Wednesdaay, July 29, 2015
Dear Reader,
Jonathan Pollard will be freed Nov. 21, thirty years to the day after he was arrested for spying for Israel. Staff Writer Stew Ain and I have the story on the long-standing and controversial saga, and our Editorial weighs in as well.Editorial
Pollard. Finally.
A protestor holds up a poster calling for the release of Pollard. Getty Images
For more than three decades Jonathan Pollard has been the center of intense controversy. So it comes as no surprise that news of his November 21 release, after his imprisonment for 30 years (the legal requirement of a life term), is fraught with rumors, theories and counter-theories about why now.
Some suggest that the White House is offering up Pollard, who spied for Israel when he was in the Navy, as a means of placating Jerusalem in the midst of the serious U.S.-Israel rift over the Iranian nuclear deal. Washington officials deny it, and it is hard to believe that they would be so tone deaf to believe that giving up a 60-year-old former spy in exchange for removing sanctions against Iran and assuring that its proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, will be even more heavily armed in the near future, would pacify the Netanyahu government. Not to mention all the other longer-term fears about the Iran nuclear deal.
Another theory posits that at a time when American Jews who oppose the deal may fear the accusation of dual loyalty, and that they are more concerned about Israel’s security than what’s best for the U.S., they are being reminded by the White House of Pollard and his misdeeds. When his crime came to light in the mid-1980s it set off a great deal of discussion and concern within the American Jewish community about dual loyalty, for which Pollard became Exhibit Number One.
It’s far more likely, though, that Pollard, who was given an unduly harsh sentence for a single count of giving classified secrets to Israel, an ally of the U.S., was going to be released anyway this November.
It will be interesting to see if he is allowed to go to Israel, where presumably he would like to live, or if he will be restricted to remaining in the U.S. Surely the White House would not like to see Pollard welcomed as a hero in Israel. And no doubt such a scene would embarrass many American Jews as well.
In the end this is a personal tragedy about a young man in his 20s whose misguided efforts to help Israel, and profit from it, robbed him of his best years. He committed a serious crime and he deserved to pay for it. But it became increasingly clear over the years that he was inordinately punished, watching men who spied for Russia and other enemy governments go free while he continued to languish in jail.
We may never know why this happened, or the extent of his crimes. But basic human compassion should be extended to a man who long ago paid the price for his sins.
editor@jewishweek.org
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/editorial/pollard-finally#XO6jmcss2J78wtqO.99
Aaron David Miller, one of the nation's leading Mideast experts and former U.S. Mideast negotiator, offers a thoughtful analysis of the Iran nuclear deal, throwing doubt on certain "truths" offered by supporters and critics.Opinion
The ‘Truth’ About The Iran Deal
A former U.S. Mideast negotiator throws some doubt on supporters’ and critics’ certainties about the pact.
Aaron David Miller
Special To The Jewish Week
Aaron Miller
One thing that critics and defenders of the Iran nuclear agreement seem to have in common is the certainty, conviction and authority with which they present their views. It’s an historic breakthrough; no, it’s an historic catastrophe; it’s this agreement or war; and my favorite — this deal sucks; negotiations, more sanctions or threat of military force could have produced an infinitely superior one. The latter is simply unknowable. Indeed, it’s at times like these that I’m reminded of Tennyson’s wonderful quip that “there lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”
Here are five supposed verities that, well, may or not be true.
The deal will stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
No it won’t. At best it’s an arms control agreement not a disarmament accord. And over time, some of its most important restrictions on core issues, such as advanced research on centrifuges and enrichment capacity, will end. The fact is Iran is already a nuclear weapons threshold state. And this accord will leave Tehran with an industrial-size nuclear infrastructure and the option to break out or even weaponize should it choose to do so. Will its leaders go that route? The decision that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence say they haven’t yet made is anyone’s guess.
The U.S. got fleeced.
Yes and no. That was Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker’s colorful way of describing how the U.S. fared in the Iran talks. Iran clearly didn’t get everything it wanted, including immediate sanctions relief. And the Iranian nuclear program will be slower, smaller and more easily monitored for at least a decade. And that’s really no small accomplishment given where the Iranian nuclear program appeared to be headed. But make no mistake, Iran got the better part of the deal. In exchange for a nuclear weapon Iran doesn’t even possess, Tehran will reap billions in sanctions relief, new-found legitimacy in the international community and still be able to maintain a large enough nuclear infrastructure to remain a nuclear weapons threshold state. Mick Jagger was wrong. You really can get what you want. The U.S. got what it needed; Iran actually did get what it wanted.
War was the only alternative to a deal.
Not so fast. Even if Congress should override a presidential veto, there’s no inexorable march to war. The United Nations Security Council resolution that the U.S. voted on could still be implemented even if U.S. oil and banking sanctions couldn’t be lifted. And Iran would reap significant political and economic benefits in such a move — blaming the U.S. and splitting the P5 + 1 (China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany). The Germans already have sent a trade delegation to Tehran. Nor is it a forgone conclusion that Iran would try to break out or sneak out to a bomb right now. What’s the point of inviting an Israeli or American attack? Better for Tehran to weigh its options and to see what it could gain by playing the political game.
The agreement will over time produce a kinder and gentler Iran.
How much time do you have? Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, didn’t endorse this accord because he saw it as a way of compromising the Iranian revolution; on the contrary it was done to preserve it and maintain control. The Iranian public wanted economic relief, and unhappy, alienated and restless people are dangerous forces for authoritarian powers. China, the former Soviet Union and Vietnam are examples of states that could open up economically and still maintain tight control. Cuba may prove to be the same way. And that’s most likely the path Iran will follow too. Don’t expect an internal Persian spring in terms of loosening up on freedoms and respect for individual rights anytime soon. And that’s also the case for Iran’s support for its bad actor friends like Assad in Syria, Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia militias.
There was a realistic and better alternative to this agreement.
We’ll simply never know for sure. Perhaps had a credible use of force been put on the table sooner and the Obama administration really challenged Iran’s regional policies in Syria and Lebanon, the Iranians would have been more pliant. But that would have required a much more risk-ready president when it came to the use of force and coalition partners who were also on board. At best both the Russians and the Chinese never saw the Iranian nuclear program in as dire terms as the U.S. did. And the Germans were eager to resume their trade ties with Iran as well. Israel was reluctant to use force on its own. And the Iranian regime would have continued on its resistance economy — pain notwithstanding — unless it could justify a good deal for itself. In a galaxy far away, a better deal might have been possible, but not here on planet Earth and not under these circumstances.
Aaron David Miller is vice president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator, and author of “The End of Greatness: Why American Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President” (St. Martin’s Press).
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/opinion/truth-about-iran-deal#p4EWzlVeFKGlMYqC.99
And novelist and law professor Thane Rosenbaum takes note of the deaths, on the same day, of two American Jewish cultural icons, Theodore Bikel and E.L. Doctorow. His essay suggests they represent Jewish life's north and south poles.National
Two Sides Of The Jewish Soul
Theo Bikel and E.L. Doctorow, who died on the same day, represented Jewish life’s north and south poles.
Thane Rosenbaum
Special To The Jewish Week
Theodore Bikel, left, and E.L. Doctorow, found fame in the United States but approached Jewish life in different directions.
One of the true riches of the Jewish people — their contribution to a society’s culture — became vastly poorer last week as two titans of Jewish song and drama, and arts and letters, Theodore Bikel, age 91, and E.L. Doctorow, age 84, both died on the same day, July 21.
Coincidences sometimes are not without purpose. They can locate the meaning of random events, grounding them in a symbolism that transcends mere trivia. For instance, the second and third presidents of the United States, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Founding Fathers of the first order, also died on the same day, July 4, 1826. They ushered in competing philosophies of American governance, and represented vastly different geographic temperaments, but in death they shared an identical end. The two had been both friends and bitter rivals, and upon their passing a young nation faced a new beginning.
So, too, can Jewish-Americans grasp this moment as weighted in similar significance — not the birth of a nation, but the culmination of its distinctive culture, which is now in need of a second act. What was lost might never be reclaimed, and may, in fact, require a complete overhaul.
Bikel is best known as Captain von Trapp from the original Broadway production of “The Sound of Music.” He also performed Tevye the Milkman, the hapless Jewish everyman from “Fiddler on the Roof,” on Broadway and around the world more times (over 2,000) than any other song and dance man before or since.
He recorded a wide array of folk songs in as many as 21 languages, including Zulu. And, yes, his renditions of Chanukah and Passover songs were more naturally in his key.
His command of accents and repertoire of talents allowed him a journeyman’s career befitting an immigrant European Jew who fled the Nazis from Vienna, was raised in pre-state Israel, and then decamped to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before moving on to Broadway and Hollywood.
Bikel’s boyhood endowed him with the ideal resume for a chameleon — the nimbly assimilated Jew who knew how to disappear within a role; a character actor who, forged by extreme events, was forced to develop character quickly. Bikel assimilated everything, taking nothing for granted and tossing even less away, like a tailor always on the lookout for suitable patches.
On film he was a Hungarian linguist in “My Fair Lady,” a German officer in “The African Queen,” and a Southern sheriff in “The Defiant Ones,” a role for which he earned an Academy Award nomination. On TV he played a Polish professor on “Charlie’s Angels” and a German butcher in “All in the Family.” Oh, and almost as a sideline, Bikel was a master of Yiddish and the leading interpreter of Sholem Aleichem.
Doctorow inhabited a very different Jewish life altogether. Born in the Bronx, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, his father owned a store in the Theater District that sold musical instruments. Although he grew up during the Depression, he was immersed in New York culture and acquired a refinement that few others of his generation, many of whom were still shaking off the dust from European shtetls and the Pale of Settlement, had the wherewithal to obtain.
Unlike Philip Roth, a contemporary who also possessed the Golden Ticket of an adolescence in the Goldena Medina — shielded from the displacements and death across the Atlantic — Doctorow more keenly embraced the manners of a postwar cultivated, Americanized Jewish intellectual. There is no equivalent to “Portnoy’s Complaint” in the backlist of Doctorow’s body of work. He had little interest in satirizing Jewish life or, as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow had done, relocating it in America. (Jews suddenly experiencing the American Dream and lamenting what was left behind was the plot line of many postwar novels.) The art of Doctorow was not only the novels, but also his own reinvention.
