"Expelled From Ramaz, Pot Dealer Scores Netflix Hit" The Jewish Week - The Jewish Week Newsletter Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Friday, 29 May 2015
Dear Reader,
One of the stars of "Orange Is The New Black" is a homegirl. Expelled from Ramaz for dealing pot, Natasha Lyonne now plays a Jewish recovering heroin addict on the Netflix hit series. NATIONAL
Expelled From Ramaz, Former Pot Dealer Scores Netflix Hit
Natasha Lyonne, who plays a Jewish ex-heroin addict on 'Orange Is The New Black,' remains connected to her religious upbringing.
Carly Stern
Editorial Intern
Natasha Lyonne stars on new series of Orange Is The New Black. Getty Images.
Natasha Lyonne is the perfect ex-drug dealer to take home to your Jewish mother—after all, the "Orange Is The New Black" actress was expelled from Ramaz, the acclaimed day school on the Upper East Side, for selling marijuana.
In a classic case of art imitating life, the actress plays a semi-autobiographical role as an acerbic, Jewish ex-heroin addict and prison inmate Nicky Nichols on the show, which will premiere its third season in June. She has spoken publicly about the impact that her religious upbringing has had on her life and career.
“I grew up in an environment where everything was all about Hitler,” Lyonne said in an interview on the popular podcast “How Was Your Week.” “When you talk about it every single day…it becomes so much a part of your DNA,” said the actress, who describes her self as being “from my father’s side Flatbush and from my mother’s side Auschwitz.”
In a 2013 interview on the podcast “WTF with Marc Maron,” the 36-year-old star revealed that not only was she an honors Talmud student at the Ramaz School on the Upper East Side, she was also “expelled for selling weed to the children.”
While Lyonne claims that she does not have completely fond memories of Ramaz, she credits her Talmudic training and the in-depth manner in which the subject is studied as a source of influence in her life and decision-making practices. (Full disclosure: The author of this piece graduated from Ramaz.)
“Basically you just do interpretations of interpretations,” said Lyonne about the Talmud in her interview with Maron. “For me, my early rebellion, before I found the drugs, would be arguing with rabbis.”
Currently, Lyonne embraces her Judaism in a variety of ways. Recently, the actress, whose real name is Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein, spoke at an event at the historic Sixth & I Synagogue in Washington D.C. in honor of the holiday of Shavuot.
You can catch Lyonne, and any Jewish references that she may make, on the third season of Orange is the New Black, which is set to premiere on Netflix on June 12. For those who don’t watch, seasons one and two are available for binging on the streaming website.
Lyonne could not be reached for comment.
editor@jewishweek.org
Move over Tinder, Verona's on the scene. The new dating app, named for Romeo and Juliet's hometown, aims to bring Israelis and Palestinians together.BRIEFS
Swiping Right On Peace In The Middle East
New dating app launched to pair Israelis with Palestinians.
Maya Klausner
Blueprint Editor
Verona dating app
“Two households, both alike in dignity … from ancient grudge break to new mutiny/Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”
In Shakespeare's play, love doomed Romeo and Juliet. Matthew Nolan, founder of a new app he called Verona as homage to the couple's native city, hopes love will help heal the Middle East. Verona is a social and dating app that matches Israelis with Palestinians.
“Is my app going to spark world peace? As much as I would love to take credit for igniting world peace, it’s going to take a lot more than my app, but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s a shift,” Nolan told VICE.
The app’s tagline boasts, “World peace, one swipe at a time.” Verona, which is modeled after the swiping style of Tinder, was launched in March for Android and will be releasing a version compatible with iOS in June, according to Digital Trends.
Verona currently has between 1,000 to 2,000 users and of those users, the majority are college students living in the United States. However, Nolan reports that there are also a few users from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ramallah.
On Tinder, the user fills in basic information like whether they are a man or a woman; on Verona, the user indicates whether they are Israeli or Palestinian.
“If, for example, there is an Arab woman who lives in Israel but wants to identify as Palestinian, she can do so and can still meet someone to fall in love with. We have hundreds of users here that are Jewish or Arab who do not necessarily live in one of the two countries, but nonetheless identify themselves as Israeli or Palestinian,” Nolan said in an interview with Ynet.news.
Nolan, who is neither Israeli nor Palestinian, but in fact a white guy from Detroit, was inspired by a close friend of his, who is Palestinian and fell in love with an Israeli girl. Nolan is more than just a tech geek. He is also a professional dating coach. By pairing his two areas of expertise he hopes to create many new couples.
Speaking of, our Israel Now section of thoughtful, provocative essays and reportage about the Jewish state, is on our homepage.
One article in the section that's getting a lot of reads is Yossi Klein Halevi's reflection on the fact that Israelis and American Jews increasingly disagree on the true nature of the greatest threat to Israel.
Israel Now 2015
Navigating the existential divide. The debate over liberal Zionism. Press freedom under siege. Israeli-Americans
as a bridge.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Flipbook Link:
Click To Flip
INSIDE THIS SPECIAL SECTION
A Wide, Wide River To Cross
Navigating Existential Divides
The Politics Of Loyalty
‘We’ve Been In This Movie Before’
Drifting Apart, Coming Together
A Full-Court Press Against The Press?
The Coalition Conundrum
The New Rhythm Of Israel-Diaspora Relations
A Wide, Wide River To Cross ›
Israelis Claim A Foothold
Can Adelson-funded Israeli American Council stay neutral on politics?
A Measure Of Mercy
'The Farewell Party' looks compassionately at the indignities of Alzheimer's.
PreviousNext
THE EDITOR'S DESK
‘I Love Israel, But Does Israel Love Me?’
Signs of growing disconnect between U.S. Jews and Israel evident at global Jewish think tank conference.
RELATED
How The World Turned Against Israel
Setbacks Feared On Religious Freedoms
A Woman’s Plight, A Community’s Shame
The New Normal
Ultra-Orthodox Mayor Cancels Bar/Bat Mitzvah For Disabled Children
On Gratitude
Turning Pain Into Joy On My Daughter's 4th Birthday, Part 1
Turning Pain Into Joy On My Daughter's 4th Birthday, Part 2
A Mother's Day Tribute For Grandmothers: 6 Tips To Help Raise Grandchildren Who Have Autism
Well Versed
The Art Of Observance
An Israeli Photographer Looks Back
Political Insider
Going To White House Via Jerusalem
Sloppy Pandering
Special Sections
Israel Now 2015
Navigating the existential divide. The debate over liberal Zionism. Press freedom under siege. Israeli-Americans
as a bridge.
Click To Flip
Healthcare April 2015
Battling genetic disease among the Bedouins. Silicon Valley BRCA testing kit making waves in market. Atlanta-based screening program expanding reach. Israeli app for ADHD gaining traction. The silence of infertility.
Click To Flip
LOVE, FEUDS
Swiping Right On Peace In The Middle East
New dating app launched to pair Israelis with Palestinians.
Editorials
On Sunday, Show Israel You Care
Up All Night
OPINION
How 'Write On For Israel' Breaks Stereotypes05/28/2015
A Conservative Rabbi Caught In Middle On Israel05/26/2015
Needed: A Performance-Driven Jewish Culture05/26/2015
News
Iranian Negotiator: Nuclear Talks May Be Extended Beyond Deadline
Houston Floods Inundate Jewish Homes And 2 Synagogues
Record-Breaking Heat Wave Hits Israel
Riskin Standing Firm In Row With Chief Rabbinate
Herman Wouk, Best-Selling Author of 'Marjorie Morningstar' Turns 100
Report: Hamas Killed Rival Palestinians Under Cover Of Conflict With Israel
HIGHER EDUCATION
Expelled From Ramaz, Former Pot Dealer Scores Netflix Hit
Natasha Lyonne, who plays a Jewish ex-heroin addict on 'Orange Is The New Black,' remains connected to her religious upbringing.
HEADLINES FROM ISRAEL
Haaretz
Cyprus police foil planned Hezbollah attacks against Israeli targets in Europe
Ynet
FIFA prepares for vote on Israel's expulsion
Jerusalem Post
Israel close to deal with Palestinians to avoid FIFA suspension vote
Arutz Sheva
PA Drops Proposal to Ban Israel from FIFA
Read an excerpt here ...
