Dear Reader,
Every year, our 36 Under 36issue is one of the most popular and important things we do. A specially designated editor spends months sifting through hundreds of applications to find 36 inspiring young people who are reinventing their -- and our -- Jewish world across a dizzying array of fields.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/36u36/grid/2014
36 Under 36 | 2014
This year, among them are a chef and entrepreneur; a passionate
Yiddishistand a boxer.
The (Smoked) Meat of Jewish Cooking: Noah Bernamoff
Chef Noah Bernamoff’s childhood home in Montreal was a traditional one: his observant Jewish parents kept a “99 percent” kosher kitchen; they sent their son to parochial schools from kindergarten through high school; they tried to impress upon him the duties and responsibilities of a religious man. That wholehearted embrace of tradition is what, at least partially, influenced Bernamoff to move to New York and pursue law as his vocation. But in 2009, during his second year at Brooklyn Law, Bernamoff found that he was spending more time thinking about the rich tradition of Jewish deli that he had left behind in his hometown than he was hitting the books.
And so, with a little help from his wife, Rae Cohen, and friend, Max Levine, the idea of Mile End Delicatessen was born. Taking its name from the historically Jewish neighborhood of Montreal where “smoked meat” — aka pastrami — is piled high on rye and two world-renowned bagel shops battle it out for customer loyalty, Bernamoff’s tiny restaurant opened in downtown Brooklyn the following year, serving the classics — matzah ball soup, chicken liver and, of course, Bernamoff’s beloved smoked meat — that he cherished from his childhood.
Bernamoff may have strayed from a more conventional path, but Mile End, too, is emphatically about tradition, just as his home was when he was small.
“This is food that’s real, genuine, and tradition-based, and that’s something that people can appreciate,” Bernamoff said of his meteoric success, which has been well chronicled in the press. The original, 435-square-foot restaurant in Brooklyn now has a second location across the river in Noho, and Bernamoff’s team just launched a companion business, Black Seed Bagels.
With such growth in just four years here in New York, Bernamoff said he is looking to other cities where Mile End might fit in.
“I’m a restless human being,” he said. “The idea of operating a Mile End in a city that’s not home is scary, but it’s also something I’m definitely excited by.”
Bathroom humor: “Our Brooklyn place is so tiny,” Bernamoff said, “that people regularly walk in and ask to sit in the ‘back room.’ I ask, ‘Did you say the bathroom? Because we don’t have a back room, but you’re welcome to sit in the bathroom if you like.’”
www.mileenddeli.com
Lauren Rothman
36 Under 36
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Bringing Yiddish into the Future: Isaac Bleaman
Isaac Bleaman is taking an old language into the modern age with his digital Yiddish enterprise.
Raised in a Conservative, non-Yiddish speaking home in California, Bleaman discovered the language through traditional music and after-school Jewish education programs; his interest grew into a passion.
“I felt like there was a gap in my knowledge,” he says. “Yiddish is intimately connected to Jewish history outside of Israel,” as well as in it.
Now fluent in the language from education at school and academic programs, he has made facilitating growth of Yiddish a personal cause.
Bleaman is currently in his first year of NYU’s linguistic doctoral program (he received his master’s in Yiddish studies at Oxford). But his interests in Yiddish academia extend beyond the mechanics of the language to what makes it personal — its intersection with Jewish culture. It was with this in mind that Bleaman created Leyenzal.org.
Leyenzal is a website that hosts free content for speakers of Yiddish with original online lectures by leading international Yiddish scholars, as well as source texts. Almost exclusively in Yiddish, the site is a chance for new speakers of the mamaloshen to hone their skills, and for those fluent to engage with it on an intellectual level.
The site was also host to what Bleaman calls the first Yiddish webinar, in which about ten speakers of the language from all around the world met in a Google hangout to discuss Yiddish literature, with Yiddish being the only common language for the group.
Bleaman is excited about using the democratizing powers of the Internet for the mamaloshen.
“Yiddish is supposed to belong to everybody,” he says. “You should have the opportunity to learn.”
Music man: Bleaman’s Yiddishkeit intersects with musical background; he sings in a Yiddish choir, and is considering forming a klezmer group (he started one at Stanford, his undergraduate alma mater,) for which he will play violin.
www.Leyenzal.org
Gabriela Geselowitz
36 Under 36
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Fighting for the Jewish Soul: Yuri Foreman
For Yuri Foreman, boxing, like Judaism, is about sparking one’s inner fire.
“The main person you are struggling with is yourself,” said the former World Boxing Association super welterweight champion, 33. “You need to conquer lack of motivation. You feel pain, but still have to spark this force within to keep going. With Judaism it’s the same thing — you have to master yourself and your emotions, and in the ring it is vital. ”
The first time Foreman, who is studying to be a Chabad rabbi, entered a synagogue, it reminded him of the first time he entered a boxing gym; he was, he says, “a deer in the headlights” encountering the unfamiliar and determined to conquer his fear.
His quest to become a world champion boxer — a dream he realized and will seek to repeat in a much-heralded comeback fight on June 7 against Jorge Melendez at Madison Square Garden — springs from his roots in the former Soviet Union: Foreman’s mother signed him up for boxing when he was seven because he was bullied for being Jewish.
Despite the beatings, he said, and despite immigrating to Israel at age 9, he didn’t really know what being Jewish meant until many years later in the U.S., when his then fiancée, now wife, Leyla Leidecker, took a passionate interest in the religion, and converted.
“If I hadn’t met her, I’d be a Russian non-observant person,” he said.
For the past several years, he has studied in Brooklyn with Rabbi DovBer Pinson, a scholar of Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah, to become a rabbi. He and his wife observe Shabbat with their two young boys, Lev, 3, and Elijah, 1.
Would he want his sons to box when they are older?
“A kid will either like it or hate it,” he said. “If he wants it, fine. But if it’s not his thing, that is OK because there’s a whole world out there.”
Glove story: An avid reader who loves music, among Foreman’s favorite artists are Simon and Garfunkel, especially their song — you guessed it — “The Boxer.” “Pure poetry,” he said. “On a daily basis, we are all getting hit with punches life throws us. Certain things, like loss, you can’t duck. You need strength to just keep going.”
www.yuriforeman.com
Heather Robinson
Contributing Editor
36 Under 36
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Another reason to celebrate, according to food columnist Amy Spiro: cherry season. She points out that unlike other summer fruits that are available, even if not at their best, all year round, cherries are really a summer thing. Get 'em while you can and bake a pie.
Cherry Season Has Arrived!
Celebrate the beloved stone fruit with this delicious pie.
Amy Spiro, Jewish Week Online Columnist
The day is near, the day is here: It's cherry season! While some fruits are better in the summer months, but you can get them all year long (think strawberries, raspberries), cherries are only around on the shelves for a few short months! That's why I get excited every year when I spot them. That and because they're delicious.
What better way to celebrate the humble cherry than with a delicious pie? Pairing the cherries with blueberries is a perfect balance: The tartness and sweetness of both mingle well with each other. I'm even so in love with cherries that I couldn't help but use some leftover pie dough to create a little cherry emblem atop my pie!
Amy Spiro is a journalist and writer based in Jerusalem. She is a graduate of the Jerusalem Culinary Institute's baking and pastry track, a regular writer for The Jerusalem Post and blogs at bakingandmistaking.com. She also holds a BA in Journalism and Politics from NYU.
Ingredients:
Crust:
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons shortening, cubed and frozen
10 tablespoons butter or margarine, diced and frozen
4 to 6 tablespoons ice water
Filling:
About 2 cups cherries, pitted and quartered
2 cups blueberries, rinsed and patted dry
1/3 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 egg white
Turbinado sugar
Recipe Steps:
Several hours in advance: throw the shortening and butter in the freezer. When you're ready to start, fill a small bowl with water and 3 to 4 ice cubes. Set aside.
Mix together the flour, sugar and salt. (I like to use a food processor for the whole thing, but it's certainly doable with a bowl and a pastry cutter.) Sprinkle the shortening on top, and pulse to combine or cut in. Repeat with the butter. Add the water, a tablespoon at a time, from the bowl of ice water (don't use any cubes!) Pulse to combine. If more water is needed for the dough to come together, add gradually. Divide the dough in two, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
Toss the cherries, blueberries and sugar together in a large bowl and set aside. Roll one of the lumps of dough out on a well-floured surface to about 12 inches in diameter. Gently transfer to a 9" pie plate (I usually fold it in fourths to transport, then unfold in the plate). Make sure the dough is flush against the sides of the plate, and trim the edges to leave only a slight overhang. Loosely cover the dough in plastic wrap and stick in the freezer for 20 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 425 F. After the shell is chilled, mix the cornstarch in to the berry mixture, and pour in to the chilled pastry shell. Roll out the remaining piece of dough and cut in to approximately 1/2 inch strips (a pizza cutter is great for this.) Interweave them to create the lattice design or lay half on the pie then the other half perpendicular atop them for an easier look.
Brush the top of the pie with the egg white and sprinkle turbinado sugar on top. Bake on 425 F for 25 minutes, then lower to 375 F and bake an additional 30 minutes.
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Another highly trafficked item on our website this week is a column about a more somber subject: the need for those who would identify as Jews to have a strong foundation of Jewish knowledge. Thousands of people have read this piece; join the conversation.
Best wishes for a wonderful weekend and Shabbat,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Editor
The Arts
Coexistence, With Oud by Ted Merwin, Special To The Jewish Week
To visual artist and playwright Tom Block, it is not just Jews, but Arabs as well, who have suffered displacement from a cherished homeland. With all the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway, the musical’s final scene of the shtetl-dwelling Jews being forced off their land lingers in our minds. But to visual artist and playwright Tom Block, it is not just Jews, but Arabs as well, who have suffered displacement from a cherished homeland.
In his new play, “Oud Player on the Tel,” Block imagines a friendship blossoming between a German Holocaust survivor and a Sufi villager in the British Mandate period that preceded the founding of Israel. It will be read this Saturday evening at the 14th Street Y with live oud music played by Rabbi Zach Fredman (one of this year’s “36 Under 36” Jewish Week picks). It is one of seven plays the Jewish Plays Project, founded by David Winitsky, is presenting at the Y.
“Oud Player,” directed by Winitsky, is the tale of Amir (Rajesh Bose), the Sufi leader of a small village outside Jerusalem, who strikes up a friendship with Melke (Matthew Boston), a middle-aged survivor. Meanwhile, Melke’s son, Mortiz (Adam Perabo), and Amir’s nephew, Mahmoud (Ryan Shams), each independently take the name of an American used car salesman, Herb Gordon, and compete to peddle vehicles to the local population. But political realities ultimately overshadow the desires of both the Jewish and Arab characters for peace and prosperity. Block’s own six-foot murals of Jewish and Arab mystics serve as the backdrop for the stage.
In an interview, Block called “Oud Player” a kind of “forensic history,” a “digging up of forgotten and overlooked” encounters between Jews and Arabs. But rather than a true story, he said, the play presents “one possible future” that was “buried under the Zionist and Pan-Arab nationalist energies” that both arose against Christian Europe in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
Like “West Bank Story,” the Academy Award-winning short film from 2005 about dueling falafel stands, in which an Israeli soldier falls in love with a Palestinian fast food cashier, “Oud Player” has what Block calls an “absurdist, tragicomic” dimension. But the play is also more serious in tone. “The Jewish characters see Israel as a phoenix rising from the ashes of the Holocaust, while the Arabs see it as a nakba — a catastrophe.”
According to Winitsky, “Given that the Israelis and Palestinians seem so far apart these days, it’s hard to believe in coexistence.” But he calls himself an “incurable optimist” who believes that “people who share so much can not only coexist, but even embrace each other.”
“Oud Player on the Tel” will be read on Saturday, June 14 at 7:30 p.m. at the 14th Street Y. A talk-back with Middle East peace activists will follow the reading. Tickets for this play (and the six other plays in the Jewish Plays Project series) are free, but must be reserved at www.jewishplaysproject.org/tickets.
THE POLITICAL INSIDER| THE ROSENBLOG| THE NEW NORMAL| A COMIC'S JOURNEY | WELL VERSED
THE NEW NORMAL
Ten Tips For Your Child's Transition To Summer by Frances Victory
As the end of the school year approaches us, here are some tips for parents of children with autism (or any child who needs support with transitions) when trying to support their son or daughter move from school to summer.1. Preview - Talk to your kids beforehand about what changes they can expect. Show them pictures of new places and people, like camp counselors. Visit any new locations with your child ahead of time so nothing is a surprise. Skype with friends and family to see where you'll be staying when you go on summertime visits. Check out the websites of summer camp facilities, hotels, attractions or city going to visit. Tour summer day or sleep away camp grounds ahead of time. If that's not possible, you may want to contact places to see if they have any DVDs that depict their facilities.
2. Schedule - Review the calendar with your child so that he or she knows when everything is happening over the course of the summer. You could create a calendar counting days left until camp or travel date. Pictures are often useful when trying to help a child understand a coming sequence of events. Develop daily, weekly or monthly calendars to show what activities will occur during the summer. If making a daily calendar of activities, break activities down step by step. This will help later when trying to understand where child is having any difficulties.
3. Adjusting to a new routine - Discuss new routines with the child. Encourage your son or daughter to ask questions. If possible, practice travel in advance.
4. Sensory concerns - Take your child’s sensory preferences into account. Sunscreen is important during summer months. Maybe rubbing sunscreen on your child bothers him or her due to heightened tactile sensitivities. Try a spray instead. Perhaps camp activities or traveling may be noisy and over-stimulating. Consider packing noise-canceling headphones.
5. Unstructured time - For some children, it'is important to create schedules even for leisure and unstructured times. Review it with your child and tweak as needed. Keep in mind that your child may need direct instruction for learning how to handle unstructured times. Ask teachers and/or therapists for ideas about areas and skills to address. Download iPhone and iPad apps that help build child’s abilities. Create a list of options for child to choose from during unstructured time.
6. Suggestions from teachers & therapists - Before break, talk to your child’s teachers to discuss ways to build on skills your child has learned throughout the school year. Perhaps you can request a large homework packet for the summer, strategies to generalize these skills in the community or resources for exploring the curriculum further. Speak to your children's therapists to ask for exercises.
7. Comforting place or object - Make sure there is a safe space available wherever you go if your child becomes overwhelmed or confused. Give your child a familiar object or favorite snack to help him or her with transitions and offer comfort and predictability. Pack your child his or her own backpack of snacks and activities for him or her to engage in while waiting at places such as restaurants or airports.
8. Visiting family and friends - Talk to friends and family beforehand about things that bother or overwhelm your child. Make sure they know ahead of time accommodations that your child will need. Ask about activities available in the area. If your child is on a restricted diet, search online for a nearby health food store that sells the food items that he or she may need. Provide friends and family with resources they can read and become familiar with your child’s possible behaviors.
9. Summer traveling - When taking family trips you can prepare the child in different ways. For example, if going to the beach, buy a small amount of sand from a hardware store and let child play with it ahead of time. Play a CD of wave sounds if you're heading to the beach. Start off slow, with day trips, so the child is comfortable with being in a new environment. Drive or fly at night so the child can sleep. Ask your pediatrician for suggestions on how to deal with any ear pain your child may experience while flying.
10. Social stories - Some children with autism may also benefit from social stories to help them learn interpersonal communication skills and important aspects of a new environment. Here is the website for a free app you can use to build your own social story - Touch Autism. Social Stories Creator and Library for Preschool, Autism, and Special Needs.
It is important for everyone to be patient and remember that new activities take time to learn and for individuals with autism to feel comfortable. Everyone learns at his or her own pace; it will take time for your child to adjust to new routines, people and places. Keep a list of what did and did not work so that you can use your own tips for next summer or when traveling during the year. Most of all have fun and enjoy your time together building great memories!
I would like to give a special thanks to Frank Ammirata, a teacher of students with autism in Brooklyn, for sharing some of the tips he has learned through his experiences.
Dr. Frances Victory received her PhD in Developmental Psychology at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Her thesis was titled, "Exploring the Role of Perceived Religiosity on Daily Life, Coping, and Parenting for Jewish Parents of Children with Autism." You can reach her at victory.frances@gmail.com
WELL VERSED
This Jew Hath Eyes by Emily Snyder
Joseph Menino as Shylock and Imani Jade Powers as Jessica in “The Merchant of Venice.” Allison Stock
Modern interpretations, in a display of goodwill, tend to downplay the text (both Shylock’s daughter and servant call him “a very devil”) and frequently cast the most commanding and sympathetic actor in the role—perhaps hoping that the audience will overlook Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity at the end.
It was with great interest, therefore, that I attended The Shakespeare Forum’s Merchant. The Forum’s credo is “Love is the Strongest Choice,” and there are many members of the tribe who attend the group’s Tuesday night, year-round open workshops.
As expected, this Merchant is a strong showing from The Shakespeare Forum—in fact, perhaps their best production thus far. The story is clearly told with an emphasis on the integrity of the text. The sets, lights, and incidental music all place us immediately in a Venice that never was (although the costumes are a bit more esoteric in setting the time). And if the directional grasp on the comedic something lacks, the drama is profound.
Joseph Menino embodies Shylock with a mixed weariness and wiliness that comes from years of persecution, while Dominic Comperatore as his rival, Antonio (“the merchant of Venice”) expresses his own simple gentility in the “love that dare not speak its name” that motivates the entire play. Michael Moreno as the rakish Gratiano is well matched in the always-spirited Sarah Hankins as Nerissa. And the youthful pages (played on alternating nights by Elektra and Ivan Birchall) are budding forces of the Bard’s best work.
But the show belongs to Hannah Goalstone as Portia, whose quiet luminosity—by turns girlish and stately—makes one feel the plight of a young woman constrained by her father’s will in matters of romance, and yet freed by her own invention in matters of love. The final trial scene is fraught with real tension as Portia delicately balances between matters of justice and mercy: issues which are still at stake in our own public court of opinion.
Unfortunately, while the show’s inherent misogyny is confronted and by that confrontation defeated, this reviewer would have liked to have seen the other inherent prejudices of the play likewise brought to the front—even in all their ugliness—in order to, as the Bard wrote elsewhere, “hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image…”
Instead, Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech had, alas, less weight because it sprang from lesser menace. The moment of his forced conversion was given more pathos—primarily due to the actor’s anguish and exasperation—but it was a moment come and gone too quick.
Love is, indeed, the strongest choice—but such a love in Shakespeare’s plays are always framed by that which is weakest in us.
The Shakespeare Forum’s Merchant is therefore a strong and beautiful outing, and we hope that soon they will embrace not only that which is lovely, but that which is bold.
"The Merchant of Venice" runs through June 14th at the Gym at Judson, NYC. Tickets available through The Shakespeare Forum.
Emily C. A. Snyder is an internationally published and produced playwright, as well as the Artistic Director of Turn to Flesh Productions. Her original five-act iambic pentameter play, Cupid and Psyche, was produced at The Barrow Group Theatre for Valentine's 2014. She is a member of the staff of The Jewish Week.
Food & Wine
From "Save The Deli" To "Enough With The Cupcakes!" Journalist David Sax's new book examines the wild world of food trends.
“When people talk about cupcakes today,” David Sax writes in his new book “The Tastemakers,” “they don’t talk about their sweetness, the colors and flavors they’re made in, or any aspect that’s inherent to how a cupcake tastes. Instead, cupcakes are a lightning rod, drawing in the energy and emotion surrounding the complicated and rapidly expanding world of food trends, a world that has come to shape nearly everything we eat.”
Sax, a journalist and the author of 2010’s “Save the Deli: in Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen,” is interested in why certain delicious, culturally-rich cuisines fail to become crave-able among the general population, and, conversely, why other no-big-deal, been-around-forever foods suddenly become so popular that not only are they eaten, they adorn T-shirts and baby onesies (I’m looking at you, kale). In “The Tastemakers”—subtitled “Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue”—Sax takes his keen, observant eye to food trends, analyzing them for his readers and telling us what, exactly, accounts for the meteoric rise of particular edibles.
“Everywhere I look these days I see food trends,” Sax writes in the book’s introduction, “and what I see are trends springing up quicker and growing faster than they ever did before…Each new trend I have witnessed in recent years left me to wonder how this whole ecosystem functioned.”
In his book, Sax breaks down that “ecosystem” into four categories: cultural trends; chef-driven trends; agricultural trends; and health-driven trends. As Sax explained to me, most food trends start as either chef-driven, health-driven or agricultural; only rarely do the most pervasive of food trends—think cupcakes, think kale—make it to a cultural trend, one that pervades other aspects of our lives besides our dinner plate.
“That’s when it’s no longer about eating,” he said. Kale, for example, Sax said, started out as an agricultural trend—farmers began offering varieties like lacinato and dinosaur in addition to the standard curly kale that everyone knew about already—and then was picked up by chefs, becoming a chef-driven trend. Of course, kale is a health-driven trend, too, with “health benefits of kale” the second most-search health benefits query on Google. All of these factors combined to give kale its (very long) day in the sun, the enduring type of food trend that becomes a cultural marker of the type of people who eat it.
Since the publication of his last book, Sax said, a wonderful surprise has been the rapid ascent of traditional Eastern European Jewish food—the exact cuisine that, only six or seven years ago, Sax sounded the alarm call for, writing about how the beloved traditions were fast disappearing. Neglected for so long, now bagels, lox, blintzes and pastrami are a bonafide trend, even meriting a mention in the new book when Sax visits CCD Innovation, a food and beverage trend-predicting firm in San Francisco, and learns that his own book and articles helped push artisan Jewish deli to the forefront.
“Years ago, with my last book, I told people to embrace this tradition and to support artisan Jewish cooking where they could find it—but, honestly, it seemed like a pie-in-the-sky idea that this food could someday totally take off,” Sax said. “And now it has. It’s amazing.”
Asked to situate the Jewish deli scene into the four trend categories outlined in the book, Sax said that it’s essentially a mix of chef-driven and cultural. Passionate young entrepreneurs such as Noah Bernamoff in New York, Ken Gordon of Kenny & Zuke’s Delicatessen in Portland, Oregon and Zane Caplansky of the eponymous Caplansky’s Deli in Toronto opened up their shops under improbable circumstances, lavished care and attention on their food, and customers responded.
“Deli food was so beaten down, so forgotten about, and had become so industrialized—when people thought of Jewish deli, they thought of pre-packed, salty Hebrew National pastrami,” Sax said. “And here these young chefs were asserting that this food mattered. A lot of people called them crazy—but they succeeded. A generation was inspired to go into this business.”
Backed by such talented, committed chefs and business owners, Sax said, the revival of the Jewish deli tradition is one trend that’s sure to endure.
“For sure it will stick around,” he said. “Like any good trend, it will keep reinventing itself.”
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