Curiously, instead of chronicling the Jewish-American journey, Doctorow became the godfather of historical fiction — novels set within epochal time periods and populated by recognizable historical characters he fictionalized in extraordinarily inventive ways.
All things Americana is what Doctorow gave his readers. And for that they made him a bestseller, far eclipsing the other Jewish novelists of his era. Indeed, Doctorow was not especially popular among Jews. He was perceived as an East Coast Wasp and received as Henry James. Virtually every major book award came his way for several of his 12 novels. Yet locating a Yiddish word or a Jewish kvetch in any of them was a lonely task, indeed.
Reading Doctorow is tantamount to a tutorial on revisionist American history: from the Civil War in “The March,” the cowboy western in “Welcome to Hard Times,” the period leading up to World War I in “Ragtime,” the gangster era of the 1930s in “Billy Bathgate,” the trial and execution of the fictionalized Rosenbergs in “The Book of Daniel,” and the new millennial crisis of faith in “City of God.”
With all that, and short stories, a play, literary essays and political writings to his credit, Doctorow somehow managed to go an entire career without having to mention Israel. Theodore Bikel was named for Theodor Herzl; Edgar Doctorow was named for Edgar Allan Poe. Enough said.
And, yet, not unlike Bikel, but less explicitly so, Doctorow found ways of folding himself within the characters he created, throwing his voice that gave away his ethnic bona fides. There was no Tevye, but there was a Tateh from “Ragtime” who rose from Orchard Street peddler to movie mogul. The Isaacsons from “The Book of Daniel” took the red-diaper Jewish route that Doctorow’s own parents, who he fictionalized in “World’s Fair,” would never have considered. The Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz headlines “Billy Bathgate,” while Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini and Sigmund Freud make whimsical cameos in Doctorow’s “Ragtime” as if in search of a minyan.
Now with the deaths of these two seminal figures, the interplay of old and new worlds, and the fusion of native tongues and awkward accents, which once defined the Jewish-American experience, has come to a reflective fork in the road. The melting pot simmers while Jewish culture readies itself for the next flame.
Unlike Adams and Jefferson, Bikel and Doctorow may have never even met, but very much like Founding Fathers, they were the north and south poles of Jewish life. Their work charted the polarity between the cunning escape artists sprinting toward the mainstream, and the sentimental nostalgists who held fast to more humble beginnings.
No wonder Bikel sang “Tradition,” the opening tune from “Fiddler on the Roof,” so many times. He was aiming for an audience far beyond those sitting inside the theater. Show biz wasn’t his sole motivation. There was also the premonitory warning, the geschrei of the town crier, Bikel’s calling of all Jews.
The torches have now been passed, but may never burn brighter.
Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist, essayist and law professor, is the author, most recently, of “How Sweet It Is!”
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/national/two-sides-jewish-soul#DtypiZHrvs3AUD20.99Also this week, Associate Editor Jonathan Mark on Jewish divisions over Iran deal; NYC to probe claim that some yeshivas fail to teach students secular subjects; swiping for a shidduch; and Culture Editor Sandee Brawarsky describes a unique memoir on how kosher recipes helped a brain aneurysm survivor recover.New York
Jews Bitterly Divided On Iran
Deal seen bringing peace or disaster.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Thousands of protestors gathered in Times Square on to voice their concerns at the Stop Iran rally. Michael Datikash/JW
It was the most haunted time of the Jewish year, the “Three Weeks” leading to Tisha B’Av, when Jerusalem’s walls crumbled, kingdoms fell, exile began, and clocks strike thirteen. “One of the ways God speaks is by way of the calendar, both for good and bad,” Rabbi Benjamin Blech, a Yeshiva University Talmud professor, tells us by phone. It was the time of the Inquisition, Germany’s entry into the First World War (a defeat that is linked to Germany’s precipitating World War II and the Shoah), and the disengagement from Gaza, leading to thousands of rockets and two wars. The changing deadline dates of the Iran deal blew like leaves through a graveyard, from last year’s July to November, to this April, June, and then July 14.
“Don’t you see,” says Rabbi Blech, “a deal that Charles Krauthammer called ‘the worst agreement in United States diplomatic history,’ a deal with a country that vows to destroy Israel, is finalized July 14, right in the middle of the Three Weeks.”
And yet, out of all the holy days, Tisha B’Av contains divergent moods. It is also the Messiah’s anticipated birthday, with all the peace and optimism that implies. In that wishful spirit, J Street sent an e-mail calling the Iran deal a “historic win for those of us who believe that tough international problems can be solved without going to war.” Republican presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham called the deal “a death sentence for Israel,” but J Street dismissed that as “wildly exaggerated.” The deal, declared J Street, “makes Israel safer, the United States safer and the entire world safer.”
However, as the grandfather asked in “Peter and the Wolf,” what “if the wolf should come out of the forest, then what would you do?” In a stunning, unprecedented dismissal of Israeli fears, one in five American Jews told a survey by the Los Angeles Jewish Journal that even if the deal makes Israel “more endangered,” they would support the deal anyway.
In the poll, 48 percent of American Jews support the deal, 28 percent oppose it. Of Jewish liberals, 72 percent support the deal; of Jewish conservatives, only 8 percent support it.
In contrast to the Jewish poll, a CNN poll showed that most Americans (52 percent) were against the deal, wanting Congress to reject it, with while 44 percent wanting it approved.
Across the bitter divide, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee warned that the deal will “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven,” leading Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (a liberal Jew) to reply, “Cavalier analogies to the Holocaust are unacceptable. Mike Huckabee must apologize to the Jewish community and to the American people for this grossly irresponsible statement.” Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, didn’t think Huckabee should apologize at all. On the contrary, said Klein, “An Iranian regime that has repeatedly spoken of wiping out the Jewish state of Israel does bear some relationship to the Nazi era.” Huckabee “did not speak out of place.”
Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren recently wrote, “For the first time in living memory, virtually all Israelis — left, right, religious, secular, Arabs, Jews — are together calling the deal disastrous.” Obama’s deal is opposed not just by Prime Minister Netanyahu but by leftist icons Ari Shavit and Labor leader Isaac Herzog. Last December, Herzog told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “I trust the Obama administration to get a good deal.”
Now, Herzog tells Goldberg, the deal “will unleash a lion from the cage … it will affect the safety of my children.” Herzog called Iran an “empire of evil and hate.” Herzog even invoked the defiant “Iron Wall” philosophy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of Likud-style Zionism. Said Herzog, “We have to build an Iron Wall to protect Israel. There are clear risks to Israel’s security in this deal.”
Peter Beinart, a frequent critic of Israel, who supports the deal, saw it from an American perspective, aiming to avoid another Iraq-style quagmire. Atoning for the mistakes of Iraq war, wrote Beinart, “means supporting the diplomatic deal with Iran.” For all the debating, he added, “the word ‘Iraq’ never comes up, and that’s insane.”
In the Jewish Journal, Rosner argued against Beinart, pointing out that “Most American Jews did not think the [Iraq] war was [necessary] for U.S. security and no one argued forcefully that it was essential to keep Israel secure.” The Iran deal, however, is not only risking Jewish lives but “the existence of the largest Jewish community in the world, the only Jewish state.”
Even journalists in the Arab world, fearful of Iran, have been bringing up the 1930s, comparing Obama to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, whose appeasement of Hitler in 1938 doomed Czechoslovakia, leading to all-out war. Last week, in the Egyptian daily Al-Watan, columnist Eimad Al-Din Adib writes, Chamberlain “who always preferred a policy of containment and appeasement, and who refrained from stern policy and confrontation at all costs [signed] the pathetic [Munich] agreement with Hitler … History is [now] repeating itself.
Adib writes that Obama’s “main mistake” is the lifting of the economic and trade embargo on Iran. Iran, says Adib “has spent insane sums” supporting extremists and terrorists in the region. If Iran did that while under sanctions, “what will they do with this influx of funds [without] one single clause or reference [in the deal] to Iran’s conduct as a country in the region. … It is as if they told Iran: Take 120 billion [dollars] and do as you please.”
On July 22, approximately 10,000 opponents of the deal gathered on sidewalks all the way from Times Square to 37th Street for a rally sponsored by over 50 organizations led by the ad hoc Jewish Rapid Response Coalition, in partnership with groups such as Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel; Americans for a Safe Israel; Jewish National Fund; National Council of Young Israel; the Orthodox Union; the Rabbinical Council of America; Simon Wiesenthal Center; and the Zionist Organization of America, among others.
UJA-Federation and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, declined to sponsor the rally, as both comprise diverse and divided membership across the political spectrum. Nevertheless, Jerry Levin, past president of UJA-Federation, and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chair of the Conference of Presidents, attended and supported the rally as individuals.
Barbara Frogel, an Israeli from Ramat Bet Shemesh summering in the United States, attended, saying, “I have [political] reasons for concern and 11 personal reasons for concern,” waving her hand at 11 of her children, nieces and nephews who were there, as well. “If the Holocaust has taught us nothing else,” she said, “it has taught us that if someone says they’re out to kill you, take them seriously.”
More than 40 adults and teens from Columbus, Ohio took a bus to New York for the rally. “We left around five this morning and got in around an hour ago,” said Yehuda Rosenberg, a high school student who plans to study in Israel come September. His friend Max Kalef, citing Iran’s calls of “Death to Israel,” said Iran would use a nuclear bomb when it could.
Glenn Richter, a leading Jewish activist for more than 50 years, was working the rally as marshall. The ad hoc nature of the rally, he said, was “yet another example of how the independent Jewish activists can push the Jewish community to action. What astounded me was that [the crowd consisted of] not only ‘the regulars,’ whom, of course, I saw, but around 50 percent of the people I never saw before, including walkers-by and non-Jews who stopped to talk to us, and join us.”
No one at the rally, no one anywhere, really, had any idea where the Iran story would lead, whether to the peace imagined by J Street or the ovens imagined by Huckabee. The story, however, was at a crossroads, and in the words of the Grateful Dead, “One way or another, this darkness has got to give.”
Jonathan@jewishweek.org
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york/jews-bitterly-divided-iran#HHk4m8afR1C3AlkB.99
New York
City To Probe 39 Brooklyn Yeshivas
DOE says it will look into claim of chasidic schools failing to teach kids adequate English and math.
