview, Obama acknowledged that Iran’s breakout time – the time in which it could quickly develop a nuclear weapon -- would increase from the current two or three months to one year, and then to almost zero in years 13 to 15 of the agreement. But at that point, he said, the U.S. would have “much better ideas about what it is their program involves.”
Gary Samore, executive director for research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former senior official in the Obama administration, cautioned in a conference call with the Israel Policy Forum that the breakout period refers only to the time it would take to “produce enough fissile material for a bomb — not the bomb itself.”
He said it would take about another year to “fashion it into a nuclear weapon, including all of the parts of a nuclear bomb… Now all of this is very theoretical because I don’t know anybody who thinks that Iran would run the risk of trying to break out at its declared nuclear facilities because … the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] would detect it within days, certainly weeks. And that would leave plenty of time for the U.S. or Israel to destroy those facilities.”
Although the wording of the proposed agreement is unclear, Samore said he understood that it requires Iran to disclose information related to its “previous research and development of a nuclear weapon — the so-called possible military dimension. If we had a better understanding of how far Iran got before they suspended the program in 2003, we could make a better judgment about how long it would take for them to actually make a nuclear device after they have the raw material.”
The IAEA has requested that information in the past, but Iran has consistently refused to provide it.
David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, cited that refusal in questioning whether Iran could be trusted to abide by any agreement it signs and if inspections would be sufficient to monitor compliance.
“We know that once sanctions are lifted, and that is supposed to happen in response to specific steps taken by Iran, they will be difficult to put back in place” should Iran violate the agreement, he said in a statement.
Harris added that the AJC would continue to support congressional review of the agreement. The White House is opposed to any legislation that would permit Congress to cancel or modify any deal that is reached.
A Surprise From Schumer
But legislation proposed by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is slated to be voted on by the committee next Tuesday. It would require any agreement to receive congressional approval. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the leading contender to be the next Senate minority leader and a strong ally of Obama, surprised many this week when he said he supports the bill, which would put him at odds with Obama.
“I strongly believe Congress should have the right to disapprove any agreement and I support the Corker bill which would allow that to occur,” he said in a statement.
But Lara Friedman, who handles policy and government relations for Americans for Peace Now, said her organization opposes the bill because among other things it would require the U.S. to certify that Iran is not supporting or engaging in terrorism against the U.S. or Americans anyplace in the world. Such a provision, she said, is nothing but a pretext “to scuttle the deal.”
“There is an argument being made that if the proposal does not deal with Iran’s behavior, it should not happen,” Friedman said. “But we spent 20 years talking of Iran as an existential threat — and this deal focuses on that. We should now take a step back and wait to see what they can achieve” in the coming talks.
Alan Eisner, a vice president at J Street, a lobby group that bills itself as a pro-Israel group that lobbies for a two-state solution, agreed that the agreement should cover only Iran’s nuclear program.
“There is a difference between what is a desirable agreement and what is a realistic agreement,” he explained. “Israel has put forth conditions we all wish could be achieved in this agreement, but in reality won’t be. And the history of arms control agreements going back to the days of the Soviet Union is that they don’t cover the whole gamut of relations.”
Gideon Aranoff, CEO of Ameinu, a progressive Zionist membership organization in the U.S., echoed those views.
“We encourage dialogue between Israel and the U.S. to help develop the strongest agreement possible,” he said. “We will be working with our partners in the Jewish community and the administration to push back against threats to Israel from Iran, but believe nuclear negotiations are not the place to address every bad action of Iran.”
Israel correspondent Michele Chabin contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Staff Writer
Secretary of State John Kerry was slated to meet with American Jewish leaders in Washington on Wednesday to convince them to support the administration’s preliminary Iran nuclear deal.
It was the latest attempt by the White House to build support in the Jewish community for the framework agreement reached last week between Iran, the U.S. and five other world powers. Just a day after its completion, Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to President Obama, held a conference call with members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to assure them that the proposed agreement is the best that could be achieved.
The White House outreach to Jewish leaders was launched after some major Jewish groups expressed skepticism if not outright opposition to the tentative deal, which negotiators are seeking to finalize by June 30.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said initially that he was concerned about the “many unanswered questions” the proposal raised.
He argued that “Iran simply cannot be trusted” given its “history of covert activity, noncompliance and never owning up to that history. ... The apparent rush to remove sanctions gives Iran an incentive to comply with the terms of the agreement, but once sanctions are removed, then what? … We do not expect a change in its behavior.”
Michael Salberg, the ADL’s director of international affairs, said Tuesday that even after hearing Obama’s comments that included assurances for Israel in weekend interviews and the comments of other White House officials, there remain a “lot of details that need to be worked out.”
