Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Dear Reader,
The impact of the high-profile cases of two New York State politicians, Sheldon Silver of the Lower East Side and Dean Skelos of Long Island, is taking its toll on the prominent Jewish areas they served. Staff Writer Stewart Ain reports on concerns of a funding hit in social service programs.
National
Lower East Side, 5 Towns Now Weighing Fortunes
With Silver convicted and Skelos’ trial ending, the two iconic Jewish areas could take a funding hit.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Convicted former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, top, and indicted former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos. Photos by Getty
With the corruption conviction last week of former Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who represented the Lower East Side, and the corruption trial of former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-L.I.) coming to an end, the impact of these high-profile cases on the Jewish community is being weighed.
“What we are afraid of is losing our poverty and social service programs,” said Neil “Nechemia Shimon” Rothenberg, a Lower East Side real estate developer and philanthropist. “These are for both the community at large and the Jewish community specifically, and Shelly lobbied Albany to fund them.”
What makes Rothenberg’s comments especially significant is that the Jewish community has seen a spike in recent years in the number of families living at or near poverty.
Skelos, who is on trial with his son, Adam, for allegedly using his position to enrich his son, is well thought of in the Orthodox community in the Five Towns of Long Island for his strong support of yeshivas, according to Michael Fragin, a Republican political consultant.
“In New York, the Senate and the Republicans are more friendly to the yeshiva agenda,” he continued. “I’m not sure a conviction would change that, but it could be a problem if the Democrats take over the Senate.”
Should he be convicted, Skelos, like Silver, would automatically be stripped of his elected office. It is assumed that Skelos’ seat, like that of Silver, would be filled in a special election April 19, the day of the presidential primary in New York State.
Skelos stepped down as Senate majority leader in May, days after his indictment, and John Flanagan (R-Smithtown) was elected to replace him as majority leader. Flanagan had served as chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Education, and, Fragin said, he, too, had been “a real friend to the non-public school community.”
“Does he have some of the relationships Skelos has as a representative of a strong Orthodox community?” Fragin said. “Probably not, but he has had a wide-open door to the needs of the Orthodox community.”
Regarding Silver’s loss as the assemblyman of the Lower East Side, Fragin said that the community “will definitely see a marked decline in resources.” He added that the community, which has undergone decades of demographic change and has sizeable numbers of Chinese and Latino residents, is “unlikely” to elect another Orthodox Jew.
“It is the end of an era as far as New York Jewish politics is concerned — particularly on the liberal side,” said Fragin.
“Silver was the most identifiable Orthodox Jewish politician in the country, although he did not wear it on his sleeve like some of the up-and-coming politicians,” he added, referring to such pols as New York City Councilman David Greenfield and Assemblymen Phil Goldfeder and Michael Simanowitz who regularly wear kipas in public.
A list detailing member items that politicians allocated to pet causes from the fiscal year 2009-2010 — the last year before then-Gov. David Paterson ended the practice of allowing pols to allocate grants to pet causes — shows Silver doling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to Jewish organizations. (He also gave plenty to non-Jewish causes.) According to the organization SeeThroughNY, the United Jewish Council of the East Side got $424,000; the Lower East Side Tenement Museum received $77,000 and $50,000 was allocated to the Center for Jewish History. Haazinu for Hearing Impaired Children got $48,000, the Eldridge Street Project got $44,000, as did Borough Park-based Nachas Health and Family Network.
And this doesn’t factor in the influence the assembly speaker had on which social service providers were awarded contracts from state agencies — not to mention how much money those agencies had to allocate.
Silver’s conviction comes 17 months after the corruption conviction of his former protégé, William Rapfogel, who headed the influential Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. Rapfogel, who was recently moved from prison to a halfway house after serving two years, was convicted of running a $9 million insurance-overpayment kickback scheme that reportedly netted him millions in cash.
Another observer, who asked to remain anonymous, said Silver’s political clout ended at the beginning of the year when his indictment compelled him to step aside as speaker after 21 years.
But Rothenberg, who said he has known Silver all of his life, said Silver never stopped taking care of his constituents.
“The Orthodox community there reads the paper differently than the average person,” he said. “We don’t see him [Silver] as a politician but as someone who is our friend and who is completely committed to the community. He never ran for higher office because he wanted to represent us. The simple people here knew that if they were in need of anything in the world, they had access to one of the most powerful people in New York. Shelly delivered for everyone in the community and the community sees him as innocent.
“This is not a stupid community,” he continued. “It is an educated community and we see him as a scapegoat. He was a very convenient target of people who say they want to ‘clean up Albany.’ … He earned a salary from a law firm he was working for, for 10 years. The articles make it seem like he got $4 million in bribes. He was paid a salary and paid taxes on it and now they are saying it was not legal.”
During the trial, the office of Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara presented evidence to show that Silver traded political favors to enrich himself. It was shown that he steered state money to a doctor who reciprocated by sending patients to Silver’s law firm, and that Silver supported legislation that helped a real estate firm that hired a law firm he also worked for. His defense insisted that because working for the state legislature is a part-time job, lawmakers are allowed to have outside jobs and that Silver did not act differently than his colleagues.
Bharara has indicated that he will seek to go after some of the $4 million he contends are the fruits of Silver’s criminal conduct.
Observers note that even should Skelos be acquitted, he has already lost his powerful leadership seat. A conviction would mean his seat would go to “someone who is not of the same stature or as seasoned a politician,” pointed out Arthur Katz, immediate past president of the Jewish Community Relations Council-Long Island. “So we will have lost an advocate of the Jewish community who had a high level position in the state legislature.”
In addition, he said, whenever an elected representative is replaced because of illness, retirement or scandal, he or she will be replaced by a freshman.
“More senior senators will have more of an ability to leverage funds than a freshman,” Katz pointed out.
A conviction might attract several Republican Jews to vie for Skelos’ seat, Fragin suggested.
Among the names mentioned are Hempstead Town Councilman Bruce Blakeman (a Republican who has served as a presiding officer of the Nassau County Legislature and a commissioner for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey), Assemblyman Todd Kaminsky (D-Long Beach) and Nassau Legislator Howard Kopel (R-Lawrence).
Reflecting on Silver’s conviction, Ester Fuchs, a professor of public affairs and political science at Columbia University, said that when a man of his “stature is convicted of this kind of political corruption, it is a tragedy for the entire city.”
“What it reveals to me is that there is a structural problem in state politics in New York,” she said. “His conviction is part of a larger problem of pay-to-play in Albany. We need to empower our elected officials to fix this. There must be systemic reform so that there are no gray areas — so that there are no politicians who think it is OK to connect kickbacks or campaign contributions to the legislative process.”
Fuchs added: “It is a hundred-year-old problem that goes back to the old-style machine politics of Tammany Hall. This is no longer about Sheldon Silver. He has been convicted. It’s over. And it’s not about Jews. We shouldn’t be looking at it in that kind of parochial way. ... Nobody believes this kind of behavior is ethical; now Preet has made it clear that it is not legal either. That is why the laws must be changed to make sure that everybody in Albany understands the implications of this conviction.”
stewart@jewishweek.org---------------------
As college campuses take on issues of race, Israel and free speech, many Jewish students feel caught in the crossfire. Staff Writer Hannah Dreyfus describes their struggle.
National
Caught In The Middle In New Campus Wars
Collision of racial justice, Israel, free speech issues putting Jewish students in bind.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
On Monday, 200 Columbia students gathered on the library steps to protest racial injustice and other issues. Michael Datikash/JW
In early November, Michael Stephenson, a Jewish sophomore at the University of Missouri, spent a night sleeping in the middle of campus alongside graduate student Jonathan Butler. Butler was on a hunger strike demanding the resignation of university President Tim Wolfe over how he handled a series of racist incidents on campus.
“I grew up with a strong focus on social justice — it was natural for me to get involved,” said the 19-year-old education major from Chicago. He is one of about 900 Jewish students on the Columbia, Mo., campus, 2 percent of the total student body. Of the 900, only about 100 are active in Jewish life, according to the director of the campus Hillel.
Stephenson, one of the engaged few and a “devout” Reform Jew, organized a social justice seder last Passover, with modern-day human rights issues standing in for each of the Ten Plagues.
Still, as a proudly Jewish student, fellow student activists question his authenticity. A strong alignment between progressive student groups and pro-Palestinian student groups on college campuses leave many Jewish students caught between the cross-currents buffeting college campuses this fall, as they struggle to navigate their feelings towards Israel with a largely dissenting popular opinion.
“I don’t know where I belong,” said Stephenson, who described several incidents he experienced while involved in activist work that “bordered on anti-Semitism.” In one exchange while working an information table for his Jewish fraternity, an Arab student accosted him by calling Jews “Nazis” and “kikes.” In another, he witnessed a prominent rabbi from St. Louis listed as a “true terrorist” at a Black Lives Matter meeting — the rabbi’s crime was sending money to Israel. In November, a swastika drawn in feces was found on the wall of a campus bathroom stall.
“It’s hard to be a Jewish student and support these groups when harsh criticism of Israel sometimes turns into criticism of the Jews,” he said. Still, he remains a strong ally of the Black Lives Matter movement. “I just try and keep my identities separate,” he said.
Sometimes that’s impossible. While participating in a recent social justice committee meeting, he heard a group of African-American students defending the recent spate of Palestinian stabbings targeting Jews in Israel. “It’s started to feel like Jewish lives don’t matter,” he said.
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College campuses across the nation were quick to echo the discontent brought to the fore by Butler and his supporters, spurred by the neighboring unrest in Ferguson, Mo. On the East Coast, elite universities including Yale, Columbia and Princeton made headlines as student activists conducted sit-ins, occupied buildings and held rallies to protest racial injustice. On these campuses and others, the traditional fall semester was transformed into a period of intense focus on racial injustice and the adjoining question — can activism stifle free speech.
At both Yale and Princeton, there have been accusations that protesters, many of them black, have tried to suppress the speech of those who disagree with them. Others welcomed the counterprotests as part of what they called a healthy debate.
Jewish students, who overwhelmingly align with black student groups in the fight for racial justice, often find themselves trapped in the crosshairs. “Intersectionality,” the new buzzword on college campuses for collaboration between diverse student groups to aid a common goal, exacerbates the dilemma, as groups having little to do with Israel stake a position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On Monday afternoon, more than 200 students gathered on the stone steps in front of Columbia University’s stately library. Set against a gray sky, students held cardboard signs with red and blue painted messages — “Columbia is Racist,” “We Won’t Support Oppression” and “CU is a Corporation”
“Mic check!” announced a student dramatically into a megaphone, before rattling off a list of student demands, including enhancing quality of life for black and other marginalized communities on Columbia’s campus and repairing the damage done to the black communities “occupied” by Columbia’s sprawling campus in Harlem and the Bronx.
The gathering, a coalition between several student groups — the Mobilized African Diaspora, Columbia Divest for Climate Justice, and No Red Tape, an anti-sexual assault activist group, among them — debuted the Barnard Columbia Solidarity Network; the network is a recently formed mega-coalition between student groups with overlapping interests. Columbia’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish student group that supports divestment from Israel, collaborate closely with the network.
About 20 Jewish student activists were sprinkled throughout the crowd. Though Hillel encouraged students to attend, many who would have otherwise been interested opted out because of No Red Tape’s public alignment with SJP, said Nicole Felmus, one of the Jewish students at the rally and a Hillel representative. Felmus, 19, who identifies with the Reform movement, participates in a Judaism and activism seminar hosted weekly at Hillel.
“Building a coalition like this is such a great idea, there’s so much student power,” she said, referring to the new Solidarity Network. “But you have to ask which voices are eliminated and which ones are diluted.”
She described the growing “internal turmoil” she feels when issues she cares deeply about — including racial equality — are conflated with questions about Israel. Still, she decided to bench her concerns and join the rally. “I feel my presence is necessary here—I need to step away from their positions I don’t agree with and support their broader goals, like having a rape crisis center on campus.”
For Elle Wisnicki, a Columbia junior and student activist who also attended the rally, balancing racial justice and Jewish values is personal. The daughter of a black mother and Jewish father, she chose to convert to Judaism at age 12. The decision to “mark her own identity” also sparked her passion for social justice.
“I have Judaism to thank for my social justice roots,” said the Hollywood, Calif., native, quoting the biblical mandate to “love the stranger in your midst.”
Today, a human rights major and a social justice fellow for Hillel, she described the tension inherent in the role.
“Jewish students have a really hard time with this,” she said, a note of exasperation in her voice. “It’s hard to say I’m a Jewish student and I support Israel, but I’m also against all the injustice going on in America. Jewish students have a really hard time separating those two identities.”
A Hillel ambassador, she is familiar with the very negative way Hillel is perceived by other progressive groups on campus. “People just don’t want to work with us,” she said, discussing the challenge of changing Hillel’s image. Her “beautiful and complicated gift” of being a multiracial Jew is one way to shift public perception, she said.
“I’m Jewish, I fought to be Jewish, and I deserve to be a part of the Hillel community. No one in the super-left-wing, liberal realm can take that away from me. Because I’m half-black, I can fit into the other realms without being questioned. I need to utilize this gift appropriately — if not me then who?”
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Belinda Cooper, an adjunct professor at Columbia and New York University and a scholar of human rights, believes discomfort is a critical part of the college experience. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she often makes Holocaust jokes in class.
“I don’t think students go to school to be in a family or to be coddled,” she said. “University is an intellectual experience. You obviously want to be happy, but that’s not the purpose.”
With a degree of disbelief, she’s watched students rally and picket against “offensive” language and behavior outside the classroom. A burgeoning focus on “microaggressions” — subtle forms of bigotry — poses harm to a culture of intellectual rigor, Cooper said. She called the now-infamous Yale letter in defense of certain Halloween costumes deemed insensitive because of their cultural appropriation a “flash point” in the debate. (The letter’s author, lecturer Erika Christakis resigned from her position at the university on Monday.)
“I don’t know any professor who feels comfortable with the wave of responses to free speech we’ve been seeing on campuses,” Cooper said.
Still, in her own classroom, she has not seen students change. In a particularly challenging exercise in her human rights seminar, she assigns students to argue opposite sides of a human rights issue. No student has declined the assignment because the task would entail arguing against his or her beliefs.
“Students have the tendency to be selectively outraged — they do not always recognize the offense they cause, but rather the offense being caused to them,” she said.
Michael Zanger-Tishler, a Jewish sophomore at Yale, said the heated conversation about free speech on campus furthered his commitment to inclusivity. Though he didn’t express a stance on the percolating question of free speech, he said the recent events have schooled him in “productive listening,” above all else.
“As a Jew, it’s really hard to witness someone else’s upsetting experiences and not be called to action,” said the Cambridge, Mass., native. The institutional history of anti-Semitism at many universities — including a quota on Jewish students at Yale — spurred him to get involved. Along with 40 other Hillel students, he marched to downtown New Haven to join a massive rally of over 1,000 students demanding racial inclusivity on campus; the gathering was called the “March of Resiliency.” As the education chair of the Yale Hillel’s board, he’s also worked to make Hillel a more “welcoming and accessible” space to students of color on the Yale campus.
“All that’s gone on has provoked internal self-reflection on our campus,” he said, mentioning a new focus on how to welcome Jews of color. “Setting aside student demands, the way we treat one another matters.”
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According to Aryeh Weinberg, director of research at Be’chol Lashon, a nonprofit that works to expand racial and ethnic inclusivity in the Jewish community, Jewish students generally don’t need much encouragement to get involved in the race conversation on campus.
“A lot of them identify with the struggle,” he said, speaking to the Jewish Week over the phone from California.
Still, in a not-yet-published study about experiences of anti-Semitism among students in the Bay Area, Weinberg found that Jewish students aligned with progressive values, including racial justice, often take a “hiatus” from their Jewish identity during college in order to avoid being questioned about Israel. The study consisted of 15 focus groups across the Bay Area and 50 personal interviews with Jewish professionals, lay leaders and community members.
“Many Jewish students have a serious problem reconciling devotion to progressive causes and the desire not to be defined by whether or not to be pro-Israel,” he said. Progressive Jewish students are subjected to an Israel “litmus” test, a hazing ritual of sorts, to determine their loyalties and positions, a prerequisite not asked of any other students trying to join. Weinberg added that most of the students interviewed were not passionately pro-Israel — rather, they defined themselves by progressive values. Many of the students interviewed who were “simply trying to get through college” were subjected to questions about their Israel stance nonetheless.
“The Israel question has morphed into an issue about race and identity rather than a conversation about policy,” said Weinberg. The most-problematic element of the 15-year-old vitriolic campus attitude towards Israel — Weinberg marked 2001 as the year the situation began to develop — is the “external defining of Jews.”
“We can’t assume this is a passing fad,” he finished, a note of gravity in his voice. “Jewish students from all different backgrounds are being increasingly marginalized by an over-focus on Israel.”
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Thalia Sass, a senior at the University of Missouri originally from St. Louis, never had to explain the Jewish high holidays growing up. She attended a high school that was one-third Jewish, and her family was active in the local Reform temple, where her community was deeply engaged in the conversation about race; the rabbi of her synagogue was one of the central leaders of the local Black Lives Matter chapter. Her commitment to tikkun olam, Judaism and Israel were never in conflict — the three were intimately connected.
Arriving on campus was a culture shock. To many of her classmates, she was the “first Jew they’d ever met.”
“Sometimes it feels like everyone here is a Baptist,” she joked, a note of sobriety in her tone. “A lot of students here were never exposed to anything else than what they grew up with.”
As the president of the Jewish Student Organization, she and several other Jewish students successfully petitioned the university to change its religious observance policy — for the first time this semester, professors cannot decline student requests to miss class to observe religious holidays.
Her experience of feeling like an outsider led her naturally to relate to the struggle of black students on campus.
Still, like so many other Jewish students, her loyalties have been questioned. Vitriol towards Israel, and several anti-Semitic incidents, leave her feeling weary.
“It’s hard to combat it — it’s tiresome to combat it,” said the biology major and aspiring doctor.
Despite some backlash, she refuses to stop fighting the fight for racial justice. At a recent Friday solidarity campout, she spearheaded a campaign titled “spread cream cheese, not hate” and handed out bagels to student protestors.
“Dialogue starts small,” she said, reflecting on her childhood growing up near the “Delmar Divide,” a nickname for Delmar Boulevard, a racial dividing line in St. Louis. “But it has to start somewhere. Strangers are only strangers when you’re standing on the other side.”
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
And my column offers an interview with David Brog, head of a major new national anti-BDS effort, on the direction it is taking amid concerns it will be politically directed by its largest funder, casino owner/philanthropist/hard right political supporter Sheldon Adelson.
Gary Rosenblatt
Strategy Emerging On Adelson BDS Effort
Big-money Maccabee Task Force analyzing focus-group data, pushing collaboration, exec Brog says.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
David Brog, the 49-year-old head of the new, Sheldon Adelson-funded, multimillion-dollar effort to combat BDS (the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel), is well aware of the high — and no doubt unrealistic — expectations among pro-Israel advocates for him to succeed.
The BDS movement appears to be growing at a number of key college campuses and has become an increasingly important priority on the Jewish communal agenda. And with upwards of $50 million at his disposal for the Maccabee Task Force, launched earlier this year at an invitation-only Las Vegas summit, there is a sense among some Israel activists that Brog should be able to squash the opposition with a major offensive.
But throwing large sums of money at this complex problem is not enough. Neither is a frontal assault on Israel’s enemies on campus, since they are less the target of Brog’s efforts than the great majority of college students — Jewish and non-Jewish — who are either uninterested in or confused by the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
“We need a very nuanced approach,” Brog told me in his first in-depth interview since becoming executive director of the task force four months ago. “Every campus is different, and the phrase ‘BDS’ is a catch-all for various efforts to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel. Even if you could ban BDS activities on campus, the problem wouldn’t go away. The battle is bigger than BDS, so our effort has to be bigger.”
Brog has been learning on the job. By his own admission he did not come to his post as an expert on the subject of BDS. He spent the last nine years as executive director of Rev. John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and many people are surprised to learn that Brog is Jewish.
CUFI promotes stronger Christian-Jewish relations, especially in support of Israel. It has not been without controversy over the years because of Rev. Hagee’s hard-line political and religious views at times. Brog was an intense and savvy advocate for CUFI, helping it become the largest Christian Zionist organization in the U.S. He hopes to use some of his connections in the evangelical Christian community in his new post, and points out that those in “the faith community” tend to respond positively to Israel.
In general, though, surveys show that young people today are not as favorably inclined toward Israel as their parents, and at the outset the task force will focus on campuses.
Brog’s first months at the task force have been spent listening to leaders of the various pro-Israel activist groups across the country, learning what they do, how they interact and perhaps overlap, and determining strengths and weaknesses in the field.
“We don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” Brog said. “I view these groups as an extended brain trust for us. We intend to find out who is doing good work and encourage them to work together.”
The task force will not have its own campus chapters, and it intends to keep a relatively low profile. It has solicited funding proposals from existing groups, evaluated them and is in the process of sending out an initial 10 grants of amounts “between five and six figures” to bolster their work, according to Brog.
Up to a dozen national partner groups and some local chapters of these groups, including students as well as professionals, are scheduled to meet Jan. 15-16 and engage in honest discussions about their successes and setbacks.
“We are trying to create a culture where we all can learn from each of the group’s experiences,” said Brog. “Which programs and projects are effective and which aren’t, and why. We have to get beyond our own echo chamber, and that’s not easy.”
The conference will be held in Las Vegas, where Brog is now based, close to his boss, Adelson, the casino billionaire whose outsized influence on Israeli and American politics is profound. His pro-Netanyahu newspaper, Israel Today, is distributed and delivered for free and is now the most-read in Israel. And his willingness to contribute large sums of campaign funds to pro-Israel candidates in the U.S. has made him a magnet for Republican candidates who seek to out-do each other in pledging their allegiance to Israel.
Brog is sensitive to the widespread perception that Adelson, who helped form the task force and is its primary funder, will seek to drive its agenda politically. Brog said it’s just not true, and he cites the fact that Adelson is the biggest funder for Birthright Israel but has not politicized that organization’s 10-day Israel trips.
Brog emphasized that the task force seeks to work with a wide range of pro-Israel groups, across the political spectrum. “We’re talking about groups that represent the broad mainstream of the pro-Israel community – groups that are dedicated primarily to make the case for Israel’s right to exist, to defend itself, and that seek to counter BDS efforts.”
He said the task force is well aware that “the vast majority of colleges are left of center, so we know that if we don’t speak to them in their language we are wasting our time.” He declined to name the groups the task force is working with but he singled out two groups that will not receive funding. They are Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports the BDS movement, and the dovish pro-Israel lobby group, J Street (and its campus organization, J Street U). Though Brog said he has been told that J Street “has been helpful” on the issue of BDS, he asserted that “we have a different approach.
“J Street may be committed to Israel in the abstract,” he explained, “but day to day, how do they spend their time — making the case for Israel” or criticizing Jerusalem’s positions? “Those are the questions we’re asking.”
As part of its research the task force sponsored focus groups of Jewish and non-Jewish college students in Southern California, Texas and New England to discuss their views of Israel, BDS and the Mideast conflict. Bill Knapp, the hired consultant for messaging, strategy and tactics, said the results of the discussions are still being analyzed. But he asserted that “facts alone won’t move people on this issue,” noting that “it’s a complex and emotional area” that entails young people’s views of themselves and their place in the world. Describing college students today as “smart but often uniformed,” he said “their opinion of Israel may be determined by their views on strong vs. weak, justice vs. injustice, life vs. death, or freedom vs. slavery.” Knapp added: “You don’t win this debate by yelling the loudest or having the longest list of facts,” suggesting that students’ views are “pliable.”
Brog said he was encouraged by the preliminary findings, noting that when students were made aware of some basic facts about Israel — that it is a vibrant democracy, that its peace offers have been rejected by the Palestinians, that it is home to many Jewish refugees from Arab lands, etc. — their sympathy for the Jewish state increased. He said the focus groups discussions also underscored that “how you share the facts, what tone you take, are important. It’s not just about the facts alone. People are motivated by what they feel.”
After the initial round of funding, the task force will start monitoring its investments while widening its reach beyond the campus. It will consider targeting high school students as well as post-college young adults, with an emphasis on social media. “We plan to invest in better short videos and articles that will arm our pro-Israel students,” Brog said. He added that there may be support for trips to Israel for small groups of non-Jewish young leaders. The task force, which now has a staff of five, will also consider launching new advocacy groups if it determines the current ones are deficient in certain areas. But the emphasis for now is on collaboration, working together with those already in the field and strengthening their efforts.
“It’s hard to say where we’ll be a year from now,” Brog said, “but we’ll focus on truths about Israel that will move students. We hope to have a holistic strategy that will resonate with undecided students and appeal to their heads and their hearts.”
Gary@jewishweek.org---------------------
Also this week, UJA-Federation raises whopping $27 million at Wall Street dinner; a different kind of Chanukah glow; GOP candidates wootop Jews; how an Israeli teenage horse lover exposed the BDS movement's true colors; and Culture Editor Sandee Brawarsky contrasts fiction from Ben Nadler and Joshua Halberstam, both modern and timeless.
New York
UJA-Fed. Wall Street Dinner Nets $27 Million
Steven A. Tananbaum, left, Eric S. Goldstein, Andrew V. Rechtschaffen, Alisa Doctoroff and Michael Milken. UJA-FederationUJA-Federation of New York’s Wall Street Dinner raised a record-breaking $27 million for the charity’s annual campaign Monday night at the Hilton New York. The sold-out dinner, which drew a record turnout of more than 1,900 leaders from the Wall Street community, marked 40 years as one of city’s leading philanthropic events.
Steven A. Tananbaum, managing partner and chief investment officer of GoldenTree Asset Management LP, received the Gustave L. Levy Award, a preeminent honor in the industry recognizing a leader in the Wall Street community for both exceptional professional achievements and commitment to UJA-Federation. Andrew V. Rechtschaffen of Greenlight Capital received the Alan C. Greenberg Young Leadership Award, which is awarded to an individual whose values and ideas reflect the extraordinary standard set by the late Alan C. “Ace” Greenberg.
Michael Milken, chairman of the Milken Institute and co-founder of the Milken Family Foundation, delivered the keynote address.
Said Eric Goldstein, UJA-Federation’s CEO: “Because of the support of the Wall Street community, people of every background enjoy programs and services at our local agencies that make their lives immeasurably better: meals for the hungry, camps for children with special needs, opportunities for people of all ages to connect with Jewish life, support for students on college campuses who are confronted with growing BDS and anti-Israel sentiment, and so much more.”
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
International
A Different Kind Of Chanukah Glow
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
Romance editors are trying to diversify their offerings with books like this Chanukah anthology. Courtesy of HarperCollins
Daughters of Israel, put down that dreidel.
Avon Books, the famous publisher of pulpy romances, has a holiday present just for you: “Burning Bright: Four Chanukah Love Stories.”
The publisher is spreading the love here. Every autumn sees a burst of Christmas romances, but years can go by between Chanukah titles.
“I have long thought the [romance] genre, as awesome as it is, doesn’t reflect the women who write it and read it. It’s often very white, very straight and very Christian,” said Sarah Wendell, the author of the foreword of “Burning Bright” and the creator of “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books,” a snarky website that celebrates and sometimes criticizes the romance publishing business. The industry sold about $1 billion worth of books in 2013, according to its trade association, the Romance Writers of America.
Last year, Wendell found herself so frustrated by the dearth of Jewish romance that last year she self-published her own, “Lighting the Flames,” about two summer camp friends whose relationship matures when they reconnect as young adults at a Chanukah-season reunion. Wendell and the anthology’s four authors are all Jewish.
“Lighting the Flames” helped inspire “Burning Bright,” said Tessa Woodward and Amanda Bergeron, the Avon editors who directed the project. During an editorial meeting, Woodward, who is Jewish, suggested a Chanukah companion to titles like “All I Want for Christmas Is a Cowboy.” She was sort of joking, she said, but the team took the idea seriously. Books on Jewish subjects sell well in other categories, and a Chanukah romance would help flesh out the list, along with male-male romances, interracial couples and characters with disabilities.
Woodward found an author, Stacey Agdern, to spearhead the project; Agdern found the three other authors and Avon, an imprint of HarperCollins, published the book online on Dec. 1. It will come out in print on Jan. 19. (Avon releases some books online first.)
In Agdern’s “A Home for Chanukah,” an interior designer and a music producer get to know each other when they plan a holiday party. Jennifer Gracen conjures up a Chanukah miracle to bring Shari Cohen and Evan Sonntag, lawyers in love but broken up, back together in “A Dose of Gelt.”
And “All I Got” by K. K. Hendin taps American Jews’ lust for Israelis in uniform when Tamar Jacobs falls for “handsome soldier” Avi Levinson.
The anthology’s marquee name is Megan Hart (yes, really), a New York Times bestselling author, whose own Chanukah miracle was writing not a spicy story but a sweet one, she said.
Known for her steamy prose, Hart actually wrote one of the only other Chanukah romances about five years ago. In her “Newly Fallen” (Mills & Boon), a naked angel named Zachariah appears in Lily Gold’s yard and stays for eight passionate nights.
But “Burning Bright’s” editors wanted the anthology to appeal to a broader audience, so Hart’s relatively chaste piece is about how the Festival of Lights brings Amanda and her “cute but mysterious new neighbor, Ben” together.
Indeed, you can judge “Burning Bright” by its tame cover, which features a fully lit menorah and a smooching couple in a picture frame. On the jacket for “All I Want for Christmas,” that cowboy’s got a 10-gallon hat, an unbuttoned shirt and a six-pack.
“I don’t know what else you would put on a Chanukah anthology,” said Hart. “A menorah is a better choice than a dreidel. A Star of David wouldn’t work. But a plate of sufganiyot would have been pretty tempting to me.”
helen@jewishweek.org
---------------------
Letter From Israel
Unbridled Prejudice
A young horse lover shows the BDS movement for what it is.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
A teen with horse sense: Horse lover Shachar Rabinovitz, left, finds herself unintentionally in international political maelstroShe’s the 13-year-old who has brought the true face of the anti-Israel boycott movement to light.
When Shachar Rabinovitz opened her email inbox last week in her northern Israel home, she couldn’t believe what she saw. She was working on a school project and reading her way around the Internet’s resources on her favorite subject, horses. One article had the email address of its author, a former Cambridge University academic, and so she tried her luck and sent Marsha Levine a message.
“I know you are a very important person and I’ve read your article about horses [“Domestication, Breed Diversification and Early History of the Horse”],” she wrote. “I love horses very much and it will be an honor if you will answer my questions.”
When the response came, it was a refusal to help her — “until there is peace in Palestine.” Shachar had not written anything about Israel, but simply mentioned that she is Israeli, and this piece of information became the sole concern of Levine, who is Jewish. “You might be a child, but if you are old enough to write to me, you are old enough to learn about Israeli history and how it has impacted on the lives of Palestinian people,” she wrote, adding: “Maybe your family has the same views as I do, but I doubt it.”
Last week Shachar watched bemused as her name started popping up in dozens of news articles, and as she received requests to appear on Israeli television. In the midst of all of this, I went to interview her.
It’s probably the first time that I ever found my interviewee in slippers, but then again, it was 9 p.m., so nearly bedtime. She comes across as a sweet girl who is always smiling, and she can’t stop giggling when her dog keeps jumping on me. She is simply crazy about horses, and shows me pictures of her riding and even kissing a horse. She rides once a week, show jumps, and says that “every notebook of mine is full of drawings of horses.” She already has plans to buy a ranch “when I retire.”
Shachar is thinking so long-term, her mother Galia chimes in, because at the moment they don’t have money to buy “a horse or even half a horse.”
When Shachar saw Levine’s email last Sunday she had just arrived home from school and a dentist appointment. She wandered over to the computer in the corner of the modest living room where I spoke to her, and logged on. She was “speechless” and “upset” when she saw the reply, and soon afterwards showed her teacher. “My teacher had helped me to write the email and I showed him — we were both shocked.”
Shachar went to school last Monday, a normal 13-year-old girl, and while she was in her lessons, her story spread like wildfire. Her father had posted Levine’s reply on Facebook, and by the evening her story was everywhere in Israel and in the British media.
Levine is not backing down on the way she dealt with Shachar’s email. “The Jews have become the Nazis,” she told a reporter from the London-based Jewish Chronicle, referring to what she called Benjamin Netanyahu’s “ethnic cleansing.” And she said that given that the Israeli government’s policies towards Gaza have support among the population, Jews have “turned themselves into monsters.” She even suggested to another British publication that Shachar emailed her with a political motivation, saying her parents “set her up.”
Talking to her, it jarred badly with me that someone so young and blameless — someone who doesn’t “really understand politics,” as the 13-year-old said — has been pulled in to this nasty political battle. She’s so innocent that she can’t help feeling for Levine when she hears her interviewed. “I felt bad for her because I don’t want to hurt any person, regardless of their political opinions,” she said.
Her home is on Kibbutz Regavim, near Binyamina in the north of Israel. It is a 10-minute drive from a mixed Jewish-Arab school where children learn in a bilingual environment, all of them studying Hebrew and Arabic, and marking Jewish and Muslim festivals. Shachar doesn’t attend this school (it’s an elementary school), but loves her Arabic lessons at school. This region and this family are a far cry from the reactionary Israel that the boycotters are portraying. Oh, and a very far cry indeed from many of the truly repressive countries in the world against which Levine has no boycott policy, and whose 13-year-old horse-crazed girls her conscience wouldn’t prevent her from answering by email.
As Shachar sat on the sofa in her living room, cuddling with her mom, she told me that she never knew that another Jewish person would hold her in so much disdain for where she lives. She held my gaze, as if I would have an answer to be able to explain this, but I could only move on to my next question.
Nathan Jeffay’s column appears twice a month.
Letter From Israel
Unbridled Prejudice
A young horse lover shows the BDS movement for what it is.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
A teen with horse sense: Horse lover Shachar Rabinovitz, left, finds herself unintentionally in international political maelstroShe’s the 13-year-old who has brought the true face of the anti-Israel boycott movement to light.
When Shachar Rabinovitz opened her email inbox last week in her northern Israel home, she couldn’t believe what she saw. She was working on a school project and reading her way around the Internet’s resources on her favorite subject, horses. One article had the email address of its author, a former Cambridge University academic, and so she tried her luck and sent Marsha Levine a message.
“I know you are a very important person and I’ve read your article about horses [“Domestication, Breed Diversification and Early History of the Horse”],” she wrote. “I love horses very much and it will be an honor if you will answer my questions.”
When the response came, it was a refusal to help her — “until there is peace in Palestine.” Shachar had not written anything about Israel, but simply mentioned that she is Israeli, and this piece of information became the sole concern of Levine, who is Jewish. “You might be a child, but if you are old enough to write to me, you are old enough to learn about Israeli history and how it has impacted on the lives of Palestinian people,” she wrote, adding: “Maybe your family has the same views as I do, but I doubt it.”
Last week Shachar watched bemused as her name started popping up in dozens of news articles, and as she received requests to appear on Israeli television. In the midst of all of this, I went to interview her.
It’s probably the first time that I ever found my interviewee in slippers, but then again, it was 9 p.m., so nearly bedtime. She comes across as a sweet girl who is always smiling, and she can’t stop giggling when her dog keeps jumping on me. She is simply crazy about horses, and shows me pictures of her riding and even kissing a horse. She rides once a week, show jumps, and says that “every notebook of mine is full of drawings of horses.” She already has plans to buy a ranch “when I retire.”
Shachar is thinking so long-term, her mother Galia chimes in, because at the moment they don’t have money to buy “a horse or even half a horse.”
When Shachar saw Levine’s email last Sunday she had just arrived home from school and a dentist appointment. She wandered over to the computer in the corner of the modest living room where I spoke to her, and logged on. She was “speechless” and “upset” when she saw the reply, and soon afterwards showed her teacher. “My teacher had helped me to write the email and I showed him — we were both shocked.”
Shachar went to school last Monday, a normal 13-year-old girl, and while she was in her lessons, her story spread like wildfire. Her father had posted Levine’s reply on Facebook, and by the evening her story was everywhere in Israel and in the British media.
Levine is not backing down on the way she dealt with Shachar’s email. “The Jews have become the Nazis,” she told a reporter from the London-based Jewish Chronicle, referring to what she called Benjamin Netanyahu’s “ethnic cleansing.” And she said that given that the Israeli government’s policies towards Gaza have support among the population, Jews have “turned themselves into monsters.” She even suggested to another British publication that Shachar emailed her with a political motivation, saying her parents “set her up.”
Talking to her, it jarred badly with me that someone so young and blameless — someone who doesn’t “really understand politics,” as the 13-year-old said — has been pulled in to this nasty political battle. She’s so innocent that she can’t help feeling for Levine when she hears her interviewed. “I felt bad for her because I don’t want to hurt any person, regardless of their political opinions,” she said.
Her home is on Kibbutz Regavim, near Binyamina in the north of Israel. It is a 10-minute drive from a mixed Jewish-Arab school where children learn in a bilingual environment, all of them studying Hebrew and Arabic, and marking Jewish and Muslim festivals. Shachar doesn’t attend this school (it’s an elementary school), but loves her Arabic lessons at school. This region and this family are a far cry from the reactionary Israel that the boycotters are portraying. Oh, and a very far cry indeed from many of the truly repressive countries in the world against which Levine has no boycott policy, and whose 13-year-old horse-crazed girls her conscience wouldn’t prevent her from answering by email.
As Shachar sat on the sofa in her living room, cuddling with her mom, she told me that she never knew that another Jewish person would hold her in so much disdain for where she lives. She held my gaze, as if I would have an answer to be able to explain this, but I could only move on to my next question.
Nathan Jeffay’s column appears twice a month.
---------------------
Books
New/Old Fiction, Times Two
The tales of Ben Nadler and Joshua Halberstam are both modern and timeless.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
“The Sea Beach Line” is filled with stories drawn from Jewish texts, both real and imagined. Nadler cites Kafka and I.B. Singer
Ben Nadler’s New York City is layered with stories. Some stories have no borders, and characters shift easily from one urban tale into another; some stories are written as they are being lived while others are mythic.
In Nadler’s novel “The Sea Beach Line” (Fig Tree Books), set in the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, a young man seeking information about his disappeared father steps into his father’s stories and a web of connections. A compelling mystery and late coming-of-age tale, the narrative is filled with stories drawn from Jewish texts, both real and imagined.
Another newly published book, “The Blind Angel: New Old Chassidic Tales” by Rabbi Tovia Halberstam, translated and retold by Joshua Halberstam (Toby Press) is a collection of stories from a pre-Holocaust European world that is no more. The book itself is a New York story, and a tale of father and son.
Reading these books back-to-back was coincidental, yet each seemed more vivid in light of the other.
Nadler’s novel opens with the classic story of the four sages who enter the orchard and encounter the divine: One dies, one goes insane, one emerges with doubt. Only Rabbi Akiva emerges with perfect faith. The narrator, Isaac (Izzy) Edel reads this story in a college literature course (after taking acid the night before), and after that, he increases his use of hallucinogens as “a way to shake off the dust of the world” and make the hidden signs along his path glow. Soon after, he is expelled from school.
Back with his mother and stepfather in New Mexico, he receives a cryptic postcard from his father with the words “Coney Island” in block letters, and his mother receives a note from a stranger telling her that Alojzy Edel, her ex-husband and Izzy’s father, is missing and presumed dead. Izzy doesn’t believe “presumed,” and sets off for New York City to find him. His first stop is 18th Street in Coney Island, the return address on the note and the site of a museum dedicated to a single artist. (In an interview, Nadler points out that those who know the intricacies of the city’s grid, know that Coney Island skips 18th Street, and no such address exists).
Izzy’s parents had divorced when he was young. His father, an immigrant from Poland via Israel, was a street vendor who sold books in the Village and probably, as his family thought, hustled other things as well. He was tough and fearless, and fatherly in brief moments. Izzy admired his father and his father’s life, even as they were cloaked in mystery; so appealingly different they were from the suburban Long Island home where his mother moved them after the divorce.
Searching for clues to his father’s whereabouts, he begins selling his father’s remaining used books on West Fourth Street. Nadler’s depiction of urban street life in 2005, as the Lower East Side is becoming more gentrified, is natural and sympathetic. The author worked as a bookseller on the same street while he was attending the New School.
“It was my education. I would sit out there and read all day,” he says. “I wanted to be around books.” While working, he knew he had rich material, but didn’t yet have the storytelling skills. After graduating, he earned an MFA from City College.
“Working on the street, you have the sense that you’re very rooted in the concrete world, watching your back, immersed in books, texts and a dream world. I had to learn about how different types of stories function, and how to put them together.”
He found chasidic stories particularly appealing as they stand outside of time and space. He cites Kafka as an influence (and, when asked, shows a Kafka-inspired tattoo on his upper arm, next to a tattooed pencil). And he says he can’t underestimate the influence of Isaac Bashevis Singer on his writing. In fact, he made a pilgrimage to the Nobel laureate’s New Jersey grave to talk to him about his book.
Nadler, now 31, lives in Midwood, Brooklyn, and says that he is attracted to myths — the honoring of myths and also the destruction of myths. His most recent chapbook is “Punk in NYC’s Lower East Side, 1981-1991.”
The novel is peopled with booksellers, hustlers, gangsters, Russians, chasidim, immigrants who are largely unseen in city life and an intriguing young woman who is a chasidic runaway, also living on the streets. There’s white-collar crime as well as violent crime. The narrator is naïve and largely in denial, so the author has the challenge of keeping Izzy in character but also getting necessary information to the reader.
“The Sea Beach Line” is just released by a New York City-based publisher that specializes in fiction chronicling the American Jewish experience. Fredric Price, founder and publisher of Fig Tree Books, says, “We were looking for a young writer of great promise who could not only tell a good story but who was able to set it in a Jewish context; and this one had the added benefit of elements of intrigue and mystery.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“The Blind Angel” is the title story in Joshua Halberstam’s collection of 40 “new old” chasidic tales. Like many of the masterfully told stories in this collection, this one touches on bittersweet matters of heaven and earth, wealth and poverty, a bride, a loan, dancing and prayer.
Halberstam, a scholar and best-selling author, was clearing a closet in his mother’s Borough Park home several years ago as she was preparing to move, when he came across boxes of his late father’s writing. One was filled with essays and newspaper stories, the other with more than 250 chasidic stories in Yiddish, each hand-typed right up to the edges of the page. These were the stories that Rabbi Tovia Halberstam retold on his popular radio show on WEVD, “Chasidim Dertzaylin” (Chasidim Retell). Often he’d read a single story over several programs and keep his thousands of listeners in suspense — they were known to stop the rabbi’s wife in the street to find out what happened next. The younger Halberstam remembers hearing his father’s voice from car radios as he’d walk to school in Borough Park.
He writes, “For chassidim, storytelling is itself a sacred performance. The tale, properly told, is akin to prayer for both the teller and the listener.”
As he explains, chasidic tales are usually stories within stories. A poor person or a seeker goes to a rebbe or pious man for advice, forming a framing story. The rebbe then responds by spinning a story in response. When the rebbe’s tale is complete, the scene shifts back to the life of the questioner, and it ends on a note of resolution. Often there’s humor and optimism along with tears, and the basic structure has endured for hundreds of years, passed down through oral tradition.
Talking with Halberstam is a lively endeavor; the interviewer is drawn into his stories within stories, followed by anecdotes and wise sayings. Clearly, he has his father’s storytelling gift. The elder Halberstam was born in Poland and came to the U.S. in 1923 (and then went back to Europe only to return in 1927). Joshua grew up in Brooklyn, the scion of rabbinic dynasties on both sides (he can trace his family back to 1500, and he’s the first not to become a rabbi). While he remains in close contact with his extended family, he has left that world; he teaches philosophy and communications at BCC/City University of New York and lives with his family on the Upper West Side.
Halberstam received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to take on these translations, and that is something he thinks his late father would appreciate. He grew up speaking Yiddish but still found translating the story and the world of the story for an audience unfamiliar with the tradition to be challenging. His voice is authentic, ever mindful of his father’s literary skills, such as foreshadowing.
“When it’s all said and done it’s the story,” he says. “If you want to tell the truth, you have to tell a story.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Books
New/Old Fiction, Times Two
The tales of Ben Nadler and Joshua Halberstam are both modern and timeless.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
“The Sea Beach Line” is filled with stories drawn from Jewish texts, both real and imagined. Nadler cites Kafka and I.B. Singer
Ben Nadler’s New York City is layered with stories. Some stories have no borders, and characters shift easily from one urban tale into another; some stories are written as they are being lived while others are mythic.
In Nadler’s novel “The Sea Beach Line” (Fig Tree Books), set in the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, a young man seeking information about his disappeared father steps into his father’s stories and a web of connections. A compelling mystery and late coming-of-age tale, the narrative is filled with stories drawn from Jewish texts, both real and imagined.
Another newly published book, “The Blind Angel: New Old Chassidic Tales” by Rabbi Tovia Halberstam, translated and retold by Joshua Halberstam (Toby Press) is a collection of stories from a pre-Holocaust European world that is no more. The book itself is a New York story, and a tale of father and son.
Reading these books back-to-back was coincidental, yet each seemed more vivid in light of the other.
Nadler’s novel opens with the classic story of the four sages who enter the orchard and encounter the divine: One dies, one goes insane, one emerges with doubt. Only Rabbi Akiva emerges with perfect faith. The narrator, Isaac (Izzy) Edel reads this story in a college literature course (after taking acid the night before), and after that, he increases his use of hallucinogens as “a way to shake off the dust of the world” and make the hidden signs along his path glow. Soon after, he is expelled from school.
Back with his mother and stepfather in New Mexico, he receives a cryptic postcard from his father with the words “Coney Island” in block letters, and his mother receives a note from a stranger telling her that Alojzy Edel, her ex-husband and Izzy’s father, is missing and presumed dead. Izzy doesn’t believe “presumed,” and sets off for New York City to find him. His first stop is 18th Street in Coney Island, the return address on the note and the site of a museum dedicated to a single artist. (In an interview, Nadler points out that those who know the intricacies of the city’s grid, know that Coney Island skips 18th Street, and no such address exists).
Izzy’s parents had divorced when he was young. His father, an immigrant from Poland via Israel, was a street vendor who sold books in the Village and probably, as his family thought, hustled other things as well. He was tough and fearless, and fatherly in brief moments. Izzy admired his father and his father’s life, even as they were cloaked in mystery; so appealingly different they were from the suburban Long Island home where his mother moved them after the divorce.
Searching for clues to his father’s whereabouts, he begins selling his father’s remaining used books on West Fourth Street. Nadler’s depiction of urban street life in 2005, as the Lower East Side is becoming more gentrified, is natural and sympathetic. The author worked as a bookseller on the same street while he was attending the New School.
“It was my education. I would sit out there and read all day,” he says. “I wanted to be around books.” While working, he knew he had rich material, but didn’t yet have the storytelling skills. After graduating, he earned an MFA from City College.
“Working on the street, you have the sense that you’re very rooted in the concrete world, watching your back, immersed in books, texts and a dream world. I had to learn about how different types of stories function, and how to put them together.”
He found chasidic stories particularly appealing as they stand outside of time and space. He cites Kafka as an influence (and, when asked, shows a Kafka-inspired tattoo on his upper arm, next to a tattooed pencil). And he says he can’t underestimate the influence of Isaac Bashevis Singer on his writing. In fact, he made a pilgrimage to the Nobel laureate’s New Jersey grave to talk to him about his book.
Nadler, now 31, lives in Midwood, Brooklyn, and says that he is attracted to myths — the honoring of myths and also the destruction of myths. His most recent chapbook is “Punk in NYC’s Lower East Side, 1981-1991.”
The novel is peopled with booksellers, hustlers, gangsters, Russians, chasidim, immigrants who are largely unseen in city life and an intriguing young woman who is a chasidic runaway, also living on the streets. There’s white-collar crime as well as violent crime. The narrator is naïve and largely in denial, so the author has the challenge of keeping Izzy in character but also getting necessary information to the reader.
“The Sea Beach Line” is just released by a New York City-based publisher that specializes in fiction chronicling the American Jewish experience. Fredric Price, founder and publisher of Fig Tree Books, says, “We were looking for a young writer of great promise who could not only tell a good story but who was able to set it in a Jewish context; and this one had the added benefit of elements of intrigue and mystery.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“The Blind Angel” is the title story in Joshua Halberstam’s collection of 40 “new old” chasidic tales. Like many of the masterfully told stories in this collection, this one touches on bittersweet matters of heaven and earth, wealth and poverty, a bride, a loan, dancing and prayer.
Halberstam, a scholar and best-selling author, was clearing a closet in his mother’s Borough Park home several years ago as she was preparing to move, when he came across boxes of his late father’s writing. One was filled with essays and newspaper stories, the other with more than 250 chasidic stories in Yiddish, each hand-typed right up to the edges of the page. These were the stories that Rabbi Tovia Halberstam retold on his popular radio show on WEVD, “Chasidim Dertzaylin” (Chasidim Retell). Often he’d read a single story over several programs and keep his thousands of listeners in suspense — they were known to stop the rabbi’s wife in the street to find out what happened next. The younger Halberstam remembers hearing his father’s voice from car radios as he’d walk to school in Borough Park.
He writes, “For chassidim, storytelling is itself a sacred performance. The tale, properly told, is akin to prayer for both the teller and the listener.”
As he explains, chasidic tales are usually stories within stories. A poor person or a seeker goes to a rebbe or pious man for advice, forming a framing story. The rebbe then responds by spinning a story in response. When the rebbe’s tale is complete, the scene shifts back to the life of the questioner, and it ends on a note of resolution. Often there’s humor and optimism along with tears, and the basic structure has endured for hundreds of years, passed down through oral tradition.
Talking with Halberstam is a lively endeavor; the interviewer is drawn into his stories within stories, followed by anecdotes and wise sayings. Clearly, he has his father’s storytelling gift. The elder Halberstam was born in Poland and came to the U.S. in 1923 (and then went back to Europe only to return in 1927). Joshua grew up in Brooklyn, the scion of rabbinic dynasties on both sides (he can trace his family back to 1500, and he’s the first not to become a rabbi). While he remains in close contact with his extended family, he has left that world; he teaches philosophy and communications at BCC/City University of New York and lives with his family on the Upper West Side.
Halberstam received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to take on these translations, and that is something he thinks his late father would appreciate. He grew up speaking Yiddish but still found translating the story and the world of the story for an audience unfamiliar with the tradition to be challenging. His voice is authentic, ever mindful of his father’s literary skills, such as foreshadowing.
“When it’s all said and done it’s the story,” he says. “If you want to tell the truth, you have to tell a story.”
editor@jewishweek.org
---------------------
Enjoy the read and Happy Chanukah,
Gary Rosenblatt
Gary Rosenblatt
NEW YORK
Entrance to a new life for young Israeli_ A Derech Eretz campus offers pre-army training in a Spartan setting. Derech Eretz
'Building A Better Future,' One Student At A Time
Program aimed at "minimizing social gaps," focuses on Israel's often-overlooked working- and middle-class teams.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
A decade after he left his native Belarus for Israel with his family, Boris was about to finish high school and to begin the army, and had given little thought to his future. Maybe he’d become a truck driver after he left the army.
Then he heard about Derech Eretz.
Four years ago, a Derech Eretz representative visited Boris’ high school in a youth village (a cross between a boarding school and a kibbutz) in the Negev region and described the school’s plans to teach participants leadership skills, to teach them more about Zionism and Israeli history than the students had learned in school, to teach them to take control of their futures. “We are looking for pioneers,” the students heard.
Boris’ eyes lit up, said Yonatan Kischinovsky, a co-founder of Derech Eretz, who was in New York City at the end of last month.
Boris signed up. He became part of Derech Eretz’s first cohort of 23 about-to-become-soldiers teenagers who met on a Spartan campus near the Egyptian border in trailer-type “caravan” buildings that they helped erect.
Since then, Derech Eretz (literally, “the way of the land,” but colloquially used to describe common courtesy) has expanded to three sites in the Negev with 150 students of both genders (men and women are housed separately, with strict rules against fraternizing), with plans to grow to 1,000 participants at five campuses in the Negev and Galilee by the end of the decade.
The growth of Derech Eretz (derecheretz.org.il) reflects the expansion of Israel’s post-high school mechina (preparatory) programs since the first ones were formed some two decades ago, aimed primarily at Israelis from Modern Orthodox backgrounds. Today, there are nearly four-dozen mechina programs in the country, serving some 5,000 Israelis from a variety of religious and social backgrounds, Kischinovsky said.
The mechinot are part remedial education, part training school, part preparation for life in the army and afterwards.
Derech Eretz’s mission statement describes the program as a “bottom-up initiative” aimed at “minimizing social gaps while creating engaged citizens, and ultimately, building a better future for Israeli society.”
Many Israelis leave high school without enough of a sense of identity — or the educational and general life skills — to flourish as adults, Kischinovsky said. The best time to reach them: during the eight-month period between high school graduation and army induction. “That is the last point when we can affect them.”
Which, he said, is why he and Avi Cohen, buddies from a tank unit in the army a decade earlier, decided to start Derech Eretz. Kischinovsky, who earned a bachelor’s in social work and a master’s in conflict management and mediation, subsequently worked on a goat farm and worked for OneFamily, a nonprofit supporting terrorism victims. Cohen was a lawyer. Both, said Kischinovsky, had grown worried by what they saw as a decline in dedication to Israeli values.
The answer, the pair decided, was a mechina. “If we wanted to move the needle, we must give them the tools … if we wanted to make a change in Israeli society,” Kischinovsky said, “we wanted to work with the youth.”
While several such programs for Israeli teens and young adults already existed, Derech Eretz would be different, Kischinovky and Cohen decided. Most existing mechinot focused either on the “elite,” people already on the fast track to success, or on “at-risk” youth who seemed headed to dead-end futures.
Derech Eretz would concentrate on the middle group, filling a mechina “vacuum” for the 70 percent who constitute “the majority of the youth of Israel … the face of what Israel will look like in the future.”
“We met them in the army,” Kischinovsky said. Derech Eretz would focus on people living in the “periphery” of the country, in the southern Negev and northern Galilee regions, away from the major urban centers in the center of the country.
Ironically, neither Kischinovsky, 33, nor Cohen, 34, are from the backgrounds whose interests they now promote. Both grew up in upper-middle-class families in urban areas. Kischinovsky is from Jerusalem; Cohen, from Tel Aviv.
They chose the name Derech Eretz as a form of recognition for the statement in the Midrash that “Derech eretz kodma l’Torah,” common courtesy comes before observance of the mitzvot — in other words, first be a mensch.
They lobbied in the offices of the Jewish Agency, government ministries, and the army, looking for money and moral support; the Jewish Agency became one of Derech Eretz’s founding partners for its first-year, one-million shekel (about $250,000) budget; the current annual budget is $1.2 million, funds coming from the Jewish Agency, the Ministry of Education, local municipalities, JNF-UK, and private contributors.
Derech Eretz is not affiliated with any political party or religious movement; its students come from all parts of Israeli life. T.
Derech Eretz has succeeded in reaching the Israelis overlooked by the earlier mechinot, who “want to be part of the story” of the country, said Erez Eshel, who has established several of the first leadership-training mechina programs. Today he leads the Ein Prat Israel Academy for Leadership, a mechina based in Kfar Adumim, and is working to found similar programs in Europe for “a new generation of young people who take responsibility for the future of their nations. It’s not needed only in Israel.”
A one-time paratrooper, Eshel became active in the mechina movement after the assassination in 1995 of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a young religious Zionist.
Derech Eretz has earned a reputation as a mechina that addresses the spiritual needs of young Israelis, he said.
So far, all the Derech Eretz students are Jewish, but Kischinovsky said plans are being considered to one day open the program to non-Jews such as the Druze, who also do army service.
Students, even those from poor families, pay “a nominal fee” to enroll in Derech Eretz, to feel invested, Kischinovsky said. “There’s nothing free in our program.”
The father of three spent 10 recent days here, in Chicago and Los Angeles “to find partners” for such initiatives as an “adopt a student” project and a scholarship fund.
In his meetings, he described how Derech Eretz operates — like a Birthright Israel program for Israelis. Derech Eretz runs early-morning-to-late-night programs for Israelis who are about to enter the army, who are in the army, and who have left the army. (Its alumni association now has 260 members.) There’s pre-army physical training. Participants do volunteer work with senior citizens and at-risk youth in local communities. They take field trips around the country. Half of them go on to an institution of higher learning. All of its participants go into the army; 80 percent enter combat units; of those, 40 percent become officers.
Some families are skeptical at first about sending their children away to take part in Derech Ertez, Kischinovsky said; the concept sounds too foreign. In the end, he said, they become supporters. “The parents say that Derech Eretz gives them back ‘a new child.’”
Boris signed up because he felt he “was not mature,” Kischinovsky said. In Derech Eretz, “he grew up, he learned.”
Boris, who ended his army service earlier this year, called Kischinovsky the other day to offer thanks. He said he is working to be able to attend Ben-Gurion University.
After Boris graduates, Kischinovsky said, he intends to return to his hometown to teach youth the sort of skills he has learned in Derech Eretz.
Boris said he would not have had these goals had he not been part of the mechina.
“That’s exactly the place we want to take [the students],” Kischinovsky said — where they have firm plans and want to reach out to other Israelis. “We want them to know enough to dream.”
steve@jewishweek.org
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MUSEUMS
A photograph of Aronson's depiction of Hell in Abraham Goldfaden's "The Tenth Commandment." Courtesy of Marc Aronson
How Boris Aronson's Designs Came To Life
Art - Museums
New show highlights avant-garde work of influential 'Fiddler' set designer.
A photograph of Aronson's depiction of Hell in Abraham Goldfaden's "The Tenth Commandment." Courtesy of Marc Aronson
How Boris Aronson's Designs Came To Life
Art - Museums
New show highlights avant-garde work of influential 'Fiddler' set designer.
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
After a preliminary meeting with director-choreographer Jerome Robbins to discuss his concept for the original 1964 production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” the set designer Boris Aronson felt that he had a good idea of how the production should look. The color, he knew, should be based on the palette of Marc Chagall’s paintings. And the set, as a whole, should also reflect Chagall’s sentimental outlook, he wrote in his notes: “simple-naïve-buoyant-primitive-childlike-charming-delightful to look at.”
Aronson, one of the greatest and most prolific theater artists of the 20th century, had begun what would ultimately be an iconic depiction of an Eastern European shtetl. In a new exhibit at the Vallois America Gallery on the Upper East Side, “Preparing the Miracle: From the Bronx to Broadway, Boris Aronson and the Yiddish Theatre,” Aronson’s early work for the Yiddish stage is revealed to be the precursor for his Broadway oeuvre.
Aronson was born in 1900 in Kiev; his father was the chief rabbi of the city. The son, who called himself “The Outlaw,” displayed an early talent for painting and a passion for stage decoration. The young artist broke into the theater by working with designer Alexandra Exter in her 1921 “cubo-futurist” production of “Romeo and Juliet” at Alexander Tairov’s avant-garde Kamerny Theatre in Moscow.
Exter, a friend of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, applied Cubist methods of painting to her work; her sets were composed of angular three-dimensional planes that reflected light at odd angles, and her costumes were sewn from mismatched scraps of jutting cloth. She was also a leading proponent of Constructivism, the Leninist artistic movement that celebrated the worker and the factory; she developed sets with platforms, ladders and moving parts that gave actors much greater freedom of movement and that exposed the inner workings of the stage machinery.
It was this avant-garde approach to stage design that Aronson imported with him when he landed in New York in 1923 (after a year in Berlin, where he published books on Chagall and on Jewish graphic arts, and organized a major modern art exhibit). He was soon swept up in the world of the Yiddish theater, at a time when there were no fewer than 17 Yiddish companies in the city. Aronson found work with the Unser Theatre (Our Theater) in the Bronx and with Maurice Schwartz’s legendary Yiddish Arts Theater. His timing was propitious. For even as the second generation of New York Jews were coming to the fore, gravitating away from the Yiddish stage and toward Broadway plays and musicals, the immigrant Jewish theater was reaching its artistic height by embracing European movements such as French Surrealism and German Expressionism.
Aronson was a key figure in this reinvigoration of Yiddish theater. His Expressionistic set for S. Anski’s last play, “Tog un Nacht” (Day and Night), was made up of irregular black-and-white geometric shapes and shadowy staircases upon which the Devil ran riot. Aronson’s imagination seemingly knew no bounds, as one sees in his fanciful 1926 sketch, “Design for the Circus,” in which one performer has a circular fan for his head while an acrobat, suspended high up in the air with one foot on the corner of a chair, waves a huge American flag from his hat.
Few of the images in the exhibit are new; most will be familiar to readers of Frank Rich and Lisa Aronson’s comprehensive coffee table book, “The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson” (Knopf, 1987), which was inspired by the New York Public Library exhibit on the designer that ran just a few months after his death in 1980. (A major upcoming exhibit on the history of the Yiddish theater, which opens at the City Museum of New York in March, will also include some of his designs.) But one of the strengths of the current exhibit is that it frequently uses both artist’s sketches and photographs to give a sense of how the designs actually came to life. For example, one sees, both in a sketch and in a photograph of the work, the marvelous frieze-like mural, with images of costumed actors, that Aronson crafted to adorn the interior of the auditorium for the Unser Theatre (Our Theater) in the Bronx. (The mural was lost when the theater was torn down in 1966).
Likewise, the exhibit includes a sketch for the extravagant drag costume Maurice Schwartz wore in Abraham Goldfaden’s “The Tenth Commandment,” the first production of Schwartz’s new Yiddish Art Theatre, for which Aronson gave full throttle to his Constructivist ideas. Especially helpful is a photograph from the production in which Schwartz appears in a scene with his co-star, the legendary Joseph Buloff.
But some images, lacking photographs, stand gloriously on their own. “Two Hasides” is a painting of a pair of chasidic Jews clad in a crazy, collage-like patchwork of scraps; the sleeves and stockings are made from torn-out pages from prayer books. And a painting of one of Aronson’s sets for Osip Dymov’s 1925 “Bronx Express,” a Surrealistic play (later translated into English and produced on Broadway) about a Lower East Side button maker who falls asleep on the subway and is seduced by the subway advertisements, shows the subway straps still hanging above the Coney Island restaurant where the characters converge. Also highly evocative are the sketches for “Oriental Dance,” a mid-1920s New York recital by the classical Russian dancer, Baruch Agadati, who moved to Palestine and became a pioneer Israeli choreographer and filmmaker.
The exhibit concludes, fittingly, with Aronson’s design for “Fiddler,” with its inverted wooden shtetl buildings marching along the top of the proscenium arch, framing the red-capped musician as he is perched precariously on Tevye’s shack. But one feels keenly the omission of the intervening decades between the 1920s and 1960s, when Aronson designed the sets for dozens of Broadway plays and musicals, including major works by Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, and Stephen Sondheim, and won six Tony Awards in the process. (His 1970 design for Sondheim’s “Company” was especially Exter-like, in its use of cage-like structures, platforms set at different heights, and two working elevators.)
Arnold Aronson (no relation to Boris), who teaches theater history at Columbia University, told The Jewish Week that although the artist got “trapped in American realism and pure Broadway naturalism,” he still managed to bring a “sculptural element” to his work, nurtured by his work in the Yiddish theater, that set him apart; the work of other top designers like Jo Mielziner (who designed “Death of a Salesman” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”), was more painterly and imagistic.
Nevertheless, the scholar noted, audiences often overlook the contribution that the designer makes to the experience of theatergoing. “Even sophisticated audience members don’t tend to know what they’re looking at — how the use of space, color, and texture determine their response to the play.”
Then again, like all the other elements that go into a theatrical production, the set is transient; when the run of the play is over, it gets dismantled. Perhaps this is why Aronson, toward the end of his life, designed a pair of Torah arks for synagogues (one at the Community Synagogue in Sands Point, L.I., and the other at Temple Sinai in Washington, D.C.) Although he himself had not set foot in a synagogue for many years, Aronson resolved “to do something they couldn’t tear down afterward” — something that would never go away.
“Preparing the Miracle: From the Bronx to Broadway, Boris Aronson and the Yiddish Theatre” runs through Dec. 23 at Vallois America, 27 E. 67th St. The gallery is open on Tuesdays-Fridays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For information, call (212) 517-3820.
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Customer service in kosher restaurants usually leaves something to be desired. Fotolia
Overheard In A Restaurant
Food & Wine
What not to say in the hospitality business.
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French Guadeloupe offers a rich history_ a mixture of several cultures and tranquil beaches. Wikimedia Commons
Laid-Back In The Caribbean
Customer service in kosher restaurants usually leaves something to be desired. Fotolia
Overheard In A Restaurant
Food & Wine
What not to say in the hospitality business.
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish Week
Thanks for the amazing responses to last month’s “What NOT to Say” column. It simply confirms that foot-in-mouth disease travels far and wide as yet another Jewish genetic disorder. Oy. As a subset of your comments, I learned that there is a special category of what not to say if you are the owner of a kosher restaurant. Here are a few exchanges that don’t seem to work:
Customer: “This meat doesn’t seem to be cooked all the way through.”
Owner: “You’re the only one who has ever complained about this the entire time this restaurant has been open.”
Customer: “Can you please shut the door? It’s cold.”
Owner: “Well, I’m not cold.”
Customer: “Excuse me, I’ve be waiting here for over five minutes. Can someone please help me?”
Owner: “What? Do you think your needs are more important than mine?!”
Customer: “There’s a mistake in my order.”
Owner: “I’ve been working here for 20 years, and you’ve been here five minutes. Which one of us is more likely to have made a mistake?”
This is rich copy. If only it weren’t real.
In Customer Service 101, it seems that the customer is always right. In kosher dining, it too often seems that the customer is always wrong. How is that working in terms of keeping customers coming back?
I asked my good friend Marc Epstein, owner of Milk Street Café in Boston, for help understanding why this problem seems legion in much of the kosher food industry. He nodded his head hopelessly. “The dynamics are not geared to customer service. First there is the attitude that many but not all rabbis have to supervision: ‘You need me. If you don’t do what I want, I will remove your hashgacha (supervision).’ Second, the customer has driven 10 miles to eat at your place and passed 250 better restaurants than yours. The person behind the counter also knows that the person eating kosher usually has nowhere else to go.”
Why would any kosher restaurant owner get better at pleasing customers, especially in areas with few kosher restaurants? Marc nods his head. “There is no economic incentive to change a kosher restaurant, but owners could adopt a different mindset. First you have to love feeding people and then you focus on the food.”
So here’s an incentive. Love. Pride. Distinction. It seems that if you viewed providing kosher food as an expression of both love of people and love of mitzvot, you would want to do everything you can to drive the non-kosher market to join you and make the kosher market feel great about observing this tradition. As if to say, “Hey, people, this is what kosher looks like.”
In “Setting the Table,” restaurant entrepreneur Danny Meyer makes a critical distinction between service and hospitality. Service is what customers expect: food on time, food served at the right temperature, good service. Hospitality is all that you do for customers that they don’t expect that makes them want to come back. We of the Abrahamic faith know that our forefather was great at service and hospitality, but we don’t always remember to live up to that tradition.
Meyer offers this advice when a customer is unhappy: respond graciously, and do so at once. “Err on the side of generosity. Apologize and make sure the value of the redemption is worth more than the cost of the initial mistake.” Learn from mistakes and make new mistakes instead of repeating old ones. Most importantly, Meyer advises people in the people business to write a great last chapter. When your relationship with a customer is compromised, don’t let the customer leave unhappy. Turn the situation around and write the last chapter.
“Until you change the dynamics of the equation,” Epstein quips, “you have the kosher food industry that you deserve.” If you view kosher restaurants as a community service, there should be a community cost, Epstein argues, and not one borne by the vendor alone. In synagogue life today you pay membership with building funds, and there are eruv funds and mikvah funds to support community institutions you value. And if you don’t do this as a service, then make your restaurant a business. Operate as if it’s not kosher, and then customer service is critical. If it’s a chesed (an act of kindness), then the community has to share the cost. If it’s a business, then run it like a business. In business, customers matter.
And when it comes to foot-in-mouth disease in the kosher restaurant business, the customer also needs to be careful. We need to watch our pleases and thank yous, and change our orders and complain with a little more class and a lot more kindness. Marc shared this doozy he heard from a friend at an event he catered: “The food was delicious. No one can believe it came from your restaurant.”
Dr. Erica Brown’s column appears the first week of the month. Her latest book is "Take Your Soul to Work" (Simon and Schuster).
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Travel
French Guadeloupe offers a rich history_ a mixture of several cultures and tranquil beaches. Wikimedia Commons
Laid-Back In The Caribbean
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
Some people came away from last week’s summit on climate change fretful about our planet’s future, or optimistic about the work ahead. Personally, as I perused a front-page New York Times photograph of the ocean-lashed Marshall Islands, I thought about all the islands I’d better visit before the sea swallows them up.
I can’t picture a world without Miami Beach, but the islands of the Caribbean are menaced by an even more present danger — volcanoes. After all, it was only a few years ago that neighboring Montserrat went from tropical paradise to latter-day Pompeii. Now, the sulfurous puffs of neighboring Mt. Soufrière menace tranquil French Guadeloupe.
This is one of the prettiest corners of the Caribbean, where French refinement meets laid-back island culture in a setting free of high-rises and crowds. Named by Columbus, Guadeloupe was a powerhouse of the 17th-century sugar trade; in the ensuing centuries, the tiny archipelago was fought over by the British, French, and Swedes, claimed by Napoleon, and was the site of slave uprisings and cholera epidemics.
All that tumult is hard to imagine now. The only reminders are the picturesque ruins of maritime forts, whose steep walls guarded promontories along the mountainous coastline. Today, few places in the world feel as relaxed and out-of-the-way as Guadeloupe, with its long, luxuriant stretches of powdery white sand, its unspoiled green hills and mangrove swamps and boats floating lazily in the harbor. Martinique is the higher-profile and more culturally intense of the French Caribbean departments — and while you hear a mix of French and Creole on Guadeloupe, you may not meet another American.
That could change, as the French territory is hoping to boost North American tourism with a greater variety of flights. In a recent search, I turned up nonstop round-trips between JFK and Pointe-à-Pitre, the its largest city, for just under $300 in January. There are even more options connecting through Miami or Puerto Rico. And once on the island, you can use those euros from your last trip to Paris.
I have long been intrigued by how ethnically diverse these small Caribbean islands are, with accents, foods and — especially — musical styles that reflect an eclectic immigration. With only around 300,000 residents, Guadeloupe is home to Lebanese, Chinese and Tamil Indian communities, as well as locals with African, European, and indigenous roots; enclaves of Bretons and Normans and a tiny Jewish minority round out the mix.
The Communité Culturelle Israelite is a Jewish congregation and community center based in Pointe-à-Pitre; a low-key presence, it serves a diverse group of about 50 families, most of them settlers from France and North Africa.
These layers of culture can be less than obvious in a land so rural, but the distinctive fusion flavor of Guadeloupe is most evident in its low-rise bars at night. The fast, thumping carnival beat of zouk music and the mellow swing of reggae-calypso hybrids are all washed down with strong local rum mixed with brown sugar and lime, a heady national drink.
By day, options for getting around Guadeloupe including renting a car — the two major islands are connected by bridge — or hiring locals to ferry you around by taxi (or, if you care to explore the most exquisite coves of the archipelago, obtaining the use of a boat).
West-facing Basse-Terre is Guadeloupe’s picturesque capital, though only its second-largest city. Ringed by green mountains, Basse-Terre is a colorful mélange of colonial buildings, hilly urban neighborhoods with stunning views, and lively open markets offering some of the tastiest fruit you’ll ever eat: papayas, pineapples, fresh-picked bananas. On the eastern island of Grande-Terre, you trade sunsets into the sea for beachfront cafés at popular spots like St. Anne, on the tranquil southern coast.
Yours truly is no snorkeler, but those who are rave about the Jacques Cousteau Reserve — a vast, protected underwater treasure off the coast of Basse-Terre. The colorful coral reefs are some of the best protected in the world; options for exploring their colonies of colorful fish include snorkeling, scuba diving, kayaking, or joining a tour on a glass-bottomed boat.
For many, a highlight of Guadeloupe is the exquisite nature reserve that sprawls across much of Basse-Terre. A national park of France, the reserve features trails that wend through tropical rainforests, mangrove swamps full of flamingos, cliffs and gorges with more than 100 steep waterfalls. Higher yet is a trail that leads up to the ominous summit of Mt. Soufrière, an active volcano that purrs and puffs above its lush hillsides.
Enjoy the view for now; like dramatic geographies everywhere, the green paradise that is Guadeloupe won’t last forever.
Kosher readers: For an upcoming column about eating kosher while traveling overseas, I’d like to hear about your experiences. What resources do you turn to, both in advance and at your destination? How do you handle the challenges of eating in countries that lack kosher certifications? What have been your best, worst, and most memorable kosher experiences outside the U.S.? Are there specific destinations — countries, cities, restaurants, markets, etc. — you would recommend to other kosher diners? Tell me at hilarasha@gmail.com.
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MORE HEADLINES:
Modern Orthodox Leaders Bless Interfaith Dialogue
National
Modern Orthodox Leaders Bless Interfaith Dialogue
Move is a re-examination of ban on such talks; common enemy in ‘extremist Islam.’
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Clockwise from top left, Rabbis Shlomo Riskin, Irving Greenberg and Marc Angel and AJC’s David Rosen.For much of the last half-century, interfaith discussions between Christian churches and the Jewish community have been largely the province of non-Orthodox Jews. Influenced by prohibitions on Jewish-Christian dialogue activities issued by prominent charedi and Modern Orthodox rabbinic leaders, most Orthodox Jews have been reluctant to engage with Catholic and Protestant counterparts in an official, public way.
This week, some Orthodox leaders joined the interfaith discussion.
A public statement, drafted by Rabbi David Rosen, a veteran of interfaith work, calling for greater cooperation between the Orthodox community and Christians “to address the moral and religious challenges of our era,” was published on the website of the Israeli-based Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation (CJCUC), an organization founded seven years ago by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of Efrat.
The statement, “To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven: Toward a Partnership between Jews and Christians,” bore the signatures of some 30 Orthodox rabbis, mostly from Modern Orthodox circles, including Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, a longtime advocate of improved interfaith relations, Rabbi Riskin, who is also the former spiritual leader of Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan, Rabbi Marc Angel of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, and Rabbi Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s international director of interreligious affairs.
“Both Jews and Christians have a common covenantal mission to perfect the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty,” the statement declares. “Our partnership in no way minimizes the ongoing differences between the two communities and the two religions.”
While the signatories cited a warming relationship between Jews and the Protestant Church, the CJCUC statement, religious in nature, did not refer to a growing political rift between supporters of Israel and some Protestant denominations, notably the Presbyterians, who in recent years have aligned themselves with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, which seeks to economically isolate Israel.
Rabbi Greenberg hailed the statement: “While individual Orthodox rabbis have made some of these statements [favoring interfaith dialogue] … they were often dismissed as individual opinions or even beyond the Orthodox pale,” Rabbi Greenberg said. “Here is an important international group of leading Orthodox rabbis who are saying that these views have standing. Hopefully it will stimulate partnership projects as well as more Orthodox rabbis joining in the dialogue.”
“The very fact that Orthodox rabbis are willing to make such a public, positive statement about Christianity is well worth noting,” said Rabbi David Sandmel, director of interfaith affairs at the Anti-Defamation League. “It speaks to the successful efforts of Christians, especially the Catholic Church, to form bonds with the Jewish community and the growing openness among Orthodox Jews to reciprocate.”
However, Rabbi Sandmel cautioned, “We should remember that this statement represents the views of those rabbis who signed it, not Orthodoxy as a whole.”
The statement, which cites traditional opinions by past rabbinic authorities who approved of limited Jewish partnership with Christians, comes a dozen years after Rabbi Eugene Korn, former Anti-Defamation League director of interfaith affairs and a current CJCUC staff member, called for a re-examination of the Orthodox prohibition on Jewish-Christian theological discussions, and three years after Rabbi Riskin stated in an essay on the CJCUC website that Christianity’s changing attitudes towards Jews and Judaism permitted wider contact with Christians.
Rabbi Riskin told The Jewish Week that this week’s statement was influenced both by Jewry’s increasingly open relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, begun by the Nostra Aetate papal document 50 years ago and by the actions in the last few years by Pope Francis, and by the terrorist actions of “extremist Islam,” which require united opposition by members of other monotheistic religions.
“We’re in the middle of a religious war” against Muslim extremists, seeking Christian “partners,” Rabbi Riskin said in a telephone interview.
Rabbi Riskin said the Catholic Church, which has dropped its call for the conversion of Jews and has recognized the Jewish community as the biblical “Chosen People,” as well as many Protestant sects’ support for Judaism as an authentic faith, allowed him and the other signatories to endorse the historic call for closer ties with Christians.
In supporting the CJCUC statement, Rabbi Riskin and other signatories argued this week that the Christian Church of the 1960s is not the Christian Church of 2015, and that the bans on interfaith work issued by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (the leader of non-chasidic charedi Jewry) and by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (leader of Modern Orthodox Jews) do not apply.
“Everything in the statement is fully consonant with Jewish law,” Rabbi Eugene Korn, academic director of CJCUC, told The Jewish Week in an email interview. “Jews have real enemies today — but Christians are no longer among them. Both communities must defeat the same assaults on our faiths from radical secularism and intolerant religious extremism.”
Philip Cunningham, professor of theology at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and director of the school’s Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations, called the CJCUC statement “unprecedented in its positivity — hopefully it will encourage deeper Catholic-Jewish theological conversation.” And Commonweal, a liberal Catholic publication, called it a “theologically compelling and provocative statement [that] is quite a 50th-anniversary present for Nostra Aetate.”
Spokesmen for the Orthodox Union (the central umbrella organization of the Modern Orthodox movement in the United States), Agudath Israel of America (the main charedi umbrella group), and (IJCIC), which coordinates interfaith activities for the Jewish community, declined to comment on the CJCUC statement. However, in 2000, the OU did comment on a precursor to the statement titled “Dabru Emet: A Statement on Christians and Christianity,” calling it “fraught with danger” and “uncomfortably relativistic.”
editor@Jewishweek.org
Modern Orthodox Leaders Bless Interfaith Dialogue
National
Modern Orthodox Leaders Bless Interfaith Dialogue
Move is a re-examination of ban on such talks; common enemy in ‘extremist Islam.’
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Clockwise from top left, Rabbis Shlomo Riskin, Irving Greenberg and Marc Angel and AJC’s David Rosen.For much of the last half-century, interfaith discussions between Christian churches and the Jewish community have been largely the province of non-Orthodox Jews. Influenced by prohibitions on Jewish-Christian dialogue activities issued by prominent charedi and Modern Orthodox rabbinic leaders, most Orthodox Jews have been reluctant to engage with Catholic and Protestant counterparts in an official, public way.
This week, some Orthodox leaders joined the interfaith discussion.
A public statement, drafted by Rabbi David Rosen, a veteran of interfaith work, calling for greater cooperation between the Orthodox community and Christians “to address the moral and religious challenges of our era,” was published on the website of the Israeli-based Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation (CJCUC), an organization founded seven years ago by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of Efrat.
The statement, “To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven: Toward a Partnership between Jews and Christians,” bore the signatures of some 30 Orthodox rabbis, mostly from Modern Orthodox circles, including Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, a longtime advocate of improved interfaith relations, Rabbi Riskin, who is also the former spiritual leader of Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan, Rabbi Marc Angel of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, and Rabbi Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s international director of interreligious affairs.
“Both Jews and Christians have a common covenantal mission to perfect the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty,” the statement declares. “Our partnership in no way minimizes the ongoing differences between the two communities and the two religions.”
While the signatories cited a warming relationship between Jews and the Protestant Church, the CJCUC statement, religious in nature, did not refer to a growing political rift between supporters of Israel and some Protestant denominations, notably the Presbyterians, who in recent years have aligned themselves with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, which seeks to economically isolate Israel.
Rabbi Greenberg hailed the statement: “While individual Orthodox rabbis have made some of these statements [favoring interfaith dialogue] … they were often dismissed as individual opinions or even beyond the Orthodox pale,” Rabbi Greenberg said. “Here is an important international group of leading Orthodox rabbis who are saying that these views have standing. Hopefully it will stimulate partnership projects as well as more Orthodox rabbis joining in the dialogue.”
“The very fact that Orthodox rabbis are willing to make such a public, positive statement about Christianity is well worth noting,” said Rabbi David Sandmel, director of interfaith affairs at the Anti-Defamation League. “It speaks to the successful efforts of Christians, especially the Catholic Church, to form bonds with the Jewish community and the growing openness among Orthodox Jews to reciprocate.”
However, Rabbi Sandmel cautioned, “We should remember that this statement represents the views of those rabbis who signed it, not Orthodoxy as a whole.”
The statement, which cites traditional opinions by past rabbinic authorities who approved of limited Jewish partnership with Christians, comes a dozen years after Rabbi Eugene Korn, former Anti-Defamation League director of interfaith affairs and a current CJCUC staff member, called for a re-examination of the Orthodox prohibition on Jewish-Christian theological discussions, and three years after Rabbi Riskin stated in an essay on the CJCUC website that Christianity’s changing attitudes towards Jews and Judaism permitted wider contact with Christians.
Rabbi Riskin told The Jewish Week that this week’s statement was influenced both by Jewry’s increasingly open relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, begun by the Nostra Aetate papal document 50 years ago and by the actions in the last few years by Pope Francis, and by the terrorist actions of “extremist Islam,” which require united opposition by members of other monotheistic religions.
“We’re in the middle of a religious war” against Muslim extremists, seeking Christian “partners,” Rabbi Riskin said in a telephone interview.
Rabbi Riskin said the Catholic Church, which has dropped its call for the conversion of Jews and has recognized the Jewish community as the biblical “Chosen People,” as well as many Protestant sects’ support for Judaism as an authentic faith, allowed him and the other signatories to endorse the historic call for closer ties with Christians.
In supporting the CJCUC statement, Rabbi Riskin and other signatories argued this week that the Christian Church of the 1960s is not the Christian Church of 2015, and that the bans on interfaith work issued by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (the leader of non-chasidic charedi Jewry) and by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (leader of Modern Orthodox Jews) do not apply.
“Everything in the statement is fully consonant with Jewish law,” Rabbi Eugene Korn, academic director of CJCUC, told The Jewish Week in an email interview. “Jews have real enemies today — but Christians are no longer among them. Both communities must defeat the same assaults on our faiths from radical secularism and intolerant religious extremism.”
Philip Cunningham, professor of theology at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and director of the school’s Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations, called the CJCUC statement “unprecedented in its positivity — hopefully it will encourage deeper Catholic-Jewish theological conversation.” And Commonweal, a liberal Catholic publication, called it a “theologically compelling and provocative statement [that] is quite a 50th-anniversary present for Nostra Aetate.”
Spokesmen for the Orthodox Union (the central umbrella organization of the Modern Orthodox movement in the United States), Agudath Israel of America (the main charedi umbrella group), and (IJCIC), which coordinates interfaith activities for the Jewish community, declined to comment on the CJCUC statement. However, in 2000, the OU did comment on a precursor to the statement titled “Dabru Emet: A Statement on Christians and Christianity,” calling it “fraught with danger” and “uncomfortably relativistic.”
editor@Jewishweek.org
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For Israel, Mixed Progress On The Arabian Peninsula
Israel News
For Israel, Mixed Progress On The Arabian Peninsula
While several Gulf State airlines are refusing Israeli passengers, Israeli mission coming to the UAE.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
While Israel and Kuwait share a distrust of radical Islam, Kuwaiti Airlines still refuses to carry Israelis on its flights.WikimAt the same time Israel is returning to the Arabian Peninsula with the planned opening of a diplomatic mission in the United Arab Emirates, other Arab nations are displaying their hostility by denying Israelis seats on their national airlines.
Not only is Kuwait’s airline challenging an Obama administration ruling that its refusal to sell tickets to Israelis is illegal, but Qatar Airlines is sending mixed signals about its policy and Saudi Arabian Airlines here flatly refuses to serve Israelis.
Nevertheless, the decision of the UAE to permit Israel to open a formal Israeli mission in its capital of Abu Dhabi is seen as a breakthrough. It would be the first Israeli mission on the Arabian Peninsula since 2009.
Although it is to be accredited to the United Nations’ International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), to which Israel is a member, and not to the UAE itself, the move is a “step forward,” according to Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.
“Obviously when there is an official relationship between one state and an organization that resides in another state it could not happen without agreement of the hosting state,” he told The Jewish Week. “There have been relations on a business level with many of the Gulf States for quite a long time. I think one should see this in a positive vein.”
Discussions about an official Israeli presence in Abu Dhabi have been conducted in great secrecy for several years, according to media reports. In fact, Israel voted in January 2009 to locate IRENA’s world headquarters in Abu Dhabi — rather than Germany — reportedly with the understanding that it would one day be able to open a diplomatic mission there.
The UAE’s decision is just another example of the changes happening in the Middle East because of the growing influence of Iran, Shoval pointed out. He said the UAE has a “very similar position — I would almost say an identical position — to that of Israel and the moderate Arab states with regard to the threat of Iran [and] Hezbollah.”
At a time when the U.S., European nations and Saudi Arabia have given Iran a seat at the negotiating table to resolve the Syrian crisis, other Middle Eastern countries including Israel view Iran with suspicion.
Yossi Alpher, a former IDF intelligence office and author of the recently published book, “Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies,” explained that Israel and other Middle East countries see themselves as “confronting a dual Islamist threat from both Iran and Daesh.”
Daesh is the pejorative Arab acronym for the Islamic State or ISIS.
“The rest of the world is cooperating with Iran against ISIS and we identify Iran as at least as serious a threat — we, the UAE — even Kuwait.”
But although Israel and Kuwait may see eye-to-eye on Iran, Kuwait remains hostile to Israel since attacking the Jewish state with 3,000 troops on Yom Kippur in 1973 along with 10 other Arab countries. In fact, its national airline, Kuwaiti Airlines, in explaining why it won’t sell tickets to Israelis said in court papers filed recently in Washington, “Kuwait and Israel are in a state of war, lack diplomatic relations and the State of Kuwait does not and cannot recognize Israeli passports as legal documents.”
That position is now being challenged by an Israeli, Eldad Gatt of Jerusalem. He was denied the right to buy a ticket on Kuwaiti Airways’ direct flight from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to London. The U.S. Department of Transportation ruled in September that the airline illegally discriminated against Gatt. The airline is appealing that ruling in federal court.
“Kuwaiti Airways is saying not only that Kuwait is in a state of war with Israel but that it considers Israeli citizens to be enemy aliens and therefore a security risk to other passengers aboard the New York to London flight,” said Jeffrey Lovitky of Washington, D.C., Gatt’s pro bono lawyer.
“That means that if an old woman [with an Israeli passport] wanted to fly, she couldn’t,” he said. “That’s absurd because airport screening is by the government and not the airlines.”
Lovitky told The Jewish Week that except for Kuwaiti Airways and Saudi Arabian Airlines, “I know of no other airline that flies to the United States that does not accept Israeli passengers.”
He noted that last summer he inquired about the policy of the UAE’s Emirates Airlines and was assured by its attorney here, Charles F. Donley II, that “passengers of any citizenship” may travel with valid travel documents “between the U.S. and any destination on the Emirates route network.”
And Lovitky said Donley told him also in an email that Israeli passport holders with the proper travel documents “do not require visas or special authorization to transit through Dubai Airport.”
Lovitky said the UAE’s other airline, Etihad, follows the same practices.
Another Gulf State airline that Lovitky said he is investigating is Qatar Airways. He said that in May he filed a formal complaint against the airline with the Department of Transportation after its attorney failed to certify his written assurances to the department that Israelis may buy tickets on the airline. In fact, the airline’s lawyer said the airline accepted 2,300 Israeli citizens during a recent three-month period.
“I asked that they submit evidence [to that effect] and they didn’t,” he noted.
At the same time, Lovitky pointed out, the website of Qatar’s Ministry of Justice said the country enforces a boycott against Israeli citizens. And, he said, Qatari law requires all Qatari companies to boycott Israeli citizens.
“Qatar has refused to explain the apparent contradiction,” Lovitky said.
Regarding Saudi Arabian Airlines, Lovitky said it does not permit Israeli passengers to board any of its flights, all of which land in Saudi Arabia.
“If Saudi Arabia wishes to exclude Israeli passengers, it should be prohibited from flying passengers beyond Saudi Arabia to third countries,” he said, adding that he plans to file a formal complaint about the airline with the Department of Transportation.
Alpher noted that after Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords in 1983, five Arab countries opened “limited diplomatic relations with Israel.” The countries — Qatar, Oman, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania — all later severed those ties because of a lack of progress over the Palestinian issue.
“But now with the UAE there is a breakthrough,” Alpher said, “despite a lack of progress.”
editor@jewishweek.org
Israel News
For Israel, Mixed Progress On The Arabian Peninsula
While several Gulf State airlines are refusing Israeli passengers, Israeli mission coming to the UAE.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
While Israel and Kuwait share a distrust of radical Islam, Kuwaiti Airlines still refuses to carry Israelis on its flights.WikimAt the same time Israel is returning to the Arabian Peninsula with the planned opening of a diplomatic mission in the United Arab Emirates, other Arab nations are displaying their hostility by denying Israelis seats on their national airlines.
Not only is Kuwait’s airline challenging an Obama administration ruling that its refusal to sell tickets to Israelis is illegal, but Qatar Airlines is sending mixed signals about its policy and Saudi Arabian Airlines here flatly refuses to serve Israelis.
Nevertheless, the decision of the UAE to permit Israel to open a formal Israeli mission in its capital of Abu Dhabi is seen as a breakthrough. It would be the first Israeli mission on the Arabian Peninsula since 2009.
Although it is to be accredited to the United Nations’ International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), to which Israel is a member, and not to the UAE itself, the move is a “step forward,” according to Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.
“Obviously when there is an official relationship between one state and an organization that resides in another state it could not happen without agreement of the hosting state,” he told The Jewish Week. “There have been relations on a business level with many of the Gulf States for quite a long time. I think one should see this in a positive vein.”
Discussions about an official Israeli presence in Abu Dhabi have been conducted in great secrecy for several years, according to media reports. In fact, Israel voted in January 2009 to locate IRENA’s world headquarters in Abu Dhabi — rather than Germany — reportedly with the understanding that it would one day be able to open a diplomatic mission there.
The UAE’s decision is just another example of the changes happening in the Middle East because of the growing influence of Iran, Shoval pointed out. He said the UAE has a “very similar position — I would almost say an identical position — to that of Israel and the moderate Arab states with regard to the threat of Iran [and] Hezbollah.”
At a time when the U.S., European nations and Saudi Arabia have given Iran a seat at the negotiating table to resolve the Syrian crisis, other Middle Eastern countries including Israel view Iran with suspicion.
Yossi Alpher, a former IDF intelligence office and author of the recently published book, “Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies,” explained that Israel and other Middle East countries see themselves as “confronting a dual Islamist threat from both Iran and Daesh.”
Daesh is the pejorative Arab acronym for the Islamic State or ISIS.
“The rest of the world is cooperating with Iran against ISIS and we identify Iran as at least as serious a threat — we, the UAE — even Kuwait.”
But although Israel and Kuwait may see eye-to-eye on Iran, Kuwait remains hostile to Israel since attacking the Jewish state with 3,000 troops on Yom Kippur in 1973 along with 10 other Arab countries. In fact, its national airline, Kuwaiti Airlines, in explaining why it won’t sell tickets to Israelis said in court papers filed recently in Washington, “Kuwait and Israel are in a state of war, lack diplomatic relations and the State of Kuwait does not and cannot recognize Israeli passports as legal documents.”
That position is now being challenged by an Israeli, Eldad Gatt of Jerusalem. He was denied the right to buy a ticket on Kuwaiti Airways’ direct flight from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to London. The U.S. Department of Transportation ruled in September that the airline illegally discriminated against Gatt. The airline is appealing that ruling in federal court.
“Kuwaiti Airways is saying not only that Kuwait is in a state of war with Israel but that it considers Israeli citizens to be enemy aliens and therefore a security risk to other passengers aboard the New York to London flight,” said Jeffrey Lovitky of Washington, D.C., Gatt’s pro bono lawyer.
“That means that if an old woman [with an Israeli passport] wanted to fly, she couldn’t,” he said. “That’s absurd because airport screening is by the government and not the airlines.”
Lovitky told The Jewish Week that except for Kuwaiti Airways and Saudi Arabian Airlines, “I know of no other airline that flies to the United States that does not accept Israeli passengers.”
He noted that last summer he inquired about the policy of the UAE’s Emirates Airlines and was assured by its attorney here, Charles F. Donley II, that “passengers of any citizenship” may travel with valid travel documents “between the U.S. and any destination on the Emirates route network.”
And Lovitky said Donley told him also in an email that Israeli passport holders with the proper travel documents “do not require visas or special authorization to transit through Dubai Airport.”
Lovitky said the UAE’s other airline, Etihad, follows the same practices.
Another Gulf State airline that Lovitky said he is investigating is Qatar Airways. He said that in May he filed a formal complaint against the airline with the Department of Transportation after its attorney failed to certify his written assurances to the department that Israelis may buy tickets on the airline. In fact, the airline’s lawyer said the airline accepted 2,300 Israeli citizens during a recent three-month period.
“I asked that they submit evidence [to that effect] and they didn’t,” he noted.
At the same time, Lovitky pointed out, the website of Qatar’s Ministry of Justice said the country enforces a boycott against Israeli citizens. And, he said, Qatari law requires all Qatari companies to boycott Israeli citizens.
“Qatar has refused to explain the apparent contradiction,” Lovitky said.
Regarding Saudi Arabian Airlines, Lovitky said it does not permit Israeli passengers to board any of its flights, all of which land in Saudi Arabia.
“If Saudi Arabia wishes to exclude Israeli passengers, it should be prohibited from flying passengers beyond Saudi Arabia to third countries,” he said, adding that he plans to file a formal complaint about the airline with the Department of Transportation.
Alpher noted that after Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords in 1983, five Arab countries opened “limited diplomatic relations with Israel.” The countries — Qatar, Oman, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania — all later severed those ties because of a lack of progress over the Palestinian issue.
“But now with the UAE there is a breakthrough,” Alpher said, “despite a lack of progress.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Musings - A Light Down Through The Ages
Musings
A Light Down Through The Ages
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeChanukah is post-biblical and there is no scriptural mention of the holiday. Why then does the blessing say God “commanded us” to light the Chanukah lights? Where does that command come from?
In the Talmud, Rabbi Nehemiah gives a profound answer (Shabbat 23a). He says the command is in the verse in Deuteronomy, “Ask your father, he will inform you; Your elders, they will tell you (Deut. 32: 7).” In other words, commands are a product of the chain of tradition as well as the direct word of God.
Judaism is an interpretive tradition. We shape our behavior through the generations, through the discussions of the study hall, the practices of the community, scholarship, tradition and aspiration. Rabbi Nehemiah teaches that we can hear the voice of God through history, through our people’s struggles and successes. The excitement of the enterprise is to listen together, to try to figure out what our ancestors are saying, how we discern the voice of God in their legacy.
Listen to the elders and light candles with the children. The glow of the lights reminds us of the miracle of a people that, like the cruse of oil, should have lasted only a short time but miraculously endured.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press).
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/musings/light-down-through-ages#S3CgLCgF8BgJ8l12.99
Musings - A Light Down Through The Ages
Musings
A Light Down Through The Ages
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeChanukah is post-biblical and there is no scriptural mention of the holiday. Why then does the blessing say God “commanded us” to light the Chanukah lights? Where does that command come from?
In the Talmud, Rabbi Nehemiah gives a profound answer (Shabbat 23a). He says the command is in the verse in Deuteronomy, “Ask your father, he will inform you; Your elders, they will tell you (Deut. 32: 7).” In other words, commands are a product of the chain of tradition as well as the direct word of God.
Judaism is an interpretive tradition. We shape our behavior through the generations, through the discussions of the study hall, the practices of the community, scholarship, tradition and aspiration. Rabbi Nehemiah teaches that we can hear the voice of God through history, through our people’s struggles and successes. The excitement of the enterprise is to listen together, to try to figure out what our ancestors are saying, how we discern the voice of God in their legacy.
Listen to the elders and light candles with the children. The glow of the lights reminds us of the miracle of a people that, like the cruse of oil, should have lasted only a short time but miraculously endured.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press).
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/musings/light-down-through-ages#S3CgLCgF8BgJ8l12.99
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