Amy Sara Clark
Deputy Managing Editor
A billboard Yaffed put up in Williamsburg earlier this year. Courtesy of Yaffed
City officials have confirmed they will investigate a complaint alleging that dozens of Brooklyn yeshivas are violating state law by giving their students a subpar education in English, math and other secular subjects.
Fifty-two yeshiva parents, graduates and former teachers signed a letter, sent on Monday to education officials, alleging that there are 39 yeshivas where boys over the age of 13 get no secular education at all. Boys aged 7 through 13 get an average of only 90 minutes of English and math instruction per day, and none at all on Fridays. Other secular subjects, such as science and history are not taught, the letter says.
Citing New York State Education Department guidelines requiring that private schools provide an education “substantially equivalent” to that of public schools, the letter asks the seven superintendents overseeing those schools to investigate the secular instruction at 38 schools in Brooklyn and one in Queens, and help any schools they find lacking to improve their English and math instruction.
Asked whether the complaint would trigger an investigation, Harry Hartfield, a Department of Education spokesman, said via email: “We take seriously our responsibility to ensure that all students in New York receive an appropriate education, and we will investigate all allegations that are brought to our attention.”
The signatures were collected by Yaffed (Young Advocates for Fair Education), a 3-year-old nonprofit advocating for a beefed up secular curriculum at chasidic yeshivas.
Yaffed founder Naftuli Moster, who attended a chasidic yeshiva in Borough Park, said the response was “nice to hear” but said he would like the Department of Education to outline what steps it plans to take to investigate and how it would help improve secular education at any schools that need it.
“Otherwise it’s just another empty promise,” he said.
Still, the promise to investigate is more of a response then Yaffed has yet received in the three years it has been asking officials to investigate yeshiva education.
In December, Yaffed’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, sent a letter to city and state officials complaining about the lack of the quality secular education and asking for a meeting. However, that letter did not have the 52 signatures and did not specify specific schools. Officials did not respond directly to Yaffed but the New York City Department of Education (DOE) told media outlets it was unable to investigate without complaints about specific schools. In February, Moster sent city and state officials a list of 27 yeshivas but got no response.
Siegel, who was executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union from 1985 through 2001, said this is the first time in his career he hasn’t received “a single response” to requests to meet with public officials.
He said he finds the silence troubling. “This is a real issue and these are officials who are supposed to follow the law and they’re not.”
Yaffed did not release the names of the people who signed the letter and has asked the DOE to follow suit in order to protect them from retaliation or social ostracism.
“They could get kicked out of the yeshiva, they could get thrown out of the synagogue,” Moster said. “Once you’re labeled as someone who is going against the community, you’re either kicked out or you feel like you’re kicked out.”
He added, however, that things are changing, noting a recent article in the charedi newspaper Hamodia advocating better secular education.
Moster began advocating for better secular education in chasidic yeshivas when he discovered how unprepared for college his own yeshiva education had left him. When he left yeshiva he did not know how to do long division or write an essay. He’d never heard of a molecule, a cell, or the U.S. system of checks and balances, or even the American Revolution.
Moster said that even the 90 minutes of secular studies he did receive each day were of poor quality. Yeshiva administrators considered secular education as a waste of time, he noted, since Judaic studies were paramount, and students treated the classes as a time to goof off.
One Yaffed supporter, who requested that his name not be used for fear of backlash against his family, graduated from a prominent Borough Park yeshiva and now sends his children there. He said his sons had learned multiplication and had started on fractions when their secular education stopped.
“The teachers are very unqualified — people from the community with hardly any English knowledge,” he said in an interview earlier this year.
“My kids are really top-notch students. Each one of their tests, all their marks are top marks and it’s such a waste that they don’t get any [secular] education,” he said.
If city or state officials fail to crack down on yeshivas with poor secular education, Yaffed plans to go to court. However that would require parents of current students to sign on publicly publically as plaintiffs, a tall order in the insular charedi communities of Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Borough Park.
“People are afraid that their children are going to be thrown out of the school [if they sign on”], Siegel said. “Even with what their concerns are, they want to be there, they want their children to be there. They just want their children’s education to be better.”
Moster and Siegel stresses that a lawsuit would be against city and state officials for not enforcing the law, not against yeshiva leadership. For this reason, they asked the DOE to also keep the names of the schools private.
“We don’t want to make this a fight against specific yeshivas,” Siegel said. “My hope is that at least one of the seven superintendents will do what they are required to do under the law and that is investigate.”
Yaffed recently set up a hotline (646-350-0075) where people can learn more about the organization and leave complaints about specific yeshivas.
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york/city-probe-39-brooklyn-yeshivas-0#46cUetCoXc8bxBog.99
Short Takes
Swiping For A Shidduch
Carly Stern
Article author Carly Stern and friend were among the NJGs (Nice Jewish Girls) at the Tribe launch. Courtesy of Carly Stern
Downstairs, in the crowded lower level of NYC hotspot ACME this past Tuesday evening, partiers took photo booth-style pictures with friends, significant others, and potential new spouses holding signs that read “NJB” (Nice Jewish Boy), “Kiss Me I’m Jewish,” and “Shalom, Jew Feel Me?”
The event was a launch party for the latest Jewish dating app, “Tribe.”
After only just debuting July 15, founder Ari Ackerman claims Tribe is already the “most advanced app in the Jewish dating world.” Unlike its counterparts like JSwipe, Coffee Meets Bagel and Tinder, Tribe’s premise focuses on making sure its users, who can range anywhere from ages 18-60, actually go out on dates.
“It’s an app that will sort of eliminate dating apps,” said Ackerman.
When creating a profile, users are asked a wide range of questions, from Jewish identity to ideal first date. The app’s algorithm then uses technology to suggest potential matches. Like other dating apps, users “swipe” left for undesirables and right for a mensch or woman worth talking to.
With only the push of a button, Tribe consumers are able to ask their matches out on dates. The app recommends a destination based on users’ previously stated preferences and current location.
“I’m officially off Tinder, I’m officially switching to Tribe,” said Brett Hoffman, 22, a recent college graduate who attended the event.
Hoffman was not alone in his enthusiasm. Throughout the night, partygoers, who were mostly young professionals still in their work clothes (the event began at 7:30 p.m.), enthusiastically tweeted, instagrammed and facebooked their newfound appreciation for the app.
The open bar may have helped influence these social media posts. In accordance with the night’s apparent theme of Jewish puns, guests could sip on drinks such as the “M.O.T.” and the “Chai Five.”
Also accessible were napkins with the inscription, “here’s my number ___” and blue and white candies strewn throughout the space.
Even though a combination of the large turnout, small event space, and outside humidity created a sweaty evening, partygoers weren’t deterred.
“Besides the heat, I’m having a nice time,” said Danielle Nadav from Brooklyn, who said she does not use Jewish dating apps.
Will she download Tribe?
“A lot of other people are doing it, too, so it makes it a fun new thing to try,” she said.
Though 29-year-old Isaac, who declined to give his last name, also wishes to download the app, he is unable to, as it is currently only available for Apple products. Still, he enjoyed the ambiance of the night.
“It’s a good vibe, good music, lots of attractive girls,” he said.
editor@Jewishweek.org
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/short-takes/swiping-shidduch#mXbEIDfBHBPsbOqo.99
Books
‘A Kosher Cookbook In The Clothing Of A Memoir’
Brain aneurysm survivor guides the reader through her recovery – the recipes that helped get here there.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
In her new memoir, Jessica Fechtor guides the reader through her recovery from a brain injury.
Jessica Fechtor came close to death as a 28-year old when an aneurysm erupted in her brain. At the time, people would offer comments like “Everything happens for a reason,” but she doesn’t believe that. “I think that everything happens and then other things happen. You take what happens and you make something with it. It’s about what we do with it,” she tells The Jewish Week.
As the month of Elul approaches with its mood of reflection before the Days of Awe, Jessica Fechtor’s new memoir, “Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals that Brought Me Home” (Avery), makes for stirring reading. Her story is one of resilience and new beginnings. Many who suffer what she did don’t survive, and many who do are severely disabled. For her, a detour became its own path.
She was newly married and a Ph.D candidate in Yiddish literature at Harvard when, in 2008, she was attending an academic conference and fell while running on a treadmill. Rushed to a nearby hospital in Vermont, she had brain surgery and due to complications, lost the vision in one eye. She was slowly recuperating at home in Cambridge when she got an infection and then required more surgery. A chunk of her skull was removed, disfiguring her face. Then she wore a hockey helmet all the time for protection, until she had additional surgery some months later to restore her skull. And because the plastic surgeon somehow didn’t show up, she had to have surgery once again. Along the way, she lost her sense of smell, although it would return.
Fechtor writes beautifully and is a warm, gracious guide through her own landscape of illness. For her, waking up from surgery is rapture, and while doctors and nurses tell her she won’t remember, she remembers clearly. “I love the first breath, how it feels spiked with extra oxygen sneaked into the atmosphere when no one was looking like rum in the punch bowl at a high school dance,” she writes.
While recovering she thought a lot about food – she always enjoyed cooking, especially baking -- and everything that goes on around it, “the dash from the breakfast table to the door, the conversations that shape us, the places and faces that make us who we are,” she writes. Even in the hospital, she began making lists of food to prepare. She missed the daily details of ordinary life, and longed to do things for herself. Back home, she was able to test herself physically in the kitchen, to readjust her vision, and to find distraction from the world of illness and recovery. As she began to feel whole again, she wanted to figure out what food had to tell her.
She writes, “There are no available statistics on how many people die each year while baking an apple pie and I’d like to believe that it’s because you can’t. When you’re cooking, you’re alive. You’ve got no choice. To fry an egg is to operate with the perfect faith that you will sit down and eat it.” She knows she is getting better when she cares about the small stuff, like burnt edges.
About four months after the aneurysm ruptured, she felt she needed a project and tried to get back to her academic studies, but found it difficult to concentrate. A friend suggested that she start a food blog, something she hadn’t heard of in 2009. To her surprise, she discovered many readers beyond her circle of family and friends, and the blog, sweetamandine.com, became very popular. At first, she didn’t tell readers about her health, but just prior to an additional surgery, as she says, “I came out on my blog and said, ‘You don’t know but you have all been with me through this, and I thank you.’” Soon after, she was approached by literary agents about writing a book.
