Friday, January 15, 2016
Dear Reader,
Readers are focused on this week's column by Jewish Week editor and publisher Gary Rosenblatt, about the group of Jewish leaders who say the community is experiencing a crisis of ethics, and is calling for reform.
Gary Rosenblatt
Seeing ‘Crisis’ In Jewish Ethics, Group Urges Reform
Rabbis, academics say recent breaches ‘make mockery of Jewish values’; offer new blueprint.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary RosenblattFed up with ethical lapses among Jewish leaders that have “reached crisis levels,” more than 350 scholars, authors, rabbis, cantors and Jewish community activists have signed onto a “declaration” that is challenging individuals and organizations to act with more transparency and accountability, and in accord with Jewish values.
In the past several years, the New York Jewish community endured the embarrassment of prominent rabbis accused of sexual abuse; a leading Jewish communal official going to prison for accepting millions of dollars in a kickback scheme; and the financial collapse of FEGS, the mammoth social service agency that seemed to suddenly lose $20 million while no one was looking.
“Disturbing developments” like these, the strongly worded declaration states, “make a mockery of Jewish values, shatter the trust that we have placed in our community’s leaders, and alienate young people from Judaism.” News of the declaration is being reported here for the first time.
Rafael Medoff, a Holocaust historian and author in Washington, D.C., said he reached a tipping point a few months ago and felt he had to do something to “at least start a conversation in the Jewish community about ethical issues that will affect the future quality of American Jewry.”
He and several other academics have just launched a website (jewishleadershipethics.org) and a “Declaration on Ethics in Jewish Leadership,” a bold 10-point statement urging that “whistleblowers should be encouraged,” “excusing offenders’ conduct or blaming the victims for coming forward is intolerable,” and that “Jewish organizations should adopt term limits, to combat the phenomenon of entrenched and self-perpetuating leaders.”
A diverse group of prominent Jewish spiritual leaders and academics from around the country — including former Rabbinical Council of America president Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, Hebrew Union College demographer Steven M. Cohen, Holocaust historians Deborah Lipstadt and Deborah Dwork, Brandeis sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman, White Plains Conservative Rabbi Gordon Tucker and University of California Santa Barbara Jewish studies professor Elliot Wolfson — have signed on to the document, which has been circulating on a grassroots level for about three weeks.
Medoff said he is pleasantly surprised at the number, diversity and quality of people who have already added their names to the initiative, which is seeking additional signatures as it spreads the word, and hopes to become an ongoing presence.
The declaration, which Medoff describes as “an opening salvo,” is not aimed at any specific group or individual but encourages organizations of all “all denominations and factions to embrace” its “core principles of ethical behavior, which are anchored in the time-honored values we cherish as Americans and Jews.”
By citing the need for democratic elections of lay and/or professional officers, setting term limits, and resisting major donors from having undue influence in determining policy, the declaration may come to represent a test for a more authentic standard of accountability in organizational life. And it raises the question of who speaks for American Jews in a community that is voluntary and increasingly factionalized.
Until now insiders have acknowledged with a wink and a shrug the difference between open equality and “Jewish democracy,” where lay leaders — often generous donors — may be chosen in a closed-door, predetermined manner and policies passed in swift voice votes.
Giving Voice To The Majority
What prompted Medoff to act, he said, was a Letter to the Editor in The Jewish Week last June from Susannah Heschel, professor of religion at Dartmouth College, regarding the “sauna scandal” surrounding Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt of the Riverdale Jewish Center.
She wrote, in part, “if bringing boys and young men with him into the sauna was perfectly acceptable, why was it kept hushed by leaders of the congregation?”
“Susannah’s letter was my inspiration,” Medoff explained. “She made a powerful point about enablers — those, including leaders of the congregation, who had long known about the rabbi’s activities but had not acted on them.
“We are seeking to give voice to the overwhelming majority of Jews who are upset” with reports of rabbis and others in leadership positions who violate the communal trust, said Heschel, one of the founders of the site.
She and Medoff formed a small committee, which also includes Thane Rosenbaum, an author and professor at NYU Law School, and Shulamit Magnus, a professor of modern Jewish history at Oberlin College. In an interview this week, they said they are determined to speak out — including naming names and citing specific failings — as part of a moral obligation not to stand idly by in the face of ethical violations.
Their declaration asserts that “concealing evidence of unethical behavior is itself unethical and antithetical to Jewish values” and that “the leaders of Jewish institutions and organizations should not receive excessive financial remuneration.”
“Shining light on issues in the dark has a way of changing the landscape,” Rosenbaum said. “Calling attention to misdeeds among Jewish leaders has its own value.”
Agreeing In Principle
Asked to respond to the declaration, the professional heads of three major Jewish organizations responded positively, if a bit defensively, in noting that their groups already comply to high ethical standards.
David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, said his organization “welcomes any initiative designed to stress the ethical and moral imperatives of Jewish behavior, be it individual or organizational, and especially against the backdrop of distressing revelations” that have come to light in recent years.
“We take those imperatives very much to heart in how we conduct ourselves at AJC. That’s why we resonated to much of what this document aspires to, even if we might have some quibbles or questions here and there…”
Harris noted that AJC has a “constant set of checks and balances” between lay and staff, executive council leaders are subject to term limits, the president serves only one three-year term, and finances are subject to strict internal and external controls “aimed at maximum accountability and transparency.” He also noted that AJC has whistle-blowing and conflict-of-interest policies, as called for in the Declaration, as well as strict non-discrimination rules.
“That said,” Harris wrote in an email from overseas, “we shall always aspire to do even better,” well aware of the “sacred bond of trust” AJC is committed to uphold.
Jonathan Greenblatt, national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League since the summer, said in an interview that he understands the sense of urgency in the Declaration, given recent “challenges” in our community. But he expressed some concern that such basic principles of ethical behavior needed to be publicized in terms of adherence in the Jewish community.
“In principle I agree with the document,” he said, though he found some of the language ambiguous. “The act of re-stating some of these principles may have value in itself, reminding us of the importance of democracy, transparency and pluralism. I get that.”
Having served as special assistant to President Obama, dealing with issues of governance and best practice in the nonprofit world, Greenblatt noted that there is a wealth of material and a well-developed set of practices available to nonprofits on the issues raised in the declaration.
Beyond that, he observed that “we are the people of The Golden Rule, we live by 613 commandments, and ethics have been core to Jewish practice for millennia. So it is unfortunate that some of our leaders are not congruent with these practices,” adding that “ADL is at the front of the line” when it comes to setting and adhering to high ethical standards.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said he, too, agreed in principle with most of the declaration, noting that organizations have differing compositions and agendas. Lay leaders of the conference are chosen by a highly representative group of members, he said, and though there have been no two-person elections since the days of Rabbi Alexander Schindler, more than three decades ago, “the process is completely open and everyone gets a hearing with the nominating committee.”
Hoenlein added that he hopes “the same process” of ethical behavior “apply to Jewish media,” which he said has been known to publish “deliberate distortions.”
(Speaking off the record, he mentioned one publication — not The Jewish Week — by name.)
It is too early to say whether or not substantive change will come about as a result of the declaration. But it was heartening to see that each of the three major leaders I reached out to for comment responded in a timely manner and had mostly positive things to say.
They took the statement seriously and sought to show how their organizations follow ethical guidelines.
What happens next?
If the public signs on to the statement in impressive numbers; if more organizations review and respond — publicly or internally — to the principles set forth; if the committee that launched the initiative follows through and names those who do not meet their standards (as well as those who do); and if all of this activity leads to more reflection and discussion, positive change could take place.