“Israel is worried and the president in the interviews acknowledged the concerns — not just those of the prime minister and the intelligence minister but of Israeli [civilians] regarding Iran’s intentions and behavior,” Salberg said.
That concern was apparent at a play area in a Jerusalem mall Monday as Grazia Mizrachi watched her granddaughter. Although the mood in the mall was especially festive due to the Passover holiday, she said she felt weighted down by the Iran framework agreement.
“If I could tell the American president one thing,” she said, “it would be: ‘Don’t do it; it will endanger Israel.’ Unless you live in Israel, you can’t comprehend our fears.”
And then, glancing at the children at play, Mizrachi added: “I’m more fearful for my granddaughter and her generation than I am for myself. They’re growing up in a world where war is more likely than peace.”
But Davida Chazan, a research development writer visiting the mall, wants to give the deal a chance to succeed.
“I think Iran is more of a barking dog than people think, and I think the Israeli government has done everything in its power to make it sound more dangerous than it actually is,” she said. “I’m sure there is some danger there, but anything that says `let’s put down our weapons and give peace a chance’ is the right direction.”
Salberg of the ADL pointed out that in one of his weekend interviews, Obama tried to reassure Israelis by saying, in essence, that if Israel were in trouble, America would have its back.
“If anybody messes with Israel, America will be there,” Obama vowed.
Salberg said it is “important for Israel and the U.S. to figure out precisely what that means.”
On Monday, Israel’s minister of intelligence, Yuval Steinitz, produced a list of 10 suggested changes to the proposed nuclear deal that he believes would make the agreement “more reasonable.”
Among the items: close the Fordo site, halt all research and development into advanced centrifuges and ship out of the country the entire stockpile of enriched uranium.
Binyamin Huga, whose Jerusalem store sells flat screen TVs, said he would add one more stipulation to the agreement: that Iran recognize Israel as a “legitimate” country with the right to exist.
“If Iran wants concessions from the Western world it needs to make concessions,” he argued. “It’s time Iran stopped calling for our destruction.”
How Much Time?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had voiced similar sentiment, but Obama told an interviewer that such a stipulation is out of the question.
“The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won’t sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms,” Obama said. “And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment.”
In that same interview, Obama acknowledged that Iran’s breakout time – the time in which it could quickly develop a nuclear weapon -- would increase from the current two or three months to one year, and then to almost zero in years 13 to 15 of the agreement. But at that point, he said, the U.S. would have “much better ideas about what it is their program involves.”
Gary Samore, executive director for research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former senior official in the Obama administration, cautioned in a conference call with the Israel Policy Forum that the breakout period refers only to the time it would take to “produce enough fissile material for a bomb — not the bomb itself.”
He said it would take about another year to “fashion it into a nuclear weapon, including all of the parts of a nuclear bomb… Now all of this is very theoretical because I don’t know anybody who thinks that Iran would run the risk of trying to break out at its declared nuclear facilities because … the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] would detect it within days, certainly weeks. And that would leave plenty of time for the U.S. or Israel to destroy those facilities.”
Although the wording of the proposed agreement is unclear, Samore said he understood that it requires Iran to disclose information related to its “previous research and development of a nuclear weapon — the so-called possible military dimension. If we had a better understanding of how far Iran got before they suspended the program in 2003, we could make a better judgment about how long it would take for them to actually make a nuclear device after they have the raw material.”
The IAEA has requested that information in the past, but Iran has consistently refused to provide it.
David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, cited that refusal in questioning whether Iran could be trusted to abide by any agreement it signs and if inspections would be sufficient to monitor compliance.
“We know that once sanctions are lifted, and that is supposed to happen in response to specific steps taken by Iran, they will be difficult to put back in place” should Iran violate the agreement, he said in a statement.
Harris added that the AJC would continue to support congressional review of the agreement. The White House is opposed to any legislation that would permit Congress to cancel or modify any deal that is reached.
A Surprise From Schumer
But legislation proposed by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is slated to be voted on by the committee next Tuesday. It would require any agreement to receive congressional approval. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the leading contender to be the next Senate minority leader and a strong ally of Obama, surprised many this week when he said he supports the bill, which would put him at odds with Obama.
“I strongly believe Congress should have the right to disapprove any agreement and I support the Corker bill which would allow that to occur,” he said in a statement.
But Lara Friedman, who handles policy and government relations for Americans for Peace Now, said her organization opposes the bill because among other things it would require the U.S. to certify that Iran is not supporting or engaging in terrorism against the U.S. or Americans anyplace in the world. Such a provision, she said, is nothing but a pretext “to scuttle the deal.”