Visit Fresh Ink For Teens Today
Check Out NYBlueprint.com Today
LENS
Riding The Waves, And The Breezes, On Israel’s Coast
FIRST PERSON
No Cavalier Decision
TRAVEL
A Shiny New Sofia
THE JW Q&A
Poland’s Jewish Revival Seen Continuing Apace
THE JW Q&A
A Military Man Leaves The Theater
CULTURE VIEW
Reading Kafka On Shavuot
A RABBI'S WORLD
What Chaplains Do
Your Comments
the Caine Mutiny was, and still is, the best wartime novel of WW2
Read more...
celeb worship is the new "avoda zara"
Read more...
all the Israel-bashing notwithstanding, it seems that American Jews fail to realize that unlike...
Read more...
Where are the many thousands of students who were influenced by Rabbi Riskin. ?Where...
Read more...
But you must surely know that "conservative" does not make you a Jew. Only Orthodox Judaism...
Read more...
more
Most Read
Expelled From Ramaz, Former Pot Dealer Scores Netflix Hit
In National
‘Peeping Rabbi’ Victims Weigh In On Sentence
In New York
After Birthright Next, What's Next?
In Gary Rosenblatt
Camp, The New Internship
In New York
A Tougher Reform Road To Conversion
In New York
Top Editorials
Up All Night
On Sunday, Show Israel You Care
Verbatim
Conflicting Pressures
Korsia's in a tough position in wake of terror attacks, say expats here.
French Chief Rabbi Walking A Fine Line
From Hoboken To Houston To Albuquerque
"It's refreshing to remember the challenge of deepening Jewish life in places where Jews are not a strong presence."
On The Road, Discovering Jewish America
Creative, Casual, Relaxed
"Jewish L.A. is fragmented but vibrant."
A New Generation Of Seekers In Jewish L.A.
New York
Camp, The New Internship
In U.S., Israelis Claim A Foothold
What You Need To Know About New York’s Proposed Education Tax Credit
No Cavalier Decision
Riskin Standing Firm In Row With Chief Rabbinate
National
Houston Floods Inundate Jewish Homes And 2 Synagogues
Expelled From Ramaz, Former Pot Dealer Scores Netflix Hit
Rabbi Byron Sherwin, Jewish Scholar And Ethicist At Spertus, Dies
Judge Orders Opening Of 1950 Testimony That Implicated Ethel Rosenberg
Herman Wouk, Best-Selling Author of 'Marjorie Morningstar' Turns 100
International
Iranian Negotiator: Nuclear Talks May Be Extended Beyond Deadline
Inquest: British Student Did Not Commit Suicide At ’03 Right-Wing Confab In Germany
Germany Sending $2,700 To Child Holocaust Survivors
Palestinians Reject Israeli Soccer Proposal, Pushing Ahead With Suspension Vote
German Anti-Semitism Panel Adds Jewish Members After Outcry
Israel
Dore Gold: Abbas ‘Could Negotiate With Israel’
Record-Breaking Heat Wave Hits Israel
Report: Hamas Killed Rival Palestinians Under Cover Of Conflict With Israel
Will Israel End Child Subsidies For Anti-Vaxxers?
Riskin at Risk?
Briefs
Swiping Right On Peace In The Middle East
Olmert Sentenced To Prison In Talansky Case
Netanyahu Confidant To Direct Foreign Ministry
Jewish Teens Stabbed On Way To Western Wall
Whooping Cough Warning Issued In Brooklyn’s Orthodox Communities
The Jewish Week | Featured Sites of Interest
RAISER & KENNIFF, PC, - CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS
YACON-SYRUP
NAPLESBAYCOLONYPROPERTIES.COM
CALGARY MLS
TAMPA FISHING CHARTERS
LIMO SERVICE NJ
INSPIRATIONAL SUCCESS QUOTES & SAYINGS
BUY CHEAP TWITTER FOLLOWERS
CONNECTICUT SHORELINE PROPERTIES
HTTP://WWW.MYINSURANCEGUIDE.CO.NZ
BAD CREDIT LOANS
LOS ANGELES CAR ACCIDENT LAWYER
PERSONAL INJURY ATTORNEYS LA - WEINSTEIN LAW
PRESCOTT FINANCIAL
Yossi Klein Halevi
Special To The Jewish Week
Iran’s Arak heavy water reactor. Photos by Wikimedia Commons
Existential threats once united the diaspora and Israel. Now, increasingly, it is existential threats — or rather opposing perceptions of existential threats — that deeply divide us.
For Israelis, preventing a nuclear Iran is a matter of life and death; and most of them agree with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that President Obama’s Iranian deal will ultimately lead to a nuclear Iran. The deal has been denounced almost across the Israeli political spectrum.
Yet many liberal American Jews are siding with Obama. Prominent American Jewish journalists have defended the deal. J Street has become, in effect, the administration’s pro-deal lobby in the Jewish community.
Obama’s Jewish supporters argue that they too oppose a nuclear Iran and that Obama’s strategy is the best way to prevent it. For Obama’s supporters, then, the debate is tactical. But for those who see Obama’s strategy as an historic disaster, the debate is far more than that: It’s existential.
The second existential divide separating liberal American Jews and the Israeli mainstream is over a Palestinian state. Liberals tend to see the occupation as the greatest threat — morally, demographically — facing the Jewish state.
A majority of Israelis agree that the occupation is a long-term existential threat, but see the creation of a Palestinian state as an imminent existential threat. Given a disintegrating Middle East, the emergence of terror enclaves on Israel’s borders, an expanding Iran unchecked by American power — creating a Palestinian state now means risking constant attack along Israel’s most sensitive border, overlooking greater Tel Aviv.
For most Israelis, then, the debate over a two-state solution isn’t ideological but tactical, a question of timing: If and when conditions are right, we’ll accept a two-state solution, but not before. But for those American Jews who regard the occupation as an historic disaster that must be ended now, the debate is existential.
The last time that an existential threat unequivocally united Israel and the diaspora was the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Not coincidentally, that was the last of Israel’s existential wars, its last conventional war. Since then, every one of Israel’s wars has been asymmetrical — fought between the Israel Defense Forces and terrorists embedded in a civilian population.
The turning point in Israel’s military history — and in diaspora-Israel relations — was the 1982 Lebanon War. That was Israel’s first “war of choice,” initially intended to push the PLO back from the northern border but quickly devolving into a far more ambitious goal of remaking Lebanon and the Middle East. That war not only failed to unite Israelis around the security threat, but was itself the cause of schism. The consequences reverberated abroad: For the first time diaspora Jews publicly protested Israeli policy during war.
Then came the first intifada of the late 1980s, and the Oslo negotiating process of the 1990s. The divisions within Israeli society culminated in the Rabin assassination; Israeli society seemed to be unraveling along its left-right divide.
The next turning point was the year 2000, when Israel accepted a two-state solution and received in return the worst wave of terrorism in its history. The result was the near-total collapse of the Israeli left, along with the credibility of its assertion that the occupation, rather than Palestinian opposition to Israel’s existence, was the main obstacle to peace. The Israeli left has never recovered: In the recent elections, the Zionist Union of Yitzhak Herzog emphasized social issues, not the discredited peace process.
The phase of Israeli history that began with the second intifada in 2000 has created a third existential divide separating the Israeli mainstream and many American Jews: the perception of whether our asymmetrical mini-wars are existential or immoral over-reactions to exaggerated threat.
The Lebanon War of 2006, along with the war against Hamas in 2008 and again last summer, were experienced by most Israelis as existential. One popular bumper sticker from the 2006 war read simply: “A war for our home,” with a sketch of a red-roofed house.
Israelis believe that, while none of those conflicts are in themselves existential, their cumulative effect surely is. The purpose of the terror groups is to defeat us through exhaustion and self-doubt, confronting us with the choice between defending ourselves in inevitably ugly wars that lead to Israel’s increased isolation, or forfeiting our right to defend ourselves and causing Israelis to despair of our future in the Middle East.
As a result, Israelis have relearned the instinct of uniting under threat. We may go at each other viciously during election campaigns, but as soon as the rockets of Hamas or Hezbollah start falling on the home front, Israel becomes an instant family.
But that Israeli consensus no longer extends to the diaspora, where voices opposing Israel — especially during our asymmetrical conflicts — are growing.