While it seems like a challenging narrative task, Fechtor skillfully combines the sequence of events, memories of her earlier life, and her adventures in the kitchen. She includes recipes connecting to memories. As she says, “It’s a kosher cookbook in the clothing of a memoir.” Appearing at the end of each chapter, her recipes, like her writing, are straightforward and distinctive, including Roasted Chicken and Baked Apricots with Cardamom Pistachios.
Born in New York City, Fechtor grew up in Ohio. She writes of meeting Eli, her husband (and a hero of the story), at a Shabbat dinner while they were both students at Columbia University, although they didn’t exchange a single word that evening. She studied music and English at Columbia, and then went on to Oxford, where she developed her interest in Yiddish literature, first through reading in translation and later learning Yiddish.
In person, Fechtor is animated, wearing large-framed eyeglasses; there are no signs of the trauma in her stylish appearance. She now lives in San Francisco with her husband and two young daughters, is keeping up the blog and is back to her studies. Before, she had been working on a dissertation related to Yiddish writer I.L Peretz, but now she has changed course, and is writing about the representation of food in Yiddish literature.
“Food tells us who we are, reminds us who we are, helps us figure out who we want to be. There are stories about food that are throughout Jewish tradition and Jewish practice. It’s the storytelling aspect – whether I’m looking into Jewish literature or writing about Jewish food, it’s the stories that draw me in,” she says.
Fechtor adds, “It was a thrill to find out why cooking and baking mattered so much. It dawned on me that baking is the incarnation of generosity. You can’t eat all those cookies. You bake to share.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/books/kosher-cookbook-clothing-memoir#edwJKudIAEYfLQy0.99
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Just a reminder that our website never stops serving up fresh content. Check it out for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion columns, and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
BETWEEN THE LINES Gary Rosenblatt
How Not To Influence Friends In Congress
‘Stop Iran Now’ rally was great theater, but mocking our national leaders is not the way to go.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
“Senator Schumer, I’m looking at you,” conservative talk radio personality Monica Crowley announced defiantly during last Wednesday’s grassroots “Stop Iran Now” rally in Times Square. She was figuratively addressing Chuck Schumer, the key New York politician who could help reverse U.S. approval of the nuclear agreement with Iran.
“We all know you would walk over your grandmother to be Senate Democratic leader,” she said. “Here’s your chance to earn the leadership that you so definitely desire” by voting against the deal.
The crowd of thousands, scattered over several blocks in the midst of rush-hour traffic and, by appearance, largely Orthodox, cheered mightily. I had a fleeting thought that Dale Carnegie, the 20th century behavioral guru and author of “How To Win Friends and Influence People,” would have winced at Crowley’s approach: Persuasion through public humiliation.
She was not alone, though, among the many rally speakers in both demonizing and demanding.
Although the organizers of the rally told me in advance that the speakers had been warned against personal attacks on President Obama and were urged to emphasize a bipartisan message, they didn’t seem to get the message. Whenever the names of President Obama, John Kerry or Hillary Clinton were mentioned, boos rang out for blocks.
Calling these Democratic officials cowards, charlatans and fools may have been emotionally satisfying for the orators — and red meat for the right-wing crowd. But if the practical goal was to convince at least 13 Democratic senators to put principle over politics and resist the president by striking down the Iran deal as immoral, ineffective and a clear danger to the values and security of the United States, mocking our national leaders was not the way to go.
In truth, the approach mirrored that of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu earlier this year when he chose to defy Obama and publicly attack the president’s Iran policy in the halls of Congress. Great theater, but it had the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than drawing enough congressional Democrats — especially Jewish ones — to block the president, it drove them to defend him instead. And in the process they blamed Netanyahu for forcing them to choose between their commitment to Israel and loyalty to their own country and commander in chief.
Although I oppose the Iran deal, as I’ve written often in these pages, I was disappointed — but not surprised — by the highly partisan tone of the rally, which was primarily sponsored by right-of-center and Orthodox groups. This was an event for venting, not for convincing.
Maybe that’s just human nature. It takes time to get past the frustration over this Iran nuclear deal and reach the point of facing reality, deciding how best to live with it. Maybe I’m not there yet either.
The most frustrating aspect of the president’s deal is that its strongest point — that Tehran might only be a few months away from a nuclear bomb if Congress rejects the agreement — is the direct result of America’s infuriatingly weak negotiating tactics.
It didn’t have to be this way. There could have been a diplomatic resolution that reflected the muscle of the United States in confronting the revolutionary regime in Iran, the world’s leading exporter of terrorism. Coercive diplomacy lets your enemy know that you are prepared to take military action if the negotiations don’t meet your goals. In addition, the Iran talks should have focused on, rather than ignored, the fact that the nuclear issue was part of a broader and deeper concern about Iran’s murderous behavior across the Middle East, and beyond — part of a religious and ideological mandate to spread its Islamic hegemony.
The White House decision to narrow the negotiations to the nuclear issue, and no other, while Iran’s supreme leader and Revolutionary Guard remain intent on defeating our way of life, is still galling to me. What if the U.S. had made a deal with Hitler during World War II that added to his war chest and allowed the crematoriums to burn on, in return for, say, staying out of the rest of Western Europe?
Immoral? Pragmatic? Both?
Once President Obama removed the stick but kept the carrot in the Iran negotiations and indicated over and over again that he wanted this deal more than our Iranian enemies, we were left with an agreement that legitimizes and guarantees Iran as a nuclear threshold state. It also unfreezes up to $150 billion to enable Tehran to accelerate its murderous goals, made clear through its chants: “Death to America and Death to Israel.”
Freeing an aging and ill Jonathan Pollard after 30 years in jail doesn’t begin to compensate for putting the Middle East, and ultimately America, in grave danger. And the plan to offer more arms to Israel so it can protect itself from the missiles of Hezbollah and Hamas — the very proxies of Iran whose arsenals the U.S. is helping to boost — seems like a cross between chutzpah and Chelm.
While Bibi Netanyahu is locked into continuing his condemnation of the deal so as not to betray the Republicans he revved up to oppose it, and while our national Jewish leaders contemplate the risks of sponsoring a major protest in Washington in September, fearful that not enough of us will show up, it’s time to step back and re-evaluate the situation.
Yes, the president promised us “no containment,” and now we face containing rather than preventing a nuclear Iran. Yes, the U.S. negotiators backed away from many of their red lines along the way. But we have to get past the emotional frustration of what could have/should have been in negotiating with Iran, and deal with the new reality in two distinct ways.
For the next six weeks that means keeping the spotlight and pressure on our local senators and other key Democratic leaders in Congress. Let them know our future support depends on their actions now, that it’s not too late to insist on a tougher deal, and that we’re watching closely.
But for ethical, political and practical reasons, let’s do it with dignity.
At the same time, though, we need to prepare for the likely outcome that the Iran deal, approved by America’s five world-power partners, is already done. That makes it all the more important for Jerusalem to lick its wounds, repair its relations with the U.S. and work together to respond when — not if — Iran violates the agreement.
Gary@jewishweek.org
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/gary-rosenblatt/how-not-influence-friends-congress#PJbKb7ddXmEkXgp1.99.
Read More 
Musings
A Sense Of Space
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special to the Jewish Week
Rabbi David Wolpe
Here is a remarkable passage from Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudun”: “a seventeenth century palace was totally without privacy. Architects had not yet invented the corridor. To get from one part of the building to another, one simply walked through a succession of other people’s rooms, in which literally anything might be going on.”
In these days when we communicate long distance, it is easy to forget the close quarters in which our ancestors lived. Tents, like barracks, don’t have rooms; palaces did not have corridors. Privacy is a luxury we have converted into a need.
The change recalls the story of a man who complained to the rabbi that his house was crowded. The rabbi told him to take in a chicken. Puzzled, the man complied. Then on successive days, the rabbi instructed him to bring in a rooster, a sheep and finally a cow. At the end of the week the man was frantic. “Now,” said the rabbi, “take all the animals out and you will be amazed how much room you have.”
Next time your space seems small, imagine a world with no corridors or no separate rooms. Or, a cow.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press).
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/musings/sense-space#0FkcHxPlLXTFYbsM.99
Read More
Picturesque scene at the shore of the - predictably - Avon River. Hilary Danailova
TRAVEL
The Bard's Welcome Here, Too
Hilary Danailova
Travel WriterAfter six hours waiting at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, I got the bad news: My colleague’s flight had been cancelled, so I’d be attending a weekend’s worth of theater by myself at the legendary Stratford Festival. Since half the fun of seeing a show is talking about it afterwards, I figured I was in for a lonely trip.
Was I ever wrong! All weekend long, wherever I went, the play was the thing to talk about. I traded “The Diary of Anne Frank” stories with the waitress who refilled my breakfast coffee, dished about “Hamlet” with the bartender over post-theater libations, and raved about the Jewish Maria with seatmates during intermission at “The Sound of Music.” The artistic caliber was on par with New York, but the infectious energy reminded me of high school drama club: Everyone in this theater-mad town seemed to have an opinion about the shows — and was eager for mine.
As I learned the fun way, Shakespeare and his ilk are at least as popular in Stratford, Ontario, as they are in Stratford-upon-Avon, the poet’s English birthplace and home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Within hours of arriving, I saw a bust of Shakespeare presiding over a rose garden, the Bard’s 400-year-old armchair in the lobby of the Festival Theatre, and swans gliding along — you guessed it — the Avon River.
The new world Stratford has more than a little old world charm. Romantic footbridges arch across the river, which winds through a shady, garden-dotted greenbelt; just steps away, the Victorian downtown boasts elegant brick buildings and sidewalk cafés. When I visited on a sunny July day, sightseers cruised down the Avon on the “Juliet III” riverboat, snapping photos of the scenery while families picnicked along the shore.
It’s a bucolic setting typical of summer theater, but Stratford is hardly a festival in the traditional sense. With shows running at four small, intimate theaters from April to October, it’s more like the city season in reverse — which makes sense when you consider the location in a rural Snow Belt. A vast majority of the 500,000 annual Festival attendees come from out of town (Canadian cities, the Midwest and — increasingly — the Northeastern U.S.); Shakespeare is at the heart of the lineup, but musicals, modern works and premieres round out the season.
