Dear Reader,
A new Pew Research Center study of religious practice in America finds the Jewish population holding steady, but indicates trends that are worrisome in terms of Jewish communal relations and support for Israel in the future. Managing Editor Rob Goldblum has the story, and our Editorial outlines the challenges.
NATIONAL
Less-Christian U.S. Seen ‘Disturbing’ For Jews On Israel
New Pew survey finds ‘stable’ Jewish population; decline in Christianity; sharp rise in unaffiliated.
Robert Goldblum
Managing Editor
The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has dropped from 78.4 in 2007 to 70.6 in 2014. Getty Images
With the religious landscape in America in the throes of dramatic change — it is less Christian, more Muslim and far more religiously unaffiliated than it was just seven years ago — the Jewish community has, perhaps surprisingly, remained stable.The country’s Jewish population ticked up ever so slightly from 2007, when it represented 1.7 percent of all U.S. adults, to 1.9 percent in 2014.
In addition, of all faith groups, Judaism has among the highest rates of retention, a fact that runs counter to a widespread trend of people leaving the religion of their childhood in a search for spiritual connection. Seventy-five percent of Jews surveyed continue to identify with their childhood faith. As religious identity becomes increasingly fluid — “religious switching,” the demographers call it — only Hindus (80 percent) and Muslims (77 percent) have higher retention rates than Jews.
These are several of the takeaways from a major study of some 35,000 Americans released this week by the Pew Research Center, the second such massive survey in the last seven years. In fact, one of the study’s authors, Alan Cooperman, Pew’s director of religion research, hailed the Jewish community’s stability.
“For Jews, the population figure may be a surprise,” he told The Jewish Week on the eve of the study’s release. “The big long-term trend is that Jewish population has been on the decline from the 1950s, when Jews represented 3 to 4 percent of theAmerican population. It has dropped since then. Here, we’re seeing stability.”
But despite the relative demographic stability of the Jewish community, the changes at play in the wider religious landscape will likely test Jewish leaders when it comes tocommunity relations and Israel. They will, given the emerging makeup of America’s religious landscape, almost certainly come under increasing pressure to make Israel’s case persuasively and to forge new coalitions to ensure communal priorities.
The Pew study, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,”
finds that the percentage of American who identify as Christian has dropped by nearly 8 points, from 78.4 percent in 2007 to 70.6 percent in 2014. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who say they are atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” — secularists who are generally believed to be less pro-Israel than more church-going Americans — spiked nearly 7 points, from 16.1 percent to nearly 23 percent.
There are now 56 million Americans who fall into that category, more than either Catholics or mainline Protestants. Among Christians, only evangelical Protestants outnumber the “nones,” as they are called.
In what could be a troubling sign for the Jewish community if the trend holds, Evangelicals — traditionally some of the Jewish state’s fiercest supporters — fell by 1 percentage point, from 26 percent to 25 percent of all American Christians.
America’s Catholic population, another source of strong support for Israel, is also on the decline, having fallen by 3.1 percent from 2007 to 2014, from 24 percent of all Christians to 21 percent. “Protestants have been on decline for several decades, and in the new study they declined both in share and absolute numbers,” Cooperman said. “Catholics, in the new study, are declining in share and absolute numbers — that’s new.”
Also, in the seven years between 2007 and last year, the percentage of Americans in non-Christian faiths — mostly Muslims and Hindus — has risen from 4.6 to nearly 6. Muslims rose from 0.4 percent of the U.S. population in 2007 to 0.9 percent in 2014, a small but statistically significant jump.
In addition, non-Hispanic whites are dwindling as a share of the overall Christian population, while Hispanics are a growing share of the Catholic, mainline Protestant and evangelical Christian populations.
All of this is likely to keep Jewish communal leaders up at night as they look out at an America that may be less friendly to Israel than it had been. Add to this the fact that more than half of Americans aged 18-29 in a Gallup poll said Israel was “unjustified” in its military response to persistent rocket fire from Hamas during last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip, and the anxiety may deepen.
“The news that American Christianity is on the decline is very disturbing in its implications for Jews,” said Steven Bayme, director of the Contemporary Jewish Life Department and the Koppelman Institute for American Jewish-Israel Relations at the American Jewish Committee. “Two central pillars of the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel are shaken by this survey.
“One is that unlike Europe, America has always been a distinctively religious, church-going society, and the base of pro-Israel support has always been there, especially in the Bible Belt. The incredible irony here, and the dominant motif of this survey, is that Jews have always feared a more Christian society. But American Christianity has been benign, at least since World War II and Vatican II. In fact, the Christianity of America has worked to shore up support for Israel.
“The paradox,” Bayme continued, “is that as Jews have feared a heavily Christian society, they should be welcoming of a growing secularization in America. But that secularization — especially in Europe — has been closely intertwined with anti-Israel sentiment. How those ‘nones’ are going to express themselves on Israel is very much open to question.”
The second pillar of the special U.S.-Israel relationship, Bayme pointed out is “an assertive American-Jewish community.” Given the American Jews’ assimilation and growing secularization, he wonders whether pro-Israel support will fade. “The challenge,” he said, “is whether we still have an assertive Jewish community” that supports Israel. He pointed to the annual Celebrate Israel parade, which will take place later in the month. “The people who attend that parade come from religious circles,” not secular ones.
In terms of a growing Muslim community, Bayme said, “The increase from 0.4 to 0.9 is sizeable, but it means that there are still about twice as many Jews as Muslims in the country. Islam in America is not like Islam in France. We shouldn’t assume that all Muslims are opponents of Israel. Historically, we’ve not done bridge building with Muslims. Now, it’s much too important to neglect.”
Regarding the demographics of the Jewish community, the current survey found that 44 percent of Jews identify as Reform (43 percent in 2007), 22 percent as Conservative (31 percent in 2007), 14 percent as Orthodox (10 percent in 2007), and 5 percent as other Jewish denominations. Sixteen percent of all Jews now say they identify with no particular branch of Judaism. (Some 850 Jews were surveyed.)
Of all religious groups, Jews and Hindus are the most highly educated and the most well-to-do. Nearly 80 percent of Hindus and nearly 60 percent of Jews are college graduates (the U.S. average is 27 percent), and 44 percent of Jews and 36 percent of Hindus report that their income is more than $100,000 (the U.S. average is 19 percent).
On intermarriage, the new Pew survey showed that 65 percent of Jewish marriages are made up of two Jewish spouses, while 35 percent have a spouse from a different religion. Jews and mainline Protestants have the oldest median age (50), and only 20 percent of all Jews fall into the 18-29 age cohort, compared with 33 percent of Muslims, 34 percent of agnostics and 37 percent of atheists. The Jewish community is also less white than it was in 2007. Today, 90 percent of Jews are white, down from 95 percent in 2007.
As for one of the survey’s central findings — the continued drift by young people away from affiliation with religious denominations, and the broad-based social change that has caused it — Pew’s Cooperman offered a recap of the leading explanations offered by sociologists. (In a much-publicized 2013 Pew study of the American Jewish community, 22 percent of Jews said they had no religion.) Many liberal-minded Americans, put off by the linkage of conservative religion and conservative politics have said, “If that’s what religion is today, I don’t want any part of it.” A second explanation suggests a correlation between delayed marriage (increased numbers of many Americans from many demographic groups are either getting married later in life, or not marrying at all) and decreases in church going.
Sociologist Robert Putnam’s now-famous metaphor for the breakdown in civic society — “bowling alone,” the title of his acclaimed 2000 book — is the basis for the third explanation: that American society is becoming more atomized and more distrusting of all institutions, not just religion; with that has come a loss of community. (The Internet has only deepened that trend.) And finally, the affluence/secularization argument suggests that as countries become wealthier and their citizens more educated, they also become less religious.
America is something of an outlier on the last point, Cooperman said, in that it is a wealthy but still very religious country. But in what must be an ominous note for Jewish leaders, he added that the U.S. “is finally falling in line with this pattern.”
robert@jewishweek.org EDITORIAL
Worrying Signs For Israel Support
The findings of a major new survey of religious practices in the U.S. by the Pew Research Center show that Jews are consistent with the trends of other Americans. Those trends indicate a significant move away from religious affiliation, particularly among the young, as found in a 2013 Pew study of American Jews.
The good news in the new study, released this week, is that the Jewish population has increased, however slightly, from 1.7 percent of Americans in 2007 to 1.9 percent in 2014. And the retention rate in Judaism is among the highest of all faiths, with 75 percent of American Jews identifying with the religion of their childhood.
But based on the survey of 35,000 people from across the country, there are serious challenges as well, particularly in terms of Jewish community relations with other faiths and continued support for Israel among Americans in general. Much of that support has been based on a religious affinity for Israel among Christians; the Pew study found a significant drop-off of Americans who identify as Christian, from 78.4 percent in 2007 to 70.6 percent last year. Also, the percentage of Americans who say they have no religious identity has increased during that time from 16.1 percent to nearly 23 percent.
“The news that American Christianity is on the decline is very disturbing in its implications for Jews,” Steven Bayme, an AJC expert on contemporary Jewish life, told The Jewish Week. (See story, page 1). He noted with irony that while Jews “have feared a heavily Christian society,” it is secularization, especially in Europe, that “has been closely intertwined with anti-Israel sentiment.”
Sociologists and religious leaders will be sifting through the new information for quite awhile. But it is clear that the Jewish community should be intensifying its outreach to the growing minority populations, including Hispanics and Muslims.
Martin Raffel, a longtime Jewish community relations professional, told The Jewish Week that “our relationship with the Muslim community has always been challenging, especially in terms of Middle East issues. But that community has to be engaged, and it should be engaged. ... As the saying goes, ‘To have a friend, you have to be a friend.’”
There is also work to be done within our own community. As the percentage of secular Jews grows, support for Israel and involvement in Jewish life can no longer be taken for granted. The narrow, hawkish government in Jerusalem today underscores the challenge of making Israel’s case at a time when U.S. and Israeli interests appear to be moving further apart and criticism of the Netanyahu government is heard openly from the White House.
What is required is conveying a deeper understanding of Mideast history, Zionist achievements and the persistent refusal of Israel’s enemies to recognize its right to exist. This needs to be done thoughtfully and creatively to Jews and other Americans who mistakenly view liberal values as inconsistent with Israel’s goals.
editor@jewishweek.org
A normally peaceful area of Sullivan County is the scene of a nasty legal battle over efforts to build a housing development being marketed to chasidic Jews. Staff Writer Stew Ain visited Bloomingburg, New York and reports on the conflict.NEW YORK
Bloomingburg Tensions Now Affecting Gov’t
Mounting legal war over housing for chasidim seen harming governance in sleepy Sullivan County town.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Shalom Lamm: No grand plan for chasidic town. Michael Datikash/JW
Bloomingburg, N.Y. — In the view of a Jewish developer, two Sullivan County municipalities are hotbeds of anti-Semitism whose governments have waged a concerted effort to derail his partially built housing development because it is being marketed to chasidic Jews.The two municipalities, in a federal lawsuit filed last month against the developer and his associates, alleged that they used “fraud, bribery and intimidation” to corruptly influence public officials to push through the 396-unit project “for the benefit of the racketeering enterprise they head.”
In the meantime, the stranglehold this conflict has on the two governments in the Catskills — the Village of Bloomingburg and the Town of Mamakating — has left them with mounting legal fees. And because the developer, Shalom Lamm, has sued the town and some public officials personally, many public officials have resigned.
“They are quitting on us in droves,” said William Herrmann, Mamakating’s town supervisor. “We have pretty much lost half of our boards over the last year — the planning board, town board, zoning board and ethics board — and we are having trouble filling those seats because of the constant threat of personal lawsuits.”
Lamm sued the town and village late last year seeking federal court intervention to “stop pervasive, government-sponsored religious discrimination.” The complaint said the municipalities, “acting on behalf of an aggressive and hateful group of their residents, are engaged in a conspiracy to prevent chasidic Jews from buying houses, establishing a private religious school, establishing a mikveh [ritual bath] and operating businesses in their community.”
The municipalities, the complaint continued, “are engaged in a series of patently illegal actions to block lawful, approved, and long-planned developments in Bloomingburg and Mamakating.”
“We didn’t sleep too well with this hanging over us,” Herrmann confided. “But I’m sleeping a lot better since [our] suit was filed [last month] because I want this in front of a federal judge and maybe a jury where they will hear all the facts and see who is right and wrong.”
Town and village officials along with community residents interviewed uniformly insisted that anti-Semitism has nothing to do with their attempts to stop the development. Instead, they said, they are trying to block its completion because Lamm and his associates played a bait-and-switch game abetted by corrupt public officials.
As they see it, the developers applied in 2006 to build a 125-unit gated community for retired second homeowners that would have no impact on the schools. But in 2012, after the mile-long village approved the project and annexed land from the town for it, residents discovered the project had became a 396-unit development that was being heavily marketed to chasidic Jews.
Lamm, a Modern Orthodox Jew who is the son of Rabbi Norman Lamm, a former chancellor of Yeshiva University, insisted that his project was always 396 units and challenged opponents to produce one document saying otherwise. They have not.
But the 396-unit project, the municipalities argued in their suit, would “bring thousands of residents to overrun the tiny Village of Bloomingburg, a village of just over 400 residents, which is committed to preserving its rural character and natural beauty by limited development and strictly enforced zoning.”
Standing atop a mountain overlooking the village, Bloomingburg Mayor Frank Gerardi pointed to the development, below that was carved out of the greenery surrounding it.
“It’s going to blight the landscape,” he said, shaking his head. “It stands out like a sore thumb. … This was all farmland.”
Fifty-one of the townhouses have already been built, including three model homes. Some units are selling for $334,000 and others for $299,000, Lamm said.
The village only began inspecting each unit last week at the rate of two per day. Based upon the inspections that have been completed, Gerardi said, changes would be required before they are deemed up to code and could be granted a certificate of occupancy.
Lamm showed a reporter and photographer one of the models last week. It was a three-bedroom home with a 9-foot ceiling in the entrance, wood floors and marble bathrooms. Hanging on a wall by the front entrance were two photographs of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the late founder of Satmar chasidim.
Those photos would not come as a surprise to Teek Persaud, co-owner for the past 28 years of the Quickway Diner located on the outskirts of the village, who said that a 16-page color brochure touting the development in Yiddish had been inserted into a chasidic newspaper, Der Yid, which is published by Satmar chasidim in Williamsburg and read throughout the chasidic community.
Lamm said the brochure was not his, that he does not speak Yiddish, and that “the Satmars sent it out to encourage friends and family to move here.”
He stressed that he had no hidden agenda to bring in Satmar chasidim.
“If blacks, Chinese, Indians, gays or other groups wants to move here, come on in,” Lamm said.
The brochure proclaimed in large letters: “A new Jewish settlement in Bloomingburg, N.Y., for Satmar chasidim.” The development is officially called Chestnut Ridge, but on the brochure it was called Kiryas Yetev Lev. Yetev Lev was the acronym for one of Rabbi Teitelbaum’s ancestors. The name is similar to that of another Satmar chasidic village 30 minutes south in Orange County, Kiryas Joel, which has a population of 21,000.
Asked if he believed this area might one day become another Kiryas Joel, Persaud replied: “It crosses our minds.”
Herrmann agreed that the homes “look nice and pretty — but for the city and Long Island, not here. This is a small community. There are no sidewalks and there is no traffic. … My school tax is 65 percent of my total tax bill and it costs the school $17,000 per child. A large-scale development kills the taxes for everyone else.”
He noted that the cost increases for special needs students and for students who are taught English as a second language; Yiddish is the primary language of Satmar chasidim.
Herrmann said the fear is that Lamm and his associates have only begun to change the rural landscape.
“There is a concept in municipal law that speaks of segmentation,” he said. “You have to explain [to the municipality] that this isn’t just a project for 100 homes or 1,000 homes” but rather is part of a larger project in the future.
In that way, the board could consider the total project and its impact on the water supply, sewers and roads to see if the community “could support” it all, he said. Herrmann added that a check of town records found that Lamm has bought a total of 2,000 acres in Mamakating near Bloomingburg.
“Why accumulate 2,000 acres?” he asked.
Lamm said he has bought “a lot” of land but denied it totals 2,000 acres. And he insisted that he has no grand, overarching development plan.
Before word spread that chasidim were moving to the community, Lamm said, “I was the most popular guy around.”
But since then, the hostility in the community has become palpable. The windows of the pizza shop and the kosher bakery he owns were broken on five separate occasions. One man has been convicted in connection with the incidents and is awaiting sentencing. And when walking to synagogue with his children and a group of chasidim one Friday night, they were confronted by a group of about 15 protestors with a bullhorn.
“Go back to where you came from,” they screamed. “This is illegal.”
And a neighbor who erected a 20-foot tall cross just feet from Chestnut Ridge last Christmas has kept it there. Lamm said it informs “new chasidic residents that they are unwelcome.”
“The cross is a symbol of peace, but when used as a tool of violence and fear, it is very troubling,” he said.
Holly Roche, who is Jewish and leader of the largest community group opposed to the development, Rural Community Coalition, insisted: “Anti-Semitism is not rampant in this community.”
The problem, she maintained, is that residents are “watching their civil rights being ripped asunder. Criminal activity is occurring and it is changing our quality of life.”
She said a 65-man team from the FBI’s public corruption squad descended on Bloomingburg last year and raided Lamm’s offices. Lamm confirmed the probe, but nothing has come of it so far.
Aaron Rabiner, a chasidic Jew who was recently elected to one of two trustee positions in Bloomingburg, pointed out that many of the project’s critics live outside the village — including Roche — and that they “are trying to disrupt the peace.”
Rabiner is part of an influx of about 40 chasidic families that have moved to Bloomingburg over the past few years. “People in the village want to unite, have peace and want our little village to prosper and grow in a positive way,” he said.
Rabiner added that the village’s failure to expeditiously grant certificates of occupancy to the new development means that they are not paying taxes while the village amasses “a tremendous amount in legal fees — $50,000 while our whole budget is $300,000.”
Bloomingburg is also the community that serves the Pine Bush School District, which in 2012 was sued by the parents of five Jewish students for permitting “rampant anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment” and “deliberate indifference” by administrators. A federal judge has declined to dismiss the case and ordered a trial.
Evan Bernstein, New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said his organization began working in the school district last year to address anti-Semitism. And this past winter he said the ADL held a community-wide training session with members of the community on how to confront anti-Semitism.
He said he found that secular Jews did not understand the “different styles of Judaism, and people said they have never interacted with someone who looks that religious.”
“Our hope is to build bridges between the secular Jewish community and the ultra-Orthodox population because so much of it is misunderstanding. We are going to develop lines of communication between them,” he said, adding, “We can’t make progress in the general community when the internal Jewish community is so polarized.”
Herrmann drove a reporter around his town last week. He stopped at a Jewish cemetery and said: “We have a 24 or 25 percent Jewish population. As you can see, no stones are broken or toppled over and there is no graffiti.”
He then stopped in front of a synagogue.
“You see, no graffiti or broken windows. You can’t say this is an anti-Semitic community. … He [Lamm] keeps saying these things hoping someone will believe him.”
Earlier, Herrmann said: “This community has been lied to and deceived; it is unbelievable what they have done to my community. And when people learned of the betrayal and deceit, they said you can’t do this in America.”
Persaud, the diner owner, said he normally does not get involved in local disputes, preferring to befriend everyone. But he said he could not remain on the sidelines in this matter because of the blatant “corruption and bribery” that took place.
Persaud noted that his father moved the family to the United States from British Guiana when he was 14 “because of the corruption there — but this is worse.”
Although wrongdoing by former village and town officials has been alleged for the past three years — and the town and village lawsuit reads like a federal racketeering indictment — no arrests or charges have been filed against anyone.
stewart@jewishweek.org
Associate Editor Jonathan Mark looks at the quixotic bid for President by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the 73-year-old Jewish socialist from Vermont.NATIONAL
Sharing The Wealth
Stickball, socialism and Bernie Sanders’ run for the White House.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Sen. Bernie Sanders. Getty Images
The quixotic bid by Sen. Bernie Sanders — a 73-year-old Jewish socialist — for the presidency of the United States, evokes a mythical long-ago for some Jewish leftists; a time when even the poor wore suits to demonstrations, carrying “red diaper” babies; when socialism was as common as stickball, speaking its dreams with a street-corner accent, as does Sanders. He represents Vermont in Congress but also his childhood Brooklyn, a workingman’s borough of blue collars and unions, hand-to-mouthpaychecks, immigrants, socialist Yiddish broadsheets and a Yiddish radio station whose very call-letters, WEVD, honored Eugene V. Debs, a founder of the legendary Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) and five times a candidate for president, each time defeated but never thinking himself a loser.They were mostly secular, but with messianic dreams. There was plenty to dream about: an end to the misery of tenements, sweatshops and industrial abuse; an end to tragedies such as the young women dying by their sewing machines or jumping out of windows during the Triangle Fire of 1911. Three times, beginning in 1914, the Lower East Side elected a Debs disciple, Meyer London, a Lithuanian-born Jew, to represent them in Congress.
London was ambivalent about Zionism, refusing to introduce a congressional resolution supporting the Balfour Declaration. In 1918, the resolution passed in spite of him, and he was defeated soon after.
Old Jewish arguments never die, and don’t fade away. In 2010, 84 years after London died, his cousin, Tony Judt, the British essayist, wrote in The New York Review of Books that London lost his seat because of “an ignominious alliance of wealthy New York Jews disturbed by his socialism and American Zionists aghast at his well-publicized suspicion of their project.” In truth, most Lower East Side voters were hardly wealthy in 1918, but they were aghast.
All that is Sanders’ inheritance, too. He openly admits to not being religious, is married to a Catholic woman, and the Religious News Service says he is “the presidential contender most willing to dissociate himself from religion.” After graduating the University of Chicago in 1964, Sanders spent several months working on a kibbutz. But Sanders, the Senate’s only Independent (though he’s running as a Democrat), boycotted Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent speech to Congress. Nevertheless, during the Gaza war of 2014, when confronted by a fiercely angry anti-Israel town hall meeting in Vermont, where Israel was accused of civilian “massacres,” Sanders sharply reminded them that Hamas had been launching rockets into Israel, had hid those rockets in Gaza population centers, and built military tunnels into Israel. When the anti-Israel crowd tried to shout him down, Sanders told them to “shut up” and let him finish.
In 2008, another presidential candidate was called a “socialist,” and friends and enemies of Barack Obama agreed it was a slur. In 2011, John Nichols’ history of American socialism called it “The ‘S’ Word.” That same year, a Pew survey found “socialism” to be the most polarizing and pejorative of any political label, with 60 percent of Americans having a negative reaction to the word.
Nevertheless, deep within that survey were hints of a socialist renaissance: 49 percent of young people (18-29) thought “socialism” positive, as did 55 percent of blacks and 44 percent of Hispanics.
Income disparity, a socialist complaint as far back as Debs, is suddenly not Sanders’ issue alone. According to the Associated Press, “Of all the buzzwords and phrases popping up early in the presidential campaign, ‘income inequality’ must be close to the top of the list. And it’s not just Democrats” saying so. “Republican candidates, too, are playing up the notion that people at the bottom of the economic ladder are getting a raw deal while the rich get richer.” And not just presidential candidates but mayors, such as New York’s Bill de Blasio, who has been speaking about income inequality across the country as if he were a candidate, criticizing the incumbent. After all, reports the AP, during Obama’s first term, “Incomes for the highest-earning 1 percent of Americans rose 31 percent” (adjusted for inflation). “For everyone else, it inched up an average of 0.4 percent.”
During the Depression, a Fortune magazine poll found 35 percent of Americans saying government should impose “heavy taxes on the rich.” Today, that number is up to 52 percent (according to a 2015 Gallup poll), and up to 32 percent of conservatives.
Not long ago, a socialist couldn’t get elected president of his shul, let alone president of the United States. But Chabad.org recently posted, “successive rebbes indicated that socialism and Judaism are not entirely at odds.”
This year, Sanders’ legislative program called for a “revolution” in college tuition, actually no tuition at all for freshmen and sophomores in public colleges, and reforms of federal student loans. He introduced legislation to “break up the Wall Streetbanks,” saying, “No financial institution should have holdings so extensive that its failure could send the world economy into crisis.”
The rights and dignity of workers has long been at the heart of the Jewish socialist agenda, and few organizations have been at the barricades longer than the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), formed in 1934, bringing together the Workmen’s Circle (Arbeiter Ring), the Jewish Labor Bund and United Hebrew Trades. The JLC’s associate director, Arieh Lebowitz, is quick to remind us that as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization the JLC cannot endorse candidates, but with a Jewish socialist running for president, well, there’s no law against telling the old stories, is there?
“From the beginning of the 20th century until the time of [Franklin] Roosevelt,” says Lebowitz, “a lot of working-class Jewish voters voted only for socialist candidates.” Then the New Deal adopted “ideas first proposed by the socialists,” such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, rights to housing, increased regulation of Wall Street. Even at that, a lot of people didn’t feel comfortable voting for Democrats, so they set up the American Labor Party,” and nominated Roosevelt on that ticket.
Voting for Roosevelt on the Labor ticket gave Jewish socialists permission, in a sense, to later vote for Roosevelt on the Democratic line. “It’s my sense,” says Lebowitz, “that the socialists never regained the majority of Jewish voters.” Jews also became more middle class, moving away from the blue-collar trades. Add to that the soaring rates of assimilation, and “We’re all playing somewhat different roles than we did decades earlier,” he added. “Maybe some people don’t want to call it socialism, but the right of workers to organize and get better working conditions is still relevant.”
What helped make socialism a dirty word, says Lebowitz, was its flirtation with and forgiveness of Soviet communism. The issue, he said, split Jewish socialists like “the Hatfields and McCoys.”
The feud continued for decades. In 1929, Arab riots in the Yishuv (pre-state Israel) killed 130 Jews, a “pogrom” said the socialist Yiddish paper, the Morgen Freiheit. Then, to placate communists, the Freiheit turned and pinned the blame on “Zionist-fascist” provocations. According to the Marginalia Review of Books, socialists angered by the new editorial policy “almost drove the Yiddish daily out of business. Vendors refused to sell the newspaper, businesses pulled their advertisements, and nearly all of its best writers quit in protest.”
Ten years later, in 1939, the movement was divided by the Hitler-Stalin pact that directly led to the annihilation of Polish Jewry (including most of the Sanders family). A 2009 documentary, “At Home In Utopia,” shown on PBS, told the story of an entirely socialist cooperative apartment complex in the Bronx. Boris Ourlicht, whose family lived there, told the filmmakers that it was considered perfectly acceptable for Boris and other young men to set up a soapbox in the early evening, when people would be getting off the subway, “and start talking about how wonderful the pact was.” The Soviet treaty with Hitler, they said, was good for “peace.”
In 1953, just weeks after the notorious “Doctor’s Plot” that rounded up Jews on fabricated charges, and with thousands of Jews freezing in Siberian prison camps, Stalin died. Yossi Klein Halevi, in his book “Like Dreamers,” writes how Kibbutz Ein Shemer, affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair, “went into mourning.” The Purim play was cancelled. The Hashomer Hatzair newspaper, whose logo read, “For Zionism – For Socialism,” had “a heroic image of Stalin” on the front page, with the headline, “The Progressive World Mourns.”
And so “socialism” still rankles many Jews, though too many of the economic problems that motivated the socialists remain. Says Lebowitz, “Pete Hamill used to say, don’t call it socialism, call it stickball.” Lebowitz added, “social justice” is really the same thing. There are now 47 organizations from every denomination, and from no denominations at all, in the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, “pursuing social justice from a Jewish perspective,” says Lebowitz, “using Jewish vocabulary, Jewish texts, Jewish history, Jewish resonance.”
And now one of their own is running for president.