“There is an argument being made that if the proposal does not deal with Iran’s behavior, it should not happen,” Friedman said. “But we spent 20 years talking of Iran as an existential threat — and this deal focuses on that. We should now take a step back and wait to see what they can achieve” in the coming talks.
Alan Eisner, a vice president at J Street, a lobby group that bills itself as a pro-Israel group that lobbies for a two-state solution, agreed that the agreement should cover only Iran’s nuclear program.
“There is a difference between what is a desirable agreement and what is a realistic agreement,” he explained. “Israel has put forth conditions we all wish could be achieved in this agreement, but in reality won’t be. And the history of arms control agreements going back to the days of the Soviet Union is that they don’t cover the whole gamut of relations.”
Gideon Aranoff, CEO of Ameinu, a progressive Zionist membership organization in the U.S., echoed those views.
“We encourage dialogue between Israel and the U.S. to help develop the strongest agreement possible,” he said. “We will be working with our partners in the Jewish community and the administration to push back against threats to Israel from Iran, but believe nuclear negotiations are not the place to address every bad action of Iran.”
Israel correspondent Michele Chabin contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Synagogues In NYC Too Big To Lose Dues
Is New York too big for the increasingly popular voluntary dues model? Local congregations weigh in.
Is New York too big for the increasingly popular voluntary dues model? Local congregations weigh in.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Beth Abraham Rabbi David Holtz and synagogue president Herb Baer look at plans for new Tarrytown building. Michael Datikash/JW
At the beginning of January, board members of Congregation Beth Abraham, a Reform synagogue in Tarrytown, met in the president’s living room to discuss a hot topic these days: synagogue dues.
Previously, the 400-family Westchester synagogue had operated under the conventional system of mandatory annual dues: congregants were required to pay a certain amount each year in order to retain their membership. Different membership categories — families, singles, seniors — dictated different rates, and those who couldn’t pay the full amount petitioned for dues relief.
But the board started to sense that the method was outdated.
“Inflexible membership doesn’t feel good to millennials,” said Allison Fine, president of Beth Abraham, referring to the demographic prize of luring 20- and 30-somethings into the synagogue. “The older generation might consider synagogue membership a part of life, but the younger generation doesn’t operate under those assumptions. Younger congregants want the freedom to come and go as they please,” she said.
So, beginning in June, Beth Abraham will for the first time implement a flexible dues model; it will suggest an annual membership fee of $3,300, but the synagogue won’t enforce payment. Congregants will be encouraged to pay more “according to their means,” but will not be turned away for declining, said Fine. The “dues relief process” protocol for congregants who can’t afford full membership will be eliminated completely.
“The new model taps into the fundamental desire to feel good about synagogue life,” she said. “This is less of a spreadsheet issue and more of an emotional issue.”
Beth Abraham’s decision to switch dues models follows on the heels of UJA-Federation of New York’s first comprehensive study of voluntary pledging, released last month. The study, which collected data from 26 small- to medium-sized Reform, Conservative and Independent synagogues across the U.S. — but none in New York City, Long Island or Westchester — questioned the importance of a formal dues model (see box).
Flexible dues represents “a cultural shift,” said Rabbi Dan Judson, one of the co-authors of the study, “Are Voluntary Dues Right For Your Synagogue?”
“People will be more engaged in their synagogue if they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility,” he said. Those who don’t or can’t pay won’t feel like “lesser members,” the rabbi said.
The move by some synagogues to an alternative dues model is the latest in a series of steps taken by mostly non-Orthodox congregations to try to stay relevant in a changing demographic landscape. Some have merged with nearby congregations, some have added Zumba, yoga or other exercise-related programming, and still others, in the teeth of the Great Recession, have brought in social workers and employment counselors to meet congregants’ changing needs.
While Beth Abraham has high hopes for the new model, other New York synagogues are wary of making dues voluntary.
The Community Synagogue, a large Reform congregation in Port Washington on Long Island, adopted a voluntary dues system in 2006 called a “fair share model,” in which congregants are asked to pay a base fee of $2,950 after which additional giving depends upon income. However, the synagogue is considering a return to the mandatory dues model because revenue has plateaued since 2008.
“Voluntary dues assume that people’s goodwill sustains the community — it won’t,” said Rabbi Irwin Zeplowitz, senior rabbi of the Community Synagogue. Though the congregation is expanding rapidly, surpassing 710 families last year and housing a Hebrew school that is “bursting at the seams,” the experiment is paying fewer dividends than anticipated.
