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August Is The Hardest Month: Disability And Parental Loneliness
On The New Normal, Beth Steinberg writes about the loneliness that is an inherent part of raising a child with disabilities. In a blog post that has since gone viral she writes about "the unknown challenge, the well-kept secret of being a person with disabilities, as well as the parent and caregiver of an individual with disabilities."The New Normal
August Is The Hardest Month: Disability And Parental Loneliness
Beth Steinberg
Akiva and his brother. Courtesy of Beth Steinberg
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Today? I want what I can’t have.
I want Akiva to sleep late. Really late. So late, that I have to march into his room, check that he’s alive, and wake him up because hey, it’s 1 PM, and I’m your mother.
I want Akiva to brush his teeth, handle bathroom details, and get dressed. By himself. Without scratching me if I hit the wrong sensory buttons.
I want Akiva to pour his own juice and get his own breakfast, while I lie indolently in bed and answer questions from my room, as one might do with their young adult children.
I want Akiva to speak and not point. To engage more fluidly and not struggle to express himself. To find words to describe what’s on his mind. To not just have language in the early hours of the morning when he sings and chats almost freely it seems.
I want Akiva to call a few friends, head for the pool, annoy me by not answering my phone calls and text messages, leave a mess in the kitchen and sit outside smoking his hookah even though he knows I think it’s an unhealthy habit.
I want Akiva to have a summer vacation the way a 18-year old might, complete with late nights, noisy friends eating me out of house and home, and a devil-may-care sense that the world is his oyster.
And, I want to complain, and not have anyone try and make it better. I want to be able to just talk about it, because August is the hardest month, the loneliest month — for him and for us. Always.
I want to bitch about this, truly bitch about it, without people feeling that we’re miskehnim, sad sacks, because we have that child, the one with the big issues, the one who’s really got special needs.
How’s that sound? Bitter? Angry? Miskehn? All of the above?
In truth, I’m not bitter about Akiva’s special needs. None of us are. Eighteen years later, we’re well-adjusted, most of the time that is, happy that he continues to develop, grow and learn. Even as we navigate and consider what his adult life could look like, aware that he will never live independently, or experience the rights of passage that our older children, who are typical, will.
I am sometimes angry. I admit to that. I own that. Not angry at him, not angry at the genetic twist of fate that gave him his particular needs, but angry at a world that hasn’t made it easy, that doesn’t teach us welcoming thoughts and an ethos of acceptance for all humankind.
Miskehnim? Sad sacks? Only occasionally do we allow ourselves the pity party, as I did the other day, sobbing on the phone about the rigors of August to my sister and brother-in-law.
You know what we really are? Lonely.
Raising him, parenting him, and loving him, is by far, the loneliest project we’ve ever taken on. For myself, my husband, and I would venture to guess, Akiva’s big brothers.
Loneliness? It’s the unknown challenge, the well-kept secret of being a person with disabilities, as well as the parent and caregiver of an individual — child, teen and adult — with disabilities.
Consider these facts locally. There are approximately 200,000 Israeli children (8% of all children) who have some kind of disability. Most of them are educated in self-contained classrooms, many in schools catering exclusively to children who have disabilities, often bused out-of-district. Parents rarely come into personal contact with one another, especially as our children get older. There’s little opportunity for mutual support and friend making.
For children educated out of their catchment area, making neighborhoods friends is complicated — both by disability and limited opportunity. While most youth movements welcome children with disabilities, few are served, and activities may not be inclusive. Some children with disabilities may successfully be included in after-school activities at the community center, or at their synagogue. They may find local friends. Or not.
And it doesn’t improve in adulthood. The stats on loneliness for adults with disabilities are sobering, much more than their peers who don’t have disabilities.
Our loneliness is tied up with Akiva’s.
When Akiva has no one to hang with, neither do we. Now 18 years old, there are no play-dates for Akiva. In truth, he’s never had a play-date. Options for social excursions with him are limited to what we feel like doing with him, which is complicated. I can’t take him to the pool on my own — he needs help and he’s a guy. Outings into town generally require a 2-person team, not always available.
What do we do? We walk to the local mall, meander and have a nosh. We visit my mother, sit for a bit, and have a nosh. We stop in at the local market, or the bakery, and walk home with our groceries.
While Akiva enjoys these simple outings, he sometimes stresses even when he’s out for even a short journey, especially during vacation periods when the lack of a regular schedule is hard on him. While he makes his needs clear, he’s not always easy to cajole home at such moments.
Weekends are the worst. On Shabbat, we weigh the benefits of where and when to go to synagogue. Should I go first, or should I send Ira off, and follow with Akiva later, hoping to limit his shul time to no more than 45 minutes.
It’s not that we don’t speak to people in shul, or eat alone on Shabbat. We almost always have visitors, and often accept invites, but there’s always that question of will it work, and what’s our escape plan if we need to leave unexpectedly?
Lately, we say to ourselves, let’s just stay at home. It’s lonely, but easier. The fatigue of watching out for his behavior, even for a friendly Shabbat lunch in a familiar setting also includes taking him to the bathroom, monitoring his food intake, and trying to be friendly to our hosts. It’s just exhausting.
When we’re home alone with him, we don’t feel conspicuous. We can relax and enjoy his company. Akiva can say, and repeat, continuously, what’s on his mind. He can sing his songs, and we can sing along. We usually do.
It makes me sad for my dreams of inclusion. For my belief in community living for all members of society, regardless of their differences. In school, and at his after-school programs, Akiva is liked — appreciated for his friendliness to others, his sense of humor, and his encyclopedic memory for songs and music. It’s out in the real world that it all falls apart. For him and for us.
Even with parents, our fellow travelers, even as we offer each other unconditional support and understanding, we go back to our lives, and the path of least resistance, loneliness.
And I know I seem so unfriendly. I am. I can barely keep myself from weeping at the frustration I feel during kiddush, as we quickly prepare a plate for an eager Akiva, and try and sit him in a quiet spot where he can enjoy his treats. I think back on when I was younger, in my former community in Brooklyn, where people knew me before and after Akiva. Was I friendlier then? More approachable? Less afraid of Akiva doing the wrong thing?
Maybe. Then of course, he was younger. Cuter to the rest of the world. Big girls smiled at him, and read books to him on occasion, or carted him off to play for a bit while we sat in shul. That hasn’t happened in years.
We try and imagine Akiva living out of his birth home, in a local apartment with his peers, one where he can both discover a level of independence that’s hard to achieve with Mom and Dad watching over you all the time, and one where we know he’s safe and secure, as well as has companions with whom he can enjoy stuff.
It seems both unimaginable and of critical importance. For him. For us.
As for the loneliness, I’m not sure it will ever really go away. It’s too embedded in who I am, who we are, our family’s history and cumulative parenting experiences, and greater society’s isolation, at times careless at times cruel, of people with disabilities and by default, their caregivers — those who love and care for them, cradle to grave.
I wish it would change.
Editor's Note: This blog originally appeared on The Times Of Israel and was republished with the author's permission.
Beth Steinberg is the Executive Director and co-founder of Shutaf, Inclusion Programs for Children with Special Needs in Jerusalem. A believer in Jewish camping, Beth is a graduate of Massad and Ramah camps, where she learned the importance of informal education programs as a platform for teaching Jewish and social values. As a parent of a child with special needs, she struggled to find workable, appropriate activities for her child. Beth believes that a well-run inclusion program can help educate and change values, creating meaningful and lasting social change.Read More
For U.S., A Lost Opportunity For Mideast Stability
Given the unrest in the Middle East, the Obama administration had the chance to reshape the geopolitical contours of the region to advance American interests and assure regional stability for decades to come. That prospect has been squandered, Menachem Genack writes in the Opinion section. Opinion
For U.S., A Lost Opportunity For Mideast Stability
Menachem Genack
Special To The Jewish Week
Menachem Genack
The Obama administration’s policy toward Iran — the attempt to engage Tehran in the vain hope that the regime will somehow transform itself into a useful and productive member of the community of nations — represents a lost opportunity. Given the unrest in the Middle East, the administration had the chance to reshape the geopolitical contours of the region in a way that would have advanced American interests and assured regional stability for decades to come. That prospect has been squandered.
The Iran nuclear deal is only the latest and most visible component of the administration’s misguided policy, one that goes beyond the profound flaws of the nuclear deal itself — flaws that will inevitably lead down the path to a nuclear-armed Iran and a dramatic shift from a nuclear-free Iran to an ongoing containment mode.
Many countries in the volatile Middle East have been concerned with Iran’s expansionist goals and its sponsorship of terrorism and use of proxies in neighboring states to advance its aggressive agenda. Iran has been and continues to be the primary cause of instability in the Middle East. Because its machinations have antagonized so many of the states in the region, a rare opportunity presented itself. President Obama could have capitalized on the regional antipathy to Iran and used it to galvanize the traditional allies of the United States into forming a bulwark against Iranian expansionism. The U.S. could have seized the day and orchestrated a strategic regional realignment; in such a realignment, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates would have joined together because of their strategic concerns with Iran and presented a united front to stymie Iran. This move could have had other beneficial results as well. With Israel and its Arab neighbors sitting on the same side of the table to address their common strategic concerns, a greater openness to solving the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate could well have ensued.
Seeing the rare confluence of interests among its traditional allies in the region, the administration did not jump at the possibility of working with them to defang Iran. This historic opening was lost not by indecision, and not by the U.S. being preoccupied and distracted with crises in other parts of the globe. It was lost due to the current administration’s deliberate decision to ignore its traditional allies and adopt a misguided policy of courting Iran.
The administration has given the back of its hand to our traditional allies in the region. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, a loyal U.S. ally for decades, was given short shrift by the administration during the convulsions of the Arab Spring. After Gen. Sisi eventually became president of Egypt, the U.S. treated him in similar fashion, delaying military aid and constantly making noises about reassessing the relationship with Egypt.
The administration completely mishandled the situation in Libya. True, Muammar Kaddafy was a despicable leader and a despot, but he had given up Libya’s nuclear program and was an effective ally of ours against terror. Further, his son, Saif al-Islam Kaddafy, was demonstrably pro-Western. Instead of cultivating a potential ally, the U.S. stood by while Libya became a failed state and a base for al-Qaeda terrorism.
Had the administration played its cards properly and forged a realignment of its allies, the result would have been a counterweight to the Iranian regime that also would have resonated with the Iranian people. Of all the societies in the Middle East (with the exception of Israel), the Iranian people are the most pro-democratic. The Iranian Green Revolution, the massive protest movement that arose in the aftermath of the fraudulent 2009 election, was the expression of a people longing for true democracy, eager to root out the entrenched hard-liners. Instead of tapping into this vein of protest and lending it support, moral and otherwise, the U.S. was conspicuous for its diplomatic paralysis. Thousands were executed while the United States was silent.
The Obama administration had the prospect of creating a realignment of forces in the Middle East that would have fostered a closer relationship between the U.S. and its traditional allies and put Iran on the defensive. Instead, we have antagonized our allies and earned their mistrust while laying the groundwork for Iran to become the most significant regional power in the Middle East. Opportunities like the one the current administration has squandered present themselves rarely. We will be suffering for a long time to come the consequences of this failure to seize a unique opportunity.
Rabbi Menachem Genack is CEO of OU Kosher and author of “Letters to President Clinton: Biblical Lessons on Faith and Leadership” (Sterling Ethos).
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Where Have All The Cantors Gone?
For more than a century, the chazzan was viewed as the prime transmitter of Jewish tradition. Yet now the market for cantors, especially traditional ones, is evaporating in many parts of the country.Culture View
Where Have All The Cantors Gone?
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
Ted Merwin
When Cantor Seymour Rockoff of Kesher Israel Synagogue in Harrisburg, Pa., died last month, it was truly the end of an era. Rockoff had been the last chazzan standing in any of the five synagogues in my community, most of which had boasted full-time cantors for decades. Cantor Sherwood Goffin of Lincoln Square Synagogue eulogized his colleague as being equally at home belting out prayers in shul and performing in the Catskills; he noted that Cantor Rockoff’s own musical compositions ranged from an anthem of the Soviet Jewry movement, “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The People of Israel Lives”), to Allan Sherman-style parodies of classic songs, such as “Cold Chopped Liver” (sung to the tune of Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River”) and “Boro Park” (sung to the tune of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s “New York, New York.”)
Where have all the cantors gone? For more than a century, the chazzan was viewed as the prime transmitter of Jewish tradition — think of Cantor Moishe Oysher in the 1937 Yiddish film, “Dem Khazns Zundl” (The Cantor’s Son), or entertainer Al Jolson in the landmark 1927 talking film, “The Jazz Singer.” During the Golden Age of Cantorial Music between the two world wars, tenors Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker could be heard, in the course of the same weekend, at both the synagogue and at the Metropolitan Opera.
Yet now the market for cantors, especially traditional ones, is evaporating in many parts of the country. Cantor Goffin, who directs the Philip and Sarah Belz School of Music at Yeshiva University, told me that while 20 years ago YU was ordaining four or five cantors a year, now they ordain just one every four or five years. “Our mantra, even at the High Holy Days, is that we have no jobs,” he lamented.
Cantor Nancy Abramson, who served for 14 years at Park Avenue Synagogue, now directs the H.L. Miller Cantorial School at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She pointed out that the “Jewish world is shrinking, so the clergy is too.” The rise of folk music in the 1960s, she said, led to Jewish singer/songwriters like Shlomo Carlebach and Debbie Friedman, whose tunes made synagogue services more participatory, making a cantor seem less necessary to cash-strapped congregations.
Even as they have incorporated more popular melodies into services, cantors still seem to congregants, according to Cantor Nathan Lam of Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles, as “too frontal,” as if performing a concert. But Lam, who has helped to prepare Patti LuPone, Linda Ronstadt, Rod Stewart, Barbra Streisand and many other stars for their film and TV roles, believes that synagogues are losing membership because “people come less when they hear their neighbors leading services.”
Rather than having the rabbi give a sermon, Lam asked, “Why not hand it out in printed form for everyone to read?” After all, “It’s the delivery that matters.” For example, when Samuel Vigoda, the last of the Golden Age cantors, sang the end of the Unetanah Tokef (the High Holy Days hymn about “who will live and who will die” in the coming year), he “used a descending scale, like a coffin being lowered into the ground.”
But as lay people have learned to lead services and chant Torah, some believe, cantors are less necessary. Mark Slobin, a professor of music at Wesleyan University and the author of “Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate” (University of Illinois Press, 1989), told me that despite the Jewish value of hiddur mitzvah (beautifying the commandments), the chazzan is now often seen as a “luxury or ornamental item” that is dispensable, except, perhaps, during the High Holy Days when congregants expect a more “charged and special experience.”
Cantor Richard Cohn, who most recently served Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, is the new director of the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College. He reported that virtually all of his school’s recent graduates have been placed, largely through “broadening and deepening the compass” of cantorial skills. Since the rise of Jewish camps in the mid-20th century, he noted, leading camp-style singing has become a focus of Reform cantors’ education, although congregants are used to singing without cantors in camp and other informal Jewish settings.
Cantor Goffin concluded Cantor Rockoff’s funeral by chanting the Eitz Chayim prayer, a highlight of Sabbath morning services, sung when the Torah is returned to the ark. It was a fitting farewell not just to Cantor Rockoff, but to cantorial music in the community. Can shuls survive without cantors — or will we soon be reciting the Unetanah Tokef for some of our synagogues as well as for ourselves?
Ted Merwin teaches religion at Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pa). He writes about theater for the paper and is the author of the forthcoming book, “Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli.”Read More
Triumph Over Terrorism: Singles Night Out For A Serious Cause [PICTURES]Triumph Over Terrorism
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A fun night for a serious cause
Maya Klausner | Editor | Fundraising, Nightlife, Singles
When greeted by Sarri Singer’s infectious smile, warm embrace and ebullient energy you would not guess that she had been a victim of a brutal terrorist attack just over a decade ago. In the back room of the Ainsworth on west 26th street last night, Singer welcomed young professionals as they gathered to enjoy cocktails and sample mini cannoli, red velvet cupcakes and soufflé sliders.
Singer, who is the founder and director of Strength to Strength, was working two blocks from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Emotionally affected by the tragedy, Sarri moved to Israel to aid terrorist victims. Little did she know that she would soon become one.
On June 11, 2003 Singer was one of the people on Bus 14 in Jerusalem where an 18-year-old Palestinian dressed as an Orthodox Jew blew himself up killing 16 people and injuring over a hundred. After being hospitalized for two weeks she returned to her hometown of Lakewood, New Jersey before going back to volunteer in Israel. Now she sits at the head of the nonprofit organization that assists victims of terrorism around the world.
Though the two-hour open bar offering top shelf mixed drinks and copious colorful confections, not to mention the attractive crowd, were a definite draw, everyone who showed up was united by the same cause: to help people.
“This is a fun event, but it’s a serious cause. This is an organization that takes care of people who really need it. Jews in America who are living so well need to feel that pain of terrorist victims across the globe,” said Jordan, who was at his first Strength to Strength event and has friends on the board.
“When bad things happens or there is a tragedy, you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life and then it’s about what you do to deal with it. That’s the essence of Strength to Strength,” said a visitor from Israel who asked to be anonymous but allowed for the use of the self-titled pseudonym, John Horowitz, before changing it to Josh Levy because, “it sounds more convincing.”
“Before 9/11 Israel was alone when dealing with terrorism. Now there is a new perspective,” said low profile Levy.
Though there is a focus on Israel and many of the chair members of the volunteer based organization are Jewish, Strength to Strength reaches out to victims of all faiths and backgrounds and provides resources around the world. Their support groups, workshops, and counseling programs extend to those who have experienced trauma either personally or have family members who have undergone trauma in the United States, Canada, South America, Europe and Israel.
The spirit of the evening careened between the heavy reality that bolsters the organization’s existence, and convivial cocktail chatter.
"I am here to meet more Jewish single people. I think it's going pretty well. I already met one person,” said Leslie Fradkin, 29.. "It's great to be part of a good cause but it's also a great way to meet people,” said Fradkin, who is from Houston and claims she was “the only Jew in Texas.”
Similarly, Lauren Englander, 30, who chaired last year’s event and co-chairs the young leadership division, shared her sense of isolation from the Jewish community before finding Strength to Strength.
“In D.C. I felt like I had a sense of Jewish community and wanted to continue my Jewish journey in New York."
The balance between dedicated awareness to a grave subject matter and celebrating a joy for life seems to be the magic formula behind Strength to Strength.
Towards the end of the night an attendee pointed up at one of the large flat screens suspended over the busy section of the venue and said, "I turned off the Yankee game to come here. That's how good of a Jew I am."
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How Many Orthodox Jews Are Republicans And 11 Other Findings From Pew
Modern Orthodox Jews make more money than other Jews, not everyone believes in God with absolute certainty, and more findings from Pew. [STUDY]How Many Orthodox Jews Are Republicans And 11 Other Findings From Pew
Uriel Heilman
JTA
Members of the Jewish Orthodox community walk down a street in a Brooklyn neighborhood on June 14, 2012, in New York City. JTA
Ever since the Pew Research Center released its landmark 2013 survey of U.S. Jewry, the study has become central to debates about everything from intermarriage to Jewish education. Now comes a new treasure trove of data from Pew about Orthodox Jews, extrapolated from the data amassed for the 2013 study (from 3,475 interviews with Jews conducted that year).
Though Orthodox Jews comprise only 10 percent of all American Jews, their share of the U.S. Jewish population is growing rapidly. And the implications are profound. “If the Orthodox grow as a share of U.S. Jews, they gradually could shift the profile of American Jews in several areas, including religious beliefs and practices, social and political views and demographic characteristics,” the new study says.
Here are some of the top findings in Pew’s new report, “A Portrait of American Orthodox Jews.”
About two-thirds of Orthodox Jews identify as haredi. About 62 percent identify as haredi Orthodox (Hasidic or non-Hasidic), and 31 percent identify as modern Orthodox. Seventy percent of Orthodox Jews say they were raised Orthodox, 12 percent were raised Conservative and 5 percent Reform.
Orthodox Jewry is growing rapidly. Among parents who have children, the Orthodox birth rate is 4.1 children per family, compared to 1.7 among the non-Orthodox. And almost half of all Orthodox parents have four or more children (48 percent), compared with just 9 percent of other Jewish parents.
Not everyone believes in God with absolute certainty. Orthodox Jews represent the only Jewish denomination where a majority of members believe in God with absolute certainty (96 percent of haredim and 77 percent of modern Orthodox). Among Conservatives the figure is 41 percent and among Reform 29 percent.
Modern Orthodox Jews make more money than other Jews. Thirty-seven percent of modern Orthodox Jews report household incomes of $150,000 or more per year, compared to 29 percent of Reform Jews, 24 percent of haredi Jews, 23 percent of Conservative Jews and 22 percent of Jews of no denomination. On the poorer end of the spectrum, 43 percent of haredim report less than $50,000 annual income for their household, compared to 30 percent of modern Orthodox and 31 percent of other Jews.
Orthodox Jews are mostly Republicans. The share of those who identify as Republicans or lean Republican was, as of 2013, 58 percent of haredim, 56 percent of modern Orthodox, 27 percent of Conservative and 17 percent of Reform.
Some Jews who call themselves modern Orthodox skip key rituals. Ten percent of modern Orthodox Jews in the survey said they did not fast on Yom Kippur, 22 percent don’t always or usually light Shabbat candles, and 17 percent don’t regularly keep kosher. On the question of whether they attend religious services weekly or more often, 67 percent of modern Orthodox Jews responded in the affirmative, compared to 60 percent of haredim and only 6 percent of all other Jews (13 percent among Conservative, 4 percent among Reform and 3 percent among Jews of no denomination).
Higher educational degrees are rare among haredim. About 38 percent of haredim have a high school diploma or less, and only 25 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher. By contrast, 60 percent of non-Orthodox Jews have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Among modern Orthodox, levels of education are more similar to other Jews than to haredim: 65 percent of the modern Orthodox have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 21 percent a high school diploma or less.
Only 11 percent of haredim live outside the Northeast. Overall, 43 percent of America’s Jews live in the Northeast, with 23 percent in the South, 23 percent in the Midwest, and 11 percent in the West. The Northeast has 61 percent of the modern Orthodox population, 43 percent of the Conservative population and 36 percent of America’s Reform Jews. Only 1 percent of haredim live out West.
Orthodox Jews marry relatively young. Three-quarters of haredi Orthodox Jews marry by age 25 (75 percent), about half of modern Orthodox Jews marry by then (48 percent), while only about one-quarter of Reform Jews and 32 percent of Conservative Jews marry by that age.
They send their kids to Jewish schools. Four out of five Orthodox Jewish parents with kids at home have at least one child in yeshiva or Jewish day school, and about three-quarters of Orthodox Jewish adults (73 percent) attended a Jewish day school or yeshiva as children (81 percent among haredim, 57 percent among the modern Orthodox). By contrast, only 17 percent of other Jews went to yeshiva or Jewish day school growing up.
Haredim hardly have any non-Jewish friends. About 97 percent of haredim say all or most of their friends are Jewish, compared to 65 percent of modern Orthodox and 26 percent of other Jews.
Jews of all denominations are proud to be Jewish. In all denominations, at least 93 percent of adherents say they’re proud to be Jewish, compared to 87 percent among Jews of no denomination. However, while 99 percent of Orthodox Jews say they have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people, the figures are 92 percent for Conservative, 78 percent for Reform and 53 percent among Jews of no denomination.
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
The Best Kosher Wine Ever, It's expensive, and it's worth it.
The world of kosher wine has made terrific progress since the market began slowly preferring dry table wines to sweet Kiddush wines some 30 odd years ago. But what is the best kosher wine on the market today? Our Food & Wine magazine has the scoop.The Best Kosher Wine Ever
Courtesy of Domaine Roses Camille
It’s expensive, and it’s worth it.
Joshua E. London
Jewish Week Online Columnist
The world of kosher wine has made terrific progress since the market began slowly preferring dry table wines to sweet Kiddush wines some 30 odd years ago. According to a great many kosher wine cognoscenti, one of the greatest kosher wines currently available today is the 2005 Domaine Roses Camille, from a tiny French boutique producer of the same name in Bordeaux.
This is a wine that leapt onto the kosher wine scene more or less out of the blue in 2010. The Israeli wine critic Daniel Rogov, just a year before his passing, “discovered” the Domaine Roses Camille 2005 during a routine tasting near the end of September 2010 and took to his online wine forum to declare it “One of the Best Kosher Wines Ever”! and wrote that it was “one of those ‘oh-wow’ wines, a wine that from first sip made my eyes open more widely and my nostrils flare just a bit ... perhaps the best ever kosher cuvee out of Bordeaux.” The wine also received kudos from the Wine Spectator, and the British fine wine magazine, Decanter, listed it among their top 100 Bordeaux for the vintage.
The 2005 bottles began selling in the $250 range, and the remaining bottles now sale for about $460 each. The 2006 vintage, the most recent available in the U.S. costs about $230. It began life as basically just an “adventure” amongst friends: Christophe Bardeau, the winemaker, and his partner, Nicolas Ranson, an observant Jew from France who now lives in Israel.
A fifth generation winemaker, Bardeau “began working the [family] vineyards at the very young age of 14,” he explains, and “spent loads of time” learning from his grandfather about the family’s vineyard holdings and the soils of Pomerol. He also studied wine at the Lycee de Libourne-Montagne in St-Émilion, and also at Bordeaux Wine University. He then gained incomparable experience as associate winemaker under the brilliant Denis Durantou at the esteemed Château L'Eglise-Clinet. Described by wine critic Neal Martin in his authoritative tome Pomerol, as “young” and “ambitious,” Bardeau decided it was time to start his own journey.
“Wine is something personal,” Bardeau notes, “I want to exchange and share through my wine. This is my medium of expression.”
But the family’s 7.5 hectares (about 18.5 acres) of vineyards is a bit of a hodgepodge, quality-wise. So he seized upon a small parcel of the family’s holdings, one hectare of 60-year-old Merlot and Cabernet Franc vines situated on a vein of blue and grey clay, which he believed to be the most exceptional. He decided to build his “family legacy” on this tiny parcel, which he renamed Domaine Roses Camille (his sister had just given birth to a daughter, Camille, and Roses “just because the rose is a symbol of love”).
“I am a servant of wine,” he insists, “it’s not me who determines when to harvest, but the grapes — I have to respect the grapes and intervene minimally in elaborating their wine.” He works the soil “mechanically and everything else is made manually, like in a small garden.”
Bardeau was doing his best to exploit his small but quality parcel to its fullest and carve out some respectable space for Domaine Roses Camille in a massive market when he met Nicolas Ranson.
He happened to be working as a mashgiach, or kosher supervisor, at a nearby St-Émilion estate that was producing a one-off kosher wine under contract. It was here that Bardeau recognized a possible niche, as he learned about kosher wine and its myriad rules of production. Determined to strike out on his own and do something worthwhile with his one hectare of vines, he approached Ranson, who liked the idea, because I knew that we will not just make another kosher wine but something that could be special.” So they formed a partnership, with Ranson providing all of the initial funding.
The first vintage was 2005, Bardeau was just 25 at the time, and they produced only three barrels worth, about 75 cases. “It became clear as time went by that the wine would be very good,” Ranson recalls, “so we decided to produce the whole plot kosher in 2006 [around 250 cases, or 3000 bottles].”
Unfortunately, fine wine is an expensive endeavor. The idea was more whim than business calculation: “There was no real market for such a wine in France, and I presented it in the U.S. at the peak of the economy crisis and the dollar was too low at the time,” Bardeau said. He ran out of money and had to unseal the 2007 barrels in the middle of the process, rendering them non-kosher.
“In my mind,” recalls Ranson, “I had participated in a very interesting experience, and that was it. I did not get involved in the non-kosher wine.” It was not until 2011 that Ranson and Bardeau became aware of Rogov’s online missive and that they had been “discovered.”
“We did not know anything about him,” says Ranson, “but since my name and email address were on some articles, people got them and I started to receive inquiries about the wine.” They contacted Rogov and decided to resume kosher production in 2011.
Bardeau soon began asking among his wine grower friends if he would use their best parcels to producer kosher wine. The results so far are the Echo de Roses Camille, Pomerol, 2011 ($95; 100% Merlot) and the Moulin du Château la Clide, Saint-Émilion Grand Cru, 2011 ($120, 50-50 blend of Cabernet Franc and Merlot). The Château Marquisat De Binet, Cuvée Abel, Montagne-Saint-Émilion, 2012 ($36; 100% Merlot) is on the way. Available from Liquidkosher.com, the exclusive importer, and distributed in the NY area by The River Wine, the wines of Domaine Roses Camille can be found locally at such retailers as Liquors Galore, Chateau du Vin, Wine on Nine or online atkosherwine.com.
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Palestinian Authority Ordered To Pay $10M Plus Installments In Terrorism Case more...Israel News
Palestinian Authority Ordered To Pay $10M Plus Installments In Terrorism Case
JTA
A federal judge ordered the Palestinian Authority and PLO to pay $10 million in cash plus $1 million in monthly installments to secure a judgment from a previous court decision on behalf of Americans killed in terrorist attacks.
Manhattan District Court Judge George Daniels ordered the security payment on Monday despite a motion filed by the U.S. State Department arguing that a high bond could strain the already weak Palestinian economy and threaten Middle East stability, The Associated Press reported.
In a February ruling that the Palestinians are appealing, a jury awarded $218.5 million in damages in a lawsuit brought by American victims and survivors of numerous Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel between 2002 and 2004. As per the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act, the damages were automatically tripled.
Daniels’ ruling is intended to remain in effect until the appeals are decided.
While attorneys for the Palestinians have argued that the Palestinian Authority cannot afford to pay $10 million, an attorney representing American victims and survivors of terrorist attacks in Israel said the P.A. has more than enough money, claiming it spends $60 million each year paying Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
editor@jewishweek.orgNadler's Iran Vote Unleashes Vitriol more...
National
Nadler’s Iran Vote Unleashes Vitriol
Congressman stunned by personal nature of reaction; House members come to his defense.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
“I never expected the vicious nature of the opposition,” Nadler told The Jewish Week Monday. Getty Images
Rep. Jerrold Nadler knew that his announced support last Friday of the Iranian nuclear agreement would trigger an angry response from opponents of the deal.
But he was stunned by stridency and personal nature of the attacks.
“I never expected the vicious nature of the opposition,” he told The Jewish Week. “It’s one thing to be told you are wrong, it’s another to say you know you are wrong and that you are doing it for terrible motives. … People are entitled to their views, but what bothers me is that people are saying, ‘You betrayed us.’ I have been a supporter of Israel all my life. This is my decision and I think it is best for the U.S. and Israel. I could be right or wrong, but to conclude that anybody who supports the deal is opposed to the Jewish people and Israel’s welfare is absurd.”
Nadler explained his decision in a nearly 5,200-word essay on his website. “After carefully studying the agreement and the arguments and analyses from all sides,” he wrote, “I have concluded that, of all the alternatives, approval of the JCPOA, for all its flaws, gives us the best chance of stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.”
And in a 45-minute interview Monday with The Jewish Week, he went through the agreement in great detail. He insisted that although the agreement lifts all restrictions on Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon in just 15 years, the world “would be no better off then than we are now without the deal.”
And in the meantime, Nadler stressed, the deal would increase from three months to 15 months the amount of time it would take for Iran to have a sufficient supply of fissile material to make one bomb. And for the next 15 years there are “air-tight assurances they can’t get a bomb,” he said, referring to the inspection and monitoring system the agreement puts in place.
Many of the personal attacks against Nadler, the only Jewish Democratic House member in the state to support the deal, can be found on Facebook, Twitter, various blogs, radio talk shows and opinion pieces. One writer said flatly that Nadler has “endangered the existence of the State of Israel and has disappointed the Jewish community.” Another referred to him as a “kappo,” a reference to the Jews who worked on behalf of Nazis in the concentration camp. A third called him “a True Traitor to your people and the USA,” and still another wrote that “The blood of Jews and Israel are on your hands.”
Zev Brenner’s call-in radio program on WMCA last weekend — which has a largely Orthodox following — devoted the entire hour to a discussion about Nadler’s decision. Brenner said there were so many calls and emails that he couldn’t get to them all and that all opposed Nadler’s decision.
“People in general were very upset,” he said later. “People view the deal as dangerous not only for Israel but for America. The opposition cuts across geographic areas. ... The phones were crazy — this is a very hot topic that people are passionate about.”
One of the studio guests, Mark Meir Appel, a social activist, said Nadler’s “decision was all about politics because he wanted to satisfy his constituency on the Upper West Side, which is liberal left-wing. … I believe very strongly that Congressman Jerry Nadler … betrayed us viciously and his entire record of what he did for the Jewish community goes out the window.”
The rhetoric has been so over the top that other members of the New York congressional delegation issued a statement Tuesday denouncing the vitriol. Signed by Democratic Reps. Eliot Engel, Nita Lowey and Steve Israel, it expresses concern that “both sides of the debate have resorted to ad hominem attacks and threats against those who don’t share their opinions. This is unacceptable. It is especially egregious to attribute malicious intent to decision makers who are thoughtfully debating the details and effects of the agreement. No matter where you stand on the Iran deal, comparisons to the Holocaust, the darkest chapter in human history, questioning the credentials of long-standing advocates for Israel, and accusations of dual loyalty are inappropriate.”
It added that all concerned should “refrain from attacks and focus on the substance of the agreement. Vitriolic rhetoric and threats distract from the thoughtful debate this important issue deserves and, in some cases, unacceptably perpetuate hate.”
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has announced his opposition to the Iranian nuclear agreement, issued his own statement calling Nadler “one of the most steadfast supporters of Israel’s security.”
“We came to different conclusions on this decision of conscience, but to question one's loyalty to this nation or one's commitment to the security of Israel, our closest ally in the region, based on how one comes out on this issue is just absurd," he said.
A letter denouncing the personal attacks was sent to Nadler Wednesday by the chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council, Greg Rosenbaum, in which he said “neither you nor any other elected officials should be subjected to any sort of personal threats or hateful attacks due to your votes."
“None of us are traitors; we have not betrayed our country, our people or our love of Israel," he added. "We are all allowed to have our own beliefs and our own convictions, and you and your fellow members of Congress should be applauded for your courage, rather than attacked for it.”
In an interview, Engel said that over the years controversial legislation has sparked angry calls from people “who say abusive things. And there are always some people – mostly from out of state – who say anti-Semitic things and crazy things. But the intensity this time is different. … It is coming from a few hotheads and people who are very emotional, and it obviously cannot be condoned. I wish people would realize we are human beings as well and make our decisions based on a lot of factors. If you don’t agree, you can show it at the ballot box.”
Abraham Foxman, national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League, sent an email to Nadler saying that although he disagreed with his decision, he admires Nadler’s “dedication, devotion and support for Israel and the Jewish people and the values our country stands for. You don’t deserve what is being thrown at you.”
Nadler represents the 10th Congressional District, which stretches from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to Greenwich Village and Battery Park City, and into Brooklyn and parts of Borough Park, Sunset Park and Gravesend. It is the district with the largest number of Jews in the U.S., and they represent a microcosm of the American Jewish community — from the liberal to the ultra-Orthodox, the latter of whom are almost universally against the Iranian deal.
The split in the community over the deal played out this week in the pages of this newspaper, and in stark ways. One full-page ad (on page 13), sponsored by American Parents & Grandparents Against the Iranian Deal, showed the Iranian and Israeli flags, with a bolt of lightning striking the Israeli flag. Its text, in part, reads: “Jerry Nadler represents more Jews than any other Congressman — He Claims To Be Pro-Israel So Why Is He Backing Obama And Iran?”
Another full-page ad (page 2), sponsored by the No Nukes for Iran Project, reads in part, “Todah Rabah [Thank You], Congressman Jerry Nadler. Thank you for leading the way to prevent a nuclear armed Iran. Kol Hakavod! [Well Done].”
Nadler’s stance on the Iranian deal has also rattled other elected representatives who serve his district. Councilman David Greenfield wrote on Facebook that Nadler is acting “against the overwhelming wishes of his Jewish constituency.”
(A spokesman for Nadler’s office said constituents are evenly divided on the issue, based upon phone calls and emails to his office.)
Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Democrat who lives in Nadler’s district, told The Jewish Week: “I’m embarrassed that he represents me.”
He noted that shortly before announcing his support for the deal —known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — Nadler released a letter he received from President Barack Obama that sought to reassure him about the concerns Nadler had raised during a private White House meeting.
“That letter was a joke – it was meaningless,” Hikind said. “I could just see Obama going back to the White House and saying, ‘Look at that stupid Jew.’ Obama bought him so cheap.”
Hikind said he is planning a demonstration this week in front of Nadler’s Manhattan office with about a dozen Holocaust survivors who will speak about the similarities today with what they experienced just during prior to the Holocaust.
At the same time, another group will stage a “Thank You Rep. Nadler” rally.
Competing groups have also announced demonstrations outside the offices of two local Democratic members of Congress who have yet to announce their position on the Iran deal: Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Gregory Meeks. And a rally is planned for next Tuesday outside the Manhattan office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y) to protest her decision to support the deal.
Hikind said he is convinced that Nadler “will have a tough time getting re-elected next year because this is such a powerful issue.”
Attempts are now reportedly underway to find a candidate to challenge Nadler in a primary. But veteran Democratic strategist Hank Scheinkopf said trying to unseat Nadler — who has served in the House since 1992 after 12 years in the Assembly — would not be easy.
“This is a test of whether the Nadler old-style liberal Jewish theology is more powerful than the newly arriving Israel-supporting Orthodox community,” he explained. “The anger over the vote is not going to dissipate quickly, and the more pro-Israel portion of his community has both the resources and the time to put together candidates. They may not beat him but they would injure him.”
Nadler told The Jewish Week that Obama’s letter about the agreement — which he said he would have voted for even without the missive — “took care of three of the four issues” he had expressed concerns about when he met Obama. The first was Obama’s commitment in writing that the U.S. would never permit Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Second, a promise that mid-level Iranian violations of the deal would be met by “smaller sanctions.” And third, that a “czar or ambassador would be put in charge of implementing the agreement and watching for violations.”
Although Nadler said he was unhappy that the deal bars international monitors from personally inspecting the Parchin military complex, Nadler said the site is believed to have been used to weaponize a nuclear bomb and “without fissile material, building a bomb is irrelevant.”
Asked about the deal’s unfreezing of billions of dollars Iran earned in oil sales and the fact that money could be used to further Iran’s terrorist activities, Nadler said the money would be unfrozen even without American support for the deal.
“We realize Iran may use some of the money for terrorism, but we will substantially increase military aid to Israel,” he said. “This deal is designed to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb — it doesn’t deal with the other menacing aspects of Iran. … I was shouting about the threat from Iran before other people were. But an Iran without a nuclear weapon is much less of a threat than an Iran with a nuclear weapon. It is an existential threat to Israel … and with a nuclear bomb in its arsenal, it can inhibit a lot of responses and make terrorism a much greater menace.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
Brown Vs. Board Of Education
JTA
CNN anchor-turned-education-advocate Campbell Brown is launching a news site called The Seventy Four.
‘The public school system in this country is broken,” says Campbell Brown, education-reform advocate and former NBC and CNN news anchor.
It’s this sentiment that led Campbell, along with Romy Drucker, to create The Seventy Four, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational news site launching Monday. The name refers to the 74 million school-age children in the United States.
Earlier this year, New York magazine dubbed Brown “the Most Controversial Woman in School Reform.” Through her nonprofit, Partnership for Educational Justice, she has helped parents file lawsuits against New York State challenging teacher tenure. She has been critical of the teachers’ union and vocal about her rejection of the status quo.
“Every education law should be based around the question, ‘Is this good for children?’ And it’s not,” she tells JTA.
Brown sees herself as both a journalist and an advocate for the powerless. Critics describe her as a union-busting, pro-charter school mouthpiece for the 1 percent.
“The critics are going to say what they want,” she says. “But I’ll let our journalism speak.”
The site launches with an inspirational profile on Chris Bonner, a search-and-rescue pilot for the Coast Guard who traded military life to become a second-grade teacher at a charter school in Newark, N.J. Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker’s debut column is about how presidential candidates should address the relationship between educational inequality and income inequality.
Campbell says that most of her detractors “are part of the education system and the status quo.”
“They have vested interests and don’t want us calling them out — but that’s our jobs as journalists,” she says.
Her opponents — pointing to the fact that her two children attend private school, a Jewish day school in Manhattan — say she is disconnected and not qualified to argue on behalf of the country’s public school students.
“On the contrary,” she says. “I’ve had opportunities that many others don’t have, and was able to choose my children’s school. I’m fully aware that many people are stuck with their failing neighborhood school.
“I care deeply about Jewish education and Jewish values, and chose a school with those values,” she says, but declined to name the school. “But every mother should have a choice when it comes to education.”
Brown was raised Catholic in Louisiana but converted to Judaism more than a decade ago. Her husband, Dan Senor, grew up modern Orthodox in Toronto. (Senor was an adviser to Paul Bremer, who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush to lead the occupational authority of Iraq, and is co-author of “Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.”)
The decision to convert was a difficult one, Brown says — she didn’t know much about Judaism growing up.
“It was something I struggled with — trying to understand why it was so important to my husband and to my mother-in-law that I do it,” she says. “I asked her to try and tell me. I’m a journalist, after all, and I ask a lot of questions.”
Brown’s mother-in-law recounted her family’s story of fleeing Slovakia during the Holocaust.
“While they were on the run, every Friday night they’d cover themselves up long enough to light Shabbat candles. That was the length they went to to preserve their traditions,” Brown recalls from the story. “How could I not raise my kids with the tradition they worked so hard to uphold?”
Brown underwent a Reform conversion while at NBC. Every week for about six months, her rabbi would come to her office, close the door and study with her.
“I never closed my door, and that was the one time during the week that I would,” she says. “The rumors were flying. People thought she must be my shrink or something.”
That “was one of the most rewarding times of my life,” Brown says.
The family lights Shabbat candles every week and observes many aspects of Judaism.
“We don’t do it to my mother-in-law’s specifications, though,” Brown jokes. Her mother-in-law now lives in Israel (where Brown and her family visited her last Passover) and “she is still a mentor to me.”
Asked about her favorite part of Jewish culture, Brown doesn’t hesitate.
“It’s the sense of community,” she says. “My kids went to Jewish preschool, they go to Jewish day school and I’m involved in our Jewish community center. It’s all very kid-centric.”
And so is her professional life, of course. Brown — along with her The Seventy Four co-founder Drucker, who worked at the New York City Department of Education on former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s transformational “Children First” reforms — say they are looking to put children’s education at the forefront of the national conversation, something that’s especially important ahead of next year’s presidential election.
The Seventy Four, they hope, will be a forum where people with different opinions and viewpoints present solutions to what Brown describes as the “current crisis in our schools.”
“Too many children in this country are falling behind at an early age and are never given the help they need to succeed,” Drucker says.
“Research shows that the most significant school-based factor in a child’s learning is the quality of his or her teacher,” she adds. “We must make it a priority that every child, regardless of their ZIP code, background or skin color, has a high-quality, effective teacher in the classroom.”
But The Seventy Four isn’t all doom and gloom. Brown and Drucker also plan to feature success stories, like Bonner’s. Stories will be both long- and short-form, with a large video component. Brown will contribute editorially.
“I think this is the direction journalism is going in: news sites that go deep on specific issues,” Brown says, pointing specifically to Bill Keller’s The Marshall Project, which covers the American criminal justice system, and the single-topic news site Syria Deeply.
And if there’s controversy, so be it, Brown says.
“That just means we’re relevant and in the heart of it all,” she says. “The role of journalists is to hold people in power accountable.”
editor@jewishweek.orgTen years after Katrina, The Tides That Bind more...National
The Tides That Bind
Ten years after Katrina, the Jews of New Orleans and Houston remain bound by a flood of emotion and caring.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
New Orleans’ Congregation Beth Israel. Courtesy of Beth Israel
Houston — Ten years ago this week, with Hurricane Katrina barreling toward them, several thousand Jews from New Orleans set out on I-10 to escape the storm. They headed west, passing Baton Rouge, then Lafayette, in the heart of the Louisiana bayou, then Lake Charles, and on across the Texas line through Beaumont and the lyrically named Mont Belvieu.
They were headed for higher ground, and sanctuary, in Houston. The ribbon of highway was a lifeline, 350 miles from ruin to rescue.
Jewish Houston, home to about 40,000 generous souls, opened its doors to the many Jews fleeing New Orleans. It was the start of a process that irrevocably changed both communities over these 10 years, and bound them in a special way, even as New Orleans — both the Jewish community and the wider city — has rebounded in the last decade.
Josh Pershell was 8 years old when his family pulled onto I-10 bound for Houston. Their house, they would later learn, was “completely flooded.” Houston would now be home. “Everyone was very welcoming and supportive,” Pershell, now 18, told The Jewish Week in a recent interview.
After Katrina, Houston Jewry offered housing and office space, moral support and counseling, free synagogue membership and day school enrollment, money and prayer books and other religious supplies for the New Orleans evacuees, several hundred of whom ended, according to estimates, ended up making Houston their home.
And then, nearly 10 years later, the high water came to Houston, on Memorial Day 2015 — 11 inches of rain in a matter of a few hours, 2,000 buildings destroyed, some of the worst flooding in the city’s history. The damage was heavy in the heart of Houston’s Jewish neighborhood, Meyerland, along Brays Bayou, home to many of its institutions.
The Jews of New Orleans — current and former ones — were among the first to reach out to the Texas city that had given them refuge. For survivors of Katrina, it was déjà vu — images from Houston of flooded buildings, of people wading in waist-deep water, of stranded individuals being rescued by rowboat.
Returning the favor done to him, Josh Pershell, a recent graduate of Houston’s Beren Academy, a Jewish day school, volunteered to help flood-battered families after the Memorial Day deluge. Along with other volunteers, he carried furniture and other ruined items out of homes, and helped people pack their intact belongings.
“I did it because I felt it was the right thing to do, and the rest of my school and my friends were doing it also,” Pershell said.
♦That the Jews of New Orleans were in a position to have lent a hand after the Houston flooding is an indication of how far the community has come since Katrina hit. In the wake of the Category 5 hurricane, the Jewish population of New Orleans plummeted by more than a third, from 9,500 to 6,000. Today, it’s 10,300. (Buoyed by a network of strengthened levees and wetlands, the city as a whole, which initially lost about 40 percent of its population of nearly 500,000, has grown to 384,000 as of March; yet Louisiana has more young people not in school or working than any state in the nation, a direct result, researchers say, of Katrina.) The local Jewish federation’s annual fundraising campaign, which took a small hit in the wake of the hurricane, has nearly reached the pre-2005 figure of $2.8 million; several Jewish institutions, which suffered heavy damage in the waters of Katrina, are located in new buildings.
“Ten years later we’re now stronger than we were before the storm,” said Bradley Bain, president of Congregation Beth Israel, a Modern Orthodox synagogue that moved into a new building two years ago, after being hosted for several years at a New Orleans Reform temple, Congregation Gates of Prayer in the suburb of Metairie.
“We’re very much a better place,” said Michael Weil, executive director of New Orleans’ Jewish federation, who helped coordinate the community-wide recovery effort, which included a campaign to attract new residents. In a telephone interview, he said Jewish New Orleans has moved beyond its initial recovery and rebuilding stages. “We’re actually rejuvenating. It’s a different world now. The community feels good about itself.”
The wider city “has become an incubator for entrepreneurship,” especially in the arts and the restaurant business, Weil said. “The Jewish community has been at the forefront of that.”
The people who left were mostly young families, who needed schools for their children; and senior citizens, who lost their homes, and lacked the resources or strength to rebuild. The people who have come are mostly young professionals, many of them single. “The new Jewish New Orleans is actually younger, in age profile, than before,” Brandeis history professor Jonathan Sarna said.
The Jewish federation’s high-visibility newcomers program, which offered a variety of financial incentives to people who moved to New Orleans, played a role, though perhaps not a crucial one, in their decision, Weil said. Instead, the city itself, its image as a vibrant place, has served as the main draw. The local economy is healthy, jobs are available. And housing, while not inexpensive, is affordable. “It’s a lot cheaper than New York City, Washington or places like that,” he said.
Weil pointed to several signs of new Jewish life in New Orleans: a Moishe House, an expanded Limmud educational program, a new Hillel House and Chabad Center at Tulane University, a new Chabad day school, an expanded JCC Uptown site and Beth Israel’s new building.
As the Aug. 29 anniversary nears, New Orleans’ synagogues are marking the decade of struggle and resilience by hosting several commemorative events that will culminate in prayer services on the weekend of the anniversary. And in a sign of the giving-back spirit, the New Orleans federation is coordinating TikkuNola volunteer work that features such activities as collecting and distributing school supplies for charter school students.
♦A few days before Katrina struck, two leaders of the New Orleans-based Jewish Children’s Regional Service, a social work agency and charitable fund that serves seven Southern states, traveled I-10 to Houston to set up a satellite office.
Led by executive director Ned Goldberg and education coordinator Melanie Musser, a small staff of displaced JCRS staffers continued to offer their services, which included personal counseling, advice on obtaining government benefits, and scholarship assistance for universities and summer camps, to New Orleans evacuees. A small JCRS satellite office remains in the JFS headquarters here; after Katrina, the agency’s client base grew by more than 50 percent.
And Goldberg, who again works fulltime in New Orleans after nearly a year in Houston, came back here recently to give back. About a month after the Houston flooding, which took place a few days before the start of the official hurricane season, Goldberg was back on I-10, this time with a carload of new and gently used Judaica, books and games for flood victims that the agency had collected from its supporters.
“Katrina families were the first to volunteer” to help Houston, said Pat Pollicoff, president of Houston’s Congregation Beth Israel, which suffered heavy water damage on Memorial Day. “They understood.”
A fundraising campaign under the auspices of the New Orleans Jewish federation, which included “dollar-for-dollar matches” for Houston Jewry from several donors, had raised “$27,470 from donors throughout the state … matched by the Goldring Family and Woldenberg foundations … for a total of $52,470,” the federation reported earlier this month.
“Katrina had a long-term effect on both New Orleans and Houston, creating a unique bond between the people of our two cities,” said Lee Wunsch, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston.
Post-Katrina, the Jewish community of Houston was “amazing,” Weil said. “They gave us everything. Everyone was aware of the help Houston gave us.”
“The close relationship with Houston is mutually beneficial,” said Brandeis’ Sarna. “Through the years there have been Jewish communities that have closely assisted one another. Baltimore and Philadelphia have historically been intertwined. In early America, Shearith Israel [in Manhattan] helped various congregations get their start and would then, later, write to them for assistance.”
♦Houston will likely need the continued help, from New Orleanians as well as others.
Wunsch called the flooding the costliest in the Jewish community’s history. “It will take 18-24 months before things get back to normal,” he said. “The price tag for this is very significant. We’ve estimated the cost … at $3.5 million.”
Wunsch estimated that 500 Jewish families here “had their homes compromised … half will need some kind of community support.”
“Every synagogue has families affected by the flood,” he told New Orleans’ Crescent City Jewish News.
Leading the financial support of the federation’s Houston Flood Relief Fund was the Jewish Federations of North America, which made a $250,000 donation.
The buildings that sustained the most damage were those of three congregations — Beth Israel, United Orthodox Synagogues, and the Meyerland Minyan — the teen building of the Jewish Community Center, and the JCC’s racquetball courts and toddler gym. They are in various stages of rebuilding and renovation; the affected synagogues, with the approach of the High Holy Days season, are holding worship services in mold-free, repaired rooms, some using texts donated by New Orleans congregations.
Drive through Meyerland and you see storage units in front of many homes, yellow building permits in many windows.
Active in the post-flood volunteer activities here are Chabad Lubavitch of Houston, Congregation Yeshurun, the national NECHAMA and All Hands organizations, the Dallas-based Texas Torah Institute educational program, and Boy Scout Troop 806, sponsored by the Beth Israel Brotherhood. Several synagogues offered free community-wide barbecues and dinners, and the JCC ran a series of workshops about receiving government benefits, concerts and films.
JFS is still counseling people traumatized by the flooding, and offering a weekly support group, said Linda Burger, the group’s executive director. New faces show up each week, she said.
After the flood, JFS staffers set up a table at the popular Three Brothers kosher bakery, which gave out free challah rolls to flood victims.
The New Orleans JFS offered practical advice in such areas as case management and setting up an effective online communications system, Burger said. “We were very prepared. Katrina taught us not to be afraid to ask for help.”
Members of Houston’s Jewish community who had generously come to the aid of New Orleans a decade ago found themselves in an unfamiliar situation this summer, Burger said. “People said it’s a lot better to be on the giving side than on the receiving side.”
“It’s much easier to give the help,” echoed Beth El’s Pollicoff.
“It’s a humbling thing” to need help — “very humbling,” she said, adding praise for the Jewish community of New Orleans. “It’s tremendous to know we have their emotional support.”
steve@jewishweek.orgLosing Their Religion, Finding Their Voices more...New York
Losing Their Religion, Finding Their Voices
Robert Goldblum
Managing Editor
Basya Schechter, Shulem Deen and moderator Sandee Brawarsky at a recent event. Michael Datikash/JW
In the 1991 alt-rock anthem from the Athens, Ga.-based band REM, the group sings, “That’s me in the spotlight / Losing my religion / Trying to keep up with you / And I don’t know if I can do it.”
Last week at a Jewish Week-sponsored literary forum, the man in the spotlight losing his religion was Shulem Deen, author of the well-received memoir about leaving the Orthodox fold, “All Who Go Do Not Return” (Graywolf Press). After years of trying to keep up with the religious and societal strictures placed upon him by his strict Skverer chasdic sect in upstate New Square, Deen made a break.
So did Basya Schechter, who shared the stage with Deen last Tuesday night before a crowd of about 600 at Congregation Rodeph Sholom on the Upper West Side. (Jewish Week culture editor Sandee Brawarsky moderated.) The vocalist, who leads the klez/world music band Pharaoh’s Daughter and is musical director at the Renewal congregation Romemu, left her insular “yeshivish” neighborhood of Borough Park years ago. But perhaps she hasn’t left her religion behind in quite the same way Deen has.
In a telling exchange, Deen, 40, explained that in giving up the certainty of the chasidic world (which included his wife of 15 years and his five children), he came to embrace the “uncertainty” that defines the modern condition for most people. But there was nothing “religious” in the place where he landed, he said, despite his gaining all kinds of insights about the world and his new place in it.
Schechter saw the glass half full, so to speak. She, too, unmoored from her cloistered upbringing, is grappling with uncertainty. But she saw a religious dimension to it — a spiritual seeking for answers and truths that would likely lie beyond her reach. Religion, she seemed to be saying, was in the searching.
The discussion touched on serious matters of faith, adjustment (Schechter choked up when she talked about how difficult it was to leave the fold and rebuild her life), and the lack of sufficient services for those who choose to leave the Orthodox lifestyle.
But there was humor, too (Deen and a friend, who hardly knew what baseball was, cruising Rockland County for a place to watch Game Seven of the 2001 World Series — “two chasids walk into a bar…,” Deen quipped.)
Deen read a pivotal passage from “All Who Go,” which was both a sharp critique of the charedi lifestyle and a revelatory moment when he realized his old religious foundation — roof, floorboards, all of it — had crumbled. Schechter read a funny essay she wrote for the occasion describing another kind of revelation: when, in seventh-grade organic chemistry class, she realized she was a swirling particle of energy at a far remove from, yet somehow still connected to, the workings of the nucleus; it was a metaphor for her life.
And there was music, a balm in the literary Gilead. Schechter sang a satirical ditty about the pre-Yom Kippur ritual of kappores (“finger lickin’” chicken), and a moving devotional song sung on the Sabbath.
In the end, both Deen and Schechter left the religious practice of their childhood behind, but in hard-won ways they found their voices in art — Schechter in music, Deen in prose. They lost plenty. But what they gained, as if they were sitting at the right hand of God, was a measure of creation.
editor@jewishweek.orgA Stone For Leo Frank: Centennial of a lynching that still chills from Atlanta to Queens. more...New York
A Stone For Leo Frank
Centennial of a lynching that still chills from Atlanta to Queens.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Lynched in Georgia, buried in Queens, Leo Frank remains a symbol of anti-Semitic intolerance in the United States. JW
On the sweltering Georgia night of Aug. 16, nearly a dozen of Marietta’s finest citizens — a former governor, a judge, lawyers, teachers, two former mayors — got into their Model T autos, driving for hours, more than 100 miles over unpaved back roads to the prison farm in Millidgeville, to hang “the Jew,” Leo Frank, convicted of murdering the beautiful 13-year-old Mary Phagan, a Christian “flower” of Southern maidenhood. During the trial, a mob shouted to the jury, “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!” Sentenced to death, the governor commuted Frank’s fate to life imprisonment, but if Frank could appeal so could the mob, and “Judge Lynch,” as they called their lesser instincts, insisted Frank must hang for Phagan’s death on April 26, 1913.
That 1913 day was overcast but a holiday, and Frank, 31, began that Shabbos of Pesach wishing his wife Lucille “Good Yundef” Passover greetings, and mailing his uncle and “dear tanta” (Yiddish for aunt) greetings, as well. They owned the National Pencil Company in Atlanta but lived in New York, leaving their nephew managing the factory. Frank wrote to them about the local opera and added, “Today was Yundef here,” but he was joking, referring not to Passover but Confederate Memorial Day — not a good day to be a New York Jewish Ivy League industrialist Yankee in Atlanta. There was a Confederate parade, he wrote, “and the thin, grey line of veterans, smaller each year, braved the rather chilly weather to do honor to their fallen heroes.” He wanted to watch holiday baseball, the Atlanta Crackers hosting the Birmingham Barons.
He didn’t bother to tell his uncle and tanta that he stopped by the office to pay his workers, including Mary Phagan, whose job it was to affix erasers onto the pencils. Her friend, Georgie Epps, was supposed to meet her at the parade. She never showed. He later told police, Mary was “afraid of advances” that Frank had made. “Frank Tried To Flirt With Murdered Girl,” headlined the Atlanta Constitution. A few days later, the headlines announced that “Mrs. Mima Famby,” proprietor of a rooming house, swore to police that Frank “wanted a room for himself and a girl on the murder night.”
Two years later, in the middle of the night, the heat rising to the 90s, the lynch mob, with guns and handcuffs, arrived at the prison farm. The prison guards, without resisting, turned the key to Frank’s cell and gave Frank, Convict 965, to the hangmen. Frank was hated inside the prison, too. A few days prior, an inmate slashed Frank’s jugular vein, and Frank, expecting to die from his wounds, didn’t even want his assailant punished. Enough already, “I’m at peace with God,” he wrote, “ready to die.”
In the darkness after midnight, Frank was pushed into one of the Model T’s. Knowing his fate, he asked if one of his soon-to-be killers could please take his wedding ring off his bound hands and give the ring to Lucille, his wife of five years (three with him in jail). The ring was taken.
At dawn, back in Marietta, the blindfolded Frank, with a noose around his neck, was hoisted onto a table. The hangmen kicked the table and Frank’s slender body, all 5-feet-8 of him, gently swayed from an oak tree, his neck broken. Cut down, men stomped on his face. Killers posed for photographs with the body, the photos sold as postcards. His wedding ring, in an envelope, was thrown at Lucille’s door.
Leo’s body was sent by train to New York, to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens. One hundred years later, he has visitors, as can be seen from the pebbles on his gravestone: “Leo Frank / Beloved Husband / April 17 1884 / August 17 1915 / “Semper Idem” (Always the Same).
In the same cemetery, across a field of stones, there are pebbles on the grave of Mendel Beilis, another Jewish factory supervisor like Frank, who in 1913, the year of Mary Phagan’s murder, was accused around Passover of murdering a young boy in Kiev, his blood needed for matzoh, accusers said. Semper Idem.
In Frank’s final moments of life, in the cool of morning, he must have wondered, how does a man of dignity and intellect, a lover of opera, a graduate of Cornell, a “macher” in the Jewish community — president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith; member of The Temple, Atlanta’s most elite Reform synagogue; a man who married into one of Atlanta’s most prominent Jewish families — how does it happen that he should be standing on a table under an oak tree, blindfolded, in a noose? His Cornell yearbook noted, “Leo Max Frank hails from sleepy Brooklyn, famed for graveyards, breweries and baby carriages.” An engineering student, “His genius found expression in three-phased generators and foundry work. ... His services as a debating coach [have] made him a fame hard to equal.”
Later that autumn, after the lynching, Frank’s B’nai B’rith created the Anti-Defamation League, even as the Knights of Mary Phagan, as some of the lynchers dubbed themselves, created the modern Ku Klux Klan, dormant since the 1870s. In the night, one could see flaming crosses on nearby Stone Mountain.
At the time of Frank’s hanging, there were no Jews in Marietta. A century later, there is a Chabad, and Conservative, and Reform synagogues. Living down the block from the lynching site, Rabbi Steven Lebow, 60, of Reform’s Temple Kol Emeth, says, “I feel I became Leo Frank’s rabbi.” He had a historical sign placed near the oak tree, and says Kaddish at the site on Frank’s yahrzeit (Elul 7).
Rabbi Lebow tells us over the phone that he officiated at a memorial for Frank last week, where they also said a prayer for Mary Phagan. In the room were Jews from all the Marietta shuls, and even some grandchildren of the hangmen.
“The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of some of the lynchers are friends of mine,” says the rabbi. “I socialize with them. I see them all the time. They are the nicest, kindest people. They are horrified by what happened here 100 years ago.”
On March 4, 1982, The Nashville Tennessean headlined, “An Innocent Man Was Lynched.” Alonzo Mann, 84, the last person alive who testified at the Frank trial, wanted to tell the truth that he didn’t tell at the trial, “Then I can die in peace,” said Mann. The old man, 14 in 1913 when he worked for Frank, told the Tennessean (and two lie detector tests), “I have something heavy on my heart. I was in the factory that day. I saw Jim Conley [carrying] the body of the girl, and Leo Frank was nowhere to be seen.” Mann said Conley, an African-American janitor at the factory, intimidated Alonzo into keeping quiet about what he saw. The boy ran home to his parents who advised Alonzo to indeed keep quiet.
Shortly after the trial, said Rabbi Lebow, Conley’s own lawyer, William Smith, sent word to the governor, “‘You’ve got the wrong guy. It was my guy (Conley) who did it.’”
It was rare, to say the least, that a Southern court would accept the testimony of a black man to convict a white man, but the court believed Conley’s accusation of Frank. Conley and the prosecution depicted Frank as a sexual monster, with a parade of underage factory girls testifying that Frank didn’t just look at them, he leered, he ogled. In Conley’s testimony, says Rabbi Lebow, “he wove in these lurid sexual details.” Even in those far more demure times, Conley testified, says Rabbi Lebow, “how Frank would regularly meet prostitutes in his office, performing oral sex on them,” and yet “it was also said that Frank was homosexual,” and that his circumcision accounted for his deviance. All this, despite Frank being charged with murder, not any sexual crime.
After Mann’s revised testimony, a Georgia parole board ruled in 1983 and again in 1986 — with the Phagan family insisting (as they insist to this day) on Frank’s guilt — that “in an effort to heal old wounds,” the parole board would pardon Frank for being lynched, but not for murdering the girl. Pardoned, because the State of Georgia failed to protect him from the lynching, precluding future legal appeals, but pardoned “without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence” in the Phagan case. He remains guilty in the eyes of the law.
The month of Elul, prelude to Rosh HaShanah, is the season to visit cemeteries, mystics teaching that the souls of our loved ones are able to advocate and intercede for us in these Days of Judgment. Who better than Leo Frank to advocate for his people, the lonely, the unfairly accused? In his time, said classmates, he was quite the debater.
jonathan@jewishweek.orgIncubating An ‘Innovation Movement’
Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent
The 16 TIP participants pose for a group shot at the Beersheva Cyber Park. Courtesy of Hebrew University
Jerusalem — They have 10 weeks to perfect The Pitch. And The Ask.
Come Sept. 10, 16 aspiring and current entrepreneurs from as many countries will sit across the table from a panel of venture capitalists looking for the next great product to invest in.
The opportunity to make the pitch, and perhaps walk away with a commitment from some angel investors, is the end-of-program prize, and the culmination of Hebrew University’s English-language Summer Trans-Disciplinary Innovation Program (TIP), an ambitious pilot program scheduled for expansion next summer. The participants are spending nearly two months at Hebrew U studying bioengineering/biotechnology, computer vision, big data/cyber-security and entrepreneurship with some of the world’s most respected scientists, financiers, marketers and R&D decision-makers.
The program is a collaboration between the Hebrew University’s Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering; the Jerusalem School of Business Administration; BioJerusalem; Rothberg International School; and Authority for Community and Youth (transdisciplinary-innovation.com).
Among the program’s highlights: the opportunity for TIP participants to personally interact with the 15 Nobel laureates taking part in The World Science Conference held Aug. 15-Aug. 20.
The students, who hail from Ethiopia, Brazil, Nepal, Croatia and a dozen other countries, are being taught by 60 lecturers, all experts in their fields.
The program focuses on innovation through lectures (regardless of their professional backgrounds, all participants attend all classes), hands-on training workshops and a great deal of team collaboration.
What makes this program unique, participants say, is the high level of mentoring from scientists, entrepreneurs and business and financial experts; the visits to emerging Israeli start-ups and well-established tech companies; and that all-important final pitch to a panel of investors.
“This program is unique and exactly what I was looking for,” said Tiago Mattos, a 35-year-old Brazilian entrepreneur and educational futurist who has launched several education-tech ventures. “I had never heard much of the information shared here, and I’ve made contact with super-successful venture capitalists. I never imagined I would be speaking face-to-face with Nobel laureates or billionaires.”
Elishai Ezra, TIP’s program director, said the program’s goal is to create an international “movement for innovation.”
Ezra said the first five weeks of the program were devoted to course work and site visits while the sixth week was devoted to ideation — the creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas. Participants with similar interests were divided into teams and instructed to come up with an innovative joint project.
“Week 7,” Ezra said, revolved around the World Science Conference Israel (WSCI), where participants discussed their ideas with the Nobel Prize winners.
They will spend Weeks 8 and 9 developing their team projects by utilizing the university’s resources, including its nano-science center, mechanical workshop and applied physics department, as well as the Bezalel art school’s prototyping facilities. Week 10 will be spent pitching and marketing their ideas to a panel of judges from the public and private sectors.
“These are industry leaders, representatives of accelerators and incubators from around the world,” Ezra said. “We’ll try to serve as the matchmaker.”
Ezra said the program has brought together an extremely diverse group of people whose median age is 28.
“They are computer engineers, entrepreneurs, people in the business industry, academia, Ph.D. students, researchers. Many new friendships have formed and networks made.”
Diverse though the participants are, the yearning to create new products and bring them to the marketplace is shared by them all.
During a seminar on the university’s Givat Ram campus an instructor told the students that in order to develop and test a product they must first choose a “Persona,” a fictional person who best represents their user base.
The instructor explained that developing a so-called “target audience” is “too big, too personal and anonymous. Your persona can be anyone. A pilot, your grandmother. What’s vital is that your actual testers be as close to your persona as possible.”
Never recruit your family or friends to be testers, the instructor advised. “You want a critique. You want to hear what’s missing,” and family and friends won’t be brutally honest.
Choosing the right testers “will flush out 80 percent of your issues,” the instructor said before listing usability testing techniques.
Emerging from the seminar, Ivy Mukherjee, a 22-year-old visual and interface designer from India, said the knowledge she has gained during the program will be “invaluable” to her work.
“You just overflow with information. You see so many things you can do with it. Now I’m thinking about usability and the need to prototype your product and go to your users.”
Mukherjee, who in her professional life is developing a project related to e-books as an iPad application, said TIP is “unique” in that it has allowed her to pursue design, technology and innovation in one course.
“No other program I know of offers this,” she said.
Samer Shawar, a 32-year-old Palestinian participant from east Jerusalem, said he plans to share what he has learned during the program with Palestinian innovators in the West Bank, where he is developing a hacker space in the city of Ramallah.
He is also developing an electronic system to alert drivers they have left a child or animal in their vehicle.
TIP, he said, “has opened my eyes to many things, from many different directions. I didn’t know how things were made. It’s taken me really deeply into innovation, into the understanding that deep research can lead to a lot of innovation.|”
Shawar said the program has also given him the confidence to proceed.
“It’s convinced me that I can do something to change the world, even if I’m only one person.” Read more at JewishWeek.Com
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JTA
CNN anchor-turned-education-advocate Campbell Brown is launching a news site called The Seventy Four.
‘The public school system in this country is broken,” says Campbell Brown, education-reform advocate and former NBC and CNN news anchor.
It’s this sentiment that led Campbell, along with Romy Drucker, to create The Seventy Four, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational news site launching Monday. The name refers to the 74 million school-age children in the United States.
Earlier this year, New York magazine dubbed Brown “the Most Controversial Woman in School Reform.” Through her nonprofit, Partnership for Educational Justice, she has helped parents file lawsuits against New York State challenging teacher tenure. She has been critical of the teachers’ union and vocal about her rejection of the status quo.
“Every education law should be based around the question, ‘Is this good for children?’ And it’s not,” she tells JTA.
Brown sees herself as both a journalist and an advocate for the powerless. Critics describe her as a union-busting, pro-charter school mouthpiece for the 1 percent.
“The critics are going to say what they want,” she says. “But I’ll let our journalism speak.”
The site launches with an inspirational profile on Chris Bonner, a search-and-rescue pilot for the Coast Guard who traded military life to become a second-grade teacher at a charter school in Newark, N.J. Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker’s debut column is about how presidential candidates should address the relationship between educational inequality and income inequality.
Campbell says that most of her detractors “are part of the education system and the status quo.”
“They have vested interests and don’t want us calling them out — but that’s our jobs as journalists,” she says.
Her opponents — pointing to the fact that her two children attend private school, a Jewish day school in Manhattan — say she is disconnected and not qualified to argue on behalf of the country’s public school students.
“On the contrary,” she says. “I’ve had opportunities that many others don’t have, and was able to choose my children’s school. I’m fully aware that many people are stuck with their failing neighborhood school.
“I care deeply about Jewish education and Jewish values, and chose a school with those values,” she says, but declined to name the school. “But every mother should have a choice when it comes to education.”
Brown was raised Catholic in Louisiana but converted to Judaism more than a decade ago. Her husband, Dan Senor, grew up modern Orthodox in Toronto. (Senor was an adviser to Paul Bremer, who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush to lead the occupational authority of Iraq, and is co-author of “Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.”)
The decision to convert was a difficult one, Brown says — she didn’t know much about Judaism growing up.
“It was something I struggled with — trying to understand why it was so important to my husband and to my mother-in-law that I do it,” she says. “I asked her to try and tell me. I’m a journalist, after all, and I ask a lot of questions.”
Brown’s mother-in-law recounted her family’s story of fleeing Slovakia during the Holocaust.
“While they were on the run, every Friday night they’d cover themselves up long enough to light Shabbat candles. That was the length they went to to preserve their traditions,” Brown recalls from the story. “How could I not raise my kids with the tradition they worked so hard to uphold?”
Brown underwent a Reform conversion while at NBC. Every week for about six months, her rabbi would come to her office, close the door and study with her.
“I never closed my door, and that was the one time during the week that I would,” she says. “The rumors were flying. People thought she must be my shrink or something.”
That “was one of the most rewarding times of my life,” Brown says.
The family lights Shabbat candles every week and observes many aspects of Judaism.
“We don’t do it to my mother-in-law’s specifications, though,” Brown jokes. Her mother-in-law now lives in Israel (where Brown and her family visited her last Passover) and “she is still a mentor to me.”
Asked about her favorite part of Jewish culture, Brown doesn’t hesitate.
“It’s the sense of community,” she says. “My kids went to Jewish preschool, they go to Jewish day school and I’m involved in our Jewish community center. It’s all very kid-centric.”
And so is her professional life, of course. Brown — along with her The Seventy Four co-founder Drucker, who worked at the New York City Department of Education on former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s transformational “Children First” reforms — say they are looking to put children’s education at the forefront of the national conversation, something that’s especially important ahead of next year’s presidential election.
The Seventy Four, they hope, will be a forum where people with different opinions and viewpoints present solutions to what Brown describes as the “current crisis in our schools.”
“Too many children in this country are falling behind at an early age and are never given the help they need to succeed,” Drucker says.
“Research shows that the most significant school-based factor in a child’s learning is the quality of his or her teacher,” she adds. “We must make it a priority that every child, regardless of their ZIP code, background or skin color, has a high-quality, effective teacher in the classroom.”
But The Seventy Four isn’t all doom and gloom. Brown and Drucker also plan to feature success stories, like Bonner’s. Stories will be both long- and short-form, with a large video component. Brown will contribute editorially.
“I think this is the direction journalism is going in: news sites that go deep on specific issues,” Brown says, pointing specifically to Bill Keller’s The Marshall Project, which covers the American criminal justice system, and the single-topic news site Syria Deeply.
And if there’s controversy, so be it, Brown says.
“That just means we’re relevant and in the heart of it all,” she says. “The role of journalists is to hold people in power accountable.”
editor@jewishweek.orgTen years after Katrina, The Tides That Bind more...National
The Tides That Bind
Ten years after Katrina, the Jews of New Orleans and Houston remain bound by a flood of emotion and caring.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
New Orleans’ Congregation Beth Israel. Courtesy of Beth Israel
Houston — Ten years ago this week, with Hurricane Katrina barreling toward them, several thousand Jews from New Orleans set out on I-10 to escape the storm. They headed west, passing Baton Rouge, then Lafayette, in the heart of the Louisiana bayou, then Lake Charles, and on across the Texas line through Beaumont and the lyrically named Mont Belvieu.
They were headed for higher ground, and sanctuary, in Houston. The ribbon of highway was a lifeline, 350 miles from ruin to rescue.
Jewish Houston, home to about 40,000 generous souls, opened its doors to the many Jews fleeing New Orleans. It was the start of a process that irrevocably changed both communities over these 10 years, and bound them in a special way, even as New Orleans — both the Jewish community and the wider city — has rebounded in the last decade.
Josh Pershell was 8 years old when his family pulled onto I-10 bound for Houston. Their house, they would later learn, was “completely flooded.” Houston would now be home. “Everyone was very welcoming and supportive,” Pershell, now 18, told The Jewish Week in a recent interview.
After Katrina, Houston Jewry offered housing and office space, moral support and counseling, free synagogue membership and day school enrollment, money and prayer books and other religious supplies for the New Orleans evacuees, several hundred of whom ended, according to estimates, ended up making Houston their home.
And then, nearly 10 years later, the high water came to Houston, on Memorial Day 2015 — 11 inches of rain in a matter of a few hours, 2,000 buildings destroyed, some of the worst flooding in the city’s history. The damage was heavy in the heart of Houston’s Jewish neighborhood, Meyerland, along Brays Bayou, home to many of its institutions.
The Jews of New Orleans — current and former ones — were among the first to reach out to the Texas city that had given them refuge. For survivors of Katrina, it was déjà vu — images from Houston of flooded buildings, of people wading in waist-deep water, of stranded individuals being rescued by rowboat.
Returning the favor done to him, Josh Pershell, a recent graduate of Houston’s Beren Academy, a Jewish day school, volunteered to help flood-battered families after the Memorial Day deluge. Along with other volunteers, he carried furniture and other ruined items out of homes, and helped people pack their intact belongings.
“I did it because I felt it was the right thing to do, and the rest of my school and my friends were doing it also,” Pershell said.
♦That the Jews of New Orleans were in a position to have lent a hand after the Houston flooding is an indication of how far the community has come since Katrina hit. In the wake of the Category 5 hurricane, the Jewish population of New Orleans plummeted by more than a third, from 9,500 to 6,000. Today, it’s 10,300. (Buoyed by a network of strengthened levees and wetlands, the city as a whole, which initially lost about 40 percent of its population of nearly 500,000, has grown to 384,000 as of March; yet Louisiana has more young people not in school or working than any state in the nation, a direct result, researchers say, of Katrina.) The local Jewish federation’s annual fundraising campaign, which took a small hit in the wake of the hurricane, has nearly reached the pre-2005 figure of $2.8 million; several Jewish institutions, which suffered heavy damage in the waters of Katrina, are located in new buildings.
“Ten years later we’re now stronger than we were before the storm,” said Bradley Bain, president of Congregation Beth Israel, a Modern Orthodox synagogue that moved into a new building two years ago, after being hosted for several years at a New Orleans Reform temple, Congregation Gates of Prayer in the suburb of Metairie.
“We’re very much a better place,” said Michael Weil, executive director of New Orleans’ Jewish federation, who helped coordinate the community-wide recovery effort, which included a campaign to attract new residents. In a telephone interview, he said Jewish New Orleans has moved beyond its initial recovery and rebuilding stages. “We’re actually rejuvenating. It’s a different world now. The community feels good about itself.”
The wider city “has become an incubator for entrepreneurship,” especially in the arts and the restaurant business, Weil said. “The Jewish community has been at the forefront of that.”
The people who left were mostly young families, who needed schools for their children; and senior citizens, who lost their homes, and lacked the resources or strength to rebuild. The people who have come are mostly young professionals, many of them single. “The new Jewish New Orleans is actually younger, in age profile, than before,” Brandeis history professor Jonathan Sarna said.
The Jewish federation’s high-visibility newcomers program, which offered a variety of financial incentives to people who moved to New Orleans, played a role, though perhaps not a crucial one, in their decision, Weil said. Instead, the city itself, its image as a vibrant place, has served as the main draw. The local economy is healthy, jobs are available. And housing, while not inexpensive, is affordable. “It’s a lot cheaper than New York City, Washington or places like that,” he said.
Weil pointed to several signs of new Jewish life in New Orleans: a Moishe House, an expanded Limmud educational program, a new Hillel House and Chabad Center at Tulane University, a new Chabad day school, an expanded JCC Uptown site and Beth Israel’s new building.
As the Aug. 29 anniversary nears, New Orleans’ synagogues are marking the decade of struggle and resilience by hosting several commemorative events that will culminate in prayer services on the weekend of the anniversary. And in a sign of the giving-back spirit, the New Orleans federation is coordinating TikkuNola volunteer work that features such activities as collecting and distributing school supplies for charter school students.
♦A few days before Katrina struck, two leaders of the New Orleans-based Jewish Children’s Regional Service, a social work agency and charitable fund that serves seven Southern states, traveled I-10 to Houston to set up a satellite office.
Led by executive director Ned Goldberg and education coordinator Melanie Musser, a small staff of displaced JCRS staffers continued to offer their services, which included personal counseling, advice on obtaining government benefits, and scholarship assistance for universities and summer camps, to New Orleans evacuees. A small JCRS satellite office remains in the JFS headquarters here; after Katrina, the agency’s client base grew by more than 50 percent.
And Goldberg, who again works fulltime in New Orleans after nearly a year in Houston, came back here recently to give back. About a month after the Houston flooding, which took place a few days before the start of the official hurricane season, Goldberg was back on I-10, this time with a carload of new and gently used Judaica, books and games for flood victims that the agency had collected from its supporters.
“Katrina families were the first to volunteer” to help Houston, said Pat Pollicoff, president of Houston’s Congregation Beth Israel, which suffered heavy water damage on Memorial Day. “They understood.”
A fundraising campaign under the auspices of the New Orleans Jewish federation, which included “dollar-for-dollar matches” for Houston Jewry from several donors, had raised “$27,470 from donors throughout the state … matched by the Goldring Family and Woldenberg foundations … for a total of $52,470,” the federation reported earlier this month.
“Katrina had a long-term effect on both New Orleans and Houston, creating a unique bond between the people of our two cities,” said Lee Wunsch, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston.
Post-Katrina, the Jewish community of Houston was “amazing,” Weil said. “They gave us everything. Everyone was aware of the help Houston gave us.”
“The close relationship with Houston is mutually beneficial,” said Brandeis’ Sarna. “Through the years there have been Jewish communities that have closely assisted one another. Baltimore and Philadelphia have historically been intertwined. In early America, Shearith Israel [in Manhattan] helped various congregations get their start and would then, later, write to them for assistance.”
♦Houston will likely need the continued help, from New Orleanians as well as others.
Wunsch called the flooding the costliest in the Jewish community’s history. “It will take 18-24 months before things get back to normal,” he said. “The price tag for this is very significant. We’ve estimated the cost … at $3.5 million.”
Wunsch estimated that 500 Jewish families here “had their homes compromised … half will need some kind of community support.”
“Every synagogue has families affected by the flood,” he told New Orleans’ Crescent City Jewish News.
Leading the financial support of the federation’s Houston Flood Relief Fund was the Jewish Federations of North America, which made a $250,000 donation.
The buildings that sustained the most damage were those of three congregations — Beth Israel, United Orthodox Synagogues, and the Meyerland Minyan — the teen building of the Jewish Community Center, and the JCC’s racquetball courts and toddler gym. They are in various stages of rebuilding and renovation; the affected synagogues, with the approach of the High Holy Days season, are holding worship services in mold-free, repaired rooms, some using texts donated by New Orleans congregations.
Drive through Meyerland and you see storage units in front of many homes, yellow building permits in many windows.
Active in the post-flood volunteer activities here are Chabad Lubavitch of Houston, Congregation Yeshurun, the national NECHAMA and All Hands organizations, the Dallas-based Texas Torah Institute educational program, and Boy Scout Troop 806, sponsored by the Beth Israel Brotherhood. Several synagogues offered free community-wide barbecues and dinners, and the JCC ran a series of workshops about receiving government benefits, concerts and films.
JFS is still counseling people traumatized by the flooding, and offering a weekly support group, said Linda Burger, the group’s executive director. New faces show up each week, she said.
After the flood, JFS staffers set up a table at the popular Three Brothers kosher bakery, which gave out free challah rolls to flood victims.
The New Orleans JFS offered practical advice in such areas as case management and setting up an effective online communications system, Burger said. “We were very prepared. Katrina taught us not to be afraid to ask for help.”
Members of Houston’s Jewish community who had generously come to the aid of New Orleans a decade ago found themselves in an unfamiliar situation this summer, Burger said. “People said it’s a lot better to be on the giving side than on the receiving side.”
“It’s much easier to give the help,” echoed Beth El’s Pollicoff.
“It’s a humbling thing” to need help — “very humbling,” she said, adding praise for the Jewish community of New Orleans. “It’s tremendous to know we have their emotional support.”
steve@jewishweek.orgLosing Their Religion, Finding Their Voices more...New York
Losing Their Religion, Finding Their Voices
Robert Goldblum
Managing Editor
Basya Schechter, Shulem Deen and moderator Sandee Brawarsky at a recent event. Michael Datikash/JW
In the 1991 alt-rock anthem from the Athens, Ga.-based band REM, the group sings, “That’s me in the spotlight / Losing my religion / Trying to keep up with you / And I don’t know if I can do it.”
Last week at a Jewish Week-sponsored literary forum, the man in the spotlight losing his religion was Shulem Deen, author of the well-received memoir about leaving the Orthodox fold, “All Who Go Do Not Return” (Graywolf Press). After years of trying to keep up with the religious and societal strictures placed upon him by his strict Skverer chasdic sect in upstate New Square, Deen made a break.
So did Basya Schechter, who shared the stage with Deen last Tuesday night before a crowd of about 600 at Congregation Rodeph Sholom on the Upper West Side. (Jewish Week culture editor Sandee Brawarsky moderated.) The vocalist, who leads the klez/world music band Pharaoh’s Daughter and is musical director at the Renewal congregation Romemu, left her insular “yeshivish” neighborhood of Borough Park years ago. But perhaps she hasn’t left her religion behind in quite the same way Deen has.
In a telling exchange, Deen, 40, explained that in giving up the certainty of the chasidic world (which included his wife of 15 years and his five children), he came to embrace the “uncertainty” that defines the modern condition for most people. But there was nothing “religious” in the place where he landed, he said, despite his gaining all kinds of insights about the world and his new place in it.
Schechter saw the glass half full, so to speak. She, too, unmoored from her cloistered upbringing, is grappling with uncertainty. But she saw a religious dimension to it — a spiritual seeking for answers and truths that would likely lie beyond her reach. Religion, she seemed to be saying, was in the searching.
The discussion touched on serious matters of faith, adjustment (Schechter choked up when she talked about how difficult it was to leave the fold and rebuild her life), and the lack of sufficient services for those who choose to leave the Orthodox lifestyle.
But there was humor, too (Deen and a friend, who hardly knew what baseball was, cruising Rockland County for a place to watch Game Seven of the 2001 World Series — “two chasids walk into a bar…,” Deen quipped.)
Deen read a pivotal passage from “All Who Go,” which was both a sharp critique of the charedi lifestyle and a revelatory moment when he realized his old religious foundation — roof, floorboards, all of it — had crumbled. Schechter read a funny essay she wrote for the occasion describing another kind of revelation: when, in seventh-grade organic chemistry class, she realized she was a swirling particle of energy at a far remove from, yet somehow still connected to, the workings of the nucleus; it was a metaphor for her life.
And there was music, a balm in the literary Gilead. Schechter sang a satirical ditty about the pre-Yom Kippur ritual of kappores (“finger lickin’” chicken), and a moving devotional song sung on the Sabbath.
In the end, both Deen and Schechter left the religious practice of their childhood behind, but in hard-won ways they found their voices in art — Schechter in music, Deen in prose. They lost plenty. But what they gained, as if they were sitting at the right hand of God, was a measure of creation.
editor@jewishweek.orgA Stone For Leo Frank: Centennial of a lynching that still chills from Atlanta to Queens. more...New York
A Stone For Leo Frank
Centennial of a lynching that still chills from Atlanta to Queens.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Lynched in Georgia, buried in Queens, Leo Frank remains a symbol of anti-Semitic intolerance in the United States. JW
On the sweltering Georgia night of Aug. 16, nearly a dozen of Marietta’s finest citizens — a former governor, a judge, lawyers, teachers, two former mayors — got into their Model T autos, driving for hours, more than 100 miles over unpaved back roads to the prison farm in Millidgeville, to hang “the Jew,” Leo Frank, convicted of murdering the beautiful 13-year-old Mary Phagan, a Christian “flower” of Southern maidenhood. During the trial, a mob shouted to the jury, “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!” Sentenced to death, the governor commuted Frank’s fate to life imprisonment, but if Frank could appeal so could the mob, and “Judge Lynch,” as they called their lesser instincts, insisted Frank must hang for Phagan’s death on April 26, 1913.
That 1913 day was overcast but a holiday, and Frank, 31, began that Shabbos of Pesach wishing his wife Lucille “Good Yundef” Passover greetings, and mailing his uncle and “dear tanta” (Yiddish for aunt) greetings, as well. They owned the National Pencil Company in Atlanta but lived in New York, leaving their nephew managing the factory. Frank wrote to them about the local opera and added, “Today was Yundef here,” but he was joking, referring not to Passover but Confederate Memorial Day — not a good day to be a New York Jewish Ivy League industrialist Yankee in Atlanta. There was a Confederate parade, he wrote, “and the thin, grey line of veterans, smaller each year, braved the rather chilly weather to do honor to their fallen heroes.” He wanted to watch holiday baseball, the Atlanta Crackers hosting the Birmingham Barons.
He didn’t bother to tell his uncle and tanta that he stopped by the office to pay his workers, including Mary Phagan, whose job it was to affix erasers onto the pencils. Her friend, Georgie Epps, was supposed to meet her at the parade. She never showed. He later told police, Mary was “afraid of advances” that Frank had made. “Frank Tried To Flirt With Murdered Girl,” headlined the Atlanta Constitution. A few days later, the headlines announced that “Mrs. Mima Famby,” proprietor of a rooming house, swore to police that Frank “wanted a room for himself and a girl on the murder night.”
Two years later, in the middle of the night, the heat rising to the 90s, the lynch mob, with guns and handcuffs, arrived at the prison farm. The prison guards, without resisting, turned the key to Frank’s cell and gave Frank, Convict 965, to the hangmen. Frank was hated inside the prison, too. A few days prior, an inmate slashed Frank’s jugular vein, and Frank, expecting to die from his wounds, didn’t even want his assailant punished. Enough already, “I’m at peace with God,” he wrote, “ready to die.”
In the darkness after midnight, Frank was pushed into one of the Model T’s. Knowing his fate, he asked if one of his soon-to-be killers could please take his wedding ring off his bound hands and give the ring to Lucille, his wife of five years (three with him in jail). The ring was taken.
At dawn, back in Marietta, the blindfolded Frank, with a noose around his neck, was hoisted onto a table. The hangmen kicked the table and Frank’s slender body, all 5-feet-8 of him, gently swayed from an oak tree, his neck broken. Cut down, men stomped on his face. Killers posed for photographs with the body, the photos sold as postcards. His wedding ring, in an envelope, was thrown at Lucille’s door.
Leo’s body was sent by train to New York, to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens. One hundred years later, he has visitors, as can be seen from the pebbles on his gravestone: “Leo Frank / Beloved Husband / April 17 1884 / August 17 1915 / “Semper Idem” (Always the Same).
In the same cemetery, across a field of stones, there are pebbles on the grave of Mendel Beilis, another Jewish factory supervisor like Frank, who in 1913, the year of Mary Phagan’s murder, was accused around Passover of murdering a young boy in Kiev, his blood needed for matzoh, accusers said. Semper Idem.
In Frank’s final moments of life, in the cool of morning, he must have wondered, how does a man of dignity and intellect, a lover of opera, a graduate of Cornell, a “macher” in the Jewish community — president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith; member of The Temple, Atlanta’s most elite Reform synagogue; a man who married into one of Atlanta’s most prominent Jewish families — how does it happen that he should be standing on a table under an oak tree, blindfolded, in a noose? His Cornell yearbook noted, “Leo Max Frank hails from sleepy Brooklyn, famed for graveyards, breweries and baby carriages.” An engineering student, “His genius found expression in three-phased generators and foundry work. ... His services as a debating coach [have] made him a fame hard to equal.”
Later that autumn, after the lynching, Frank’s B’nai B’rith created the Anti-Defamation League, even as the Knights of Mary Phagan, as some of the lynchers dubbed themselves, created the modern Ku Klux Klan, dormant since the 1870s. In the night, one could see flaming crosses on nearby Stone Mountain.
At the time of Frank’s hanging, there were no Jews in Marietta. A century later, there is a Chabad, and Conservative, and Reform synagogues. Living down the block from the lynching site, Rabbi Steven Lebow, 60, of Reform’s Temple Kol Emeth, says, “I feel I became Leo Frank’s rabbi.” He had a historical sign placed near the oak tree, and says Kaddish at the site on Frank’s yahrzeit (Elul 7).
Rabbi Lebow tells us over the phone that he officiated at a memorial for Frank last week, where they also said a prayer for Mary Phagan. In the room were Jews from all the Marietta shuls, and even some grandchildren of the hangmen.
“The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of some of the lynchers are friends of mine,” says the rabbi. “I socialize with them. I see them all the time. They are the nicest, kindest people. They are horrified by what happened here 100 years ago.”
On March 4, 1982, The Nashville Tennessean headlined, “An Innocent Man Was Lynched.” Alonzo Mann, 84, the last person alive who testified at the Frank trial, wanted to tell the truth that he didn’t tell at the trial, “Then I can die in peace,” said Mann. The old man, 14 in 1913 when he worked for Frank, told the Tennessean (and two lie detector tests), “I have something heavy on my heart. I was in the factory that day. I saw Jim Conley [carrying] the body of the girl, and Leo Frank was nowhere to be seen.” Mann said Conley, an African-American janitor at the factory, intimidated Alonzo into keeping quiet about what he saw. The boy ran home to his parents who advised Alonzo to indeed keep quiet.
Shortly after the trial, said Rabbi Lebow, Conley’s own lawyer, William Smith, sent word to the governor, “‘You’ve got the wrong guy. It was my guy (Conley) who did it.’”
It was rare, to say the least, that a Southern court would accept the testimony of a black man to convict a white man, but the court believed Conley’s accusation of Frank. Conley and the prosecution depicted Frank as a sexual monster, with a parade of underage factory girls testifying that Frank didn’t just look at them, he leered, he ogled. In Conley’s testimony, says Rabbi Lebow, “he wove in these lurid sexual details.” Even in those far more demure times, Conley testified, says Rabbi Lebow, “how Frank would regularly meet prostitutes in his office, performing oral sex on them,” and yet “it was also said that Frank was homosexual,” and that his circumcision accounted for his deviance. All this, despite Frank being charged with murder, not any sexual crime.
After Mann’s revised testimony, a Georgia parole board ruled in 1983 and again in 1986 — with the Phagan family insisting (as they insist to this day) on Frank’s guilt — that “in an effort to heal old wounds,” the parole board would pardon Frank for being lynched, but not for murdering the girl. Pardoned, because the State of Georgia failed to protect him from the lynching, precluding future legal appeals, but pardoned “without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence” in the Phagan case. He remains guilty in the eyes of the law.
The month of Elul, prelude to Rosh HaShanah, is the season to visit cemeteries, mystics teaching that the souls of our loved ones are able to advocate and intercede for us in these Days of Judgment. Who better than Leo Frank to advocate for his people, the lonely, the unfairly accused? In his time, said classmates, he was quite the debater.
jonathan@jewishweek.orgIncubating An ‘Innovation Movement’
Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent
The 16 TIP participants pose for a group shot at the Beersheva Cyber Park. Courtesy of Hebrew University
Jerusalem — They have 10 weeks to perfect The Pitch. And The Ask.
Come Sept. 10, 16 aspiring and current entrepreneurs from as many countries will sit across the table from a panel of venture capitalists looking for the next great product to invest in.
The opportunity to make the pitch, and perhaps walk away with a commitment from some angel investors, is the end-of-program prize, and the culmination of Hebrew University’s English-language Summer Trans-Disciplinary Innovation Program (TIP), an ambitious pilot program scheduled for expansion next summer. The participants are spending nearly two months at Hebrew U studying bioengineering/biotechnology, computer vision, big data/cyber-security and entrepreneurship with some of the world’s most respected scientists, financiers, marketers and R&D decision-makers.
The program is a collaboration between the Hebrew University’s Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering; the Jerusalem School of Business Administration; BioJerusalem; Rothberg International School; and Authority for Community and Youth (transdisciplinary-innovation.com).
Among the program’s highlights: the opportunity for TIP participants to personally interact with the 15 Nobel laureates taking part in The World Science Conference held Aug. 15-Aug. 20.
The students, who hail from Ethiopia, Brazil, Nepal, Croatia and a dozen other countries, are being taught by 60 lecturers, all experts in their fields.
The program focuses on innovation through lectures (regardless of their professional backgrounds, all participants attend all classes), hands-on training workshops and a great deal of team collaboration.
What makes this program unique, participants say, is the high level of mentoring from scientists, entrepreneurs and business and financial experts; the visits to emerging Israeli start-ups and well-established tech companies; and that all-important final pitch to a panel of investors.
“This program is unique and exactly what I was looking for,” said Tiago Mattos, a 35-year-old Brazilian entrepreneur and educational futurist who has launched several education-tech ventures. “I had never heard much of the information shared here, and I’ve made contact with super-successful venture capitalists. I never imagined I would be speaking face-to-face with Nobel laureates or billionaires.”
Elishai Ezra, TIP’s program director, said the program’s goal is to create an international “movement for innovation.”
Ezra said the first five weeks of the program were devoted to course work and site visits while the sixth week was devoted to ideation — the creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas. Participants with similar interests were divided into teams and instructed to come up with an innovative joint project.
“Week 7,” Ezra said, revolved around the World Science Conference Israel (WSCI), where participants discussed their ideas with the Nobel Prize winners.
They will spend Weeks 8 and 9 developing their team projects by utilizing the university’s resources, including its nano-science center, mechanical workshop and applied physics department, as well as the Bezalel art school’s prototyping facilities. Week 10 will be spent pitching and marketing their ideas to a panel of judges from the public and private sectors.
“These are industry leaders, representatives of accelerators and incubators from around the world,” Ezra said. “We’ll try to serve as the matchmaker.”
Ezra said the program has brought together an extremely diverse group of people whose median age is 28.
“They are computer engineers, entrepreneurs, people in the business industry, academia, Ph.D. students, researchers. Many new friendships have formed and networks made.”
Diverse though the participants are, the yearning to create new products and bring them to the marketplace is shared by them all.
During a seminar on the university’s Givat Ram campus an instructor told the students that in order to develop and test a product they must first choose a “Persona,” a fictional person who best represents their user base.
The instructor explained that developing a so-called “target audience” is “too big, too personal and anonymous. Your persona can be anyone. A pilot, your grandmother. What’s vital is that your actual testers be as close to your persona as possible.”
Never recruit your family or friends to be testers, the instructor advised. “You want a critique. You want to hear what’s missing,” and family and friends won’t be brutally honest.
Choosing the right testers “will flush out 80 percent of your issues,” the instructor said before listing usability testing techniques.
Emerging from the seminar, Ivy Mukherjee, a 22-year-old visual and interface designer from India, said the knowledge she has gained during the program will be “invaluable” to her work.
“You just overflow with information. You see so many things you can do with it. Now I’m thinking about usability and the need to prototype your product and go to your users.”
Mukherjee, who in her professional life is developing a project related to e-books as an iPad application, said TIP is “unique” in that it has allowed her to pursue design, technology and innovation in one course.
“No other program I know of offers this,” she said.
Samer Shawar, a 32-year-old Palestinian participant from east Jerusalem, said he plans to share what he has learned during the program with Palestinian innovators in the West Bank, where he is developing a hacker space in the city of Ramallah.
He is also developing an electronic system to alert drivers they have left a child or animal in their vehicle.
TIP, he said, “has opened my eyes to many things, from many different directions. I didn’t know how things were made. It’s taken me really deeply into innovation, into the understanding that deep research can lead to a lot of innovation.|”
Shawar said the program has also given him the confidence to proceed.
“It’s convinced me that I can do something to change the world, even if I’m only one person.” Read more at JewishWeek.Com
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