Not long ago a prominent American rabbi told me that if Israel attacks Iran, many American Jews may side with the Obama administration — even if thousands of missiles are falling on Tel Aviv. Speaking with deep anxiety, he concluded that we can no longer count on a united American Jewry even if Israel finds itself under unprecedented attack.
My own existential fears are mainstream Israeli. I regard Obama’s Iranian deal as the single greatest threat facing Israel today. I believe, too, that Israel has no choice but to continue periodically fighting its mini-wars against the terror enclaves on our borders. And while I believe that the absence of a Palestinian state is a long-term existential threat to Israel, I fear that its creation today would be a greater danger.
How then do I maintain a civil conversation with Jews who are on the other side of these issues? How to remain in solidarity with my fellow Jews when we are arguing about life and death?
Some American liberal friends of mine — passionate Zionists — feel so desperate about the occupation that they support a boycott of products from the settlements. But if boycotting fellow Jews is an appropriate response to perceived existential threat, then why stop at settlements? Should those of us who regard Obama’s deal with Iran as a mortal danger boycott groups and individuals in the Jewish community who support the president’s policy?
At stake is nothing less than our ability to function as a people — one of the great achievements of the Zionist revolution.
The first principle, then, in governing our debates over primal fears of survival is this: delegitimizing fellow Jews is itself a kind of existential threat.
The second principle is humility. No one segment of the Jewish people has a monopoly on concern for Israel’s survival. Much as I vehemently disagree with Obama’s Jewish supporters, I cannot allow myself the emotional satisfaction of denouncing their motives. That kind of Jewish conversation leads to the abyss.
And so we are left with this challenge: how to remain faithful to our most deeply held truths about Israel’s predicament, while remaining faithful to our mutual covenant as a people. Navigating this dilemma will require all our wisdom as an ancient people that has known how to overcome both external threat and suicidal schism.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His 2013 book, “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Country” (Harper), won the Jewish Book Council’s Everett Family Book of the Year Award.
Another is from Yehuda Kurtzer, who claims that both the right and the left have misrepresented liberal Zionism.
The Politics Of Loyalty
Yehuda Kurtzer
Special To The Jewish Week
A home in Gaza destroyed by Israel during last summer’s war.
It is in vogue to say that liberal Zionism is in crisis. Last summer’s war in Gaza provoked a spate of essays purporting that the confrontation between liberal values and the policies of a hawkish Israel were making the ideology untenable. In this portrayal, liberal Zionism was a precarious political ideology that entailed support for the State of Israel while believing that the state had to express progressive values, and that history and politics were conspiring to unmake an ideology and prove it to have been feeble and unrealistic all along.
This portrayal is the result of an unwitting conspiracy between right and left. Several thinkers on the left — Peter Beinart, Alan Wolfe and others — locate the failure of Zionism in the growing ideological divide between the younger generation and the American Jewish “establishment” and its support for an Israeli government which acts at cross-purposes with the central Jewish values important to most American Jews.
Their discomfort, also expressed after the recent Israeli elections, provides fodder for this thesis, namely, that Zionism is contingent on the absence of dissonance between Israel and the values significant for American Jewish identity. The belief is that discord creates a crisis resulting first in “distancing” from Israel and, eventually, a collapse of the ideology and the relationship altogether.
To the right, the struggles of liberal Zionists are a source of glee and triumphalism. They affirm the right’s belief that their opponents’ ideology was fragile all along and implicitly connect it to the struggle for survival of liberal Judaism, which is suffering from its abandonment of Jewish particularity. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe — and perhaps also on American college campuses, which the right is tracking carefully and presenting as a crisis — signals an essential Jewish “otherness” that liberal Zionists and their universalist values never took seriously.
This is a challenging moment for me. I am an American Jew deeply connected personally, professionally, and spiritually to the State of Israel. I have struggled recently through periods of deep disappointment bordering on outrage about actions undertaken by the State and trends that signal the rise of antidemocratic tendencies among the electorate. I have also felt a deep sense of impotence as a non-citizen and non-resident who is both implicated — out of a good sense of Jewish peoplehood — in the actions of the State of Israel, as well as in the behavior of Jewish communal organizations that sometimes give cover to these actions, and are largely incapable, except through complicated networks of influence, to lead toward processes of change.
To paraphrase David Hartman, z”l, Israel has lost the quality of being primarily a “naches machine” for American Jews; it is now exporting meaningful quantities of disappointment.
But the issue now is not me, and it is not Israel; the problem we face is that both the right and the left have misconstrued and misrepresented liberal Zionism. The problem of the moment is not merely one of identities, but of ideas.
Simply put, one of the greatest philosophical mistakes we Jews made following the creation of Israel was the too-quick transformation of Zionism from a discourse of imagination into a discourse of loyalty.
Consider the breathtaking diversity of Zionist ideas and dreams prior to the creation of the State of Israel. In Jewish educational environments such as my own, we were taught to think of these in strict categories. Political Zionism aimed to solve “the Jewish problem” of intrinsic, unending alienation from the structures of power and authority with a nationalist response. Religious Zionism sought to reconcile deep-seated longings for a return to the land and for the messianic age with an open window of political possibility that could achieve pieces of those longings, even incrementally. Cultural Zionism sought to retrieve the spiritual integrity of the Jewish People after millennia of dislocation, dispersion, and cultural deracination.
In this account, in spite of the competition among these ideas, each thinker and movement is afforded a pride of place in a (retrospectively) collaborative project. Some aspects of this wide network of ideas succeeded more than others and had greater staying power within the State once it finally arrived. But this retrospective narrative validated different ideas as partners in the solving of a Big Problem — the absence of statehood and statecraft — and enabled the translation of those ideas to the mechanics of running the state once we had it.
This understanding of Zionism yields a devastating demand for those who would inherit its legacy: Now that we have a state, we focus on defending and protecting what we have. Sure, ideology still persists and matters, and we see the veins and arteries of those ideologies in the living and breathing organism of the state: some bulging at times and others weaker, some infused with oxygen and some starved. Now that the body is born and named, however, our job becomes to shelter it rather than fantasize about what it will be.
There is a different way to understand the story of Zionism, which is to interpret it as a messier, more violent, and yet inherently pluralistic competition of imagination, because pluralism can mean that no full knowledge of truth is possible, and because power structures are such that no ideology is capable of seizing the kind of consensus or authority to make other ideas impossible or untenable.
The real legacy of that moment in Jewish history was not extra-parliamentary relics such as the strange, idiosyncratic World Zionist Congress, whose function was to fantasize about what might be possible, or even the State itself, but the shared, collective project engaged in a diverse dance between pragmatism and fantasy.
Why did we let this Zionism go? There were urgent demands once the State had been created, and these befell both its Jewish inhabitants and their diaspora brethren, who substituted philanthropy and advocacy for the physical work of nation building as acts of loyalty to the project. But Zionism then became essentially only a means of perpetuating the political choices that had emerged from the pre-State ideological mess — choices now invested with the imprimatur of majority choice, political leadership, and gradually, precedent.
This was a great loss to the Jewish people, and the costs have not been fully realized. The transformation of a language of longing for a place, into the mechanics of loyalty to a place in which we have arrived, is a dramatic, emotionally wrought choice we did altogether too quickly, and whose emotional consequences we have suppressed at our peril. Our historical narratives of actual arrival in the Promised Land are few and far between; we have far, far more stories, from the banishment from Eden through the Babylonian Exile and beyond, of wanderings and alienations, accompanied by a ceaseless longing to return home. This longing for home is an essential feature of what it means to be Jewish. By what hubris do we now pretend that the fantasizing of the possible is easily replaced by mere perpetuation of new status quos?
Retrieving Zionism as an imaginative discourse for the Jewish people is the best answer to the “crisis” of liberal Zionism. To the left, I say: Separating Judaism and Zionism and treating them as discrete projects is a deep misunderstanding of both. Zionism is the discourse of what the Jewish people can make possible in the longing for a return to Zion.
It may manifest in different choices and may translate to different political realities, but a Zionist Jew sees opportunity and is challenged by what is not present to make it so; it has been, and could be again, the greatest project of Jewish spiritual, religious, political, and cultural renewal our people has ever seen.