It’s a long shot to disrupt a communal culture, but if our Jewish institutions want to remain relevant in the 21st century, they’d best be responsive to the voices of those who care most.
The declaration can be found at www.jewishleadershipethics.org.
Gary@jewishweek.org
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Academics who say they are not "cheerleaders" for Israel, but want to critique the BDS movement, are jumping into the fray.
National
Attacking BDS From The Left
Academics counter ‘Orwellian’ linkage of Israel protests with other progressive issues.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
“We’re not just cheerleaders,” says historian Kenneth Waltzer.As the BDS movement continues to roil college campuses around the country, the focus of attention in the Jewish community has largely been on students. High-profile and big-money efforts — $50 million from Las Vegas billionaire and Republican mega-giver Sheldon Adelson, $100 million from the Jewish National Fund — are underway to help arm Jewish students in fighting the campus wars aimed at delegitimizing Israel.
Missing in the loud and troubling debate in any significant way has been the voice of Jewish faculty.
That seems poised to change as fast-moving events on the college green are pulling Jewish faculty members off the sidelines of the BDS controversy and into the fray.
“Until this academic year, most of my concerned colleagues felt that not responding to every provocation was the best strategy,” said Sylvain Cappell, a math professor at New York University and a longtime critic of academic boycotts. “We were not interested in giving the cause free publicity or stoking the already confrontational atmosphere.”
But growing efforts to link Israel with a host of other hot-button issues on campus, including racial injustice and sexual assault, caused Cappell to re-evaluate. He referred to the current campus climate as a “turning point.”
“Promoters of BDS have been working overtime to embed themselves in the matrix of progressive concerns and student movements on campus,” said Cappell, who has argued against academic boycotts of Israel on CNN and public radio in the past. “We are at a point where we can no longer ignore the issue.” (See Opinion piece on page 41).
That strategy on the part of BDS supporters — “intersectionality,” it’s been called — is fueling a new counterpunch, as some well-known academics, many of them Jewish, are joining forces to press the case against boycotts.
The just-launched initiative, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), aims to unite academics around the country to facilitate constructive dialogue about Israel. Led by Mark Yudof, president emeritus of the University of California system, and Kenneth Waltzer, former director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University, the AEN hopes to combat “Orwellian efforts to link Israel with a multitude of issues, from the shootings in Ferguson to high levels of student tuition,” according to a statement announcing the network released at the end of last month. So far, a “couple hundred” people have signed on, Waltzen said.
Unlike previous right-wing groups that have organized efforts to combat BDS on campus, AEN stands on the left side of the spectrum — “center, liberal and progressive,” Waltzer told The Jewish Week Monday.
“I wouldn’t blanche at being called ‘pro-Israel,’ but we’re not just cheerleaders — we’re academics, we’re people who have critical perspectives. What we want is robust conversation,” he said. That conversation does not shy away from criticism of Israel, he said.
“We think, quite frankly, that if we’re going to make any headway on campus, we have to use a language that appeals to academics. We’re not interested in ‘safe spaces’; we’re interested in universities as free and open spaces for intellectual engagement.”
Though the majority of AEN members are Jewish, Waltzer said the network aims to engage faculty members from different traditions. Current board members who are not Jewish represent the “multicultural front” the network hopes to present.
Waltzer also stressed that the network is not just planning on becoming a “faculty listserv.”
“We’re interested in drilling down [to foster] active membership on campuses.” Those who sign on are expected to write, speak and intervene in administrative decisions of concern, he said.
“In the face of activities aimed at vilifying Israel, AEN members will facilitate robust and civilized discussions relating to Israel on campuses, promote academic freedom and freedom of expression, stand for human rights for Arabs and Jews, and engage colleagues and students to better understand these complex issues,” Yudof, the network’s chair, said in the statement. AEN is currently finishing up a manual entitled “Academic Freedom and BDS: A Guide for University Presidents and Administrators,” which they expect to disseminate soon.
Though some well-known academic organizations began embracing academic boycotts of Israel in recent years — notably the Association for Asian American Studies in April 2013 and the American Studies Association in December 2013 — last weekend the American Historical Association firmly rejected a resolution targeting Israel. The measure, defeated by a 111-50 vote, accused Israel of restricting Palestinian academic activities in Gaza and the West Bank. Jewish institutions lauded the defeat as a step forward.
Justin Cammy, associate professor of Jewish studies and comparative literature at Smith College, a private liberal arts institution for women in Northampton, Mass., joined the AEN because he believes boycotts run counter to the core academic principle of engagement. Though he considers himself on the political left, he finds the BDS movement’s resolution to boycott Israeli “institutions but not individuals” spurious and hypocritical.
“Every scholar is embedded in an institution,” Cammy told The Jewish Week. “Once you say you’re going to boycott an entire country worth of people, that goes beyond political decision making. That borders on bigotry.”
At Smith, like at several other liberal arts institutions, a “fair share” of professors signed on to an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, Cammy said.
“There are colleagues of mine who simply don’t understand that there is no place for illiberal strategies in liberal American education. Once you go to boycotting scholars or institutions of higher learning, you have transgressed the fundamental idea of what education is all about.”
Miriam F. Elman, associate professor of political science at Syracuse University and member of AEN, stressed the importance of an organization geared towards faculty, rather than students.
“Students are transient — faculty and administration are here for the long-term. We’re the ones setting the tone and ultimately driving student activism,” she said.
At Syracuse, which has the sixth largest population of Jewish students at a private university, according to HIllel International, the problem is largely faculty “steering students in an anti-Israel direction” and an administration that has “refused to intervene,” said Elman. Prior to the launch of the AEN, she and five other tenured professors — her untenured colleagues are “absolutely not willing” to take a pro-Israel stance for fear of retribution, said Elman — formed an ad-hoc committee to deal with individual events they found disturbing.
In one such incident, Josh Ruebner, a vehement critic of Israel who has been flagged by the Anti-Defamation League for his rhetoric, was invited to speak at the university on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Though Elman tried to organize a protest, the speech went on as planned. In another incident, Steven Salaita, an American scholar whose allegedly anti-Semitic tweets during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict caused the University of Illinois to withdraw its offer of employment, was invited to speak on campus. The speech was sponsored by nine academic departments. According to Elman, she spent over 100 hours organizing a response; on the day of the speech, a few students manned a protest outside the packed auditorium. Norman Finkelstein, the virulent critic of Israel who was banned from entering the country in 2008 was invited to speak on Israel Independence Day.
“I feel overwhelmed by what I’m required to do to keep up a healthy discourse about Israel on this campus,” Elman said, describing the throng of Jewish students who file into her office every semester seeking counsel on how to deal with professors who assign what they think are offensive readings or “shut them down” for voicing differing perspectives. Most students end up dropping the courses, she said.
“Professors need support just as much as students, if not more,” she said, a note of weariness in her voice. “We’re in the trenches here.”
Correction: A prior version of this story said that the speech by American scholar Steven Salaita was cancelled due to a resolution drafted by pro-Israel faculty members. The speech was not cancelled. A group of pro-Israel faculty members were able to withdraw a resolution put forward in favor of Salita by the University Senate. We regret the error.
editor@jewishweek.org
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On a lighter note, the Orthodox population explosion in Brooklyn has manifested itself in the lists of 2014's most popular names. For white babies, Biblical monikers took six of the ten top spots.
National
New Babies, Old Names
Helen Chernikoff
Baby Chaya is angry her name is so common. FotoliaBrooklyn’s fast-growing Orthodox Jewish population has been demonstrating its demographic clout for a while now. It has shaped the broader Jewish community in such crucial areas as politics (more conservative) and money (less wealthy). But not until recently has it begun to influence a phenomenon so important that it’s the subject of countless websites and books and incessant Internet chatter. That’s right: baby names.