When he was a young man in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders was intrigued by stickball.
jonathan@jewishweek.org
Also this week, preparing to mark Jerusalem Day in Riverdale; Jewish bioethicists weigh in on Johnson & Johnson experimental drug panel; new coalition in Israel may be too narrow to be effective; Culture Editor Sandee Brawarsky on Sami Rohr Prize-winner's collection of stories, "The Best Place On Earth"; and our Food and Wine section features wines for Shavuot, and the poignant story of a vegetarian Yiddish cookbook, circa 1938.NEW YORK
A Jerusalem ‘That Brings People Together’
Riverdale event draws wide range of Jews to mark Jerusalem Day.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
In May 1967, for the first time since the Holocaust, Jews were digging mass graves for themselves, expecting the worst from the coming war in which Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and 13 allied armies threatened to destroy the Jewish State. In the cool of the morning of June 7, Israel went from apocalyptic fear to the shofar of Redemption blowing, and the words crackling on army radio, “the Temple Mount is in our hands.”
As Yossi Klein Halevi tells it in his award-winning book, “Like Dreamers,” the thoughts of young soldiers “drifted into history,” realizing they would be “the first soldiers of a sovereign Jewish state in 18 centuries to enter the capital of the Jewish people.” Even secular soldiers kissed the Wall where no Jew had been allowed to stand in 19 years, and then they were on the Temple Mount and Jewish history was forever changed. In the grit of war, the 28th of Iyar became not just a holiday but a holy day, Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day.
In 1967, no one could have imagined that in less than 50 years Yom Yerushalayim (this Sunday, May 17) would fall on hard times. Once widely celebrated, it has almost disappeared from the communal map, not even listed on many Jewish calendars. Attempting a revival, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale is hosting a Yom Iyun (day of learning), celebrating “the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem,” celebrating Jewish unity on the anniversary of Jerusalem’s unification.
HIR Rabbi Steven Exler tells us, “Yerushalayim is meant to be a place that brings people together, opening our hearts to what’s possible in the world.” In that spirit, the event is bringing together a rare if not unprecedented (at least since the early post-war years) “diversity of voices, all kinds of shiurim [classes],” reflecting on Jerusalem’s significance “through art, history, religious significance,” with teachings and conversations aiming at “breaking down barriers.” Along with HIR’s Rabbi Exler and Senior Rabbi Avi Weiss, some of the participating groups will be Camp Ramah-Nyack (Conservative), Bnei Akiva (an Orthodox youth organization), the Sholom Hartman Institute, CLAL, AIPAC, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), Yeshivat Chovivei Torah, Yeshivat Maharat, the Drisha Institute, Mechon Hadar (an egalitarian yeshiva), and the UJA-Federation of New York.
The day will begin, says Rabbi Exler, with a Tefillah Chagigit, davening appropriate for a festival, including Jerusalem melodies, Hallel with a bracha (blessing), and a spiritual sense “that Jerusalem, as it is today, is absolutely a modern miracle.”
Rabbi Exler hopes people will take away an awareness that Yom Yerushalayim “deserves its own special attention” and that the day’s conversations and teachings reaffirm not only Jewish dreams and unity but Jerusalem’s “point of commonality between people who otherwise have religious and political differences.”
The event runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with prayers at 8 a.m. and will take place at Hebrew Institute, 3700 Henry Hudson Parkway in the Bronx. Admission is $45.
NEW YORK
Jewish Bioethicists Weigh In On Johnson & Johnson Panel
Plan to arbitrate experimental drug requests raises question of whether Jewish law allows doctors to prioritize one life over another.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
NYU’s Arthur L. Caplan to head new Johnson & Johnson ethics panel. Wikimedia Commons
The emotional debate over whether companies should allow desperately ill people to have access to experimental drugs was reignited last week afterJohnson & Johnson announced the appointment of a panel to arbitrate patient requests. The move, announced by the company on Thursday, is believed to be the first of its kind in the industry. The panel will be headed by bioethicist Arthur L. Caplan of New York University, who has written extensively about the issue of experimental drug availability, known as “compassionate use.”
“Pharmaceutical companies have long regarded all of their information as propriety data, not to be shared with anyone, but this is starting to change,” Caplan told The Jewish Week via email.
Caplan, himself Jewish, noted that different religious traditions will be heard by the panel. He also noted that his Jewish education plays a role in his deep concern for human life.
Though drug companies have been granting emergency access to their unapproved drugs since the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, saying yes leads inevitably to anguished decisions over who should be given the medicine. The lens of Jewish medical ethics adds another level of complexity to the already thorny issue of fairness and equal access to care.
“Within Jewish tradition, one of the strongest mandates is to save a person’s life,” said Rabbi Elliot Dorff, professor of bioethics at American Jewish University and author of a book on modern medical ethics. “However, tradition is not blind to the fact that there are scarce resources.”
Rabbi Dorff also raised the question of collective benefit versus personal benefit, one question that arises if a drug is distributed before testing is completed.
“At whose cost do you provide experiment drugs to those who are desperate?” he said. “Delaying the clinical process could delay the drug being made available to everyone.”
Still, he said, nobody should expect the panel to be able to address all the issues connected to compassionate use. “We all want neat and clean guidelines for how to proceed in tricky matters of life and death,” he said. “But that isn’t possible, and can’t be expected.”
Kenneth Feinberg, the attorney best known for serving as the special master of the Federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001, reiterated that while there is no easy way to choose one case over another, the law does provide certain guidelines for the ethical prioritization of patients. He mentioned age, pre-existing conditions, strength, contributory negligence (such as smoking), and, the most equivocal, “intrinsic” worth to society, or “communitarian impact.”
“A doctor who practices medicine and assists others in the healing process might be more highly valued than a busboy,” said Feinberg. “It’s a harsh reality, but life is made up of harsh realities.”
He added that a communitarian ethic, stressing the collective responsibility to assist the individual, is consistent with Jewish thought.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — the community has an obligation to help the individual,” said Feinberg, himself Jewish.
While law may provide certain guidelines for the prioritization of one patient over another, Jewish law adheres to a “first-come, first-serve” methodology, according to Rabbi Moshe Tendler, leading scholar in medical ethics at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school (RIETS).
“Today, everyone must be treated equally,” he said, noting that evaluating the risks versus the benefits of experimental treatment is a critical first step. “We cannot play God and choose one life over another.”
Though choosing one case over another may be undesirable, the volume of patients seeking compassionate use today makes it necessary, said Rabbi Mark Washofsky, longtime faculty member at Hebrew Union College (HUC-JIR) and author of several responsa, or rabbinic decisions, on Jewish bioethics.
“The panel’s task is reminiscent of the old Jewish discussion: If several people are in the dessert and there’s not enough water to go around, who drinks?” he said. “One school of thought says that we don’t decide, fate must decide. The other way of making the decision is based upon medical effectiveness — who is more likely to benefit?”
Following the Jewish mandate to “heal and be healed,” a decision made on the basis of who will benefit more is a sound decision according to Jewish law, he said. “Most seeking experimental treatments are in an advanced stage of disease,” he said. “If the experts on this panel decide that a particular recipient wouldn’t have a chance of success even if given access to the drug, giving that supply to someone else is an ethically justifiable decision.”
In recent years, families desperate to gain access to unapproved treatments have taken to social media, lobbying for sick loved ones via online campaigns and petitions. Efforts to shame companies into granting their requests have often failed in the past, because drug makers fear that permitting advanced access might interfere withclinical trials.
Still, the question of whether a company is ethically obliged to make such treatments available remains pertinent.
According to Jewish medical ethics expert Rabbi Kenneth Brander, the question of a company’s responsibility to the patient presents conflicting values.
“On the one hand, as long as the drug has been proven by medical experts to be effective and the patient is being encouraged by an expert in the field, then the ‘ill person in front of us’ needs to be our first priority,” said Rabbi Brander, staff adviser of the Medical Ethics Society at Yeshiva University, quoting from a Talmudic discussion about medical precedence.
On the other hand, there is a biblical commandment to heal in a responsible manner, he said.
“One must be guided by both. This means we must insure the efficacy of medicines and leave that process to knowledgeable people with appropriate practice protocols,” he said.
Still, “messing up testing regimes” is a risk that cannot be underestimated, said Rabbi Warshofsky. “If careful and fastidious trials are the best way to advance medicine, intervening with the orderly development of drugs could cause far-reaching problems,” he said. “Jewish ethics wouldn’t object to making trial drugs available, as long as that doesn’t hurt anyone else,” he said, stressing the qualification. “If the general public is denied access to a drug because protocol has been disrupted for one individual, that could very well qualify as hurting others.”
Though a company does take risks by releasing a drug before it has completed clinical trials, in Jewish law it would be a difficult case to make to withhold treatments once they are in the final experimental stage, said Rabbi J. David Bleich, professor of Jewish Law and Ethics at Cardozo Law School.
“Good science doesn’t always means good ethics,” said Bleich, who has represented the Orthodox perspective on bioethics in front of Congress and in several governmental deliberations. “Until now, pharmaceutical companies have largely made decisions based own their own, internal considerations.” The Johnson & Johnson panel, he said, is a significant improvement.
“They will be faced with difficult, and oftentimes painful, dilemmas,” he concluded. “But these cases will be under the eye of ethical scrutiny in a formal setting for the first time. It’s a huge step forward.”
hannah@jewishweek.org
ISRAEL NEWS
Too Narrow To Move?
Netanyahu’s tissue-thin coalition already coming under pressure from a number of quarters.
Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent
Political watchers are questioning the long-term stability of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Getty Images
Tel Aviv — On the evening of his sweeping come-from-behind election victory, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to move swiftly to form a new government, saying that Israel could spare no time to meet political challenges at home and abroad.But nearly two months later, the four-time prime minister still has not brought his government to the parliament for a vote of confidence. Netanyahu has had to endure drawn-out negotiations with coalition partners that concluded just minutes before the legal expiration of his mandate last Wednesday.
Now, with a tissue-thin coalition of 61 of the parliament’s 120 seats, the prime minister is taking the maximum time under law to dole out cabinet positions among legislators in his Likud Party. Though the goal is to buy loyalty to the government by deputizing as many ministers and deputy ministers as possible, the process doesn’t bode well for the future stability of a coalition that will be constantly exposed to the threats of individual coalition members.
While some believe that a narrowly constructed coalition of like-minded right-wing and religious parties will succeed in forming a joint agenda, most Israeli analysts say the seeds are already being sown for the next elections in another two years.
“There is a major issue of trust between the coalition members,” said Yochanan Plessner, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute and a former Knesset member.
Plessner was referring to Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett, the leader of the nationalist religious Jewish Home Party, who are known to dislike one another and have clashed over the prime minister’s handling of the Gaza war during the last government. Bennett represents the charismatic face of the next generation of right-wing leadership in Israel who, say observers, is presumably waiting for the right time to try to displace the prime minister.
The question of settlement expansion in the West Bank is shaping up to be the main policy fissure between the two in the upcoming government. While Jewish Home is known as a pro-settler party and much of Netanyahu’s Likud has an ideological loyalty to building throughout the West Bank, analysts note that the prime minister isn’t liable to pursue the policies with much gusto.
That’s because Israel’s new government is the country’s most far-right coalition in a generation, without a moderate or dovish party to reassure the international community about the future of peace talks with the Palestinians. With the Palestinians pushing new initiatives at the United Nations and other international bodies aimed at upgrading their diplomatic standing, the prime minister will be loathe to approve provocative settlement-building projects that will make the international community more likely to support the Palestinians in their diplomatic initiatives.
Another landmine in the road ahead for the government is a Supreme Court order for the government to evacuate Amona, a West Bank settler outpost that the high court ruled was built on private land. Some members of Bennett’s party have said that the party will bolt the coalition if the government complies with such an order.
“Settlements could tear apart the government,” said Amir Tibon, a diplomatic correspondent for the Israeli news site Walla! “If Bibi gets to a point where settlement construction needs to be restrained for awhile, what does Bennett do? He could wake up in a year and tell Bibi, ‘Either we annex the Etzion bloc or I’m out of the government,” Tibon said, referring to a settlement region southwest of Jerusalem that is widely expected to remain inside Israel as part of a peace deal.
The prime minister’s aides said last week that he wants to eventually broaden his coalition, and would try to lure the opposition leader from the dovish Zionist Union Party, Isaac Herzog, to join as foreign minister. The problem is that it became more difficult for Herzog to join the government after Netanyahu ended up with an unexpectedly narrow coalition. Herzog, who might face a challenge to retain leadership of the Labor Party, won’t want to be the person to save Netanyahu right now. The other options for Netanyahu are to try to lure individual legislators from the opposition to break with party ranks and cross the line; or to call for fresh general elections.
Domestically, the coming inauguration of Netanyahu’s fourth government is spurring concern that conservatives from Jewish Home and Likud will seek to pass legislation to erode institutions considered the last bastion of Israeli liberalism, such as the Supreme Court. Incoming Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked has said that the Israeli high court’s tendency to strike down laws passed by the Knesset is a sign that the judiciary has become too powerful, and that balance of power between branches of government needs to be recalibrated.
She has also backed laws to limit non-governmental organizations from getting funding from foreign governments and a quasi-constitutional basic law to elevate Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic values.
Many believe that the coalition’s narrow majority will render such judicial reform impossible. What’s more, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and his centrist Kulanu Party are strongly opposed to any far-reaching reform of the legal system. Gradual change, he said, is possible.
“If they try to bite off more than they can chew they won’t accomplish anything,” said Gil Hoffman, a political commentator for the Jerusalem Post. “If they nibble, then they can succeed.”
What the government is expected to accomplish is a rollback of policies adopted over the last two years to end entitlements for the ultra-Orthodox and help prod the burgeoning population of men from yeshivas into the workplace. With Shas and the United Torah Judaism parties back in the coalition after being left in the opposition in the previous parliament, they are expected to restore funding for charedi schools that don’t teach core secular curriculum. They also are expected to restore subsidies for yeshivas and to families with at least three children. That will be a disincentive for yeshiva students to get jobs.
“People were leaving [yeshivas] because of necessity and not ideology, and now that incentive won’t be there,’’ said Dov Lipman, a U.S.-born rabbi who served as a legislator in the previous parliament. He too believes the government’s days might be numbered.
The main part of the coalition’s agenda is expected to ride on Kahlon, who has promised major reforms in Israel’s housing market, food retail market and consumer banking — all with the goal of making the cost of living more affordable in Israel and reining in runaway inflation in real estate. But with just 61 votes, passing major economic reform will be nearly impossible for Kahlon, who is expected to pressure Netanyahu to widen the government to strengthen its bare majority. If no one joins, Netanyahu and Kahlon could be stymied on the economy.
“Kahlon will find it difficult to deliver on his agenda, and if that’s the case I can’t see him continuing for very long,” said Plessner. “He received a mandate for economic change, not economic stagnation.”
editor@jewishweek.org
BOOKS
‘To Tell Mizrahi Stories’
Rohr Prize-winner Ayelet Tsabari is a writer on a mission.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Tsabari’s stories are peopled with the children and grandchildren of imigrants from Yemen, Iraq and Morocco. HarperCollins
To read Ayelet Tsabari’s stories is to walk right into the living room of an elderly Yemenite grandmother cared for by a young Filipina woman in Rosh HaAyin, or a loud Tel Aviv bar filled with soldiers in varying degrees of off-duty, or to have tea in a backyard garden on an island off Vancouver, where license plates read “The Best Place on Earth.”Born in Israel and now living in Toronto, Tsabari writes with an uncommon immediacy and energy. As she tells The Jewish Week, she’s a writer with a mission — “to tell Mizrahi stories,” referring to Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent, who were largely absent from the books she read growing up. While she’s writing though, she’s not thinking about a specific message.
“If I did, it wouldn’t make for a good story,” she says. “When I write, I just write.”
Tsabari was in New York City last week to receive the 2015 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature (with its $100,000 cash award) for her debut collection of stories, “The Best Place on Earth.” The book was published by Harper Collins Canada and will be published in the U.S. next year by Random House. She was accompanied by her husband and toddler daughter, and her mother and two of her brothers came from Israel for the ceremonies.
Tsabari grew up in Petah Tikveh, outside of Tel Aviv, with five siblings in her Yemenite family. She sees herself in all of the characters in this collection, and admits a soft spot for the sensitive young boy Uri in “The Poets in the Kitchen Window.” That story is set during Operation Desert Storm, when Uri and his family carry their gas masks everywhere and frequently hear the sirens that send them into sealed rooms and underground shelters. Initially Uri hides his love of poetry so that he isn’t made fun of in school, but when his sister brings him a volume of poetry by an Iraqi writer who found inspiration in the streets of their Ramat Gan neighborhood, he begins filling notebooks with new poems and images. Uri’s sister has just returned from India; his mother is in a psychiatric hospital and his father is largely absent, as “poems tugged at him.”
The author also mentions the young narrator in “Warplanes” who, like Tsabari, lost her father during the time of the Lebanon War. The narrator laments that he doesn’t get the attention or honor that those who are war heroes (and their families) receive; her beloved father died of a weak heart. The story takes place in September, just before Rosh HaShanah, when it’s not supposed to rain, but the air feels heavy with moisture, “like being draped in a sheet just out of a washing machine.”
Tsabari’s father — to whom the book is dedicated — was a lawyer and also a poet. In an early poem he wrote, “A poet’s craft is an artist’s kingdom/not for you, son of Yemen.” That line breaks her heart. Haim Tsabari published one poem in 1967. After he died, his friends published a volume of his poetry.
Her stories are peopled with the children and grandchildren of immigrants from Yemen, Iraq and Morocco, children of Sinai settlers, illegal workers, displaced and transient Israelis and others who, like the title of one story, have been “Invisible.” In these stories, family ties — between siblings, between parents and children — are sometimes stretched and pulled, but they are elastic, with room to bounce back and chances for forgiveness.
Tsabari has been writing since she was a child. Even before she knew how to write, she would create comic strips and tell stories. When she was 10, she had her first publication in an Israeli children’s magazine.
Although her native language is Hebrew, Tsabari now writes in English, as she has been doing since 2006. (She has lived in Canada for 16 years.)
“It wasn’t a conscious decision,” she explains. “There was no definitive moment. I went a few years without writing at all. I felt lost between languages — I wasn’t using Hebrew that much and my English wasn’t good enough, and I felt at the time that it would never be good enough. It was a painful and lengthy process.”
Eventually, she says that she had to go for it, to risk the ridicule. “It’s a good way to keep you humble,” she says.
“What I miss most about Hebrew is something not really identifiable. It’s what you miss at home, the feel of it, the smell of it,” she says, adding, “There’s something very comfortable about Hebrew. Like an old shirt.”
At times, “Hebrew butts in. A word, a phrase. I just let it. I don’t like to interfere too much and will write the Hebrew words in English lettering.”
Does she think about again living in Israel? “All the time. I wish I had an easier time with committing to just staying where I am. I’m happy. Canada is a great country. Wonderful things happened to me in Canada,” she says. While she knows people who are content where they are, she is tortured. “I struggle every time I go, for along period of time. I think, I could do this. I could be home again.”
So how did she end up in Canada, married to a Canadian man, raising their 2-year-old daughter — she speaks Hebrew to her — in Toronto?
“There’s always a guy,” she laughs. In her 20s, she drifted, like many Israelis, to India; she met a Canadian man there and moved back to Vancouver with him. “It wasn’t a calculated plan, I wasn’t thinking of moving for good, but why not?” The relationship ended, and she stayed. She moved to Toronto six years ago.
When she began writing in English, she wanted to fit in, but she became increasingly aware that she wasn’t North American. Rather, she recognized that her heritage and upbringing shaped her personality and informs her writing, both in content and style.
She has long loved the Bible — she’s admittedly not a religious person but sees no contradiction in this. She thinks of much Jewish writing as having “a sentimental tone, a little big somber, with longing. I feel like there’s much of that in my writing, and also the sense of drama and conflict. Those passions are very Israeli.”
In her office, there’s a large mirror and she makes use of it. She used to act and she speaks certain lines out loud as she is writing. She’ll look at the mirror to be able to describe a certain gesture or facial expression and to create realistic dialogue.
In addition to writing, Tsabari takes photographs, and when she was “between languages” she made some documentary films. She says that photography feeds her writing. “It’s a break from words. It’s nice to see, nice not to speak. The quietness of it is very appealing. I have been told that my writing has a bit of a cinematic quality. You can see that I see the world in a very visual way. I’m very attentive to sensory details, not just visually, but smell is important too. I create a picture.”
Her writing has the poetic quality of someone who sees deeply and with compassion, ever aware of her surroundings. She stays with her literary images for an extra second or two, adding a layer of description and intensifying the moment.
During her stay in Israel, she interviewed elderly Yemenite women around the country, taking down their life stories, songs, rituals, beliefs and memories, and taking their photographic portraits. The women are mostly illiterate, and their stories are largely unknown and, as Tsabari remarks, “on the verge of being lost.” This is part of a decade-long documentary project.
The recipient of several Canadian literary awards, she is now working on a memoir in essays and a novel. In Toronto, she teaches creative non-fiction writing, which she loves doing, and also looks forward to taking a break to devote full time to writing, thanks to the Rohr Prize.
editor@jewishweek.org
Five Fun Israeli Whites For Shavuot
Binyamina’s 2013 Reserve Chardonnay. Carmel’s 2014 Selected Emerald Reisling.
Whites are easy for Shavuot, the only Jewish holiday that gives dairy pride of place at the table.Gamliel Kronemer
Special To The Jewish Week
Shavuot is the day, according to tradition, when the Jewish people received the Torah. There are many venerable customs associated with this holiday: staying awake until dawn to study Torah, reciting the ancient liturgical poem “Akdamut,” and, of course, serving dairy foods at the holiday meals.
While the braised briskets, pot roasts and roast turkeys that are staples during most Jewish holidays cry out for rich red wines, the fish, cream sauces, blintzes and cheesecakes that are typical Shavuot fare demand good white wines. So for a Shavuot edition of Fruit of the Vine, I’ve been tasting Israeli whites for under $20.
However, after tasting 11 recently released, moderately priced kosher whites from Israel, I was disappointed. Wines that in previous vintages had been quite good were showing poorly, and none of the wines were standouts. Yet there were five that were good, or very good, and any one would work for Shavuot.
One of the best wines was Binyamina’s 2013 Reserve Chardonnay. With a light to medium body, this crisp, fruit-forward, dark-straw-colored wine, made from Chardonnay grapes grown in the Galilee, has a bouquet of honeysuckle, honey and tangerines. Look for flavors of tangerines, Meyer lemons, oak and honeysuckle, with a note of spice at the back of the palate. Well crafted, this wine should drink well for at least another two years.
Score B+ ($19.99. Available at Beacon Wine & Spirits 2120 Broadway, Manhattan, [212] 877-0028.)
Also very good was Carmel’s 2010 Appellation Chardonnay. Made from 100 percent grapes grown in the Galilee, the wine was a mixture of Chardonnay made in two different ways — one part was fermented and aged in stainless steel tanks, and the remainder was fermented and aged sur-lie in small French oak barrels. Tawny-straw in color, this light-to-medium-bodied wine has flavors and aromas of apples, heather and honey, with a note of fresh cream. Drink within the next 18 months.
Score B/B+ ($15.95 Available at Skyview Wine and Spirits, 5681 Riverdale Ave., Riverdale, [888] 759-8466.)
The surprise wine of the tasting was Carmel’s 2014 Selected Emerald Riesling. A crossbreed of Riesling and Muscadelle created at the University of California at Davis, Emerald Rieslings were intended to be Riesling-like wines that could be produced in warm climates; the grape has been widely planted in Israel. However, in my experience, Israeli Emerald Rieslings tend to be flabby and charmless. So I was shocked when I found out, after my blind tasting, that this lively little wine was made from Emerald Riesling. A blend of 60 percent Emerald Riesling and 40 percent Chenin Blanc, all grown in the Shomron (northern West Bank), this light-bodied, straw-colored, crisp, off-dry wine has flavors and aromas of mandarin oranges, nectarines and honey, with just a hint of roasted yams.
Score B/B+ ($9.97 Available at Wine Library, 586 Morris Ave., Springfield, N.J., [973] 376-0005.)
While overall 2014 seems to have been a disappointing vintage for Israeli Sauvignon Blanc, two wines in the tasting were exceptions. Tabor’s 2014 Adama Sauvignon Blanc is a straw-colored, light-bodied wine made from grapes grown in the Galilee. With a fruity nose — redolent of kiwifruit, lychee, peaches and pineapples — the wine tastes of grapefruit and lychee. Simple, crisp and refreshing, this wine should be consumed within the next year.
Score B ($19. Available at Bottlerocket Wine & Spirit, 5 W. 19th St., Manhattan, [212] 929-2323.)
Also worth seeking is Arza’s 2014 Charisma Sauvignion Blanc. Made from grapes grown in the Galilee, this light-bodied, straw-colored wine has a faint but pleasant nose of pineapple, gooseberries and honeysuckle, with a slightly earthy note. Look for flavors of apples, lemons and gooseberries. Structured with a nice level of acidy, this wine should be drunk within the next six to eight months.
Score B- ($11.99 Available at Chateau de Vin, 544 Central Ave., Cedarhurst, L.I., [516] 374-9643.)Reviving The Alice Waters Of Vilna
Fania Lewando oversees her Dieto-Jarska Jadlodajnia on the street Jews called Daitche Gasse in Vilna. Courtesy of Random House
Fania Lewando's Yiddish vegetarian cookbook was the first of it's kind.Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
It’s a “Julie and Julia” for the Jews, but kosher, and sadder.
The 2009 Nora Ephron movie celebrated the life and work of Julia Child through the story of a secretary who decided to cook every recipe in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in the span of a year.
On May 26, Random House will publish a cookbook that is very different from Child’s treif-heavy magnum opus: “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook,” by Fania Lewando. Published in 1938 in Yiddish, Lewando’s book has its own story within a story. The revivalists are Barbara Mazur and Wendy Waxman, who vowed to restore her book to the world.
“We thought, ‘We have to give this woman a voice and bring this book back, because it’s so extraordinary and so relevant,” said Mazur, 67, who was shown one of the few surviving copies during a tour of the rare book room at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research six years ago.
Lewando’s time was short, but she was ahead of it. She was born in Poland, in the late 1880s, the second of six children, five of them girls. The rest of the family emigrated to England and America but the United States refused Lewando and her husband Lazar, an egg merchant, a visa because he had been wounded in the leg when the Soviets invaded Poland in 1920.
They moved instead to Vilna, a center of Jewish culture known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” and she became an author/entrepreneur/teacher/activist whose ideas and ambition anticipated the careers of famous vegetable lovers like Alice Waters by 40 years. Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan may espouse “Meatless Mondays,” but Lewando pushed for at least three meatless days a week, “to protect oneself and family members from various stomach upsets.”
She “was definitely prescriptive, definitely strict,” said Eve Jochnowitz, the Yiddish language and Jewish foodways expert who translated the book. “She was pretty tough, as an author at least.”
Jewish cookbooks first appeared in the early 1800s and among the earliest examples are short Yiddish manuscripts brides used to learn to cook or supervise a servant, according to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. The most popular early cookbook was written in German, and it was the basis for the first cookbook known to be written in Yiddish, Kokhbuch far yudishe froyen. Lewando's book was unusual in that it was vegetarian.
The book’s readers were primed for vegetarianism by necessity. Jews couldn’t get kosher meat, or afford it, due to anti-Semitic restrictions on kosher slaughter and boycotts on Jewish businesses.
Originally titled “Vegetarish-Dietisher Kookbukh” and illustrated with images taken from seed packets labeled in Yiddish and English, Lewando’s book has about 400 recipes. Its broad scope and dishes like Cauliflower Soup with New Potatoes evoke Deborah Madison’s 1997 California-style book “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.” Madison wrote the blurb for back cover of “The Vilna Vegetarian,” praising its “simplicity and goodness.”
In other ways, “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook” heralds the earnest Jewish vegetarianism of “The Moosewood Cookbook” and the chavurah movement. It includes a preface from a doctor answering the question “Why Are Fruits and Vegetables So Important for the Organism?” Another, called “Vegetarianism as a Jewish Movement,” gave a short history of vegetarianism. There’s a whole section of cutlets, from celeriac to nut.
Of course, there’s also Beet Broth With Mushrooms, Sauerkraut Stewed With Sour Cream, Prune Tsimmes — recipes that sound more like what the contemporary reader expects from a Yiddish cookbook of the 1930s. A recipe for Preserved Eggs calls first for the cook to clean a barrel, one that “does not leak or smell bad.”
Jochnowitz converted the recipe amounts from metric to English and from weight to volume to render the book easier to use by today’s home cook. Otherwise, she tried to preserve Lewando’s text and instead wrote editor’s notes that clarify potential anachronisms and add historical background.
Lewando’s recipe for Toasted Farfel Porridge, for example, consists of three sentences including a command to “cook like all porridges.” Jochnowitz gives a detailed recipe, complete with notes on making dough into farfel in Vilna — chopping — versus other parts of the Yiddish world — cutting, plucking and grating — and a citation for an April 1965 article in the International Journal of American Linguistics.
Jochnowitz discovered the book in 1994, and almost 20 years later, Mazur found Jochnowitz online at her blog and asked her to interview for the translator job.
“From the moment I saw it, I knew I would translate it,” said Jochnowitz, who is also a chef and baker. Nobody else knows the difference in Yiddish between celery and celeriac, a bumpy, blotchy variety of celery, Mazur said.
Mazur herself didn’t know it in English before she started cooking from Lewando’s book, and she credits the author with introducing her to “the joy of celeriac,” in addition to a style of Jewish cooking that insists vegetables are as worth eating as meat, traditionally considered the central dish of festive meals.
The upcoming Shavuot holiday, which starts on May 23, is the only major Jewish festival that gives dairy pride of place at the table. The tradition commemorates the moment after the Israelites received the Torah, but before they knew how to do kosher slaughter.
Boris Kletskin’s eponymous Warsaw-based publishing house printed the book, Jochnowitz said. Kletskin likely printed about 1,000 copies, which were sold through a network of multilingual bookshops that served Jews across Yiddish-speaking Europe, said Eddy Portnoy, an academic advisor at YIVO. It received a favorable advance review in Literarishe Bleter, a literary journal with a circulation of at least 40,000. In the late 1930s, there were about 3 million Yiddish speakers in Poland and neighboring countries, Portnoy said.
“American Jews think all European Jews were living in Anatevka,” Mazur said. “And they don’t know how sophisticated a city like Vilna was, and they should know.”
Lewando ran a cooking school where she taught Jewish women about nutrition, in addition to a vegetarian restaurant her husband owned, called Dieto-Jarska Jadlodajnia, which means Vegetarian Restaurant.
Artist Marc Chagall; poet Itzik Manger and diverse journalists, activists, linguists and educators signed the guest book, excerpts of which are reprinted in “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook.” Chagall praised the food, even though he “came with a delicate stomach.”
Lewando also worked as chef on a luxury kosher cruise across the Atlantic, her grand-nephew Efraim Sicher writes in one of the book’s prefaces. She traveled to England to try to interest H.J. Heinz in her recipes, and possibly get a job.
Many women worked at the time in such jobs as seamstresses or hairdressers, and some owned businesses, Portnoy said. Few women were as prominent as Lewando.
“If I went to a party today and met a woman who wrote a cookbook, and owned a restaurant and operated a cooking school, I would be impressed,” said Waxman, 38. She and Mazur know each other because Mazur was the best friend of Rosalie Katz, Waxman’s late mother. They became especially close at Katz’ bedside in a Houston cancer hospital, said Mazur, who carried a purse of Katz’ for luck the day the two pitched their project to Random House’s Jewish imprint, Schocken.
It took them six years to get the project in front of a publisher. Neither had publishing experience. Waxman, a mother of two, had worked in politics and also has a degree in early childhood education; Mazur didn’t work while raising her three children.
“It was a Barbara and Wendy project,” Waxman said, “and we had to figure out how to get it off the ground.”
They first tried to publish the book themselves. They raised $20,000, much of it from friends and family, and used it to hire Jochnowitz, a copy editor and a graphic designer who created a prototype to show potential donors. They pitched the project to foundations and contemplated raising the money by selling pages of the book to donors, as in a high school yearbook or the journal at an annual gala.
Then they realized they needed the imprimatur of a boldfaced name to help them sell the book and targeted Joan Nathan, the author of 10 cookbooks, most recently “Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France.” They signed up for a 2013 Passover workshop Nathan was leading at Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in Westchester County. During a break, they rushed the podium, brandishing their prototype.
“We were channeling Fania,” Waxman said, referring to Lewando.
Nathan grasped the significance of the book right away. She connected Waxman and Mazur with her editor, Altie Karper, the editorial director of Schocken Books, Random House’s Jewish division, who bought the book from YIVO. Nathan also wrote a foreword for the book. Random House declined to reveal the terms of the contract or the number of books they’re printing.
After meeting Karper, Waxman and Mazur sat down to rejoice, not at a bar, but at Bouchon, a bakery near Random House’s Rockefeller Center offices.
“This called for celebration with calories,” Waxman said.
Still, the moment was bittersweet, Mazur said. Lewando’s family doesn’t know exactly when she died, but witnesses say Soviet soldiers captured her and her husband when they were trying to escape the Nazis. Germany entered Vilna on June 24, 1941.
“So much was starting right before everything ended,” Jochnowitz said. “There were so many journals and newspapers for which we have Volume 1 Number 1, so many encyclopedias with [the first volume] Aleph … It was like a rose opening, and it’s just sickening and tragic to know how the story ended.”
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Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
Gary Rosenblatt
How The World Turned Against Israel
Gary Rosenblatt
BETWEEN THE LINES Gary Rosenblatt
How The World Turned Against Israel
Many of the countries now so critical of Jerusalem once widely admired its courage and resilience.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and PublisherThe BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel is gaining steam on U.S. campuses, and a major New York Times article this week described how the Jewish state has become a bitter divide between Jewish and minority students. So it might be helpful to step back and explore how it is that Jerusalem, the former darling of theinternational community, has become its pariah.
That’s just what Joshua Muravchik has done in his timely, clear and comprehensive new book, “Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel” (Encounter Books). Muravchik, a fellow at theJohns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, traces the evolution of the moral failure of much of the world, which has gone from championing Israel’s struggle to establish a democracy in a hostile Mideast to condemning it as a racist, oppressive, colonial state.
“I think this is a sober book,” the 67-year-old, soft-spoken author explained during an interview at The Jewish Week the other day. “It’s an attempt to present strong arguments in a logical way — not to presume the reader starts out agreeing with me.”
Once a national chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League (1968-1973), Muravchik’s politics shifted gradually, but dramatically. He acknowledges that he is frustrated at being labeled a neoconservative, albeit a “serious” one, based in part on his defense of George W. Bush’s foreign policy positions. “I’m perceived as a kind of bogie man,” he said, “preaching to the converted.” He notes that his latest book — it’s his 11th — has been reviewed favorably in conservative publications, described as being honest and forthright, while being criticized on the left for failing to blame Israel for displacing and occupying the Palestinians.
He said he would like to bring his message to liberal campuses, where Israel is more readily denounced than understood. But invitations can be hard to come by for someone with his Mideast views.
While many Zionist supporters assert that the world’s bias against Israel can be attributed to anti-Semitism, Muravchik feels that response is insufficient. He points out that many of the countries now so critical of Jerusalem once widely admired its courage and resilience. Indeed, his book opens with a description of the enormous popularity of “Exodus,” as both a best-selling 1958 Leon Uris novel that described Israel’s battle for statehood in heroic terms, and then as a popular movie two years later, with Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan, the sabra freedom fighter with the firepower and looks to kill.
The Conflict, Redefined
If all the world loves an underdog, Israel was a prime example, a tiny state forged from the ashes of the Holocaust, asserting the right of the Jewish people to return to the land of their biblical roots after centuries of displacement and persecution. Support for Israel peaked after the Six-Day War of 1967 when Israel, after being threatened with extinction by Egypt, joined by Syria and Jordan, thoroughly defeated the Arab armies, though vastly outnumbered. Ever since, as Muravchik notes, support for Israel has never been the same because the war redefined the conflict. “No longer was it Israel versus Arabs,” he writes. “Now it was Israel versus the homeless Palestinians. David had become Goliath.”
He goes on to show how a combination of Arab oil wealth and the violent actions of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1970s turned the United Nations, which created the Zionist state, into a one-sided adversary, and transformed the PLO into a “progressive” liberation movement.
PLO leader Yasir Arafat, reinforced by intellectual supporters like the late Columbia University professor Edward Said and influential world leaders like Bruno Kreisky of Austria, turned the Marxist notion of class struggle into a story of white, imperialist racism against minorities like the Palestinians. This was the New Left, and Israel was a primary target.
Were Israeli policies to blame for this dramatic shift? Muravchik acknowledges that they were, focusing on Menachem Begin, whose years in office as prime minister solidified and justified the settlement movement and alienated many former allies of Zion, including Jews here and in Israel.
“I admire his courage,” Muravchik told me, “but his war in Lebanon [which began in 1982] was a debacle, and his justification for his nationalism — ‘God gave us the land, end of discussion’ — was widely viewed as “unyielding.”
In our interview, Muravchik noted that he is “not a supporter of expandingsettlements,” but he says “it is unfair of Israel’s detractors to say that settlements are the main stumbling block to peace. Really, it’s the other way around.
“The thrust of my argument,” he continues, “is not that Israel is blameless, but that treatment of Israel is unfair.”
‘Desperately Afraid Of Iran’
He points to President Obama as an example of someone who “seems to blame Israel first,” noting, for example, that after the president was turned down in seeking concessions from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, “we never heard a word about it.” Not so in the case of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was publicly blamed by the White House for the lack of Mideast peace progress.
Muravchik says he is “desperately afraid of Iran having the [nuclear] bomb, which would change the whole Mideast equation, just their having it.” He believes the U.S. has been a weak negotiator — “we’re moving backward” — because Obama wants a deal more than Iran does, and “a deal won’t stop” the Iranians from achieving their nuclear goal.
In a Washington Post opinion piece in March, Murachvik suggested, in effect, that “we give war a chance.” He wrote that war with Iran is America’s “best option” because tighter sanctions won’t be enough to dissuade its leaders from fulfilling their revolutionary goals to rule the Mideast, for starters. “Only military actions,” like those taken by Israel against Iraq and Syria, “have halted nuclear programs,” he observed. “Sanctions have never stopped a nuclear drive anywhere.”
Muravchik concedes that airstrikes might have limited effect and that Iran would strike back. “I full-out confess that Iran would do something nasty back at us, and could unleash Hezbollah on Israel. We have vulnerabilities and they would exploit them. Americans would be killed.”
But “the real choice,” he believes, is “to attack Iran and suffer some consequences, or let them be a nuclear power” and risk America being attacked in a full-scale war. “It’s not out of the question, though it’s more likely they’ll ‘just’ be more aggressive in the region, leading to a bigger regional war.”
Muravchik notes that America’s stake in the Iran issue “is not existential, but a nuclear Iran will lead to a violent chain of events with a big cost for the U.S.”
As to what role Israel should play, he points out that his field is U.S. policy. But it seems clear he would support Israel taking whatever steps it deemed necessary to bolster its security. And on the Palestinian peace front he would like to see Israel “continue to support a two-state solution,” ready to cede land, if necessary — but only when the Palestinians “are ready to lay to rest their insistence on the right of return” and to make a deal “that would end the conflict.”
Despite Israel’s military might, Muravchik still views it as David, a small state in an increasingly hostile neighborhood. And as he asserts in the last sentence of his book, “The relentless campaign to recast it instead as a malevolent Goliath places it in grave peril.”
Gary@jewishweek.org
Rabbi David Wolpe
MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
MUSINGSRabbi David Wolpe
Special To The Jewish Week
New Morning
New Morning
Jacob's blessing is one of self-transformation.
Like A Slice Of The Amalfi Coast
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
Pitch Perfect Star Ben Platt Talks Nerd-dom
Alan Zeitlin
Contributing Writer
Film, Talks
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NATIONAL
Less-Christian U.S. Seen ‘Disturbing’ On Israel
New Pew survey finds ‘stable’ Jewish population; sharp rise in unaffiliated.
Robert Goldblum
Managing Editor
The country’s Jewish population ticked up ever so slightly from 2007, when it represented 1.7 percent of all U.S. adults, to 1.9 percent in 2014.
In addition, of all faith groups, Judaism has among the highest rates of retention, a fact that runs counter to a widespread trend of people leaving the religion of their childhood in a search for spiritual connection. Seventy-five percent of Jews surveyed continue to identify with their childhood faith. As religious identity becomes increasingly fluid — “religious switching,” the demographers call it — only Hindus (80 percent) and Muslims (77 percent) have higher retention rates than Jews.
These are several of the takeaways from a major study of some 35,000 Americans released this week by the Pew Research Center, the second such massive survey in the last seven years. In fact, one of the study’s authors, Alan Cooperman, Pew’s director of religion research, hailed the Jewish community’s stability.
“For Jews, the population figure may be a surprise,” he told The Jewish Week on the eve of the study’s release. “The big long-term trend is that the Jewish population has been on the decline from the 1950s, when Jews represented 3 to 4 percent of theAmerican population. It has dropped since then. Here, we’re seeing stability.”
But despite the relative demographic stability of the Jewish community, the changes at play in the wider religious landscape will likely test Jewish leaders when it comes to community relations and Israel. They will, given the emerging makeup of America’s religious terrain, almost certainly come under increasing pressure to make Israel’s case persuasively and to forge new coalitions to ensure communal priorities.
The Pew study, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” finds that the percentage of American who identify as Christian has dropped by nearly 8 points, from 78.4 percent in 2007 to 70.6 percent in 2014. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who say they are atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” — secularists who are generally believed to be less pro-Israel than more church-going Americans — spiked nearly 7 points, from 16.1 percent to nearly 23 percent. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/
There are now 56 million Americans who fall into that category, more than either Catholics or mainline Protestants. Among Christians, only evangelical Protestants outnumber the “nones,” as they are called.
In what could be a troubling sign for the Jewish community if the trend holds, Evangelicals — traditionally some of the Jewish state’s fiercest supporters — fell by 1 percentage point, from 26 percent to 25 percent of all American Christians.
America’s Catholic population, another source of strong support for Israel, is also on the decline, having fallen by 3.1 percent from 2007 to 2014, from 24 percent of all Christians to 21 percent. “Protestants have been on decline for several decades, and in the new study they declined both in share and absolute numbers,” Cooperman said. “Catholics, in the new study, are declining in share and absolute numbers — that’s new.”
Also, in the seven years between 2007 and last year, the percentage of Americans in non-Christian faiths — mostly Muslims and Hindus — has risen from 4.6 to nearly 6. Muslims rose from 0.4 percent of the U.S. population in 2007 to 0.9 percent in 2014, a small but statistically significant jump.
In addition, non-Hispanic whites are dwindling as a share of the overall Christian population, while Hispanics are a growing share of the Catholic, mainline Protestant and evangelical Christian populations.
All of this is likely to keep Jewish communal leaders up at night as they look out at an America that may be less friendly to Israel than it had been. Add to this the fact that more than half of Americans aged 18-29 in a Gallup poll said Israel was “unjustified” in its military response to persistent rocket fire from Hamas during last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip, and the anxiety may deepen.
“The news that American Christianity is on the decline is very disturbing in its implications for Jews,” said Steven Bayme, director of the Contemporary Jewish Life Department and the Koppelman Institute for American Jewish-Israel Relations at the American Jewish Committee. “Two central pillars of the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel are shaken by this survey.
“One is that unlike Europe, America has always been a distinctively religious, church-going society, and the base of pro-Israel support has always been there, especially in the Bible Belt. The incredible irony here, and the dominant motif of this survey, is that Jews have always feared a more Christian society. But American Christianity has been benign, at least since World War II and Vatican II. In fact, the Christianity of America has worked to shore up support for Israel.
“The paradox,” Bayme continued, “is that as Jews have feared a heavily Christian society, they should be welcoming of a growing secularization in America. But that secularization — especially in Europe — has been closely intertwined with anti-Israel sentiment. How those ‘nones’ are going to express themselves on Israel is very much open to question.”
The second pillar of the special U.S.-Israel relationship, Bayme pointed out is “an assertive American-Jewish community.” Given the American Jews’ assimilation and growing secularization, he wonders whether pro-Israel support will fade. “The challenge,” he said, “is whether we still have an assertive Jewish community” that supports Israel. He pointed to the annual Celebrate Israel parade, which will take place later in the month. “The people who attend that parade come from religious circles,” not secular ones.
In terms of a growing Muslim community, Bayme said, “The increase from 0.4 to 0.9 is sizeable, but it means that there are still about twice as many Jews as Muslims in the country. Islam in America is not like Islam in France. We shouldn’t assume that all Muslims are opponents of Israel. Historically, we’ve not done bridge building with Muslims. Now, it’s much too important to neglect.”
Regarding the demographics of the Jewish community, the current survey found that 44 percent of Jews identify as Reform (43 percent in 2007), 22 percent as Conservative (31 percent in 2007), 14 percent as Orthodox (10 percent in 2007), and 5 percent as other Jewish denominations. Sixteen percent of all Jews now say they identify with no particular branch of Judaism. (Some 850 Jews were surveyed.)
Of all religious groups, Jews and Hindus are the most highly educated and the most well-to-do. Nearly 80 percent of Hindus and nearly 60 percent of Jews are college graduates (the U.S. average is 27 percent), and 44 percent of Jews and 36 percent of Hindus report that their income is more than $100,000 (the U.S. average is 19 percent).
On intermarriage, the new Pew survey showed that 65 percent of Jewish marriages are made up of two Jewish spouses, while 35 percent have a spouse from a different religion. Jews and mainline Protestants have the oldest median age (50), and only 20 percent of all Jews fall into the 18-29 age cohort, compared with 33 percent of Muslims, 34 percent of agnostics and 37 percent of atheists. The Jewish community is also less white than it was in 2007. Today, 90 percent of Jews are white, down from 95 percent in 2007.
As for one of the survey’s central findings — the continued drift by young people away from affiliation with religious denominations, and the broad-based social change that has caused it — Pew’s Cooperman offered a recap of the leading explanations offered by sociologists. (In a much-publicized 2013 Pew study of the American Jewish community, 22 percent of Jews said they had no religion.) Many liberal-minded Americans, put off by the linkage of conservative religion and conservative politics have said, “If that’s what religion is today, I don’t want any part of it.” A second explanation suggests a correlation between delayed marriage (increased numbers of Americans from many demographic groups are either getting married later in life, or not marrying at all) and decreases in church going.
Sociologist Robert Putnam’s now-famous metaphor for the breakdown in civic society — “bowling alone,” the title of his acclaimed 2000 book — is the basis for the third explanation: that American society is becoming more atomized and more distrusting of all institutions, not just religion; with that has come a loss of community. (The Internet has only deepened that trend.) And finally, the affluence/secularization argument suggests that as countries become wealthier and their citizens more educated, they also become less religious.
America is something of an outlier on the last point, Cooperman said, in that it is a wealthy but still very religious country. But in what must be an ominous note for Jewish leaders, he added that the U.S. “is finally falling in line with this pattern.”
NEW YORK
When Jacob wrestles with the angel until sunrise, the angel tells Jacob to release him as the dawn breaks. Jacob insists on a blessing. The angel asks Jacob his name, and then tells him he is no longer Jacob, but Israel [Genesis 32:25-33].
Usually when we ask for a blessing, we expect something tangible. A blessing consists of health, or possessions, or perhaps an internal state like happiness. But to simply change a name? Who thinks if asked for a blessing a proper response is — “You are no longer Arnold. Now your name is Fred”?
Yet the blessing teaches a deep lesson. The angel does not only change Jacob’s name, he also explains the meaning: “Israel” is one who has striven with God and human beings, and prevailed. So Jacob’s blessing is that of self-transformation. He no longer has to be the Jacob of the past, the trickster, the one estranged from family, fearful of the future. He has struggled, survived and been changed.
Teshuva, repentance, promises that we can become new. Jacob will walk with a limp, scarred by battle. But the man who leaves in the morning is different from the man who began wrestling deep in the night.
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 Praga coast at dusk offers an inviting look of Greek scenery. Hilary Danailova/JW
TRAVELLike A Slice Of The Amalfi Coast
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
“Here,” the smiling Greek woman said, proffering a jar of burnt-amber marmalade. “It’s homemade. We call it the Jewish citrus.”
When I think Jews and citrus, I think of Florida and how my grandfather in Century Village used to send me a care package of honeybells every winter. I never expected to find anything Jewish in Parga — a sleepy resort town on the Greek Epirus coast opposite Corfu — let alone oranges. But as I learned over breakfast in a hotel café, the variety of citron grown on these green mountains for millennia is none other than the biblical etrog, whose role in the Sukkot ritual has cemented the association.
In fact, although biblical citron was as close as I came to finding Jewish culture during a weekend in Parga, Jews — a mix of Sephardim and Romaniotes, Byzantine Greek Jews — lived among Epirus’ orange trees as far back as the eighth century. (Most either perished in World War II or emigrated to Israel shortly thereafter.) And that marmalade was awfully good. I spread it on fried sufganiyot-style pancakes at breakfast, chasing each bite with a spoonful of thick strained yogurt and even thicker coffee.
Nestled into a turquoise bay in the shadow of the Pindos Mountains, Parga resembles nothing so much as a slice of Italy’s Amalfi Coast — which is perhaps unsurprising when you consider that Parga spent much of its history as an outpost of the Venetian Empire, passing into French, English and Ottoman hands before joining Greece a century ago.
The town itself is a picturesque jumble of colorful houses overlooking a half-moon beach, where inviting cafés dot the waterfront promenade, and small boats bob in a harbor. I watched the shadows shift over a series of tiny, rocky islands just offshore; two larger isles, the lyrically named Paxos and Antipaxos, are visible on the horizon.
From the hills above Parga, you can see all the way to Corfu, a resort of international renown. But while boats sail regularly from Parga to Corfu, Paxos, Antipaxos or nearby Lefkada, most Corfu-bound vacationers depart from the larger port of Igoumenitsa, just north on the Albanian border.
Apart from Igoumenitsa and Corfu, Epirus — which lies along the Ionian Sea — is a sparsely inhabited region of olive groves, pine forests and stunning mountain scenery. Between Parga and Igoumenitsa, endless sandy coves glistened beneath the seaside cliffs along a lonely highway, with nary another car in sight. Sleepy villages and whitewashed churches appear from time to time, along with roadside apiaries that fuel a local honey industry.
Then there are the ruins. Inhabited since classical times, Epirus is thick with the vestiges of fortresses erected against Turkish pirates. We explored 14th-century castle ruins on a rocky, pine-forested bluff at one end of Parga, where shady paths wind around the headlands to the wilder, more expansive Valtos Beach just north of town. Many visitors catch a bus for Anthoussa Village to tour the Ali Pasha Castle, a grander, better-preserved relic of Ottoman times.
Parga itself is easy to explore on foot, but in the sunshine of a late-spring afternoon, the sea beckoned. “I wouldn’t set foot in that sea after September,” laughed a hotel clerk as she handed me a beach towel. Seventy degrees may be frigid for Greeks, but visitors from more northerly climes found the water delightful at Parga’s three sandy beaches.
After a dinner of whole roasted fish and cold retsina, I set out to do some shopping. The cobblestoned streets of Parga Town are largely flat — ideal for puttering amid shops selling sun gear, flaky honey and feta-cheese pastries, handmade leather goods and soap crafted from local olive oil.
I had scoped out the shops after lunch, but in the soaring midday heat, everything had been closed save for the ice-cream counters. Parga comes alive as the sun sets over that fortress hill; at dusk, families of all ages, Greeks and Italians and Albanians as well as British tourists, stroll along the lapping waves of the harbor. Cafés slowly fill with locals sipping ouzo, sharing platters of mezze and moving on to metaxa as night falls. As the crowds settled into bars to watch Barcelona play Munich, I lingered along the water’s edge — inhaling that heady fragrance of pine, sea salt and Jewish citrus.
editor@jewishweek.org
One actor's Platt-form for success.
Featured on NYBLUEPRINTPitch Perfect Star Ben Platt Talks Nerd-dom
Alan Zeitlin
Contributing Writer
Film, Talks
Actor Ben Platt, 21, made a splash as the magic obsessed, Star Wars aficionado Benji Applebaum in Pitch Perfect. Platt, who was raised in California and now lives in New York, also had a role in a little known Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, and will share a screen with Meryl Streep this summer in Ricki and the Flash. Platt recently took his magic skills to The Jewish Theological Seminary for Reshet Ramah, which serves Ramah alumni. Following his performance the actor talked about Pitch Perfect 2 opening on May 15, taking the stage in The Book of Mormon, his Ramah experience and his new play he hopes will move to Broadway.
How did you prepare for the role of being a nerdy guy in Pitch Perfect?
Well I consider myself a pretty nerdy guy already, but nerdy in a different way. I’m very nerdy about musical theater and show tunes and all that so I kind of equated it with the magic and “Star Wars.” That was my jumping off point.
How did you get the part and what was the audition like?
It was fairly random. I’ve been going on auditions since I was nine. All I knew was that there was music and it was a college-age kid so it seemed up my alley. The character happened to have my name so that was nice. I went in and did a general call with the casting director, called back for the director, and did a screen test. It was right before I was supposed to go to school.
Did you have to sing a song?
Yes. I sang “Feeling Good.” It was Michael Buble’s version.
Did you think the movie would be a hit when you made it?
I don’t think we knew it was going to be a cultural phenomenon the way that it was. We had a great time and we all thought it was very sweet and funny and sharp. It was low budget and the fact that it took off was one of those momentous things ... You had the cups thing adding to it and “The Sing-Off” and the Pentanonix. It was the best we could ask for.
In the film you are first intimidated by cool A Cappella singers. Any experience with them in real life?
All my siblings went to Penn and Off The Beat is the cool group there, and they were in it so that was my first exposure. And briefly when I was at Columbia here, I was in Non-Sequitur.
In Pitch Perfect 2 do you do more or less magic?
Same amount of magic. But I get to sing more because I’m already in the group. I don’t have to worry too much about him being uncomfortable or him overcoming his first time on stage. Now he’s more grown up. There’s some more comedy. It’s really fun.
What was it like to be a Jewish actor doing “The Book of Mormon.”
It was fun. I was the only Jew in the cast at the time. In terms of the material, it wasn’t an issue. I got to teach the cast-mates a little about Judaism. We started in Chicago away from home. When there was a holiday coming up I would share the traditions with them and it was a nice way to bond.
What was it like working with Anna Kendrick?
She’s super nice, super sweet and the chemistry is really great. Apart from Anna and Brittany (Snow) we were all essentially unknown in the beginning so to experience this cultural phenomenon together, there’s no way the chemistry wouldn’t be great.
In this film, the singing competition is international. Do you think any countries will feel insulted?
I don’t think so. It’s all in good fun. It’s not specific, it’s all kind of caricature. I think people will enjoy it.
Do you get recognized a lot now?
Not too bad yet. A lot of times it’s “where do I know you from?” and then I have to list my resume which is weird.
How did going to Ramah in Ojai, California impact you?
It taught me a lot about how to be part of a group and a greater whole, and of course in theater it’s important to invest in yourself and your talent but to never lose sight of the fact that it’s about generosity and building a community. Being able to connect with people quickly like when you’re reading with people in an audition is crucial, and camp definitely brought me out of my shell.
Tell me about the musical in D.C you’re starring in this summer.
It’s a musical called Dear Evan Hansen. It’s written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and it’s directed by Michael Greif, who directed Rent and Next To Normal. Steven Levenson wrote the book. The lead role was written for me. It’s about loss and how we deal with that in the age of social networking and the need for instant gratification. It asks whether or not honesty is the best policy.
NATIONAL
Less-Christian U.S. Seen ‘Disturbing’ On Israel
New Pew survey finds ‘stable’ Jewish population; sharp rise in unaffiliated.
Robert Goldblum
Managing Editor
America’s Christian population is in decline, according to new Pew study. Getty Images
With the religious landscape in America in the throes of dramatic change — it is less Christian, more Muslim and far more religiously unaffiliated than it was just seven years ago — the Jewish community has, perhaps surprisingly, remained stable.The country’s Jewish population ticked up ever so slightly from 2007, when it represented 1.7 percent of all U.S. adults, to 1.9 percent in 2014.
In addition, of all faith groups, Judaism has among the highest rates of retention, a fact that runs counter to a widespread trend of people leaving the religion of their childhood in a search for spiritual connection. Seventy-five percent of Jews surveyed continue to identify with their childhood faith. As religious identity becomes increasingly fluid — “religious switching,” the demographers call it — only Hindus (80 percent) and Muslims (77 percent) have higher retention rates than Jews.
These are several of the takeaways from a major study of some 35,000 Americans released this week by the Pew Research Center, the second such massive survey in the last seven years. In fact, one of the study’s authors, Alan Cooperman, Pew’s director of religion research, hailed the Jewish community’s stability.
“For Jews, the population figure may be a surprise,” he told The Jewish Week on the eve of the study’s release. “The big long-term trend is that the Jewish population has been on the decline from the 1950s, when Jews represented 3 to 4 percent of theAmerican population. It has dropped since then. Here, we’re seeing stability.”
But despite the relative demographic stability of the Jewish community, the changes at play in the wider religious landscape will likely test Jewish leaders when it comes to community relations and Israel. They will, given the emerging makeup of America’s religious terrain, almost certainly come under increasing pressure to make Israel’s case persuasively and to forge new coalitions to ensure communal priorities.
The Pew study, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” finds that the percentage of American who identify as Christian has dropped by nearly 8 points, from 78.4 percent in 2007 to 70.6 percent in 2014. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who say they are atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” — secularists who are generally believed to be less pro-Israel than more church-going Americans — spiked nearly 7 points, from 16.1 percent to nearly 23 percent. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/
There are now 56 million Americans who fall into that category, more than either Catholics or mainline Protestants. Among Christians, only evangelical Protestants outnumber the “nones,” as they are called.
In what could be a troubling sign for the Jewish community if the trend holds, Evangelicals — traditionally some of the Jewish state’s fiercest supporters — fell by 1 percentage point, from 26 percent to 25 percent of all American Christians.
America’s Catholic population, another source of strong support for Israel, is also on the decline, having fallen by 3.1 percent from 2007 to 2014, from 24 percent of all Christians to 21 percent. “Protestants have been on decline for several decades, and in the new study they declined both in share and absolute numbers,” Cooperman said. “Catholics, in the new study, are declining in share and absolute numbers — that’s new.”
Also, in the seven years between 2007 and last year, the percentage of Americans in non-Christian faiths — mostly Muslims and Hindus — has risen from 4.6 to nearly 6. Muslims rose from 0.4 percent of the U.S. population in 2007 to 0.9 percent in 2014, a small but statistically significant jump.
In addition, non-Hispanic whites are dwindling as a share of the overall Christian population, while Hispanics are a growing share of the Catholic, mainline Protestant and evangelical Christian populations.
All of this is likely to keep Jewish communal leaders up at night as they look out at an America that may be less friendly to Israel than it had been. Add to this the fact that more than half of Americans aged 18-29 in a Gallup poll said Israel was “unjustified” in its military response to persistent rocket fire from Hamas during last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip, and the anxiety may deepen.
“The news that American Christianity is on the decline is very disturbing in its implications for Jews,” said Steven Bayme, director of the Contemporary Jewish Life Department and the Koppelman Institute for American Jewish-Israel Relations at the American Jewish Committee. “Two central pillars of the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel are shaken by this survey.
“One is that unlike Europe, America has always been a distinctively religious, church-going society, and the base of pro-Israel support has always been there, especially in the Bible Belt. The incredible irony here, and the dominant motif of this survey, is that Jews have always feared a more Christian society. But American Christianity has been benign, at least since World War II and Vatican II. In fact, the Christianity of America has worked to shore up support for Israel.
“The paradox,” Bayme continued, “is that as Jews have feared a heavily Christian society, they should be welcoming of a growing secularization in America. But that secularization — especially in Europe — has been closely intertwined with anti-Israel sentiment. How those ‘nones’ are going to express themselves on Israel is very much open to question.”
The second pillar of the special U.S.-Israel relationship, Bayme pointed out is “an assertive American-Jewish community.” Given the American Jews’ assimilation and growing secularization, he wonders whether pro-Israel support will fade. “The challenge,” he said, “is whether we still have an assertive Jewish community” that supports Israel. He pointed to the annual Celebrate Israel parade, which will take place later in the month. “The people who attend that parade come from religious circles,” not secular ones.
In terms of a growing Muslim community, Bayme said, “The increase from 0.4 to 0.9 is sizeable, but it means that there are still about twice as many Jews as Muslims in the country. Islam in America is not like Islam in France. We shouldn’t assume that all Muslims are opponents of Israel. Historically, we’ve not done bridge building with Muslims. Now, it’s much too important to neglect.”
Regarding the demographics of the Jewish community, the current survey found that 44 percent of Jews identify as Reform (43 percent in 2007), 22 percent as Conservative (31 percent in 2007), 14 percent as Orthodox (10 percent in 2007), and 5 percent as other Jewish denominations. Sixteen percent of all Jews now say they identify with no particular branch of Judaism. (Some 850 Jews were surveyed.)
Of all religious groups, Jews and Hindus are the most highly educated and the most well-to-do. Nearly 80 percent of Hindus and nearly 60 percent of Jews are college graduates (the U.S. average is 27 percent), and 44 percent of Jews and 36 percent of Hindus report that their income is more than $100,000 (the U.S. average is 19 percent).
On intermarriage, the new Pew survey showed that 65 percent of Jewish marriages are made up of two Jewish spouses, while 35 percent have a spouse from a different religion. Jews and mainline Protestants have the oldest median age (50), and only 20 percent of all Jews fall into the 18-29 age cohort, compared with 33 percent of Muslims, 34 percent of agnostics and 37 percent of atheists. The Jewish community is also less white than it was in 2007. Today, 90 percent of Jews are white, down from 95 percent in 2007.
As for one of the survey’s central findings — the continued drift by young people away from affiliation with religious denominations, and the broad-based social change that has caused it — Pew’s Cooperman offered a recap of the leading explanations offered by sociologists. (In a much-publicized 2013 Pew study of the American Jewish community, 22 percent of Jews said they had no religion.) Many liberal-minded Americans, put off by the linkage of conservative religion and conservative politics have said, “If that’s what religion is today, I don’t want any part of it.” A second explanation suggests a correlation between delayed marriage (increased numbers of Americans from many demographic groups are either getting married later in life, or not marrying at all) and decreases in church going.
Sociologist Robert Putnam’s now-famous metaphor for the breakdown in civic society — “bowling alone,” the title of his acclaimed 2000 book — is the basis for the third explanation: that American society is becoming more atomized and more distrusting of all institutions, not just religion; with that has come a loss of community. (The Internet has only deepened that trend.) And finally, the affluence/secularization argument suggests that as countries become wealthier and their citizens more educated, they also become less religious.
America is something of an outlier on the last point, Cooperman said, in that it is a wealthy but still very religious country. But in what must be an ominous note for Jewish leaders, he added that the U.S. “is finally falling in line with this pattern.”
Bloomingburg Tensions Now Affecting Gov’t
Mounting legal war over housing for chasidim seen harming governance in sleepy Sullivan County town.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Shalom Lamm: No grand plan for chasidic town. Michael Datikash/JW
Bloomingburg, N.Y. — In the view of a Jewish developer, two Sullivan County municipalities are hotbeds of anti-Semitism whose governments have waged a concerted effort to derail his partially built housing development because it is being marketed to chasidic Jews.The two municipalities, in a federal lawsuit filed last month against the developer and his associates, alleged that they used “fraud, bribery and intimidation” to corruptly influence public officials to push through the 396-unit project “for the benefit of the racketeering enterprise they head.”
In the meantime, the stranglehold this conflict has on the two governments in the Catskills — the Village of Bloomingburg and the Town of Mamakating — has left them with mounting legal fees. And because the developer, Shalom Lamm, has sued the town and some public officials personally, many public officials have resigned.
“They are quitting on us in droves,” said William Herrmann, Mamakating’s town supervisor. “We have pretty much lost half of our boards over the last year — the planning board, town board, zoning board and ethics board — and we are having trouble filling those seats because of the constant threat of personal lawsuits.”
Lamm sued the town and village late last year seeking federal court intervention to “stop pervasive, government-sponsored religious discrimination.” The complaint said the municipalities, “acting on behalf of an aggressive and hateful group of their residents, are engaged in a conspiracy to prevent chasidic Jews from buying houses, establishing a private religious school, establishing a mikveh [ritual bath] and operating businesses in their community.”
The municipalities, the complaint continued, “are engaged in a series of patently illegal actions to block lawful, approved, and long-planned developments in Bloomingburg and Mamakating.”
“We didn’t sleep too well with this hanging over us,” Herrmann confided. “But I’m sleeping a lot better since [our] suit was filed [last month] because I want this in front of a federal judge and maybe a jury where they will hear all the facts and see who is right and wrong.”
Town and village officials along with community residents interviewed uniformly insisted that anti-Semitism has nothing to do with their attempts to stop the development. Instead, they said, they are trying to block its completion because Lamm and his associates played a bait-and-switch game abetted by corrupt public officials.
As they see it, the developers applied in 2006 to build a 125-unit gated community for retired second homeowners that would have no impact on the schools. But in 2012, after the mile-long village approved the project and annexed land from the town for it, residents discovered the project had became a 396-unit development that was being heavily marketed to chasidic Jews.
Lamm, a Modern Orthodox Jew who is the son of Rabbi Norman Lamm, a former chancellor of Yeshiva University, insisted that his project was always 396 units and challenged opponents to produce one document saying otherwise. They have not.
But the 396-unit project, the municipalities argued in their suit, would “bring thousands of residents to overrun the tiny Village of Bloomingburg, a village of just over 400 residents, which is committed to preserving its rural character and natural beauty by limited development and strictly enforced zoning.”
Standing atop a mountain overlooking the village, Bloomingburg Mayor Frank Gerardi pointed to the development, below that was carved out of the greenery surrounding it.
“It’s going to blight the landscape,” he said, shaking his head. “It stands out like a sore thumb. … This was all farmland.”
Fifty-one of the townhouses have already been built, including three model homes. Some units are selling for $334,000 and others for $299,000, Lamm said.
The village only began inspecting each unit last week at the rate of two per day. Based upon the inspections that have been completed, Gerardi said, changes would be required before they are deemed up to code and could be granted a certificate of occupancy.
Lamm showed a reporter and photographer one of the models last week. It was a three-bedroom home with a 9-foot ceiling in the entrance, wood floors and marble bathrooms. Hanging on a wall by the front entrance were two photographs of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the late founder of Satmar chasidim.
Those photos would not come as a surprise to Teek Persaud, co-owner for the past 28 years of the Quickway Diner located on the outskirts of the village, who said that a 16-page color brochure touting the development in Yiddish had been inserted into a chasidic newspaper, Der Yid, which is published by Satmar chasidim in Williamsburg and read throughout the chasidic community.
Lamm said the brochure was not his, that he does not speak Yiddish, and that “the Satmars sent it out to encourage friends and family to move here.”
He stressed that he had no hidden agenda to bring in Satmar chasidim.
“If blacks, Chinese, Indians, gays or other groups wants to move here, come on in,” Lamm said.
The brochure proclaimed in large letters: “A new Jewish settlement in Bloomingburg, N.Y., for Satmar chasidim.” The development is officially called Chestnut Ridge, but on the brochure it was called Kiryas Yetev Lev. Yetev Lev was the acronym for one of Rabbi Teitelbaum’s ancestors. The name is similar to that of another Satmar chasidic village 30 minutes south in Orange County, Kiryas Joel, which has a population of 21,000.
Asked if he believed this area might one day become another Kiryas Joel, Persaud replied: “It crosses our minds.”
Herrmann agreed that the homes “look nice and pretty — but for the city and Long Island, not here. This is a small community. There are no sidewalks and there is no traffic. … My school tax is 65 percent of my total tax bill and it costs the school $17,000 per child. A large-scale development kills the taxes for everyone else.”
He noted that the cost increases for special needs students and for students who are taught English as a second language; Yiddish is the primary language of Satmar chasidim.
Herrmann said the fear is that Lamm and his associates have only begun to change the rural landscape.
“There is a concept in municipal law that speaks of segmentation,” he said. “You have to explain [to the municipality] that this isn’t just a project for 100 homes or 1,000 homes” but rather is part of a larger project in the future.
In that way, the board could consider the total project and its impact on the water supply, sewers and roads to see if the community “could support” it all, he said. Herrmann added that a check of town records found that Lamm has bought a total of 2,000 acres in Mamakating near Bloomingburg.
“Why accumulate 2,000 acres?” he asked.
Lamm said he has bought “a lot” of land but denied it totals 2,000 acres. And he insisted that he has no grand, overarching development plan.
Before word spread that chasidim were moving to the community, Lamm said, “I was the most popular guy around.”
But since then, the hostility in the community has become palpable. The windows of the pizza shop and the kosher bakery he owns were broken on five separate occasions. One man has been convicted in connection with the incidents and is awaiting sentencing. And when walking to synagogue with his children and a group of chasidim one Friday night, they were confronted by a group of about 15 protestors with a bullhorn.
“Go back to where you came from,” they screamed. “This is illegal.”
And a neighbor who erected a 20-foot tall cross just feet from Chestnut Ridge last Christmas has kept it there. Lamm said it informs “new chasidic residents that they are unwelcome.”
“The cross is a symbol of peace, but when used as a tool of violence and fear, it is very troubling,” he said.
Holly Roche, who is Jewish and leader of the largest community group opposed to the development, Rural Community Coalition, insisted: “Anti-Semitism is not rampant in this community.”
The problem, she maintained, is that residents are “watching their civil rights being ripped asunder. Criminal activity is occurring and it is changing our quality of life.”
She said a 65-man team from the FBI’s public corruption squad descended on Bloomingburg last year and raided Lamm’s offices. Lamm confirmed the probe, but nothing has come of it so far.
Aaron Rabiner, a chasidic Jew who was recently elected to one of two trustee positions in Bloomingburg, pointed out that many of the project’s critics live outside the village — including Roche — and that they “are trying to disrupt the peace.”
Rabiner is part of an influx of about 40 chasidic families that have moved to Bloomingburg over the past few years. “People in the village want to unite, have peace and want our little village to prosper and grow in a positive way,” he said.
Rabiner added that the village’s failure to expeditiously grant certificates of occupancy to the new development means that they are not paying taxes while the village amasses “a tremendous amount in legal fees — $50,000 while our whole budget is $300,000.”
Bloomingburg is also the community that serves the Pine Bush School District, which in 2012 was sued by the parents of five Jewish students for permitting “rampant anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment” and “deliberate indifference” by administrators. A federal judge has declined to dismiss the case and ordered a trial.
Evan Bernstein, New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said his organization began working in the school district last year to address anti-Semitism. And this past winter he said the ADL held a community-wide training session with members of the community on how to confront anti-Semitism.
He said he found that secular Jews did not understand the “different styles of Judaism, and people said they have never interacted with someone who looks that religious.”
“Our hope is to build bridges between the secular Jewish community and the ultra-Orthodox population because so much of it is misunderstanding. We are going to develop lines of communication between them,” he said, adding, “We can’t make progress in the general community when the internal Jewish community is so polarized.”
Herrmann drove a reporter around his town last week. He stopped at a Jewish cemetery and said: “We have a 24 or 25 percent Jewish population. As you can see, no stones are broken or toppled over and there is no graffiti.”
He then stopped in front of a synagogue.
“You see, no graffiti or broken windows. You can’t say this is an anti-Semitic community. … He [Lamm] keeps saying these things hoping someone will believe him.”
Earlier, Herrmann said: “This community has been lied to and deceived; it is unbelievable what they have done to my community. And when people learned of the betrayal and deceit, they said you can’t do this in America.”
Persaud, the diner owner, said he normally does not get involved in local disputes, preferring to befriend everyone. But he said he could not remain on the sidelines in this matter because of the blatant “corruption and bribery” that took place.
Persaud noted that his father moved the family to the United States from British Guiana when he was 14 “because of the corruption there — but this is worse.”
Although wrongdoing by former village and town officials has been alleged for the past three years — and the town and village lawsuit reads like a federal racketeering indictment — no arrests or charges have been filed against anyone.
stewart@jewishweek.org
NATIONAL
Sharing The Wealth
Stickball, socialism and Bernie Sanders’ run for the White House.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Sen. Bernie Sanders. Getty Images
The quixotic bid by Sen. Bernie Sanders — a 73-year-old Jewish socialist — for the presidency of the United States, evokes a mythical long-ago for some Jewish leftists; a time when even the poor wore suits to demonstrations, carrying “red diaper” babies; when socialism was as common as stickball, speaking its dreams with a street-corner accent, as does Sanders. He represents Vermont in Congress but also his childhood Brooklyn, a workingman’s borough of blue collars and unions, hand-to-mouth paychecks, immigrants, socialist Yiddish broadsheets and a Yiddish radio station whose very call-letters, WEVD, honored Eugene V. Debs, a founder of the legendary Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) and five times a candidate for president, each time defeated but never thinking himself a loser.They were mostly secular, but with messianic dreams. There was plenty to dream about: an end to the misery of tenements, sweatshops and industrial abuse; an end to tragedies such as the young women dying by their sewing machines or jumping out of windows during the Triangle Fire of 1911. Three times, beginning in 1914, the Lower East Side elected a Debs disciple, Meyer London, a Lithuanian-born Jew, to represent them in Congress.
London was ambivalent about Zionism, refusing to introduce a congressional resolution supporting the Balfour Declaration. In 1918, the resolution passed in spite of him, and he was defeated soon after.
Old Jewish arguments never die, and don’t fade away. In 2010, 84 years after London died, his cousin, Tony Judt, the British essayist, wrote in The New York Review of Books that London lost his seat because of “an ignominious alliance of wealthy New York Jews disturbed by his socialism and American Zionists aghast at his well-publicized suspicion of their project.” In truth, most Lower East Side voters were hardly wealthy in 1918, but they were aghast.
All that is Sanders’ inheritance, too. He openly admits to not being religious, is married to a Catholic woman, and the Religious News Service says he is “the presidential contender most willing to dissociate himself from religion.” After graduating the University of Chicago in 1964, Sanders spent several months working on a kibbutz. But Sanders, the Senate’s only Independent (though he’s running as a Democrat), boycotted Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent speech to Congress. Nevertheless, during the Gaza war of 2014, when confronted by a fiercely angry anti-Israel town hall meeting in Vermont, where Israel was accused of civilian “massacres,” Sanders sharply reminded them that Hamas had been launching rockets into Israel, had hid those rockets in Gaza population centers, and built military tunnels into Israel. When the anti-Israel crowd tried to shout him down, Sanders told them to “shut up” and let him finish.
In 2008, another presidential candidate was called a “socialist,” and friends and enemies of Barack Obama agreed it was a slur. In 2011, John Nichols’ history of American socialism called it “The ‘S’ Word.” That same year, a Pew survey found “socialism” to be the most polarizing and pejorative of any political label, with 60 percent of Americans having a negative reaction to the word.
Nevertheless, deep within that survey were hints of a socialist renaissance: 49 percent of young people (18-29) thought “socialism” positive, as did 55 percent of blacks and 44 percent of Hispanics.
Income disparity, a socialist complaint as far back as Debs, is suddenly not Sanders’ issue alone. According to the Associated Press, “Of all the buzzwords and phrases popping up early in the presidential campaign, ‘income inequality’ must be close to the top of the list. And it’s not just Democrats” saying so. “Republican candidates, too, are playing up the notion that people at the bottom of the economic ladder are getting a raw deal while the rich get richer.” And not just presidential candidates but mayors, such as New York’s Bill de Blasio, who has been speaking about income inequality across the country as if he were a candidate, criticizing the incumbent. After all, reports the AP, during Obama’s first term, “Incomes for the highest-earning 1 percent of Americans rose 31 percent” (adjusted for inflation). “For everyone else, it inched up an average of 0.4 percent.”
During the Depression, a Fortune magazine poll found 35 percent of Americans saying government should impose “heavy taxes on the rich.” Today, that number is up to 52 percent (according to a 2015 Gallup poll), and up to 32 percent of conservatives.
Not long ago, a socialist couldn’t get elected president of his shul, let alone president of the United States. But Chabad.org recently posted, “successive rebbes indicated that socialism and Judaism are not entirely at odds.”
This year, Sanders’ legislative program called for a “revolution” in college tuition, actually no tuition at all for freshmen and sophomores in public colleges, and reforms of federal student loans. He introduced legislation to “break up the Wall Streetbanks,” saying, “No financial institution should have holdings so extensive that its failure could send the world economy into crisis.”
The rights and dignity of workers has long been at the heart of the Jewish socialist agenda, and few organizations have been at the barricades longer than the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), formed in 1934, bringing together the Workmen’s Circle (Arbeiter Ring), the Jewish Labor Bund and United Hebrew Trades. The JLC’s associate director, Arieh Lebowitz, is quick to remind us that as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization the JLC cannot endorse candidates, but with a Jewish socialist running for president, well, there’s no law against telling the old stories, is there?
“From the beginning of the 20th century until the time of [Franklin] Roosevelt,” says Lebowitz, “a lot of working-class Jewish voters voted only for socialist candidates.” Then the New Deal adopted “ideas first proposed by the socialists,” such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, rights to housing, increased regulation of Wall Street. Even at that, a lot of people didn’t feel comfortable voting for Democrats, so they set up the American Labor Party,” and nominated Roosevelt on that ticket.
Voting for Roosevelt on the Labor ticket gave Jewish socialists permission, in a sense, to later vote for Roosevelt on the Democratic line. “It’s my sense,” says Lebowitz, “that the socialists never regained the majority of Jewish voters.” Jews also became more middle class, moving away from the blue-collar trades. Add to that the soaring rates of assimilation, and “We’re all playing somewhat different roles than we did decades earlier,” he added. “Maybe some people don’t want to call it socialism, but the right of workers to organize and get better working conditions is still relevant.”
What helped make socialism a dirty word, says Lebowitz, was its flirtation with and forgiveness of Soviet communism. The issue, he said, split Jewish socialists like “the Hatfields and McCoys.”
The feud continued for decades. In 1929, Arab riots in the Yishuv (pre-state Israel) killed 130 Jews, a “pogrom” said the socialist Yiddish paper, the Morgen Freiheit. Then, to placate communists, the Freiheit turned and pinned the blame on “Zionist-fascist” provocations. According to the Marginalia Review of Books, socialists angered by the new editorial policy “almost drove the Yiddish daily out of business. Vendors refused to sell the newspaper, businesses pulled their advertisements, and nearly all of its best writers quit in protest.”
Ten years later, in 1939, the movement was divided by the Hitler-Stalin pact that directly led to the annihilation of Polish Jewry (including most of the Sanders family). A 2009 documentary, “At Home In Utopia,” shown on PBS, told the story of an entirely socialist cooperative apartment complex in the Bronx. Boris Ourlicht, whose family lived there, told the filmmakers that it was considered perfectly acceptable for Boris and other young men to set up a soapbox in the early evening, when people would be getting off the subway, “and start talking about how wonderful the pact was.” The Soviet treaty with Hitler, they said, was good for “peace.”
In 1953, just weeks after the notorious “Doctor’s Plot” that rounded up Jews on fabricated charges, and with thousands of Jews freezing in Siberian prison camps, Stalin died. Yossi Klein Halevi, in his book “Like Dreamers,” writes how Kibbutz Ein Shemer, affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair, “went into mourning.” The Purim play was cancelled. The Hashomer Hatzair newspaper, whose logo read, “For Zionism – For Socialism,” had “a heroic image of Stalin” on the front page, with the headline, “The Progressive World Mourns.”
And so “socialism” still rankles many Jews, though too many of the economic problems that motivated the socialists remain. Says Lebowitz, “Pete Hamill used to say, don’t call it socialism, call it stickball.” Lebowitz added, “social justice” is really the same thing. There are now 47 organizations from every denomination, and from no denominations at all, in the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, “pursuing social justice from a Jewish perspective,” says Lebowitz, “using Jewish vocabulary, Jewish texts, Jewish history, Jewish resonance.”
And now one of their own is running for president.
When he was a young man in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders was intrigued by stickball.
jonathan@jewishweek.org
NEW YORK
A Jerusalem ‘That Brings People Together’
Riverdale event draws wide range of Jews to mark Jerusalem Day.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
In May 1967, for the first time since the Holocaust, Jews were digging mass graves for themselves, expecting the worst from the coming war in which Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and 13 allied armies threatened to destroy the Jewish State. In the cool of the morning of June 7, Israel went from apocalyptic fear to the shofar of Redemption blowing, and the words crackling on army radio, “the Temple Mount is in our hands.”
As Yossi Klein Halevi tells it in his award-winning book, “Like Dreamers,” the thoughts of young soldiers “drifted into history,” realizing they would be “the first soldiers of a sovereign Jewish state in 18 centuries to enter the capital of the Jewish people.” Even secular soldiers kissed the Wall where no Jew had been allowed to stand in 19 years, and then they were on the Temple Mount and Jewish history was forever changed. In the grit of war, the 28th of Iyar became not just a holiday but a holy day, Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day.
In 1967, no one could have imagined that in less than 50 years Yom Yerushalayim (this Sunday, May 17) would fall on hard times. Once widely celebrated, it has almost disappeared from the communal map, not even listed on many Jewish calendars. Attempting a revival, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale is hosting a Yom Iyun (day of learning), celebrating “the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem,” celebrating Jewish unity on the anniversary of Jerusalem’s unification.
HIR Rabbi Steven Exler tells us, “Yerushalayim is meant to be a place that brings people together, opening our hearts to what’s possible in the world.” In that spirit, the event is bringing together a rare if not unprecedented (at least since the early post-war years) “diversity of voices, all kinds of shiurim [classes],” reflecting on Jerusalem’s significance “through art, history, religious significance,” with teachings and conversations aiming at “breaking down barriers.” Along with HIR’s Rabbi Exler and Senior Rabbi Avi Weiss, some of the participating groups will be Camp Ramah-Nyack (Conservative), Bnei Akiva (an Orthodox youth organization), the Sholom Hartman Institute, CLAL, AIPAC, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), Yeshivat Chovivei Torah, Yeshivat Maharat, the Drisha Institute, Mechon Hadar (an egalitarian yeshiva), and the UJA-Federation of New York.
The day will begin, says Rabbi Exler, with a Tefillah Chagigit, davening appropriate for a festival, including Jerusalem melodies, Hallel with a bracha (blessing), and a spiritual sense “that Jerusalem, as it is today, is absolutely a modern miracle.”
Rabbi Exler hopes people will take away an awareness that Yom Yerushalayim “deserves its own special attention” and that the day’s conversations and teachings reaffirm not only Jewish dreams and unity but Jerusalem’s “point of commonality between people who otherwise have religious and political differences.”
The event runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with prayers at 8 a.m. and will take place at Hebrew Institute, 3700 Henry Hudson Parkway in the Bronx. Admission is $45.
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