The Jewish quotient amps up during Festival time in this Canadian farm region, where Teutonic place names — Baden, New Hamburg — reflect German immigrant roots. Local Jewish life is centered around congregations in the nearby towns of Kitchener and Waterloo, and the Festival regularly engages rabbis to consult on cultural and religious authenticity for the many Jewish-themed productions — “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Merchant of Venice,” to name a recent few.
Jewish patrons, artists and scholars are well represented throughout the Festival. During my visit, the buzz centered around the bravura performance of Stephanie Rothenberg — an NYU-trained American-Jewish actress — as Maria, the nun-turned-singing-governess in “The Sound of Music.”
Sara Farb, the Jewish star of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” prefaced her own performance with a moving tribute to her grandmother, who survived a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Later that weekend, the Forum – an ongoing series of lectures, workshops and concerts on Festival themes – featured a talk by the Canadian-Jewish writer Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker and “Another Sound of Music,” a presentation about music in the Nazi camps.
Indeed, Stratford works hard to keep its visitors engaged, with plenty to do before and after the shows (there’s even a “Sound of Music” picnic lunch series, with potato salad and sing-alongs down by the river). At the show itself, moments after the last strains of “Climb Every Mountain” died away, I watched more than a hundred audience members eagerly fill seats for a post-show Q&A with the actors.
The enthusiasm was so contagious that I stayed until midnight despite my post-flight fatigue. Then I went for a drink at Down the Street, a few blocks away on a lively stretch of Ontario Street — and bumped into half the cast, toasting and unwinding after another great show. The next morning, getting coffee at Revel Caffé, I saw Farb at the next table.
How has Stratford come to enjoy such a passionate following? By investing in an impressive audience-building effort that should be an example for arts communities everywhere. Stratford ensures its next generation by sending its actors into Ontario schools for theater workshops, filling matinées with class trips, sponsoring summer theater camps and offering a variety of discounted tickets for children, students, teachers and families.
The Festival even takes care of transportation: There’s a $20 round-trip festival bus that departs twice daily from Toronto’s Intercontinental Hotel. Those flying into Toronto on Porter Airlines, the fabulous little gem of an airline that lands right in downtown Billy Bishop Airport, can shuttle to the Intercontinental for free — so out-of-town theater buffs can make a smooth two-hour connection from one aisle seat to another for just $10.
As I sipped on free espresso in the Porter lounge, waiting to board my flight home, I spotted fellow travelers clutching “Hamlet” programs. We started chatting, agreed that Jonathan Goad’s Dane was one for the ages, and traded opinions on the minimalist sets and costumes. The Stratford spirit is contagious — and as I learned on one whirlwind trip, all the world truly is a stage here in summertime.
editor@jewishweek.org
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/features/travel/bards-welcome-here-too#6vkhpyOspIEGr8jk.99.
MusingsA Sense Of Space
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special to the Jewish Week
Rabbi David Wolpe
Here is a remarkable passage from Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudun”: “a seventeenth century palace was totally without privacy. Architects had not yet invented the corridor. To get from one part of the building to another, one simply walked through a succession of other people’s rooms, in which literally anything might be going on.”
In these days when we communicate long distance, it is easy to forget the close quarters in which our ancestors lived. Tents, like barracks, don’t have rooms; palaces did not have corridors. Privacy is a luxury we have converted into a need.
The change recalls the story of a man who complained to the rabbi that his house was crowded. The rabbi told him to take in a chicken. Puzzled, the man complied. Then on successive days, the rabbi instructed him to bring in a rooster, a sheep and finally a cow. At the end of the week the man was frantic. “Now,” said the rabbi, “take all the animals out and you will be amazed how much room you have.”
Next time your space seems small, imagine a world with no corridors or no separate rooms. Or, a cow.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press).
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/musings/sense-space#0FkcHxPlLXTFYbsM.99
Read More
Picturesque scene at the shore of the - predictably - Avon River. Hilary Danailova
TRAVEL
The Bard's Welcome Here, Too
Hilary Danailova
Travel WriterAfter six hours waiting at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, I got the bad news: My colleague’s flight had been cancelled, so I’d be attending a weekend’s worth of theater by myself at the legendary Stratford Festival. Since half the fun of seeing a show is talking about it afterwards, I figured I was in for a lonely trip.
Was I ever wrong! All weekend long, wherever I went, the play was the thing to talk about. I traded “The Diary of Anne Frank” stories with the waitress who refilled my breakfast coffee, dished about “Hamlet” with the bartender over post-theater libations, and raved about the Jewish Maria with seatmates during intermission at “The Sound of Music.” The artistic caliber was on par with New York, but the infectious energy reminded me of high school drama club: Everyone in this theater-mad town seemed to have an opinion about the shows — and was eager for mine.
As I learned the fun way, Shakespeare and his ilk are at least as popular in Stratford, Ontario, as they are in Stratford-upon-Avon, the poet’s English birthplace and home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Within hours of arriving, I saw a bust of Shakespeare presiding over a rose garden, the Bard’s 400-year-old armchair in the lobby of the Festival Theatre, and swans gliding along — you guessed it — the Avon River.
The new world Stratford has more than a little old world charm. Romantic footbridges arch across the river, which winds through a shady, garden-dotted greenbelt; just steps away, the Victorian downtown boasts elegant brick buildings and sidewalk cafés. When I visited on a sunny July day, sightseers cruised down the Avon on the “Juliet III” riverboat, snapping photos of the scenery while families picnicked along the shore.
It’s a bucolic setting typical of summer theater, but Stratford is hardly a festival in the traditional sense. With shows running at four small, intimate theaters from April to October, it’s more like the city season in reverse — which makes sense when you consider the location in a rural Snow Belt. A vast majority of the 500,000 annual Festival attendees come from out of town (Canadian cities, the Midwest and — increasingly — the Northeastern U.S.); Shakespeare is at the heart of the lineup, but musicals, modern works and premieres round out the season.
The Jewish quotient amps up during Festival time in this Canadian farm region, where Teutonic place names — Baden, New Hamburg — reflect German immigrant roots. Local Jewish life is centered around congregations in the nearby towns of Kitchener and Waterloo, and the Festival regularly engages rabbis to consult on cultural and religious authenticity for the many Jewish-themed productions — “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Merchant of Venice,” to name a recent few.
Jewish patrons, artists and scholars are well represented throughout the Festival. During my visit, the buzz centered around the bravura performance of Stephanie Rothenberg — an NYU-trained American-Jewish actress — as Maria, the nun-turned-singing-governess in “The Sound of Music.”
Sara Farb, the Jewish star of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” prefaced her own performance with a moving tribute to her grandmother, who survived a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Later that weekend, the Forum – an ongoing series of lectures, workshops and concerts on Festival themes – featured a talk by the Canadian-Jewish writer Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker and “Another Sound of Music,” a presentation about music in the Nazi camps.
Indeed, Stratford works hard to keep its visitors engaged, with plenty to do before and after the shows (there’s even a “Sound of Music” picnic lunch series, with potato salad and sing-alongs down by the river). At the show itself, moments after the last strains of “Climb Every Mountain” died away, I watched more than a hundred audience members eagerly fill seats for a post-show Q&A with the actors.
The enthusiasm was so contagious that I stayed until midnight despite my post-flight fatigue. Then I went for a drink at Down the Street, a few blocks away on a lively stretch of Ontario Street — and bumped into half the cast, toasting and unwinding after another great show. The next morning, getting coffee at Revel Caffé, I saw Farb at the next table.
How has Stratford come to enjoy such a passionate following? By investing in an impressive audience-building effort that should be an example for arts communities everywhere. Stratford ensures its next generation by sending its actors into Ontario schools for theater workshops, filling matinées with class trips, sponsoring summer theater camps and offering a variety of discounted tickets for children, students, teachers and families.
The Festival even takes care of transportation: There’s a $20 round-trip festival bus that departs twice daily from Toronto’s Intercontinental Hotel. Those flying into Toronto on Porter Airlines, the fabulous little gem of an airline that lands right in downtown Billy Bishop Airport, can shuttle to the Intercontinental for free — so out-of-town theater buffs can make a smooth two-hour connection from one aisle seat to another for just $10.
As I sipped on free espresso in the Porter lounge, waiting to board my flight home, I spotted fellow travelers clutching “Hamlet” programs. We started chatting, agreed that Jonathan Goad’s Dane was one for the ages, and traded opinions on the minimalist sets and costumes. The Stratford spirit is contagious — and as I learned on one whirlwind trip, all the world truly is a stage here in summertime.
editor@jewishweek.org
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/features/travel/bards-welcome-here-too#6vkhpyOspIEGr8jk.99.
Read More
Camp crowd's response to the talent show. Screenshot
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
9 Best Jewish Moments From 'Wet Hot American Summer'
JTAWelcome back to Camp Firewood! “Wet Hot American Summer,” cult classic movie from 2001, will soon be a Netflix miniseries, premiering July 31.
Camp Firewood isn’t an observant place, but it’s chalk full of Jews — there’s even a camper named David Ben-Gurion. The movie is reportedly based on director David Wain’s childhood experience as a camper at Jewish Camp Modin in Maine, as previously noted in an earlier article.
Whereas the movie follows the impossibly eventful and dramatic final day of camp in 1981, viewers will this time arrive with the campers on day one.
The same star-studded staff will be there to welcome them, including Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks and Paul Rudd. Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig and Jason Schwartzman are among the new hires.
As a generation of Jewish summer campers will recall, the movie isn’t afraid to get weird and raunchy — with pubescent tongue mashing, talking canned vegetables and triumphant refrigerator humping being just a few examples.
But many of the best moments are good old-fashioned Jewish jokes.
1. Men can be real "insensitive schmucks"
Precocious camper Aaron helps Gail deal with being left by her husband. "The truth is: A lot of the time men can be real, and excuse the Yiddish, insensitive schmucks," he explains. Even more healing than Aaron's words are his "magic" massages.
2. "Well, she might be. She's got a pretty big nose
After landing his dream girl, Gerald "Coop" Cooperberg calls to tell his parents they can stop worrying about his love life. Asked the inevitable Jewish-parent follow-up question, he says, "I don't think so. Well, she might be. She's got a pretty big nose."
3.Calling camper "David Ben-Gurion"
Roll call by camp director, Beth, is heavily Jewish. "Amanda Klein, Jessica Azaria, Ira Stevenberg, Saul Zimmerstein, David Ben-Gurion."
