The New York Jewish Week - Connecting The World to Jewish News, Culture, and Opinion - Wednesday, 27 November 2013

The New York Jewish Week - Connecting The World to Jewish News, Culture, and Opinion - Wednesday, 27 November 2013

-------

Dear Reader,

As the reality of the interim deal with Iran sinks in, Israel-supporters are struggling with how to respond. Josh Mitnick, our Israel Correspondent, spoke to analysts who felt Jerusalem should pare back its demand that Iran give up its entire enrichment program. Our Editorial calls for focusing on the upcoming final agreement and dealing from strength, not weakness.

ISRAEL NEWS

Israel Needs New Tack Post-Deal, Analysts Suggest

Focus should now be on realistic final pact, not on ending Iran’s enrichment program.

Joshua Mitnick, Israel Correspondent

Tel Aviv — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of the Geneva compromise on Iran’s nuclear program was resounding: Iran had emerged with a “dream” deal that allowed it to continue to enrich uranium — for the first time with the blessing of the international community.

But as Israel and the international community size up the upcoming negotiations on a permanent deal, many local analysts are saying that Israel will have to pare back its demand that Iran give up its entire enrichment program.

“Is Israel’s focus on zero enrichment the right focus?” asked Jonathan Rhynhold, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University. “Having enrichment is not necessarily bad. If it’s for peaceful purposes. … The focus on zero enrichment has been a mistake.”

Israel has contended that even if Iran is allowed to enrich uranium at low levels of 3.5 percent, it will be able to convert that into weapons-grade enriched uranium. Netanyahu notes that the interim agreement contravenes resolutions by the United Nations Security Council that say that Iran should not be allowed to enrich uranium.       

However, Rhynold and others believe that Israel should look past that principle and focus on what it would take to ensure that Iran isn’t able to construct a weapon in a short amount of time. Rhynhold said Israel should focus on ensuring that Iran dismantles its underground nuclear facility at Fordow, its plutonium plant at Arak, and the weapons-development site at Parchin.

“If you leave it as a question of enrichment, yes or no, it’s a futile exercise,” said Oded Eran, a former Israeli ambassador to the European Union. He also suggested that that a robust monitoring group could prevent Iran from converting low-level enriched uranium into fuel for a weapon.

Netanyahu and other Israeli officials say the agreement puts Israel in existential danger; the prime minister’s opponents have characterized his diplomatic efforts as too shrill. But a number of analysts say the agreement is neither a dream deal nor a disaster.

“We’re not talking about the destruction of the Third Temple,” said Amos Yadlin, a former IDF intelligence chief and the head of the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv University think tank. “Without loving this agreement, it’s better than a situation of no agreement,” he said.

In a conference call with Israeli reporters, Yadlin took issue with Netanyahu’s argument that that if only world powers had ratcheted up sanctions on Iran, the regime would have been brought to its knees and given up on its nuclear program.

“The thought that only sanctions will prompt Iran to agree to a better deal is wishful thinking,” he said, noting that if there had been no agreement, the coalition that put the sanctions in place might have disbanded.

Yadlin’s remarks seemed to echo the sentiment of a senior Israeli officer currently in the IDF intelligence branch, who just a week before the agreement said that a deal with sanctions relief would “stabilize” Iran. The intelligence officer used none of the alarmist terms or metaphors to describe the situation in Iran used by Netanyahu.

While the prime minister likened Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Israeli intelligence sees his rise as a genuine expression of public protest against the regime.

Yadlin said the final agreement needs to take Iran’s nuclear program backward. If the country today is considered a “threshold” nuclear power with the ability to make a bomb within months, the final agreement needs to push the time to “breakout” to several years. Negotiators need to focus on reducing the tens of thousands of centrifuges as well as removing the already enriched material that Yadlin says is enough to make several explosives.

He also criticized the prime minister’s handling of the public diplomacy, saying that future dialogue over Iran should be kept discrete and classified, rather than being conducted via newspaper headlines.

That type of public conflict reduces Israel’s influence on the talks, Yadlin said. Other analysts have said that its also injuring Israel’s relationship with the United States.

Bar-Ilan’s Rhynhold disagreed, arguing that the prime minister has an obligation to voice his objections, and that they help to improve the deal.

“If that’s what the prime minister believes, he’s duty bound to say it. I believe that Israel taking a hard line improved the terms of a deal,” he said. “The Iranians clearly pay attention to Israel’s red line; our job is to play the bad cop.”

The agreement is already reverberating throughout the region, and many expect that Iran talks will have fallout for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Both the Iran talks and the peace negotiations have a target date to conclude within six months.

Netanyahu hinted at the linkage over the last few weeks, saying that if Israel feels the threat of Iran’s nuclear program growing, then it will be less inclined to make security concessions to the Palestinians. At the same time, many in the region fear the deal is a sign that the U.S. is shifting its focus away from the Mideast and will be less involved in the peace process, making it more difficult to support a deal with security guarantees for Israel.

“It was assumed we would enjoy the U.S. security net, and if the U.S. is leaving, then where’s the net?” asked Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

A top Palestinian official, Hanan Ashrawi, alleged this week that the Israeli government is accelerating settlement activity in the West Bank as a “quid pro quo” against the West and to convey a message of protest.

Not everyone sees the deal as bogging down peace talks. Analyst Yossi Alpher said that President Obama might find new international leverage that could be used to prod Israel if the diplomacy with Iran is successful.

“It’s certainly possible that the administration will feel that it succeeded at Geneva despite Netanyahu’s opposition,” he said, “and this empowers it to press Netanyahu on the Palestinians as well.”

---

EDITORIAL

Iran: What Now?

Approaching this holiday weekend, as we ponder the next steps in the troubled U.S.-Israel relationship, we’re reminded of the story of the hen and the turkey checking the farmer’s menu the night before Thanksgiving. It called for a grand luncheon the next day of “scrambled eggs followed by the traditional festive meal.” Sadly, the turkey turned to the hen and said, “From you he wants a contribution; from me he wants a total commitment.”

In a sense, that’s the difference between the perspectives of Washington and Jerusalem in assessing the six-month deal designed to slow Iran’s nuclear program. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel noted this week that the agreement presented “minimal” risks for the U.S. In the short term he’s right. America is the world’s most powerful country and thousands of miles from Tehran. For an administration reflecting a national weariness with war, it’s understandable that there is satisfaction in an agreement to put Iran’s nuclear efforts on hold while attempting to negotiate a permanent arrangement that would prevent its achieving nuclear arms.

For Israel, though, as the prime target of Tehran, the world leader in terrorism, with sophisticated, well-armed militias in Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Gaza (Hamas), the price to pay for a failed nuclear agreement is “a total commitment.”

Not only is it understandable that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led the campaign against what he and many others in the Mideast neighborhood considered “a bad deal,” but he deserves credit for finally galvanizing the U.S. and the West to impose the tough economic sanctions that brought Iran to the table in Geneva. It’s clear, though, that Israel and Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region, fearful of a more muscular and confident Iran, were unable to prevent the deal. And they are feeling doubly disappointed, if not betrayed, in learning that Washington, despite repeated, adamant denials, was holding secret talks with Iran for months.

President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have sought to assure Jerusalem that the deal is in Israel’s interest, making it a safer place to live. No doubt that was their intention, but Netanyahu boldly asserts that Israel is not bound by the agreement, fueling the notion that the deal makes an Israeli military strike necessary and inevitable. 

Since both the U.S. and its Mideast allies agree that the primary goal is to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threat, the question now is how to proceed over the next six months (which, it should be noted, is also the time frame for the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks). Should Netanyahu continue to lead the public charge against being duped by the Iranians, or is it time to sit down and try to make the best of the deal at hand, assuring that aggressive monitors do their job and that the eased sanctions do not collapse altogether?

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but we think it’s time to tone down the steady barrage of public criticism, at least for now, and concentrate on the details of the deal, going forward. In addition, an idea being advanced that calls for the U.S. to sign security treaties with such countries as Israel and Saudi Arabia, pledging to defend them if they are threatened, deserves discussion, though sadly such U.S. assurances have lost credibility in recent days.

Supporters of the deal point out that it offers the best and only alternative to a nuclear arms race in the Mideast and could prevent a war. Critics invoke the Munich pact of 1938, when the British played into Hitler’s hands, and the 1994 North Korea agreement on nuclear arms, which Pyongyang promptly ignored.

It all comes down to determining if Iran is motivated by a desire to do business with — or fool, and perhaps defeat — the West. Until now there was every reason to believe that the devil is not in the details but in the seat across the negotiating table. After all, Iran’s revolutionary government is guided by a supreme religious leader advocating Islamic hegemony, it is responsible for a long list of terror attacks around the world, and a multibillion-dollar program to build nuclear arms amid calls to remove the Zionist regime. Not exactly confidence-builders in going forward with a lasting agreement. That’s why the approach now should be one that comes from strength, not weakness, insisting on demands that would oversee the dismantling of the Arak plutonium plant and of centrifuges that could produce nuclear weapons. If it is successful, more power and credit to the administration. But anything short of that and Washington should walk away from the table, having learned a tough lesson about the limits of diplomacy — hopefully before it’s too late.

editor@jewishweek.org

---

Staff Writer Stewart Ain spent time this week in Pine Bush, New York, where local residents expressed shock at a lawsuit alleging that the local school district is rife with anti-Semitism.

NEW YORK NEWS

Bias Charge Dumbfounds Residents Of Pine Bush

Anti-Semitism described in suit is unfair portrayal of their town, they say.

Stewart Ain, Staff Writer

Pine Bush, N.Y. — Suddenly, they don’t even recognize their own town anymore.

The six women eating in a diner near the Crispell Middle School in this hamlet about 75 miles north of New York City said they were incredulous when they read that a civil rights lawsuit had been filed against the Pine Bush School District claiming that it is rife with anti-Semitism that has gone largely unchecked.

The women, who like most of the 15 residents interviewed at a diner and supermarket this week declined to give their names, said the community described in the lawsuit bore little resemblance to the one they’ve lived in for years. In fact, one said she retired as a Pine Bush Elementary School teacher five years ago and was dumbfounded by the complaint — especially the allegation that all five of the children whose parents brought the suit said they experienced anti-Semitism in the Crispell Middle School.

“Crispell was the place where we all wanted our kids to go,” she said. “It has a safe, nurturing, comfortable environment. The teachers there I know are caring, loving people — the kids always came first.”

Many of those interviewed questioned the timing of the front-page article about the suit in The New York Times earlier this month. Some suggested that community opposition to a 396-unit townhouse being built in the school district and reportedly marketed exclusively to Satmar Jews somehow triggered the Times’ story.

As they explained it, the developers decided to fight growing opposition to the development by claiming residents don’t want Jews moving in. To prove their point, they leaked the suit to the Times as evidence of anti-Semitism in the community.