To the right, which accuses liberal Zionists of betraying Israel with their agitation that it be better, I demand to know: When did Judaism tolerate — much less legislate — complacency?
Liberal Zionism should rehabilitate the “ought” of Israel as a legitimate discourse that neither rejects the country’s accomplishments nor seeks to improve it except through its own democratic processes, empowering it in the spirit of a Maimonidean messianic longing which knows that sovereignty is only the beginning of an opportunity to do something great, to enact the visions of justice and righteousness that our tradition demands become the enduring legacy of the Jewish people.
This is the future of liberal Zionism: reclaiming its past glory as the activity of Jews in Israel and around the world to transform the State of Israel into a platform for fulfilling the wildest fantasies of Jewish imagination. This new/old Zionist conversation will be and must be even messier than it already is, and our community must foster more comfort than the politics of loyalty generally allow with the anxieties this messiness engenders. We Jews can take it; we have seen much worse than what is possible when we foster profound debate on what our collective future should look like. After all, where would the State of Israel be without it?
Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer is the president of The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
Yehuda Kurtzer
Special To The Jewish Week
A home in Gaza destroyed by Israel during last summer’s war.
It is in vogue to say that liberal Zionism is in crisis. Last summer’s war in Gaza provoked a spate of essays purporting that the confrontation between liberal values and the policies of a hawkish Israel were making the ideology untenable. In this portrayal, liberal Zionism was a precarious political ideology that entailed support for the State of Israel while believing that the state had to express progressive values, and that history and politics were conspiring to unmake an ideology and prove it to have been feeble and unrealistic all along.
This portrayal is the result of an unwitting conspiracy between right and left. Several thinkers on the left — Peter Beinart, Alan Wolfe and others — locate the failure of Zionism in the growing ideological divide between the younger generation and the American Jewish “establishment” and its support for an Israeli government which acts at cross-purposes with the central Jewish values important to most American Jews.
Their discomfort, also expressed after the recent Israeli elections, provides fodder for this thesis, namely, that Zionism is contingent on the absence of dissonance between Israel and the values significant for American Jewish identity. The belief is that discord creates a crisis resulting first in “distancing” from Israel and, eventually, a collapse of the ideology and the relationship altogether.
To the right, the struggles of liberal Zionists are a source of glee and triumphalism. They affirm the right’s belief that their opponents’ ideology was fragile all along and implicitly connect it to the struggle for survival of liberal Judaism, which is suffering from its abandonment of Jewish particularity. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe — and perhaps also on American college campuses, which the right is tracking carefully and presenting as a crisis — signals an essential Jewish “otherness” that liberal Zionists and their universalist values never took seriously.
This is a challenging moment for me. I am an American Jew deeply connected personally, professionally, and spiritually to the State of Israel. I have struggled recently through periods of deep disappointment bordering on outrage about actions undertaken by the State and trends that signal the rise of antidemocratic tendencies among the electorate. I have also felt a deep sense of impotence as a non-citizen and non-resident who is both implicated — out of a good sense of Jewish peoplehood — in the actions of the State of Israel, as well as in the behavior of Jewish communal organizations that sometimes give cover to these actions, and are largely incapable, except through complicated networks of influence, to lead toward processes of change.
To paraphrase David Hartman, z”l, Israel has lost the quality of being primarily a “naches machine” for American Jews; it is now exporting meaningful quantities of disappointment.
But the issue now is not me, and it is not Israel; the problem we face is that both the right and the left have misconstrued and misrepresented liberal Zionism. The problem of the moment is not merely one of identities, but of ideas.
Simply put, one of the greatest philosophical mistakes we Jews made following the creation of Israel was the too-quick transformation of Zionism from a discourse of imagination into a discourse of loyalty.
Consider the breathtaking diversity of Zionist ideas and dreams prior to the creation of the State of Israel. In Jewish educational environments such as my own, we were taught to think of these in strict categories. Political Zionism aimed to solve “the Jewish problem” of intrinsic, unending alienation from the structures of power and authority with a nationalist response. Religious Zionism sought to reconcile deep-seated longings for a return to the land and for the messianic age with an open window of political possibility that could achieve pieces of those longings, even incrementally. Cultural Zionism sought to retrieve the spiritual integrity of the Jewish People after millennia of dislocation, dispersion, and cultural deracination.
In this account, in spite of the competition among these ideas, each thinker and movement is afforded a pride of place in a (retrospectively) collaborative project. Some aspects of this wide network of ideas succeeded more than others and had greater staying power within the State once it finally arrived. But this retrospective narrative validated different ideas as partners in the solving of a Big Problem — the absence of statehood and statecraft — and enabled the translation of those ideas to the mechanics of running the state once we had it.
This understanding of Zionism yields a devastating demand for those who would inherit its legacy: Now that we have a state, we focus on defending and protecting what we have. Sure, ideology still persists and matters, and we see the veins and arteries of those ideologies in the living and breathing organism of the state: some bulging at times and others weaker, some infused with oxygen and some starved. Now that the body is born and named, however, our job becomes to shelter it rather than fantasize about what it will be.
There is a different way to understand the story of Zionism, which is to interpret it as a messier, more violent, and yet inherently pluralistic competition of imagination, because pluralism can mean that no full knowledge of truth is possible, and because power structures are such that no ideology is capable of seizing the kind of consensus or authority to make other ideas impossible or untenable.
The real legacy of that moment in Jewish history was not extra-parliamentary relics such as the strange, idiosyncratic World Zionist Congress, whose function was to fantasize about what might be possible, or even the State itself, but the shared, collective project engaged in a diverse dance between pragmatism and fantasy.
Why did we let this Zionism go? There were urgent demands once the State had been created, and these befell both its Jewish inhabitants and their diaspora brethren, who substituted philanthropy and advocacy for the physical work of nation building as acts of loyalty to the project. But Zionism then became essentially only a means of perpetuating the political choices that had emerged from the pre-State ideological mess — choices now invested with the imprimatur of majority choice, political leadership, and gradually, precedent.
This was a great loss to the Jewish people, and the costs have not been fully realized. The transformation of a language of longing for a place, into the mechanics of loyalty to a place in which we have arrived, is a dramatic, emotionally wrought choice we did altogether too quickly, and whose emotional consequences we have suppressed at our peril. Our historical narratives of actual arrival in the Promised Land are few and far between; we have far, far more stories, from the banishment from Eden through the Babylonian Exile and beyond, of wanderings and alienations, accompanied by a ceaseless longing to return home. This longing for home is an essential feature of what it means to be Jewish. By what hubris do we now pretend that the fantasizing of the possible is easily replaced by mere perpetuation of new status quos?
Retrieving Zionism as an imaginative discourse for the Jewish people is the best answer to the “crisis” of liberal Zionism. To the left, I say: Separating Judaism and Zionism and treating them as discrete projects is a deep misunderstanding of both. Zionism is the discourse of what the Jewish people can make possible in the longing for a return to Zion.
It may manifest in different choices and may translate to different political realities, but a Zionist Jew sees opportunity and is challenged by what is not present to make it so; it has been, and could be again, the greatest project of Jewish spiritual, religious, political, and cultural renewal our people has ever seen.
To the right, which accuses liberal Zionists of betraying Israel with their agitation that it be better, I demand to know: When did Judaism tolerate — much less legislate — complacency?
Liberal Zionism should rehabilitate the “ought” of Israel as a legitimate discourse that neither rejects the country’s accomplishments nor seeks to improve it except through its own democratic processes, empowering it in the spirit of a Maimonidean messianic longing which knows that sovereignty is only the beginning of an opportunity to do something great, to enact the visions of justice and righteousness that our tradition demands become the enduring legacy of the Jewish people.
This is the future of liberal Zionism: reclaiming its past glory as the activity of Jews in Israel and around the world to transform the State of Israel into a platform for fulfilling the wildest fantasies of Jewish imagination. This new/old Zionist conversation will be and must be even messier than it already is, and our community must foster more comfort than the politics of loyalty generally allow with the anxieties this messiness engenders. We Jews can take it; we have seen much worse than what is possible when we foster profound debate on what our collective future should look like. After all, where would the State of Israel be without it?
Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer is the president of The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
Have a lovely weekend and Shabbat, everybody,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
THE ARTS
Director Eran Riklis, whose new film is "A Borrowed identity." Courtesy of Israel Film Center
Matters Of Identity, Mideast Style
George Robinson
Special To The jewish WeekIn the turbulence of the contemporary Middle East, a little thing like personal identity is fragile, evanescent and in jeopardy. That would seem to be the message of the opening and closing night films on display at this year’s weeklong Israel Film Center Festival, which begins June 4.
Eran Riklis opens the event with the New York premiere of “A Borrowed Identity,” scripted by popular Israeli Arab novelist Sayed Kashua from his novel “Dancing Arabs.” The closer is also a New York premiere. “Self-Made,” written and directed by Shira Geffen, reunites her with Sarah Adler, who starred in “Jellyfish,” Geffen’s previous feature. Both films involve an exchange of identities, but they couldn’t be more dissimilar.
“A Borrowed Identity,” like its literary source, is a bildungsroman that traces the youth of a young Israeli Arab, Eyad (Tawfeek Barhom), as he picks his way through the minefield of ethnic identity and Jewish-Arab conflict. Although there are moments of levity, “Borrowed” is essentially the latest installment in the director’s ongoing search for the human side of the crisis. As in his best films, “The Syrian Bride,” “The Lemon Tree” and “Cup Final,” Riklis is trying to find some reason for optimism, but the material stubbornly refuses to provide one. Instead, it is his own dogged commitment to a cinematic humanism that is the most hopeful element in the film.
Although “A Borrowed Identity” pivots on the literal event invoked in its title, the name of the film also serves as a reminder of the uniquely ambiguous status of the Israeli Arabs. Eyad encounters the expected racism in the larger society, but finds allies among his classmates at the elite arts school he attends in Jerusalem. He also becomes involved with someone even worse off than he, Yonatan (Michael Moshonov), whose muscular dystrophy has already put him in a wheelchair. The problem with “A Borrowed Identity” is that, despite some very nice acting, the film is sluggishly paced and too often feels like a rather obvious version of a ’50s problem picture. And yet, against all odds, the final 15 minutes is genuinely moving, as Riklis’ complex language of camera movement pays emotional dividends.
If “A Borrowed Identity” sinks under the weight of its own earnestness, by contrast, “Self-Made” skips along, buoyed by the helium-like lightness of its own surreal humor. It’s the sort of film in which a famous Israeli artist, Michal (Adler) switches places with a Palestinian factory worker, Nadine (Samira Saraya), and no one seems to notice, not even husbands and lovers, despite the two women looking nothing like one another. It’s the sort of film in which a mysterious bouquet is delivered to Michal by a young Palestinian boy who will, 80 minutes later, give her an identical bouquet under even more unlikely circumstances.
In short, Geffen has taken the absurdist, almost cartoonish strain of her first feature, “Jellyfish,” and expanded on it, while losing some of its twee qualities (perhaps by losing her co-director, husband Etgar Keret). Some of the earlier film’s themes remain the same, of course: the capriciousness of fate, the stifling nature of women’s daily lives in both Israel and Palestine and the weird outcroppings of candy colors in the midst of the most mundane settings, suggesting the risibility underpinning reality.
The film opens with a long take of Michal asleep on her bed, which suddenly gives way under her, dropping her to the floor where a bump on the head knocks big holes in her short-term memory. With that device conveniently in place, Geffen assaults her with a procession of stunningly obtuse journalists, photographers and workmen, culminating in the delivery of a new bed from the insanely efficient ETACA (an Ikea-like furniture purveyor). The bed, of course, can’t be completed because it is missing a small piece, which gives Michal the opportunity to tell someone that she’s “lost a screw.” Her path will cross repeatedly and mysteriously with Nadine’s until, through a series of misadventures, they exchange roles. The result is refreshingly oblique, grounded in the Israeli reality but just fantastic enough to be funny in unexpected ways.
Dani Menken’s documentaries, “39 Pounds of Love” and “Dolphin Boy,” are both films in which a literal journey also is a spiritual and metaphorical one. His new fiction film, “Is That You?” attempts to repeat that structure, but his protagonist, Roni (Alon Aboutboul) is neither physically challenged nor a victim of trauma like the central figures in the other two films. Rather, he is a 60-year-old movie projectionist who has been fired from his job in Tel Aviv and decides to try to locate an old flame, now supposedly in the United States. At the outset of his search he encounters a filmmaking student, Myla (Naruna Kaplan de Macedo), who inveigles him into helping her shoot her movie about lost chances and regrets, footage from which gives “Is That You?” it’s ramshackle structure. Despite the presence of the novelist Nevo Eshkol as co-writer, the result is alternately slack and saccharine.
New Directors/New Films has become a reliable source of Israeli film premieres in New York in the past decade, and two of the films included in the Israel Film Center’s event had their first screenings in that festival.
Tom Shoval’s “Youth” is a frequently disturbing blend of family melodrama and crime film in which a rapidly declining middle-class family in a Tel Aviv suburb struggles with growing debts and shrinking income. The young adult sons of the family decide to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy Orthodox family, with results that stop just short of the farcical. Shoval treats the material with deadly seriousness, though, using the brothers’ behavior as a lens for examining machismo in contemporary Israeli culture.
“The Kindergarten Teacher,” Nadav Lapid’s second feature, is a slow-burning drama in which the title character, played with great nuance by Sarit Larry, gradually becomes obsessed with a seeming prodigy. As in his debut film, “Policeman,” Lapid paints his picture with precision, a welter of brilliantly worked-out camera movements that capture his protagonists within the restless, compulsive energy that finally drives them in circles. In the end, “The Kindergarten Teacher” is not all that dissimilar from its predecessor, with an impulsive act of rebellion that cannot succeed confirming Lapid’s Yeatsian apocalyptic vision, his conviction that “the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Disquieting, no doubt, and one may reject its predictive powers, but as a piece of filmmaking, “The Kindergarten Teacher” is an intoxicating un-fun ride.
The Israel Film Center Festival is presented June 4-11 by the JCC in Manhattan (76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue), which will host most of the screenings. For schedule, venues and other information, go to www.israelfilmcenter.org/festival.
FOOD & WINE
Shirah Luna Matta Vineyard Aglianico 2013
Weiss Brothers Train On The Vine
Joshua E. London And Lou Marmon
Jewish Week Online CorrespondentsObservant brothers learned in the field, not the classroom.
Joshua E. London And Lou Marmon
Jewish Week Online Columnists
"Opportunity is missed by most people," Thomas Edison is quoted as saying, “because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” For Gabriel Weiss, a founder of the Shirah Wine Company, it appeared in the form of surplus grapes from California’s 2005 bumper crop. That year the harvest was so large that many vineyards couldn’t sell all their grapes, so some were simply left on the vine.
Weiss had moved to California in 2004 to work at the kosher Herzog Winery as a "cellar rat," a grunt-work laborerwho works inside a winery or barrel room, getting messy with the non-romantic side of wine making. It is a physically demanding job, with long hours and little pay, but can be a fabulous position from which to learn all about making wine. In 2005, a vineyard owner with surplus grapes he couldn’t sell told Weiss that he and a couple of friends, fellow Herzog Winery cellar rats, could have as much as they could pick and haul away from his San Luis Obispo County vineyard. So early the next day, they did just that.
They got a half ton of Syrah grapes and aged a barrel of wine for nine months in a garage. It yielded 288 bottles which they split 3 ways, naming it Shirah, the Hebrew word for "song" and a play on "Shiraz," another name for Syrah-based wine.
Gabriel’s brother, Shimon, eventually moved west to work at Herzog and Covenant, and in 2008 the brothers made their first wines together. Their wines, released in 2009 under their Shirah label, were an instant critical success and a fantastic start in a very tough industry.
Although religiously observant, the Weiss brothers are somewhat unorthodox winemakers. Their winemaking education has been all on-the-job, rather than from university study. Behind their labels are some powerful, fascinating, creative blends and single vineyard bottlings. The Shirah Luna Matta Vineyard Aglianico 2013 ($65) is one of their most recent releases. Made from the southern Italian Aglianico varietal, the wine's grapes came from an organic and almost entirely dry-farmed vineyard in Paso Robles. This wonderful, balanced wine displays lovely dried red fruit, licorice and mint aromas leading into supple black plum, strawberry, fig, dark chocolate, leather and exotic spice flavors, in a medium frame and a lengthy finish. It is a delightful, food-friendly wine that expresses both the winemaker’s sense of adventure and their growing expertise.