Every year, the New York City Department of Health, like the national Social Security Administration, tracks and reports the most popular names. Among white baby girls, Biblical names occupied six of the top 10 spots in 2014, with Esther coming in second place, behind Olivia.
“If you call out ‘Chaya’ in a group of young women who are involved in Torah living, you’re going to get a lot of head turning,” said Bronya Shaffer, mother of 10 and grandmother of 21 who works for the “Ask the Rabbi” team at Chabad.organd lectures on such topics as healthy relationships and childhood sexual abuse.
In 2013, the most recent year for which demographic data is available, 120,487 babies were born in New York City. About 33 percent were white, 30 percent Hispanic, 20 percent black and 17 percent Asian, according to city data.
Parents report their race on the birth certificate form, but not their religious affiliation, so the bureau can’t draw conclusions about whether religion is driving the popularity of individual names, said Gretchen Van Wye, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Vital Statistics.
But Brooklyn, where nearly a quarter of the population is Jewish, according to the UJA’s 2011 Jewish Community Study, does have a big impact on the citywide name statistics because it’s the most populous borough and has the highest birthrate, she said.
Of the 122,084 infants born in the city in 2014, 34 percent — 41,190 babies — were born in Brooklyn. Queens had the next highest birthrate, with 26,937 babies.
For the city as a whole, the No. 1 girl’s name was Sophia; for boys, it was Ethan.
Moshe was the fourth most-popular name among white boys in 2014; Biblical names like Joseph (No. 1), David (No. 2) and Jacob (No. 5) also dominated that list.
Rachel, Leah and Sarah occupied spots three, four and seven on the list of white girls names. Chaya came in sixth place, and that name’s consistent popularity — it also placed in 2010 and 2005 — speaks to the love many Brooklynites still hold for Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson, the wife of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who died in 1998, Shaffer said. Jewish naming trends also have some inherent stability because of the tendency to name children after relatives, she added.
“We’ve got Chayale and Chaike and Mushkie,” to help distinguish one Chaya from another and another, Shaffer said.
Having too many Chayas or Moshes are good problems to have, she added. When she was growing up, in Montreal in the 1950s, the parents in her community all gave their children legal names that could “pass” in mainstream society.
She said she was too embarrassed to reveal her own name of record, for the record, but recalled that she studied with a girl she called Nehama, whose actual name was Mary, and another she called Sarah, whose birth certificate read “Agnes.”
By the time Shaffer had her own children, the names on their birth certificates matched those they answered to at home, but her mother kvetched quietly about it. Now all that’s in the past.
“For my children, it’s not even a question,” she said.
helen@jewishweek.org
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Have a great weekend,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
Books
The ‘Stuff’ Of Memoir
Judy Batalion’s book moves between order and disorder.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
It took years for Batalion to connect her mother’s and grandmother’s hoarding back to their experience of the Holocaust.Judy Batalion’s mother had been an artist, a published poet who followed Leonard Cohen around Greece. When readers encounter her in her daughter’s fine memoir “White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess In Between” (New American Library), she appears to be a shadow of that earlier self, surrounded in her Montreal home by piles of unreturned library books, thousands of videocassettes, stale danish and towers of rotting cans of tuna: Every surface is piled high with stuff, all precariously close to an avalanche.
In this domestic chaos, Judy’s father sleeps in a corner of the basement as there’s no space in their bedroom. Most nights, Judy can barely sleep due to the accumulated dust. As a young girl, she feels shame, hoping that no one at her Jewish day school notices that she gets picked up after school some days by her grandmother, on foot, rather than by a fashionable parent in a sleek car, like the others. She wouldn’t think of inviting a friend over. The author recalls “the feeling of drowning, that I’d never be able to get what I wanted because what my mother wanted was already there and I had to use that up first.”
Her memoir is in perfect pitch: The reader feels compassion for these characters, and appreciates the author’s ability to see humor as well as darkness. In alternating sections, Batalion tells two stories, her own coming-of-age and finally leaving home, and a present-day story of her marriage, her anxieties about motherhood and the birth of her two children.
Batalion’s mother — the memoir is dedicated to her but she is unnamed — was born in 1945, in Kirgizia, while the family was in transit from Siberia back to Poland. She spent her earliest years in DP camps, “born into the fresh smell of a murdered family, a refugee before she even knew what home was.” She had one doll and then none when she gave that to another girl. Later, she made sure that Judy had Barbie dolls, 100 of them.
Judy’s grandmother Zelda, who lived nearby in Montreal, was also a hoarder, filling her closets beyond capacity with already discounted clothing she’d bargain for. When Judy and her brother Eli would eat dinner there after school with their grandfather, they’d set up newspapers on the floor where the four of them would eat her grandmother’s multi-course meal of made-from-scratch food (after she haggled with grocers). Often, Zelda retold her stories, of escaping from Warsaw by swimming across a river.
It was only years later that Batalion connected their hoarding and their experience of the Holocaust, understanding that her mother had been “formed in the cadence of hiding, running, survival.” She wonders what has been passed on to her, and what she would pass along.
Judy’s father, a doctor whose family had immigrated to Canada a generation earlier, tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy. On Sundays, even in the snow, he and Judy would take long walks all over the city. In an interview, she recalls being hyper aware of everything around her. “I grew up in such a chaotic space; I needed to be like that to survive.”
Batalion attended a Workmen’s Circle school where most classmates were grandchildren of survivors, and she learned to speak Yiddish. She says, “I was extremely lucky to have been good at school — school was ordered and I got a lot of attention for doing so well. I think that saved me and got me out of the house to go to Harvard.” In fact, it was her mother who convinced her father to let her go. “I like to think,” she says, “on some level, that she knew I needed to be freed.”
After graduating from Harvard, Batalion moved to London to continue her studies in art history. She turned her academic eye to other people’s stuff, writing her doctoral thesis on domestic representation in art. “I wanted to understand what home was. My personal obsessions drove my academic interests,” she recalls. She spent a decade working as a curator in design while living in a spare, one-bedroom, white-walled apartment. While she appreciated the order she is able to maintain, she never felt quite at home. In those years, the somewhat shy Batalion did stand-up comedy in London.
She says that she has been exploring the themes of the memoir — “the same obsessions with mother-daughter relationships, with stuff” — for all of her life, whether as a student, an art historian or a stand-up comic, but always from a more distant angle than in the book, which is most intimate.
After her grandmother died in Montreal, Batalion visited from London and found things had gotten worse at home. She could barely open the doors to rooms in the house, which was overrun with plastic bags of files — her mother was involved in all sorts of legal matters related to her parents’ estate and she feared people were after her. Batalion writes, “And then there were the dozens of clocks — bright blue and orange, pink and green, thick silvery hands and thin gold numerals, flashing digital and faux grandfather, each set at a different time, the congregation asynchronous and thus tracing not only the seconds, but the seconds between the seconds, one long allegro of passing, a blaring metronome with no pause, calling to mind our internal clocks, the fragility of our rhythms, the ease with which it could all go terrifically wrong.”
Batalion never told anyone about her home situation, and her father wouldn’t speak about it either. Only once, when they visit her in London, does he stand up for Judy when her mother is being extremely difficult. Later, a social worker suggests that those who live with others’ mental illness become absorbed in it. She believes that some of that happened with her father, and that he also wanted to maintain their family harmony.
The “kismet moment” of her life was when she was living in London, dating the man who would become her husband. Jon invited her to his parents’ home to break the fast after Yom Kippur. Just before they got out of the car, he tells her, as though to warm her against the unexpected, “My mother has a lot of stuff.” It turns out that she too was a hoarder. But Jon didn’t have shame and even made some jokes as though it was a quirky habit, and she learns a lot from him.
Now, their home in the Chelsea section of Manhattan is neat and organized. She prefers not buying things, and admits that with children “it’s impossible to lead the white-walled existence I dreamed of for so long” — and she has trouble throwing out the bejeweled toilet tissue rolls her older daughter Zelda brings home from preschool.
Through her experience of motherhood and through writing, Batalion comes to feel more empathy for her mother, understands the deep trauma that her mother and grandmother experienced, and feels their enormous love for her.
These days, her mother no longer leaves the house, and is no longer accumulating additional stuff. “My mother always surprises me,” she says, recounting that after much trepidation, she showed the memoir to her mother who took her time — which made the author more anxious — and then made a suggestion that the tone in one of the chapters was off, that her mix of humor and pathos was limiting the emotional impact of the story. Judy was enormously relieved.
“Life is messy,” Batalion says, when asked about her book’s message. “You can’t really control it. And it’s possible to change family dynamics. Be honest with yourself.” She adds, “I’m not trying to teach; this is a memoir that offers my friendship to people who might experience similar things.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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National
Attacking BDS From The Left
Academics counter ‘Orwellian’ linkage of Israel protests with other progressive issues.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
“We’re not just cheerleaders,” says historian Kenneth Waltzer.As the BDS movement continues to roil college campuses around the country, the focus of attention in the Jewish community has largely been on students. High-profile and big-money efforts — $50 million from Las Vegas billionaire and Republican mega-giver Sheldon Adelson, $100 million from the Jewish National Fund — are underway to help arm Jewish students in fighting the campus wars aimed at delegitimizing Israel.
Missing in the loud and troubling debate in any significant way has been the voice of Jewish faculty.
That seems poised to change as fast-moving events on the college green are pulling Jewish faculty members off the sidelines of the BDS controversy and into the fray.
“Until this academic year, most of my concerned colleagues felt that not responding to every provocation was the best strategy,” said Sylvain Cappell, a math professor at New York University and a longtime critic of academic boycotts. “We were not interested in giving the cause free publicity or stoking the already confrontational atmosphere.”
But growing efforts to link Israel with a host of other hot-button issues on campus, including racial injustice and sexual assault, caused Cappell to re-evaluate. He referred to the current campus climate as a “turning point.”
“Promoters of BDS have been working overtime to embed themselves in the matrix of progressive concerns and student movements on campus,” said Cappell, who has argued against academic boycotts of Israel on CNN and public radio in the past. “We are at a point where we can no longer ignore the issue.” (See Opinion piece on page 41).
That strategy on the part of BDS supporters — “intersectionality,” it’s been called — is fueling a new counterpunch, as some well-known academics, many of them Jewish, are joining forces to press the case against boycotts.
The just-launched initiative, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), aims to unite academics around the country to facilitate constructive dialogue about Israel. Led by Mark Yudof, president emeritus of the University of California system, and Kenneth Waltzer, former director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University, the AEN hopes to combat “Orwellian efforts to link Israel with a multitude of issues, from the shootings in Ferguson to high levels of student tuition,” according to a statement announcing the network released at the end of last month. So far, a “couple hundred” people have signed on, Waltzen said.
Unlike previous right-wing groups that have organized efforts to combat BDS on campus, AEN stands on the left side of the spectrum — “center, liberal and progressive,” Waltzer told The Jewish Week Monday.
“I wouldn’t blanche at being called ‘pro-Israel,’ but we’re not just cheerleaders — we’re academics, we’re people who have critical perspectives. What we want is robust conversation,” he said. That conversation does not shy away from criticism of Israel, he said.
“We think, quite frankly, that if we’re going to make any headway on campus, we have to use a language that appeals to academics. We’re not interested in ‘safe spaces’; we’re interested in universities as free and open spaces for intellectual engagement.”
Though the majority of AEN members are Jewish, Waltzer said the network aims to engage faculty members from different traditions. Current board members who are not Jewish represent the “multicultural front” the network hopes to present.
Waltzer also stressed that the network is not just planning on becoming a “faculty listserv.”
“We’re interested in drilling down [to foster] active membership on campuses.” Those who sign on are expected to write, speak and intervene in administrative decisions of concern, he said.
“In the face of activities aimed at vilifying Israel, AEN members will facilitate robust and civilized discussions relating to Israel on campuses, promote academic freedom and freedom of expression, stand for human rights for Arabs and Jews, and engage colleagues and students to better understand these complex issues,” Yudof, the network’s chair, said in the statement. AEN is currently finishing up a manual entitled “Academic Freedom and BDS: A Guide for University Presidents and Administrators,” which they expect to disseminate soon.
Though some well-known academic organizations began embracing academic boycotts of Israel in recent years — notably the Association for Asian American Studies in April 2013 and the American Studies Association in December 2013 — last weekend the American Historical Association firmly rejected a resolution targeting Israel. The measure, defeated by a 111-50 vote, accused Israel of restricting Palestinian academic activities in Gaza and the West Bank. Jewish institutions lauded the defeat as a step forward.
Justin Cammy, associate professor of Jewish studies and comparative literature at Smith College, a private liberal arts institution for women in Northampton, Mass., joined the AEN because he believes boycotts run counter to the core academic principle of engagement. Though he considers himself on the political left, he finds the BDS movement’s resolution to boycott Israeli “institutions but not individuals” spurious and hypocritical.
“Every scholar is embedded in an institution,” Cammy told The Jewish Week. “Once you say you’re going to boycott an entire country worth of people, that goes beyond political decision making. That borders on bigotry.”
At Smith, like at several other liberal arts institutions, a “fair share” of professors signed on to an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, Cammy said.
“There are colleagues of mine who simply don’t understand that there is no place for illiberal strategies in liberal American education. Once you go to boycotting scholars or institutions of higher learning, you have transgressed the fundamental idea of what education is all about.”
Miriam F. Elman, associate professor of political science at Syracuse University and member of AEN, stressed the importance of an organization geared towards faculty, rather than students.
“Students are transient — faculty and administration are here for the long-term. We’re the ones setting the tone and ultimately driving student activism,” she said.
At Syracuse, which has the sixth largest population of Jewish students at a private university, according to HIllel International, the problem is largely faculty “steering students in an anti-Israel direction” and an administration that has “refused to intervene,” said Elman. Prior to the launch of the AEN, she and five other tenured professors — her untenured colleagues are “absolutely not willing” to take a pro-Israel stance for fear of retribution, said Elman — formed an ad-hoc committee to deal with individual events they found disturbing.
In one such incident, Josh Ruebner, a vehement critic of Israel who has been flagged by the Anti-Defamation League for his rhetoric, was invited to speak at the university on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Though Elman tried to organize a protest, the speech went on as planned. In another incident, Steven Salaita, an American scholar whose allegedly anti-Semitic tweets during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict caused the University of Illinois to withdraw its offer of employment, was invited to speak on campus. The speech was sponsored by nine academic departments. According to Elman, she spent over 100 hours organizing a response; on the day of the speech, a few students manned a protest outside the packed auditorium. Norman Finkelstein, the virulent critic of Israel who was banned from entering the country in 2008 was invited to speak on Israel Independence Day.
