Missionary Renegade: The New York Jewish Week: Connecting the World to Jewish, News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Friday, 7 November 2014

The New York Jewish Week: Connecting the World to Jewish, News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Friday, 7 November 2014

Dear Reader,

The Modern Orthodox community continues to struggle in the aftermath of the news that a leading rabbi allegedly spied on women in the mikvah. As we were at The Jewish Week continue our efforts to gather the news and try to understand its significance, we upset another leading rabbi who compared our publication with the Nazi propaganda machine. Read our editorial here.

EDITORIAL

A Rabbi’s Low Blow
The leader of Teaneck's biggest Orthodox synagogue compares The Jewish Week to Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer.
The Jewish Week has long encouraged respectful debate and discussion in its pages on religious, political and social issues. And we look to our rabbis to serve as role models in expressing views that educate rather than marginalize.
So we were particularly disheartened when a member of the executive committee of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) and spiritual leader of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun, an 800-member synagogue, the largest Orthodox congregation in Teaneck, N.J., took to his blog last week to compare The Jewish Week to an infamous Nazi newspaper.
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, who has described “Jewish journalism” as an “oxymoron,” was upset that our initial online report last week on his resignation as head of a conversion court erred in identifying it as the Beth Din of America when in fact it was the Beit Din of the Rabbinical Council of Bergen County. (We corrected the mistake later that day.) He was particularly disturbed with a phrase that said he had “shared the company” of Rabbi Barry Freundel on the RCA executive committee. Rabbi Freundel was arrested in Washington, D.C., last month for voyeurism at the mikvah.
We regret the use of the phrase, which was not intended to suggest, as Rabbi Pruzansky inferred, that he was “somehow … connected to the alleged malfeasance in DC.”
(According to their rabbinic colleagues, though, the two men were politically aligned in an unsuccessful challenge to the RCA slate of officers elected in 2012, calling for the group to resist more open approaches to Orthodoxy.)
Here, in part, is what Rabbi Pruzansky wrote about us:
“They should apologize. But, I guess, to follow their way of reporting, both The Jewish Week’s publisher and Julius Streicher (Der Sturmer) published newspapers that dealt a lot with Jews. Same business, I suppose. That’s bad company to be in.”
Der Sturmer, of course, was the central vehicle of the Nazi propaganda machine.
We find the comparison outrageous, particularly coming from a leading community rabbi and RCA executive member. And to date, the lack of a public expression of remorse from the rabbi and the institutions he serves, or is affiliated with, speaks volumes.
editor@Jewishweek.org

Also, see our homepage for additional coverage of the mikvah scandal, including an opinion piece from the RCA explaining that organization's decision to review its conversion standards.

http://www.thejewishweek.com/

It is a tough time. But bright spots glimmer. Longtime Jewish journalist Andrew Silow-Carroll, the editor of the New Jersey Jewish News, has written a book that tells Jewish history through its jokes.

THE JW Q&A

4,000 Years, 10 Jokes
Jewish history is like the waiter who asks the table full of retired ladies, 'Is anything all right?'
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer

Andrew Silow-Carroll: “There’s Jewish humor, and there’s Judaism humor.”

Andrew Silow-Carroll, editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, is a veteran of the Jewish community’s communications world, with previous stints at The Forward and CLAL. He’s also a maven on Jewish humor. He’ll talk about “The History of the Jews in Ten Jokes” at Temple Emanu-El’s adult education Skirball Center on Nov. 19, Dec. 3 and 10. The Jewish Week interviewed him by email. This is an edited transcript.
Q: A Google search of “Jewish history” brings up 111,000,000 results. You can condense it into 10 jokes?
A: Nine, if I leave out the one about a rabbi, the priest and the gastroenterologist. In fact I like to think of this as a history course, with jokes as the organizing principle for a discussion of 10 major themes in Jewish history, from the Israelite’s relationship with God to the growing divide between cultural and religious Judaism in the early 21st century. I was inspired by the British Museum series, “A History of the World in 100 Objects.” But coming up with 100 anything is too much like work.
Humor experts say there are seven jokes; the rest are variation of the paradigms. Jews have three extra?
In Israel they have seven jokes; in the Diaspora we observe the other three — four if it’s a leap year.
How has Jewish humor changed over the centuries to reflect the changing times?
There are jokes told from a position of power, and jokes told from positions of relative powerlessness. In the Talmud, the sages can be quite cutting in their replies to nonbelievers and skeptics, and since the rabbis wrote the book, and felt in control of their political and religious domain, you can imagine who comes out better in these debates. But skip ahead a millennia or so, and you can see more self-deprecating Jewish humor — whether it is the wedding badchan [Jester] ridiculing the bride and groom, or the Catskills comic roasting his fellow Jews.
Does all Jewish humor translate — in other words, is it dependent on a specific location, a specific culture, a specific language?
There’s Jewish humor, and there’s Judaism humor. Jewish humor tends to translate, since it trades in stock stereotypes — miserliness, assertive wives, smothering mothers, hypocritical or incompetent clergy — that listeners either share or can plug into their own culture. The Judaism jokes require a certain level of Jewish education or knowledge. There’s a great old joke with the punch line, “your dog is so machmir! [halachically strict]” which kills in the yeshiva, but no so much at Caroline’s.
At one time, the overwhelming majority of stand-up comics in the U.S. were Jewish. The percentage is going down now. Are today’s American Jews less funny than earlier ones?
Not less funny — less hungry. The Jewish humor explosion of the mid-20th century came at a time of limited opportunities for Jews in so many professions, including on the stage. It’s sort of like Jews and basketball — it used to be our game, until we got into law school.
Is all of Jewish history funny?
It’s like the waiter who asks the table full of retired Jewish ladies, “Is anything all right?” We don’t have a very happy history. But even in the midst of misery, Jews developed a sense of humor as a coping style. Jews tell jokes about the Inquisition, about the Holocaust, about pogroms — oh wait, that’s just Mel Brooks.
Does Jewish humor go back to biblical times?
Hershey Friedman wrote a fun, smart paper called “Humor in the Hebrew Bible,” and gives examples of all these different styles found there: “puns, wordplays, riddles, jokes, satires, lampoons, sarcasm, irony, wit, black humor, comedy, slapstick, farce, burlesques, caricatures, parody, and travesty.” The funniest set piece in Chumash is probably that of Balaam’s ass, and not just because 8-year-olds giggle whenever their Hebrew schoolteacher says “ass.” It’s the forerunner of every 19th-century joke about the lowly peddler who turns the tables on a Cossack or a Russian policeman.
Was it hard to get a speaking gig for such a shortened version of Jewish history?
I speak very quickly.
steve@jewishweek.org
Shabbat Shalom, everyone.
Best,
Helen Chernikoff, Web Director

The Arts

Sometimes a song is just a song: Mahler, left, and Freud. Wikimedia Commons

Lieder Of The Pack

'Art Song on the Couch,' inspired by the edginess of Freud's Vienna, features music by Mahler, Schoenberg and Strauss.
George Robingson - Special To The Jewish Week

Despite his powerful attraction to literature and the visual arts, Sigmund Freud was by his own admission utterly immune to the charms of music. In a 1914 essay, he wrote, “I spend a long time before [works of art] trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”

How ironic, then, that “Art Song on the Couch: Lieder in Freud’s Vienna,” the Nov. 11 offering from the New York Festival of Song, is not only a very full program, it is a rich one as well, showcasing the cream of early 20th-century composers from Mitteleuropa, including Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Erich Korngold and Alexander Zemlinsky. (The program even includes a song by Alma Mahler, who had been a student of Zemlinsky’s — and his mistress — before she married Mahler.)

“This isn’t really about a concert that Freud would have liked,” admits Steven Blier, the NYFOS’ artistic director. “It’s more about these creators who were in that milieu of self-discovery [pioneered by Freud], and what rocks were being turned over and what they were finding under the rocks and unashamedly writing about.”

Although Freud wouldn’t “get” the musical art behind these songs, their air of nervous, edgy mental confusion and contortion was unmistakably the product of the same dangerous explorations as Freud’s own researches; they embody that combustible blend of sexuality, family ties and social repression which was at the center of turn-of-the-20th-century Viennese society. After all, this was the milieu that gave us Klimt, Schiele and Schnitzler.

Neurotic times breed neurotic art, and the NYFOS program certainly reflects that reality.

“The fact that this concert occurs on the 75th anniversary of Freud’s death is a complete coincidence,” Blier says. “I’m thrilled that it worked out that way, but the real impetus for the program came from Strauss’ Opus 67, the Ophelia-Lieder, his setting of Ophelia’s song fragments from ‘Hamlet.’ The settings are so bizarre, so manic, so depressive, so ... psychiatric.”

Blier elaborates on that analysis in his program notes for the recital: “Strauss’ music gives us an Ophelia straight out of the mental ward, where he paints her anomie, obsessive-compulsive behavior, manic flights, deep depression, and emotional repression in strange, evocative writing for voice and piano.”

With that very, er, Freudian beginning, it was simply a matter of selecting other songs with similar characteristics. As Blier notes, “I was looking for conflict and subtext and surprising ways of setting text.”

He managed to even find one composer, perhaps the most prominent one in the program, who had even had a brief therapeutic encounter with Freud.

Gustav Mahler met with the father of psychoanalysis over a long evening in 1910, when the musician sought out a vacationing Freud for advice. It must have worked, because after that four-hour conversation Mahler reclaimed his wife Alma, and rekindled his composing career.

“The whole thing is, not to propose a big theory, but to let people listen to songs and hear them in the context of a time that they know something about,” Blier says. “We all imagine what it must have been like when [psychoanalysis] was just starting, the tumultuous atmosphere in Vienna in which the arts and intellectual pursuits were thriving. We tried to choose the repertoire so that some of the central issues get brought up.”

Even Freud would have understood that.

“Art Song on the Couch: Lieder in Freud’s Vienna” will be presented by the New York Festival of Song on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 8 p.m. at Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Music Center (129 W. 67th St.). The program will include songs by Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Erich Korngold, Alexander Zemlinsky and Alma Mahler, performed by Janai Brugger, soprano; John Brancy, baritone; and Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, pianists. For information, go to www.nyfos.org/couch.

WELL VERSED
Tale From The Italian Resistance

Gloria Kestenbaum

Blogs
THE POLITICAL INSIDER \| THE ROSENBLOG \| THE NEW NORMAL \| A COMIC'S JOURNEY \| WELL VERSED
THE NEW NORMAL Beit Issie Shapiro To Establish Cerebral Palsy Center In Israel Jodie Cohen Beit Issie Shapiro, Israel's leading disabilities organization, has announced it will set up the country's first Center of Excellence for Cerebral Palsy and severe motor disabilities. This has been made possible by the generosity of New Yorkers Eileen and Jerry Lieberman, long-time and dedicated supporters and members of the NY Board of Trustees. Mr. Lieberman is also the former President and Chief Operating Officer of Alliance Bernstein L.P. read more...	Beit Issie Shapiro, Israel’s leading disabilities organization, has announced it will set up the country’s first Center of Excellence for Cerebral Palsy and severe motor disabilities. This has been made possible by the generosity of New Yorkers Eileen and Jerry Lieberman, long-time and dedicated supporters and members of the NY Board of Trustees. Mr. Lieberman is also the former President and Chief Operating Officer of Alliance Bernstein L.P.	The Lieberman Inter-Disciplinary Center is expected to impact thousands of people, and will be the leading authority on Cerebral Palsy in Israel.	The Center will encompass all the work at Beit Issie Shapiro related to Cerebral Palsy, and will allow the organization to document its knowledge, expertise and best practice so it can be shared and implemented by others.	Approximately one in every 1,000 people in Israel suffers from Cerebral Palsy, a brain disorder that disrupts the ability to control motor movements. One of the greatest challenges facing children and adults with cerebral palsy is their often lifelong dependence on others.	Beit Issie Shapiro is renowned for its innovations to improve quality of life for people with disabilities. It already shares best practice globally through its Special Consultative Status to the UN’s Economic and Social Council.	The Lieberman Center will provide professionals, as well as families dealing with CP, with Beit Issie Shapiro’s latest research findings. BIS’ Knowledge Management process will ensure that the professional research is easily understandable to the general public. The Center will develop guides and run training seminars and conferences for people with CP, parents and professionals.	“At Beit Issie Shapiro, we believe that every child who has CP has the right to the full realization of their ability to live as independent a life as possible,” says Lili Levinton, Director of Professional Services. “We are committed to ensuring the fulfillment of this right. We want to share our knowledge in order to improve services everywhere. The Lieberman Cerebral Palsy Center of Excellence will do just that.”	Jerry and Eileen Lieberman and Naomi Stuchiner, Beit Issie Shapiro’s Founding President will be receiving the American Friends of Beit Issie Shapiro Humanitarian Award at its celebration on November 5th 2014. For information, and to register please go to AFOBISNYGala.org

Courtesy Berkley Books

“The Garden of Letters” is the story of a young cello student, Elodie Bertoletti –- picture Audrey Hepburn in “Love in the Afternoon” –- who gets caught up in the Italian Resistance during WWII. There’s been much written and filmed about the French and Polish Resistance but this is my first introduction to the heroes and heroines of the Italian cause.

If you’re looking for a traditional romance, “The Garden of Letters” byAlyson Richman (Berkley Books) may not be your best choice: Although romance pervades the novel and is the subtext for much of the plot, still –- as in life –- it’s the backdrop rather than the main story. But if you’re looking for a story set in a rarely-explored milieu, with appealing characters and unexpected twists, this is your book.

Although the resistance is at the story’s core, various subplots run through the book. As the characters move back and forth in time and place, from Venice in the 20s to Portofino in the 30s to Verona in the 40s, with a nod to the disastrous Italo-Ethiopian War in the mid-30s, each personality is given an in-depth history, and background. If at times, some of the creations don’t sufficiently come to life, many of them do leave an indelible impression on the reader.

Elodie’s life as a cellist, both before and during her participation in the anti-Fascist campaign, is painstakingly well-researched, but I found this heroine less compelling and fully-written than some of the other characters, such as her parents and Angelo, the Veronese doctor who rescues her as the book begins. And although titled “The Garden of Letters,” based on another history running through the novel, the book might be better named after the musical notes that Elodie pursues, both in her playing and in her underground activities.

As the author explains in an explicatory coda, many of the characters are based on real-life historical figures. Luca, a bookseller and Elodie’s first love, who hides weapons and codes inside his books, was inspired by the original owner of an extant bookstore in Venice. Many of the other Resistance characters are based on documented histories, as well. Although this is not primarily the story of the Italian-Jewish experience during the War, Jewish characters abound, from Jewish Resistance fighters who worked alongside their Italian confreres to peripheral characters whose sudden absence or removal to unknown destinations is duly recorded.

By and large, the novel is engaging and enlightening on a subject not often depicted. If occasionally I found the dialogue somewhat overblown and falsely dramatic, especially between the various young lovers, perhaps you can put that down to my middle-aged insensibility.

Gloria Kestenbaum is a corporate communications consultant and freelance writer.

Food & Wine

A Soviet-inflected Thanksgivukah cranberry sauce for turkey kotleti. Fotolia

Happy Thanksgiving, Comraderom Georgia (the country), spiced cranberry relish to go with turkey kotleti.
Anya von Bremzen - Special To The Jewish Week
With its lavish spicing and creative use of fresh herbs, Georgian food was adored by Russians. This tangy, vibrantly flavored relish is classically made with sour plums called tkemali, but it adapts beautifully to Thanksgiving cranberries.

Servings & Times

Yield:

Makes about 2 cups

Active Time:

15 min

Total Time:

30 min

HideIngredients

One 12-ounce bag of cranberries, rinsed and picked over

4 tablespoons sugar, or more to taste

1-1/2 cups water, or more as needed

1 large garlic clove, crushed in a press

1 teaspoon dried mint, crushed

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

Large pinch Aleppo pepper or small pinch dried chilies

Large pinch of ground fenugreek

Pinch of cinnamon

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

3 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro leaves

2 scallions, thinly sliced

2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley

2 tablespoons finely chopped basil or tarragon

HideSteps

In heavy medium saucepan over medium heat, combine cranberries, sugar, and 1 cup water. Bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve sugar and cook until the cranberries begin to pop. Reduce heat to medium-low low, add the remaining water, and simmer, stirring often until the sauce is thickened and the cranberries begin to dissolve, about 15 minutes. Add a little more water if the sauce is too thick. Remove from heat, add the garlic, and let cool slightly.
Meanwhile, in a small skillet, combine the mint, coriander, Aleppo pepper, fenugreek and cinnamon. Toast the spices over medium heat, shaking the pan, until fragrant, about 30 seconds.
Stir the spices into the relish and season with salt and pepper. Scrape the relish into a bowl, cover with plastic and let stand until completely cool or refrigerate until ready to use. Right before serving fold in the cilantro, scallions, parsley and basil. Makes about 2 cups.