Cleveland Cavaliers coach David Blatt. Wikimedia Commons
BACK OF THE BOOK
No Cavalier Decision
Ben Krull
Special To The Jewish Week
LENS
Getty Images
Riding The Waves, And The Breezes, On Israel's Coast
LENS
Riding The Waves, And The Breezes, On Israel’s Coast
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
In these days of warm weather, Israel’s Mediterranean coast attracts thousands of joggers and sunbathers, swimmers and Frisbee throwers, paddleball players and people who come to watch the scene or eat an al fresco meal in the breeze.
And today they come for kite surfing.
The water sport, which combines elements of surfing, paragliding and windsurfing, has participants propelled across the water by a large power kite while seated on a small surfboard; it’s especially popular on the beaches of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv.
According to kite surfing experts, the best seasons along the Mediterranean are May through June, and September through October. Optimum time on the Sea of Galilee is July through August; in Eilat, spring and autumn.
This month is a perfect time to head to the Mediterranean. All you need is a surfboard and a big kite.steve@jewishweek.org
MATCHMAKER
How Maria Met Yitz
Leah Hakimian
Special To The Jewish Week
Yitz and Maria Lauterbach. Courtesy of yarovinsky.co.il
Yitz Lauterbach met Maria Kharina in an international relations class at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Appropriately, their own backgrounds made for an interesting international relationship.
Yitz was raised in an ultra-orthodox home in Philadelphia. In 2004, at the age of 18, he made aliyah and joined the Israel Defense Forces as a lone soldier, an army term for “those whose families live abroad and who have chosen to leave their countries of origin to serve the State of Israel." Religiously, Yitz became less observant.
Maria was born in the small Russian town of Revda, where there were very few Jews. Still, she felt the Zionist calling, and, in 2005, when she was 17, she too made aliyah and joined the army as a lone soldier.
Yitz and Maria didn’t meet until 2008. After becoming friends at Hebrew University, they maintained their friendship as they both enrolled in the university’s Baccalaureate Program. Then Yitz had to drop out when his father became ill and he went home to Philadelphia.
“Skyping kept us together for a year,” explains Maria. “We would Skype two to three hours a night. Luckily, I worked the night shift as a hotel receptionist, so the time difference between Jerusalem and Philadelphia wasn’t a problem.”
A decade ago, long-distance relationships were considered risky, and often doomed. However, a recent study conducted by Microsoft’s Idea Lab found that 47 percent of their respondents credit Skype with “keeping the love alive” while far apart.
2012-2013 was a transition year for Maria and Yitz. After his dad died, Yitz finished some projects he had started for the U.S. military, and then he made plans to return to Israel. “By that time, I was head over heels in love with Maria,” said Yitz. “I used to suck at the whole romance thing, but it happened so naturally with Maria. She’s the love of my life.”
Back in Jerusalem, they became a couple. Maria, who had completed a degree in Business Administration, was working at a conference center. One of Yitz’s favorite jobs was being a Birthright leader. “One guy from my group later joined the army, and he credits me,” Yitz reveals with pride. He’s also proud of his current work with the Israel Police.
In August 2013, the couple flew to the Amalfi Coast of Italy, where Yitz proposed. Among other things, it was important to Maria that “Yitz is a gentleman, and he doesn’t drink or curse.” She adds: “I also like it when he brings me flowers.” Yitz soon learned about the Russian custom for bringing flowers: Giving an even number of flowers is a bad omen, because they place an even number of flowers on graves.
Yitz and Maria planned their wedding for August 2014. However, a month earlier, following incessant rocket fire on Israel from Gaza, Israel launched its military operation, Protective Edge. Yitz reminisces: “Many of our friends from the army were unable to come to our wedding because they had emergency call-ups. My grandmother, Bella Reznick, from Philadelphia, almost had to cancel her flight; but luckily, she made it.”
As Yitz broke the glass under the marriage canopy to remember the destruction of the Second Temple, the officiating rabbi reminded the guests of a more recent tragedy – the scores of Israeli soldiers who had lost their lives in Tzuk Eitan.
Maria and Yitz were married in the Old City of Jerusalem on August 21, 2014. Mazal tov.Dr. Leah Hakimian currently researches the question: How Jewish couples meet and marry. In the 1990’s she founded two nonprofit Jewish matchmaking programs, and continues to champion the role of community in helping singles meet. She resides in Jerusalem and Great Neck, New York.
The Jewish Week
Web Director
THE ARTS
Director Eran Riklis, whose new film is "A Borrowed identity." Courtesy of Israel Film Center
Matters Of Identity, Mideast Style
George Robinson
Special To The jewish WeekIn the turbulence of the contemporary Middle East, a little thing like personal identity is fragile, evanescent and in jeopardy. That would seem to be the message of the opening and closing night films on display at this year’s weeklong Israel Film Center Festival, which begins June 4.
Eran Riklis opens the event with the New York premiere of “A Borrowed Identity,” scripted by popular Israeli Arab novelist Sayed Kashua from his novel “Dancing Arabs.” The closer is also a New York premiere. “Self-Made,” written and directed by Shira Geffen, reunites her with Sarah Adler, who starred in “Jellyfish,” Geffen’s previous feature. Both films involve an exchange of identities, but they couldn’t be more dissimilar.
“A Borrowed Identity,” like its literary source, is a bildungsroman that traces the youth of a young Israeli Arab, Eyad (Tawfeek Barhom), as he picks his way through the minefield of ethnic identity and Jewish-Arab conflict. Although there are moments of levity, “Borrowed” is essentially the latest installment in the director’s ongoing search for the human side of the crisis. As in his best films, “The Syrian Bride,” “The Lemon Tree” and “Cup Final,” Riklis is trying to find some reason for optimism, but the material stubbornly refuses to provide one. Instead, it is his own dogged commitment to a cinematic humanism that is the most hopeful element in the film.
Although “A Borrowed Identity” pivots on the literal event invoked in its title, the name of the film also serves as a reminder of the uniquely ambiguous status of the Israeli Arabs. Eyad encounters the expected racism in the larger society, but finds allies among his classmates at the elite arts school he attends in Jerusalem. He also becomes involved with someone even worse off than he, Yonatan (Michael Moshonov), whose muscular dystrophy has already put him in a wheelchair. The problem with “A Borrowed Identity” is that, despite some very nice acting, the film is sluggishly paced and too often feels like a rather obvious version of a ’50s problem picture. And yet, against all odds, the final 15 minutes is genuinely moving, as Riklis’ complex language of camera movement pays emotional dividends.
If “A Borrowed Identity” sinks under the weight of its own earnestness, by contrast, “Self-Made” skips along, buoyed by the helium-like lightness of its own surreal humor. It’s the sort of film in which a famous Israeli artist, Michal (Adler) switches places with a Palestinian factory worker, Nadine (Samira Saraya), and no one seems to notice, not even husbands and lovers, despite the two women looking nothing like one another. It’s the sort of film in which a mysterious bouquet is delivered to Michal by a young Palestinian boy who will, 80 minutes later, give her an identical bouquet under even more unlikely circumstances.
In short, Geffen has taken the absurdist, almost cartoonish strain of her first feature, “Jellyfish,” and expanded on it, while losing some of its twee qualities (perhaps by losing her co-director, husband Etgar Keret). Some of the earlier film’s themes remain the same, of course: the capriciousness of fate, the stifling nature of women’s daily lives in both Israel and Palestine and the weird outcroppings of candy colors in the midst of the most mundane settings, suggesting the risibility underpinning reality.
The film opens with a long take of Michal asleep on her bed, which suddenly gives way under her, dropping her to the floor where a bump on the head knocks big holes in her short-term memory. With that device conveniently in place, Geffen assaults her with a procession of stunningly obtuse journalists, photographers and workmen, culminating in the delivery of a new bed from the insanely efficient ETACA (an Ikea-like furniture purveyor). The bed, of course, can’t be completed because it is missing a small piece, which gives Michal the opportunity to tell someone that she’s “lost a screw.” Her path will cross repeatedly and mysteriously with Nadine’s until, through a series of misadventures, they exchange roles. The result is refreshingly oblique, grounded in the Israeli reality but just fantastic enough to be funny in unexpected ways.
Dani Menken’s documentaries, “39 Pounds of Love” and “Dolphin Boy,” are both films in which a literal journey also is a spiritual and metaphorical one. His new fiction film, “Is That You?” attempts to repeat that structure, but his protagonist, Roni (Alon Aboutboul) is neither physically challenged nor a victim of trauma like the central figures in the other two films. Rather, he is a 60-year-old movie projectionist who has been fired from his job in Tel Aviv and decides to try to locate an old flame, now supposedly in the United States. At the outset of his search he encounters a filmmaking student, Myla (Naruna Kaplan de Macedo), who inveigles him into helping her shoot her movie about lost chances and regrets, footage from which gives “Is That You?” it’s ramshackle structure. Despite the presence of the novelist Nevo Eshkol as co-writer, the result is alternately slack and saccharine.
New Directors/New Films has become a reliable source of Israeli film premieres in New York in the past decade, and two of the films included in the Israel Film Center’s event had their first screenings in that festival.
Tom Shoval’s “Youth” is a frequently disturbing blend of family melodrama and crime film in which a rapidly declining middle-class family in a Tel Aviv suburb struggles with growing debts and shrinking income. The young adult sons of the family decide to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy Orthodox family, with results that stop just short of the farcical. Shoval treats the material with deadly seriousness, though, using the brothers’ behavior as a lens for examining machismo in contemporary Israeli culture.
“The Kindergarten Teacher,” Nadav Lapid’s second feature, is a slow-burning drama in which the title character, played with great nuance by Sarit Larry, gradually becomes obsessed with a seeming prodigy. As in his debut film, “Policeman,” Lapid paints his picture with precision, a welter of brilliantly worked-out camera movements that capture his protagonists within the restless, compulsive energy that finally drives them in circles. In the end, “The Kindergarten Teacher” is not all that dissimilar from its predecessor, with an impulsive act of rebellion that cannot succeed confirming Lapid’s Yeatsian apocalyptic vision, his conviction that “the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Disquieting, no doubt, and one may reject its predictive powers, but as a piece of filmmaking, “The Kindergarten Teacher” is an intoxicating un-fun ride.
The Israel Film Center Festival is presented June 4-11 by the JCC in Manhattan (76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue), which will host most of the screenings. For schedule, venues and other information, go to www.israelfilmcenter.org/festival.
FOOD & WINE
Shirah Luna Matta Vineyard Aglianico 2013
Weiss Brothers Train On The Vine
Joshua E. London And Lou Marmon
Jewish Week Online CorrespondentsObservant brothers learned in the field, not the classroom.
Joshua E. London And Lou Marmon
Jewish Week Online Columnists
"Opportunity is missed by most people," Thomas Edison is quoted as saying, “because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” For Gabriel Weiss, a founder of the Shirah Wine Company, it appeared in the form of surplus grapes from California’s 2005 bumper crop. That year the harvest was so large that many vineyards couldn’t sell all their grapes, so some were simply left on the vine.
Weiss had moved to California in 2004 to work at the kosher Herzog Winery as a "cellar rat," a grunt-work laborerwho works inside a winery or barrel room, getting messy with the non-romantic side of wine making. It is a physically demanding job, with long hours and little pay, but can be a fabulous position from which to learn all about making wine. In 2005, a vineyard owner with surplus grapes he couldn’t sell told Weiss that he and a couple of friends, fellow Herzog Winery cellar rats, could have as much as they could pick and haul away from his San Luis Obispo County vineyard. So early the next day, they did just that.
They got a half ton of Syrah grapes and aged a barrel of wine for nine months in a garage. It yielded 288 bottles which they split 3 ways, naming it Shirah, the Hebrew word for "song" and a play on "Shiraz," another name for Syrah-based wine.
Gabriel’s brother, Shimon, eventually moved west to work at Herzog and Covenant, and in 2008 the brothers made their first wines together. Their wines, released in 2009 under their Shirah label, were an instant critical success and a fantastic start in a very tough industry.
Although religiously observant, the Weiss brothers are somewhat unorthodox winemakers. Their winemaking education has been all on-the-job, rather than from university study. Behind their labels are some powerful, fascinating, creative blends and single vineyard bottlings. The Shirah Luna Matta Vineyard Aglianico 2013 ($65) is one of their most recent releases. Made from the southern Italian Aglianico varietal, the wine's grapes came from an organic and almost entirely dry-farmed vineyard in Paso Robles. This wonderful, balanced wine displays lovely dried red fruit, licorice and mint aromas leading into supple black plum, strawberry, fig, dark chocolate, leather and exotic spice flavors, in a medium frame and a lengthy finish. It is a delightful, food-friendly wine that expresses both the winemaker’s sense of adventure and their growing expertise.
Cleveland Cavaliers coach David Blatt. Wikimedia Commons
BACK OF THE BOOK
No Cavalier Decision
Ben Krull
Special To The Jewish Week
Although I have rooted for the New York Knicks since the 1970s, this year I become a Cleveland Cavaliers fan. My attraction to the team stems from an even deeper connection than the childhood bond I formed with the Knicks.
Please don’t accuse me of jumping on the King James bandwagon. I switched loyalties before LeBron James signed with the franchise.
In fact, I have no attachment to any of the Cavalier players. Rather it’s their coach, Dave Blatt, who drew me to the team. More specifically it was Blatt’s Israeli background that made me a Cleveland fan.
My introduction to Blatt took place last year when I visited Israel. This was during the Euro League Basketball playoffs and I watched a first round game on television between Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv and Emporio Armani Milan.
Maccabi Tel Aviv, which was coached by Blatt, is the New York Yankees of Israeli basketball. They fell 13 points behind Milan with two minutes left, but made a furious rally, to tie the game in regulation, before winning in overtime. The grit they showed in their comeback hooked me on the team.
When I returned to New York I followed their march to the Euro League title, which included an upset win in the championship game. I knew from reading Israeli newspapers that the entire country celebrated the improbable win, and I felt a sense of pride in the Israeli team’s triumph.
A few moths later the Cavaliers hired Blatt, which, as a Zionist, made me feel vested in his success. I somehow felt that if he brought long-suffering Cleveland a championship, it would reflect well on the Jewish state. But if Israel’s greatest coach fell short of expectations, the Jewish state would be exposed as second rate.
My gut reaction linking Israel to the fate of Coach Blatt is, of course, nonsensical. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement won’t lose steam if LeBron James hoists the O’Brien trophy at the end of the playoffs. Nor will anti-Semitism spike if the Cavs are eliminated.
Moreover, I know nothing about Blatt. Perhaps he is supporter of the West Bank settler movement, which I disdain. Maybe he isn’t even the type of guy I would want to have a beer with.
Still, the realization that nothing of importance for me or the Jewish people rests on Dave Blatt’s success doesn’t shake my sense that the Cavaliers’ playoff run has an impact beyond basketball. My irrational identification with Blatt and his team is of a piece with how many fans acquire their loyalties.
We root, root, root for the home team even though we get nothing in return for their victories, except higher ticket prices. In most instances the players on the court or the field aren’t even natives of the city represented on their jerseys (LeBron, an Akron, Ohio, Cleveland native, notwithstanding).
This same phenomena holds true in Israel, where the best players on Maccabi Tel Aviv and other top teams come from the United States and Europe, and aren’t even Jewish. That fact, however, doesn’t stop the Israelis from feeling a dose of national pride when their teams defeat European rivals.
Israeli nationalism was on full display this January when I again visited Tel Aviv and went to a Maccabi Electra game against Spain’s FC Barcelona.
By this time Blatt was in Cleveland and Barcelona was heavily favored. The 11,700-seat arena was sold out, as the raucous spectators sang the Israeli national anthem, and repeated a series of soccer-type cheers throughout the contest.
The game was tight throughout, as Maccabi pulled off a last second victory, with an African-American, Jeremy Pargo, leading the way. While cheering alongside the Maccabi faithful I felt a bond with them, which made it even more important to me that their former coach succeed and show the basketball world what an Israeli could do.
Maccabi Electra was eliminated from this year’s Euro League playoffs, but Blatt and the Cavs live on. They are underdogs in the Eastern Conference finals, but I am hopeful that Blatt can coach them to an upset, just like he did with Maccabi in their unlikely championship run.
If a Jew indeed leads Cleveland to the NBA promised land, this Zionist will rejoice as much as any of the Cavalier faithful — even while knowing that the immense challenges facing the Jewish state are impervious to the sense of empowerment I associate with fast breaks and blocked shots.Ben Krull is an attorney who works in Manhattan Family Court.
Please don’t accuse me of jumping on the King James bandwagon. I switched loyalties before LeBron James signed with the franchise.
In fact, I have no attachment to any of the Cavalier players. Rather it’s their coach, Dave Blatt, who drew me to the team. More specifically it was Blatt’s Israeli background that made me a Cleveland fan.
My introduction to Blatt took place last year when I visited Israel. This was during the Euro League Basketball playoffs and I watched a first round game on television between Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv and Emporio Armani Milan.
Maccabi Tel Aviv, which was coached by Blatt, is the New York Yankees of Israeli basketball. They fell 13 points behind Milan with two minutes left, but made a furious rally, to tie the game in regulation, before winning in overtime. The grit they showed in their comeback hooked me on the team.
When I returned to New York I followed their march to the Euro League title, which included an upset win in the championship game. I knew from reading Israeli newspapers that the entire country celebrated the improbable win, and I felt a sense of pride in the Israeli team’s triumph.
A few moths later the Cavaliers hired Blatt, which, as a Zionist, made me feel vested in his success. I somehow felt that if he brought long-suffering Cleveland a championship, it would reflect well on the Jewish state. But if Israel’s greatest coach fell short of expectations, the Jewish state would be exposed as second rate.
My gut reaction linking Israel to the fate of Coach Blatt is, of course, nonsensical. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement won’t lose steam if LeBron James hoists the O’Brien trophy at the end of the playoffs. Nor will anti-Semitism spike if the Cavs are eliminated.
Moreover, I know nothing about Blatt. Perhaps he is supporter of the West Bank settler movement, which I disdain. Maybe he isn’t even the type of guy I would want to have a beer with.
Still, the realization that nothing of importance for me or the Jewish people rests on Dave Blatt’s success doesn’t shake my sense that the Cavaliers’ playoff run has an impact beyond basketball. My irrational identification with Blatt and his team is of a piece with how many fans acquire their loyalties.
We root, root, root for the home team even though we get nothing in return for their victories, except higher ticket prices. In most instances the players on the court or the field aren’t even natives of the city represented on their jerseys (LeBron, an Akron, Ohio, Cleveland native, notwithstanding).
This same phenomena holds true in Israel, where the best players on Maccabi Tel Aviv and other top teams come from the United States and Europe, and aren’t even Jewish. That fact, however, doesn’t stop the Israelis from feeling a dose of national pride when their teams defeat European rivals.
Israeli nationalism was on full display this January when I again visited Tel Aviv and went to a Maccabi Electra game against Spain’s FC Barcelona.
By this time Blatt was in Cleveland and Barcelona was heavily favored. The 11,700-seat arena was sold out, as the raucous spectators sang the Israeli national anthem, and repeated a series of soccer-type cheers throughout the contest.
The game was tight throughout, as Maccabi pulled off a last second victory, with an African-American, Jeremy Pargo, leading the way. While cheering alongside the Maccabi faithful I felt a bond with them, which made it even more important to me that their former coach succeed and show the basketball world what an Israeli could do.
Maccabi Electra was eliminated from this year’s Euro League playoffs, but Blatt and the Cavs live on. They are underdogs in the Eastern Conference finals, but I am hopeful that Blatt can coach them to an upset, just like he did with Maccabi in their unlikely championship run.
If a Jew indeed leads Cleveland to the NBA promised land, this Zionist will rejoice as much as any of the Cavalier faithful — even while knowing that the immense challenges facing the Jewish state are impervious to the sense of empowerment I associate with fast breaks and blocked shots.Ben Krull is an attorney who works in Manhattan Family Court.
LENS
Getty Images
Riding The Waves, And The Breezes, On Israel's Coast
LENS
Riding The Waves, And The Breezes, On Israel’s Coast
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
In these days of warm weather, Israel’s Mediterranean coast attracts thousands of joggers and sunbathers, swimmers and Frisbee throwers, paddleball players and people who come to watch the scene or eat an al fresco meal in the breeze.
And today they come for kite surfing.
The water sport, which combines elements of surfing, paragliding and windsurfing, has participants propelled across the water by a large power kite while seated on a small surfboard; it’s especially popular on the beaches of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv.
According to kite surfing experts, the best seasons along the Mediterranean are May through June, and September through October. Optimum time on the Sea of Galilee is July through August; in Eilat, spring and autumn.
This month is a perfect time to head to the Mediterranean. All you need is a surfboard and a big kite.steve@jewishweek.org
MATCHMAKERHow Maria Met Yitz
Leah Hakimian
Special To The Jewish Week
Yitz and Maria Lauterbach. Courtesy of yarovinsky.co.il
Yitz Lauterbach met Maria Kharina in an international relations class at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Appropriately, their own backgrounds made for an interesting international relationship.
Yitz was raised in an ultra-orthodox home in Philadelphia. In 2004, at the age of 18, he made aliyah and joined the Israel Defense Forces as a lone soldier, an army term for “those whose families live abroad and who have chosen to leave their countries of origin to serve the State of Israel." Religiously, Yitz became less observant.
Maria was born in the small Russian town of Revda, where there were very few Jews. Still, she felt the Zionist calling, and, in 2005, when she was 17, she too made aliyah and joined the army as a lone soldier.
Yitz and Maria didn’t meet until 2008. After becoming friends at Hebrew University, they maintained their friendship as they both enrolled in the university’s Baccalaureate Program. Then Yitz had to drop out when his father became ill and he went home to Philadelphia.
“Skyping kept us together for a year,” explains Maria. “We would Skype two to three hours a night. Luckily, I worked the night shift as a hotel receptionist, so the time difference between Jerusalem and Philadelphia wasn’t a problem.”
A decade ago, long-distance relationships were considered risky, and often doomed. However, a recent study conducted by Microsoft’s Idea Lab found that 47 percent of their respondents credit Skype with “keeping the love alive” while far apart.
2012-2013 was a transition year for Maria and Yitz. After his dad died, Yitz finished some projects he had started for the U.S. military, and then he made plans to return to Israel. “By that time, I was head over heels in love with Maria,” said Yitz. “I used to suck at the whole romance thing, but it happened so naturally with Maria. She’s the love of my life.”
Back in Jerusalem, they became a couple. Maria, who had completed a degree in Business Administration, was working at a conference center. One of Yitz’s favorite jobs was being a Birthright leader. “One guy from my group later joined the army, and he credits me,” Yitz reveals with pride. He’s also proud of his current work with the Israel Police.
In August 2013, the couple flew to the Amalfi Coast of Italy, where Yitz proposed. Among other things, it was important to Maria that “Yitz is a gentleman, and he doesn’t drink or curse.” She adds: “I also like it when he brings me flowers.” Yitz soon learned about the Russian custom for bringing flowers: Giving an even number of flowers is a bad omen, because they place an even number of flowers on graves.
Yitz and Maria planned their wedding for August 2014. However, a month earlier, following incessant rocket fire on Israel from Gaza, Israel launched its military operation, Protective Edge. Yitz reminisces: “Many of our friends from the army were unable to come to our wedding because they had emergency call-ups. My grandmother, Bella Reznick, from Philadelphia, almost had to cancel her flight; but luckily, she made it.”
As Yitz broke the glass under the marriage canopy to remember the destruction of the Second Temple, the officiating rabbi reminded the guests of a more recent tragedy – the scores of Israeli soldiers who had lost their lives in Tzuk Eitan.
Maria and Yitz were married in the Old City of Jerusalem on August 21, 2014. Mazal tov.Dr. Leah Hakimian currently researches the question: How Jewish couples meet and marry. In the 1990’s she founded two nonprofit Jewish matchmaking programs, and continues to champion the role of community in helping singles meet. She resides in Jerusalem and Great Neck, New York.
The Jewish Week
1501 Broadway, Suite. 505
New York, New York 10036 United States
___________________________________
___________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment