Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Dear Reader,
Some hard feelings are in the air among parents and faculty at the elite Fieldston School about how the administration handled, or mishandled, a swastika incident and efforts to promote inter-racial understanding. Deputy Managing Editor Amy Sara Clark reports.New York
Swastika Incident Reverberating At Fieldston
Parents at elite Riverdale school say swastika-as-peace symbol assembly is part of a long pattern of slights against Jews.
Amy Sara Clark
Deputy Managing Editor
ECFS's response to reports of swastikas at the middle school has roiled parents and alumni alike. Wikipedia CommonsWhen the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an elite private school on a leafy campus in Riverdale, embarked last year on an experiment to promote racial pride and inter-racial understanding among its diverse group of third- through fifth-graders, parents and alumni were vehemently split.
While proponents viewed the program as being on the leading edge of tolerance education, others saw it as a well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided effort that would only deepen the racial divide.
This week, as the school is dealing with the fallout from its response to a swastika incident, controversy has sprung up again, with parents discussing the issue in parking lots and ball field bleachers, and alumni going “ballistic” on Facebook, according to one alum.
Parents, middle school teachers and alumni of ECFS, at least one of whom is a prominent “second generation” Holocaust spokesman, have been firing off letters and emails to school officials asking why the administration wasn’t treating what they see as a clear case of anti-Semitism the same way it has addressed other acts of bigotry.
“If someone had written the N-word or put a Confederate flag on the wall, I think there would have been a stronger reaction,” said middle school parent Ben Hort, suggesting the administration would have held a school-wide assembly about it and sent an email to parents asking them to discuss the incident at home.
“For whatever reason, this administration seems less attuned to Jewish issues,” he said.
In this case, the school gave a 15-minute presentation to just one grade that focused on the swastika’s peaceful meanings in other cultures. After an article ran in the New York Post that quoted parents criticizing the school’s response, Head of School Damian Fernandez sent parents and alumni a short letter defending the presentation, which he said, “made clear that the swastika should not appear anywhere at ECFS, in any context,” and articulating what parents say the assembly didn’t, that “a swastika is hate speech and, as such, its depiction will not be tolerated in our school.”
After being deluged with emails from alumni and parents who said this response didn’t go far enough, last week the administration did an about-face, sending a second letter outlining plans to work with the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance in Manhattan to create in-depth, ongoing Holocaust education programs at the middle school.
The administration, which is now working with a PR firm, declined to respond to a detailed list of questions from The Jewish Week on both the swastika controversy and the racial understanding program, referring reporters instead to its second letter.
But that letter, despite the turnaround it represented, is not likely to quell all the bad feelings.
'Willful Disregard'
While criticism of the focus of the assembly has come from multiple camps, a contingent of Jewish parents say what they see as a bungled response is not a one-off situation. Rather, they contend that it is part of a decades-long pattern of, at best, an unconscious insensitivity towards the concerns of Jewish families, and, at worst, a willful disregard for them.
Several parents pointed to what they considered much stronger responses to other allegedly bigoted acts, including Ebola jokes last fall and the discovery of lists ranking seventh-grade girls “in terms of their attractiveness.” In both instances the school had much longer assemblies and sent long emails to parents urging them to discuss the incidents at home.
When the swastikas began popping up — including in the artwork of a student who, the administration said, didn’t know the symbol was associated with the Nazis because it symbolized "peace and well-being" in his culture — the middle school principal, Kevin Jacobson, took a different tack, according to a letter purportedly signed by 19 middle-school teachers that was posted on the alumni Facebook page.
The teachers said that when they asked the principal to hold an educational assembly in response to the incident, the principal was hesitant, saying that as far as he knew, “only teachers” were upset about the swastikas.
The following week he approved the brief presentation for the sixth grade. Of the 10 bullet points shown to the students at the meeting, only three were about Nazism, the teachers said. Only one mentioned Jews, noting that the symbol was used “to promote hate and violence” against them and others. The presentation didn’t reference the Holocaust, or note that the Nazis murdered “a third of the world’s Jews, along with another five million people,” the letter said.
After the Post article appeared, the administration was “overwhelmed” with alumni emails, a parent told The Jewish Week.
“Admittedly, I was at Fieldston five decades ago,” wrote Menachem Rosensaft, the son of two Holocaust survivors who was born in the Bergen-Belson displaced persons camp and who frequently comments on the concerns of the children of Holocaust survivors.
“I am certain that the school has changed, but I do not want to believe that it has changed to such an extent that the students there can be told (a) that the swastika has predominantly positive connotations, and (b) that it can or should be considered objectively, as it were. ... How, then, can any teacher or administrator at Fieldston talk about the swastika to students without stating categorically that it is the symbol of the perpetration of the biggest genocide in history, and that it remains the symbol of contemporary neo-Nazi movements.”
This last point shocked parents across the multicultural spectrum. How could the school ignore the swastika’s meaning as an emblem of hatred against not only Jews, but also people from immigrant, LGBT, black, Latino and other minority groups, one parent of color told The Jewish Week, referring to white supremacists who often make use of the symbol.
'Like Chicken Pox'
While the letter from the administration that followed the Post article outlined the new education programs, it also maintained that the only swastika that appeared in the school was the one incorporated into the artwork.
While parents and alumni were pleased with the new partnership, they were mystified by the administration’s continued assertion that only one swastika was confirmed.
“I don’t understand why they’re pretending it didn’t happen,” said Hort, whose son told The Jewish Week that he saw multiple swastikas drawn on a piece of paper left out in the art room. And, Hort said, at parent-teacher conferences last week, a teacher confirmed that he knew of multiple sightings of swastikas.
“He said it was like 'chicken pox.' They were reasonably small but they kept cropping up,” Hort said.
A teacher confirmed to another parent that a student reported an additional sighting: a swastika in a girls' bathroom stall. The teacher said she reported it to the administration but when school officials sent someone to investigate nothing was found, the parent said.
'Visibly Minority'
The irony of the dustup about race and anti-Semitism at Fieldston is that the school has a rich Jewish background. Founded in 1878 by Felix Adler, the son of a rabbi, to serve Jews and other minorities who were discriminated against at other private schools, Fieldston became a haven for secular Jews and a stronghold of liberal values where students were taught to pursue social justice and racial equality.
Over the decades, the pre-K-12 institution has added an increasing number of non-white students to its roster of 1,700 students spread throughout its three Riverdale schools (Lower, Middle and Upper) and its Upper West Side pre-K-5 school.
There is no public information on the number of Jewish students currently at the school, but parents interviewed by The Jewish Week estimated that today, roughly a third of the students in the lower and middle divisions are Jewish. However that percentage is likely to drop significantly over the next decade as the school works towards its goal of increasing ECFS' percentage of students who, as one parent put it, are "visibly minority."
Under the “Diversity” heading on its admissions fact sheet, the school says that about 35 percent of its student body and 15 percent of its faculty and staff are people of color. It does not note any other measures of diversity, such the percentage of students with disabilities, or from specific religious or ethnic backgronds, or who come from households that include LGBT or first-generation immigrant members. Nor does the fact sheet note socioeconomic status, although under the "Financial Aid" heading it notes that about 22 percent of families get some form of monetary assistance.
“For a long time the school has been viewing diversity as simply skin color,” said one parent. “But there is so much more than skin color, and they really need to get their act together on that.”
'Little Slights'
Several alumni noted that when they attended the school, there was a significant amount of Holocaust education, including a “remembrance day” during which Holocaust survivors spoke.
“These [programs] don’t exist anymore, which means there had been a conscious decision to take them out of the curriculum,” said one parent, who, like all the parents who spoke to The Jewish Week except for Hort, asked to remain anonymous because they feared that voicing criticism might be held against their children.
In addition to the response to the swastikas, several Jewish parents pointed to the affinity group program (now called Conversations on Race), which they said negated their children’s Jewish identity by instructing them to check either the “white” or the “not sure” box. (The other boxes kids could check were: “African-American/black,” “Asian/Pacific Islander,” “Latina/o” and “multi-racial.”) After parents from a wide range of racial and ethnic identities complained that telling students to mark “not sure” when they knew exactly who they were was also damaging, the administration changed that group’s name to “general discussion.”
At the crux of the disagreement about affinity groups, several parents said, is that the school’s administration considers a “minority” to be a group that faces discrimination and economic disadvantage, and sees New York-area Jews as part of the privileged group.
But there are plenty of Latino students who are white, and plenty from affluent households, they countered.
When their argument didn’t have an effect, a few parents who were members of the Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale, discussed their concerns with the shul’s education director, Mason Voit. He put together an email to the administration explaining why American Jews had a particular Jewish identity and didn’t consider themselves white — to no avail.
“I would have liked the school to be able to hear the concerns of the parents,” Voit said. “There are really important characteristics of being white that the Jewish students just don’t share, but I think there was an inability of the school to see the Jewish identity of the kids as being anything other than a religious identity.”
Voit and parents said the current controversies are not the only examples of what they see as "microagressions" toward Jewish students.
Voit pointed to an incident 11 years ago, in which he and more than 100 protestors, including nearly a dozen rabbis, held a silent rally at the school regarding a panel discussion that included several Palestinian activists who advocate abolishing Israel, and no pro-Israel panelists.
Parents also noted an incident in October when a student was reading aloud Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” the teacher didn’t discuss a line that many consider to be anti-Semitic.
“I think the kids should read Oscar Wilde,” one parent said, despite the fact that the writer was an unapologetic anti-Semite. “But when you read a story that has a little anti-Semitic dig in it, when it’s read aloud in class and the teacher doesn’t stop and discuss the line,” she said, that’s a real problem.
They also said that while hate crimes against other minorities that make headlines — such as arson attempts at black churches in the South — are regularly discussed at the school, similar crimes against Jews — the fires set to seven Jewish homes in Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens last month — are not. If you only got your news from inside the school, one parent said, you wouldn't know that anti-Semitism exists.
All the Jewish parents interviewed stressed that they do not belive anyone on the administration is anti-Semitic or that their children feel uncomfortable on campus. Hort's son agreed, telling The Jewish Week that when he and his friends saw the swastikas in the art room they "didn't think anything of it."
Voit said that he's had multiple discussions with synagogue parents on the issue, and he agreed that the atmosphere at Fieldston is not anti-Semitic.
"There are organizations that are hostile to Jews; I don't think Fieldston is among them. But it sounds like there are some areas where they are sort of tone-deaf," he said, expaining that the issue is not with what administrators and teachers do, but what they don't.
"I think the omissions are extremely intentional," he said. "They're active omissions."
Another parent put it this way: “The school talks about microaggressions against children of color, and what’s ironic about it is that I feel that the school is perpetrating microaggressions against Jewish students."
"There are these little slights all the time," she continued. "If it had been happening to students of color, it would be on the administration’s radar.”
But despite the work to be done, parents and alumni who spoke to The Jewish Week said they are encouraged by the administration’s decision to institute Holocaust education programs at the Middle School.
“The school is listening,” one parent said. “It is changing.”
amyclark@jewishweek.org
Update: This story was updated on Dec. 16 with additional information, including comments from Hort's son, who spoke to The Jewish Week after the original story went to press. In addition, an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how The Jewish Week learned that a student reported finding a swastika in a bathroom stall. The information came from a parent who learned of it from a teacher. No teachers spoke to The Jewish Week. ---------------------
Writing from Gush Etzion on the West Bank, Contributing Editor Josh Mitnick describes the scene at a supermarket that caters to both Arab and Jewish customers - some call it "the peace market" - and how the current wave of Arab attacks in the area has taken its toll.Israel News
A Market That Sells More Than Groceries
Tense times at the Gush junction store, but a resolve to get along.
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Israeli soldiers guard the Gush Etzion junction just outside the market. Joshua Mitnick/JWGush Etzion Junction, West Bank — For years, the supermarket here has seemingly defied the political daily reality of the West Bank.