“People are preoccupied with a ‘what will I get out of it,’ attitude,” said Rabbi Zeplowitz. Orthodox Jews consider membership dues to be part of the mitzvah, the religious commandment, to support one’s congregation, he said. “In the non-Orthodox, non-mitzvah oriented world, it’s very difficult to create a sense of mutual responsibility.”
The synagogue’s large size might play a role in the voluntary model’s failure, suggested Judson, who said the “sweet spot” for congregations using this model is 400 member households.
“Communication is simply easier in a smaller congregation,” said Judson, adding that diffused sense of financial responsibility is much more likely to develop in a large synagogue.
The feeling that “we can always go somewhere else” exacerbated the problem at Community, said Rabbi Zeplowitz. “Sense of loyalty in New York is a tricky thing,” he said. “Why should members commit themselves to one synagogue when there’s another a few blocks over?”
Beth Abraham’s Fine expressed concern about the competition factor, even as her synagogue gears up for the change. However, she’s hoping the new voluntary model will give Beth Abraham the necessary edge.
“It’s not like we’re in Vermont, where’s there’s no competition,” she said. “The new model will allow us to reimagine our relationship with congregants.”
Still, size and competition aren’t the only factors that influence the collection of dues.
Congregation Ohel Yitzhack, a small Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, has relied on a voluntary dues system since 1973. According to the congregation’s rabbi, the expectation of commitment among Orthodox congregants makes all the difference.
“In a more rigidly Orthodox group, there’s an immutable sense of responsibility,” said Rabbi Leib Kelman, leader of the congregation. “There needs to be a minyan all year round, so people do what they have to — no compromises,” he said.
During the High Holidays, the synagogue, located in a rapidly gentrifying area of Brooklyn, opens its doors to newcomers and non-Orthodox Jews looking for services.
“Jews who only visit the synagogue once or twice a year have no interest in paying for the privilege,” said Rabbi Kelman. “The voluntary model works for us because our congregants can’t go a week without shul.”
In the UJA-Federation study, no Orthodox synagogues were included. Judson agreed that Orthodox congregants expect to pay dues in a way other denominations do not.
“In many interfaith and Reform families, people aren’t used to fees,” he said, explaining that they are more accustomed to the “voluntary commitment system” found in Christian churches. For Orthodox congregations, dues remain a “living” idea, and since the voluntary system seems to work, there’s no impetus for change, he said.
Temple Beth-El, a small Reform congregation in Jersey City that was part of the UJA-Federation study, felt an acute need for change when people started to leave the community a few years back. The synagogue has since adopted a system in which members are asked to make an annual pledge of $1,900, but people are not turned away if they can’t commit. Since the model’s implementation in 2011, the 165-member congregation has seen a growth of five to 10 members a year.
“There are no lines you have to cross to be part of our community,” said Rabbi Debby Hachen, the synagogue’s leader. “We needed people to feel welcome because our numbers were hurting.”
Though Beth-El’s community remains “porous” in nature, the attitude that the synagogue is there for all of it, and not just for card-carrying members, has revitalized the congregation.
“We’ll accept you as you are — that’s the message we want to send,” said Rabbi Hachen. “If the temple is filled, dues will follow.”
Paying Their Dues,Only Less So
Below are the key findings in UJA-Federation’s study of alternative synagogue dues. Eighty-eight percent of the synagogues using the voluntary commitment model are in or around large cities, and 81 percent have fewer than 500 members.
Among synagogues that changed to the new model:
♦The average annual membership increase was 4 percent. Two synagogues saw the dramatic increases of 25 percent and 15 percent;
♦The level of membership engagement and involvement increased: on a 1-5 scale, level of engagement increased from an average of 3.5 to an average of 4.1;
♦The average total revenue increased by 4.4 percent;
♦Perceived value of membership on a 1-5 scale went from an average of 3.3 to 4.1;
♦None of the synagogues reported “free rider” problems.
hannah@jewishweek.org
INTERNATIONAL
New Battle Over ‘Mein Kampf’
After 70 years, the ‘Nazi Bible’ will be published inside Germany again. Will increased access fuel anti-Semitism?
Staff Writer
Beth Abraham Rabbi David Holtz and synagogue president Herb Baer look at plans for new Tarrytown building. Michael Datikash/JW
At the beginning of January, board members of Congregation Beth Abraham, a Reform synagogue in Tarrytown, met in the president’s living room to discuss a hot topic these days: synagogue dues.