But Holly Roche, leader of the Rural Community Coalition, which is spearheading community opposition to the project because of its size in a village of 375 residents, said that theory no longer worked after she disclosed she is Jewish.

“Now they are calling me anti-Satmar,” she said.

“The best defense is a strong offense,” explained a Jewish resident about the developers’ approach, who asked that his name not be used for fear it might complicate his business dealings in the area.

The developer, Shalom Lamm, did not return phone calls seeking comment. But he was quoted as saying he has nothing to do with sales of the townhouse and that anyone who wishes may buy one.

There have been several articles, including a 16-page supplement, published in Jewish and Yiddish newspapers promoting the development to the Satmar chasidic community. A girls’ yeshiva is also under discussion, and residents said they have heard talk of a boys’ yeshiva being built as well.

The Times’ story has sparked state and federal investigations, and Rabbi Joel Schwab of Temple Sinai in Middletown said the Anti-Defamation League would be presenting a program at his synagogue next month for Jewish parents and students on how to handle anti-Semitic incidents.

Lucy Fox, the synagogue’s Hebrew school director and principal, said she welcomed such a program because she “would not know what to do or what to tell students to do.”

She was one of a half-dozen Jews interviewed at Temple Sinai who said the allegations of pervasive anti-Semitism in the school system surprised them — and their families.

“My mother called from Woodmere hysterical after reading the story,” said the Jewish man who asked to remain anonymous.

Dahlia Fox, Lucy Fox’s daughter-in-law, said her “mother in Stony Brook called and said she read the article and wanted to know what’s going on. I said we’re OK, we’re fine — and my son is very vocal about being Jewish.”

Ali Manzo, the mother of fourth grade twins, said she had had no problems with anti-Semitism and even asked her children if they “knew what a swastika is and they didn’t.”

The suit alleges that the five students from three Jewish families experienced anti-Semitism that was rampant in this rural community that straddles Orange and Ulster counties. It claimed the “anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment was a relentless and inescapable aspect of plaintiffs’ school life” and that each “has been psychologically traumatized, and some have suffered physical harm. One is now being home-schooled, another was taken out of the school district for nearly a year to help him recover from the psychological trauma, one is considering the possibility of transferring to a school outside the district and the other two are still attending schools within the district.”

It is alleged that nothing was done about swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti throughout the schools.

“The physical attacks against Jewish students included a swastika drawn on a student’s face against her will, the severe beating of one plaintiff with a hockey stick, and repeated slapping of another plaintiff in the head,” according to the suit. “Students also threw coins at plaintiffs, sometimes on a regular basis, and one plaintiff had to fight off two students who attempted to shove coins in her mouth.”

The incidents were alleged to have occurred in the Pine Bush Elementary School, the Crispell Middle School and the Pine Bush High School beginning in 2008. The school district has denied the allegations.

And people interviewed at random here said none of it rings true.

“In my heart of hearts, I can’t believe it,” said one woman. “I know many of the students and they are kind and helpful. A lot of people here are talking about it and have the same sentiments I do.”

Shaun Burgos of Bloomingburg, the site of the controversial townhouse, said the oldest of his two sons is a student at Crispell and that he spoke with him about anti-Semitism after the article appeared.

“I asked if he saw anything like that there and he said, ‘No dad,’” Burgos said. “He would have told me if there was.”

He then questioned why, if these alleged incidents have been going on for so many years, the parents waited so long to sue.

Another shopper, when asked about the Times’ article snapped, “Why now?  It’s planting seeds of bad thought about the school district.”

The woman, who said she could not give her name because she is a school district employee, said: “From what I hear, incidents may have taken place against these kids but not to the extremes [claimed]. And if other parents had known what was happening, they would have backed up those families. There are many parents who speak out here.”

Asked if the suit has besmirched the good name of the community, she said: “Absolutely, yes. Just Google ‘Pine Bush’ and the first thing you get are the anti-Semitism charges.”

One of the women at the diner agreed, saying: “No one likes to hear anything negative about their community – and this has tarnished its image.”

“The whole thing is unfortunate,” said the woman seated next to her, who said she is Jewish and who said she found it hard to believe.

Susan Notar, a retired teacher who serves as the volunteer chair of the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orange County, said she gave courses on tolerance in 2011 to teachers and three months ago to the entire eighth grade at the Circleville Middle School after Jewish parents complained about anti-Semitic incidents there.

Notar recalled that Pine Bush had once been home to a local Ku Klux Klan chapter and for a time Jews were not welcome.

One woman in the supermarket said she vividly remembered that time. She explained that she had a Jewish sounding maiden name and that after her family moved to Pine Bush in 1960, someone threw a lit bag of manure onto the front porch of her parents home.

“There was a lot of fire,” she said. “They thought we were Jewish. When my father came home, he made a big sign that he put in the front lawn. It said, ‘We are not Jewish and even if we were, it is none of your business.’ The lawsuit reminded me of that incident. I thought that stuff was long gone from here, but apparently it’s not. To me, it’s horrible. … There is no excuse for prejudice.”

Charlie Carnes, supervisor of the Town of Crawford (one of seven towns within the Pine Bush School District), said he believes anti-Semitic incidents have occurred in the school district but that they were “isolated.”

“In just about any school district — especially rural ones — that is how kids are, and the complaints were not handled properly,” he said. “I know that some kid drew a swastika on a desk a few weeks ago and it was immediately removed. … I have two kids in school and one graduated two years ago. I haven’t seen it [rampant anti-Semitism], nor have my children nor their friends. Occasionally they will hear something, but it is very isolated.

“If these things were proven to have happened, I have not heard about it. … Now when Bloomingburg comes up, all of a sudden it is on the front page of The New York Times. It makes one think.”

stewart@jewishweek.org

---

My column focuses on Ari Shavit, the Israeli journalist whose new book, "My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel," is receiving wide acclaim. He hopes the book will spark an honest, if difficult, conversation by diaspora and Israeli Jews on the Jewish state's complexities.

GARY ROSENBLATT

‘We’ve Lost Our Narrative’

Ari Shavit hopes his new book will revive an honest, painful, conversation on Israel.

Gary Rosenblatt

Ari Shavit, the popular Israeli newspaper columnist for Haaretz, seems to be everywhere in the American media these days, talking about his newly published and highly praised book, “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel.” That’s a good thing for those of us who believe that the better Israel is known and understood, flaws and all, the more it will be appreciated and supported.

In the past week Shavit, 57, and a native of Rehovot, was on “The Charlie Rose Show” and NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross; he was interviewed at the 92nd Street Y by his friend, New Yorker editor David Remnick; and his book was heralded three times in The New York Times with increasingly superlative acclaim.

Last Tuesday Shavit spent several hours at The Jewish Week, noting in an interview that he is already anticipating his next trip to the U.S., in January, when he will visit a number of college campuses. (He will appear at a Jewish Week Forum here March 6; see below). He said he hopes to engage students in a “deep and different dialogue” about an Israel that must be criticized for its treatment of Palestinians and “celebrated for the miracle it is.”

“I’m a total Zionist,” he said in his rich baritone voice with the trace of a British accent. (He has family in England and spends summers there.) Unlike many of his countrymen, Shavit understands and appreciates the importance of American Jewry. Indeed, he says we need each other — that Israel cannot deal with the Palestinians and Iran without American Jewish support. “And you have Pew,” he says, referring to the recent Pew Research Center study showing the precipitous decline among non-Orthodox Jews in terms of religious and communal engagement. “There is no way you can keep progressive Jews in the community without us,” he said, asserting that Israel and American Jewry must find more ways to work together.

But he noted that it is an uphill battle to reach those young Jews “who see Israel as an embarrassment.

“We need to make Israel attractive and sexy again,” he said, “and to connect it with the heart of the Jewish experience. My mission is to change the Israel conversation and revive the sense of a relevant, renewed Zionism.”

A tall order, but Shavit lacks neither self-confidence nor talent. And he would like to see his book, which explores and exposes Israel’s best and worst qualities, as the ticket to the anticipated conversation.

Open, Honest Account

Like others who have lauded “My Promised Land,” a personalized history of Israel over the last century, I admire its ability to confront the country’s deepest moral flaws without losing sight of the miracle of its existence, and its remarkable successes.

Shavit gives us an open and honest account of the real Israel, from the early wave of European pioneers at the end of the 19th century, like his great-grandfather, who gave up a lucrative life in London to settle in the barren land, to the 2011 social protest on the streets of Tel Aviv and the foreign policy planners dealing with the existential challenge of Iran today.

Along the way there are chapters on the success of the orange industry in the 1920s; the development of the country’s nuclear program in Dimona, and all it symbolized; the 1950s generation of Holocaust survivors who settled in Israel and quietly committed to create new life; the growth of the settlement movement; the author’s army service as a guard in a Gaza prison, an experience that prompted him to become active in the peace movement; the emergence of the haredi Sephardi party, Shas, under Aryeh Deri; and the sex, drugs and hedonism of Tel Aviv in the early years of the 21st century.

Most powerful, though, is the chapter on the killing of scores of Arabs and the expulsion of thousands from the city of Lydda (now Lod) during the 1948 War of Independence. With toughness and tenderness, Shavit interviews Jews involved in the fighting, and describes their confusion and anguish, and he imagines “the columns of the homeless,” more than 30,000 leaving their city in stunned silence.

“Do I wash my hands of Zionism?” he asks in the book. Though “horrified” by what took place, “when I try to be honest about it,” he writes, “I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.”

For Shavit, the answer is clear, if not simple: “I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know if it wasn’t for them, I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.”

Shavit presents Israel in all its complexity: the fulfillment of a dream that saved the lives of persecuted Jews from many countries, as well as an occupying country that maintains its strong hold on another people.

“What I did was risky,” Shavit told the audience at the 92nd Street Y event. In writing about Israel’s moral dilemmas, “I was trying to touch the fire,” he said, adding that as a native Israeli deeply committed to the Jewish state and people, he has “the inner strength to deal with the taboos.” If you don’t address “the dark side,” he suggested, you have little credibility when celebrating the accomplishments of today’s vibrant Israeli society.

In the final chapter, though, ever the realist, Shavit cannot predict a happy ending for his country. “There was hope for peace but there will be no peace here,” he concludes. “Not soon.

“What this nation has to offer is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge.”

‘We Lost Our Sense Of Meaning’

In our interview, Shavit attributed that intensity to “the richness of Zionism” that “was always flexible and life-loving, deeply optimistic” despite representing “the ultimate victims of the 20th century, and threatened to this day.” But “our main problem is that we lost our narrative,” he said; he hopes to revive it. “We were a story that became a reality, but we lost our sense of meaning. We need to love Israel in a new, authentic way” that both praises the society’s accomplishments and recognizes its shortcomings.

It’s critical, Shavit believes, to engage both Israeli and diaspora Jews in the discussion, recognizing that “any simplistic approach is wrong” because “complexity is built into the place.”

He worries that diaspora Jews became polarized over Israel in recent years and then “refused to even talk about it” because Jerusalem’s policies so divided the community. “The more critical approach is more promising” as a remedy, he insisted. “I hope young American Jews will see how to relate to Israel without faking it.” And he added that young Israeli Jews as well are in search of historical context. It is the highest priority that they be given a reason beyond nationalism as to why they are fighting for Israel, he said.

But while Israeli youth are “living Herzl’s dream, breathing a total Jewish existence,” Shavit fears that diaspora Jewry is disappearing. The future of British Jewry, he noted, “is not pretty”: a “wonderful life for individual Jews, but shrinking rapidly,” with the exception of the ultra-Orthodox. Shavit recalls that he wrote what he describes as “an apocalyptic piece” for The New York Times Magazine around the time of the millennium suggesting that American Jewry, if it is not careful, may become “a lush, comfortable graveyard of the Jewish people.” A strong sentiment, but one he still believes.

“I’m very worried” about the recent reports underscoring the level of assimilation here, he said. And he is hoping that his book will help spur an honest and deeper discussion about where Israel fits into the Jewish identity of young people, here and in Israel.

Gary@jewishweek.org

Ari Shavit will discuss his new book at a Jewish Week Forum on March 6, 2014 at 7:30 p.m. at Central Synagogue. More details about ticket reservations will be available soon.

---

Also this week, JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen responds to those ready to write off the Conservative movement; Yeshiva University, in financial emergency, looks for ways to stay solvent; Footsteps marks 10 years of helping former haredi young people make their way in the secular world; Associate Editor Jonathan Mark on fears of the "knockout" in Crown Heights; The Folksbiene Theater marks Theodore Bikel's 90th birthday; and Heather Robinson on the limits of online dating.

OPINION

A L’Chaim To Conservative Judaism

JTS chancellor: ‘Complacency’ and ‘despair’ … ‘are forbidden;' ‘both are distractions from the task at hand.’

Arnold Eisen

I’ve spent the better part of my adult life as a scholar of American Judaism, with a special focus on figures at the center of Conservative Judaism, and I’ve spent most of those years enjoying the benefits of Conservative Jewish institutions, conversations and communities.

Consider this short list: Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto, Calif., where my wife and I davened for 21 years and where we celebrated the b’nai mitzvah of our children; Camp Ramah, which my daughter attended as a camper for two summers and where my son worked on staff for three; repeated experiences of emotional and spiritual support from clergy and community at moments when my family and I most needed it; a pattern of ritual celebrations and holiday observances that I shall treasure as long as I live; a kind of Talmud Torah — reverent engagement with Jewish text and history, in the context of broader ideas and learning — that to this day remains distinctive to Conservative Judaism; a fervent but critical Zionism that is no less distinctive; and, last but never least, a fulsome sense of what it is to serve God in this time and place with an open heart as well as a totally engaged mind and an enraptured soul.

That is but a short list, woefully incomplete, of what I most treasure in the set of gifts made available to me week after week, from adolescence until today, through the path in Torah that we call (never without some discontent at the name) Conservative Judaism.

I have experienced the incalculable blessings that life as a Jewish human being makes possible, in significant measure, thanks to Conservative Judaism. Indeed, I became chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary because this kind of Judaism — fostered by JTS for more than a century — continues to mean so much to me, and I wanted to spend my days, and not just my evenings, working to secure its future.

I have enormous debts of gratitude to repay to many Conservative rabbis, from Heschel and Kaplan to my teacher Sam Lachs, and to friends and colleagues who have changed my life for the better. I can now add rabbinical students, chazzanim, and educators to that list. So many Conservative congregants have inspired me in so many ways over the years, and have made a huge mark on clal Yisrael organizations, such as AIPAC, Hillel and federation; on the movements to liberate Soviet Jewry and found Jewish Studies on American campuses; on the campaigns for civil rights and to guard the good name of Israel. That impact is out of all proportion to Conservative numbers. I proudly count myself one of these Conservative “Jews in the pews,” and would not trade them for any Jews anywhere for all that I wish our community were more learned, more observant, and more determined to resist the powerful allurements of the society and culture in which we, being Conservative Jews, participate fully.

You will perhaps forgive me, therefore, if I express a certain amount of weariness and disappointment at hearing people who should know better (and often do know better) declare Conservative Jews less worthy than others, and pronounce the Judaism that elicits the best efforts of hundreds of thousands of Jews in North America, nurtures their spirits, comforts, teaches, and sustains them — Conservative Judaism — dead, almost dead, deserving of death, or any of the hundred other ways that one hears people speaking nowadays about the Judaism I love. Enough! Need I say that I am the first to admit the shortcomings of Conservative Jewish thinking and institutions over the years and down to our own day? What Conservative Jew is not expert in finding fault with Conservative Judaism? We are far from perfect (though no less perfect than anyone else), and bear our fair share of responsibility for a Jewish population in America that is far less active than it could and should be. (Many others likewise share in this responsibility.)

Any American Jew who has had eyes open to our collective situation has no right or reason to be surprised at the findings in the Pew Research Center report, most of which have been predicted by analysts and activists for a long time. We who care about the Jewish future on this continent are obligated, I believe, to greet this latest wake-up call with renewed resolve. Too many Jews are opting out of Jewish life. Too few are Jewishly literate. Most have never experienced live study of a Jewish text or a Jewish ritual that touched the soul. Complacency (“we’re already doing many good things; let’s just keep doing them”) is utterly forbidden under these trying circumstances, but so is despair (“we might as well give up on the effort to build a non-Orthodox Judaism in this country”). Both are distractions from the task at hand. This is a generation that has a lot of work to do.

The report is not good news for American Jewry, even if it offers evidence that some things are going very right: things that we need to do a lot more of and to make available to a lot more people. And the Pew findings continue a spate of bad news for Conservative Jews who lack the birthrate that, along with tight communities, is largely responsible for Orthodox growth in recent decades, and who also lack the rate of intermarriage that is largely responsible for recent growth in Reform numbers (and especially the numbers who declare themselves Reform without actually joining Reform temples).

Conservative Jews are just beginning to create a more effective structure to respond appropriately to what ails us and take maximum advantage of the many things we do exceedingly well: Ramah camps, day schools, revitalized synagogues, adult learning. Things are on the mend in the vital religious center of North American Jewry. We have much to be proud of, and the successes we have enjoyed should never be left unmentioned at a time of hand wringing and derision. But let’s be the first to admit that there is much more to be done if we are to stop, and even reverse, the recent numerical decline.

Learn From Our Mistakes

What is to be done in the community as a whole? Let me start with a modest procedural proposal. Could we make it a rule of Jewish discourse in North America that we learn from the mistakes made when followers of Begin beat up followers of Ben-Gurion, and vice versa; or chasidim literally and figuratively bashed mitnagdim (opponents of chasidim), and vice versa; or both of those groups informed on liberal Jews or maskilim to the authorities, and vice versa? Could we manage to take a vow that Jews will find good things to say about one another, build bridges rather than burn them, join criticism of themselves and their own movements to the constructive criticism they make of others, and refrain from pronouncing other Jews or their Jewish paths traitorous or lazy or already/imminently dead? Haven’t we suffered enough over the years from enemies declaring us dead (remember Arnold Toynbee’s famous description of the Jews as living “fossils,” soon to go the way of the dinosaur) to stop doing it to one another?

Let’s remember too that there are multiple factors of long standing that have caused the situation in which we find ourselves. Simplistic explanations and quick fixes are both certain to miss the mark. The most revealing lines in the Pew report, in my view, were those that showed parallels between Jews and other groups in America. Jews attend and join synagogues less at the same moment that church membership and attendance have fallen. Jews are reluctant to join any organization or institution when all Americans, in the famous phrase of political scientist Robert Putnam, are “bowling alone.” Jews, like Christians, report declining interest in religion in favor of spirituality, social justice, and individual fulfillment. Judaism, like every other religion in North America (indeed, in the world), is numerically stronger at the extremes and less so in the center.

We seek to build Jewish communities in America at a time of unparalleled individualism. We are heirs to a discipline of commandment in an age of “sovereign selves.” We expect allegiance to our particular group, its traditions and its homeland, at a time when universalism holds ever-greater sway. And, having urged our kids to participate fully in American life, sent them to university, and set them on the path to ambitious careers, we are now dismayed to find them acting in accordance with the general pattern: marrying much later if they marry, having fewer children if they have children, favoring career over almost everything, and choosing romantic partners without regard to family, community of origin, or ultimate concerns.

I doubt that Jews can entirely reverse the demographic trends that, outside the bounds of Orthodoxy, will soon result in there being far fewer Jews in America, and have already resulted in there being far less Judaism of any substance. Some community leaders have called for honest conversation among us about the unrealistic expectation that, men or women, we can “have it all.” I second that motion, and add a plea that we begin a parallel conversation about marriage and the family. The organized Jewish community needs to focus not only on numbers of Jews we are losing, but on the quality of the Jewish lives we sustain. We must find a way to fund a number of initiatives that would make a huge difference in keeping Jews Jewish and persuading Jews to have and raise Jewish children. Daycare and early childhood programs, for example. Seriously Jewish summer camps such as Ramah. A variety of day and supplementary schools that break the mold of “Hebrew school.” College initiatives that are not junior versions of “your parents’ Judaism.” Communities for 20- and 30-somethings that transcend the tired boundaries of “religion versus culture.” JTS is involved in every single one of these efforts in ways that transcend denominational boundaries. Let’s feed the Jewish spirit, engage the mind, link Jewish professional ambitions to the teaching of tradition and the building of community. Let’s never fail to serve the quest for God. And, yes, let’s get young Jews in the same room with other young Jews as often as we possibly can.

Let Us Respect Our Achievements

Were Conservative Judaism walking down the blind alley depicted by recent critics; had we done nothing to change our ways or our organizational structure in recent years; were JTS or any of the leaders of Conservative Jewish organizations deaf to the forces and trends that critics cite, then I too might despair about our future. (Even then, however, loving Conservative Judaism as I do, I would set about the project of expanding rather than abandoning all hope for serious non-Orthodox Judaism, and direct effort and dollars elsewhere). Of course, we need honest conversation about what commands Jews and why, a project that JTS has advanced in many dozens of congregations by engaging Conservative Jews in far-reaching discussion, study, and practice of mitzvah — a term that resonates with Conservative laypeople and elicits both good thinking and strong commitment. Yes, we need more passionate davening in more shuls, a goal that is achieved more widely than the critics allow, but that is all too often inhibited by worship spaces far too large for the number of worshippers and by a deplorable tendency to make the congregation into an audience for chazzan and rabbi — spectators to a Judaism in which they do not participate fully and which they do not fully own. Conservative Jews have too often been let down by leaders who asked too little of them by way of learning or practice, and misled by leaders who saw Conservativism as end rather than means, forgetting that the point is not this or that denomination or organization, but the path that enables Jews to choose life, choose good, choose blessing.

But please, my fellow Conservative Jews, even as we right these and other wrongs, let’s never fail to respect ourselves and our achievements. Those achievements did not cease in the alleged “glory days” when social and cultural forces propelled Conservative Judaism forward instead of forcing it to swim upstream. And if I had to chart a future for Jewish life in North America, and guess what path is most likely to secure that future, I would put my money on a model of Judaism that sees the world through an egalitarian lens, accepts the best that modernity has to offer; appreciates science and the arts; respects other faith communities and other Jews; and understands that, while good fences make for good neighbors, it relies for its survival upon low walls and high regard for others. I would bet upon Jews to learn by study and practice — albeit in ways that are new or evolving as I write — what is distinctive in their heritage so that they always have something Jewishly serious to offer the world, resources with which to resist the many temptations of modern life, something to root them and infuse them with ultimate meaning in the face of fashion and ephemera.

Conservative Jews know that we don’t help the cause of Judaism by acting as if Judaism is just like every other tradition or cause, any more than we help it by denying that Judaism has a lot to learn from other traditions and often needs to ally itself with other causes. The world awaits our Jewish response, and the world —infinite in its varieties, overflowing with possibility, stunning in what it has to teach us — contributes immeasurably to our understanding of what that response needs to be. That is the Torah I have learned and to which I hold on for dear life.

I am drawn to Conservative Judaism, when all is said and done, because I want with every fiber of my being, and with proper humility, to serve the Lord my God, and so serve God’s Creation with all my heart, all my mind, all my soul, all my might. Mind without heart, heart without soul, study without practice, ritual without ethics, Judaism without Jews, or Jews without Judaism —none of these will do. Let’s turn to one another, in the wake of the Pew report, drink a well-deserved l’chaim for many more years of life for a renewed Conservative Judaism — and then let’s get to work.

Arnold Eisen is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

---

NEW YORK NEWS

YU In Debt, Says Current Financial Structure Not Sustainable

President Richard Joel says ‘everything is on the table.’

Gary Rosenblatt, Editor And Publisher

Yeshiva University is on the financial ropes, struggling to meet payroll.

President Richard Joel sent out a letter last week alerting the YU community that the Modern Orthodox institution’s financial situation is dire and in need of immediate support. On Monday a special board meeting was held to discuss steps that need to be taken in the short term.

“Everything is on the table,” Joel told The Jewish Week on Tuesday, with discussions said to have touched on increased tuitions, reduction of faculty and the sale of property.

Noting that many private universities are “under siege” in these difficult economic times, Joel said YU was “under greater siege,” given its unique role in providing a dual curriculum of both Jewish and secular studies in multiple locations, at a discounted tuition, and with full scholarships for rabbinical students.

The current financial structure is not sustainable, he said, adding: “We are a strong asset-laden university that is asset-rich but cash poor.” The “serious issues of liquidity” have to “raise real concerns about our future direction.”

Several people knowledgeable with the situation confirmed that the issue is critical — “a matter of meeting payroll,” one said. They added that the school has sought to get its house in order after operating in a “hand-to-mouth” manner financially for decades, and is now running significant deficits that cannot be sustained.

At issue, they asserted, was whether the Jewish community, and particularly the Modern Orthodox community, is prepared to step up and ensure the survival and sustainability of its flagship institution. If not, they said, it may not continue “as we know it.”

They and others believe that there is sufficient wealth in the Modern Orthodox community to keep YU viable, though acknowledging families are under great stress in meeting increasing day school tuitions. “It’s a matter of matching support to need,” one insider said.

It has been reported previously that YU, which was hard hit by the Madoff scandal in 2008, had a deficit of $30 million. No figure was given as to the current situation. In addition, Moody’s recently downgraded the school’s credit rating and for the last year it has faced a $380 million sex abuse lawsuit.

In his letter last week, Joel noted that in the last five years the school “downsized administration, froze salaries and decreased retirement contributions and departmental budgets.

“We intended to achieve a balanced budget by this year so that we could then begin to reverse the trend of cutbacks. Despite our best efforts, we have not yet succeeded.”

He noted that staff and lay leaders are working to “reframe the way we educate and dare to think outside of the box. Our new strategic vision must focus on our core, look to further integration and efficiencies between schools and find new programs and revenue producers, including online education.”

Scott Goldberg, recently appointed vice provost, will specialize in global education opportunities, and a new provost, with an expertise in online education, is being sought over the next several months.

Joel’s letter said YU is exploring “all aspects of our operations to increase revenue, improve operational efficiencies and manage costs. We require more support and more philanthropy. We must distribute financial aid more deliberately.”

Now in his 11th year as president, Joel is generally given high marks for the innovations and spirit he brought to YU. Early on he focused on committing to excellence, improving the quality of education through increased tenured positions and extending YU’s reach by creating the Center for the Jewish Future, which broadens the school’s role in the community and exposes its students to the wider Jewish world.

But five years ago Joel’s grand vision ran up against the Madoff scandal directly — YU had invested heavily with Madoff and lost well over $100 million. Since then some supporters have questioned Joel’s ambitious plans, and he has had to modify his goals to fit the times.

Some now see the Center for the Jewish Future as a luxury while others note that the student-faculty ratio of 6-to-1 must be increased. Suggested cost-savings ideas also include charging tuition for rabbinic students, reducing student services and cutting back on the number of credits students get for their post-high school year in Israel yeshiva study.

While YU is anchored in, and helps define, the Modern Orthodox community, it also serves other segments of the community, particularly in its graduate schools, which include the Albert Einstein Medical College and the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School. Funding has come from a wide range of philanthropists. However, several of the major foundations in the Jewish community do not support YU financially, based on their assumption that the Orthodox community is growing, and thriving in many ways, and does not need their support.

No doubt YU’s administration would argue, in light of its current difficulties, that such thinking is shortsighted.

gary@jewishweek.org

---

NEW YORK NEWS

For Those Seeking A New Life, A Safe Space

Footsteps celebrates 10 years of helping the formerly ultra-Orthodox navigate a secular world.

Tova Ross, Special To The Jewish Week

A 10-year anniversary deserves a night out, and the milestone marking a decade’s work of Footsteps — the New York-based nonprofit helping formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews master the tools to succeed in secular society — was no exception.

Looking over the crowd earlier this month at the Skyline Hotel last Thursday night, it was difficult to imagine the strikingly attired men and women mingling freely in their former lives, dressed as chasidic Jews and strictly segregated by gender and from greater society. Since its inception, Footsteps has helped over 800 people obtain GEDs, attend college through tutoring and financial assistance, and secure professional internships and jobs. But its most important function, members say, is serving as a substitute family for those who’ve been cut off from their ultra-Orthodox relatives.

“I left an extremely close-knit community,” says Ari Mandel, a former Nikelsburger chasid from Rockland County who served in the U.S. army after he left and now studies at New York University. “Those at Footsteps became my new family, and really get what it’s like for someone who essentially has to start over from scratch.”

Another Footsteps participant, who only wanted to use her first name, Hindy, says Footsteps literally “saved my life” after she left her Satmar community in Williamsburg. “I’m a naturally social person, and when I lost all my friends I became extremely depressed. Footsteps made me feel like I was not alone.”

It was these people in mind that Malkie Schwartz had when she created Footsteps at age 22. At first the former Lubavticher from Crown Heights ran the organization as a monthly support group that met at the Y and NYU’s Bronfman Center.

“I had secular family members who helped me when I left, but I knew most people didn’t, and I saw that their own struggles were that much harder because of it,” explains Schwartz, who began imagining a formal organization to help these people and quickly realized her idea needed financial backing to grow.

Schwartz’s aunt, Deborah Freedman — now a Footsteps board member — connected her to close friend Peter Cherneff, a New York attorney who was immediately taken with Schwartz’s drive and vision. “Deborah told me to meet Malkie for a cup of coffee, and see if there’s anything to it,” Cherneff told those in attendance at the gala event, where he and Schwartz were honored for their work. “So I did, and here I am.”

Schwartz, who largely credits Cherneff for Footsteps’ success, stepped down from the organization’s helm in 2008 to focus on law school, but remains in touch with members and current executive director Lani Santo, who took over in 2010.

In the past few years, membership has steadily increased. In 2012, a Footsteps report found that new membership had grown from 35 in 2009 to 95 in 2012, a 170 percent jump.

The plight of those leaving ultra-Orthodox communities has received wider attention in recent years with the 2010 publication of “Hush,” a young adult novel about sexual abuse in chasidic Borough Park and Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” about growing up in Satmar Williamsburg.

The people who benefit from Footsteps primarily come from chasidic and haredi communities throughout the tri-state area, though people regularly call from other countries; the challenges they reference include familial alienation, difficulty navigating an unfamiliar world with little in the way of secular education or knowledge of social mores, and the fear of meeting self-fulfilling prophecies to become failures or drug addicts that are projected by their former communities.

“One of my biggest fears about leaving was that I will end up just as the community predicted, one of those ‘chasidshe bums’ who sat around, smoked and did nothing with his life,” explains Samuel Katz, who studied at Satmar and Slabodka yeshivas, of his initial hesitation before becoming closely involved with Footsteps. Katz was not able to attend the Nov. 14 gala as he is currently a Fulbright scholar studying in Berlin.

Certainly, there are high rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies among “Fotsteppers,” as members are fondly referred to, says Santo; an internal survey found some 50 percent had a mental health diagnosis, and 35 percent were in therapy.

“From a mental health perspective, asking questions is a healthy thing to do,’ explains Santo. “When someone isn’t given the space to do that or is afraid of losing family and social connections if they do, it can lead to a very bad place. Footsteps offers a safe space for people to thrive after they leave ultra-Orthodoxy.”

Though members say they are never pushed to do anything they’re uncomfortable with — several members proudly retain their payes or yarmulkes — and most events are scheduled around Shabbat and yom tov and have kosher food availability, Footsteps’ mission occasionally encounters criticism from Orthodox figures who decry what they perceive as indoctrination of vulnerable young Jews into secular lifestyles absent of any religious observance.

“I could never endorse this type of program that might push people in a secular direction,” says Rabbi David Montrose, who heads the Midwest region of Nefesh, an international network of Orthodox mental health professionals, and who has worked with “off-the-derech,” or “off-the-path” youths in his private practice. “You can go to a vocational college or a Jewish Federation vocational program; you don’t need to go to Footsteps. To push people into secular life is like carrying someone’s neshama (soul) out of the body; I would not want to be people who do that on their day of judgment.”

Others in the Orthodox world take a more balanced view, like Eliyahu Fink, an Orthodox rabbi in Los Angeles who studied at right-wing institutions such as Baltimore’s Ner Israel Yeshiva and the Yeshiva of Far Rockaway. “I’d prefer to see our community warmly support formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews, but right now, Footsteps is doing that work,” he says. “While we may express our dismay that there’s a need for Footsteps, we must also express our appreciation that it’s there.”

Over the next decade, Schwartz hopes that Footsteps will be brought to different communities across the country, and to college campuses to serve as a resource for students whose higher education experience is the first one outside their insular communities. “I see so many directions that the organization can go in under Lani’s leadership,” she says.

Aside from seeing people who once floundered find their footing in greater society and obtain traditional measures of success such as degrees, career paths and new social circles, Schwartz and Santo agree it’s especially gratifying to see Footsteppers take an active role in giving back. Three members have joined the organization’s board and serve as spokespeople for the organization through writing and media appearances. One example is Leah Vincent, who discussed the need for Footsteps on Katie Couric’s talk show. Katz helped coordinate the “It Gets Besser” website and video project (a play on the anti-gay bullying “It Gets Better” campaign) to inspire those on the verge of leaving by showing them others’ stories of transformation. Others have gone on to form their own organizations, including Naftuli Moster, who founded Yaffed to advocate for secular education reform in chasidic schools.

Still, perhaps the best sign of Footsteps’ success is when it is no longer needed by the members it once served.

Hindy, currently pursuing a graduate degree at a top university in New York, doesn’t attend many Footsteps events anymore. “I think it’s a sign of success and integration,” she says, “when you can kind of stand on your own.”

---

NEW YORK NEWS

Knockout Comes To Crown Heights

Nerves frayed with wave of anti-chasidic violence.

Jonathan Mark, Associate Editor

In recent weeks, an opaque two-line prayer began to jump out from the siddur at Crown Heights chasidim: “Al tirah,” “Don’t be afraid of sudden terror when it comes,” for come it will.

It has been coming, without warning, for weeks: A surprise and powerful punch to a random chasid’s face by a random young perpetrator — at least eight times in Crown Heights, according to police, with at least three punch-outs to Jews elsewhere in Brooklyn. The punch often leaves the Jew unconscious, crumpled on the sidewalk. Nothing is stolen. Often nothing is said. Young blacks call it the “knockout game.” Young black teens, their faces blurred to defy identification, told WCBS television that kids do it because they  think “it’s fun.” “They just want to see if you got enough strength to knock somebody out.”

In several recent incidents, terror has come to chasidic families on Friday nights. Towards midnight, as the family sleeps, thieves use automobile jacks to pry open the window bars of private homes, stealing the silver and anything else that can be carried.

Terror comes with a rock thrown at a young boy’s head; with a hot cup of coffee, in a paper bag, thrown at the face of a yeshiva boy on his way to school; with a broomstick beating the head of an older woman; with another woman told to cross the street or be stabbed. Devorah Halberstam, whose son Ari was shot in 1994 by an Arab gunman on the Brooklyn Bridge, admitted that coming home late at night, last week, she ran the block-and-half from her car to her home.

Twenty years after the riots and violent home invasions of 1991, a palpable tension is back in Crown Heights. Police wear riot helmets as they watch from horseback. A Brooklyn South police command van is parked on the corner of Kingston Avenue and Eastern Parkway. In the night, a half-dozen police cars, red lights whirling as the cars are idling, wait outside 770 Eastern Parkway, Chabad Lubavitch headquarters.

Is “knockout” anti-Semitic? It feels that way to many, but it may be more racial than anything else. There have knockouts from St. Louis to Syracuse, always with black punchers and white victims (and seven dead ones), but only in New York have all the victims been Jewish. Blacks also call the game “Polar Bear Hunting” because the victims are white.

New York police have been cautious with linking the New York crimes to the national ones. Asked about knockout, Chief Owen Monaghan of Brooklyn South told us, “There have been a series of assaults. That’s what we’re talking about. The knockout issue is significant in other areas, as we’ve seen on the Internet, but we’re dealing with specific crimes right here and that’s being actively being investigated by the hate crimes task force.”

The blacks of Crown Heights have “grievances,” that most haunted of urban words. Laurie Cumbo, 38, who is black and newly elected to the City Council representing part of Crown Heights, told us that when she was campaigning she heard many in the African-American and Caribbean community complaining that “Many of the buildings are owned by the Jewish community and [black tenants felt] there was a deliberate movement to push them out of their homes. What they would say to me is [the Jews are] doing this, not fixing that, making noise, they’re trying to push me out.’

“They tell me, ‘You better do something about this.’ They fear an ultimate takeover,” Cumbo continues. “Many [blacks living in private homes] talk about how proud they are, that no matter how many ‘bags of money’ were brought to their doors [by Jews] to buy their homes, they’re not selling.”

Young blacks might be picking up on the resentment. “It may be one of those things,” says Cumbo, “that when they come home their parents are talking, ‘those damn Jews,’ not that they’re talking to the kids but kids hear.”

Rabbi Eli Cohen, executive director of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, says of the landlord and real estate charges, “I don’t hear that kind of complaint.” Whoever says that “is living 20 years in the past,” when the complaints were first widely heard, coincidentally or not, at the time of the riot.

As for “bags of money,” he says, “Look, you may have individuals going around to see what homes are available, but there’s no systematic effort to displace people. That is just not going on.”

On many of the street lamps are posters for Yud Tet Kislev, a chasidic day for spiritual elevation, and posters from the Guardian Angels safety patrol for the more earthly danger: “Be aware of your surroundings. Avoid being distracted by cell phone or electronic devices. If you are a victim… call the police from a safe location.”

On the sidewalk outside the Kol Tuv (“It’s all good!”) grocery, a chasid explains, “There’s been cell phone snatchings. They would just come up from behind and grab it out of your hand. So, initially the reaction was, OK, we won’t use our phones out in the open. … Now this is worse. With knockout, they are not even looking to take anything but just inflict harm. My wife and I had a conversation about being afraid to go out at night. My son walks home from school and I tell him to walk with his friends. It’s frightening. Absolutely frightening.”

The Crown Heights Jewish Community Council invited more than 70 blacks, Jews, educators, clergy and politicians to a summit meeting last week over breakfast.

Some of the black school principals said what was needed was dialogue and education. “Yeah,” said Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, “we need to do all those things. … But people in this community were attacked [and] adults were belted in the face. … It’s a pretty incredible thing that we have to explain that its not OK to belt people in the street… I’m all for teaching the kids, but something that would be more effective would be arrests. … I remember 1991, what happened in this community. People called it a pogrom. There was Jewish blood in the street.”

(After last week’s knockout attack of a Jewish man in Borough Park, the first in that neighborhood, police arrested Amrit Marajh, 28. Released on $750 bail, Marjh claimed innocence and said he even had a Jewish girlfriend.)

Cumbo said violent behavior “is not to be tolerated… At the same time, we don’t want to ruin the lives of young people who are too young to understand. We want to do this in such a way that this kind of immature and dangerous behavior does not condemn individuals for the rest of their lives.” She called for black-Jewish dialogue. “Perhaps a basketball tournament, perhaps a youth panel discussion, where young people can talk about each other’s culture.”

After the breakfast, one Jewish participant, who asked not to be identified, was incredulous: “Basketball? A youth conversation? If women were being raped here, would we tell the women to dialogue with young men before we caught the rapists? If there was a Ku Klux Klan rally, we would tell young blacks to play sports with whites, until we knew which of the white kids was at such a rally?”

Rev. Al Sharpton, still despised by many Jews in Crown Heights for his anti-Semitic speeches and inflammatory marches during the Crown Heights riot, was not at the summit but nevertheless issued a strong statement condemning the knockouts this past week: “This kind of behavior is deplorable… We would not be silent if it was the other way around. We cannot be silent or in any way reluctant to confront it when it is coming from our own community. Kids are randomly knocking out people [from] another race — some specifically going at Jewish people. This kind of insane thuggery –there is nothing cute about that.”

On the sidewalk outside the Kol Tuv, olive oil Chanukah candles were on sale. In the gloaming, young girls in long skirts were walking home from school and mothers pushed baby carriages. Yellow school buses from United Lubavitcher Yeshiva rolled down Montgomery Street. Chasidic clarinet music was piped into the streets.

All over Crown Heights, it was time for evening prayer in the shuls and shtiebels. “Don’t be afraid of the sudden terror,” though come it will. This is a world of brokenness and mystery, but blessed is the God “who brings on the darkness.”

jonathan@jewishweek.org

---

MUSIC

‘The Voice Of The Rebirth Of Yiddish Culture’

The Folksbiene marks Theo Bikel’s 90th birthday with a celebration.

George Robinson, Special To The Jewish Week

The memory is clear, the fear still palpable.

“We looked from behind our curtains, and in the street we saw the hardware rumbling past — the cannons, the machine guns, and the open limousines with Goering and Hitler,” Theodore Bikel says. “We trembled. And within days the expected and feared happened.”

Three-quarters of a century have passed but the memory of the Anschluss, of the Nazi takeover of Bikel’s native Austrial is still fresh.

But, as Bikel told an audience of dignitaries in Vienna last month, “The mass murderers are gone and I’m still here, singing the song of freedom and peace.”

He made that statement of defiant triumph as the guest of honor at a commemoration of Kristallnacht, and will undoubtedly reaffirm it in front of another, more celebratory crowd on Dec. 2, when the Folksbiene Theater recognizes the singer-actor on his 90th birthday.

“It was important that I was able to [say that] in a location no less than the Austrian parliament, in front of the head of the Austrian government and certain ambassadors,” he says. “It was symbolically important.”

The choice of Bikel as honoree as the Folksbiene approaches its own centenary is also symbolically important.

“To my generation, which grew up in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Theodore Bikel was the voice of the rebirth of Yiddish culture,” Moishe Rosenfeld, producer of the event, wrote in an e-mail last week. “His albums of Yiddish songs were played constantly in my home and in thousands like it around the world, long before there was a klezmer revival, which he helped inspire. There isn’t anyone more worthy of being honored by the Yiddish world than Theo.”

Rosenfeld’s choice of words is also “symbolically important.” Everyone calls Bikel “Theo,” an affectionate diminutive that suggests close kinship, a reflection of the warmth he projects on stage, on screen, in concert, and of the way that younger generations of Jews (and non-Jews) have taken him to their hearts like a kindly, if occasionally gruff, beloved uncle.

Unsurprisingly, it is his lifelong commitment to Yiddish that Bikel says should be his legacy.

“I’d like to be remembered for the fact that I am passionate about the survival of Yiddish as a language,” he affirms, “As poetry, as literature, as the heimishe, homebound language of my people.”

Bikel is well aware of the feelings he evokes in audiences, but he is also cautious in his assessment of his life.

When the Nazis marched into Vienna, he was only 13.

“Overnight I turned from a human being with equal rights into an object of hatred, of derision and persecution,” he says. “It made me a refugee, which in one way or another I still am today. Despite success, a refugee is one that can never go home. You can visit, but you can’t be home.”

However, he adds quickly, there is a positive side to that status.

“You’re at home nowhere, but you’re also at home everywhere,” he says. “And I’ve made sure I that I was.”

He certainly has been at home everywhere professionally. As a theater actor, he co-founded the Cameri Theatre in Israel, attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and has been nominated for the Tony Award twice. As a film actor he has an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor (for “The Defiant Ones”) and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; on the small screen he has won an Emmy and appeared on everything from “Law and Order” to “Babylon 5.” He has recorded over 20 music albums, co-founded the Newport Folk Festival and performed with over two-dozen symphony orchestras. He has also written several books.

Looking back from 90, is there anything he hasn’t done in the arts?

After a brief pause, Bikel replies, “I haven’t done ballet, much to the delight of the audience.”

The other thing Theodore Bikel hasn’t done at 90 is slow down. He is producing and starring in a new documentary, “Theodore Bikel in the Shoes of Sholem Aleichem,” which is in post-production.

“It’s an interplay between my life and the life of Sholem Aleichem,” he explains.

He also has a number of concerts scheduled for the new year, as well as the Dec. 2 event.

Bikel can honestly say that as a singer he’s never been at a loss for words. After all, he has sung in 23 different languages.

“I don’t play favorites when it comes to material,” he says. “I find Slavic songs easily mastered. I recently started singing in Bosnian, and that is a Slavic tongue, so it came fairly quickly. When I had to learn a song in Zulu, that wasn’t so easy. But I happen to have the ability to do accents very well and it helps.”

He also doesn’t play favorites as an actor. In television and film, Bikel has frequently been cast as a heavy, whether a comic villain like Zoltan Karpathy in “My Fair Lady,” or something darker like a U-boat officer in “The Enemy Below.”

“An actor plays what an actor plays,” he says philosophically. “Sometimes they’re heroes, sometimes they’re villains; you do whatever comes down the pike. You try to do it with as much expertise as you’re capable of, to let your skills as an actor take over. I don’t have to like them or what they do. But the villains are needed; conflict is what drama thrives on and you help the conflict.”

His favorite roles come from the other side of the dramatic spectrum. Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” and the title character of Zorba in the underrated Kander-Ebb musical that bears his name are complex, three-dimensional characters.

Still, like all working actors, he demurs, “Whatever I happen to be doing at the time, that’s my favorite.”

What Tevye and Zorba have in common is that they are life-force characters whose personalities reach the last row of the highest balcony in the biggest theaters in the land. Bikel’s reaction to reaching 90 suggests that this is what he shares with those two outsized figures.

“The secret is, don’t hold back,” he says. “Live fully. Don’t treat yourself with kid gloves and don’t treat life that way either. Just live.”

“Miracle of Miracles: A Chanukah Extravaganza,” featuring Theodore Bikel, will be presented by The National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene on Monday, Dec. 2 at 7:30 p.m. at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Symphony Space (95th Street and Broadway). For information, call (212) 213-2120, x203 or go to http://www.nationalyiddishtheatre.org/productions/miracle-of-miracles-a-chanukah-extravaganza.

Bikel’s Jewish-themed recordings are available at hatikvahmusic.com.

---

TABLE FOR ONE

Women And Intermarriage

Nearly six in 10 U.S. Jews married since 2000 have a non-Jewish spouse. Are we losing identity or gaining family?

Heather Robinson, Jewish Week Correspondent

Jennifer Marcus Crivella, a 43-year-old stay-at-home mother and former elementary school teacher, the only child of protective parents, was raised in Pittsburgh to date “only nice Jewish boys.”

But as early as high school, the boy she really loved — now her husband — was Eric Crivella, 44, a Henry-Winkler-as-Fonzie lookalike.

“No matter what other boys I was seeing, I always wanted to be with Eric,” she said recently via speakerphone, while shuttling the couple’s children, Sydney, 3, and Tyler, 8, to play dates in the town of Katy, Texas, where the family lives.

The Crivellas’ story reflects a not-uncommon phenomenon: a couple falls in love, intermarries, the non-Jewish partner agrees to raise the children as Jews — then converts.

Never has this type of story been more relevant than at present, when, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2013 “Portrait of American Jews” released last month, nearly six in 10 American Jews who have married since 2000 have a non-Jewish spouse.

Some Jewish communal leaders welcome interfaith couples.

“The goalpost has moved from ‘Do you marry someone Jewish?’ to ‘How will you raise your kids?’” said Paul Golin, associate executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, a national organization based in New York and dedicated to helping interfaith families connect to Jewish institutions and programs.

Most rabbis, even those who are savvy to the modern dating scene, take a harder line.

“I’m against Jews marrying non-Jews,” said Arnie Singer, an Orthodox rabbi who has created Jzoog.com, a new online dating website that matches Jews with other Jews and requires its users to be of the faith.

As for Jennifer and Eric, they developed feelings for each other in high school, but didn’t act on them because of the religious difference. They attended Penn State, fell in love, and after graduation, got engaged. But when Jennifer insisted that Eric convert to Judaism, he balked, calling off their engagement.

“He told me he didn’t want to feel like he was converting with a gun to his head,” she recalled.

Heartbroken, they went their separate ways, and Jennifer dated a series of Jewish men. One in particular, whom she describes as “nice,” wanted to marry her, but she didn’t feel it was right.

She never forgot Eric.

Years passed, and the couple reconnected. Jennifer agreed to marry Eric — on the condition they would raise their children as Jews. Then, several months after their wedding by civil ceremony, Eric volunteered to undergo a conversion within the Conservative movement.

“He didn’t want to be pushed into it, he wanted to do it in his own time,” said Jennifer.

Today the family observes the holidays and is planning to join Houston’s Temple Sinai.

Cases like the Crivellas’ prompt the question: will a Jewish community that shuns members who marry outside the faith be more, or less, likely to see those couples raise children as Jews?

One of Pew’s more striking revelations is that as of 2013, Jewish women are slightly more likely than Jewish men to be intermarried in the U.S.: among married Jewish women, 47 percent are married to a non-Jewish spouse, and among married Jewish men, 41 percent are married to a non-Jewish spouse.

Anecdotally, many Jewish women say that’s no surprise.

Millicent Levy-McCarthy, 40, a corporate headhunter in Charleston, S.C., grew up expecting to marry a Jewish man because doing so was important to her father, who was raised Orthodox. But at almost 36, after getting her heart broken by a man who happened to be Jewish, she found love with Enselmo “Mac” McCarthy, a naval officer who was raised Catholic.

“I married an officer and a gentleman,” she said. “I trust him without even a nanosecond of doubt, and that is more important than having religion in common would have been.”

As a single Jewish-American woman, I can’t help but wonder why it is more vital to “marry Jewish” than to marry a wonderful human being — Jewish, non-Jewish and interested in converting or raising a Jewish child without converting — when Judaism is (for two of the three main branches) matrilineal? (So any child I bear, if I am so blessed, will be Jewish). And when some of the greatest leaders of our people were not of “pure” Jewish ancestry?

King David was descended from Ruth, a great biblical heroine and Jew-by-choice, who famously said, “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

I think of the words of Lebanese Christian poet Khalil Jibran: “When love calls you answer, though his ways are hard and steep … And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”

Then there are the words of Dora Iwler, my mother’s departed friend. A strong Jewish woman in every sense, Dora survived a Nazi slave labor camp and went on to raise a Jewish family. She valued Judaism and preferred to see Jewish couples marry. But when she overheard guests at a Passover seder “tsk tsking” an interfaith couple, she said: “In a world of so much hatred, we must have respect for love.”

heather@jewishweek.org

---

Enjoy the read, Happy Thanksgiving and Chanukah, and Shabbat shalom,

Gary Rosenblatt

P.S. For breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion columns, features and more, check out our website anytime.

http://www.thejewishweek.com/

---

Between the Lines - Gary Rosenblatt

'We've Lost Our Narrative'

Ari Shavit, the popular Israeli newspaper columnist for Haaretz, seems to be everywhere in the American media these days, talking about his newly published and highly praised book, “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel.” That’s a good thing for those of us who believe that the better Israel is known and understood, flaws and all, the more it will be appreciated and supported.

In the past week Shavit, 57, and a native of Rehovot, was on “The Charlie Rose Show” and NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross; he was interviewed at the 92nd Street Y by his friend, New Yorker editor David Remnick; and his book was heralded three times in The New York Times with increasingly superlative acclaim.

Last Tuesday Shavit spent several hours at The Jewish Week, noting in an interview that he is already anticipating his next trip to the U.S., in January, when he will visit a number of college campuses. (He will appear at a Jewish Week Forum here March 6; see below). He said he hopes to engage students in a “deep and different dialogue” about an Israel that must be criticized for its treatment of Palestinians and “celebrated for the miracle it is.”

“I’m a total Zionist,” he said in his rich baritone voice with the trace of a British accent. (He has family in England and spends summers there.) Unlike many of his countrymen, Shavit understands and appreciates the importance of American Jewry. Indeed, he says we need each other — that Israel cannot deal with the Palestinians and Iran without American Jewish support. “And you have Pew,” he says, referring to the recent Pew Research Center study showing the precipitous decline among non-Orthodox Jews in terms of religious and communal engagement. “There is no way you can keep progressive Jews in the community without us,” he said, asserting that Israel and American Jewry must find more ways to work together.

But he noted that it is an uphill battle to reach those young Jews “who see Israel as an embarrassment.

“We need to make Israel attractive and sexy again,” he said, “and to connect it with the heart of the Jewish experience. My mission is to change the Israel conversation and revive the sense of a relevant, renewed Zionism.”

A tall order, but Shavit lacks neither self-confidence nor talent. And he would like to see his book, which explores and exposes Israel’s best and worst qualities, as the ticket to the anticipated conversation.

Open, Honest Account

Like others who have lauded “My Promised Land,” a personalized history of Israel over the last century, I admire its ability to confront the country’s deepest moral flaws without losing sight of the miracle of its existence, and its remarkable successes.

Shavit gives us an open and honest account of the real Israel, from the early wave of European pioneers at the end of the 19th century, like his great-grandfather, who gave up a lucrative life in London to settle in the barren land, to the 2011 social protest on the streets of Tel Aviv and the foreign policy planners dealing with the existential challenge of Iran today.

Along the way there are chapters on the success of the orange industry in the 1920s; the development of the country’s nuclear program in Dimona, and all it symbolized; the 1950s generation of Holocaust survivors who settled in Israel and quietly committed to create new life; the growth of the settlement movement; the author’s army service as a guard in a Gaza prison, an experience that prompted him to become active in the peace movement; the emergence of the haredi Sephardi party, Shas, under Aryeh Deri; and the sex, drugs and hedonism of Tel Aviv in the early years of the 21st century.

Most powerful, though, is the chapter on the killing of scores of Arabs and the expulsion of thousands from the city of Lydda (now Lod) during the 1948 War of Independence. With toughness and tenderness, Shavit interviews Jews involved in the fighting, and describes their confusion and anguish, and he imagines “the columns of the homeless,” more than 30,000 leaving their city in stunned silence.

“Do I wash my hands of Zionism?” he asks in the book. Though “horrified” by what took place, “when I try to be honest about it,” he writes, “I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.”

For Shavit, the answer is clear, if not simple: “I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know if it wasn’t for them, I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.”

Shavit presents Israel in all its complexity: the fulfillment of a dream that saved the lives of persecuted Jews from many countries, as well as an occupying country that maintains its strong hold on another people.

“What I did was risky,” Shavit told the audience at the 92nd Street Y event. In writing about Israel’s moral dilemmas, “I was trying to touch the fire,” he said, adding that as a native Israeli deeply committed to the Jewish state and people, he has “the inner strength to deal with the taboos.” If you don’t address “the dark side,” he suggested, you have little credibility when celebrating the accomplishments of today’s vibrant Israeli society.

In the final chapter, though, ever the realist, Shavit cannot predict a happy ending for his country. “There was hope for peace but there will be no peace here,” he concludes. “Not soon.

“What this nation has to offer is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge.”

‘We Lost Our Sense Of Meaning’

In our interview, Shavit attributed that intensity to “the richness of Zionism” that “was always flexible and life-loving, deeply optimistic” despite representing “the ultimate victims of the 20th century, and threatened to this day.” But “our main problem is that we lost our narrative,” he said; he hopes to revive it. “We were a story that became a reality, but we lost our sense of meaning. We need to love Israel in a new, authentic way” that both praises the society’s accomplishments and recognizes its shortcomings.

It’s critical, Shavit believes, to engage both Israeli and diaspora Jews in the discussion, recognizing that “any simplistic approach is wrong” because “complexity is built into the place.”

He worries that diaspora Jews became polarized over Israel in recent years and then “refused to even talk about it” because Jerusalem’s policies so divided the community. “The more critical approach is more promising” as a remedy, he insisted. “I hope young American Jews will see how to relate to Israel without faking it.” And he added that young Israeli Jews as well are in search of historical context. It is the highest priority that they be given a reason beyond nationalism as to why they are fighting for Israel, he said.

But while Israeli youth are “living Herzl’s dream, breathing a total Jewish existence,” Shavit fears that diaspora Jewry is disappearing. The future of British Jewry, he noted, “is not pretty”: a “wonderful life for individual Jews, but shrinking rapidly,” with the exception of the ultra-Orthodox. Shavit recalls that he wrote what he describes as “an apocalyptic piece” for The New York Times Magazine around the time of the millennium suggesting that American Jewry, if it is not careful, may become “a lush, comfortable graveyard of the Jewish people.” A strong sentiment, but one he still believes.

“I’m very worried” about the recent reports underscoring the level of assimilation here, he said. And he is hoping that his book will help spur an honest and deeper discussion about where Israel fits into the Jewish identity of young people, here and in Israel.

Gary@jewishweek.org

Ari Shavit will discuss his new book at a Jewish Week Forum on March 6, 2014 at 7:30 p.m. at Central Synagogue. More details about ticket reservations will be available soon.

---

NEWS and FEATURES

Short Takes

Beit Rabban Pilot To Cap Tuition Costs

Amy Sara Clark, Special To The Jewish Week

As parents struggle with the rising costs of a full-time Jewish education, one Manhattan school has announced a pilot program to help address that need.

Beit Rabban Day School is offering a substantial discount to parents who enroll multiple children for the 2014-15 school year through its Tuition Affordability Initiative.

The Upper West Side school, which serves preschoolers through fifth graders and is planning for a middle school, will allow families to cap their tuition at 15 percent of the household’s adjusted gross income, regardless of how many children are enrolled.

Unlike the school’s scholarship program, this initiative is aimed at middle-income families — those making between about $150,000 and $400,000 a year — and sets a minimum of 55 percent of the full cost of a family’s tuition.

“We had a number of families in the school who came in at different points to talk about how difficult it was to make Jewish choices in New York City,” said Rabbi Andrew Davids, who heads the school. “They could afford it [tuition] with one, but couldn’t afford it with two. … Or it was precluding them from sending their kids to Jewish summer camp, or from joining a congregation. This was a way for us to make it just a little bit easier for them.”

Tuition at Beit Rabban ranges from $20,903 for half-day preschoolers to $31,127 for fourth and fifth graders. This is on par with most New York City day schools, where tuition ranges between $20,000 for kindergarten to $40,000 at some high schools.

In Beit Rabban’s program, families will be able to calculate their tuition based on their income — and they will know that the cost won’t change anytime soon.

“What we’re offering is different than financial aid, we’re offering predictability,” Rabbi Davids said.

For example, a family making $325,000 with a child in preschool, another in kindergarten and a third in second grade would normally pay $84,173 per year. But through the program they’ll pay 15 percent of their income, equaling $48,750.

The program is sponsored in part by the AVI CHAI Foundation, which is also funding a program at Robbins Hebrew Academy in Toronto. The foundation modeled the initiative, dubbed iCAP, after a similar effort started by Solomon Schechter of Greater Boston.

“They introduced the program two years ago and seem to have been getting pretty good results … it’s really created this favorable buzz,” said Daniel Perla, AVI CHAI’s program officer for day school finance.

Over the past two years, at least a dozen schools in the U.S. and Canada have instituted tuition assistance programs for middle-income families. In New York, Riverdale’s SAR High School gave eligible middle-income high school students a $2,000 tuition credit last year through the help of an anonymous donor.

AVI CHAI’s iCAP program reimburses participating schools for one-third of the discount they’re giving the families. It has a budget of $500,000, enough to fund it in five schools for three years. Interested institutions are encouraged to apply, Perla said.

The foundation set the pilot program at three years with the expectation that it will take some time before it becomes profitable.

“Year one, we’re not looking for anything more than a modest increase. It takes a couple of years to have an impact,” he said. After that, “there shouldn’t be any cost to these programs, because the hope is they will be bringing in new families.”

editor@jewishweek.org

---

New York News

Bias Charge Dumbfounds Residents Of Pine Bush

Anti-Semitism described in suit is unfair portrayal of their town, they say.

Stewart Ain, Staff Write

Pine Bush, N.Y. — Suddenly, they don’t even recognize their own town anymore.

The six women eating in a diner near the Crispell Middle School in this hamlet about 75 miles north of New York City said they were incredulous when they read that a civil rights lawsuit had been filed against the Pine Bush School District claiming that it is rife with anti-Semitism that has gone largely unchecked.

The women, who like most of the 15 residents interviewed at a diner and supermarket this week declined to give their names, said the community described in the lawsuit bore little resemblance to the one they’ve lived in for years. In fact, one said she retired as a Pine Bush Elementary School teacher five years ago and was dumbfounded by the complaint — especially the allegation that all five of the children whose parents brought the suit said they experienced anti-Semitism in the Crispell Middle School.

“Crispell was the place where we all wanted our kids to go,” she said. “It has a safe, nurturing, comfortable environment. The teachers there I know are caring, loving people — the kids always came first.”

Many of those interviewed questioned the timing of the front-page article about the suit in The New York Times earlier this month. Some suggested that community opposition to a 396-unit townhouse being built in the school district and reportedly marketed exclusively to Satmar Jews somehow triggered the Times’ story.

As they explained it, the developers decided to fight growing opposition to the development by claiming residents don’t want Jews moving in. To prove their point, they leaked the suit to the Times as evidence of anti-Semitism in the community.

But Holly Roche, leader of the Rural Community Coalition, which is spearheading community opposition to the project because of its size in a village of 375 residents, said that theory no longer worked after she disclosed she is Jewish.

“Now they are calling me anti-Satmar,” she said.

“The best defense is a strong offense,” explained a Jewish resident about the developers’ approach, who asked that his name not be used for fear it might complicate his business dealings in the area.

The developer, Shalom Lamm, did not return phone calls seeking comment. But he was quoted as saying he has nothing to do with sales of the townhouse and that anyone who wishes may buy one.

There have been several articles, including a 16-page supplement, published in Jewish and Yiddish newspapers promoting the development to the Satmar chasidic community. A girls’ yeshiva is also under discussion, and residents said they have heard talk of a boys’ yeshiva being built as well.

The Times’ story has sparked state and federal investigations, and Rabbi Joel Schwab of Temple Sinai in Middletown said the Anti-Defamation League would be presenting a program at his synagogue next month for Jewish parents and students on how to handle anti-Semitic incidents.

Lucy Fox, the synagogue’s Hebrew school director and principal, said she welcomed such a program because she “would not know what to do or what to tell students to do.”

She was one of a half-dozen Jews interviewed at Temple Sinai who said the allegations of pervasive anti-Semitism in the school system surprised them — and their families.

“My mother called from Woodmere hysterical after reading the story,” said the Jewish man who asked to remain anonymous.

Dahlia Fox, Lucy Fox’s daughter-in-law, said her “mother in Stony Brook called and said she read the article and wanted to know what’s going on. I said we’re OK, we’re fine — and my son is very vocal about being Jewish.”

Ali Manzo, the mother of fourth grade twins, said she had had no problems with anti-Semitism and even asked her children if they “knew what a swastika is and they didn’t.”

The suit alleges that the five students from three Jewish families experienced anti-Semitism that was rampant in this rural community that straddles Orange and Ulster counties. It claimed the “anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment was a relentless and inescapable aspect of plaintiffs’ school life” and that each “has been psychologically traumatized, and some have suffered physical harm. One is now being home-schooled, another was taken out of the school district for nearly a year to help him recover from the psychological trauma, one is considering the possibility of transferring to a school outside the district and the other two are still attending schools within the district.”

It is alleged that nothing was done about swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti throughout the schools.

“The physical attacks against Jewish students included a swastika drawn on a student’s face against her will, the severe beating of one plaintiff with a hockey stick, and repeated slapping of another plaintiff in the head,” according to the suit. “Students also threw coins at plaintiffs, sometimes on a regular basis, and one plaintiff had to fight off two students who attempted to shove coins in her mouth.”

The incidents were alleged to have occurred in the Pine Bush Elementary School, the Crispell Middle School and the Pine Bush High School beginning in 2008. The school district has denied the allegations.

And people interviewed at random here said none of it rings true.

“In my heart of hearts, I can’t believe it,” said one woman. “I know many of the students and they are kind and helpful. A lot of people here are talking about it and have the same sentiments I do.”

Shaun Burgos of Bloomingburg, the site of the controversial townhouse, said the oldest of his two sons is a student at Crispell and that he spoke with him about anti-Semitism after the article appeared.

“I asked if he saw anything like that there and he said, ‘No dad,’” Burgos said. “He would have told me if there was.”

He then questioned why, if these alleged incidents have been going on for so many years, the parents waited so long to sue.

Another shopper, when asked about the Times’ article snapped, “Why now?  It’s planting seeds of bad thought about the school district.”

The woman, who said she could not give her name because she is a school district employee, said: “From what I hear, incidents may have taken place against these kids but not to the extremes [claimed]. And if other parents had known what was happening, they would have backed up those families. There are many parents who speak out here.”

Asked if the suit has besmirched the good name of the community, she said: “Absolutely, yes. Just Google ‘Pine Bush’ and the first thing you get are the anti-Semitism charges.”

One of the women at the diner agreed, saying: “No one likes to hear anything negative about their community – and this has tarnished its image.”

“The whole thing is unfortunate,” said the woman seated next to her, who said she is Jewish and who said she found it hard to believe.

Susan Notar, a retired teacher who serves as the volunteer chair of the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orange County, said she gave courses on tolerance in 2011 to teachers and three months ago to the entire eighth grade at the Circleville Middle School after Jewish parents complained about anti-Semitic incidents there.

Notar recalled that Pine Bush had once been home to a local Ku Klux Klan chapter and for a time Jews were not welcome.

One woman in the supermarket said she vividly remembered that time. She explained that she had a Jewish sounding maiden name and that after her family moved to Pine Bush in 1960, someone threw a lit bag of manure onto the front porch of her parents home.

“There was a lot of fire,” she said. “They thought we were Jewish. When my father came home, he made a big sign that he put in the front lawn. It said, ‘We are not Jewish and even if we were, it is none of your business.’ The lawsuit reminded me of that incident. I thought that stuff was long gone from here, but apparently it’s not. To me, it’s horrible. … There is no excuse for prejudice.”

Charlie Carnes, supervisor of the Town of Crawford (one of seven towns within the Pine Bush School District), said he believes anti-Semitic incidents have occurred in the school district but that they were “isolated.”

“In just about any school district — especially rural ones — that is how kids are, and the complaints were not handled properly,” he said. “I know that some kid drew a swastika on a desk a few weeks ago and it was immediately removed. … I have two kids in school and one graduated two years ago. I haven’t seen it [rampant anti-Semitism], nor have my children nor their friends. Occasionally they will hear something, but it is very isolated.

“If these things were proven to have happened, I have not heard about it. … Now when Bloomingburg comes up, all of a sudden it is on the front page of The New York Times. It makes one think.”

stewart@jewishweek.org

---

Food and Wine

For Turkey Day, A Jewish-Italian Tradition

Make a meatloaf the way they do in Venice and Ferrara.

Alessandra Rovati, Jewish Week Online Columnist

This year’s much-hyped “Thanksgivukah,” aside, many Jews always celebrate Thanksgiving Day with an intensity usually reserved to our most sacred holidays. We identify with the Pilgrims, who travelled across an ocean to flee religious persecutions and find freedom. With their sweat and faith, they fought against illness and scarcity, finally turning America’s wilderness into their “Promised Land.”

As in our favorite Jewish holidays, the Thanksgiving table is also exquisitely symbolic. Pumpkin, and of course turkey, represent bounty. Cranberries are always combined with plenty of sugar to make a palatable sauce, but their true nature is extremely sour. That contrast is symbolic of life’s challenges and triumphs.

But the corn is especially complicated, and it’s fraught with ambiguities in other cultures, as well.

Here, at Thanksgiving, it reminds us of the harsh winter before the first harvest, when the pilgrims barely had enough to eat. It is said that at one point there was so little food that each person was given only five kernels of corn per day.

In Northern Italy, where I’m from, corn is seen as both a comfort food and a symbol of scarcity. When it first arrived from the Americas, it quickly spread through Lombardy and the Veneto, where landowners reaped huge profits by feeding their workers only polenta.

Tasty and filling, it was so lacking in vitamins and protein that it caused an epidemic of Pellagra, the same deficiency disease that spread in the American South during the Great Depression.

Much like the cup that every Jewish groom crushes underfoot at his wedding, these gastronomic cues remind us that while giving thanks for the many blessings that we enjoy each day living in America, we should not forget the tears that are shed and the lives that are lost every year.

Symbolism aside, here’s an Italian Jewish turkey dish that can easily cross over to our winter holiday season, although Jews in northern communities like Venice and Ferrara eat this dish on Rosh Hashana and Passover. Cooking the loaf in the skin is a distinctively Jewish technique.

Alessandra Rovati is an Italian food writer and lecturer based in New York. In addition to her published articles and recipes in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Joy of Kosher and several international publications, Alessandra writes Italian-Jewish culinary history on her web site, DinnerinVenice.com. Alessandra  has been a featured guest on a variety of television and radio programs and has spoken at universities and cultural institutes. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest for more classic Jewish Italian cuisine recipes.

Ingredients:

About 4 lbs turkey meat, mostly dark

Few slices Hungarian salami, finely minced

2 raw eggs and 2 boiled eggs

1 tbsp freshly minced parsley

Handful pistachios, optional

Salt and pepper

Chicken or meat broth

Recipe Steps:

With a sharp pairing knife, remove the turkey skin in one piece (or ask your butcher to do it).

Combine the ground meat with the eggs, parsley, salt, pepper, a large pinch of nutmeg or mixed meatball spices and the finely minced salami. If desired, add a handful of peeled pistachios.

Spread the turkey skin over the counter (or use a rectangle of parchment paper if you prefer not to use the skin). Form a meat loaf with the ground turkey filling and place it over the skin, arranging the boiled eggs inside. Spread the skin over the loaf and sew it with strong embroidery cotton. If you need to close any holes in the skin, you can patch them with excess skin. Do not overstuff, and make a couple of small holes in the skin with a fork.

If using parchment instead of the skin, wet it first to soften it, and tie candy-style with kitchen string: It will be somewhat less moist and flavorful, but still good!

Place the loaf at the bottom of a heavy pot, and cover it with the broth. Simmer for about 2 hours. Allow the loaf to cool for 15-20 minutes before unwrapping and slicing.

Serve slightly warm or at room temperature, accompanied by a couple of spoonfuls of the broth or by little mayonnaise and a side of greens.

Total time:  160 minutes

---

Travel

France In The Caribbean

Hilary Larson, Travel Writer

It’s midwinter and as frostbite sets in on your hike to the subway, you’re pining for a beach. But your spouse disdains the Caribbean, preferring the cosmopolitan pleasures of Europe.

The solution: Martinique. A Windward Island of the Lesser Antilles, Martinique is an overseas department of France, which means the currency is the euro, the language is Français and the cuisine is considerably more refined than in much of the Caribbean.

The Europhile can browse the marches (markets), marvel at 19th-century architecture and take in an evening of French culture at the Thêatre Aimé Césaire. And the sun-worshipper has a myriad of stunning beaches — powdery white-sand in the southern coves; volcanic-black in the mountainous north — at which to scuba dive, snorkel or simply contemplate a Caribbean sunset.

This being France, Martinique also has a more stable and traditional Jewish presence than in much of the Caribbean. Centered in the Fort-de-France suburb of Schoelcher on the island’s west coast, the Jewish community maintains a historic synagogue, a community center and the institutions and rituals that define overseas Jewish life.

Of all the islands of the West Indies, Martinique is also among the most purely enjoyable — and not just because it’s a chic little piece of France.

Martinique is blessed not only by beaches, but also by a terrain of lush, verdant mountains, flower-scented rainforests and shimmering bays that delight the senses at every curve of the road. The island strikes a sweet spot so elusive in Caribbean islands: developed enough to have plenty to see and do, but free of the kind of tacky commercialism that blights so many of the English-speaking islands nearby.

True, it’s harder to get to than some tropical destinations. But a new direct American Airlines flight out of Miami — with a New York connection — just launched for this winter season, making the trip easier than ever before.

2013 is the centennial of one of Martinique’s most beloved cultural icons: Aimé Césaire, whose first name (meaning “loved”) more or less sums up the way locals feel about the Renaissance man who presided over Fort-de-France as mayor for half a century. Césaire, who died in 2008, was a renowned poet, playwright and civil rights crusader in addition to being a politician, which is why the president of France attended his state funeral in Fort-de-France, and local officials named the Martinique International Airport after him a few years back.

The Thêatre Aimé Césaire in Fort-de-France is the place to take in an evening of culture after a long day at the beach. The current season features plays by Bertolt Brecht and Jean Cocteau alongside concerts by the Martinique Classical Quintet, and various events to mark the Césaire centennial.

Césaire’s city is thriving in his absence. Low-scale and charming, with an easygoing tropical rhythm, Fort-de-France has rivers that snake canal-like through back alleys, reminding me a little of Venice, Calif.

Its buildings, of various shades of maize, terracotta and apricot, largely date to the early 20th century; some sport lacey wrought-iron detail or flower-filled balconies. The most famous building in Fort-de-France — the fin-de-siècle Schoelcher Library, shipped over from Paris — is (in my view) an eye-catching monstrosity, a vaguely Byzantine concoction of zebra stripes that appears to sport every possible façade all at once.

Fort-de-France became the island’s capital only after the 1902 eruption of Mt. Pelée — a still-active volcano on the island’s far north — killed more than 30,000 and destroyed the main metropolis of St.-Pierre. That explains the relatively recent vintage of downtown Fort-de-France. Today the island’s center of gravity lies firmly in its southern half: in the bustling streets of Fort-de-France and the quaint village of St. Anne, where French pop wafts from the open-air cafés, markets overflow with breadfruit, and the best beaches are just a stroll away.

The early Jewish settlers settled further north, in the 17th century, when Dutch rule gave way to French colonization; Sephardic merchants established the island’s first synagogue in the 1660s. Many of the 100-plus families who compose today’s Association Culturelle Israelite, the historic Sephardic temple, are descendants of those original French and Portuguese Jewish families; many more are 20th-century settlers from mainland France and French North Africa. A few years ago, a Chabad center opened to further invigorate Jewish life on the island.

While the early Jews came for economic opportunity, more recent arrivals are drawn to Martinique’s irresistible ethnic mélange, a hybrid French-Créole culture that feels in many ways more fluid than the traditional societies back home.

No institution celebrates the fusion of tropical and Continental quite like the Grand Ballet of Martinique, which performs at hotels throughout the season. Despite the name, the Grand Ballet bears little resemblance to its formal European counterparts; here in the tropics, “ballet” is loosely translated to mean 30 dancers in vibrant skirts of red and yellow swirling and dipping to infectious island rhythms.

Throw in dozens of lovely antique chapels and museums that celebrate everything from local ethnography to Martinique’s volcanoes, and culture vultures will find plenty to satisfy. But then those beaches beckon — and even the most ardent Francophile has to admit that Martinique, free of Paris’ wintry chill, might be the most enticing part of France this time of year.

editor@jewishweek.org

-------

The Jewish Week

1501 Broadway, Suite 505

New York, NY 10036 United States

-------