“I feel overwhelmed by what I’m required to do to keep up a healthy discourse about Israel on this campus,” Elman said, describing the throng of Jewish students who file into her office every semester seeking counsel on how to deal with professors who assign what they think are offensive readings or “shut them down” for voicing differing perspectives. Most students end up dropping the courses, she said.
“Professors need support just as much as students, if not more,” she said, a note of weariness in her voice. “We’re in the trenches here.”
Correction: A prior version of this story said that the speech by American scholar Steven Salaita was cancelled due to a resolution drafted by pro-Israel faculty members. The speech was not cancelled. A group of pro-Israel faculty members were able to withdraw a resolution put forward in favor of Salita by the University Senate. We regret the error.
editor@jewishweek.org
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On a lighter note, the Orthodox population explosion in Brooklyn has manifested itself in the lists of 2014's most popular names. For white babies, Biblical monikers took six of the ten top spots.
National
New Babies, Old Names
Helen Chernikoff
Baby Chaya is angry her name is so common. FotoliaBrooklyn’s fast-growing Orthodox Jewish population has been demonstrating its demographic clout for a while now. It has shaped the broader Jewish community in such crucial areas as politics (more conservative) and money (less wealthy). But not until recently has it begun to influence a phenomenon so important that it’s the subject of countless websites and books and incessant Internet chatter. That’s right: baby names.
Every year, the New York City Department of Health, like the national Social Security Administration, tracks and reports the most popular names. Among white baby girls, Biblical names occupied six of the top 10 spots in 2014, with Esther coming in second place, behind Olivia.
“If you call out ‘Chaya’ in a group of young women who are involved in Torah living, you’re going to get a lot of head turning,” said Bronya Shaffer, mother of 10 and grandmother of 21 who works for the “Ask the Rabbi” team at Chabad.organd lectures on such topics as healthy relationships and childhood sexual abuse.
In 2013, the most recent year for which demographic data is available, 120,487 babies were born in New York City. About 33 percent were white, 30 percent Hispanic, 20 percent black and 17 percent Asian, according to city data.
Parents report their race on the birth certificate form, but not their religious affiliation, so the bureau can’t draw conclusions about whether religion is driving the popularity of individual names, said Gretchen Van Wye, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Vital Statistics.
But Brooklyn, where nearly a quarter of the population is Jewish, according to the UJA’s 2011 Jewish Community Study, does have a big impact on the citywide name statistics because it’s the most populous borough and has the highest birthrate, she said.
Of the 122,084 infants born in the city in 2014, 34 percent — 41,190 babies — were born in Brooklyn. Queens had the next highest birthrate, with 26,937 babies.
For the city as a whole, the No. 1 girl’s name was Sophia; for boys, it was Ethan.
Moshe was the fourth most-popular name among white boys in 2014; Biblical names like Joseph (No. 1), David (No. 2) and Jacob (No. 5) also dominated that list.
Rachel, Leah and Sarah occupied spots three, four and seven on the list of white girls names. Chaya came in sixth place, and that name’s consistent popularity — it also placed in 2010 and 2005 — speaks to the love many Brooklynites still hold for Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson, the wife of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who died in 1998, Shaffer said. Jewish naming trends also have some inherent stability because of the tendency to name children after relatives, she added.
“We’ve got Chayale and Chaike and Mushkie,” to help distinguish one Chaya from another and another, Shaffer said.
Having too many Chayas or Moshes are good problems to have, she added. When she was growing up, in Montreal in the 1950s, the parents in her community all gave their children legal names that could “pass” in mainstream society.
She said she was too embarrassed to reveal her own name of record, for the record, but recalled that she studied with a girl she called Nehama, whose actual name was Mary, and another she called Sarah, whose birth certificate read “Agnes.”
By the time Shaffer had her own children, the names on their birth certificates matched those they answered to at home, but her mother kvetched quietly about it. Now all that’s in the past.
“For my children, it’s not even a question,” she said.
helen@jewishweek.org
----------------------
Have a great weekend,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
Books
The ‘Stuff’ Of Memoir
Judy Batalion’s book moves between order and disorder.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
It took years for Batalion to connect her mother’s and grandmother’s hoarding back to their experience of the Holocaust.Judy Batalion’s mother had been an artist, a published poet who followed Leonard Cohen around Greece. When readers encounter her in her daughter’s fine memoir “White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess In Between” (New American Library), she appears to be a shadow of that earlier self, surrounded in her Montreal home by piles of unreturned library books, thousands of videocassettes, stale danish and towers of rotting cans of tuna: Every surface is piled high with stuff, all precariously close to an avalanche.
In this domestic chaos, Judy’s father sleeps in a corner of the basement as there’s no space in their bedroom. Most nights, Judy can barely sleep due to the accumulated dust. As a young girl, she feels shame, hoping that no one at her Jewish day school notices that she gets picked up after school some days by her grandmother, on foot, rather than by a fashionable parent in a sleek car, like the others. She wouldn’t think of inviting a friend over. The author recalls “the feeling of drowning, that I’d never be able to get what I wanted because what my mother wanted was already there and I had to use that up first.”
Her memoir is in perfect pitch: The reader feels compassion for these characters, and appreciates the author’s ability to see humor as well as darkness. In alternating sections, Batalion tells two stories, her own coming-of-age and finally leaving home, and a present-day story of her marriage, her anxieties about motherhood and the birth of her two children.
Batalion’s mother — the memoir is dedicated to her but she is unnamed — was born in 1945, in Kirgizia, while the family was in transit from Siberia back to Poland. She spent her earliest years in DP camps, “born into the fresh smell of a murdered family, a refugee before she even knew what home was.” She had one doll and then none when she gave that to another girl. Later, she made sure that Judy had Barbie dolls, 100 of them.
Judy’s grandmother Zelda, who lived nearby in Montreal, was also a hoarder, filling her closets beyond capacity with already discounted clothing she’d bargain for. When Judy and her brother Eli would eat dinner there after school with their grandfather, they’d set up newspapers on the floor where the four of them would eat her grandmother’s multi-course meal of made-from-scratch food (after she haggled with grocers). Often, Zelda retold her stories, of escaping from Warsaw by swimming across a river.
It was only years later that Batalion connected their hoarding and their experience of the Holocaust, understanding that her mother had been “formed in the cadence of hiding, running, survival.” She wonders what has been passed on to her, and what she would pass along.
Judy’s father, a doctor whose family had immigrated to Canada a generation earlier, tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy. On Sundays, even in the snow, he and Judy would take long walks all over the city. In an interview, she recalls being hyper aware of everything around her. “I grew up in such a chaotic space; I needed to be like that to survive.”
Batalion attended a Workmen’s Circle school where most classmates were grandchildren of survivors, and she learned to speak Yiddish. She says, “I was extremely lucky to have been good at school — school was ordered and I got a lot of attention for doing so well. I think that saved me and got me out of the house to go to Harvard.” In fact, it was her mother who convinced her father to let her go. “I like to think,” she says, “on some level, that she knew I needed to be freed.”
After graduating from Harvard, Batalion moved to London to continue her studies in art history. She turned her academic eye to other people’s stuff, writing her doctoral thesis on domestic representation in art. “I wanted to understand what home was. My personal obsessions drove my academic interests,” she recalls. She spent a decade working as a curator in design while living in a spare, one-bedroom, white-walled apartment. While she appreciated the order she is able to maintain, she never felt quite at home. In those years, the somewhat shy Batalion did stand-up comedy in London.
She says that she has been exploring the themes of the memoir — “the same obsessions with mother-daughter relationships, with stuff” — for all of her life, whether as a student, an art historian or a stand-up comic, but always from a more distant angle than in the book, which is most intimate.
After her grandmother died in Montreal, Batalion visited from London and found things had gotten worse at home. She could barely open the doors to rooms in the house, which was overrun with plastic bags of files — her mother was involved in all sorts of legal matters related to her parents’ estate and she feared people were after her. Batalion writes, “And then there were the dozens of clocks — bright blue and orange, pink and green, thick silvery hands and thin gold numerals, flashing digital and faux grandfather, each set at a different time, the congregation asynchronous and thus tracing not only the seconds, but the seconds between the seconds, one long allegro of passing, a blaring metronome with no pause, calling to mind our internal clocks, the fragility of our rhythms, the ease with which it could all go terrifically wrong.”
Batalion never told anyone about her home situation, and her father wouldn’t speak about it either. Only once, when they visit her in London, does he stand up for Judy when her mother is being extremely difficult. Later, a social worker suggests that those who live with others’ mental illness become absorbed in it. She believes that some of that happened with her father, and that he also wanted to maintain their family harmony.
The “kismet moment” of her life was when she was living in London, dating the man who would become her husband. Jon invited her to his parents’ home to break the fast after Yom Kippur. Just before they got out of the car, he tells her, as though to warm her against the unexpected, “My mother has a lot of stuff.” It turns out that she too was a hoarder. But Jon didn’t have shame and even made some jokes as though it was a quirky habit, and she learns a lot from him.
Now, their home in the Chelsea section of Manhattan is neat and organized. She prefers not buying things, and admits that with children “it’s impossible to lead the white-walled existence I dreamed of for so long” — and she has trouble throwing out the bejeweled toilet tissue rolls her older daughter Zelda brings home from preschool.
Through her experience of motherhood and through writing, Batalion comes to feel more empathy for her mother, understands the deep trauma that her mother and grandmother experienced, and feels their enormous love for her.
These days, her mother no longer leaves the house, and is no longer accumulating additional stuff. “My mother always surprises me,” she says, recounting that after much trepidation, she showed the memoir to her mother who took her time — which made the author more anxious — and then made a suggestion that the tone in one of the chapters was off, that her mix of humor and pathos was limiting the emotional impact of the story. Judy was enormously relieved.
“Life is messy,” Batalion says, when asked about her book’s message. “You can’t really control it. And it’s possible to change family dynamics. Be honest with yourself.” She adds, “I’m not trying to teach; this is a memoir that offers my friendship to people who might experience similar things.”
editor@jewishweek.org
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Marijuana growing in a medical marijuana production facility in Toronto
OU Gives Pot High Marks
JTA
JTA
Food & Wine
Medical use is OK, says OU.
Medical use is OK, says OU.
A New York company is preparing to market what it says is the world’s first kosher-certified marijuana.
The Orthodox Union has certified Vireo Health of New York’s non-smokable medical marijuana products,Vireo announced in a news release Wednesday. Vireo is one of five medical marijuana providers selected to participate in a New York state medical marijuana program that goes into effect next month; none of the others will be certified kosher.
“Being certified kosher by the OU will not only help us serve the dietary needs of the largest Jewish community in the United States, but also combat unfortunate stigmas associated with medical cannabis,” Vireo CEO Ari Hoffnung said in a statement. “Today’s announcement sends an important message to New Yorkers of all faiths and backgrounds that using medical cannabis to alleviate pain and suffering does not in any way represent an embrace of ‘pot’ culture.”
Rabbi Menachem Genack, CEO of the O.U.’s kashrut department, said in a statement that Vireo’s medical cannabis products “were developed to alleviate pain and suffering in accordance with the New York State Compassionate Care Act.”
The statement adds, “Using medical cannabis products recommended by a physician should not be regarded as a ‘chet,’ a sinful act, but rather as a mitzvah, an imperative, a commandment.”
Vireo operates a facility in the upstate town of Perth and will open four retail dispensaries in January, including two in the New York City area.---------------------
National
Jerry Lewis’ Unseen Holocaust Comedy Brought To Light
Steve Lipman
Lewis in YouTube clip of “The Day the Clown Cried.” Courtesy of Richard LattoIt’s probably the most famous movie that no one has ever seen.
In 1972 Jerry Lewis, then at the zenith of his international popularity as a comedian and director, adapted a decade-old script, directing and starring in “The Day The Clown Cried,” the fictional story of a Jewish clown in a Nazi concentration camp. Most of the filming took place in Sweden.
Two decades before Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning “Life is Beautiful,” about a father and son in a concentration camp, set the tone for a number of so-called Holocaust comedies, Lewis’ film broke new ground.
But Lewis never completed the production, never released it, and never fully explained why.
Since then, “The Day The Clown Cried” has achieved an iconic place among students of the Shoah and cinema, becoming, according to a new documentary, one of the most sought-after films in the world.
Last week a unit of the British Broadcasting Corporation released a documentary on the film. Produced by BBC South, “The Story Of The Day The Clown Cried” is available now only online (bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03dj9kr), featuring rare footage from the production, interviews with cast members and speculation about Lewis’ reasons for deciding that the film should not be seen.
The documentary may be carried on one of BBC’s many channels “one of these days,” said producer Richard Latto. “We’re very hopeful.”
Latto, a veteran BBC producer who “is not from a Jewish background,” heard about the film 15 years ago, while in college, and became fascinated by it as an example of “comedy that pushes the envelope.”
A Holocaust comedy by Lewis, then best known for “The Nutty Professor,” a comedian who would make “funny noises for comic effect,” was an image changer, Latto told The Jewish Week in a telephone interview. “You would never imagine him tackling a topic like the Holocaust.”
Busy with other projects, Latto picked up his research in the Lewis film five years ago, enlisting Jewish comedian David Schneider, whose mother was a refugee from Nazi Austria, to serve as narrator and on-screen interviewer.
Latto reached out to Lewis to take part in the production; Lewis did not reply.
The documentary includes excerpts from a television interview in which Lewis said he was “embarrassed” by the way “The Day The Clown Cried” turned out. “I was ashamed of the work … it was bad, bad, bad.”
The BBC documentary also alludes to a financial reason for scrapping the film’s release — Lewis did not receive sufficient support from backers.
Lewis, 89, last year donated a collection of his films to the Library of Congress, reportedly including “The Day The Clown Cried” — but it is not clear if it is a complete copy or a partial one, featuring some scenes filmed in France.
According to a provision of Lewis’ donation, the LOC copy of the 1972 production cannot be shown in public until 2025. “I would be surprised,” Latto said, “if we see it in his lifetime.”
steve@jewishweek.org
Steve Lipman| In The Beginning
New York
Three-Way Conversation
By Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." And a Jewish scholar, a Christian scholar and an Islamic scholar recently explained what those words (and some others in the Bible) mean. The representatives of the three monotheistic faiths offered their insights into the opening of Genesis, the description of the world's creation, at a biblical study session at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. "Creation itself is the divine light concealed," said Rabbi Sarah Reines of Central Synagogue, who referred to Talmudic, midrashic and kabbalistic sources in her presentation. "In essence, the renewal of the world becomes a weekly event," said Rev. Christine McSpadden, associate rector of St. Bartholomew's Church in Manhattan, who cited the opinions of classical biblical criticism in explaining "not the how, but the why of creation." "Creation is God's means of displaying Himself to Himself," said Joseph Lumbard, a doctoral candidate in Islamic studies at Yale University, who drew on the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Mohammed. A standing-room crowd of about 100 people peppered the participants with theological questions.But as significant as their esoteric opinions (which generally agreed with each other) was their presence together. The tri-faith discussion, including a Muslim representative, was part of a local trend: Islam, the fastest-growing religion in the United States, is assuming a greater visibility in interreligious programs once exclusively Jewish and Christian. A similar event (a symposium on the Torah, New Testament and Koran) was held recently at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan. Rabbi Reines called the inclusion of a Muslim scholar "an acknowledgement" of Islam's increased role in American society. "We've been trained to think of Islam as a Middle Eastern religion," she says. "It's also right here in New York." Lumbard's interpretation of Islamic teachings was a reminder, she said, that "We're all basing ourselves on the same [biblical] tradition. The doctrines aren't so different." Lumbard agreed. "We're talking," he said, "about the same God."
It's probably the most famous movie that no one has ever seen.
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MORE HEADLINES :
Shir Inclusion: No Madness Involved|The New Normal >>
Shir Inclusion: No Madness Involved
Melinda Jones
Some of the Shir Madness Mensches. Courtesy of Melinda JonesMichael’s life took a turn for the better when he became a volunteer at Melbourne’s first ever Jewish Music Festival, Shir Madness. After a phone interview he was allocated to one of the most senior volunteer roles of venue manager. He attended the training and spent some time clarifying details of the task at the volunteer briefing. He did a really great job on that day. Unbeknown to us, Michael had spent many years at a special school and had never before in his life been given a position of responsibility.
Michael felt empowered by his experience and has gained confidence to look for work. He loved being part of Shir Madness and has promised to volunteer again for our next festival in 2 years time.
Emily is a blind woman in her 40s who also volunteered at Shir Madness. She had said she wanted to be a meet and greet person, which we worried would be difficult for her. So when she started her shift we scheduled an extra one of our floaters to be there as back up. It turned out that she had great fun and did a remarkable job. Not only did Emily write to me afterwards saying that she loved being involved, but others wrote about their surprise that she could do the job so well.
Jono, a guy on the spectrum in his late 30s, proved to be one of the most versatile and helpful volunteers. Jono was a member of my dream team – people who were on standby to do whatever was needed whenever it was needed. Jono helped set up tables, carried equipment, delivered food to the green room and even spent some time checking wristbands at the entry to venues. He couldn’t last very long in any particular role, but as long as we were very clear about what needed to be done and how it should be done we were able to keep his anxiety at bay. We certainly want him back next time.
These are just three of the many stories I could tell about volunteers at Shir Madness. The festival involved 30 artists/ensembles performing on 6 stages over 10 hours. The festival sold out when we reached venue capacity at 1,200, and we had to turn people away at the door. To make this happen we depended on volunteers – and we needed 150 volunteers to work from bump-in at midnight through the day until bump-out finishing at midnight.
So we reached out to every organization and every network in the Jewish community that we could find. Because I believe that people with disabilities are ordinary people with strengths and weakness like anyone else, I included in the call out people with disabilities who I knew and worked through their networks in the same way as I called out to the university student body, retired baby boomers, synagogues and everywhere else I could think of. The application to volunteer asked the person’s name and age group, with room to comment about your preferred type of task. Because shifts were for 4 hours, I also asked if there were issues of stamina to let me know so we could organize some shorter shifts or split shifts. I did not ask about ability or disability.
Before we ran the volunteer briefing and training, either I or a member of the management committee rang and spoke with every applicant. We asked what they were interested in doing so we could match volunteers to task. We were particularly looking for people we thought could take the jobs involving more responsibility. But we also wanted to know who was a people person, meeting and greeting, and who would be better behind the scenes. A number of people told us they needed to be sitting or couldn’t managing more than two hours. No one asked and no one told us that they had a disability unless they felt telling us would help ensure them a role they felt able to play.
Of the 150 volunteers on the day 15-20 percent had disabilities. We had blind volunteers and deaf volunteers, people with mobility impairments, people with intellectual disabilities, people with psychiatric disabilities and people on the spectrum. They ranged in age from 18 to 80 years old – although like most of our volunteers they were in their mid-to-late 20s or their 30s.
There was certainly no madness involved in including people with disabilities in Shir Madness. We needed volunteers. We needed people to contribute doing tasks they felt comfortable with and something they enjoyed. So volunteering was a win-win situation. Every single volunteer was a Mensch. There is no reason to believe that this was different when the volunteer happened, also, to have a disability. What is a little off, though, is that anyone should ever think otherwise.
I have no proof of all this by way of photographs. We had no disabled poster boy or girl included in our marketing. This is as it should be. When inclusion is normal, it should be nothing to write home about.
Melinda Jones is an Australian human rights lawyer and a disability/inclusion advocate. As a result of acquiring a disability, Melinda retired from teaching law at the University of NSW in 2001. She is widely published, most recently a book Critical Perspective on Human Rights Law and Disability (2011). A Melinda is currently working on a book, Judaism, Justice & the Rights of People with Disabilities.---------------------
2015 National Jewish Book Awards Announced |Well Versed >>Well Versed
2015 National Jewish Book Awards Announced
Sandee Brawarsky
Courtesy NYU PressJewish Week theatre critic Ted Merwin was named winner of the 2015 Jewish Book Award in the category of Education and Jewish Identity for “Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli,” a well–researched and lively work of cultural history.
The winners were announced today by the Jewish Book Council in a long list of categories from Visual Arts to Fiction to Sephardic Studies.
Shulem Deen, who wrote a memoir of leaving the Chassidic world, “All Who Go Do Not Return” was selected in the category of Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice. Edward Hirsch was named the poetry winner for his book-length poem about the loss of his son, “Gabriel: A Poem,” and Daniel Torday won the fiction prize for “The Last Flight of Poxl West,” a debut novel that explores the nature of war, memory and storytelling.
Bruce Hoffman’s “Anonymous Soldier: The Struggle for Israel, 1917 -- 1947” was named Everett Family Book of the Year.
Other winners include Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in Modern Jewish Thought, John Benditt in Debut Fiction and Laura Amy Schlitz in Young Adult Literature. The full list is available on the Jewish Book Council website.
This is the 65th year that the National Jewish Book Awards are to be given out. Presentation of the awards will take place at a March 9th ceremony at the Center for Jewish History.
---------------------
Rabbi David Wolpe's Musings >>
Musings
A Mother’s Gentle Push
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeThe word describing the basket in which Moses is placed as an infant is “tevah,” the same word used to describe Noah’s ark. Many commentators draw the parallel between the man who saved the world and the man who saved the Jewish people.
But who made the “tevah?” In Noah’s case, he made it at God’s direction to save himself. But in Moses’ case, it was made by his mother at her own initiative. She fashioned a sort of ark, not to save herself, but to save her child. Moses is then rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. Perhaps the story is less about Moses and more about mothers.
For many of us, our mother is the one who placed us in the vessel that enabled us to venture out into the world. She gave the ark a gentle push, offering it direction. As Jocheved did with Moses, our mother is one who both anticipated the danger and prepared the container to shelter and bring her child to safe shores. Moses survived and grew up to instruct the world; but his accomplishment was only possible because before he was born, Jocheved sat in hiding, waiting for his birth and weaving a basket.
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).
The Jewish Week1501 Broadway, Suite 505
Shir Inclusion: No Madness Involved|The New Normal >>
Shir Inclusion: No Madness Involved
Melinda Jones
Some of the Shir Madness Mensches. Courtesy of Melinda JonesMichael’s life took a turn for the better when he became a volunteer at Melbourne’s first ever Jewish Music Festival, Shir Madness. After a phone interview he was allocated to one of the most senior volunteer roles of venue manager. He attended the training and spent some time clarifying details of the task at the volunteer briefing. He did a really great job on that day. Unbeknown to us, Michael had spent many years at a special school and had never before in his life been given a position of responsibility.
Michael felt empowered by his experience and has gained confidence to look for work. He loved being part of Shir Madness and has promised to volunteer again for our next festival in 2 years time.
Emily is a blind woman in her 40s who also volunteered at Shir Madness. She had said she wanted to be a meet and greet person, which we worried would be difficult for her. So when she started her shift we scheduled an extra one of our floaters to be there as back up. It turned out that she had great fun and did a remarkable job. Not only did Emily write to me afterwards saying that she loved being involved, but others wrote about their surprise that she could do the job so well.
Jono, a guy on the spectrum in his late 30s, proved to be one of the most versatile and helpful volunteers. Jono was a member of my dream team – people who were on standby to do whatever was needed whenever it was needed. Jono helped set up tables, carried equipment, delivered food to the green room and even spent some time checking wristbands at the entry to venues. He couldn’t last very long in any particular role, but as long as we were very clear about what needed to be done and how it should be done we were able to keep his anxiety at bay. We certainly want him back next time.
These are just three of the many stories I could tell about volunteers at Shir Madness. The festival involved 30 artists/ensembles performing on 6 stages over 10 hours. The festival sold out when we reached venue capacity at 1,200, and we had to turn people away at the door. To make this happen we depended on volunteers – and we needed 150 volunteers to work from bump-in at midnight through the day until bump-out finishing at midnight.
So we reached out to every organization and every network in the Jewish community that we could find. Because I believe that people with disabilities are ordinary people with strengths and weakness like anyone else, I included in the call out people with disabilities who I knew and worked through their networks in the same way as I called out to the university student body, retired baby boomers, synagogues and everywhere else I could think of. The application to volunteer asked the person’s name and age group, with room to comment about your preferred type of task. Because shifts were for 4 hours, I also asked if there were issues of stamina to let me know so we could organize some shorter shifts or split shifts. I did not ask about ability or disability.
Before we ran the volunteer briefing and training, either I or a member of the management committee rang and spoke with every applicant. We asked what they were interested in doing so we could match volunteers to task. We were particularly looking for people we thought could take the jobs involving more responsibility. But we also wanted to know who was a people person, meeting and greeting, and who would be better behind the scenes. A number of people told us they needed to be sitting or couldn’t managing more than two hours. No one asked and no one told us that they had a disability unless they felt telling us would help ensure them a role they felt able to play.
Of the 150 volunteers on the day 15-20 percent had disabilities. We had blind volunteers and deaf volunteers, people with mobility impairments, people with intellectual disabilities, people with psychiatric disabilities and people on the spectrum. They ranged in age from 18 to 80 years old – although like most of our volunteers they were in their mid-to-late 20s or their 30s.
There was certainly no madness involved in including people with disabilities in Shir Madness. We needed volunteers. We needed people to contribute doing tasks they felt comfortable with and something they enjoyed. So volunteering was a win-win situation. Every single volunteer was a Mensch. There is no reason to believe that this was different when the volunteer happened, also, to have a disability. What is a little off, though, is that anyone should ever think otherwise.
I have no proof of all this by way of photographs. We had no disabled poster boy or girl included in our marketing. This is as it should be. When inclusion is normal, it should be nothing to write home about.
Melinda Jones is an Australian human rights lawyer and a disability/inclusion advocate. As a result of acquiring a disability, Melinda retired from teaching law at the University of NSW in 2001. She is widely published, most recently a book Critical Perspective on Human Rights Law and Disability (2011). A Melinda is currently working on a book, Judaism, Justice & the Rights of People with Disabilities.---------------------
2015 National Jewish Book Awards Announced |Well Versed >>Well Versed
2015 National Jewish Book Awards Announced
Sandee Brawarsky
Courtesy NYU PressJewish Week theatre critic Ted Merwin was named winner of the 2015 Jewish Book Award in the category of Education and Jewish Identity for “Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli,” a well–researched and lively work of cultural history.
The winners were announced today by the Jewish Book Council in a long list of categories from Visual Arts to Fiction to Sephardic Studies.
Shulem Deen, who wrote a memoir of leaving the Chassidic world, “All Who Go Do Not Return” was selected in the category of Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice. Edward Hirsch was named the poetry winner for his book-length poem about the loss of his son, “Gabriel: A Poem,” and Daniel Torday won the fiction prize for “The Last Flight of Poxl West,” a debut novel that explores the nature of war, memory and storytelling.
Bruce Hoffman’s “Anonymous Soldier: The Struggle for Israel, 1917 -- 1947” was named Everett Family Book of the Year.
Other winners include Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in Modern Jewish Thought, John Benditt in Debut Fiction and Laura Amy Schlitz in Young Adult Literature. The full list is available on the Jewish Book Council website.
This is the 65th year that the National Jewish Book Awards are to be given out. Presentation of the awards will take place at a March 9th ceremony at the Center for Jewish History.
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Rabbi David Wolpe's Musings >>
Musings
A Mother’s Gentle Push
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeThe word describing the basket in which Moses is placed as an infant is “tevah,” the same word used to describe Noah’s ark. Many commentators draw the parallel between the man who saved the world and the man who saved the Jewish people.
But who made the “tevah?” In Noah’s case, he made it at God’s direction to save himself. But in Moses’ case, it was made by his mother at her own initiative. She fashioned a sort of ark, not to save herself, but to save her child. Moses is then rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. Perhaps the story is less about Moses and more about mothers.
For many of us, our mother is the one who placed us in the vessel that enabled us to venture out into the world. She gave the ark a gentle push, offering it direction. As Jocheved did with Moses, our mother is one who both anticipated the danger and prepared the container to shelter and bring her child to safe shores. Moses survived and grew up to instruct the world; but his accomplishment was only possible because before he was born, Jocheved sat in hiding, waiting for his birth and weaving a basket.
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).
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The Next 'Han Solo' Might Be Jewish
JTA
The Next 'Han Solo' Might Be Jewish
JTA
Film & Television
NY Blueprint
Four Jewish actors are on the short list for the new 'Star Wars' spin off film
Four Jewish actors are on the short list for the new 'Star Wars' spin off film
“Star Wars” character Han Solo could soon join the tribe.
After seeing thousands of auditions, Disney and Lucasfilm have narrowed down their list of actors to star in an upcoming “Han Solo” spinoff film to “about a dozen,” Variety reported.
Four Jews — Logan Lerman, Dave Franco, Ansel Elgort and Emory Cohen — are on the short list, along with other big names, like Miles Teller and Scott Eastwood, Clint Eastwood’s son, according to Variety’s sources.
Lerman, 23, is arguably the best-known of the four Jewish hopefuls, having starred in “Fury,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and “Noah.”
Franco, the 30-year-old younger brother of James Franco, has played supporting roles in comedies “21 Jump Street” and “Neighbors.”
Elgort, 21, known for starring in the blockbusters “Divergent” and “The Fault in Our Stars,” has a Russian-Jewish father. His maternal grandmother, who was not Jewish, helped save Norwegian-Jewish children escape the Nazis during World War II by posing as their mother and taking them to neutral Sweden. She was caught and imprisoned in a concentration camp in Norway for 18 months.
Cohen, 25, appeared in several independent films before his breakout starring role in “Brooklyn” last year.
The still-untitled Han Solo film will feature a younger version of the character first immortalized by the one and only (half-Jewish) Harrison Ford, Variety reported. The film won’t go into production until next year, according to Variety, but whoever wins the starring role may also make a cameo in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” which is already filming.
Variety reported that executives will likely decide between the would-be Han Solos in the next few weeks.
May the Force be with them all.
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