Previously, the 400-family Westchester synagogue had operated under the conventional system of mandatory annual dues: congregants were required to pay a certain amount each year in order to retain their membership. Different membership categories — families, singles, seniors — dictated different rates, and those who couldn’t pay the full amount petitioned for dues relief.
But the board started to sense that the method was outdated.
“Inflexible membership doesn’t feel good to millennials,” said Allison Fine, president of Beth Abraham, referring to the demographic prize of luring 20- and 30-somethings into the synagogue. “The older generation might consider synagogue membership a part of life, but the younger generation doesn’t operate under those assumptions. Younger congregants want the freedom to come and go as they please,” she said.
So, beginning in June, Beth Abraham will for the first time implement a flexible dues model; it will suggest an annual membership fee of $3,300, but the synagogue won’t enforce payment. Congregants will be encouraged to pay more “according to their means,” but will not be turned away for declining, said Fine. The “dues relief process” protocol for congregants who can’t afford full membership will be eliminated completely.
“The new model taps into the fundamental desire to feel good about synagogue life,” she said. “This is less of a spreadsheet issue and more of an emotional issue.”
Beth Abraham’s decision to switch dues models follows on the heels of UJA-Federation of New York’s first comprehensive study of voluntary pledging, released last month. The study, which collected data from 26 small- to medium-sized Reform, Conservative and Independent synagogues across the U.S. — but none in New York City, Long Island or Westchester — questioned the importance of a formal dues model (see box).
Flexible dues represents “a cultural shift,” said Rabbi Dan Judson, one of the co-authors of the study, “Are Voluntary Dues Right For Your Synagogue?”
“People will be more engaged in their synagogue if they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility,” he said. Those who don’t or can’t pay won’t feel like “lesser members,” the rabbi said.
The move by some synagogues to an alternative dues model is the latest in a series of steps taken by mostly non-Orthodox congregations to try to stay relevant in a changing demographic landscape. Some have merged with nearby congregations, some have added Zumba, yoga or other exercise-related programming, and still others, in the teeth of the Great Recession, have brought in social workers and employment counselors to meet congregants’ changing needs.
While Beth Abraham has high hopes for the new model, other New York synagogues are wary of making dues voluntary.
The Community Synagogue, a large Reform congregation in Port Washington on Long Island, adopted a voluntary dues system in 2006 called a “fair share model,” in which congregants are asked to pay a base fee of $2,950 after which additional giving depends upon income. However, the synagogue is considering a return to the mandatory dues model because revenue has plateaued since 2008.
“Voluntary dues assume that people’s goodwill sustains the community — it won’t,” said Rabbi Irwin Zeplowitz, senior rabbi of the Community Synagogue. Though the congregation is expanding rapidly, surpassing 710 families last year and housing a Hebrew school that is “bursting at the seams,” the experiment is paying fewer dividends than anticipated.
“People are preoccupied with a ‘what will I get out of it,’ attitude,” said Rabbi Zeplowitz. Orthodox Jews consider membership dues to be part of the mitzvah, the religious commandment, to support one’s congregation, he said. “In the non-Orthodox, non-mitzvah oriented world, it’s very difficult to create a sense of mutual responsibility.”
The synagogue’s large size might play a role in the voluntary model’s failure, suggested Judson, who said the “sweet spot” for congregations using this model is 400 member households.
“Communication is simply easier in a smaller congregation,” said Judson, adding that diffused sense of financial responsibility is much more likely to develop in a large synagogue.
The feeling that “we can always go somewhere else” exacerbated the problem at Community, said Rabbi Zeplowitz. “Sense of loyalty in New York is a tricky thing,” he said. “Why should members commit themselves to one synagogue when there’s another a few blocks over?”
Beth Abraham’s Fine expressed concern about the competition factor, even as her synagogue gears up for the change. However, she’s hoping the new voluntary model will give Beth Abraham the necessary edge.
“It’s not like we’re in Vermont, where’s there’s no competition,” she said. “The new model will allow us to reimagine our relationship with congregants.”
Still, size and competition aren’t the only factors that influence the collection of dues.
Congregation Ohel Yitzhack, a small Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, has relied on a voluntary dues system since 1973. According to the congregation’s rabbi, the expectation of commitment among Orthodox congregants makes all the difference.
“In a more rigidly Orthodox group, there’s an immutable sense of responsibility,” said Rabbi Leib Kelman, leader of the congregation. “There needs to be a minyan all year round, so people do what they have to — no compromises,” he said.
During the High Holidays, the synagogue, located in a rapidly gentrifying area of Brooklyn, opens its doors to newcomers and non-Orthodox Jews looking for services.
