The Jewish Week Connecting the Word with Jewish News, Culture, Features, Opnions - Friday, October 30, 2015

The Jewish Week Connecting the Word with Jewish News, Culture, Features, Opnions - Friday, October 30, 2015
THE ARTS

"Censored Voices" based on Amos Oz_s interviews with soldiers after the Six-Day War. Courtesy Music Box Films
Punch And Counterpunch
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

This has been an autumn in which all the news from the Middle East suggests that the entire population of the region has gone quite mad. Whether it has been Jews burning babies, 12-year-old Palestinians stabbing Israeli kids of the same age, or the prime minister shifting the blame for the Shoah away from Hitler, the past several months have been a nightmare for anyone who cares about Israelis or Palestinians.

It may sound unlikely, but this year’s Other Israel Film Festival, which begins next week, may provide a few flashes of light amidst the gloom of the daily reports. Now in its ninth year, the festival has evolved from a showcase for films by and about the region’s minorities to a sturdy fixture on the fall film circuit that examines the ever-complicated realities of the Jewish state from a multiplicity of viewpoints.

It appears that this year’s event is focusing on two disparate but not unrelated themes: the need for and fruits of intercultural cooperation, and the tendency of Zionist thought to return inevitably to self-definition and self-criticism.

The two most prominent films on the schedule, both of which will open theatrically not long after the festival, are rather painful documentary efforts in the latter vein. “Censored Voices,” by Mor Loushy, has already stirred considerable ire among American neoconservatives and their Israeli counterparts. I suspect that “Colliding Dreams,” the first directorial collaboration for two of the most reliable local Jewish filmmakers, Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky, may have the same result.

In the month that followed the Six-Day War, a young writer and soldier named Amos Oz went around the kibbutzim with a tape recorder, soliciting the recollections of fellow combat survivors. Those tapes would be the basis of a book, “The Seventh Day,” edited by Avram Shapira. At the time, only 30 percent of the transcripts were used, in large part due to military censorship. Nearly 50 years later, those tapes, no longer embargoed, serve as the spine for Loushy’s film.

The memories — and the wounds, physical and psychical — were fresh. The young men were articulate and understandably devastated by what they had seen. For nearly all of them, the elation that the rest of Israel felt was short-lived. Loushy matches the voices on her soundtrack with footage from the period, much of it unseen since the war itself, and shots of the same witnesses as they are today, sitting silently and listening to their younger selves.

As Oz drily observes at the outset, “people did not come back happy from [the] war.” One of the witnesses is asked if he thought about “the homeland” during combat and he retorts, “Not for a second.” Others dismiss the recovery of the Kotel as meaningless to them. These emotions coming from young Jewish soldiers of the IDF seem as unfamiliar as the images that accompany them, although we have heard much worse as the succession of wars has continued.

Even the atrocity stories, the source of much of the rage since “Censored Voices” played Israel and the festival circuit, are a preview of worse to come from generations to follow. However, it is during a recollection of action in the Sinai theater, with the brutal killing of newly seized prisoners, that Loushy makes what I feel is a single serious misstep, cutting from footage of a battle winding down and Egyptian soldiers surrendering to post-battle footage of corpse-and-wreckage strewn desertscapes, with the implication that what we are seeing is what was being described in the 1967 recordings. The film ends with a disclaimer that says that the images are not to be construed as depicting what the taped testimony recalls, but that bell rang a half-hour earlier.

More troubling, and a depressing preview of worse to come, are the reminiscences of the men who fought in the heavily populated Jerusalem area. As one of them bluntly states, “When you come in contact with civilians, it’s horrible.” Although this was no guerrilla war, the involvement of the civilian population was unavoidable and occasionally tragic. Evacuating non-combatants was a nightmare and, as one of them says, “That’s not why I went to war.”

Were these young men the victims of their own naïveté? In wartime, combat soldiers do awful things. Civilians suffer needlessly. Popular culture had ignored (or severely downplayed) those truths, except when the crimes were committed by our enemies and the civilians were our own. In the aftermath of filmed and televised atrocities, from Vietnam to this morning’s front pages, we are now vastly more sophisticated, jaded or inured to such events.

And that, sadly, is what one finally takes away from “Censored Voices.”

Amos Oz is nearly the only famous Israeli opinion-maker who doesn’t turn up in “Colliding Dreams,” a 149-minute documentary that attempts to squeeze the history of Zionism and the state of Israel into a too-small package. Among the familiar names and faces that run through the film are A.B. Yehoshua, Yoram Kaniuk, Hillel Halkin, Yossi Klein Halevi, Hanan Ashrawi, Sari Nussibeih, Moshe Halbertal, several founders of Peace Now and a couple of prominent members of the settler movement. The directors possess admirable track records. Dorman is responsible for “Arguing the World” and “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness,” Rudavsky for “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America” and “Hiding and Seeking.”

In truth, many of the speakers in the film are highly effective, particularly Halkin and Mordecai Bar-On, who have the most screen time and the best lines, so to speak. The story they all tell is, of course, a compelling one, and with its dominant focus on the intellectual conflicts within the Zionist movement, the film has a tone of slightly cool detachment that is both effective and appropriate. The problem is that at two-and-a-half hours, it is both too long and too short. Essentially, “Dreams” would work better as a four- or five-hour miniseries or a Marcel Ophuls-style megafilm.

By far the greater problem, though, is the sheer familiarity of the subject matter, which is not helped by the chronological structure. After many programs on PBS and the like, we have heard these arguments and seen a lot of this footage. For most of its length, “Colliding Dreams” is better crafted and more subtle and thoughtful than its predecessors (although the last half-hour seems painfully attenuated), and its parade of highly articulate observers offers some intelligent and witty commentary; but very little that feels new.

By comparison, “Jerusalem Boxing Club” by Helen Yanovsky and “Arab Movie” by Eyal Sagui Bizawe and Sara Tsifroni seem delightfully fresh and, with each about an hour long, concise. Each focuses on a phenomenon that is at once uniquely Israeli — the proliferation of amateur boxing clubs, the Friday afternoon broadcasts of Egyptian musicals and melodramas on the Israel Broadcasting Authority — and yet somehow universal. There have been many portraits of inspirational coaches like Gershon Luxemburg, who runs the eponymous gym in Jerusalem, of men and women who give selflessly to their young charges, and an equal number of affectionate, nostalgic recollections of the impact of pop culture on previous eras.

Both these films go about their tasks with a cheerful countenance, and the settings of their subject within the turbulent bouillabaisse of contemporary Israel makes their messages of cooperation and enjoyment across class and cultures all the more effective. “Jerusalem Boxing Club,” in particular, could be profitably extended by another half-hour or so, but each of these films is pretty nearly perfect as is.

The Other Israel Film Festival, now in its ninth year, will run Nov. 5-12. It is presented by the Israel Film Center at JCC Manhattan (76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue), which hosts many of the events. In addition to the films, there will be sessions with many of the filmmakers, including a panel discussion on Israeli film censorship, moderated by Jewish Week’s George Robinson. For complete listings and information, go to www.otherisrael.org.

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FOOD & WINE

This dish combines the pleasure of popcorn with the nutritional value of chickpeas. Lauren Rothman_JW
Not Good Vegan Food, Just Good Food
Lauren Rothman
Jewish Week Online Columnist
Leafing through Tal Ronnen’s new cookbook “Crossroads,” named for the chef’s popular Los Angeles restaurant, you might experience one of the following reactions. Perhaps you’ll dog-ear ten or 20 pages, your mind racing with all the ideas you want to translate to the plate. Maybe you’ll run to your pantry to inspect your stocks of the classic Mediterranean ingredients — za’atar, pistachios, pomegranate molasses — the book’s recipes call for. Likely you’ll salivate over Crossroads’ gorgeous, full-page color photos of salads, spreads, soups, desserts, cocktails and more. Probably, though, you’ll wonder what unites all of these inviting-looking dishes.
The subtitle of the book, released earlier this month by Artisan, provides a gentle cue: Extraordinary Recipes from the Restaurant That Is Reinventing Vegan Cuisine. That’s right: these flatbreads, pastas, cakes and tortes omit meat, milk, cream, cheese, eggs and even honey. The point, according to Israeli-born Ronnen, is that you might not even notice. At his swanky West Hollywood restaurant, which he runs alongside executive chef Scot Jones and pastry chef Serafina Magnussen, diners enjoy fried “calamari” (made of rings of hearts of palm); “oysters” (constructed out of artichoke puree); and pappardelle “Bolognese” prepared with Italian-style vegan sausage, the sole meat substitute used on Crossroads’ menu.
“There are no obvious vegan cues, and most guests don’t even make the connection that the menu is plant-based,” Ronnen writes in the book’s preface. Opened in 2013, it’s not just Crossroads’ menu that sets it apart from L.A.’s usual patchouli-scented breed of vegan eateries, but also its atmosphere: an upscale dining room featuring deep leather banquettes and ultramodern chandeliers, the restaurant is a dining experience first and a vegan dining experience second.
“Crossroads has a convivial energy and serves the wonderful food that one would expect from an upscale restaurant,” Ronnen, who was born on a moshav outside Jerusalem and whose Israeli heritage continues to inspire his cooking, writes. “The only difference being that no animal products are used to prepare it.”
A thorough reading of Ronnen’s cookbook provides assurance that the home cook certainly won’t miss the meat — much less the milk — in any of Crossroads’ full-flavored dishes. Relying on the bold tastes found in ingredients such as harissa, olives, fava beans and pistachios, Ronnen creates a tempting menu of mix-and-matchable Mediterranean mezzes, salads, pastas, desserts and more. Written in an approachable voice and, with a few exceptions, favoring straightforward techniques over cheffy tricks, the cookbook’s recipes would appeal to any type of diner, vegan or not. And because they contain no animal products, they’re a neutral addition to any meat or dairy meal.
Crossroads’ signature — and its top-selling — dish is the aforementioned “artichoke oysters,” dollops of pureed artichokes that are served on an artichoke leaf (the “shell”), topped with a fried oyster mushroom (the “oyster”) and drizzled with bearnaise sauce, a traditional accompaniment to fried oysters. A visual trick similar to the restaurant’s batter-fried hearts of palm with aioli that mimic calamari, these clever dishes are nonetheless exceptions to Crossroads’ style. Unlike mock-meat tofu or seitan (soy products the restaurant does not employ since the plant is not grown in the Mediterranean region), for the most part, with Crossroads’ food what you see is what you get. That means the sumptuous, layered flavors of homemade flatbreads topped with butternut squash, mustard greens and fried Brussels sprouts; a summery peach salad deepened with umami-rich balsamic-glazed cipollini onions; mini kale spanikopitas dipped into spicy harissa sauce and dotted with bright mint oil; and much, much more. And then there are the desserts: rich confections including spice cake parfaits with roasted pumpkin mousse and whipped coconut cream, and a positively decadent chocolate layer cake with hazelnut syrup, fig jam and creamy chocolate-fig frosting. It’s hard to imagine any omnivore turning down this fare.
As Ronnen explains in Crossroads’ intro, the dishes inside are meant to be mixed and matched; featuring complimentary flavor profiles, they all pretty much go together. One of the book’s small plate recipes, Spiced Chickpeas, is a perfect example of the approachability, and versatility of Ronnen’s recipes. First, cooked chickpeas are tossed with oil, salt, and plenty of vibrant spices—think cumin, red pepper flakes and cayenne—then roasted to a crispy, crunchy, addictively popcorn-like snack. You can save the chickpeas as-is for daylong snacking, or take the recipe to its conclusion by braising the legumes in a simple sherry-fortified tomato sauce and serving them over rice with one of the cookbook’s excellent flatbreads. On the night I prepared them, I incorporated them seamlessly into an Indian-themed meal, plating them up with fluffy basmati rice, mustard seed-flecked potatoes and a cooling cucumber raita.
Yes, I made — and served — dairy. Don’t tell chef Ronnen.
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FIRST PERSON
The 'Primitive' Immigrants
Ben Krull
Special To The Jewish Week

Ben Krull
Politicians who find sport in demonizing immigrants often praise their European ancestors, who came to the United States from abroad. Previous generations of immigrants, after all, supposedly valued work and family, to achieve the American dream. But a recent reading of Kate Simon’s 1982 best-selling memoir “Bronx Primitive” suggested that the Eastern Europeans who passed through Ellis Island in the early 1900s were less admirable than they’ve been depicted.
The best-selling book chronicled how Simon immigrated with her mother from Poland, at age 4, to join her father; he had come to the city a few years earlier and landed in a Jewish-Italian neighborhood in the Bronx. Both parents were determined to learn English and build a prosperous future, one that was unavailable to Jews in the anti-Semitic hotbeds from which they fled. This was a scenario much like the one I heard in childhood.
My paternal great-grandfather fled the Russian pogroms at age 9 and raised himself up from nothing to become a prosperous Brooklyn coat manufacturer, and beloved patriarch, who gave jobs to his relatives.
His story, contrasted with my privileged, Upper East Side upbringing, made me feel like a freeloader who nonchalantly strolled down the path that my ancestors toiled to lay out for me.
Simon’s father left their apartment each morning for work — where he earned a good income designing shoes — while her mother attended English classes. Her father also sponsored two Polish cousins who lived with them for several months.
These cousins worked hard to obtain marketable skills and learn the language of their new country. But the admirable qualities of Simon’s family coexisted with a dark undercurrent.
The relatives her father sponsored would come into her room at night to sexually pleasure themselves, by fondling the future-author’s adolescent body. She concluded that her father knew about the abuse, but saw it as his relatives’ right to use his daughter as they pleased.
She was also sexually molested by a close family friend and a local barber, who would slip his hands underneath her shirt while warning her not to struggle, lest he cut her with his scissors. In the meantime her father took numerous lovers, including a niece he helped immigrate from Poland.
Corporal punishment was also part of the author’s upbringing, as her father repeatedly used a belt on his children’s buttocks, stopping only “when he was out of breath, his face red, his brown eyes bulging.” But the most startling revelation in “Bronx Primitive” involved a Dr. James, who made several mysterious visits to Simon’s home.
Birth control was non-existent in the author’s Bronx neighborhood, leading women to abort unwanted pregnancies with hairpins, hangers and noxious chemicals, which sometimes led to death from septic shock. When self-help measures failed to abort the fetus, some desperate mothers often allowed their newborns to suffocate or die of exposure.
A retired New England physician, Dr. James performed abortions, free of charge, so his patients would not have to resort to murder or the brutal means they employed to end pregnancies. Simon learned that her mother had 13 abortions, and that some women in her neighborhood had even more.
While reading “Bronx Primitive” I wondered how many of my immigrant relatives were sexual predators, or beat their children with belts, or were guilty of infanticide, or refused to curtail their sexual appetites, despite knowing the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy. Even if my ancestors were as pristine as I have been told, many of the Jews who came here at the turn of the 20th century surely held the dismissive attitudes towards women and children that sanctioned the behavior Simon wrote about.
In comparing ourselves to the legendary figures we have made our forbearers out to be, we necessarily appear wanting. America’s current crop of immigrants also look suspect when measured against a sanitized version of our immigrant past.
“Bronx Primitive” freed me from feeling inferior to the immigrants of my great-grandparent’s generation. The progressive sensibilities that mark today’s attitudes towards women and children have made me a more compassionate parent and spouse than many of the immigrants who arrived in New York in the early 1900s.
Despite the revelations in “Bronx Primitive,” I am still awed by the feats of the immigrants from Eastern Europe who raised themselves up from nothing. Nonetheless, Kate Simon has allowed me to see the generation of Americans that came through Ellis Island in a more measured light, while also seeing a truer version of my own generation, as we build on the American dream.
Ben Krull, a regular contributor to this space, is an attorney who works in Manhattan Family Court. Read More

Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
Chappy Challah-Ween
Maya Klausner
EditorIt is a time honored American tradition to celebrate Halloween: it is also a time honored Jewish tradition to debate whether or not to celebrate Halloween.
Although most of the fall holiday’s religious associations have melted away like the fun size chocolate candies we ghoulishly pop into our mouths come this time of year, some Jews, especially those with Orthodox leanings, reject Halloween because of its Pagan, Celtic and ultimately, Christian roots.
With that said, Halloween is scientifically proven to be the most fun day of the year: free candy, dressing up as whatever you want and society having to remain silent, hay rides, haunted houses, carving pumpkins, dancing to the monster mash and, of course, watching a marathon of scary movies that you regret halfway through but continue to watch because you are a boss.
If you are a fellow Halloween fanatic but have not received the kosher stamp of approval from family or friends to partake in the frightful festivities, we might have a magic potion to ameliorate your troubles.
To show that one can get into the spirit of All Hallow’s Eve without forfeiting the spirt of Judaism, we have culled together a list of Jewish-inspired costumes.
Enjoy and Chappy Challaween!
1. Young chazzan

2. Little Rachel

3. Baby chassid

4. Adult rabbi

5. Bagel and lox couple costume

6. Moses Jr.

7. Grand rabbi

8. Adult Joseph

9. Alarmed bagel

10. Challah- shoulder pad-chic because, of course this is a thing

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Featured on FRESHINK FOR TEENS
A Common Thread
Sewing binds me to my great-grandmother and my family's heritage.
Hannah Shippas
A family treasure: The author with her great-grandmother's manual sewing machine.
Sewing is a big part of my life. Like my Jewish heritage, it’s who I am and what makes me, me. I’m a senior in high school and ever since I was in elementary school, I have been fascinated by crafts like sewing. Sewing has been passed down on my mother’s side, the same way as Judaism. Not only has the hobby been passed down, but so has a machine: my great-grandmother’s sewing machine. My great-grandma used the machine to make clothes when she came to America before the Holocaust. It doesn’t run on electricity, but instead has a foot pedal to manually move the needle up and down. Since the machine has meant so much to our family, we haven’t sold it. In a way, the machine connects me to my family’s past and to my Jewish heritage. I consider the machine to be a part of our identity, justifying my love for sewing.
When I was in second grade, my grandmother showed me her sewing machine and made a simple doll for me to color. Since I was very young and my grandmother didn’t want me to get hurt, she waited until I was a few years older to give me a needle. The first thing I ever sewed by hand was a small cat head. After my grandma helped me complete the project, I carried around the plush animal everywhere. When I reached middle school, I started to buy different sewing books and started to sew felt by hand. I ended up making a small, green alien with beads on his head; a bunny with his hands in his pockets; and a little pirate mouse with an eye patch. (Photo: Hannah with her one-of-a-kind video game dolls.)
The more I started to sew, the more I wanted to make my own patterns. I joined the felting club in school. I made my first doll from my imagination and named her Kaneena. Since I would assign personalities to my dolls, I gave Kaneena characteristics that I would want: she was strong, brave and smart. I gave her long, red yarn hair and two tattoos: a heart on her arm and a crudely made Star of David on her back. I carried her around everywhere and brought her to school and family gatherings on Chanukah and Passover. I would sit her in my lap and pretend that I was not reading the prayers and the Four Questions to my family, but to Kaneena. My grandma went shopping for clothing patterns for Kaneena (they were designed for Barbie dolls). She showed me how to make clothing on her sewing machine and helped me make a dress, a shawl, a shirt and pants for Kaneena. She even put snaps on the clothes so they wouldn’t slide off. Whenever I would bring her to holiday gatherings, I could show off her nice dress and shawl.
As the years went by, I started to improve my skills but realized I could only go so far sewing by hand. My grandma tried to teach me how to use her machine, but I ended up getting too frustrated threading it. I wasn’t able to sew on my great-grandmother’s machine either even though I appreciated the machine’s history and how it works. I decided to invest in my own sewing machine. Using all of my Chanukah money, I bought a beginner’s model that has over 20 types of stitches and four different sewing machine feet.
I like to improve my sewing skills as much as possible. Instead of coming up with my own ideas, though, I take characters from video games and bring them to life. While this may not be the most original idea, it does help improve my skills. When I show the dolls to my friends who play video games, they immediately recognize who it is. My favorite video games on which to base characters are “Team Fortress 2,” “Minecraft,” “Portal,” the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” series and “SCP-Containment Breach.” I also make pillows for my friends and sew rips in clothing. For my best friend’s birthday, I made her a pillow that combined different patterns of fabric that reminded me of her. I even found the perfect design: a fabric piece with the Star of David in gold and blue! She loved it and sleeps with it next to her every night. (Photo: Her best friend's beloved pillow.)
Like Judaism, sewing is a big part of my life. I hope that when I have children, I can pass down this skill the same way I am going to pass down my heritage. Not only will I pass down the tradition of saying the prayer before eating challah, dipping apples in honey and throwing bread crumbs into the river, but I will also pass down sewing so my children can learn about a tradition that existed before my family came to America. I want my children to know Passover’s Four Questions as well as they know how to do a running stitch.
Watch Hannah make a spy doll on YouTube.
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BLOGS
THE NEW NORMAL
Why "Pushing In" Benefits All LearnersDana Keil
Support Services for diverse learners, such as SETSS (Special Education Teacher Support Service) Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy and Counseling, are invaluable resources that can change the way a mainstream classroom accommodates students with disabilities.
Students who require this type of related services receive a legal document called an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) from their local education agencies, which dictates how often students should receive each therapy and for how long. Where the session takes place, however, can make a world of difference.
Related services should be provided at school, during school hours, rather than after school. Children have a busy schedule of afterschool activities and are exhausted after a long day of school. Additionally, since all therapists have their own styles, therapists who work within a school will be more aligned to the school’s culture and educational philosophy.
In school, there are two options for service providers, known as “Push in” or “Pull out.” The pull out model is common because it’s assumed that small group or 1:1 therapy without the distraction of class will be the most beneficial to the students. For example, if a student is mandated for speech therapy, the speech therapist pulls her out of her classroom at the same times each week. The student and therapist go to an office or resource room for the duration of therapy, after which the student returns to her class, and the therapist pulls out the next student on the schedule.

Though it seems simple and routine, the pull-out model generlaly has the least impact on the rest of the community, and is the least successful approach for holistically supporting the child receiving the services. The reality is that children are forced to leave their friends and learning communities to do something that their peers aren’t aware of, in a section of the school typically designated exclusively for students with disabilities, while missing out on social opportunities by being removed from the classroom. For therapists, it is difficult to simulate real life situations in an empty room. There are no opportunities to integrate the work children are doing with their therapists with the work happening in the classroom. Therefore, work done with therapists stays in the Special Education wings of schools.
The Push-in model is less common, because it takes more effort for the parties involved, but it is the most effective way to support the whole child: not just Jon who struggles with math, but Jon who loves Legos, riding his bike, and has memorized every state capital. This model involves therapists entering children’s learning environments and providing services in the classroom in real time. This underutilized model has extraordinary benefits including reducing stigma, increasing organic learning, reducing missed class material, continued progress with the classroom teacher and neurotypical modeling by other students.
When children are removed from the classroom, they sometimes present defiantly to therapists— and this behavior may be because the children prefer to stay in the classroom with their peers or are embarrassed to be pulled out. This turns into a power struggle between the student, not wanting to leave, and the therapist, just trying to do her job and ultimately results in wasted sessions.
When pushing in, the stigma is reduced or eliminated. Therapists pushing in can work with a group of students at a table, or go from student to student one-on-one, and they look and act like another teacher in the classroom. In fact, a sign of successful integration of a therapist in the classroom is when neurotypical students approach this adult and ask for next steps on the assignment or to go to the bathroom. In this way, students with a disability receive the same support, but in the comfort of their classrooms, making them more receptive to the support and also helping the classroom teachers by gaining another active adult’s assistance.

Additionally, with the Push-In model, teachers are able to observe the strategies that the therapist is working on with the child, and implement the strategies even without the therapist, giving the student infinitely more support than one 30-minute session. Ultimately, therapists aren’t pulling an essential piece out of the classroom, but are joining the classroom, and are treated as full members of the classroom community.
Another great benefit of pushing in is the organic nature of the therapy. If a child has weak fine motor skills, he can be pulled from the classroom to put pegs into a board and strengthen the muscles in his hand. Alternatively, the occupational therapist can push into the classroom during a writing lesson and help him with his grip, letter formation, and spacing, in congruence with his peers. The student is more motivated to do the work because it is in real time, and he benefits more from it because he sees the tangible benefits of the help he is receiving, which is completing the same work at the same time as the rest of his classmates. This is doubly important for therapy focusing on social skills such. The best way for a child to learn conflict resolution skills or how to initiate a conversation is by doing it in the natural environment with the support of the therapist preparing the student for the interaction, watching the scenario unfold, and helping the child debrief afterwards.
This reason ties into the important factor of neurotypical modeling. It is possible for students to work on their decoding skills in isolation. It is better for students to see their friends working on those tricky diphthongs and to learn from them in the context of the Language Arts lesson with the added benefit of their presence as motivation. This also holds true across other domains and an IEP goal quickly goes from a theoretical skill to work on, to a child thinking, “I want to do what my friends are doing so I will watch, learn and work harder on this, so I can do it too!"

Lastly, with push-in, the student isn’t missing class material. Students cannot be expected to catch-up, or stay on par with their peers if they are constantly removed from the classroom and missing essential lessons. Sometimes, pull out therapy is taking the student a step back, when its purpose is to move the student forward.
Ultimately, for inclusion to be successful, schools need the help of talented related service providers. The best use of these therapists is their influence and expertise permeating in the natural learning environment for students with disabilities to gain needed skills without the stigma.
Dana Keil is the Director of Room on the Bench: A Project of Luria Academy of Brooklyn, where she served as the Director of Support Services for three years. She is a certified Special Educator in New York and Massachusetts and has a B.S. in Severe Special Education from Boston University and an M.S. in Special Education with a focus on Behavior Disorders from Hunter College. Dana has experience in the New York City and Brookline, Massachusetts Public School systems, as a Special Educator in inclusive classrooms.Read More
WELL VERSEDSearching For Roots
Gloria Kestenbaum

Helene Aylon. From the Turnings series (2010).
Walking along East Broadway towards the Educational Alliance, I surrender to early culinary memories of the Lower East Side — sweet treats at Uncle Shia’s (Susswein’s) bakery and pizza at Noah’s Ark at a time when kosher pizza was still an exotic treat. The Forward building still dominates, an elegant reminder of the Lower East Side’s once bustling Jewish community but the old Educational Alliance building, which shares the street, is happily unrecognizable after a recent gut renovation: The Manny Cantor Center, part of the Educational Alliance network, is now a sparkling new, open and airy modern space but with the same warm feeling my Aunt Pola described when she worked there decades ago.
Ushering you into this welcoming, contemporary center is the “Manny Cantor Wave” (2015), a colorful, dynamic installation specially created for the space by Susan Fishman and Elena Kalman. With its goal of calling attention to the importance of water in our lives, “Wave” is an appropriate introduction to the exhibit currently on view: "Rooted: The Ecological Duality of Nature and Jewish Identity." The works on display explore the connection between Jewish identity, art and nature from the perspective of both the artist/creator and the viewer.
The show grew from a series of residencies that Art Kibbutz established over these past years; the most recent used as its theme Shmitta, the biblically-mandated Sabbath year in which the land in Israel is left to lie fallow and all agricultural activity is forbidden. Some of the pieces in the exhibit were created in the Art Kibbutz creative oasis, while others were produced in various places and times but all have in common a relationship with the artists’ roots, their connections to the earth and to their Jewish identity.
As Rabbi Joanna Samuels, executive director of the Educational Alliance Manny Cantor Center stated in her introductory address, “What does its mean to be rooted, to let things grow? Shmitta feels very alive when I think about the current struggles in Israel. If everyone on all sides could just loosen our tight grips on the land, just for a moment, we might be able to let something grow and be nourished."
It’s a beautiful idea, letting go of the root in order to allow for growth and the pieces in the exhibit all played with different notions of rootedness, using materials ranging from dirt, branches and bones to augmented reality. Jackie Brookner, a doyenne of the ecological, feminist art movement, was represented by two pieces, both grounded in the use of actual soil. In “Native Tongues” (1997), using only soil and water, the artist created oddly beautiful and surprisingly sturdy sculptures, invoking tongues in their many manifestations — mother tongues, foundations and our primal bond with language and earliest roots. A second Brookner offering, “Untitled” (1997), would normally be called a painting but no paint was used, only soil and water. Conceptually, the piece hearkens back to the abstract expressionists but a small anthill of soil lurks on the bottom left of the canvas, an earthy signature grounded in dirt. Hila Amram’s "Cell Culture Club: Untitled” (2015) features an actual plant growing out of a knapsack, green and blossoming while Stephanie Osin Cohen (2015) literally creates roots of a tree extending from the gallery space in her site-specific installation, “INT. Tree.”
Cynthia Beth Rubin, on the other hand, takes a decidedly high-tech approach to nature. In her piece “Roots” (2015) she uses Augmented Reality to show source material such as plankton in water; in some ways, her art is an organism in itself.
Other well-known artists are represented here. “A Sky and Water Triptych” (2012) from Tobi Kahn’s AHRAV series is included, beautifully somber, abstract landscapes of sky and water, separated by a darker line of horizon. Ken Goldman, the Israeli artist known for his sometimes tongue-in-cheek explorations of the Jewish experience, provided “Dirty Jew” (2014), a self-portrait of the artist drenched in the organic milking waste of his kibbutz; reclaiming the term “dirty Jew,” Goldman positions himself as a “proud hard-working man of the land.”
The works of the Grande Dame of the eco-feminist movement, Helène Aylon, are a centerpiece of the exhibition, curated by Aimee Rubensteen with Yona Verwer. A pioneer of eco-feminist art now in her 80s, Aylon looks at religion from a feminist point of view. In two pieces from The Turnings series (2010), Aylon depicts herself as a “foremother,” placing herself in the trajectory of Jewish history and tradition and facing her own intimations of mortality. “I went to trees, bushes, water, aspects of nature. I turned to the right and turned to the left. I didn’t get any answers but I’m still turning.”
I’m not sure that I understand all the answers implicit in this interesting and thought-provoking exhibit but the questions are worth the journey.
"Rooted: The Ecological Duality of Nature and Jewish Identity" is on view at the Manny Cantor Center through December 1. The exhibit is presented by Art Kibbutz and co-sponsored by the Jewish Art Salon and the Manny Cantor Center, Educational Alliance
Gloria Kestenbaum is corporate communications consultant and freelance writer.Read More

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