Offering discounts on everything from produce to breakfast cereals, the Rami Levy store — more boxy warehouse than fancy market — has attracted shoppers from both the Jewish settlements and the Arab town of Bethlehem. Located at a heavily traveled traffic circle in the middle of the Etzion bloc of settlements, the supermarket has overcome calls for boycotts on both sides and employs both Israelis and Palestinian working side by side.
One Palestinian customer once dubbed it, “The peace supermarket.”
But a wave of about 10 terrorist attacks targeting the intersection in the last two months — most tragically a shooting attack on Nov. 18 that killed 18-year-old American gap-year student Ezra Schwartz — has undermined the experiment in coexistence.
Employees say fewer shoppers are coming; those who do show up say they are more wary; and the Gush Etzion traffic circle is full of soldiers who finger M-16 rifles for fear that the next stabbing or car ramming could come at any time.
At the entrance to a parking lot where cars with Israeli yellow license plates park alongside Palestinian cars with white-and-green plates, a pair of Israeli soldiers wave off Palestinian motorists who aren’t employed at the supermarket. The fear is that the drivers might try to run down shoppers.
“There’s nothing we can do about it. We say to them, ‘Go back and tell your neighbors to stop the attacks,’” said one of the soldiers at the entry way. “They accept it with understanding.”
Mahmoud Siag, an east Jerusalem resident who worked in the supermarket bakery, said he understood the reason for the Israeli security crackdown. But he also expressed sympathy for work colleagues from the Hebron region who were getting into work an hour late because they’d been held up at checkpoints and roadblocks the army has deployed at the entrances to most Palestinian villages around Hebron — which has been the main hotbed of violence.
“Lots of friends with Palestinian cars aren’t allowed in this part of the parking lot,” Siag said, referring to the new restrictions. Palestinian Christians from Bethlehem, who accounted for more than 50 percent of the shoppers on Sundays, have all but disappeared. “Maybe two or three still come,” said Siag.
For all the chaos outside, many employees at the supermarket insisted that inside the grocery store, the atmosphere remained unchanged. “It’s fine. Like a peace conference,” joked a security guard. “What is outside is outside, and inside there’s no difference,” said another employee.
Vera, a Bethlehem resident who manages both Jewish and Arab checkout clerks, said the Palestinian employees of the supermarket were disturbed by the wave of attacks. “The feeling is bad. We feel sad about what is going on, because we work together and love each other,” said another store manager who wasn’t authorized to speak to the media.
Opened in 2010 by Jerusalem retailing businessman Rami Levy, the supermarket spurred criticism from religious right hard-liners for employing Palestinians and Jews. Chief rabbis from the nearby settlements of Alon Shvut and Kiryat Arba published a religious ruling against the employment of Arab men at the market — citing concerns about interfaith affairs with Jewish women.
Alon Shvut’s Chief Rabbi Gidon Perl said store management should pay higher salaries in order to avoid employing Arabs.
However, Levi did not back down, saying that his supermarket would stand as a symbol of coexistence. Currently, supermarket management said the store employs equal numbers of Arab and Jewish staffers — though some employees at the store claimed a majority of the staff is Palestinian.
Palestinians who shop and work at the supermarket defy efforts to boycott Israeli business in the settlements. During Palestinian holiday seasons, Arab patronage accounts for as much as 60 percent of sales.
Speaking to The Jewish Week, supermarket owner Levy said that attacks at Gush Etzion have cut into sales, but that the drop was no different than those experienced in his store in Jerusalem.
“The point is to hurt the coexistence. It’s hurting both Arabs and Jews. But life is stronger than the events,” said Levy. “People might be a little scared on the day of the attack. People are more careful. But they aren’t abandoning the store.”
Jewish shoppers also expressed concern. One shopper from the settlement of Neve Daniel said his wife refused to come to the supermarket alone, and said the store these days feels emptied of customers. Aliza Hammer, 42, pushed a cart full of groceries, and said that she had stopped taking her children along for the trip from her home in the settlement of Nokdim to the supermarket. “The route isn’t pleasant.”
Another customer named Aliza said she felt more hostility from Palestinian employees in the last year. “You’re always looking over your shoulder,” she said, adding that she’s carried a Glock pistol for years. “It’s like a Chicago gangland.”
She claims the supermarket management has removed items from the shelves that could be used by individual attackers. “Go ahead and look for the knives here,” she said. “You won’t find them.”
But other Israeli shoppers said they would continue to patronize the store despite the tense situation.
“I’m a big believer in that supermarket. I think it means a lot to the area; it’s a symbol of how things could work,” said Yaacov Ribner, a resident of nearby Efrat, who makes weekly visits to store, but acknowledged, “A lot of people that work and shop there are Arabs, and we get along wonderfully. The situation has put a dent into that. … It’s just a natural progression of the events. The situation in Israel is too tense. I don’t view every Arab or Muslim as a terrorist, but at the same time you can’t be naïve and you have to look around.”
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
My column deals with a recent conference here dealing with "an existential problem" in Israeli society -- the fact that the fast-growing charedi (or "ultra-Orthodox") population, under-educated and under-employed, is a major drain on the economy.Gary Rosenblatt
Moving Charedim Into Israeli Workforce
In conference here, funders grapple with crisis over lack of employment.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Israel has “an existential problem.” No, it’s not a nuclear Iran, or ISIS at the northern border.
It’s charedim (also known as ultra-Orthodox Jews), too few of whom have adequate secular education and too few of whom have jobs to support their families — a situation that threatens to turn Israel’s economy into a “Third World” one. The problem is especially grave given that charedim are the fastest-growing segment in the Jewish state’s population.
But getting potential funders to open their wallets to back programs that will move charedim into the Israeli workforce won’t be easy.
That was one of the takeaways from a daylong conference held here earlier this month that addressed the challenges presented by the lack of charedi participation in the Israeli workforce. It was called “Accelerate: Charedi Employment and Economic Empowerment,” and was hosted by the Jewish Funders Network (JFN), the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Rachel Charitable Trust of London and several other prominent charitable foundations in Europe and Israel. It brought together potential funders as well as practitioners in the field, and included panel presentations and breakout sessions describing a unique model that connects charedi entrepreneurs to high-tech and start-up companies offering mentorship, training and hiring.
The message: don’t donate because you support the charedi way of life; donate to benefit the State of Israel — economically, socially, politically and strategically.
“Charedi employment is not about charedim,” British businessman and philanthropist Leo Noe, who heads the Rachel Charitable Trust, asserted in his opening remarks. “It is about poverty, welfare, education, employment, social mobility, tolerance, economic growth, investment, Israel, unity and more.”
Following up on Noe’s remarks, Sir Mick Davis, another well-known British businessman who chairs the Jewish Leadership Council of Great Britain, offered a thorough and gloomy analysis of Israel’s challenges in the 21st century, focusing on how philanthropists can best strengthen the Jewish state. At one point he noted that “almost half of Israel’s children today are receiving a Third World education, and they tend to come from the fastest growing portions of the population,” namely charedim and Israeli Arabs.
“Children receiving a Third World education will only be able to maintain a Third World economy. A Third World economy cannot support the First World defense and security force that Israel needs.”
Thus, Davis asserted, Israel is faced with “an existential problem” that requires philanthropic as well as continued government support for educational and employment programs aimed at charedi young men.
Noe explained why he and two philanthropic partners have contributed more than $60 million in the last seven years to The Kemach Foundation he launched (as part of the Rachel Charitable Trust) to support charedi employment in Israel. (The name refers to a well-known phrase in Jewish lore: “Ayn kemach, ayn Torah,” without flour — or more generally, sustenance — there can be no Torah study.)
Noe said he was motivated to act after seeing a “culture of complacency” among charedim when it comes to supporting their families, and the “lack of tolerance” between charedim and the rest of Israeli society.
It’s not difficult to see why that mutual resentment is prevalent. Most charedim see the pursuit of Torah study as a man’s life’s work. As a result theirs is a largely closed society and secular education, army service and employment, other than teaching Torah and ritual services, are eschewed. Those who study Torah full time are subsidized by the government. The charedim, who often have large families, say they are supporting society spiritually. Not surprisingly most Israelis resent this situation, where a portion of their taxes goes to maintain a lifestyle they view as living off of Israeli society rather than contributing to it.
Compounding the social divide is the fact that while charedim make up about 10 percent of Israel’s population today, that figure is expected to almost triple in the next four decades.
The Kemach Foundation has shown much success as a major employment agency for charedim, Noe said, bringing thousands of men and women into the work force in the last few years, particularly in technology, through educational training and by encouraging companies to hire a cohort that has proven to be bright, loyal and committed on the job.
He said the effort reduces the financial strain on the government in helping people support their families and make for sustainable communities. And, he added, it is an expression of Jewish values.
Noe called for partnerships and collaboration from more funders, noting that a goal of the conference was to widen the effort “from the bottom up” and enhance Israeli society. “I cannot change every charedi in Israel, and perhaps none of us should,” he said. “But together we can provide opportunities for them to acquire skills and provide opportunities for them to succeed on their own.”
‘What Are The Men Doing?’
The Accelerate program was the first major effort by JFN to focus on charedi employment. Some funders present were familiar with the programs and already supported them. For others it was clearly new territory.
One funder, questioning a charedi panelist who is the mother of seven and the CEO of a start-up communications company, asked: “What are the men doing, and how do you change their values?”
The panelist, Sari Roth, explained with pride that her husband was a Torah scholar and that she is fully supportive of their division of labor — his to learn Torah and educate their children spiritually, and hers to be the breadwinner. It was personal and poignant moment that revealed the gap between mainstream and charedi ideals.
We learned that while rabbinic leaders of the charedi communities are not about to publicly endorse young men leaving the beit midrash, or house of Torah study, to find employment, the rabbis will not prevent it, either. And on an individual basis, if a young scholar tells the rabbi he is unable to support his family, the rabbi may encourage him to make use of various employment services operated by and geared toward charedi men.
One foundation representative at the conference later told me he found the program to be fascinating. But he said the charity he works for is not prepared to fund any charedi programs at this time, in part because many of the services are geared to young men in their 20s who are failing economically. His foundation would rather see more proactive programs — there are a few — that work with charedi boys still in high school, or earlier, teaching them secular as well as religious subjects and orienting them toward university and/or the work force.
“Why wait until their options are limited?” asked the foundation program officer, who spoke off the record because he had not cleared his remarks with his superiors first. (He also noted that more Jewish funders appear to be helping Israeli Arabs than charedim.)
Responding to his critique, Yael Simon, the London-based philanthropic adviser to the Rachel Charitable Trust, told me, “He’s right, but that’s like encountering a flood in your kitchen” and responding by taking steps to prevent future floods. “First, you have to deal with the problem at hand,” she said.
Simon, who spent 18 months traveling the globe to organize the Accelerate conference, said its main success was having funders, NGOs, representatives of the Israeli government, charedi educators and entrepreneurs, and high-tech officials in the same room. The key, she said, is in “including rather than excluding,” and in showing sensitivity and respect to the charedi community while offering its members an opportunity to benefit their daily lives without sacrificing their values.
Angelica Berrie, president of the Russell Berrie Foundation in New Jersey and JFN co-board chair, expressed enthusiasm for the Accelerate program in her closing remarks at the conference. She called it “an eye-opening experience … because I learned how much I still don’t know about what other funders and nonprofits are doing around the issue of increasing participation to strengthen Israel.”
She called for creativity and collaboration in moving charedi education and employment to the forefront of JFN funders’ issues. And this week she told me her foundation has “dipped its toes in the water,” giving out some grants for vocational and educational programs for charedim and “getting to see how we can collaborate.”
Others are showing interest, too. Simon, of the Rachel Charitable Trust, said she has received very positive feedback, and Eli Genauer of the Samis Foundation in Seattle said his board will be exploring ways to help.
Perhaps the most encouraging element of the Accelerate approach is that it can apply to other minority and periphery groups in Israel, including Ethiopian Jews and Israeli Arabs. It would require a combination of government support, philanthropic funding and close cooperation with any specific community to gradually bring its members into the mainstream work force and society.
The Charedi experience could be a model for the future.