“Jews who only visit the synagogue once or twice a year have no interest in paying for the privilege,” said Rabbi Kelman. “The voluntary model works for us because our congregants can’t go a week without shul.”
In the UJA-Federation study, no Orthodox synagogues were included. Judson agreed that Orthodox congregants expect to pay dues in a way other denominations do not.
“In many interfaith and Reform families, people aren’t used to fees,” he said, explaining that they are more accustomed to the “voluntary commitment system” found in Christian churches. For Orthodox congregations, dues remain a “living” idea, and since the voluntary system seems to work, there’s no impetus for change, he said.
Temple Beth-El, a small Reform congregation in Jersey City that was part of the UJA-Federation study, felt an acute need for change when people started to leave the community a few years back. The synagogue has since adopted a system in which members are asked to make an annual pledge of $1,900, but people are not turned away if they can’t commit. Since the model’s implementation in 2011, the 165-member congregation has seen a growth of five to 10 members a year.
“There are no lines you have to cross to be part of our community,” said Rabbi Debby Hachen, the synagogue’s leader. “We needed people to feel welcome because our numbers were hurting.”
Though Beth-El’s community remains “porous” in nature, the attitude that the synagogue is there for all of it, and not just for card-carrying members, has revitalized the congregation.
“We’ll accept you as you are — that’s the message we want to send,” said Rabbi Hachen. “If the temple is filled, dues will follow.”
Paying Their Dues,Only Less So
Below are the key findings in UJA-Federation’s study of alternative synagogue dues. Eighty-eight percent of the synagogues using the voluntary commitment model are in or around large cities, and 81 percent have fewer than 500 members.
Among synagogues that changed to the new model:
♦The average annual membership increase was 4 percent. Two synagogues saw the dramatic increases of 25 percent and 15 percent;
♦The level of membership engagement and involvement increased: on a 1-5 scale, level of engagement increased from an average of 3.5 to an average of 4.1;
♦The average total revenue increased by 4.4 percent;
♦Perceived value of membership on a 1-5 scale went from an average of 3.3 to 4.1;
♦None of the synagogues reported “free rider” problems.
hannah@jewishweek.org
INTERNATIONAL
New Battle Over ‘Mein Kampf’
After 70 years, the ‘Nazi Bible’ will be published inside Germany again. Will increased access fuel anti-Semitism?
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
The dust jacket of the 1926-27 edition of “Mein Kampf.” Wikimedia Commons
Working at a portable typewriter in a small jail cell in 1924 and 1925, Adolf Hitler completed a 700-page manuscript. His National Socialist manifesto outlined his paranoiac description of a global Jewish conspiracy, and plans for annihilating Germany’s Jews once he came to power.
“Mein Kampf,” or “My Struggle,” became a bestseller in Germany after Hitler became chancellor less than a decade later; every newlywed couple in the country received a copy.
After Germany’s defeat in World War II and Hitler’s death, U.S. troops who occupied Munich seized the Nazis’ chief publishing house, and the book’s copyright passed to Bavaria’s regional government. Since then, Bavaria has zealously prevented the book’s publication in Germany.
Unlike the swastika and the Nazi salute, the sale and reading of “Mein Kampf” are not banned in Germany, but the book, subject to a 70-year copyright ban upon the death of an author, has remained largely a shadowy presence there, largely unread outside of neo-Nazi circles and university courses where it is studied in selected excerpts.
At the end of this year, the copyright ban on publication of “Mein Kampf” expires. For the first time in 70 years it will be openly available.
An academic institute in Munich is preparing an annotated edition of the book, packed with footnotes and explanations that will demystify Hitler’s words, putting Hitler’s claims into a historical context and pointing out contradictions and factual errors. The new edition, which is to come out early next year, will be expensive, out of financial range for most readers; it will be geared for use by researchers and university professors. In addition, Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education has indicated that it may create special materials for teachers in case neo-Nazis start distributing the book.
A French publishing house also plans to issue its own heavily footnoted edition of “Mein Kampf,” but some observers say the pending release of the book known as “the Nazi Bible” has the most resonance in Germany, which started World War II and coordinated the Final Solution that wiped out two-thirds of European Jewry.
Copies of “Mein Kampf” could be displayed in the windows of German bookstores within a year. “That’s the image one has to deal with,” said David Marwell, executive director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Manhattan. “It could be shocking for German Jews to see. The issue is for people living in Germany.”
However, other academicians and Jewish leaders say the uncontested publication of “Mein Kampf” in Western countries for the first time in seven decades may be problematic for Jews elsewhere, outside of Germany; while “Mein Kampf” has remained available over the decades in libraries and antiquarian bookstores, it has also become a bestseller in many countries throughout the Muslim world, especially popular in India, Turkey and Russia.
Experts point to the growing incidence of global anti-Semitism, especially following Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas terrorists in Gaza last year, and greater acceptance of neo-Nazi parties in some European countries.
The impending open availability of a book that inspired a generation of Nazi enthusiasts raises many questions, which have special relevance on the eve of Yom HaShoah, the annual commemoration of the Holocaust that is marked on April 15: Will “Mein Kampf” in German bookstores be a danger? Will it fuel anti-Semitism? Will it disturb the country’s aging Holocaust survivors?
“I think there’s a valid concern that the copyright expiration of ‘Mein Kampf’ could contribute to making it more widely available to the public, especially though online and digital publishing,” said Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman, pointing to “a sudden surge in digital downloads of e-book editions of Hitler’s manifesto” a year ago.
“Everyone, even a neo-Nazi group, will be able to republish the book,” said Foxman, a Holocaust survivor. “There is always the concern … that some people who are already infected with anti-Semitism will misuse the book in an attempt to glorify Hitler or reinforce their own warped views about Jews.”
Foxman said he endorses the publication of the forthcoming annotated edition. To complement that effort, the ADL has posted background information on “Mein Kampf” on its website and has contacted major booksellers in the U.S. about including information from ADL on their websites if the book is offered for sale.
However, law professor Thane Rosenbaum, a child of Holocaust survivors who often writes about Holocaust-related themes, said the publication of an annotated edition on ‘Mein Kampf” carries its own risk — it could offer anti-Semites the “imprimatur” of academic respectability. “On the basis of [scholarly] authority, they will be able to invoke the language of Hitler as well as his political theories.
“Any free society that is interested in human rights should be concerned,” Rosenbaum said.
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote in a letter to The New York Times that “We must do everything we can to prevent [its] publication. We owe it to Hitler’s victims.”
On the other hand, a wide range of German-Jewish leaders, at both the national and regional level, said they support the publication of an annotated edition of “Mein Kampf.”
Banning the book from being sold or published “gives it a status as something almost mythical,” said Michael Brenner, a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Munich. The child of Holocaust survivors, he is an active member of the German-Jewish community in addition to teaching Jewish studies at American University in Washington. “I don’t see anything bad that a very serious institute will publish it. When you study the historical period in college, you should have this available.”
In 2012, Bavaria allocated 500,000 euros ($544,000) to the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History, founded in 1949 to study the phenomenon of National Socialism, for a team of scholars to prepare the annotated edition. The Bavarian government was initially planning to publish the edition but decided against it after coming under attack by some scholars and politicians. But it has not withdrawn its money or support for the project. The Institute will publish the book.
Bavarian officials, after conversations with survivors, decided that it would be a mistake, for “diplomatic and human” reasons, to publish “Mein Kampf,” a government spokesmen told The Jewish Week in an email.
Edith Raim, a member of the Institute’s research team, said via email that “everybody with some common sense will understand that researchers/historians need to read Nazi texts for their research — it is … sensible to deal with [‘Mein Kampf’] in a scholarly fashion, showing the prejudices, the mistakes, the errors and the outright stupidity of some of Hitler’s arguments.
“I doubt whether it will once again become a bestseller,” Raim said. “Times have considerably changed since [the 1920-30s]. I doubt whether anti-Semites can make any use of the book for current purposes.”
steve@jewishweek.org
Staff Writer
The dust jacket of the 1926-27 edition of “Mein Kampf.” Wikimedia Commons
Working at a portable typewriter in a small jail cell in 1924 and 1925, Adolf Hitler completed a 700-page manuscript. His National Socialist manifesto outlined his paranoiac description of a global Jewish conspiracy, and plans for annihilating Germany’s Jews once he came to power.
“Mein Kampf,” or “My Struggle,” became a bestseller in Germany after Hitler became chancellor less than a decade later; every newlywed couple in the country received a copy.
After Germany’s defeat in World War II and Hitler’s death, U.S. troops who occupied Munich seized the Nazis’ chief publishing house, and the book’s copyright passed to Bavaria’s regional government. Since then, Bavaria has zealously prevented the book’s publication in Germany.
Unlike the swastika and the Nazi salute, the sale and reading of “Mein Kampf” are not banned in Germany, but the book, subject to a 70-year copyright ban upon the death of an author, has remained largely a shadowy presence there, largely unread outside of neo-Nazi circles and university courses where it is studied in selected excerpts.
At the end of this year, the copyright ban on publication of “Mein Kampf” expires. For the first time in 70 years it will be openly available.
An academic institute in Munich is preparing an annotated edition of the book, packed with footnotes and explanations that will demystify Hitler’s words, putting Hitler’s claims into a historical context and pointing out contradictions and factual errors. The new edition, which is to come out early next year, will be expensive, out of financial range for most readers; it will be geared for use by researchers and university professors. In addition, Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education has indicated that it may create special materials for teachers in case neo-Nazis start distributing the book.
A French publishing house also plans to issue its own heavily footnoted edition of “Mein Kampf,” but some observers say the pending release of the book known as “the Nazi Bible” has the most resonance in Germany, which started World War II and coordinated the Final Solution that wiped out two-thirds of European Jewry.
Copies of “Mein Kampf” could be displayed in the windows of German bookstores within a year. “That’s the image one has to deal with,” said David Marwell, executive director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Manhattan. “It could be shocking for German Jews to see. The issue is for people living in Germany.”
However, other academicians and Jewish leaders say the uncontested publication of “Mein Kampf” in Western countries for the first time in seven decades may be problematic for Jews elsewhere, outside of Germany; while “Mein Kampf” has remained available over the decades in libraries and antiquarian bookstores, it has also become a bestseller in many countries throughout the Muslim world, especially popular in India, Turkey and Russia.
Experts point to the growing incidence of global anti-Semitism, especially following Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas terrorists in Gaza last year, and greater acceptance of neo-Nazi parties in some European countries.
The impending open availability of a book that inspired a generation of Nazi enthusiasts raises many questions, which have special relevance on the eve of Yom HaShoah, the annual commemoration of the Holocaust that is marked on April 15: Will “Mein Kampf” in German bookstores be a danger? Will it fuel anti-Semitism? Will it disturb the country’s aging Holocaust survivors?
“I think there’s a valid concern that the copyright expiration of ‘Mein Kampf’ could contribute to making it more widely available to the public, especially though online and digital publishing,” said Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman, pointing to “a sudden surge in digital downloads of e-book editions of Hitler’s manifesto” a year ago.
“Everyone, even a neo-Nazi group, will be able to republish the book,” said Foxman, a Holocaust survivor. “There is always the concern … that some people who are already infected with anti-Semitism will misuse the book in an attempt to glorify Hitler or reinforce their own warped views about Jews.”
Foxman said he endorses the publication of the forthcoming annotated edition. To complement that effort, the ADL has posted background information on “Mein Kampf” on its website and has contacted major booksellers in the U.S. about including information from ADL on their websites if the book is offered for sale.
However, law professor Thane Rosenbaum, a child of Holocaust survivors who often writes about Holocaust-related themes, said the publication of an annotated edition on ‘Mein Kampf” carries its own risk — it could offer anti-Semites the “imprimatur” of academic respectability. “On the basis of [scholarly] authority, they will be able to invoke the language of Hitler as well as his political theories.
“Any free society that is interested in human rights should be concerned,” Rosenbaum said.
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote in a letter to The New York Times that “We must do everything we can to prevent [its] publication. We owe it to Hitler’s victims.”
On the other hand, a wide range of German-Jewish leaders, at both the national and regional level, said they support the publication of an annotated edition of “Mein Kampf.”
Banning the book from being sold or published “gives it a status as something almost mythical,” said Michael Brenner, a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Munich. The child of Holocaust survivors, he is an active member of the German-Jewish community in addition to teaching Jewish studies at American University in Washington. “I don’t see anything bad that a very serious institute will publish it. When you study the historical period in college, you should have this available.”
In 2012, Bavaria allocated 500,000 euros ($544,000) to the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History, founded in 1949 to study the phenomenon of National Socialism, for a team of scholars to prepare the annotated edition. The Bavarian government was initially planning to publish the edition but decided against it after coming under attack by some scholars and politicians. But it has not withdrawn its money or support for the project. The Institute will publish the book.
Bavarian officials, after conversations with survivors, decided that it would be a mistake, for “diplomatic and human” reasons, to publish “Mein Kampf,” a government spokesmen told The Jewish Week in an email.
Edith Raim, a member of the Institute’s research team, said via email that “everybody with some common sense will understand that researchers/historians need to read Nazi texts for their research — it is … sensible to deal with [‘Mein Kampf’] in a scholarly fashion, showing the prejudices, the mistakes, the errors and the outright stupidity of some of Hitler’s arguments.
“I doubt whether it will once again become a bestseller,” Raim said. “Times have considerably changed since [the 1920-30s]. I doubt whether anti-Semites can make any use of the book for current purposes.”
steve@jewishweek.org
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