Efforts to expose Gafni expands; NY Jewish Film Festival
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Dear Reader,
Spiritual teacher and former rabbi Marc Gafni is being banned by many leaders in the New Age community that once embraced him, as allegations of his sexual abuses pile up. Now the Esalen Institute is "in flux" over whether to cancel Gafni's planned workshop next month on relationships.
National
Gafni Faces Fallout From New Age Community
Deepak Chopra cuts ties publicly; Esalen Institute ‘in flux’ over abuse allegations aimed at former rabbi.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Marc Gafni. Via marcgafni.comWith spiritual guru Marc Gafni the subject of a widening and increasingly public effort to denounce his status in the New Age community, based on accusations that he is a sexual abuser, the prestigious Esalen Institute is “in flux” over whether to allow the former rabbi to offer a planned workshop on relationships next month.
Gordon Wheeler, president of the institute, told The Jewish Week that the leadership of the Big Sur, Calif.-based retreat and educational center is “looking into the situation,” based on complaints being raised about Gafni’s behavior.
Already some 25 New Age leaders — including Deepak Chopra, the best-selling author; Andrew Harvey, founder of the Institute for Sacred Activism; Craig Hamilton, CEO of Evolving Wisdom; author Jean Houston; and Stephen Dinan, CEO of The Shift Network — have signed a public statement disavowing themselves from Gafni.
(Chopra is believed to have disengaged from Gafni several years ago privately.)
The leaders, who sent out their statement to 180,000 subscribers to The Shift Network, said they had “concluded, based upon direct experience, investigation, or conversation with trusted allies, that we cannot endorse Marc Gafni as a teacher in any way.”
In his radio broadcast, Harvey, a highly respected figure in the New Age movement, said that after hearing complaints about Gafni, he sought out and spoke to “very brave” women who said they had suffered abuse from Gafni. Theirs were “some of the most painful and devastating life stories” he had ever heard, he said, detailing “mind control and physical abuse.”
Harvey said he is praying for the women and for Gafni, who he described as “a person of remarkable gifts who has made a series of very dangerous and destructive choices, it seems.”
Also last week a strongly worded petition entitled “Stop Marc Gafni From Abusing Again” was posted on the website change.org by Rabbi David Ingber, spiritual leader of Romemu in New York. The statement was signed initially by more than 100 rabbis, as well as other prominent educators in the Jewish community. It calls on those who continue to support Gafni “to cut all financial and institutional ties with … one who teaches spirituality but acts with absolute disregard for those teachings.”
As of Tuesday, more than 2,600 people had signed on, and the there were hundreds of online comments from men and women who accused Gafni of dishonesty, deception, manipulation and immoral activity.
Chief targets of the effort are Whole Foods, whose co-founder and CEO John Mackey, is a supporter of Gafni and chairs the executive board of Gafni’s Center for Integral Wisdom, and the Esalen Institute, where Gafni is scheduled to co-present a workshop on “Evolutionary Relationships” on Feb. 5-7.
Rabbi Ingber told The Jewish Week that as Gafni “rises in the New Age world he continues to act with impunity. We in the Jewish community didn’t do enough years ago. We could have prevented many of the more recent victims.”
Gafni, 55, has been the subject of numerous reports in The Jewish Week since 2004, when he acknowledged a number of sexual relationships outside of marriage but denied accusations that he had sexually abused two teenage girls when he was a young rabbi. While he recently said he did not represent himself “as someone who didn’t sleep with students,” he has long asserted that his critics exaggerate allegations against him and that he is victim of a vendetta. His Orthodox ordination from Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, founding rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue and now chief rabbi of Efrat, a Jewish community in the West Bank, was rescinded years ago when numerous allegations of sexual misconduct were leveled at Gafni. The Jewish Renewal movement reiterated its ban against Gafni last week, saying he is “not a rabbi or spiritual leader recognized by Aleph: Alliance for Spiritual Renewal.”
Long considered persona non grata in virtually all segments of the Jewish community, Gafni became newsworthy most recently when The New York Times published an article Dec. 25 on his increasing stature in the New Age community, which has prompted an exploration into his controversial past history.
“We are listening and learning,” said Esalen’s Wheeler told The Jewish Week. “We are not brushing away” the accusations against Gafni, who is described on the Esalen website as “a visionary scholar, public intellectual and spiritual artist” whose “teaching is marked by a deep transmission of heart, love and leading-edge provocative wisdom.”
Esalen is said to be exploring whether it is legally bound to honor its contractual commitment with Gafni for the upcoming workshop next month. Wheeler noted that such contracts with teachers — it has nearly 1,000 of them a year — emphasize ethical behavior and strictly prohibit teachers from engaging in any sexual contact or flirtation with students while at Esalen.
“Our policy is one strike and you’re out” when it comes to inappropriate behavior during programs at the institute, which seeks to foster transformational behavior to change the world.
Wheeler also said that a number of popular and gifted teachers over the years have not been invited to Esalen because of violation of boundary issues.
“It’s a slippery slope to judge someone’s intimate behavior,” Wheeler said, adding that Esalen has not had a case where it did not honor a contract signed with a teacher. But he said the institute is continuing to hold conversations with Gafni and his critics to determine “the best outcome, and how we go forward after Feb. 7,” the date of the workshop.
“We need counsel and education, and we appreciate” hearing from those whose information can be helpful, Wheeler said. “It’s a very sad situation but it is heartening that people are dealing with these issues.”
Whole Foods Market issued a statement that said “John Mackey’s involvement with Marc Gafni and the Center for Integral Wisdom is his personal business and does not represent an endorsement or support for either Mr. Gafni or the Center for Integral Wisdom by Whole Foods Market.”
Some critics contend that Mackey, in his capacity as an executive board member of Gafni’s nonprofit center, is violating his fiduciary responsibility to the ethical values of Whole Foods.
The rabbis and Jewish communal leaders who signed the Gafni petition wrote that they were “motivated by the obligation embedded in the belief that whoever saves a single life, it is as if they have saved a whole world. Marc Gafni has left a trail of pain, suffering, and trauma amongst the people and congregations who were unfortunate to have trusted him. He has abused his extraordinary intellectual gifts and charisma to harm many who came to him in search of spiritual guidance and teaching. He has used professional alliances to legitimize himself by association, and thereby be able to continue creating more harm. As a result Marc Gafni is neither trusted, respected, nor welcome to teach virtually anywhere in Judaism.
“In community after community, those who have trusted him have had their trust betrayed,” the petition continued. “Some of those who sign here were severely misled and [former] defenders of Gafni’s integrity” later came to see that they too “had been deceived. For decades now, Gafni has behaved in ways that violate every ethical and legal standard known to us; his misdeeds go far beyond what was reported in the New York Times.”
Donna Zerner of Portland, Ore., worked on a book with Gafni about a dozen years ago, when she was single and lived in Colorado. She told The Jewish Week their involvement progressed for a time and she is currently in close contact with eight women “who also felt traumatized by their experience” with Gafni.
In her comment on the petition she said she was writing “on behalf of those of us who have been exploited, manipulated and traumatized by our toxic entanglements with this man. After decades of attacking and discrediting his victims, and hoodwinking reputable leaders and organizations into trusting him as a man of integrity — just as we once fervently trusted and supported him — it is time for the truth to finally emerge so that no one else is hurt.”
Gary@jewishweek.org--------------------
Contributing Editor Nathan Jeffay visited with residents of Arara, Israel, the hometown of the gunman who terrorized Tel Aviv, and finds a far more peaceful Arab population than the one Prime Minister Netanyahu describes.
Letter From Israel
Two Realities Collide In Northern Arab Towns
In suspected killer’s hometown, Netanyahu’s ‘lawless’ comments sting.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
An aerial view of the Arab Israeli town of Asara. Wikimedia CommonsArara, Israel — I’m driving through the Arab villages of northern Israel, headed to the hometown of the gunman who is terrorizing Tel Aviv. One village away from my destination of Arara, I see a charred billboard. It’s a poster placed by an Arabic website, championing Jewish-Arab coexistence — and attacked by arsonists.
Is this the region of the people who placed the poster, or the people who burned it? Is it defined more by the fact that just before I pass the billboard I see the only Jewish-Arab school in the country that’s based in an Arab village, and that about 30 of the students come from the suspected gunman’s town — or the fact that I also pass a junction where young Arabs rioted a few months ago?
Israelis who listened to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction last Saturday, the day after Nashat Melhem reportedly killed three people — two Jewish Israelis and an Arab Israeli — came away with a very clear idea of what it’s like around here. After learning that the alleged killer hailed from Arara, the prime minister stood at the murder scene along Dizengoff Street and decried the existence of “enclaves in which there is no law enforcement and in which there is Islamist incitement, rampant crime and illegal weapons.”
Netanyahu said some other things, but what got widely reported were these comments — his declaration that he’s “not prepared to accept two States of Israel, a state of law for most of its citizens and a state within a state for some of them,” and that “one cannot say ‘I am an Israeli in rights and a Palestinian in obligations.’”
As the nation was gripped by the story of the attack this week, with Melhem still on the run, Tel Aviv still on alert, and the families of bar manager Alon Bakal, 26, 30-year-old Shimon Ruimi, a civilian employee of the IDF, and 42-year-old cab driver Amin Shaaban mourning their loved ones, Netanyahu stood by his comments.
In Arara, a town of about 25,000, on Monday, Orwa Natour, 26, was incredulous. “I take it personally,” he said. As far as he’s concerned, the stigma brought to his town by the murderer is bad enough, but Netanyahu’s comments portray it as the kind of wild place that it isn’t.
Defying the stereotype of life in a lawless enclave, Natour works as a physical therapist in the nearby Jewish town of Pardes Hanna — but said that he’s afraid he’ll be discriminated against if he decides to change jobs. He fears that the combination of what happened and Netanyahu’s reaction will make Jewish employers suspicious of Arara residents. “It affects me and affects all the people around me,” he said.
Netanyahu didn’t define the scope of his comments, but they have been widely understood as referring to much of Israel’s Arab sector. In this way, they echoed his claim in last year’s election that Arabs were “heading to the polling stations in droves,” a comment aimed at galvanizing his hardline base.
This time around, the leader of the political opposition, Isaac Herzog, went so far as to suggest that he is inciting anger toward all Arabs. “Israel does not have a prime minister,” Herzog said. “If Israel had a prime minister, he would not incite against one-fifth of Israel’s citizens and make them into outlaws.”
But the airtime he received for his comments pleased many on the right, who fear Arab areas and view Israel’s Arab minority as a fifth column.
The veteran rightist journalist Caroline Glick wrote that Netanyahu had given “one of the most significant speeches of his career.” In the speech he announced a plan to strengthen law enforcement in Arab areas — and since then an Israeli TV report has claimed that he wants to hinge a new $4 billion aid package for Arab areas on acceptance of this plan. Netanyahu’s office denied this report.
In Arara this week, people mostly weren’t thinking ahead to long-term aid packages, but rather about how to process the news and maintain their town’s reputation.
“This is very sad for us, because we live here with Jewish people and are friends with them,” Melhem’s middle school teacher, Abed Said, told me, professing shock at his former pupil’s “big mistake.”
He remembers Melhem as a “chaotic” child who didn’t want to learn and who worried his father, but not as a potential terrorist. He was still absorbing what happened.
Ali Halil, a baker in his 30s, talking as he packed pita bread for sale, echoed similar sentiments. “It hurts,” he said. “Murder is murder — it doesn’t matter if it’s a Jew or an Arab.” As he spoke, recounting how he learned about the local connection to the attack while he was watching Hebrew-language television, a driver from one of the big Israeli food conglomerates delivered kosher meat products to a neighboring store.
There is antagonism to the state and the government to be found around here, and the hardline Islamic Movement has a small following. There’s complexity in the politics and the identity of Arab populations everywhere in Israel — this place is no exception — and there are also likely to be residents who feel more ambivalent about the attack than they would like to say. But here suburban middle-class values tend to win out, and Natour, the physical therapist, is far from alone in spending his day-to-day life in cordial contact with Jewish Israelis.
Azab Atef, a 55-year-old lifeguard who works at a nearby kibbutz called the attack “catastrophic” and said that he fears what the neighboring Jewish communities are thinking. As we walked through Arara, he pointed ahead of him toward nearby Jewish towns. “Katzir, Harish,” he said, ticking off the towns. “We’re neighbors; we live together. This is not good for us.”
Then he adds: “Now I say to Jewish people that I’m from Arara and they say: ‘Ooh, that place is crazy.’”
Nathan Jeffay’s column appears twice a month.---------------------
As the New York Jewish Film Festival turns 25, film critic George Robinson reflects on its impressive achievements.
New York
The Jewish Story, Through A Global Lens
The N.Y. Jewish Film Festival, one of the first of its kind, hits 25.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
Rediat Amare is the focus of the Ethiopian film “Lamb.”On a brisk January night in 1992, The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center co-hosted a screening of Judit Elek’s drama of blood libel and persecution in 19th-century Hungary, “Memories of a River.” It was the opening night of the first New York Jewish Film Festival, so when this year’s festival begins on Wednesday, Jan. 13, for its two-week run, it will mark the 25th year of the event, a significant milestone in an art that is itself only 120 years old.
In a quarter-century the numbers piled up. The festival has shown more than 675 films, features and shorts, from 43 countries, including 320 world, U.S. or New York premieres, and 62 of the films have gone on to theatrical runs.
As impressive as those numbers are, they are not the achievement of which festival director Aviva Weintraub is most proud.
“There is something irreplaceable about going into a room at the same time as a group of other people, seeing a film and discussing it with them afterwards,” she said in a telephone interview earlier this week. “That is the beauty of a film festival.”
If a public screening of a film provides an instant, if random, community, the intensely focused experience of an event like the N.Y. Jewish Film Festival — a couple of weeks of films on a shared theme in a few venues close together — can feel like a blessed retreat into a sort of cinematic summer camp.
That sense of a community in conversation is part of the appeal of themed film festivals, particularly ones that center on issues of personal identity. The NYJFF and the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (which dates from 1980) came to maturity at the same time as similarly vanguard Asian and LGBT events. “We were among the first out of the gate,” Weintraub said.
In a commemorative essay written for the 25th anniversary, Weintraub talked about the part played by the festival in “this ongoing, evolving conversation about what it means to be Jewish.” Asked about that observation, she admitted that what really struck her when she revisited the early years of the event was that she found “more continuity and through-lines than abrupt changes.”
She explained, “There are always personal documentaries, features that look at important thinkers like Freud, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt. A lot of documentaries about filmmakers and musicians, also. There are some filmmakers whose work we showed in the first or second year who were back last year — Peter Forgacs — or have new work in this year’s festival — Amos Gitai. And there are other connections. In the first year we showed a Russian film, “Sunset,” based on Isaac Babel’s “Odessa Tales,” and this year’s retrospective includes “Benya Krik,” a silent film drawn from the same material.”
She added, chuckling, “It’s an example of the universe folding back on itself, but in a good way.”
In the early years of the New York Jewish Film Festival, the programming focus was very much centered on Jewish-themed films from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. As the sheer novelty of such works ebbed, a more global vision emerged. The range of films in this year’s event is indicative of that trend. The opening night feature, “Lamb,” is the first film from Ethiopia to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival. The closing night film is Natalie Portman’s adaptation of Amos Oz’s memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness.” In between are films from Canada, Argentina, Ukraine, Belgium, France, Germany and, of course, the U.S. and Israel. Factor in a selection of “greatest hits” from previous years’ festivals and you have well over a dozen flags flying this year alone.
“It’s apparent that there is a tremendous output of films with Jewish content all over the world,” Weintraub said, adding, “Our first concern is the quality of the film. We want to feel that every film that’s presented is good, solid filmmaking.”
“Lamb,” a first feature by Yared Zeleke, is in some ways typical of the festival’s selection policy. A coming-of-age story set in an isolated, mountainous rural region of Ethiopia, the film uses the language of a sort of global neorealism that is currently the default setting for movies produced outside the big-budget commercial mainstream. It deftly combines an economy of means with elements of family melodrama in an attempt to convey the universal elements of contemporary life without sacrificing the specificity of local detail.
Zeleke’s protagonist is 11-year-old Jew, Ephraim (Rediat Amare). Left with distant relatives by his widowed father who must seek work in the city, Ephraim’s only companion and friend is his young sheep. He finds himself at the center of a fractious family constellation, with his uncle disapproving of Ephraim’s interest in cooking, and coveting the lamb for ritual and culinary purposes. The potential for a treacly outcome is obvious, but Zeleke brings a cool detachment to the material with bracingly anti-sentimental results. From the opening long shots of boy and lamb dwarfed by the beautiful but distancing immensity of the mountains, we are in the hands of a talented filmmaker whose vision is more cosmic than tragic.
Amos Gitai has been well served by the N.Y. Jewish Film Festival since its inception, and he returns the favor gloriously with his newest film, “Rabin: The Last Day,” which will open theatrically at the end of the month. As a result of its commercial release, we will discuss it at greater length in a future issue, but suffice it to say, “Rabin” is Gitai’s best film since “Kippur.” It’s a steely, intense yet sober investigation into the machinations of the ultra-nationalist Israeli right that led to the assassination of the Israeli prime minister. Highly reminiscent of the chilly forensic rigor of the late Italian master Francesco Rosi (“Salvatore Giuliani” and “The Mattei Affair” being forebears), this is a tough-minded, unflinching work of art, the first great film of 2016.
What about the future of the festival?
“Oh, we’re definitely thinking about next year,” Weintraub said. “You want to stay ever-vigilant, because you don’t want to miss something wonderful.”
The New York Jewish Film Festival opens Wednesday, Jan. 13 and runs through Jan. 26. For schedule, tickets and information, go to nyjff.org.---------------------
Also this week, interview with an expert on global anti-Semitism; Ari Goldman on the connection between journalism and the noisy beit midrash of a Lakewood, NJ yeshiva; hopeful signs for federations in latest Jewish GDP survey; and a novel on a Jewish-Arab love affair, nixed by education ministry, is now a hot seller in Israel.
The JW Q&A
Jews ‘Stuck In Middle’ In A Changing Europe
Stewart Ain
Charles Asher Small: Attacks on Israeli policies call for a “nuanced” response.Charles Asher Small is founder and executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). He is also a fellow at Stanford University and a professor at the Moshe Dayan Centre at Tel Aviv University.
ISGAP is an international organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism “on the battlefield of ideas,” striving to study and debate contemporary anti-Semitism as a legitimate area of study. It runs academic programs at several universities — including Harvard and Columbia — and this year launched a two-week program that taught 30 teachers how to create courses on contemporary anti-Semitism. With the BDS (Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment) movement reaching into universities, concert halls and product labeling, we reached out to Small for a Europe-wide perspective. This is an edited transcript.
Q.: There are those who believe that the recent decision of the European Union to require all goods made in the West Bank to be labeled as such is just the first step towards a wider boycott designed to punish Israel. Do you agree?
A: I don’t necessarily agree. I think we have to recognize the BDS movement for what it is — an organized movement out to delegitimize and dehumanize, and for many, eradicate the State of Israel.
At times there is legitimate criticism of Israel, and our response should be nuanced. Sometimes there are allies who want the best for us — it’s a leap to say the EU wants to destroy Israel. But I would strongly urge it — given the rapidly changing dynamics of the Middle East — to adjust its policies to confront this group. Labeling products from the West Bank is not its most pressing issue.
In recent days, two Swedish leaders have claimed that Israel is carrying out extrajudicial killings of Palestinians and that knife attacks in Israel fail to meet the internationally accepted definition of terror attacks. Each later retracted the statements, but what’s going on in Sweden?
The Swedish government is losing all international legitimacy as Jewish citizens are forced to move from urban neighborhoods such as Malmo because they are not safe there any longer. Malmo, in which Jews lived for centuries, has now become basically Judenrein because the extraordinary anti-Semitism and violence there against Jews made them flee. …
After World War II, Sweden established a reputation for social democracy and inclusiveness. But over the last several decades this model appears to be crumbling rapidly and the government should focus on its own problems rather than making bizarre statements that have no grounding in fact or scholarship.
Last summer during Israel’s fight with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, there were a series of attacks on Jews in several European countries. In Germany, there were cries for Jews to be gassed and burned. One Jewish leader there said it was not just anti-Israel rhetoric but “pure hatred of Jews.”
Today’s anti-Semitism focuses on attacking Jewish notions of peoplehood. For the last two generations, Israel has been delegitimized and denigrated by European and Western intellectuals and journalists. This delegitimization argues that Israel is a racist or an apartheid Nazi state. If this is true, then Jewish communities in the diaspora and young students in liberal university environments who express any connection to Israel and the Jewish people or who have strong religious and cultural ties to the land are vulnerable to the same dehumanization and anti-Semitism. This is an affront not just to Jewish communities and students but also to the very fabric of democratic societies and values.
How do you understand what is happening in the Netherlands, which last year saw a 71 percent spike in anti-Semitic incidents, including a shopkeeper who turned away a Jewish woman in Amsterdam saying, “We don’t currently sell to Jews.”
The general atmosphere is shifting and when Western countries and leaders engage with radical political Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian revolutionary regime — which advocate as a fundamental ideological principle the eradication of the State of Israel and the killing of Jews — is it any wonder that anti-Semitism is increasing in Europe and in North America?
France’s hard-right, anti-immigrant National Front party just scored some impressive election victories. What does this mean for Jews?
The moderate center is under increasing pressure in Europe. You have the rise of radical Islam there and the silence of the liberal-intellectual-moderate center. That is leading to the rise of the extreme right, and Jewish communities find themselves stuck in the middle between radical elements of the Muslim community, the extreme left and the extreme right. This is most acute in countries like France, Belgium and even the United Kingdom.---------------------
New York
The Jewish ‘Newsroom’
Teasing out the connections (and disconnects) between journalism and Judaism in a noisy beit midrash.
Ari L. Goldman
Special To The Jewish Week
The author (center in inset) pores over a Talmudic text in a high-decibel yeshiva study hall. Photos by Menachem ButlerAt first I could not take the noise. Arguments, debates, shouting, pounding on the table and the special singsong pattern of speech unique to Talmud study.
I was in the crowded beit midrash, the study hall, of an annual two-day gathering called a Yarchei Kallah sponsored by Beth Medrash Govoha of Lakewood, N.J. The noise was so deafening that I had trouble hearing my study partner, Rabbi Moshe Rockove, who sat just across the narrow table from me.
After almost an hour of this, I told Rockove that I had enough and suggested that we move to the lobby or find a quiet room to continue our study.
But he urged me not to move. “Think of this as a newsroom on deadline,” he told me. “Here someone is debating a lead, there someone is suggesting a new headline and here comes a reporter with a story. It’s a form of organized chaos.”
I have spent years working in newsrooms and less time in study halls, but I never before saw the connections between the two.
Both were, to be sure, noisy places, but also places full of energy, creativity and intensity where people found a shared purpose.
I persevered through the noise and lasted another day and a half in the beit midrash.
Over my career, I have often considered the connections between journalism and Judaism. I think of the journalistic impulse to document events and how our tradition has kept scrupulous accounts of Jewish history. I think about how every Jewish argument has at least two sides, just like a good piece of journalism. I think of the imperative to tell the truth and be fair. But the beit midrash as newsroom was a new one for me.
The sponsor of the two-day event, Beth Medrash Govoha, runs the huge yeshiva in Lakewood, N.J., popularly known as BMG with some 6,500 students. It is associated with the black hat or “yeshivish” brand of Orthodoxy that takes its Torah study seriously. It is one of the largest yeshivot in the world.
The program, which was held over Christmas weekend at a Hyatt hotel in Princeton, and attracted 220 adults, mirrors in a small way the study done in the yeshiva itself. Participants were given source books and were asked to prepare the material with a study partner, or chavruta. Then a rabbi would give a lecture or shiur that expanded and elucidated the material and then wrapped wrap up the session.
But unlike the discussions at the yeshiva, which can get rather theoretical, the discussions here were intended to be practical. The theme was “Compete the Right Way,” and it started with foundational texts from the Talmud and rabbinic literature. Among these were texts that explored the rights of farmers and fishermen, the ability of poor people to shake olives from a tree and the rules for men courting women with intent to marry.
The texts also made it clear that there were different ethical obligations toward Jews, on the one hand, and idol worshippers on the other.
The text study was followed by a panel of rabbis who were dayanim, or rabbinic court judges, who spoke about the ethical implications of the texts. Among the more concrete and contemporary issues covered were poaching clients and employees from competing businesses; persuading a business to switch its credit card processor and the ethics of an out-of-town business competing with local vendors.
Participants were laymen who had studied Talmud, either at BMG or other yeshivot, and who had chosen careers other than the rabbinate or scholarship. Most of the participants were businessmen, but there were also a smattering of professionals, including a dozen lawyers. Since they were learning law, albeit Jewish law, BMG arranged for the lawyers who needed them to get Continuing Legal Education credit, something required to continue practicing in some states. Three pulpit rabbis, one from as far away as Silver Spring, Md., came with groups of congregants who studied together.
“It’s not a vacation in the classic sense,” said the organizer, Rabbi Avi Colman. “It’s more of a spiritual recharge.”
It was also noisy. After Rabbi Rockove, my study partner, made the analogy to the newsroom, I thought of my favorite journalism movie of the year, “Spotlight,” which is about the Boston Globe’s investigation of clergy sex abuse in the Boston Archdiocese. At one point in the movie, all hell breaks loose when an editor decides to hold a story and a reporter insists that it run immediately. The argument, set in the newsroom, is rather passionate and, well, Talmudic.
Rabbi Rockove, a 45-year-old BMG administrator, knows both the newsroom and the yeshiva. In an earlier phase of life, he was a reporter for Yated Ne’eman, a popular charedi newspaper published in Monsey, N.Y. He told me that the first hour of study was often the noisiest owing to the enthusiasm of the participants. He promised that it would quiet down, a bit. I’m not sure that it did, but I got used to it.
I was at the event as a guest of BMG, which is marketing itself more aggressively to outsiders. In 2013, David Landes wrote a long piece for Tablet about the yeshiva’s exponential growth. And in 2014 Marc Oppenheimer wrote an article for The New York Times magazine on the community’s social network, and noted that the yeshiva is now just a tad smaller than Harvard College.
I went to the event out of a combination of curiosity and nostalgia. I had studied Talmud in the pre-seminary program at Yeshiva University. In my two days of study at BMG I remembered what attracted me to Talmud study: the imaginative tales and the camaraderie of the beit midrash, where discussions were as fluid and fanciful as the Talmud we studied. And I remembered what turned me off: the endless splitting of hairs and tortured logic that existed only here and nowhere else and often without any relevance to the world outside.
If there were parallels to a newsroom, it was to a newsroom long gone. Like early newsrooms, this was an all-male world. No women were in the beit midrash. Wives were not welcome on this vacation, although there was a special lecture offered — via telephone — for those who stayed home. (Colman told me that 136 women called in.) It was also a newsroom of the past because there was virtually no technology. I didn’t see one open laptop in the beit midrash, although there was one computer terminal available that connected with a database called Otzar HaChochmo that can access 76,000 Jewish books. It was rarely in use.
Also it was not a newsroom of today because there was no news. No one mentioned ISIS or the Iran deal or the latest stabbing attacks in Israel. No one mentioned the tornadoes in Texas or the floods in Missouri or even the presidential election. And, perhaps most tellingly, no one mentioned Sheldon Silver or William Rapfogel or other Orthodox felons.
There were just a few acknowledgments of the world outside the walls of the beit midrash. Rabbi Benzion Kokis, a teacher at BMG, emphasized that there is an ethical imperative — and even a self-interest — in treating all people fairly. “If we betray the goyim, they will ask: ‘Is this the people that God redeemed?’” Rabbi Kokis spoke of Toras Emmes, the Torah of Truth. “It is one thing,” he said, “to learn Toras Emmes and another thing to live Toras Emmes.” He said that the task of all those who studied over the two days of the event was to make the transition from learning to living. “It is not easy,” he concluded, “but nothing equals that Kiddush hashem [sanctification of God’s name].” ---------------------
Opinion
Some Federations Rebounding From The Great Recession
Mark Pearlman
Special To The Jewish Week
Mark PearlmanHere’s some good news as we enter 2016. The latest update of the “The Jewish GDP (Gross Domestic Product)” study shows that Jewish federations in the U.S. have finally begun to recover from the Great Recession that began in 2008. The new study reports that federations’ total revenues significantly increased since the last published study, one year ago, but that some federations are doing far better than others.
The Jewish GDP analysis, a project of The Jewish Week, provides an opportunity to better understand the post-recession period and foster informed discussion on the Jewish community’s future finances and performance. It touched on such issues as transparency, efficiency and accountability.
The study analyzed financial data from the years 2007 and 2013/2014 (the latest data available), from Jewish nonprofit organizations, using the GuideStar database of public financial disclosure forms that nonprofits are legally required to file to the Internal Revenue Service. The total revenue that all those Jewish organizations collected is “The Jewish GDP.”
The project aims to track the financial health of the Jewish non-profit sector over time (see “Nonprofits Still Seen Struggling Long After Recession,” Jan. 2, 2015.)
Federation revenues from 2012 to 2014 tracked gains in the stock market during that time, though the gains were not as strong as the market.
The stock market strongly appreciated (by more than 40 percent) since our prior Jewish GDP study, and significant resources flowed back to the federation system (more than 27 percent). The federations have now recovered on an aggregate basis since the stock market fallout in 2008 and subsequent recession, increasing by 3 percent. This is welcome news since the prior study reported the Jewish federations had not yet experienced a full recovery, having fallen by 19 percent.
However, the new study finds that income inequality exists among the various federations, as improved revenue results are not uniform and disparity prevails between locations; the complete rebound only occurred for roughly a third of the federations. The other two-thirds are still below the 2007 level and have endured net revenue losses in the post-recession period.
Another Jewish GDP highlight is the impressive success of the Combined Jewish Federations of Greater Boston. It increased total revenues over 1.5 times (161 percent) since 2007, while other local federations struggled to recover or remain below their 2007 level. How to explain the Boston federation’s success?
Jeffrey Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, notes: “Boston’s federation made the strategic choice to partner with Jewish families in their pursuit of doing good, most especially when these projects aligned with the federation’s priorities. They abandoned the historical concept of the primacy of the annual campaign. As a result, they have been outpacing all other large communities, including in the growth of their annual campaign.”
(A future report in this series will focus in more specific detail on the Boston strategies in comparison to other federations.)
As for takeaways for 2016 and beyond, the latest Jewish GDP study benefited from an extremely favorable fundraising and endowment environment (2013-14) in which the stock market soared. This atypical bull market is unlikely to continue. For the year just ended, the 2015 S&P Index closed with a slight annual gain, and 2016 is forecasted for single-digit increases at best. Jewish organizations will need to apply lessons from the last downturn in 2008 and 2009 to manage their way through the next upcoming cycle.
Finally, recurring questions remain, including “How are we doing?” and “How can we do better?” These questions are at the heart of a data-driven, performance-based culture, one that is only beginning to permeate Jewish life. Performance metrics are fundamental to making better decisions, leading to a stronger community in the future. Unfortunately, such metrics are lacking in areas as diverse as social service, Jewish education, philanthropy, Israel engagement and community relations.
For 2016, the Jewish GDP Project will facilitate discussions for this critical community issue by launching the initiative with a Jan. 12 event: “Measurement & Metrics: The Future of Philanthropy.” The luncheon will be co-sponsored with the Jewish Funders Network and will showcase innovative approaches in nonprofit evaluation by the Robin Hood Foundation and UJA-Federation of New York. (See box for details.)
“The Jewish GDP Project: Beyond the Dollars” is a project of The Jewish Week Investigative Journalism Fund. The reports are based on research by business strategist Mark Pearlman and Yale University management professor Edieal Pinker. Ariel Mintz provided research analysis.
‘Measurement & Metrics,’ Jan. 12 At Robin Hood
The Robin Hood Foundation will host a program, “Measurements & Metrics: The Future of Philanthropy,” at noon on Jan. 12, featuring Judith Samuels, managing director for impact and performance assessment at UJA-Federation of New York, in conversation with Michael Weinstein, chief program officer of the Robin Hood Foundation.
Jewish Week editor Gary Rosenblatt will moderate the discussion, which will explore innovative approaches to evaluating nonprofit performance. Mark Pearlman, who is sponsoring the event as part of The Jewish Week’s Jewish GDP project, believes it should be particularly helpful for donors.
For details, visit jfunders.com.---------------------
Israel News
This Romance Is Too Hot
Education Ministry’s move against cross-border love affair novel is new culture war salvo.
Michele Chabin
Contributing Editor
Fish out of water? Dorit Rabinyan’s tale of Jewish-Arab love is flying off the shelves. Iris Nesher
Jerusalem — It is the love that dare not speak its name — at least not in the tension-laced Israel of early 2016.
That romance — between a Palestinian painter in the West Bank and an Israeli translator, found in a moderately successful novel from a year-and-a-half-ago — is the latest chapter in the ongoing culture war dividing Israeli society; those on the left and right this week are lining up to debate whether Dorit Rabinyan’s Montague-Capulet tale is suitable literature for the country’s high school students.
The book, “Gader Haya” (which will be printed in English as “Borderlife” and sold in the U.S. in 2017), is, not surprisingly given the controversy, flying off the shelves.
“Many, many people came in on Thursday and Friday and requested it,” said an employee of a popular Jerusalem bookstore, who requested anonymity because she wasn’t authorized to speak with the press. “We had several copies and sold every one by the time we closed the store for Shabbat. We’ve reordered and are waiting for the new shipment to arrive.”
Most of the people who bought the book “said they were doing so out of principle,” the bookstore worker said. “They were against perceived government censorship.”
Rabinyan’s taboo romance became a hot item within hours after the Education Ministry decided not to include it in the country’s advanced Hebrew literature curriculum for high school students.
The demand has been so great, Rabinyan’s agent, Debra Harris, told The Jewish Week, that another printing has been ordered.
The novel depicts the New York-based romance of Khilmi Nasser, a Palestinian painter from the West Bank and Liat Binyamini, a translator from Israel. As they fall in love, the fear and biases they held begin to crumble.
The book also shows the IDF in a harsh light, according to Education Minister Naftali Bennett.
Although the ministry has emphasized that the book isn’t banned — students and teachers can bring it to school — the decision not to include it in the curriculum has caused an uproar in Israel, where some are defending the decision and others are accusing the government of meddling.
The lines are clearly drawn on social media, where a lively debate on the book has been taking place.
Those supportive of Education Minister Naftali Bennett’s decision — which he made following a recommendation by an educators’ committee to disqualify the book from curriculum consideration even though the ministry’s pedagogical board had already supported its inclusion — are mystified by the media circus and upset by media reports of a “book banning.”
“I haven’t read the book but I am disturbed by the media’s use of inflammatory language saying it is ‘banned,’” Randi Mellman Oze, a Jerusalem mother with teenagers, wrote in a Facebook thread. “People went crazy because they supposedly banned the book, when all they did was keep it off the curriculum. It’s allowed on school property and in the library.”
Moshe Matitya, a Jerusalem father of teens, attributed the brouhaha to left-wing activists.
“Why are leftists so upset that students will not be forced to read this book? It had simply been under consideration for inclusion in the required reading list of next year’s syllabus, and it was decided not to include the book in that list.”
David Bedein, a conservative Israeli journalist and social worker, said the ministry had “sound reasons” not to include a novel that “glorifies” a romantic relationship between an Arab man and a Jewish woman.
“All of us who studied social work in Israel learned from the ‘Mark of Cain’ by criminologist Shlomo Shoham, which revealed how a generation of Jewish girls from immigrant transit camps in the 1950s and 1960s were offered to work for Arab Muslim men in their villages, and how many Jewish girls became entrapped for life in Arab villages,” Bedein said.
Consequently as many as 50,000 halachically Jewish children grew up in Israeli Muslim Arab homes, he said, citing Shoham’s statistics.
Today, Bedein said, “Jewish girls venture out in Israeli cities where there is a contiguous Muslim population. … It is hard to resist the charm of a middle-class Arab man who poses an attraction that a Jewish girl may have difficulty fending off.”
Whether Jews and Arab are mingling (very few Jewish-Arab couples marry in Israel, and if they do the ceremony must take place outside the country) is not something the government should be trying to prevent, critics of the ministry’s decision say.
Many Israelis were upset by a statement from an unnamed ministry official quoted by Haaretz, who justified the book’s exclusion on the basis of “identity.”
“Intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews are viewed by many in society as a threat to their separate identities,” the official said. “Adolescents don’t have the systemic view that includes considerations involving maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the people and the significance of [intermarriage].”
Isaac Herzog, who heads the Israeli opposition, called the ministry’s decision political and said “the aggressive and unnecessary act of disqualifying a book based on a mistaken and narrow understanding of its content is another brick ... in the wall of intimidation, exclusion and inflexibility of the Netanyahu government.”
David B. Green, a senior writer at Haaretz and its former book-review editor, told the Jewish Week there is a “growing insularity” in Israeli society in general “that encourages Jewish Israelis to feel not only that their physical security is at risk, but also that their religious culture and values are threatened from every direction, and must be defended.”
In this case, “it also reflects a different philosophy about the goals of education,” Green said.
Mordechai Kremnitzer, vice president of research at the Israel Democracy Institute and an expert in Arab-Jewish relations as well as national security and democracy, believes the ministry’s decision was “unwise.”
“Its impact was exactly the opposite of what was intended. It’s raised a lot of curiosity about the book and sales have grown significantly as a result.”
It also smacks of “quasi-censorship, which stems from some strange idea that we have to protect Jewish values against other values and that sexual relations between Israelis and Palestinians might endanger Jewish values.”
While Kremnitzer acknowledged that some parents and students might consider the book “offensive and harmful,” he thinks “a more self-confident ministry would be able to resist this type of opposition. Some people will be happy whatever the decision.”
“Israeli society is much more tolerant than the attitude expressed by the ministry. That’s why this decision has been met by so much criticism.”
Since the news of the book’s disqualification late Dec. 30 “at least 11” high school classes decided to discuss the book, according to Haaretz, and the attorney general is reportedly planning to examine the ministry’s decision.
Harris said the public interest in “Gader Haya,” though totally unexpected, has given the already popular book a huge boost.
“It’s an agent’s dream,” she said.
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. You know the drill. Our website is always there for you with breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion essays and other features.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/
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Survivors Meet Again,
Worlds From Sosnowiec
Steve Lipman
Worlds From Sosnowiec
Steve Lipman
In The Beginning
A Changing Mission
Hilary Danailova
Ann Welner, left, and Bella Ellerton, center, natives of the same city in pre-Holocaust Poland. hanie Ellerton
Ann Welner, left, and Bella Ellerton, center, natives of the same city in pre-Holocaust Poland. hanie Ellerton
Nearly 74 years ago, a pair of young Jewish women left their hometown in southwest Poland, on a transport to a Nazi concentration camp. Both survived the Holocaust, but went their separate ways after World War II.
A random conversation on Long Island last month led to their unplanned reunion.
Shanie Ellerton, a member of Chabad of West Hempstead, brought her mother, Roz Speiser, to one of the synagogue’s Sunday morning social programs for seniors for the first time a few weeks ago. Mother and daughter sat at a table next to a stranger, Ann Welner, a 90-year-old West Hempstead resident who regularly attends the events.
Ellerton detected an accent.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Poland.”
“Where in Poland?”
“Sosnowiec,” Welner answered.
“My mother-in-law is from Sosnowiec,” Ellerton said. “Maybe you knew her.”
Ellerton’s mother-in-law, Bella — maiden name, Baila Steiglitz — was at home that Sunday morning, but Welner remembered the name Baila Steiglitz from Sosnowiec. “You have to bring her,” Welner told Ellerton. She did, the next week.
While they hadn’t known each other growing up in their hometown, Welner (née Hanka Jerzy) and Steiglitz were together later.
“We were together on the transport, we were together in the camps,” Welner said.
Welner and Bella were on the first major deportation of Jews from Sosnowiec in May 1942. The pair of teenagers was sent to Waldenburg, a labor camp in what is now southwest Poland. They remained together until liberation came in early 1945.
The two women eventually found husbands, immigrated to the United States, had children and made careers. Several years ago they both moved to West Hempstead to be near their children. Although they live about a half-mile from each other, they never crossed paths.
Until Ellerton brought her mother-in-law to the Chabad seniors program.
When Bella was introduced to Welner, she “lit up,” Ellerton said. They started talking in Polish.
“I was just shocked. I didn’t think this was possible,” Welner said.
They’ve since gone back each Sunday, renewing their long-interrupted friendship.
What do they talk about?
They’re not telling. And since the conversations are in Polish, Ellerton doesn’t know. Probably not the war years. Bella never talks about that time, Ellerton said. She said her mother-in-law was born in 1922 or 1923. “No one knows.”
Bella’s memory about details of that time is fuzzy. “I don’t want to remember,” she said.
Ellerton has managed over the years to put together scraps of information about what happened to her mother-in-law during the war — a series of concentration camps and escape from a death march, a story that parallels Welner’s. Both women lost their parents in the Shoah.
Sosnowiec had a Jewish population of 28,000 in September 1939, at the start of the war. About 700 returned after, but most quickly left for the United States or Israel. Today, only a handful of Jews live there.
Both women enjoy the weekly reunion.
Watching the two women get together after all these decades is “an incredible feeling,” said Rabbi Yossi Lieberman, who has served as the Chabad emissary in West Hempstead for the past 14 years. If you do something to bring people together, sometimes they come together in surprising ways, he said.
Welner believes the reunion was not random.
“There are no coincidences,” she said. “Everything is being made above.”
steve@jewishweek.org
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A Changing Mission
Hilary Danailova
Travel
San Francisco
In 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,'
Judaism Takes Center Stage
Linda Buchwald
San Francisco
Walking down Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, I swooned slightly amid a swirl of visual stimuli.
There were dozens of new eateries, from Breton bistros to gourmet chocolatiers; toy stores where everything was wooden and non-toxic; boutiques full of faux retro clocks and snarky greeting cards. I’m used to expensive cities, but $12 chocolate bars and $20 brunch entrées were still kind of disorienting in a district I remember, from the 1990s, as poor.
Across the street, vestiges of that Mission remained. Sidewalk vendors hawked tables of used nightgowns and well-worn plastic toys in front of a taqueria with a crumbling sign and fluorescent lighting, where lunch cost $4.
As my husband Oggi and I admired the murals of Clarion Alley — a narrow, historic lane celebrated for its public art — several unfriendly-looking men eyed us. One of them edged a bit too close and muttered something; with a surge of adrenaline, we quickened our pace to emerge into the gentrified safety of Valencia.
This tension — between wealthy, tech-economy newcomers and struggling longtime residents — is the defining narrative of contemporary San Francisco. And the Mission, a formerly Latino immigrant district, is at the core of this narrative, an urban metaphor for the vertiginous upscaling of an erstwhile bohemia. Sensationalized in stories of Google buses and million-dollar evictions to make room for luxury condos, the Mission today is indisputably richer, yet no less quirky.
Quirkiness — the archly ironic kind immortalized in “Portlandia” — is the unofficial religion of San Francisco. The Mission’s muraled, multi-ethnic heritage long ago spawned its own (counter) culture, expressed in numerous parades and street festivals throughout the year. Many of these involve drag, non-heteronormative values (a term you hear a lot) and occasionally sacrilege — like the annual Eastertime Hunky Jesus Contest held by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a satirical organization that raises awareness and money for LGBT issues, in Dolores Park.
This beloved lawn is the heart of the Mission, both literally and spiritually. On weekends, as brunch lines form at nearby Tartine, locals sprawl across the park’s green hill, enjoying the city’s sunniest microclimate and spectacular views over the downtown skyline.
Dolores Park gets its name from Mission Dolores, the adjacent parish founded by JunÃpero Serra in the Colonial era — and the oldest surviving building in San Francisco. Now a historic landmark, Mission Dolores has withstood numerous earthquakes and generations of gold-seeking settlers and remains a draw for tourists and worshippers.
Catholicism may have founded the Mission, but Jewish life is on the rise there. Exhibit A: The Kitchen, one of several newish congregations catering to the post-synagogue, hipster parent set, which holds regular services, classes and events at the SF Friends School (originally a Levi Strauss factory). Or the Mission Minyan, another post-denominational group — you choose egalitarian or separate seating, and all the food is kosher — that meets in the colorfully frescoed Women’s Building, a non profit community arts center.
Exhibit B might be the phenomenally popular Wise Sons Deli, which was launched on the trendy 24th Street corridor a few years ago by a pair of transplanted, deli-starved Angelenos. The Wise Sons take on classic Jewish “comfort food” — a much-lauded matzo ball soup, pastrami, etc. — features the farm-fresh ingredients of California. (Another Wise Sons location recently opened in the Contemporary Jewish Museum in downtown San Francisco.)
My sister, who lives nearby, swears by Wise Sons chocolate babka and rye loaves, both made in-house. She’s also a fan of challah made by the Oakland kosher institution Grand Bakery, one of numerous kosher items sold at a new Mission outpost of the Gus’s Market gourmet chain.
And she bought her Jonathan Adler menorah and seder plate at Aldea, a Jewish-owned home furnishings store on Valencia. As for me, I’ve lost entire afternoons prowling the Valencia boutiques, as my long-suffering husband can attest. Nearly all the shops are locally owned, and filled with an urbane sensibility that makes for distinctive souvenirs (as I like to call overpriced dresses. Babka makes a terrific memento, but wouldn’t last the trip.)
A few blocks down Mission Street, as the neighborhood’s affluence visibly deteriorates, a handy BART station whisks you to downtown Market Street in under five minutes. That kind of convenience — plus all the sunshine — helps explain the Mission’s newfound appeal; so do pretty Victorian buildings and pocket parks where our daughter Zelda played happily.
Everyone I chatted with in those parks and cafés worked in technology, came from somewhere else, and appeared to be under 40. Perhaps it’s inevitable, given the economic forces shaping the Bay Area, that San Francisco is losing some of its vaunted diversity to the high-tech 21st century Gold Rush.
But change is to California what ice is to Antarctica: its defining essence and eternal allure. As single-source chocolatiers join taquerias, the muraled Mission landscape remains, for now, exhilarating.
Reminder: For an upcoming column, I’m still looking for advice and stories from kosher travelers. Write me at hilarasha@gmail.com.
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In 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,'
Judaism Takes Center Stage
Linda Buchwald
In The Beginning
"'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend': The Jewish TV Show You Should Be Watching"
Screenshot via youtube.comJTA
"'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend': The Jewish TV Show You Should Be Watching"
Screenshot via youtube.comJTA
Comedy, Film & Television, Television
If the ratings for CW’s newest show, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” are any indication, you probably aren’t watching it. If not, you’re missing out.
Now that creator and star Rachel Bloom is nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a TV series — fingers crossed for her on Sunday! — it’s time to tune in. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is hilarious and zany, and as it happens, it addresses Jewish identity in unexpectedly profound ways.
The series is the story of Rebecca Bunch, a successful New York lawyer who follows her summer camp ex-boyfriend to small-town California, never mind he’s in a serious relationship with someone else. The musical comedy features lots of singing and dancing, the campy products of Rebecca’s wild imagination. These aren’t your typical Broadway numbers, though the show features the talents of stage veterans Santino Fontana and Donna Lynne Champlin.
Rebecca’s Judaism is a huge part of the series, recurring in ways both explicit and subtle. Few other shows — Amazon’s “Transparent” excepted — deal with Jewish identity this deeply.
Typically on TV, Judaism is little more than a plot device — like on “Friends,” where the Jewishness of Ross and Monica Geller is most likely to come up with a token Christmastime mention of Hanukkah. Or characters like Schmidt, on “New Girl,” who uses Jewish phrases all the time, but typically just plays them for laughs.
On “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” Judaism is more than just a punchline — though it’s certainly that, too. This was apparent during the midseason finale, which begins on a boat from Europe to America in 1901.
“I know we are fleeing,” a mother tells her daughter, “but you couldn’t comb your hair?”
Jewish daughters will probably laugh in recognition. But what’s significant here is that the entire scene is in Yiddish. A sprinkling of Yiddish phrases may be heard on television here and there, but name another mainstream show that’s had an entire scene in the language.
Other comedic moments point to larger truths. As Rebecca replaces Christmas decorations with Hanukkah ones before her mother’s visit, she wonders: “Chanukah. Hanukah. Hanuk-kah. Which one of you is right?” It’s a moment both funny and familiar, with a nod toward informal comfort that many young Jews today feel among Christian symbols.
For single Jewish women, the show hits another nerve: Rebecca’s mother, a perfectly cast Tovah Feldshuh, finds many ways to hint that her daughter should be married. After finding a stash of condoms, for example, she tells Rebecca she won’t get a husband “that way.” The relationship is reminiscent of Rhoda Morgenstern, the prototypical single Jewish female, and her mother on “Rhoda,” a spinoff of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Rhoda, however, never had to deal with the minefield that online dating — another cultural phenomenon that “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” hilariously nails. In one episode, after Rebecca takes a Tinder date back to her place, she performs a slinky number with the refrain: “Hey sexy stranger, come back to my place and I hope you’re not a murderer.”
If there’s one line that best captures how Judaism plays in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” it’s the riposte by the mother to Rebecca’s claim that if she has a child, she would only want her to be happy.
“Our people are not about happy,” the mother says. “We’re about survival.”
In “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” Rebecca moves across the country to be happy, but it’s not easy. She struggles. She suffers through bad dates and endures pretty girls who poke at her self-esteem. She faces everything else life throws at her — and comes out (relatively) intact on the other side. What could be more Jewish than that?
Although the ratings haven’t been great, CW has ordered more episodes for a total of 18 for the first season. The show returns Jan. 25, so you have plenty of time to catch up.
You can thank me later.
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MORE HEADLINES
Between the Lines - Frustration With Israel Is Growing Here At Home
Gary Rosenblatt
Frustration With Israel Is Growing Here At Home
The hard fact is that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at odds with the next generation of Americans.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary RosenblattEven as Israel endures daily “lone wolf” attacks from young Palestinians prepared to die for the cause of spilling Jewish blood, American Jewish leaders confide that generating support for the Jewish state is becoming increasingly difficult these days — even within the Jewish community, and especially among younger people.
In contrast to the widespread emotional identification shown for Parisians and others around the world who have been attacked by Islamic militants, it is hard to find much empathy out there for Israelis seeking to go on with their lives amidst the prospect of violence they face each day.
In a series of private conversations in recent days with a variety of professionals who make their living advocating for Israel and Jewish causes, I was struck by a consistent theme I heard: deep concern about Israel’s future and its relationship with diaspora Jewry. There was a feeling that the political and diplomatic situation is getting worse as Israel is increasingly isolated on the international scene — even spied on by the U.S., we learned last week.
Closer to home, efforts by the last Knesset to liberalize positions on personal religious status — on such issues as conversion, marriage, divorce and women’s prayer at the Kotel — have been reversed by the current coalition in Jerusalem. That is one more signal to the great majority of American Jews, who are not Orthodox, that they are seen as second-class Jews in the eyes of the State of Israel they are urged to support.
I share these worries about a weakening of our identification with Israel. The hard fact is that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at odds with the next generation of Americans, including many Jews, who want to see greater efforts to resolve the Palestinian conflict and who put the onus for the impasse on Jerusalem. It is not only President Obama who feels that way. The fastest growing segments of American society — women, young people, blacks and Latinos — are less supportive of Israel than the previous generation, according to polls.
A young professional with extensive experience in countering the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel at colleges tells me, “It’s just not cool to be Jewish on campus today,” especially if that means identifying with Israel at a time when the Mideast’s only democratic state is cast as a pariah, accused of apartheid. Liberal students quick to respond to discrimination against blacks and other minorities somehow fail to identify with the only Mideast society that proudly supports rather than punishes gays and lesbians. That leaves little room for progressive Jewish students who back Israel’s right to exist. While some of their elders scorn them for criticizing Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians and the occupation of the West Bank, their classmates shun them for identifying with Israel at all.
Federation executives worry privately that when the generation of major funders who vividly remember Israel’s struggle for statehood and the anguish of the 1967 and 1973 wars passes from the scene, raising substantial dollars for the Jewish state will be that much harder.
“It’s very complicated” making Israel’s case, the execs say, and they’re right. In part that’s because Israelis are no longer seen as our poor cousins, asking for a handout. Indeed, their economy is booming, even though the huge gap between the “haves” and “have nots” is worrisome, especially given the ongoing and rapid growth of the Israeli Arab and charedi communities, lowest on the income scale.
In part it’s because Israel’s Chief Rabbinate seeks to set religious standards ever higher rather than show compassion for the hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking Israeli citizens who would seek conversion. The situation is creating a substantial threat to Israeli cohesiveness and damages the longstanding image of Israel as a compassionate society that mirrors our own Western values and Jewish ideals.
Of course these perceptions of Israel today are not the full picture. They do not credit a vibrant Israeli democracy functioning in a region that has become increasingly chaotic, lawless, violent and threatening since the woefully misnamed Arab Spring. These critical views do not account for: courageous young men and women who serve their remarkable IDF with skill and commitment; a society whose Arab and Israeli citizens, overall, coexist day to day with civility and respect; and a nation whose accomplishments in the areas of technology, medicine, science and water are the envy of the rest of the world.
But while many of us take pride in Israel as a Start-Up Nation, we cannot ignore that it is also known at home for its Lock-Up Leadership — soon to have a former prime minister joining a former president behind bars as a result of differing forms of corruption at the highest levels of government.
Israel is not a perfect society, and those of us who seek to make its case err when we try to portray the Arab-Israeli conflict in black-and-white terms. The more we recognize and acknowledge the complexity of the clash, and the fact that Israelis themselves are divided on how to resolve it, the more credibility we will have in putting forth Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
Whether or not it is fair, the strong perception today is that the Israeli government is moving further right, and intransigent, at a time when the rest of the world is fed up with the Israel-Palestinian impasse, seeing no hope for a resolution in the foreseeable future. (And bear in mind that there are no term limits in Israel, and no political figure left of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seen as capable of besting him at the polls.)
Jewish leaders here are expressing deep, if so far private, frustration over the lack of action on Jerusalem’s part to improve its image, if not its strategic position.
One national leader told me he’d like to fly to Israel, with a group of his top colleagues, to try to convince Netanyahu in dramatic fashion of the need for “a plan, any plan” to break the impasse.
But that is not likely to happen, and, of course, the views of American Jewish leaders have long been known to the prime minister. Netanyahu and his government will continue to make decisions based on their own narrow and immediate political interests, and we can only hope they will coincide with national interests as well.
Our job remains to show support for Israel, if not all its policies, and to emphasize its remarkable achievements and importance in a chaotic, hostile region. But our job is getting harder with each passing day.
If the ratings for CW’s newest show, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” are any indication, you probably aren’t watching it. If not, you’re missing out.
Now that creator and star Rachel Bloom is nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a TV series — fingers crossed for her on Sunday! — it’s time to tune in. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is hilarious and zany, and as it happens, it addresses Jewish identity in unexpectedly profound ways.
The series is the story of Rebecca Bunch, a successful New York lawyer who follows her summer camp ex-boyfriend to small-town California, never mind he’s in a serious relationship with someone else. The musical comedy features lots of singing and dancing, the campy products of Rebecca’s wild imagination. These aren’t your typical Broadway numbers, though the show features the talents of stage veterans Santino Fontana and Donna Lynne Champlin.
Rebecca’s Judaism is a huge part of the series, recurring in ways both explicit and subtle. Few other shows — Amazon’s “Transparent” excepted — deal with Jewish identity this deeply.
Typically on TV, Judaism is little more than a plot device — like on “Friends,” where the Jewishness of Ross and Monica Geller is most likely to come up with a token Christmastime mention of Hanukkah. Or characters like Schmidt, on “New Girl,” who uses Jewish phrases all the time, but typically just plays them for laughs.
On “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” Judaism is more than just a punchline — though it’s certainly that, too. This was apparent during the midseason finale, which begins on a boat from Europe to America in 1901.
“I know we are fleeing,” a mother tells her daughter, “but you couldn’t comb your hair?”
Jewish daughters will probably laugh in recognition. But what’s significant here is that the entire scene is in Yiddish. A sprinkling of Yiddish phrases may be heard on television here and there, but name another mainstream show that’s had an entire scene in the language.
Other comedic moments point to larger truths. As Rebecca replaces Christmas decorations with Hanukkah ones before her mother’s visit, she wonders: “Chanukah. Hanukah. Hanuk-kah. Which one of you is right?” It’s a moment both funny and familiar, with a nod toward informal comfort that many young Jews today feel among Christian symbols.
For single Jewish women, the show hits another nerve: Rebecca’s mother, a perfectly cast Tovah Feldshuh, finds many ways to hint that her daughter should be married. After finding a stash of condoms, for example, she tells Rebecca she won’t get a husband “that way.” The relationship is reminiscent of Rhoda Morgenstern, the prototypical single Jewish female, and her mother on “Rhoda,” a spinoff of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Rhoda, however, never had to deal with the minefield that online dating — another cultural phenomenon that “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” hilariously nails. In one episode, after Rebecca takes a Tinder date back to her place, she performs a slinky number with the refrain: “Hey sexy stranger, come back to my place and I hope you’re not a murderer.”
If there’s one line that best captures how Judaism plays in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” it’s the riposte by the mother to Rebecca’s claim that if she has a child, she would only want her to be happy.
“Our people are not about happy,” the mother says. “We’re about survival.”
In “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” Rebecca moves across the country to be happy, but it’s not easy. She struggles. She suffers through bad dates and endures pretty girls who poke at her self-esteem. She faces everything else life throws at her — and comes out (relatively) intact on the other side. What could be more Jewish than that?
Although the ratings haven’t been great, CW has ordered more episodes for a total of 18 for the first season. The show returns Jan. 25, so you have plenty of time to catch up.
You can thank me later.
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MORE HEADLINES
Between the Lines - Frustration With Israel Is Growing Here At Home
Gary Rosenblatt
Frustration With Israel Is Growing Here At Home
The hard fact is that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at odds with the next generation of Americans.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary RosenblattEven as Israel endures daily “lone wolf” attacks from young Palestinians prepared to die for the cause of spilling Jewish blood, American Jewish leaders confide that generating support for the Jewish state is becoming increasingly difficult these days — even within the Jewish community, and especially among younger people.
In contrast to the widespread emotional identification shown for Parisians and others around the world who have been attacked by Islamic militants, it is hard to find much empathy out there for Israelis seeking to go on with their lives amidst the prospect of violence they face each day.
In a series of private conversations in recent days with a variety of professionals who make their living advocating for Israel and Jewish causes, I was struck by a consistent theme I heard: deep concern about Israel’s future and its relationship with diaspora Jewry. There was a feeling that the political and diplomatic situation is getting worse as Israel is increasingly isolated on the international scene — even spied on by the U.S., we learned last week.
Closer to home, efforts by the last Knesset to liberalize positions on personal religious status — on such issues as conversion, marriage, divorce and women’s prayer at the Kotel — have been reversed by the current coalition in Jerusalem. That is one more signal to the great majority of American Jews, who are not Orthodox, that they are seen as second-class Jews in the eyes of the State of Israel they are urged to support.
I share these worries about a weakening of our identification with Israel. The hard fact is that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at odds with the next generation of Americans, including many Jews, who want to see greater efforts to resolve the Palestinian conflict and who put the onus for the impasse on Jerusalem. It is not only President Obama who feels that way. The fastest growing segments of American society — women, young people, blacks and Latinos — are less supportive of Israel than the previous generation, according to polls.
A young professional with extensive experience in countering the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel at colleges tells me, “It’s just not cool to be Jewish on campus today,” especially if that means identifying with Israel at a time when the Mideast’s only democratic state is cast as a pariah, accused of apartheid. Liberal students quick to respond to discrimination against blacks and other minorities somehow fail to identify with the only Mideast society that proudly supports rather than punishes gays and lesbians. That leaves little room for progressive Jewish students who back Israel’s right to exist. While some of their elders scorn them for criticizing Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians and the occupation of the West Bank, their classmates shun them for identifying with Israel at all.
Federation executives worry privately that when the generation of major funders who vividly remember Israel’s struggle for statehood and the anguish of the 1967 and 1973 wars passes from the scene, raising substantial dollars for the Jewish state will be that much harder.
“It’s very complicated” making Israel’s case, the execs say, and they’re right. In part that’s because Israelis are no longer seen as our poor cousins, asking for a handout. Indeed, their economy is booming, even though the huge gap between the “haves” and “have nots” is worrisome, especially given the ongoing and rapid growth of the Israeli Arab and charedi communities, lowest on the income scale.
In part it’s because Israel’s Chief Rabbinate seeks to set religious standards ever higher rather than show compassion for the hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking Israeli citizens who would seek conversion. The situation is creating a substantial threat to Israeli cohesiveness and damages the longstanding image of Israel as a compassionate society that mirrors our own Western values and Jewish ideals.
Of course these perceptions of Israel today are not the full picture. They do not credit a vibrant Israeli democracy functioning in a region that has become increasingly chaotic, lawless, violent and threatening since the woefully misnamed Arab Spring. These critical views do not account for: courageous young men and women who serve their remarkable IDF with skill and commitment; a society whose Arab and Israeli citizens, overall, coexist day to day with civility and respect; and a nation whose accomplishments in the areas of technology, medicine, science and water are the envy of the rest of the world.
But while many of us take pride in Israel as a Start-Up Nation, we cannot ignore that it is also known at home for its Lock-Up Leadership — soon to have a former prime minister joining a former president behind bars as a result of differing forms of corruption at the highest levels of government.
Israel is not a perfect society, and those of us who seek to make its case err when we try to portray the Arab-Israeli conflict in black-and-white terms. The more we recognize and acknowledge the complexity of the clash, and the fact that Israelis themselves are divided on how to resolve it, the more credibility we will have in putting forth Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
Whether or not it is fair, the strong perception today is that the Israeli government is moving further right, and intransigent, at a time when the rest of the world is fed up with the Israel-Palestinian impasse, seeing no hope for a resolution in the foreseeable future. (And bear in mind that there are no term limits in Israel, and no political figure left of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seen as capable of besting him at the polls.)
Jewish leaders here are expressing deep, if so far private, frustration over the lack of action on Jerusalem’s part to improve its image, if not its strategic position.
One national leader told me he’d like to fly to Israel, with a group of his top colleagues, to try to convince Netanyahu in dramatic fashion of the need for “a plan, any plan” to break the impasse.
But that is not likely to happen, and, of course, the views of American Jewish leaders have long been known to the prime minister. Netanyahu and his government will continue to make decisions based on their own narrow and immediate political interests, and we can only hope they will coincide with national interests as well.
Our job remains to show support for Israel, if not all its policies, and to emphasize its remarkable achievements and importance in a chaotic, hostile region. But our job is getting harder with each passing day.
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Musings - Anger Management
Musings
Anger Management
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeThe sages of our tradition were very wary of anger. “Rabbah, son of Rav Huna, said: “When one loses his temper, even the Divine Presence is unimportant in his eyes” [Nedarim 22b]. While not denying the possibility that righteous anger can exist, repeatedly the Rabbis warn against anger, which is like a boiling pot that overspills and scalds everyone nearby.
Anger exemplifies the wisdom of what Emerson teaches: “Our moods don’t believe each other.” We say things, and often do things, in anger that we would never do in calmer moments. Yet words spoken in anger cannot be recalled; forgiven perhaps, but rarely forgotten. Keeping a leash on our fury is one of the most important disciplines of character a human being can develop.
Anger arises within us but is like an invader, a force we do not control. We can learn to avoid reacting out of anger however, knowing that if we “count to 10” our words will be wiser and truer to our deep character. Anger blots out the sun, even, as Rabbah teaches, the Divine Presence. Wait out the rage until the light streams back in and your life will be better in the coming year.
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).---------------------
In Paris, A Tragic Anniversary
Steve Lipman
Musings - Anger Management
Musings
Anger Management
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeThe sages of our tradition were very wary of anger. “Rabbah, son of Rav Huna, said: “When one loses his temper, even the Divine Presence is unimportant in his eyes” [Nedarim 22b]. While not denying the possibility that righteous anger can exist, repeatedly the Rabbis warn against anger, which is like a boiling pot that overspills and scalds everyone nearby.
Anger exemplifies the wisdom of what Emerson teaches: “Our moods don’t believe each other.” We say things, and often do things, in anger that we would never do in calmer moments. Yet words spoken in anger cannot be recalled; forgiven perhaps, but rarely forgotten. Keeping a leash on our fury is one of the most important disciplines of character a human being can develop.
Anger arises within us but is like an invader, a force we do not control. We can learn to avoid reacting out of anger however, knowing that if we “count to 10” our words will be wiser and truer to our deep character. Anger blots out the sun, even, as Rabbah teaches, the Divine Presence. Wait out the rage until the light streams back in and your life will be better in the coming year.
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).---------------------
In Paris, A Tragic Anniversary
Steve Lipman
Lens
Photo By Getty Images
Last January was a black time in the City of Lights.
This week some light is returning to Paris.
On the first anniversary of the series of terrorist attacks in the French capital that took a total of 17 lives, the country is pausing this week to remember the tragedy and honor the victims’ memories.
French President Francoise Hollande and other political leaders are participating this week in memorial ceremonies at the sites where French citizens — Jews, Muslims and Christians among them — lost their lives to Islamic extremists. Hollande unveiled plaques at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket, at the former offices of the Charlie Hebdo satire magazine, and at the street corners where two police officers were shot to death.
A French soldier, above, stands guard outside Hyper Cacher; as a plaque is being installed behind him.
In the year since the killing spree, France has upgraded its security at likely targets, nearly 8,000 French Jews have made aliyah, Hyper Cacher has undergone a full renovation, and life has slowly returned to normal for many of the Jews who remain in France.
“It took me six months to be able to come back,” one Hyper Cacher customer told Agence France-Presse.
Another member of the 500,000-strong French Jewish community called the attacks “a real breaking point.”
“I don’t feel safe here anymore. As Jews, we are a preferred target, in a country which itself is a target,” the person added. “Now we know we can be killed while doing our grocery shopping, or walking in the street.”
Commemorations are scheduled this week at Paris’ police headquarters and at the Place de la Republique, and spontaneous demonstrations, featuring flowers and candles and moments of silence, are expected.
Hollande is to attend an event this week sponsored by CRIF, France’s major umbrella Jewish organization.
steve@jewishweek.org
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