Gary@jewishweek.org---------------------
Also this week, mixed reactions to a rabbi's talk at the White House Chanukah party; Haaretz/New Israel Fund conference in NYC highlights the challenges Israel poses for the political left; a psychiatrist asks, "are Islamic terrorists crazy?" remembering NBA great Dolph Schayes; 'Son Of Saul' filmmaker on his intense, controversial depiction of life in Auschwitz.International
Shedding Light, And Heat, At White House Chanukah Party
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Rabbi Susan Talve, with President Obama, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin at White House Chanukah party. Steve SheffeyHow far does the light of the Chanukah candles extend?
For Susan Talve, a St. Louis rabbi who recited the blessing at last Wednesday afternoon’s Chanukah candle-lighting ceremony at the White House, it was a chance to illuminate many of the ills besetting the nation and the world.
But several of those in attendance and a number of bloggers expressed outrage that she used the event to promote such things as the Black Lives Matter movement, opening America’s doors to “all immigrants and refugees,” cleaning “up the fires of toxic nuclear waste,” “getting guns off our streets,” and “justice for Palestinians.”
One of the guests, Abraham Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told The Jewish Week: “It was appropriate for a rabbi to bring a spiritual message and historical perspective; it was inappropriate to engage in a personal political advocacy diatribe. She is entitled to her views, but one should have a sense of proportion as to where and when to voice them.”
Ezra Friedlander, founder and CEO of the public relations firm that bears his name, said he was “a bit surprised at the tone and the content of her remarks. It certainly struck me as not in sync with what you would think when you bring so many different people — especially so many Jewish people — into a room. … She spoke in generalities — strident generalities — and many coded references,” he continued. “It wasn’t necessary.”
Rabbi Talve told The Jewish Week that she is “sorry if it [her remarks] were divisive. I really am. … I can appreciate that people felt that way.”
She explained that she believes these are “desperate times and there is no higher calling for us than pikuach nefesh — the saving of a life. As Rabbi [Abraham Joshua] Heschel said, if our prayers don’t lead us to action, they can be in vain.”
Rabbi Talve said it was the first time she had been invited to the White House and believes it was because of her activist role last year during the Ferguson riots. She said most of the comments she had heard about her remarks were positive.
Among those who agreed with her was Steve Sheffey, an Obama delegate in 2012 and the editor of a pro-Israel newsletter in Chicago.
“She really spoke to the Jewish values that most American Jews hold,” he told The Jewish Week. “I thought she was very energetic. The crowd loved her and she really connected the spirit of Chanukah to our own age in terms of how we have the power to fight for what is right — even though we may be few in number. … It was entirely appropriate.”
One blogger, however, was upset that the rabbi used the Arabic word, “Insh ‘Allah” (Allah Willing), at one point in her remarks. But Rabbi Talve said it was Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who was standing behind her with President Barack Obama, who first used the word in agreeing with something she said.
“I was surprised [to hear it] and I just repeated it,” Rabbi Talve explained. “I grew up with a Jewish grandfather who spoke Arabic, and when I heard it coming from behind me, it felt like it was such an affirmation of a big tent.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
---------------------
New York
Under Haaretz’ Auspices, The Left Kvells, Kvetches
American and Israeli progressives gather at new conference to debate the Jewish state.
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
From left, Aluf Benn, Merav Michaeli, Jeremy Ben-Ami, Husam Zomlot and Robert Danin. Erica Gannet for IRL ProductionsThe event featured milling crowds, lemon bars, glasses of wine and a menorah-lighting ceremony. Was it a Chanukah party or a conference?
Yes.
Officially billed as a “new Israeli-American discussion” hosted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the nonprofit New Israel Fund, the Dec. 13 gathering gave many attendees a feeling of connection and energy.
“It’s nice to be with people you agree with,” said Linda Lebovitz, a criminal defense attorney from Long Island, to The Jewish Week as she scanned the crowd crammed into the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.
“There’s a real sense of empowerment here,” New Israel Fund spokeswoman Naomi Paiss told The Jewish Week.
“The Jewish left is not dead,” said Sanford Weiner, a supporter of Americans for Peace Now and J Street and a board member of Partners for a Progressive Israel, at the end of the day. “Although the two-state solution might be.”
Indeed, the event’s warm glow laid bare some of the challenges the Jewish state poses for the left, both Israeli and American.
AIPAC, which lobbies the U.S. government on behalf of the Jewish state, has long dominated Israel activism, with its $70 million budget and ever-expanding annual conference. Last year’s headcount: about 14,000.
J Street, founded in 2008, has given Jews who don’t like AIPAC’s support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government another way to support Israel. At HaaretzQ, as Sunday’s event was called — “Q” for questions — J Street’s constituency reconnected and recharged between its conferences, which draw crowds of about 3,000 each. About 1,200 people, higher than the 800 originally expected, attended HaaretzQ, said Paiss.
“My whole world is here,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, in an interview. “People feel empowered, people feel networked, people understand that they’re not alone, and that to me is about as important an outcome as any.”
But some fretted that the conference might have generated more heat than light.
Palestinian activist Carol Daniel Kasbari, a speaker on a panel about Israeli and Palestinian resistance, criticized the sessions for being long on talk and short on plans for action. There were so many talks, she told The Jewish Week, that nobody could delve deeply enough on any one topic, and participants didn’t have enough time to meaningfully network. And she almost walked out when she realized that a panel on Jerusalem, which she had asked to speak on didn’t include a Palestinian.
“Are we really coming here to blah blah blah some more?” she asked.
Squeezing 60-some speakers into one day was a challenge, Haaretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn wrote in an e-mail from Israel after the conference was over.
“We’ll learn the lessons,” he wrote, and said the meeting achieved Haaretz’ goals of making itself more known in the United States, and facilitating a memorable conversation.
Even Weiner, who enthusiastically praised the quality of the speakers both Israeli and American and called the conference as a whole “diverse,” felt compelled to backtrack and amend that comment slightly: “Diverse, but within a narrow range,” he said.
While many attendees and speakers compared the gathering favorably to AIPAC for presenting a less relentlessly rosy, more realistic vision of Israel, Haaretz’ lineup was in many ways a mirror image of AIPAC’s. Conversations about human rights dominated; security concerns were not ignored, but took a back seat.
Reuven “Ruvi” Rivlin represented the right in his morning keynote speech, but leaned heavily on his prerogative as President of Israel, a largely ceremonial role, to strike a feel-good note by talking a lot about the importance of Haaretz as an Israeli institution, “a newspaper with a specific agenda [that] gives a voice to many different opinions,” and one that he read as a child, for the comics.
The Israelis said the gathering was useful. It was a chance to connect with potential allies after years of focusing on recruiting support in Europe, said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer.
“In America it was more difficult, even five or six years ago, to say certain things, like the ‘a-word,’ even to more liberal crowds,” he told The Jewish Week, referring to the claim that Israel’s government is creating an apartheid-like system of racial segregation with separate roads and towns.
American Jews have become more receptive to criticism from the Israeli left about its own country as their disenchantment with Netanyahu has grown, he said.
“We’re bringing American Jews into the conversation that is already happening in Israel, which tends to be a lot more edgy and freer than the conversation the leading American Jewish organizations want to see here,” said Paiss of the New Israel Fund.
Politicians seized the day to remind American progressives that their camp needs financial support.
“The left have to understand how much money the right pours into Israel,” MK Merav Michaeli, of the center-left Zionist Union party, said in an interview.
In a session about whether Israel is a divisive force among U.S. Jews, Haaretz moderator Chemi Shalev reminded panelists that the American-Jewish right has always had more motivation and more money than the American-Jewish left when it comes to Israel.
“You’ve fought for everyone,” he told Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of the predominantly LGBT synagogue Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, “but right-wing donors have one issue or two: Israel, and maybe Jewish identity.”
“No doubt the right has certain advantages over us, but we have the advantage of actually being correct,” she responded, both acknowledging the right’s tactical advantages and avoiding more discussion of them by letting fly a big laugh line.
The conference also revealed fault lines in the Israeli left.
Michaeli and Husam Zomlot, director of Fatah’s Foreign Relations Commission, got into an argument during their panel discussion on unfreezing the peace process that highlighted the distance between the Jewish left and the Palestinians.
Zomlot spoke in favor of sanctions and boycotts against Israel, and said the last moment of hope was under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Michaeli tried to find an area of agreement with him by paying tribute to those leaders, but concluded with a direct criticism of Zomlot.
“Please, you and I are sitting here because you and I believe that we can and we must bridge this thing and find a solution,” she said. “You have to recognize the right of the Jewish people for the state of Israel in the land of Israel, and until you do that, we are both staying very righteous.”
PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat asked the conference organizers to remove the Israeli flag from the stage, saying he didn’t want to speak under it, and they “respected his request,” Benn wrote in his e-mail.
And MK Tzipi Livni, leader of the Zionist Union party, exposed another fracture on the left when she took time in her morning keynote talk to scold Breaking the Silence, the Israeli NGO that fights the occupation of Palestinian territory by publishing the testimony of soldiers who served in the West Bank and Gaza. Breaking the Silence member Avner Gvaryahu was one of the conference’s speakers.
“Breaking the Silence, give your information to formal committees,” Livni said. “As a mother of two combat soldiers, I give you this message.”
And throughout the conference, the conversation returned to the question of the two-state solution. Many said there is no other option; equally as many asked if it is dead, or said it already is.
“I challenge the people attending this conference and all of those in our camp to end the debate about whether or not the two-state solution is dead,” Ben-Ami pleaded during one panel discussion. “It’s like wheeling a patient into the ER, and the doctor stands back to ask, ‘Well how close is he to dying? Is he dying? Is he not?’”
Everybody laughed.
“There is no other solution,” Ben-Ami said.
helen@jewishweek.org
---------------------
Under Haaretz’ Auspices, The Left Kvells, Kvetches
American and Israeli progressives gather at new conference to debate the Jewish state.
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
From left, Aluf Benn, Merav Michaeli, Jeremy Ben-Ami, Husam Zomlot and Robert Danin. Erica Gannet for IRL ProductionsThe event featured milling crowds, lemon bars, glasses of wine and a menorah-lighting ceremony. Was it a Chanukah party or a conference?
Yes.
Officially billed as a “new Israeli-American discussion” hosted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the nonprofit New Israel Fund, the Dec. 13 gathering gave many attendees a feeling of connection and energy.
“It’s nice to be with people you agree with,” said Linda Lebovitz, a criminal defense attorney from Long Island, to The Jewish Week as she scanned the crowd crammed into the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.
“There’s a real sense of empowerment here,” New Israel Fund spokeswoman Naomi Paiss told The Jewish Week.
“The Jewish left is not dead,” said Sanford Weiner, a supporter of Americans for Peace Now and J Street and a board member of Partners for a Progressive Israel, at the end of the day. “Although the two-state solution might be.”
Indeed, the event’s warm glow laid bare some of the challenges the Jewish state poses for the left, both Israeli and American.
AIPAC, which lobbies the U.S. government on behalf of the Jewish state, has long dominated Israel activism, with its $70 million budget and ever-expanding annual conference. Last year’s headcount: about 14,000.
J Street, founded in 2008, has given Jews who don’t like AIPAC’s support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government another way to support Israel. At HaaretzQ, as Sunday’s event was called — “Q” for questions — J Street’s constituency reconnected and recharged between its conferences, which draw crowds of about 3,000 each. About 1,200 people, higher than the 800 originally expected, attended HaaretzQ, said Paiss.
“My whole world is here,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, in an interview. “People feel empowered, people feel networked, people understand that they’re not alone, and that to me is about as important an outcome as any.”
But some fretted that the conference might have generated more heat than light.
Palestinian activist Carol Daniel Kasbari, a speaker on a panel about Israeli and Palestinian resistance, criticized the sessions for being long on talk and short on plans for action. There were so many talks, she told The Jewish Week, that nobody could delve deeply enough on any one topic, and participants didn’t have enough time to meaningfully network. And she almost walked out when she realized that a panel on Jerusalem, which she had asked to speak on didn’t include a Palestinian.