4. The girls from Bunk 10 are "really horny this summer"
Determined to get their closeted gay friend McKinley "the ultimate," J.J. and Gary, go down the list of potential girls: Debbie? Debbie Debbie? Tall Debbie? Debbie Freeman? "She's in heat!"
5. "So then Rabbi Rothstein says ..."
Camp talk-radio personality and resident dirty kid, Arty "The Beekeeper" Solomon, has the comedic repertoire of an old Jewish man. He stays sharp during the year on Jewish day school radio.
6. "I love it that sometimes for no reason you're late for shul"
When Katie breaks off a morning-long romance with Coop, he professes his undying love. "I love the way you laugh, and I love the way your hair smells, and I love it that sometimes for no reason you're late for shul," he wails.
7. "I went to sleep-away camp so long ago, it was the Stone Age"
Talent show MC Alan Shemper brings down the house with a monologue about how he attended Jewish summer camp during the Stone Age. "For breakfast, we had to eat scrambled pterodactyl eggs and raptor bacon," he quips, drawing howls of laughter from the audience.
8. "Let's pray this works" – in Hebrew
With a piece of NASA's Skylab space station hurtling toward the camp rec hall, the science geeks say a Hebrew prayer that their deflector — powered by a Dungeons & Dragons dice — will save the day.
9. "I don't think so, Ronald von Kleinenstein"
When Gail's husband Ron shows up at the talent show to win her back, she finds the strength to tell him she's "sick and tired of being sick and tired." In '80s movie fashion, the main characters resolve their problems in the movie's final moments – with the notable exception of poor Coop.
International Camp crowd's response to the talent show. Screenshot
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
9 Best Jewish Moments From 'Wet Hot American Summer'
JTAWelcome back to Camp Firewood! “Wet Hot American Summer,” cult classic movie from 2001, will soon be a Netflix miniseries, premiering July 31.
Camp Firewood isn’t an observant place, but it’s chalk full of Jews — there’s even a camper named David Ben-Gurion. The movie is reportedly based on director David Wain’s childhood experience as a camper at Jewish Camp Modin in Maine, as previously noted in an earlier article.
Whereas the movie follows the impossibly eventful and dramatic final day of camp in 1981, viewers will this time arrive with the campers on day one.
The same star-studded staff will be there to welcome them, including Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks and Paul Rudd. Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig and Jason Schwartzman are among the new hires.
As a generation of Jewish summer campers will recall, the movie isn’t afraid to get weird and raunchy — with pubescent tongue mashing, talking canned vegetables and triumphant refrigerator humping being just a few examples.
But many of the best moments are good old-fashioned Jewish jokes.
1. Men can be real "insensitive schmucks"
Precocious camper Aaron helps Gail deal with being left by her husband. "The truth is: A lot of the time men can be real, and excuse the Yiddish, insensitive schmucks," he explains. Even more healing than Aaron's words are his "magic" massages.
2. "Well, she might be. She's got a pretty big nose
After landing his dream girl, Gerald "Coop" Cooperberg calls to tell his parents they can stop worrying about his love life. Asked the inevitable Jewish-parent follow-up question, he says, "I don't think so. Well, she might be. She's got a pretty big nose."
3.Calling camper "David Ben-Gurion"
Roll call by camp director, Beth, is heavily Jewish. "Amanda Klein, Jessica Azaria, Ira Stevenberg, Saul Zimmerstein, David Ben-Gurion."
4. The girls from Bunk 10 are "really horny this summer"
Determined to get their closeted gay friend McKinley "the ultimate," J.J. and Gary, go down the list of potential girls: Debbie? Debbie Debbie? Tall Debbie? Debbie Freeman? "She's in heat!"
5. "So then Rabbi Rothstein says ..."
Camp talk-radio personality and resident dirty kid, Arty "The Beekeeper" Solomon, has the comedic repertoire of an old Jewish man. He stays sharp during the year on Jewish day school radio.
6. "I love it that sometimes for no reason you're late for shul"
When Katie breaks off a morning-long romance with Coop, he professes his undying love. "I love the way you laugh, and I love the way your hair smells, and I love it that sometimes for no reason you're late for shul," he wails.
7. "I went to sleep-away camp so long ago, it was the Stone Age"
Talent show MC Alan Shemper brings down the house with a monologue about how he attended Jewish summer camp during the Stone Age. "For breakfast, we had to eat scrambled pterodactyl eggs and raptor bacon," he quips, drawing howls of laughter from the audience.
8. "Let's pray this works" – in Hebrew
With a piece of NASA's Skylab space station hurtling toward the camp rec hall, the science geeks say a Hebrew prayer that their deflector — powered by a Dungeons & Dragons dice — will save the day.
9. "I don't think so, Ronald von Kleinenstein"
When Gail's husband Ron shows up at the talent show to win her back, she finds the strength to tell him she's "sick and tired of being sick and tired." In '80s movie fashion, the main characters resolve their problems in the movie's final moments – with the notable exception of poor Coop.
Pollard Reflects On Hopes Dashed
U.S. denies spy's release is linked to Iran deal; 30-year sentence widely seen as excessive.
Stewart Ain and Gary Rosenblatt
Israeli protestors call for the release of Jonathan Pollard in 2014. Getty Images
Jonathan Pollard, who will be released from prison Nov. 21, 30 years to the day after he was arrested by FBI agents outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, once shared with The Jewish Week his reaction to reports — later proved false — that he was about to be freed in 1996.
It was during the Wye River peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and at one point President Bill Clinton was said to have sweetened the deal by offering to free Pollard, a civilian U.S. Navy intelligence officer serving a life sentence after pleading guilty in 1987 to passing classified military information to Israel.
In one of many phone calls Pollard placed to editors and reporters at The Jewish Week in the mid-to-late 1990s, he recalled that his second wife, Esther, had phoned him in prison “at 7 in the morning” to tell him the news.
“Everybody here was very happy for me,” he said. “I’ve never shaken so many hands in my life. The guards, too, patted me on the back. The guards said, ‘You’re going home.’ … I was packing; I thought this was it. I packed my Chumash [Five Books of Moses], my tallit and tefillin and my wife’s pictures.
“Everybody was coming around my room asking for books, clothes, deodorant, food. Everybody was claiming things. That’s what happens in prisons.”
Pollard said his roommate, a Muslim, “embraced me and said, ‘Both our peoples are going home, isn’t it wonderful?’”
He was referring to the planned release of 750 Palestinian prisoners who were to be set free as part of the peace accord.
Pollard said he later “heard through my own channels that I would be leaving Saturday night and going to Israel with the prime minister on his plane.”
But later in the day he said he learned that Clinton had acceded to opposition to his release from the CIA.
“The room started spinning, I got nauseous and broke into a cold sweat,” he recalled. “My blood pressure shot up and I went and sat down at my desk and blacked out. I was out for about a minute or two.”
Pollard, who will be 61 on Aug. 7, doubtless heard many rumors since then about the possibility of his release. During his long years in prison, many American Jews changed their attitudes toward him from anger and embarrassment at the time of his arrest, which sparked heated debates about U.S.-Israel dual loyalty, to sympathy for the inordinately harsh sentence he received.
In Israel, too, there was a softening toward Pollard, whose notoriety embarrassed the country, and to his plight. In 1995, he was granted Israeli citizenship.
His case became a cause for many pro-Israel advocates. Even in recent years it was common for a speaker discussing Israel and the Middle East in the Jewish community to field questions from an audience and be asked first about the Pollard case. It evoked strong feelings on both sides of the issue, not so much over whether he was guilty of a crime but whether his punishment was unduly harsh.
Ken Lasson, a law professor and writer in Baltimore, was part of the small, informal team of pro bono attorneys who devoted countless hours seeking Pollard’s release. Lasson told The Jewish Week on Tuesday that “the average sentence for the crime Pollard committed was two to four years.”
“I always maintained he was guilty,” said Lasson, who was among the attorneys and supporters thanked by Pollard in a statement released Tuesday by his lead attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman. “It was the punishment that was so unfair — a gross violation of American justice. An American tragedy.”
Lasson said that over time he became convinced that anti-Semitism played a role in the fact that Pollard, who spied for Israel, an ally, languished in jail while others who spied for enemies of the U.S. were released sooner.
“What else could it be?” he asked. “I couldn’t see any other reason.”
Even before the official announcement on Tuesday that Pollard would be released on parole, the case was being debated again — this time focused on whether the timing was part of a White House effort to placate Israel over the Iran nuclear agreement.
U.S. officials denied the reports and noted that at the time Pollard was sentenced, a life sentence meant 30 years — and those 30 years come due Nov. 21.
Shortly before the parole board announced its decision to free Pollard, Abraham Sofaer, a former State Department legal adviser who led the team that gathered the information that led to Pollard’s conviction, said he hoped Pollard would be released.
“I think [30 years] is an adequate punishment,” he told The Jewish Week. “It is really a matter of rachmanis [compassion] now. There is no need to punish him [further], and no call to keep him in prison. He is not a danger to the U.S. whatsoever, and that is why I think the parole board should let him go,” he said. He added that he has no “respect” for Pollard because of his spying activities for which Israel paid him — both in cash and in gifts.
The total is believed to be about $21,000.
Sofaer said two key factors accounting for Pollard’s long sentence were poor legal advice at the time of his sentence and his unrepentant attitude after he was first imprisoned.
Initially, Pollard insisted that he was providing Israel with material that was critical to its defense and that he was passing on only material that was supposed to have been provided as part of bilateral agreements between the two allies.
Pollard, who had had high-level security clearance, told The Jewish Week by phone from his prison in Butner, N.C., in December 1998 that he knew exactly what classified material he was sharing with Israel and that he “went to great lengths to sanitize as much of the information as I could before I provided it to Israel.”
He maintained money was never an issue for him and he insisted that the U.S. deliberately withheld the information that was supposed to be shared with Israel in order to prevent the country from taking any more unilateral actions like its 1981 bombing of the nearly completed Iraqi nuclear reactor.
He also pushed back against the comments of four retired U.S. Navy admirals who called Pollard a “traitor” in an op-ed in The Washington Post. Pollard said that by calling him a traitor — a crime with which he was never charged — the admirals were “redefining the status of Israel with regard to the U.S. If I am a traitor, who is the enemy I served?”
He also denied suggestions that, if freed, he would resume his illegal conduct.
“I have given my word that I am remorseful and will do whatever I have to do to lead a constructive and honest life in the future,” he said.
Sofaer noted that in subsequent years Pollard was more mellow and was quoted as saying that he had “made a mistake and that he wants to go and live the rest of his life in quiet bliss.”
As a condition of his parole, Pollard must remain in the U.S. for five years. Noting Pollard’s expressed desire to settle in Israel, his chief attorneys, Lauer and Semmelman, said they would ask President Obama to permit him to move to Israel immediately upon his release. Such permission is not considered likely.
The attorneys noted that Pollard asked them to say that he is looking forward to being reunited with his wife and that he was thankful to his pro bono lawyers, the National Council of Young Israel and others in the U.S. and Israel who had championed his release.
In an interview before the parole board’s announcement, Pollard’s former wife, Anne, who was arrested with him in 1985 and served five years in prison, told the Voice of Israel that Pollard is “very ill and needs immediate medical attention.”
She added: “He has lost 30 years — his entire adult life. The world has changed so remarkably in 30 years. There was no Internet or cell phones. For Jonathan to grasp the real world will take some time.”
Stewart Ain is staff reporter and Gary Rosenblatt is editor and publisher of The Jewish Week.
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/international/pollard-be-released#MIZTwtuy8vgbjbEy.99
Read More Opinion
The ‘Truth’ About The Iran Deal
A former U.S. Mideast negotiator throws some doubt on supporters’ and critics’ certainties about the pact.
Aaron David Miller
Special To The Jewish Week
Aaron Miller
One thing that critics and defenders of the Iran nuclear agreement seem to have in common is the certainty, conviction and authority with which they present their views. It’s an historic breakthrough; no, it’s an historic catastrophe; it’s this agreement or war; and my favorite — this deal sucks; negotiations, more sanctions or threat of military force could have produced an infinitely superior one. The latter is simply unknowable. Indeed, it’s at times like these that I’m reminded of Tennyson’s wonderful quip that “there lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”
Here are five supposed verities that, well, may or not be true.
The deal will stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
No it won’t. At best it’s an arms control agreement not a disarmament accord. And over time, some of its most important restrictions on core issues, such as advanced research on centrifuges and enrichment capacity, will end. The fact is Iran is already a nuclear weapons threshold state. And this accord will leave Tehran with an industrial-size nuclear infrastructure and the option to break out or even weaponize should it choose to do so. Will its leaders go that route? The decision that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence say they haven’t yet made is anyone’s guess.
The U.S. got fleeced.
Yes and no. That was Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker’s colorful way of describing how the U.S. fared in the Iran talks. Iran clearly didn’t get everything it wanted, including immediate sanctions relief. And the Iranian nuclear program will be slower, smaller and more easily monitored for at least a decade. And that’s really no small accomplishment given where the Iranian nuclear program appeared to be headed. But make no mistake, Iran got the better part of the deal. In exchange for a nuclear weapon Iran doesn’t even possess, Tehran will reap billions in sanctions relief, new-found legitimacy in the international community and still be able to maintain a large enough nuclear infrastructure to remain a nuclear weapons threshold state. Mick Jagger was wrong. You really can get what you want. The U.S. got what it needed; Iran actually did get what it wanted.
War was the only alternative to a deal.
Not so fast. Even if Congress should override a presidential veto, there’s no inexorable march to war. The United Nations Security Council resolution that the U.S. voted on could still be implemented even if U.S. oil and banking sanctions couldn’t be lifted. And Iran would reap significant political and economic benefits in such a move — blaming the U.S. and splitting the P5 + 1 (China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany). The Germans already have sent a trade delegation to Tehran. Nor is it a forgone conclusion that Iran would try to break out or sneak out to a bomb right now. What’s the point of inviting an Israeli or American attack? Better for Tehran to weigh its options and to see what it could gain by playing the political game.
The agreement will over time produce a kinder and gentler Iran.
How much time do you have? Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, didn’t endorse this accord because he saw it as a way of compromising the Iranian revolution; on the contrary it was done to preserve it and maintain control. The Iranian public wanted economic relief, and unhappy, alienated and restless people are dangerous forces for authoritarian powers. China, the former Soviet Union and Vietnam are examples of states that could open up economically and still maintain tight control. Cuba may prove to be the same way. And that’s most likely the path Iran will follow too. Don’t expect an internal Persian spring in terms of loosening up on freedoms and respect for individual rights anytime soon. And that’s also the case for Iran’s support for its bad actor friends like Assad in Syria, Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia militias.
There was a realistic and better alternative to this agreement.
We’ll simply never know for sure. Perhaps had a credible use of force been put on the table sooner and the Obama administration really challenged Iran’s regional policies in Syria and Lebanon, the Iranians would have been more pliant. But that would have required a much more risk-ready president when it came to the use of force and coalition partners who were also on board. At best both the Russians and the Chinese never saw the Iranian nuclear program in as dire terms as the U.S. did. And the Germans were eager to resume their trade ties with Iran as well. Israel was reluctant to use force on its own. And the Iranian regime would have continued on its resistance economy — pain notwithstanding — unless it could justify a good deal for itself. In a galaxy far away, a better deal might have been possible, but not here on planet Earth and not under these circumstances.
Aaron David Miller is vice president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator, and author of “The End of Greatness: Why American Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President” (St. Martin’s Press).
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/opinion/truth-about-iran-deal#StQJfLcazvODcSuY.99
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New York OpinionThe ‘Truth’ About The Iran Deal
A former U.S. Mideast negotiator throws some doubt on supporters’ and critics’ certainties about the pact.
Aaron David Miller
Special To The Jewish Week
Aaron Miller
One thing that critics and defenders of the Iran nuclear agreement seem to have in common is the certainty, conviction and authority with which they present their views. It’s an historic breakthrough; no, it’s an historic catastrophe; it’s this agreement or war; and my favorite — this deal sucks; negotiations, more sanctions or threat of military force could have produced an infinitely superior one. The latter is simply unknowable. Indeed, it’s at times like these that I’m reminded of Tennyson’s wonderful quip that “there lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”
Here are five supposed verities that, well, may or not be true.
The deal will stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
No it won’t. At best it’s an arms control agreement not a disarmament accord. And over time, some of its most important restrictions on core issues, such as advanced research on centrifuges and enrichment capacity, will end. The fact is Iran is already a nuclear weapons threshold state. And this accord will leave Tehran with an industrial-size nuclear infrastructure and the option to break out or even weaponize should it choose to do so. Will its leaders go that route? The decision that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence say they haven’t yet made is anyone’s guess.
The U.S. got fleeced.
Yes and no. That was Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker’s colorful way of describing how the U.S. fared in the Iran talks. Iran clearly didn’t get everything it wanted, including immediate sanctions relief. And the Iranian nuclear program will be slower, smaller and more easily monitored for at least a decade. And that’s really no small accomplishment given where the Iranian nuclear program appeared to be headed. But make no mistake, Iran got the better part of the deal. In exchange for a nuclear weapon Iran doesn’t even possess, Tehran will reap billions in sanctions relief, new-found legitimacy in the international community and still be able to maintain a large enough nuclear infrastructure to remain a nuclear weapons threshold state. Mick Jagger was wrong. You really can get what you want. The U.S. got what it needed; Iran actually did get what it wanted.
War was the only alternative to a deal.
Not so fast. Even if Congress should override a presidential veto, there’s no inexorable march to war. The United Nations Security Council resolution that the U.S. voted on could still be implemented even if U.S. oil and banking sanctions couldn’t be lifted. And Iran would reap significant political and economic benefits in such a move — blaming the U.S. and splitting the P5 + 1 (China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany). The Germans already have sent a trade delegation to Tehran. Nor is it a forgone conclusion that Iran would try to break out or sneak out to a bomb right now. What’s the point of inviting an Israeli or American attack? Better for Tehran to weigh its options and to see what it could gain by playing the political game.
The agreement will over time produce a kinder and gentler Iran.
How much time do you have? Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, didn’t endorse this accord because he saw it as a way of compromising the Iranian revolution; on the contrary it was done to preserve it and maintain control. The Iranian public wanted economic relief, and unhappy, alienated and restless people are dangerous forces for authoritarian powers. China, the former Soviet Union and Vietnam are examples of states that could open up economically and still maintain tight control. Cuba may prove to be the same way. And that’s most likely the path Iran will follow too. Don’t expect an internal Persian spring in terms of loosening up on freedoms and respect for individual rights anytime soon. And that’s also the case for Iran’s support for its bad actor friends like Assad in Syria, Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia militias.
There was a realistic and better alternative to this agreement.
We’ll simply never know for sure. Perhaps had a credible use of force been put on the table sooner and the Obama administration really challenged Iran’s regional policies in Syria and Lebanon, the Iranians would have been more pliant. But that would have required a much more risk-ready president when it came to the use of force and coalition partners who were also on board. At best both the Russians and the Chinese never saw the Iranian nuclear program in as dire terms as the U.S. did. And the Germans were eager to resume their trade ties with Iran as well. Israel was reluctant to use force on its own. And the Iranian regime would have continued on its resistance economy — pain notwithstanding — unless it could justify a good deal for itself. In a galaxy far away, a better deal might have been possible, but not here on planet Earth and not under these circumstances.
Aaron David Miller is vice president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator, and author of “The End of Greatness: Why American Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President” (St. Martin’s Press).
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/opinion/truth-about-iran-deal#StQJfLcazvODcSuY.99
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City To Probe 39 Brooklyn Yeshivas
DOE says it will look into claim of chasidic schools failing to teach kids adequate English and math.
Amy Sara Clark
Deputy Managing Editor
A billboard Yaffed put up in Williamsburg earlier this year. Courtesy of Yaffed
City officials have confirmed they will investigate a complaint alleging that dozens of Brooklyn yeshivas are violating state law by giving their students a subpar education in English, math and other secular subjects.
Fifty-two yeshiva parents, graduates and former teachers signed a letter, sent on Monday to education officials, alleging that there are 39 yeshivas where boys over the age of 13 get no secular education at all. Boys aged 7 through 13 get an average of only 90 minutes of English and math instruction per day, and none at all on Fridays. Other secular subjects, such as science and history are not taught, the letter says.
Citing New York State Education Department guidelines requiring that private schools provide an education “substantially equivalent” to that of public schools, the letter asks the seven superintendents overseeing those schools to investigate the secular instruction at 38 schools in Brooklyn and one in Queens, and help any schools they find lacking to improve their English and math instruction.
Asked whether the complaint would trigger an investigation, Harry Hartfield, a Department of Education spokesman, said via email: “We take seriously our responsibility to ensure that all students in New York receive an appropriate education, and we will investigate all allegations that are brought to our attention.”
The signatures were collected by Yaffed (Young Advocates for Fair Education), a 3-year-old nonprofit advocating for a beefed up secular curriculum at chasidic yeshivas.
Yaffed founder Naftuli Moster, who attended a chasidic yeshiva in Borough Park, said the response was “nice to hear” but said he would like the Department of Education to outline what steps it plans to take to investigate and how it would help improve secular education at any schools that need it.
“Otherwise it’s just another empty promise,” he said.
Still, the promise to investigate is more of a response then Yaffed has yet received in the three years it has been asking officials to investigate yeshiva education.
In December, Yaffed’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, sent a letter to city and state officials complaining about the lack of the quality secular education and asking for a meeting. However, that letter did not have the 52 signatures and did not specify specific schools. Officials did not respond directly to Yaffed but the New York City Department of Education (DOE) told media outlets it was unable to investigate without complaints about specific schools. In February, Moster sent city and state officials a list of 27 yeshivas but got no response.
Siegel, who was executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union from 1985 through 2001, said this is the first time in his career he hasn’t received “a single response” to requests to meet with public officials.
He said he finds the silence troubling. “This is a real issue and these are officials who are supposed to follow the law and they’re not.”
Yaffed did not release the names of the people who signed the letter and has asked the DOE to follow suit in order to protect them from retaliation or social ostracism.
“They could get kicked out of the yeshiva, they could get thrown out of the synagogue,” Moster said. “Once you’re labeled as someone who is going against the community, you’re either kicked out or you feel like you’re kicked out.”
He added, however, that things are changing, noting a recent article in the charedi newspaper Hamodia advocating better secular education.
Moster began advocating for better secular education in chasidic yeshivas when he discovered how unprepared for college his own yeshiva education had left him. When he left yeshiva he did not know how to do long division or write an essay. He’d never heard of a molecule, a cell, or the U.S. system of checks and balances, or even the American Revolution.
Moster said that even the 90 minutes of secular studies he did receive each day were of poor quality. Yeshiva administrators considered secular education as a waste of time, he noted, since Judaic studies were paramount, and students treated the classes as a time to goof off.
One Yaffed supporter, who requested that his name not be used for fear of backlash against his family, graduated from a prominent Borough Park yeshiva and now sends his children there. He said his sons had learned multiplication and had started on fractions when their secular education stopped.
“The teachers are very unqualified — people from the community with hardly any English knowledge,” he said in an interview earlier this year.
“My kids are really top-notch students. Each one of their tests, all their marks are top marks and it’s such a waste that they don’t get any [secular] education,” he said.
If city or state officials fail to crack down on yeshivas with poor secular education, Yaffed plans to go to court. However that would require parents of current students to sign on publicly publically as plaintiffs, a tall order in the insular charedi communities of Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Borough Park.
“People are afraid that their children are going to be thrown out of the school [if they sign on”], Siegel said. “Even with what their concerns are, they want to be there, they want their children to be there. They just want their children’s education to be better.”
Moster and Siegel stress that a lawsuit would be against city and state officials for not enforcing the law, not against yeshiva leadership. For this reason, they asked the DOE to also keep the names of the schools private.
“We don’t want to make this a fight against specific yeshivas,” Siegel said. “My hope is that at least one of the seven superintendents will do what they are required to do under the law and that is investigate.”
Yaffed recently set up a hotline (646-350-0075) where people can learn more about the organization and leave complaints about specific yeshivas.
amyclark@jewishweek.org
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york/city-probe-39-brooklyn-yeshivas#gCmJpgeRv5rQPTkM.99 National
Two Sides Of The Jewish Soul
Theo Bikel and E.L. Doctorow, who died on the same day, represented Jewish life’s north and south poles.
Thane Rosenbaum
Special To The Jewish Week
Theodore Bikel, left, and E.L. Doctorow, found fame in the United States but approached Jewish life in different directions.
One of the true riches of the Jewish people — their contribution to a society’s culture — became vastly poorer last week as two titans of Jewish song and drama, and arts and letters, Theodore Bikel, age 91, and E.L. Doctorow, age 84, both died on the same day, July 21.
Coincidences sometimes are not without purpose. They can locate the meaning of random events, grounding them in a symbolism that transcends mere trivia. For instance, the second and third presidents of the United States, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Founding Fathers of the first order, also died on the same day, July 4, 1826. They ushered in competing philosophies of American governance, and represented vastly different geographic temperaments, but in death they shared an identical end. The two had been both friends and bitter rivals, and upon their passing a young nation faced a new beginning.
So, too, can Jewish-Americans grasp this moment as weighted in similar significance — not the birth of a nation, but the culmination of its distinctive culture, which is now in need of a second act. What was lost might never be reclaimed, and may, in fact, require a complete overhaul.
Bikel is best known as Captain von Trapp from the original Broadway production of “The Sound of Music.” He also performed Tevye the Milkman, the hapless Jewish everyman from “Fiddler on the Roof,” on Broadway and around the world more times (over 2,000) than any other song and dance man before or since.
He recorded a wide array of folk songs in as many as 21 languages, including Zulu. And, yes, his renditions of Chanukah and Passover songs were more naturally in his key.
His command of accents and repertoire of talents allowed him a journeyman’s career befitting an immigrant European Jew who fled the Nazis from Vienna, was raised in pre-state Israel, and then decamped to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before moving on to Broadway and Hollywood.
Bikel’s boyhood endowed him with the ideal resume for a chameleon — the nimbly assimilated Jew who knew how to disappear within a role; a character actor who, forged by extreme events, was forced to develop character quickly. Bikel assimilated everything, taking nothing for granted and tossing even less away, like a tailor always on the lookout for suitable patches.
On film he was a Hungarian linguist in “My Fair Lady,” a German officer in “The African Queen,” and a Southern sheriff in “The Defiant Ones,” a role for which he earned an Academy Award nomination. On TV he played a Polish professor on “Charlie’s Angels” and a German butcher in “All in the Family.” Oh, and almost as a sideline, Bikel was a master of Yiddish and the leading interpreter of Sholem Aleichem.
Doctorow inhabited a very different Jewish life altogether. Born in the Bronx, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, his father owned a store in the Theater District that sold musical instruments. Although he grew up during the Depression, he was immersed in New York culture and acquired a refinement that few others of his generation, many of whom were still shaking off the dust from European shtetls and the Pale of Settlement, had the wherewithal to obtain.
Unlike Philip Roth, a contemporary who also possessed the Golden Ticket of an adolescence in the Goldena Medina — shielded from the displacements and death across the Atlantic — Doctorow more keenly embraced the manners of a postwar cultivated, Americanized Jewish intellectual. There is no equivalent to “Portnoy’s Complaint” in the backlist of Doctorow’s body of work. He had little interest in satirizing Jewish life or, as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow had done, relocating it in America. (Jews suddenly experiencing the American Dream and lamenting what was left behind was the plot line of many postwar novels.) The art of Doctorow was not only the novels, but also his own reinvention.
Curiously, instead of chronicling the Jewish-American journey, Doctorow became the godfather of historical fiction — novels set within epochal time periods and populated by recognizable historical characters he fictionalized in extraordinarily inventive ways.
All things Americana is what Doctorow gave his readers. And for that they made him a bestseller, far eclipsing the other Jewish novelists of his era. Indeed, Doctorow was not especially popular among Jews. He was perceived as an East Coast Wasp and received as Henry James. Virtually every major book award came his way for several of his 12 novels. Yet locating a Yiddish word or a Jewish kvetch in any of them was a lonely task, indeed.
Reading Doctorow is tantamount to a tutorial on revisionist American history: from the Civil War in “The March,” the cowboy western in “Welcome to Hard Times,” the period leading up to World War I in “Ragtime,” the gangster era of the 1930s in “Billy Bathgate,” the trial and execution of the fictionalized Rosenbergs in “The Book of Daniel,” and the new millennial crisis of faith in “City of God.”
With all that, and short stories, a play, literary essays and political writings to his credit, Doctorow somehow managed to go an entire career without having to mention Israel. Theodore Bikel was named for Theodor Herzl; Edgar Doctorow was named for Edgar Allan Poe. Enough said.
And, yet, not unlike Bikel, but less explicitly so, Doctorow found ways of folding himself within the characters he created, throwing his voice that gave away his ethnic bona fides. There was no Tevye, but there was a Tateh from “Ragtime” who rose from Orchard Street peddler to movie mogul. The Isaacsons from “The Book of Daniel” took the red-diaper Jewish route that Doctorow’s own parents, who he fictionalized in “World’s Fair,” would never have considered. The Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz headlines “Billy Bathgate,” while Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini and Sigmund Freud make whimsical cameos in Doctorow’s “Ragtime” as if in search of a minyan.
Now with the deaths of these two seminal figures, the interplay of old and new worlds, and the fusion of native tongues and awkward accents, which once defined the Jewish-American experience, has come to a reflective fork in the road. The melting pot simmers while Jewish culture readies itself for the next flame.
Unlike Adams and Jefferson, Bikel and Doctorow may have never even met, but very much like Founding Fathers, they were the north and south poles of Jewish life. Their work charted the polarity between the cunning escape artists sprinting toward the mainstream, and the sentimental nostalgists who held fast to more humble beginnings.
No wonder Bikel sang “Tradition,” the opening tune from “Fiddler on the Roof,” so many times. He was aiming for an audience far beyond those sitting inside the theater. Show biz wasn’t his sole motivation. There was also the premonitory warning, the geschrei of the town crier, Bikel’s calling of all Jews.
The torches have now been passed, but may never burn brighter.
Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist, essayist and law professor, is the author, most recently, of “How Sweet It Is!”
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/national/two-sides-jewish-soul#6fcoYW1pqedSW41a.99
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