“Are we really coming here to blah blah blah some more?” she asked.
Squeezing 60-some speakers into one day was a challenge, Haaretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn wrote in an e-mail from Israel after the conference was over.
“We’ll learn the lessons,” he wrote, and said the meeting achieved Haaretz’ goals of making itself more known in the United States, and facilitating a memorable conversation.
Even Weiner, who enthusiastically praised the quality of the speakers both Israeli and American and called the conference as a whole “diverse,” felt compelled to backtrack and amend that comment slightly: “Diverse, but within a narrow range,” he said.
While many attendees and speakers compared the gathering favorably to AIPAC for presenting a less relentlessly rosy, more realistic vision of Israel, Haaretz’ lineup was in many ways a mirror image of AIPAC’s. Conversations about human rights dominated; security concerns were not ignored, but took a back seat.
Reuven “Ruvi” Rivlin represented the right in his morning keynote speech, but leaned heavily on his prerogative as President of Israel, a largely ceremonial role, to strike a feel-good note by talking a lot about the importance of Haaretz as an Israeli institution, “a newspaper with a specific agenda [that] gives a voice to many different opinions,” and one that he read as a child, for the comics.
The Israelis said the gathering was useful. It was a chance to connect with potential allies after years of focusing on recruiting support in Europe, said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer.
“In America it was more difficult, even five or six years ago, to say certain things, like the ‘a-word,’ even to more liberal crowds,” he told The Jewish Week, referring to the claim that Israel’s government is creating an apartheid-like system of racial segregation with separate roads and towns.
American Jews have become more receptive to criticism from the Israeli left about its own country as their disenchantment with Netanyahu has grown, he said.
“We’re bringing American Jews into the conversation that is already happening in Israel, which tends to be a lot more edgy and freer than the conversation the leading American Jewish organizations want to see here,” said Paiss of the New Israel Fund.
Politicians seized the day to remind American progressives that their camp needs financial support.
“The left have to understand how much money the right pours into Israel,” MK Merav Michaeli, of the center-left Zionist Union party, said in an interview.
In a session about whether Israel is a divisive force among U.S. Jews, Haaretz moderator Chemi Shalev reminded panelists that the American-Jewish right has always had more motivation and more money than the American-Jewish left when it comes to Israel.
“You’ve fought for everyone,” he told Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of the predominantly LGBT synagogue Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, “but right-wing donors have one issue or two: Israel, and maybe Jewish identity.”
“No doubt the right has certain advantages over us, but we have the advantage of actually being correct,” she responded, both acknowledging the right’s tactical advantages and avoiding more discussion of them by letting fly a big laugh line.
The conference also revealed fault lines in the Israeli left.
Michaeli and Husam Zomlot, director of Fatah’s Foreign Relations Commission, got into an argument during their panel discussion on unfreezing the peace process that highlighted the distance between the Jewish left and the Palestinians.
Zomlot spoke in favor of sanctions and boycotts against Israel, and said the last moment of hope was under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Michaeli tried to find an area of agreement with him by paying tribute to those leaders, but concluded with a direct criticism of Zomlot.
“Please, you and I are sitting here because you and I believe that we can and we must bridge this thing and find a solution,” she said. “You have to recognize the right of the Jewish people for the state of Israel in the land of Israel, and until you do that, we are both staying very righteous.”
PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat asked the conference organizers to remove the Israeli flag from the stage, saying he didn’t want to speak under it, and they “respected his request,” Benn wrote in his e-mail.
And MK Tzipi Livni, leader of the Zionist Union party, exposed another fracture on the left when she took time in her morning keynote talk to scold Breaking the Silence, the Israeli NGO that fights the occupation of Palestinian territory by publishing the testimony of soldiers who served in the West Bank and Gaza. Breaking the Silence member Avner Gvaryahu was one of the conference’s speakers.
“Breaking the Silence, give your information to formal committees,” Livni said. “As a mother of two combat soldiers, I give you this message.”
And throughout the conference, the conversation returned to the question of the two-state solution. Many said there is no other option; equally as many asked if it is dead, or said it already is.
“I challenge the people attending this conference and all of those in our camp to end the debate about whether or not the two-state solution is dead,” Ben-Ami pleaded during one panel discussion. “It’s like wheeling a patient into the ER, and the doctor stands back to ask, ‘Well how close is he to dying? Is he dying? Is he not?’”
Everybody laughed.
“There is no other solution,” Ben-Ami said.
helen@jewishweek.org
---------------------Opinion
Are Islamic Terrorists Crazy?
Understanding killers' rationale doesn’t make it sane, a psychiatrist writes.
Isaac Steven Herschkopf
Special To The Jewish Week
Isaac Steven HerschkopfI know madness; I know it intimately.
As president of NYU-Bellevue Psychiatric Alumni, having served on Bellevue’s Teaching Faculty since 1978, I recognize crazy, even when it’s an ocean away.
Murdering as many innocent people, as quickly as you can, is madness. Terrorists, no matter their origin, or motive, are crazy.
But aren’t they cold and calculating? They are, but so are most serial killers and other psychotic murderers.
Yes, they have motives, and grievances, that we can understand even if we don’t agree with them. But so do all psychotic individuals.
Medical students often make the mistake of denying their patient’s psychosis because they can connect the dots of his loose associations and understand his grievances. The question is however, are those grievances sane?
When, for example, an individual coldly, calculatingly, travels great distances to cunningly confront a celebrity, whose lifestyle offends them, or who has been broadcasting secret messages to them, we understand their grievances, but we know that they’re crazy. Why should that change if it’s more than one individual?
Clinically, we frequently encounter a folie a deux, a madness of two isolated family members who convince themselves that they are right while the rest of the world are fools. Less frequently, we see entire Munster-like families with the same belief system. Infrequently, we find large, self-isolating, passionate groups that figuratively (in the case of Jonestown, literally) swallow the Kool-Aid. This can start out as mass hysteria, which is usually transient, but it can deteriorate into something more permanent and self-destructive, a madding crowd.
We can understand both their primary and secondary gain: Belonging to any tribe, even a terrorist branch, makes an isolated individual feel like part of a family. Weapons of mass destruction give the most impotent individual an ephemeral omnipotence. Martyrdom provides a raison d’ etre, the illusion of purpose, to the most purposeless life. Understanding their rationale, however, doesn’t make it sane.
The unfortunate reality is that most insane individuals wander the periphery of our civilization untreated, but also unfettered. Whether because of cost, convenience or philosophy, our approach has been: No harm, no foul. If you don’t bother us, we won’t bother you.
On the other hand, not only do we define suicidal and homicidal behavior as crazy, but, in practical terms, these are the only manifestations of psychosis that justify involuntary hospitalization.
But aren’t all soldiers homicidal and suicidal? No, soldiers kill if they have to, and die if they must, but prefer to avoid both. The difference between dreaming of a White Christmas, or of 72 virgins, is not a matter of religion, but of psychopathology.
As society evolves, we become more tolerant of differing belief systems. You can worship any God you choose and practice any religion you believe in. You can even fervently believe that I am destined for hell because I don’t agree with you. You cannot, however, act to send me there yourself.
When your belief system threatens our existence, we can no longer afford that tolerance. In the past, and in the present, when an individual, or group of individuals, sane or insane, threatens us, we either incarcerate or destroy them to protect ourselves.
Not to do so would be insane on our parts.
Dr. Isaac Steven Herschkopf is the author of “Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: Embracing Anger to Heal Your Life.” His work has appeared in literary, news and medical publications.
---------------------
New York
A Superstar And Symbol Of A Generation
Remembering the great NBA player and Bronx native Dolph Schayes.
Jeffrey S. Gurock
Special To The Jewish Week
Dolph Schayes, in his days with the Syracuse Nationals. Wikimedia CommonsWhen basketball, the iconic “city game,” was still a very Jewish sport for several early decades in the last century, Adolph “Dolph” Schayes was arguably our team’s greatest player. He was the best of many talented Jewish players who helped establish the National Basketball Association, a 8-foot-inch NBA Hall-of-Fame forward, a member of most lists of the league’s 50 best-ever athletes.
A native of the Bronx, born to immigrants from Romania, he was a symbol of a generation, that made its success in this country with a combination of brain and brawn.
And he was representative of generational change, one of the last of the large number of prominent Jews who excelled in professional sports. In recent years, NBA rosters have included only a few Jewish players, most notably Israel-born Omri Casspi of the Sacramento Kings; today, only a handful of Jews play in the NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball.
Mr. Schayes’ son Danny (at 6-11, he towered over his father) played in a less-Jewish NBA from 1981 to 1999, a good but not great player; his nephew Todd, a basketball coach in Denver who never reached the NBA, coached in the 2001 Maccabiah Games in Israel, leading his two U.S. teams to a silver and bronze medal.
Mr. Schayes, who died last week at 87, became a sort of hero of mine when as a boy I accompanied my father and my brother to the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan to see this great Jewish star’s Syracuse Nationals go up against the New York Knicks. Back then, pro basketball was so low-key that tickets cost between $1 and $3 dollars and the Ringling Brothers Circus annually bumped NBA games out of Madison Square Garden.
For me, the highlight of the game was Mr. Schayes getting into a fight with New York star Richie Guerin. The conflagration was not Jewish vs. Catholic fisticuffs, just two strong competitors battling it out. But I remember leaving the arena thinking that Dolph was one tough Jew.
Much later in my life, I became an acquaintance of Mr. Schayes when I spoke about my book on Judaism and sports at a Conservative synagogue in Syracuse, where he and his wife Naomi lived most of their adult lives. I was pleased that he did not take offense to my indicating publicly - somewhat tongue in cheek - that he had come to be remembered primarily as “Dan Schayes’ Dad.”
He took the humor with grace.
Soon thereafter, I turned to Mr. Schayes as a source for a book on New York Jews. Typical of his generation, he asserted that his Jewishness was not at all rooted in synagogue life — he readily admitted that he never was bar mitzvahed. Rather, his sense of belonging to the Jewish people grew out of his daily encounters with other Jews on the streets of his neighborhood. His connectedness was so strong that he came to believe that “everyone was Jewish.”
The giant of a man first sharpened his shooting skills and elbows when he led the Trylons, an all-Jewish club that played spirited games against other ethnic groups on the asphalt playgrounds and band-box gyms that in the early 1940s were part of the street sports culture of Davidson Avenue, just a few blocks west of the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Mr. Schayes would once recount that the most challenging matches pitted them against Catholic clubs at the St. Francis Xavier tournament. There he and his teammates, just adolescents at the time, “suffered slings and arrows and things thrown at them from a hostile crowd.” But he also remembered matter-of-factly that due to his deadly set shot, “the Jews always won.”
As a high schooler, Dolph went on to sports-powerful De Witt Clinton High School, and from there it was a short bus ride to New York University’s uptown campus, where he starred from 1944-48. When Schayes arrived on campus, the school was beginning to move away from the discriminatory “personal and psychological” tests that weeded out many Jews from that bucolic preserve on University Heights. During this era, NYU downtown readily admitted Jews; the uptown campus wanted to train a WASP elite.
Mr. Schayes put the lie to the belief that Jews did not possess the old collegiate spirit because they were not “varsity men.” Earning All-American honors (and good grades to boot) he majored in aeronautical engineering; one year he was honored as the Violets’ ideal alumnus.
During his distinguished 16-year career with the Nationals, as the consummate power forward — before that term came into vogue — Mr. Schayes was a frequent all-star. At the time of his retirement, after the 1963-64 season, he was the league’s all-time leading scorer, his records eventually eclipsed by a rather larger fellow named Wilt Chamberlain.
Later in life, living in a very different type of Jewish world, his allegiance to his people became more formalized -- within as always, his venue of sports -- when he coached the U.S. basketball team in the 1977 Maccabiah Games; Danny Schayes was his star player.
I remember how I felt when I picked up the phone one day and heard his voice saying: “Professor Gurock, this is Dolph Schayes.” The little boy in me was so excited to speak to a childhood hero.
As we spoke, what came across was his modesty, humor, self-effacement and above all, intelligence that included borrowing a line from Shakespeare (Hamlet’s “slings and arrows”) to describe how he was received at a Bronx tournament so many decades earlier. I remember Dolph Schayes as a great ballplayer, a proud Jew, and above all a soft-spoken, humble individual notwithstanding all of the accolades that he most certainly earned.
Jeffrey S. Gurock is the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University and author of Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Indiana University Press) and Jews in Gotham (NYU Press.)
---------------------
Film
Carrying ‘That Destruction’ In Their Genes
‘Son of Saul’ filmmaker and star on what went into making the intense Sonderkommando story set in Auschwitz, and the controversy it engendered.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
Director László Nemes and Géza Röhrig on the set of “Son of Saul.” Photo by Ildi Hermann, Courtesy of Sony Pictures ClassicsLászló Nemes knew that when it came time to make his first feature film he wouldn’t have trouble finding a subject.
The Holocaust, in his native Hungary.
“It’s a pretty defining event for me,” said the director of “Son of Saul,” the controversial and intense new film about Auschwitz that opens Dec. 18. “I’ve been carrying that destruction in my genes,” he adds with a grimace.
His star, Geza Röhrig, has a similar set of damaged chromosomes in his personal history.
“If you add in the aunts and cousins, the number of family we lost in the Shoah is well into double digits,” he said. The two were interviewed when the film played the New York Film Festival here in October.
Both men are Jews by birth and upbringing, writers and creators by trade and temperament, at once detached and yet possessed of a flame-like intensity.
Just like the film.
A fiction film based on the writings of members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, “Son of Saul” is set in the very heart of the killing machinery. The Sonderkommando were predominantly Jewish prisoners selected by the camp personnel to do the actual dirty work of the death camps, helping herd the victims from the trains to the gas chambers, sorting through the belongings of the dead, cleaning the blood and excrement from the killing rooms, filling the crematoria with bodies and then disposing of the ashes. In exchange, they were briefly given better food and sleeping arrangements than the other prisoners, but every few months the entire group would be killed and replaced. They were, after all, among the very few witnesses to the murders being methodically committed in the death camps.
Apparently some critics were upset by the focus on the Sonderkommando, who they considered tacit accomplices in the murders. However, as even a cursory glance at Anglo-American criminal law or the Nuremberg trial records would tell them, someone acting under duress is not an accomplice but a victim. Some also felt that the film’s singular focus on one Sonderkommando denied the viewer a wider context on the Holocaust.
Nemes’ explanation for the film’s focus, drawn largely from the writings of Sonderkommando members who didn’t survive, is straightforward.
“I didn’t want to make a film with a distant, detached point of view,” he says. “I wanted to place the audience in the shoes of one person in the middle of the killing machine. Otherwise the Holocaust becomes an abstract concept and the audience can back away.”
But at the same time, the film eschews the easy torture-porn images, obscuring them with smoke or focusing his camera on the faces of the men doing their terrible work.
In October 1944 the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz organized a short-lived, violent rebellion. They dynamited one of the crematoria, fought the SS with smuggled and improvised weapons. Around this time, they also managed to take a handful of photos of the gas chambers and the victims, the only visual documentation extant.
“Son of Saul” is set during the 48 hours surrounding these events. From its opening shot of Saul Ausländer (Röhrig) working in the ordinary turmoil of a shift at the gas chambers, we are only occasionally aware of the larger picture. Rather, Nemes literally focuses our attention on Saul, almost always in close-up, his heavy brow often obscuring his penetrating, dark eyes, an impassive observer so inured to the nightmare around him that he seems utterly dehumanized. Nemes uses long takes and a perpetually moving camera combined with very shallow focus, with the result that we are only vaguely aware of the ghastly sights around Saul, as dimly aware as he seems to be.
He is truly an Ausländer, an outsider, a stranger, even to his own feelings. The constant motion serves to numb Saul (and the audience) to the (sur)reality around him. His strangeness is rendered all the more acute when he becomes convinced that one of the young victims of the day’s murderous proceedings is his own son. When Saul decides to give the child a traditional Jewish burial, his path begins to diverge from that of his fellow prisoners.
The background/foreground tension is at the very heart of the film’s sulfurous dialectic of mass murder, and Nemes worked hard to visualize it. Between the long takes and the restlessly wandering, probing camera that alternately follows and leads Saul, the film required a daunting level of preplanning, juxtaposed with a certain improvisational flair.
“We did plan everything visually,” Nemes says.
“He’s a tremendously organized filmmaker,” Röhrig chimes in.
Nemes continues, “We had to know the work process in the background. We had to know all the details. I had on a tablet [computer] an overhead grid indicating all the camera positions. We would add the main action into the background, but the background [came] first. It was a mixture of chaos and organization.”
The result is a film that is relentless in its intensity and focus, yet densely layered thematically, visually and, most of all, aurally. Working closely with sound designer Tamás Zányi, Nemes has constructed a film whose soundtrack is as important as its images. Devoid of background music but constructed with great care, the sound of “Son of Saul” is as exceedkingly intuitive as the visuals were exceedkingly mapped out.
“It was very organic,” Nemes says. “We understood that we would use a lot of sound without identifiable sources, [things like the constant sound of] the machinery of the crematoria. It’s like a living beast. But at some point in the process we started taking stuff out. We needed an instinctive understanding of the sound of the film.”
One element of the visual track that sets the film apart from virtually all recent films about the Shoah is its palette. The film does have a muted palette, but his choice of natural color pays powerful dividends towards the end of the film when events take us outside the camp into a birch-tree forest whose greenery seems almost liberatingly vivid.
By way of explanation Röhrig, who has a yeshiva background, talks about the rabbinic dialectic that juxtaposes the Law and the World.
“There is no green in the Torah,” he says. “But by 1944 there’s no Law, no Torah and all you have left is the green. Only the world remains.”
Despite the dark forces in power in contemporary Hungarian politics, the film was successful in its native land.
“People are taking about the film and making it the focus,” Nemes says with obvious satisfaction. “It’s in the conversations in a country that still hasn’t come to terms with this part of its history.”
Unfortunately, the interview with Nemes and Röhrig took place before the announcement of plans to erect a statue in Szekesfehervar of the notorious anti-Semite Balint Homan. Their comments on the state of Europe today, however, make their point-of-view clear.
Asked about Hungary’s current ultra-right government, Nemes is blunt.
“European civilization is falling into little pieces,” he says. “The fact that a strong Jewish civilization was destroyed in Europe less than a hundred years ago is linked to the fact that Europe has no future. Hungary is a desolate country. In 1910 Budapest was a vibrant, multicultural city, but now it’s a city – and a country – in ruins. But Hungarians don’t understand that.”
Röhrig adds somberly, “We have to retell this story — l’dor va-dor — in whatever way it takes. It’s still a part of our reality.”
“Son of Saul” opens Friday, Dec. 18 at Film Forum (209 W. Houston St.) and the Lincoln Plaza (Broadway and 62nd Street). For information, go to filmforum.com or lincolnplazacinema.com.---------------------
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. A gentle reminder that our web site is waiting for you with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion columns and more.
Carrying ‘That Destruction’ In Their Genes
‘Son of Saul’ filmmaker and star on what went into making the intense Sonderkommando story set in Auschwitz, and the controversy it engendered.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
Director László Nemes and Géza Röhrig on the set of “Son of Saul.” Photo by Ildi Hermann, Courtesy of Sony Pictures ClassicsLászló Nemes knew that when it came time to make his first feature film he wouldn’t have trouble finding a subject.
The Holocaust, in his native Hungary.
“It’s a pretty defining event for me,” said the director of “Son of Saul,” the controversial and intense new film about Auschwitz that opens Dec. 18. “I’ve been carrying that destruction in my genes,” he adds with a grimace.
His star, Geza Röhrig, has a similar set of damaged chromosomes in his personal history.
“If you add in the aunts and cousins, the number of family we lost in the Shoah is well into double digits,” he said. The two were interviewed when the film played the New York Film Festival here in October.
Both men are Jews by birth and upbringing, writers and creators by trade and temperament, at once detached and yet possessed of a flame-like intensity.
Just like the film.
A fiction film based on the writings of members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, “Son of Saul” is set in the very heart of the killing machinery. The Sonderkommando were predominantly Jewish prisoners selected by the camp personnel to do the actual dirty work of the death camps, helping herd the victims from the trains to the gas chambers, sorting through the belongings of the dead, cleaning the blood and excrement from the killing rooms, filling the crematoria with bodies and then disposing of the ashes. In exchange, they were briefly given better food and sleeping arrangements than the other prisoners, but every few months the entire group would be killed and replaced. They were, after all, among the very few witnesses to the murders being methodically committed in the death camps.
Apparently some critics were upset by the focus on the Sonderkommando, who they considered tacit accomplices in the murders. However, as even a cursory glance at Anglo-American criminal law or the Nuremberg trial records would tell them, someone acting under duress is not an accomplice but a victim. Some also felt that the film’s singular focus on one Sonderkommando denied the viewer a wider context on the Holocaust.
Nemes’ explanation for the film’s focus, drawn largely from the writings of Sonderkommando members who didn’t survive, is straightforward.
“I didn’t want to make a film with a distant, detached point of view,” he says. “I wanted to place the audience in the shoes of one person in the middle of the killing machine. Otherwise the Holocaust becomes an abstract concept and the audience can back away.”
But at the same time, the film eschews the easy torture-porn images, obscuring them with smoke or focusing his camera on the faces of the men doing their terrible work.
In October 1944 the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz organized a short-lived, violent rebellion. They dynamited one of the crematoria, fought the SS with smuggled and improvised weapons. Around this time, they also managed to take a handful of photos of the gas chambers and the victims, the only visual documentation extant.
“Son of Saul” is set during the 48 hours surrounding these events. From its opening shot of Saul Ausländer (Röhrig) working in the ordinary turmoil of a shift at the gas chambers, we are only occasionally aware of the larger picture. Rather, Nemes literally focuses our attention on Saul, almost always in close-up, his heavy brow often obscuring his penetrating, dark eyes, an impassive observer so inured to the nightmare around him that he seems utterly dehumanized. Nemes uses long takes and a perpetually moving camera combined with very shallow focus, with the result that we are only vaguely aware of the ghastly sights around Saul, as dimly aware as he seems to be.
He is truly an Ausländer, an outsider, a stranger, even to his own feelings. The constant motion serves to numb Saul (and the audience) to the (sur)reality around him. His strangeness is rendered all the more acute when he becomes convinced that one of the young victims of the day’s murderous proceedings is his own son. When Saul decides to give the child a traditional Jewish burial, his path begins to diverge from that of his fellow prisoners.
The background/foreground tension is at the very heart of the film’s sulfurous dialectic of mass murder, and Nemes worked hard to visualize it. Between the long takes and the restlessly wandering, probing camera that alternately follows and leads Saul, the film required a daunting level of preplanning, juxtaposed with a certain improvisational flair.
“We did plan everything visually,” Nemes says.
“He’s a tremendously organized filmmaker,” Röhrig chimes in.
Nemes continues, “We had to know the work process in the background. We had to know all the details. I had on a tablet [computer] an overhead grid indicating all the camera positions. We would add the main action into the background, but the background [came] first. It was a mixture of chaos and organization.”
The result is a film that is relentless in its intensity and focus, yet densely layered thematically, visually and, most of all, aurally. Working closely with sound designer Tamás Zányi, Nemes has constructed a film whose soundtrack is as important as its images. Devoid of background music but constructed with great care, the sound of “Son of Saul” is as exceedkingly intuitive as the visuals were exceedkingly mapped out.
“It was very organic,” Nemes says. “We understood that we would use a lot of sound without identifiable sources, [things like the constant sound of] the machinery of the crematoria. It’s like a living beast. But at some point in the process we started taking stuff out. We needed an instinctive understanding of the sound of the film.”
One element of the visual track that sets the film apart from virtually all recent films about the Shoah is its palette. The film does have a muted palette, but his choice of natural color pays powerful dividends towards the end of the film when events take us outside the camp into a birch-tree forest whose greenery seems almost liberatingly vivid.
By way of explanation Röhrig, who has a yeshiva background, talks about the rabbinic dialectic that juxtaposes the Law and the World.
“There is no green in the Torah,” he says. “But by 1944 there’s no Law, no Torah and all you have left is the green. Only the world remains.”
Despite the dark forces in power in contemporary Hungarian politics, the film was successful in its native land.
“People are taking about the film and making it the focus,” Nemes says with obvious satisfaction. “It’s in the conversations in a country that still hasn’t come to terms with this part of its history.”
Unfortunately, the interview with Nemes and Röhrig took place before the announcement of plans to erect a statue in Szekesfehervar of the notorious anti-Semite Balint Homan. Their comments on the state of Europe today, however, make their point-of-view clear.
Asked about Hungary’s current ultra-right government, Nemes is blunt.
“European civilization is falling into little pieces,” he says. “The fact that a strong Jewish civilization was destroyed in Europe less than a hundred years ago is linked to the fact that Europe has no future. Hungary is a desolate country. In 1910 Budapest was a vibrant, multicultural city, but now it’s a city – and a country – in ruins. But Hungarians don’t understand that.”
Röhrig adds somberly, “We have to retell this story — l’dor va-dor — in whatever way it takes. It’s still a part of our reality.”
“Son of Saul” opens Friday, Dec. 18 at Film Forum (209 W. Houston St.) and the Lincoln Plaza (Broadway and 62nd Street). For information, go to filmforum.com or lincolnplazacinema.com.---------------------
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. A gentle reminder that our web site is waiting for you with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion columns and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
---------------------
When The Kosher Chef Is KingSteve K. Walz
Special To The Jewish Week
The year-old Herbert Samuel restaurant in the Ritz Carlton in Herzliya. Courtesy of the Ritz CarltonWhen the Aubergine restaurant opened 15 years ago in the David Intercontinental hotel in Tel Aviv, it marked a new day in Israel’s culinary scene. Here was what critics were calling a really fine Israeli-Mediterranean-French eatery, with dishes crafted by executive chef Alon Hirtenstein, and it was kosher. And it wasn’t a free-standing storefront restaurant. It was tucked into the hotel’s atrium lobby.
It was, arguably, the beginning of a trend, as upscale Israeli hotels began to reposition themselves by tweaking or upgrading their high-end kosher offerings. The trend is being swept along by the popularity of celebrity chef shows and the increasingly sophisticated culinary tastes of travelers and business executives.
“If you are a luxury property, you must offer guests a range of dining possibilities, including a signature chef’s restaurant and not just a dining room,” said Rafi Baeri, vice president of marketing and sales for the Dan Hotel chain, which runs the prestigious King David Hotel in Jerusalem and Dan Tel Aviv. “Many guests usually stay more than one just one evening, so you have to vary what and where they are eating in the hotel, and based on our experience, most guests will want to indulge themselves in a high-quality meal.”
Both the King David and the Dan Tel Aviv showcase first-class kosher restaurants — La Regence in the former and Hayarkon 99 in the latter. “For restaurants of this caliber to be successful, you have to invest in creative thinking because these restaurants are small in size but labor intensive, meaning you have to not only have a great chef but also an extremely attentive staff of waiters, sommeliers, etc., as the service is part of the show,” Baeri explained.
Though La Regence existed in the King David Hotel since before the birth of the State of Israel (prior to becoming part of the Dan Hotel chain), the restaurant, which highlights classic French cuisine and service, started garnering headlines when executive chef David Bitton took over seven years ago.
“Historically, it’s the oldest kosher restaurant within a five-star hotel in Israel,” said Elie Fischer, who heads the food and beverage department at the King David Hotel. “It became kosher after the Federmann family, owners of the Dan chain, purchased the King David in 1957.” Chef Bitton, Fischer said, has raised the profile of the restaurant, largely through his use of the “slow cooking” technique.
Fischer said that Bitton’s reputation is such that top chefs from France, including those who have received an elite Michelin star ranking, annually visit the King David Hotel in order to learn about the challenges of kosher cuisine and cook new dishes with the chef.
According to Chen Broner, assistant general manager of food and beverage at the Dan Tel Aviv, the Hayarkon 99 restaurant, which opened in 2009 and is helmed by chef Oved Alfia, has become a popular spot not just among the hotel guests, but also within the local business community as well.
“During the past few years, chef Alfia has made a tremendous impact with the restaurant; guests from other hotels have flocked over to the restaurant, as well as local business executives and even members of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, who want to entertain their foreign guests in a high-end restaurant that is not overly expensive.”
Alfia, Broner said, is something of a locavore, making use of the freshest ingredients that he purchases from the local fruit and vegetable market, fishermen and cattle farms.
Over in Herzliya Pituach, the Ritz Carlton Hotel last year became the first luxury facility in the global chain to feature a kosher chef’s restaurant. The restaurant, which is called Herbert Samuel and overlooks the Herzliya Marina, is the kosher culinary flipside of the iconic non-kosher Herbert Samuel restaurant in Tel Aviv, which is run by Adi’s Lifestyle Group.
Relying on fresh ingredients straight from local markets, complemented by the best Israeli wines, the menu embraces meat and fish dishes combining French and Mediterranean culinary accents. The menu features Herbert Samuel’s signature dishes such as the tomato salad and chestnut gnocchi.
“Today people are more health-conscious when it comes to dining out; even the more traditional kitchens favor lighter and healthier options, such as the growing trend of avoiding high-fat dairy products, like butter and cream,” said Herbert Samuel’s chef, Kobi Ohayon. “Our menu gives diners the opportunity to indulge in an elevated kosher experience without losing the flavors and richness of fine dining cuisine. … I offer them a ‘new kitchen’ experience Israeli-Mediterranean style where there’s a healthy dose of olive oil and fresh ingredients.” ---------------------
News:
Reopening A Forgotten Chapter Of Yiddish Theater
Arts - Theater
An operetta from the 'Jewish Verdi' weds Old World and New.
Harlem Chef Gets Lesson In Kashrut
Food & Wine
Greater Boston's Jewish Hub
Travel
'We Insist On Equality'
New York---------------------
When The Kosher Chef Is KingSteve K. Walz
Special To The Jewish Week
The year-old Herbert Samuel restaurant in the Ritz Carlton in Herzliya. Courtesy of the Ritz CarltonWhen the Aubergine restaurant opened 15 years ago in the David Intercontinental hotel in Tel Aviv, it marked a new day in Israel’s culinary scene. Here was what critics were calling a really fine Israeli-Mediterranean-French eatery, with dishes crafted by executive chef Alon Hirtenstein, and it was kosher. And it wasn’t a free-standing storefront restaurant. It was tucked into the hotel’s atrium lobby.
It was, arguably, the beginning of a trend, as upscale Israeli hotels began to reposition themselves by tweaking or upgrading their high-end kosher offerings. The trend is being swept along by the popularity of celebrity chef shows and the increasingly sophisticated culinary tastes of travelers and business executives.
“If you are a luxury property, you must offer guests a range of dining possibilities, including a signature chef’s restaurant and not just a dining room,” said Rafi Baeri, vice president of marketing and sales for the Dan Hotel chain, which runs the prestigious King David Hotel in Jerusalem and Dan Tel Aviv. “Many guests usually stay more than one just one evening, so you have to vary what and where they are eating in the hotel, and based on our experience, most guests will want to indulge themselves in a high-quality meal.”
Both the King David and the Dan Tel Aviv showcase first-class kosher restaurants — La Regence in the former and Hayarkon 99 in the latter. “For restaurants of this caliber to be successful, you have to invest in creative thinking because these restaurants are small in size but labor intensive, meaning you have to not only have a great chef but also an extremely attentive staff of waiters, sommeliers, etc., as the service is part of the show,” Baeri explained.
Though La Regence existed in the King David Hotel since before the birth of the State of Israel (prior to becoming part of the Dan Hotel chain), the restaurant, which highlights classic French cuisine and service, started garnering headlines when executive chef David Bitton took over seven years ago.
“Historically, it’s the oldest kosher restaurant within a five-star hotel in Israel,” said Elie Fischer, who heads the food and beverage department at the King David Hotel. “It became kosher after the Federmann family, owners of the Dan chain, purchased the King David in 1957.” Chef Bitton, Fischer said, has raised the profile of the restaurant, largely through his use of the “slow cooking” technique.
Fischer said that Bitton’s reputation is such that top chefs from France, including those who have received an elite Michelin star ranking, annually visit the King David Hotel in order to learn about the challenges of kosher cuisine and cook new dishes with the chef.
According to Chen Broner, assistant general manager of food and beverage at the Dan Tel Aviv, the Hayarkon 99 restaurant, which opened in 2009 and is helmed by chef Oved Alfia, has become a popular spot not just among the hotel guests, but also within the local business community as well.
“During the past few years, chef Alfia has made a tremendous impact with the restaurant; guests from other hotels have flocked over to the restaurant, as well as local business executives and even members of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, who want to entertain their foreign guests in a high-end restaurant that is not overly expensive.”
Alfia, Broner said, is something of a locavore, making use of the freshest ingredients that he purchases from the local fruit and vegetable market, fishermen and cattle farms.
Over in Herzliya Pituach, the Ritz Carlton Hotel last year became the first luxury facility in the global chain to feature a kosher chef’s restaurant. The restaurant, which is called Herbert Samuel and overlooks the Herzliya Marina, is the kosher culinary flipside of the iconic non-kosher Herbert Samuel restaurant in Tel Aviv, which is run by Adi’s Lifestyle Group.
Relying on fresh ingredients straight from local markets, complemented by the best Israeli wines, the menu embraces meat and fish dishes combining French and Mediterranean culinary accents. The menu features Herbert Samuel’s signature dishes such as the tomato salad and chestnut gnocchi.
“Today people are more health-conscious when it comes to dining out; even the more traditional kitchens favor lighter and healthier options, such as the growing trend of avoiding high-fat dairy products, like butter and cream,” said Herbert Samuel’s chef, Kobi Ohayon. “Our menu gives diners the opportunity to indulge in an elevated kosher experience without losing the flavors and richness of fine dining cuisine. … I offer them a ‘new kitchen’ experience Israeli-Mediterranean style where there’s a healthy dose of olive oil and fresh ingredients.” ---------------------
News:
Reopening A Forgotten Chapter Of Yiddish Theater
Arts - Theater
An operetta from the 'Jewish Verdi' weds Old World and New.
Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week
It takes a shtetl: A scene from the Folksbiene’s revival of “Di Goldene Kale.” Ben Moody
He was a Lithuanian immigrant whose sparkling operettas, which ranked with those of the greatest of European composers, wowed audiences on the Lower East Side and paved the way for the Broadway musical. They even called him “Victor Herbert with a yarmulke,” a reference to the German-raised prolific Tin Pan Alley composer of popular operettas. His name was Joseph Rumshinsky, and he wrote close to 100 light operas, almost none of which have been performed for at least half a century.
But now, with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s new production of “Di Goldene Kale” (The Golden Marriage), a forgotten chapter of Yiddish theater has been reopened, one that illuminates how Eastern European Jewish liturgical and folk traditions were gloriously wedded with American musical innovations like ragtime, Tin Pan Alley and jazz.
Rumshinsky was one of a quartet of composers — the others were Sholom Secunda, Alexander Olshanetsky, and Abraham Ellstein — who dominated Yiddish musical theater during the first half of the 20th century in America. “Di Goldene Kale” premiered in New York on Feb. 9, 1923, at the Second Avenue Theater, during the era when the doors to further immigration from Eastern Europe were being slammed shut by the federal government. Arriving when the immigrant population was at its height, and encapsulating the fantasies of Jewish immigrants for success in America, it became one of the most popular of Rumshinsky’s operettas. The new production runs through New Year’s Weekend at the Folksbiene’s new home, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City.
Directed by Brynna Wasserman and Motl Didner, “Di Goldene Kale” is a fairy tale about an Eastern European Jewish girl named Goldele (Rachel Policar) who, having been left as a child in the care of another family, inherits a massive fortune from her father in America. Although many in the village seek to woo her, including the handsome young son, Misha (Cameron Johnson), of the family in which she was raised, she rashly promises her hand to any suitor who can reunite her with her mother.
Meanwhile, Goldele’s millionaire American cousin, Jerome (Glenn Seven Allen), who comes to take her back with him to New York, falls in love with the daughter of her adoptive family, Khanele (Jillian Gottlieb). As the action shifts to New York, the characters must sort out their relationships, both to each other and to an alien society ruled by conspicuous consumption rather than love or loyalty.
Michael Ochs, a retired music professor at Harvard, discovered the vocal lines of “Di Goldene Kale” in 1990 in a Harvard archive; he put them together with the orchestral score, which he found at UCLA. The reassembled operetta was first performed last summer at Rutgers with the help of Zalmen Mlotek, the artistic director of the Folksbiene, who then resolved to bring it to New York. As Mlotek told The Jewish Week, audiences have responded to the piece “as if they were back in 1923, in the original audience,” enjoying the “singable melodies, the humor and the pathos.”
What makes “Di Goldene Kale” particularly exciting, added Didner, the Folksbiene’s associate artistic director, is that it contains “everything that one associates with long-lost Yiddish theater — true love, the long lost mother, the longing for the Old Country, a patriotic scene, and a masquerade ball.” Along with its diversity of musical styles — from Russian and Ukrainian folk songs to opera to ragtime (with echoes, throughout the score, of Jacques Offenbach, Felix Mendelssohn, Georges Bizet, and Gilbert and Sullivan) — it was, Didner observed, “a checklist of what audiences wanted” from both Yiddish theater and European operetta.
In line with the Yiddish theater’s penchant for dramatizing Jewish ritual, Didner noted, “Di Goldene Kale” even contains a Kiddush scene in the middle, in which the Friday night blessing over the wine is chanted in operatic style. Indeed, as Rumshinsky wrote in his memoirs, “Klangn fun Mayn Leben” (Sounds From My Life), he found a “perceptible rivalry” in America between the synagogue and the theater — in the synagogue, “hopping ditties sung, flutes, trombones [and] clarinets are imitated, there is much falsetto singing, there is a stamping of feet, tunes without words are indulged in…” while in the theater, he found “choirs garbed in prayer shawls and skullcaps, Jews bearded, Jews bearing Scrolls of the Law, and a great deal of singing of the accepted liturgical pieces — just as if it were a synagogue!”
This interplay between the synagogue and the concert hall was characteristic of Yiddish culture, according to Hankus Netsky, a composer and ethnomusicologist who founded the Klezmer Conservatory Band. He told The Jewish Week that Rumshinsky’s compositions were so popular that when he had a wedding scene in one of his operettas, “musicians doing weddings in New York would have to play the new tune the next Sunday in their synagogue ceremonies.”
Netsky called Rumshinsky the “Jewish Verdi,” the guy who wrapped up his entire culture and made it into art.” While he “knew that he could make people melt by evoking the sound of prayer, as he did by quoting musically from Kol Nidrei, he was also completely aware of everything that was going on in popular music.” This is why, Netsky said, a well-known Rumshinsky song like “Sheyne Vi Di Levone” (Beautiful As The Moon), can be performed as a rumba or swing number as well as a traditional Jewish tune. “He knew what the Jewish template was,” Netsky explained, “and could extend it in any direction.”
Rumshinsky also had an outsized influence, Netsky said, on American Jewish composers like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. Berlin attended “Di Goldene Kale” in 1923, where he was no doubt tickled to hear his patriotic 1917 song “Over There” used in the score. And George Gershwin played selections from Rumshinsky’s “Dos Tsebrokhene Fidele” (The Broken Fiddle) in the Catskills in the late 1910s. But Netsky said that Berlin and Gershwin, who had Jewish backgrounds, were merely “stuck with a little bit of residual Jewishness, like a chocolate bar made in a factory that uses peanuts.” But Rumshinsky, he observed, was the opposite. “He came here with both a full Jewish education and full musical education and truly invented American Jewish music.”
“Di Goldene Kale” runs through Jan. 3 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Place. Performance schedule varies, but is typically Wednesdays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 6 p.m., Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 2 p.m. and Fridays at noon. (There are also added performances at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. this Thursday, Dec. 17, but no performance this Friday, December 18). For tickets, $40 ($20 for students), call OvationTix at image: chrome-extension://lifbcibllhkdhoafpjfnlhfpfgnpldfl/call_skype_logo.png(866) 811-4111 FREE or visit nytf.org.
---------------------
Harlem Chef Gets Lesson In Kashrut
Food & Wine
One chef from Harlem and one from Jerusalem created this dish. Michele Chabin/JW
Chefs Johnson and Barak say they will win the Taste of Waldorf Astoria competition.
Michele Chabin
Special To The Jewish Week
One of the first things Joseph "JJ" Johnson, a chef at the trendy The Cecil restaurant in Harlem, did when he flew to Israel to learn from and collaborate with Chef Itzik Barak, the master chef of the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Jerusalem, was to unpack some of the favorite kitchen knives and other utensils he uses back home.
Johnson was utterly shocked when Barak nearly shouted, “No, you can’t bring them into the kitchen because the rabbi said they’re not kosher.” And they could not be made kosher.
While the two chefs spoke several times before Johnson’s arrival, the New Yorker hadn’t thought to ask about the knives and the Israeli never thought to bring it up.
Johnson, a semifinalist in the Rising Star category of the 2015 Restaurant & Chef James Beard Awards, was chosen to participate in the Waldorf Astoria chain’s Taste of Waldorf Astoria competition, a cook-off between five pairs of master chefs and up-and-coming ones in New Orleans, Orlando, Amsterdam, Beijing and Jerusalem.
In 2014 Johnson, whose specialty is Afro-Asian food, was named one of the most promising chefs under the age of 30 by Forbes and Zagat’s.
Standing at the hotel’s kitchen counter alongside Barak on Dec. 3, the day the two chefs unveiled the dish they hope will win the New York-based competition on February 24, 2016, Johnson smiled broadly as he related his first encounter with kosher dietary laws.
“Cooking kosher has required a mental change” the young chef admitted with a rueful smile. “Now I just don’t bring that ingredient over here or that ingredient over there. I can’t just set up a cutting board wherever I want. And I never knew kosher meat is salted,” a fact that affects how dishes are flavored.
Johnson, whose family roots are Puerto Rican, African American and Caribbean, said his first trip to Israel, and especially his visit to Mahane Yehuda, was a feast for the senses.
“Jerusalem’s market has some of the best produce I’ve ever seen. San Francisco has nothing on the Jerusalem market. Chef Itzik knows everyone there and everywhere we went we were invited behind the counter,” he said.
Dining in different restaurants every night, Johnson discovered that the spices in many Israeli dishes are similar to the ones he uses back home: “Really bold spices speak to me. There’s really some love and soul in Israeli food.”
The elegant and yes, delicious, dish the chefs co-created is called Seven Species; it consists of sea bream topped with sourdough bread and smoked eggplant and a bulgur salad sprinkled with pumpkin, pomegranates, dates and ginger. Tahini adds to the flavor.
Barak, who is considerably older and more experienced than his New York apprentice, called the collaboration “a true partnership. I’ve made a friend. We’re going win,” he said.
---------------------Greater Boston's Jewish Hub
Travel
Brookline excels in the suburban pursuits of eating, shopping, and outdoor leisure.
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
A shot of Washington Street in downtown Brookline. Wikimedia Commons
I’ll admit it: Charming though it may be, Boston can literally drive me crazy. My Honda and I have gotten lost more times than I can count amid picturesque alleys and baffling bridges.
The trickiest neighborhood of all is Brookline. Even Google’s algorithms are no match for those winding streets that, a friend helpfully explained, were born as cow paths in the 1600s.
Back then, Brookline was part of the city of Boston. But it carved out a separate identity more than 300 years ago and clings proudly to enclave status today, despite being surrounded by the city proper. After all, the onetime home of Saul Bellow, Michael Bloomberg, Barbara Walters, and Patriots owner Robert Kraft — along with Tom Brady and Gisele — has enough glory of its own.
For the traveler, Brookline is best experienced as the lively, tasty Jewish hub of greater Boston. Since the major attractions are in Boston proper — the Museum of Fine Arts and cobblestoned Back Bay to the east; the Boston University campus, the Charles River and Cambridge just north — it’s no surprise that Brookline excels in the suburban pursuits of eating, shopping, and outdoor leisure.
Outdoors — in wintertime Boston? It’s a valid question, considering that I saw remnants of last year’s epic snowfall still piled high on a June visit. But with 60-degree weather in December, Brookline’s lovely parks are still full of families. As the parent of a high-energy toddler, I noted with approval the verdant expanses throughout Brookline — from well-kept playgrounds to the shady expanses of Amory Park, where wooden footbridges crisscross willow-draped ponds, and hilly lawns boast views over downtown.
Fittingly, Brookline was home and inspiration for Frederick Law Olmsted, the Central Park designer and America’s most famous landscape architect. Olmsted’s private studio and gardens are now a national park and historic site; admission to these lovely grounds is free, and a guided tour is worthwhile for those interested in either gardening or parks.
The physical heart of Brookline — and its Jewish immigrant community, which dates back more than a century — is Coolidge Corner, the intersection of the town’s two main drags, Beacon and Harvard streets. Named not for Silent Cal but for a 19th-century merchant, the spot has a namesake in the vintage Coolidge Corner Theatre, a lovingly restored Art Deco-era movie house with eclectic screenings and cultural events.
You could turn onto Beals Street and visit Brookline’s other main attraction, the unassuming clapboard house where our 35th president grew up, preserved today as the John F. Kennedy National Historic Site. Or you could do what I do: Eat and shop your way down Harvard Street, a veritable smorgasbord of Jewish dining options.
Starting at the north end, you have Rubin’s Kosher Restaurant, a popular catering spot with the kind of menu items you rarely see outside New York — kishkas, kasha varnishkas, kugel. Further down on a block dotted with kosher take-out is Kupel’s Bakery, another kosher spot that specializes in bagels and all that accompanies them.
And right near Coolidge Corner is Zaftig’s Delicatessen, which calls itself a Jewish-style deli and is decidedly unkosher. Populated by the same youthful hipsters who shop down the street at Trader Joe’s, Zaftig’s has a menu that nods to the Jewish classics — knishes, brisket, potato pancakes — but reads more like a typical Boston pub, heavy on salads and burgers.
Crossing Harvard Street, the big question is: Ice cream or shopping? Brookline’s most vibrant intersection is bustling with independent boutiques selling toys, clothes, and especially books. In a town said to have the highest percentage of Ph.Ds anywhere, the Brookline Booksmith is the equivalent of a neighborhood bar — a gathering spot for book clubs, author readings and children’s events.
After tarrying amid the shelves there, I wandered down Harvard to another institution: Kolbo, a fixture for Judaica since the late’ 70s and the source for handmade mezuzot, menorahs, and the gorgeous ketubot that decorate so many of my Boston friends’ living rooms. The Israel Book Shop, a few blocks away, is a destination for Jewish calendars, Hebrew-language children’s games, puzzles in the shape of Israel, and an impressive array of Jewish books – from the colorful to the scholarly.
My final stop in this or any Boston neighborhood is J.P. Licks, a local ice cream chain with the flavor I can’t find outside of New England: coffee Oreo. Everything here is kosher certified (and a lot of it is vegan, gluten- or dairy-free), including seasonal temptations like candy cane, gingerbread molasses, and eggnog ice cream flavors.
Driving out of Brookline recently, I was struck by how quickly urban blocks gave way to thick forests and tranquil duck ponds. It was awhile before I noticed the frustrated refrain of my Android GPS: “Rerouting … rerouting … rerouting…,” foiled once again by the cow paths of Brookline.
But if we were stranded in the woods, at least I had a bag of rugelach with me.
editor@jewishweek.org
---------------------
MORE HEADLINES:'We Insist On Equality'
‘We Insist On Equality’
Reform and Conservative leaders press Israeli president on rights for non-Orthodox.
JTA
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and URJ head Rabbi Rick Jacobs at last week’s event here. JTAIt was all hugs and smiles when Israeli President Reuven Rivlin met last Friday with leaders of America’s three main Jewish denominations at an event hosted by UJA-Federation of New York.
But when it came time to speak, the Reform and Conservative leaders made clear they had no intention of papering over their disappointment with Israel’s government when it comes to non-Orthodox rights in Israel.
Both Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism and Rabbi Steven Wernick of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism called on Israel to grant equal rights to non-Orthodox Jews on matters concerning marriage, divorce, conversion and worship at the Western Wall.
“We insist on equality, not just at the Kotel — the Western Wall — but also in rabbinical courts, under the bridal canopy, at funerals and conversions,” Rabbi Jacobs said. “It cannot be that Israel will be the only democratic state in the world that formally does not grant equal rights to the majority of the Jewish people.”
Rabbi Wernick applauded the Israeli president for citing the late Conservative sage Abraham Joshua Heschel in Rivlin’s remarks at the White House Hanukkah party on Wednesday. “Yet Rabbi Heschel in Israel would not be afforded the same rights as our Orthodox brethren — can’t do marriage, can’t do divorces, can’t do conversions,” Rabbi Wernick said.
When Rivlin’s turn to speak arrived, he made a point of calling attention to the fact that he was referring to Rabbis Jacobs and Wernick by the title “rav” — rabbi in Hebrew. At least one of his predecessors pointedly refused to use that appellation.
It was a sign of how little progress the Reform and Conservative movements have made in getting Israeli recognition and rights that the president felt that merely calling them rabbis merited highlighting.
The Israeli Rabbinate still does not recognize non-Orthodox conversions, does not allow Conservative or Reform rabbis to preside over funerals and does not sanction weddings performed by non-Orthodox rabbis. In fact, any rabbi who performs a wedding in Israel outside the auspices of the Rabbinate may be subject to a two-year prison sentence, even if the rabbi is Orthodox.
The current Israeli government has rolled back even some recent baby steps toward greater religious pluralism. The last government loosened conversion rules to allow prospective Israeli converts to convert under any municipal rabbi in Israel (still all Orthodox). That step would have allowed those with strict hometown rabbis to convert under a more flexible rabbi from out of town, but the current government rescinded it.
The rhetoric from the Israeli Rabbinate and Religious Affairs Ministry hasn’t been encouraging either. Last week, after Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs, visited a Conservative Jewish day school in New York and tweeted that he found the students inspiring, Israeli Chief Rabbi David Lau called the visit unacceptable.
“When you go to a specific place and recognize a specific community, if it’s a community that creates distance from the Jewish people, I don’t see how you can consider that,” Rabbi Lau told a charedi Orthodox radio station. “You cannot go to a place where the education distances Jews not only from the tradition, but also from the past, and therefore from the future of the Jewish people.”
In July, Israeli Religious Services Minister David Azoulay said Reform Jews aren’t Jews.
That echoed a comment Rivlin himself famously made back in 1989, when as a Knesset member he visited a Reform synagogue and referred to the service as “idol worship, not Judaism.” Rivlin has since distanced himself from that comment and made amends with Conservative and Reform leaders.
Since his election last year as president, largely a ceremonial role in Israel, Rivlin has sought to build bridges, not burn them. He has become an outspoken advocate for Arab-Israeli rights, slammed Jewish extremism and vociferously condemned Israeli racism.
At Friday’s event in New York, Rivlin, who wore a large white skullcap, offered warm talk to the Reform and Conservative leaders, but no prospect of concrete changes. (Rivlin also embraced the Orthodox organizational leader present, Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president emeritus of the Orthodox Union.)
“It’s important for the State of Israel to show full respect and full sensitivity to all American Jews,” Rivlin said. “Even the major differences between us are an honest expression of concern shared by all of us, whether Orthodox, Reform or Conservative.
“We can and we should argue aggressively, but from the position of respect, of fairness, without denying anyone’s Jewishness, without denying the place of one approach or another within Jewish dialogue today,” he said. “Jewish culture is a culture of dispute through listening, and that is the most important thing: to listen one to another, even if sometimes we cannot agree or we are not ready to agree.”
After the meeting, Rabbi Jacobs hailed Rivlin for being a constructive voice while noting the president’s limitations to effect legislative change, given his ceremonial role.
“Rather than just talk about it and sing about it, we have to make change happen,” Rabbi Jacobs told JTA.
Nevertheless, Rabbi Jacobs said he holds out little prospect for change under the current government, given the right-wing and charedi composition of the ruling coalition. The focus for the Reform movement during this term, the rabbi said, is to hold the line.
“We want to hold the little gains that we have and not go backwards,” Rabbi Jacobs said. “In the meantime, those of us in the non-Orthodox movements have a challenging moment both in strengthening the ties to Israel and in helping her become what she has always said she can be.”
For his part, Rabbi Wernick said that even though Rivlin doesn’t have political power, his bully pulpit gives him influence.
“If he and his staff can become voices for change, that presents more opportunities,” Rabbi Wernick told JTA. “And he’s changed even from when I first met with him as president. I feel like he’s listening. Let’s give him credit where credit is due.”
editor@jewishweek.org
---------------------
Musings - Bits, Bytes, Being
Rabbi David WolpeMusings - Bits, Bytes, Being
Rabbi David WolpeSpeaking to another human being, one brings a fullness to the encounter. We look each other in the eyes and relate person to person. With a machine, we are inevitably partial; most of us remains hidden; it is an event of bits and bytes, not of being.
Some studies demonstrate that the mere presence of a phone on a table reduces the intimacy of conversation between two people. We are drawn away; a piece of us dwells in the suspended expectation of the screen’s siren song. We await the tone or light that is implicitly more urgent than the person before us. It is the technological equivalent of always watching the door for someone more interesting to enter. But now it is the medium, not the person; a person becomes more compelling by virtue of not being there. A text from an acquaintance trumps a confidence from an intimate.
Moses was given the greatest accolade in the Torah — he saw God “face to face.” A face-to-face encounter is the highest form of interaction. What we see on a screen is managed, curated, distant. Before you is presence, a human being, the image of God.
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/bits-bytes-being#9XeVMVWhzsShJObS.99
---------------------
Opinion - A Patrilineal Proposal: 'Bath' Mitzvah
Joshua HammermanSpecial To The Jewish Week
Joshua HammermanThirty years ago Rabbi Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg looked ominously at the landscape of American Jewry. With spiraling intermarriage rates and the 1983 decision of the Reform movement to allow Jewish status to be determined by the identity of the father, he peered into the future and asked, in a seminal essay in Clal Perspectives, “Will There be One Jewish People in the Year 2000?” He predicted that, “within decades, the Jewish people will be divided into two, mutually hostile groups who are unable and unwilling to marry each other.”
Rabbi Greenberg’s prognostication turns out to have been an understatement. If ONLY there were just two mutually hostile groups — for in fact the Jewish community has been divided into many more hostile camps, divided along halachic, ideological and political fault lines. Patrilineal descent is only one of the challenges we now face — but it is a big one, and now, a generation later, we are talking not in hypotheticals; we’re talking about real lives, an estimated 200,000 real lives, and counting.
Samantha (not her real name), a college student with a solid Jewish identity and a non-Jewish mother, grew up in a nearby Reform congregation where her family was very involved. She went on a Birthright Israel trip and fell in love with an Israeli guy, who then broke the news to her that most Israelis, including his own family, would not consider her to be Jewish.
Crushed by this revelation, she didn’t call her rabbi, who had never told her about the patrilineal descent issue. She called me, the Conservative rabbi across town, whom she had also known since childhood.
I made it clear that she should not feel ashamed or embarrassed in any way, that her Jewish upbringing had been solid and that we could rectify the situation relatively easily. All that would be required is a little dip into the ritual bath. I’d bring a few rabbis, we would sign a couple of documents, and that would be that.
Samantha took the patrilineal plunge and before she could dry off, her personal existential crisis was resolved, since the Israeli government would have to consider her to be Jewish — even though most Orthodox rabbis there would not accept my conversion.
I began to wonder whether there might be a way to reduce the pain for future Samanthas.
That’s when it came to me … the Bath Mitzvah.
The goal: for every 13-year-old to voluntarily immerse in a mikvah before her big day as a universally accepted part of the bar/bat Mitzvah experience.
OK, I know that at first glance might seem like the dumbest idea since the Betamax. But hear me out.
If Samantha had immersed before her bat mitzvah, the question of parentage would have been rendered irrelevant, since immersion is technically all that is required for conversion of a minor. For boys it’s more complicated, but since the vast majority of patrilineal boys are circumcised in infancy, that complication is minimized.
But to ask only patrilineal kids like Samantha to immerse, while giving their matrilineal friends a free pass, would be an insult to Samantha’s upbringing, and by extension, to the integrity of those movements that embrace patrilineality. There is enormous pressure on Conservative congregations to accept Samantha and the other patrilineals (and their children), yet to do so would create even more friction with the movements to the right. True, we could say that those movements don’t accept our conversions anyway, but that is precisely what the Reform movement said in the ’80s in their decision to go down the patrilineal path in the first place.
What we need is a way out that upholds the integrity both of Jewish tradition and all the religious streams. The stakes are enormous for all those who care about Samantha and her cohorts, who, if we don’t stop our bickering, will simply throw up their hands and walk away from Jewish communal life. At the very least, I hope my idea can inspire a dialogue that will lead to other initiatives.
As I envision the Bath Mitzvah, students would immerse either individually or as a class (yes, with bathing suits). Mikvahs would be preferred, but I can imagine enormous, community wide splash-fests in South Beach, Montauk or Santa Monica. Like the twinnings with Soviet Jews in the 1980s, this “dunk for unity” would link Jewish students of all backgrounds and become a meaningful component of the rite of passage, standardized and sanctioned by all the movements and supported by secular institutions like federations, JCCs and Israeli consulates. Curricula would be developed to explain how this simple act could unite the Jewish people. Perhaps the same funding partners that brought us Birthright Israel could incentivize this program by offering scholarships for family Israel trips.
Yes, there would be logistical concerns; compromise would be necessary on all sides. Conversion standards would need to be relaxed among the more traditional movements and those denominations currently accepting patrilineal descent would have to acknowledge the benefits of resolving a problem that they in part created.
There would be a number of ancillary advantages:
- Bath Mitzvah would send a clear message that we are all, in essence, Jews by choice;
- It would expose more Jews to the experience of ritual immersion without having to address, for the moment, more complicated questions regarding family purity;
- It would present a spiritual dimension to the bar mitzvah experience that is so often missing, marking it as a liminal moment — a symbolic passage through a “birth canal” of childhood to Jewish maturity;
- It would model for our kids — and for Israelis — how American Jews can work together for the common good, and how, in pioneering Orthodox feminist Blu Greenberg’s words, where there’s a rabbinic will, there’s a halachic way”;
- It would help transition American Jewry to a “post-gevalt” posture on intermarriage, redirecting our entire focus to fully embracing all Jewish children, including those of the 50 percent of Jewish millennials who grew up in dual faith families;
- Last but not least, it would enable Jews of different streams to more easily marry one another.
So what’s yours?
Rabbi Joshua Hammerman is spiritual leader of Temple Beth-El in Stamford, Conn.
Read More
---------------------
JWFoodandWine.com
NYBlueprint.com
JWCalendar.com
FreshInkForTeens.com
TheJewishWeek.com
---------------------
The Jewish Week
---------------------
JWFoodandWine.com
NYBlueprint.com
JWCalendar.com
FreshInkForTeens.com
TheJewishWeek.com
---------------------
The Jewish Week
1501 Broadway, Suite 505
New York, New York 10036, United States
---------------------
---------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment