No, we had no Snowmageddon, but it's chilly nonetheless. Don't you want some cocoa? We've got options for you, and they're not only kosher, they're fair-trade. Ahhhh ...
Cocoa With A Cause
Special To The Jewish Week
No, we didn’t have snowmageddon, but at least your delicious mug of hot cocoa won’t be overhyped. To warm up your winter morning (or frankly any time of day), try fair trade hot cocoa mixes for an indulgent taste with that doesn’t compromise your values.
“Fair trade principles embody key Jewish values of justice, dignity and respect,” wrote Ilana Schatz, founding director of Fair Trade Judaica, in an e-mail to The Jewish Week. “Choosing fair trade when we have a choice provides us the opportunity of actively living our Jewish values in day-to-day consumer choices,” she wrote. “Fair Trade Judaica is building a fair trade movement in the Jewish community through outreach, education and by expanding the production, distribution and sale of Fair Trade Judaica products.
Fair trade means that farmers and buyers are engaged in an equitable trading partnership, according to Schatz. Farmers earn a livable wage and guarantee the following: safe working conditions, the prohibition of child labor and environmentally sustainable farming practices. Three different organizations monitor fair trade standards and provide certification, each using their own logo which the consumer can find on product packaging.
Fair Trade Judaica maintains a list of kosher-certified hot cocoa mixes on their website. The products are high qualitybeverages. They don’t use additives or flavorings. “ Just cocoa — maybe sugar, maybe vanilla,” wrote Schatz.
Flavors run the gamut. Theo brand sells a chipotle flavored chocolate drink. Equal Exchange combines chocolate with cinnamon and cayenne pepper for a zesty sip. For the traditionalists, plenty of fair trade companies sell sweet combinations such as vanilla bean and cinnamon (look for Cisse brand).
Fair trade hot chocolate and other products can be found at chains such as Gristedes, Fairway, Whole Foods, Citarella and Gourmet Garage. Of course in this weather shopping online from the warmth of your home is appealing. Try Equal Exchange for fair trade products.
Along with rock salt, snow shovel and a flashlight, fair trade hot cocoa should be on your supply list for weathering the next storm.Popular on our website this week: Rabbi Shlomo Riskin has chosen the successor of his educational network, Ohr Torah Stone, naming Rabbi David Stav of Tzohar.
ISRAEL NEWS
Riskin Chooses Successor For His Educational Network
The American-born rabbi taps Rabbi David Stav of Tzohar to co-lead Ohr Torah Stone in Israel.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, who has built an educational empire within Modern Orthodoxy over the last three decades in Israel, has designated a potential successor, The Jewish Week has learned.
Rabbi Riskin, 74, who first achieved fame as the spiritual leader of Lincoln Square Congregation on Manhattan’s West Side in the early 1960s and oversaw its growth until his aliyah two decades later, has appointed Rabbi David Stav, the founder ofIsrael’s Tzohar Rabbinical Organization, as co-chancellor of the Ohr Torah Stonenetwork of educational institutions.
Rabbi Stav, 55, a native Israeli who ran a vigorous though ultimately unsuccessful campaign last year for Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, will share Rabbi Riskin’s administrative, teaching and fundraising duties at Ohr Torah Stone, Rabbi Riskin said in a telephone interview. He will be considered Rabbi Riskin’s successor as head of the educational network for both women and men that he established in 1983.
“It’s mutually understood,” he said.
Rabbi Riskin said he has no plans to retire from his work at Ohr Torah Stone, which has grown from 12 students to some 3,000 at 19 schools in 11 locations. He is considered a premier fundraiser and visits the U.S. frequently as a speaker.
“I needed help,” said the Brooklyn native and Yeshiva University graduate, who is also chief rabbi of the West Bank community of Efrat. “It’s a great deal for one individual. This will strengthen Modern Orthodoxy and religious Zionism,” he added.
Both rabbis have attracted devoted followers in religious Zionist and progressive circles for positions championing the role of women in Orthodox Judaism and criticizing the fundamentalist nature of the country’s Orthodox religious establishment, drawing heavy criticism from charedi leaders.
A respected scholar and teacher, Rabbi Stav is more soft-spoken than the charismatic Rabbi Riskin, but he has helped Tzohar grow in numbers and influence with its goal of making Orthodox rabbis seen as warm and welcoming, particularly to prospective brides and grooms in Israel, where marriages must be performed by Orthodox clergy.
While Ohr Torah Stone and Tzohar will not formally merge, they will work together on issues of joint concern and make Modern Orthodoxy a more visible presence in Israel, Rabbi Riskin said, declining to name specific goals.
“Like Rabbi Riskin, [Rabbi Stav] is an outspoken advocate for an accessible, compassionate and embracing Judaism which will repair the rifts in Israeli society and alleviate the alienation many Israelis feel in crucial areas such as conversion, marriages and divorces,” according to the Ohr Torah Stone announcement of Rabbi Stav’s appointment. “He has devoted his life to promoting an ethical, inclusive and inspiring approach to Zionistic, Jewish life in Israel.”
Rabbi Stav, who also serves as chief rabbi of the city of Shoham and heads a hesder yeshiva in Petach Tikva that combines Torah study with army service, said he will curtail his teaching duties at Bar-Ilan University in order “to help [Rabbi Riskin] carry out his mission.”
With many observers of Jewish life in the United States describing a “move to the right” in the Modern Orthodox movement in recent decades, Rabbi Riskin’s action, in partnering with Rabbi Stav, is a clear sign that he is resisting such a move toward a charedi orientation.
“He seem to be pointing towards the Dati Leumi (National Religious, as Modern Orthodox are known in Israel),” said Judy Baumel-Schwartz, a professor of modern Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University. “I don’t think anyone can think that Riskin ever wanted his institutions to really move to the right — he wants Ohr Torah Stone to remain vibrant, and I guess he sees this as the best way to do it.”
While she felt the alliance would have limited impact on Israel society beyond the Anglo community, Steven Bayme, director of the American Jewish Committee’scontemporary Jewish life department, observed that it “is a trade that benefits both sides, in baseball terminology.” He said the partnership provides Rabbi Riskin, viewed as liberal Orthodox in Israel, “more credibility and greater standing” in that society while it “beefs up” the “modern credentials” of Rabbi Stav, who “came under great criticism during the [Chief Rabbinate] campaign “for not being sufficiently pluralistic.”
The Ohr Torah Stone network of schools includes separate gap-year yeshiva programs for young men and women from the U.S. and elsewhere in the diaspora. It also has a rabbinical school for men and programs offering advanced degrees for women.
Tzohar, which Rabbi Stav founded 20 years ago, is the largest Modern Orthodox rabbinical organization in Israel. According to Rabbi Riskin, about 660 rabbis in Israel are members of Tzohar.
It sponsors training sessions for rabbis, stressing, according to the organization’s website, a “professional, tolerant and inclusive” rabbinate.
“My vision” at Ohr Torah Stone “is to take [Rabbi Riskin’s] academic institutions and make them,” in working with Tzohar, “as one big movement that will inspire Israeli society,” Rabbi Stav said. “It gives us more opportunities,” leveraging the influence of both organizations, he said.
Rabbi Stav said that Rabbi Riskin, who has often challenged the positions of Israel’s charedi-dominated religious establishment, is seen in some circles as revolutionary, while he prefers to work within the system to effect change — hence his race for the Chief Rabbinate.
“I don’t see myself as revolutionary,” Rabbi Stav said. “Changes in religious life should be made by evolution and not revolution.”
He said his candidacy for chief rabbi, during which he accused the haredi establishment of corruption within the Chief Rabbinate and of efforts to exclude rather than include potential converts, increased his visibility among many American Jews.
Rabbi Stav will be a scholar-in-residence in Englewood, N.J., on the Shabbat of Feb. 13-14, sponsored by Congregation Ahavath Torah.
steve@jewishweek.orgAnother highly trafficked article is staff writer Amy Sara Clark's piece about the role Jewish organizations are playing in the nationwide campus-based movement to change the culture around sexual assault.
NATIONAL
On Campus, An Assault On The Status Quo
Jewish groups moving quickly to combat sexual assault with an array of tactics.
Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writer
The last shuttle bus from Cambridge back to Brandeis had long gone. A cab to Waltham would have cost a fortune. The extra bed she’d been promised in a friend of a friend’s dorm room never materialized.
It was 3 a.m. on an unfamiliar college campus, and, after a low-key party, Amalia Bob-Waksberg, a 19-year-old freshman, was stuck.
Her only option, in the end, was the room of a guy who had pursued her — aggressively, despite multiple rejections — at the party. No worries, he said. He’d sleep on the floor. She didn’t want to make a fuss.
Before she knew it, though, the nice Jewish boy from Harvard had slipped into bed with her, and Bob-Waksberg froze. “I never said no when it was happening, but I gave a lot of signals,” she said. “When it was happening I was crying, but I didn’t say no.”
The next morning, she fell apart. “I was curled up in a ball on the floor of the shuttle crying. I couldn’t even see anything around me. I’ve never felt so dissociated from the world around me,” she said. She couldn’t even walk straight; a friend helped her back to her dorm. She couldn’t do anything for days.
Finding few resources for survivors of sexual assault at Brandeis, she worked to create them, founding Brandeis Students Against Sexual Violence and helping to start a blogwhere students could anonymously post their own stories. She and other student activists met with student leaders and administrators, gathered signatures, and successfully pressured the school into making significant changes.
Today, new student orientation incudes 2.5 hours of sexual assault prevention training; the ethics code and disciplinary procedures for sexual assault have been improved and students can file a sexual assault complaint online instead of going to campus police. The administration hired more staff dedicated to the issue, instituted a rape hotline, and just last month, five years after Bob-Waksberg’s assault, a rape crisis center opened on campus.
Bob-Waksberg is part of a growing movement on college campuses to end the culture that tolerates sexual assault by encouraging survivors to speak out and bystanders to step in. Jewish organizations — including the San Francisco-based Shalom Bayit, a nonprofit addressing violence against women, where Bob-Waksberg now works — are at the forefront of this movement. Jewish organizations are training Hillel staff to help survivors and training students to lead workshops on bystander intervention. They’re screening documentaries, holding discussion sessions and working through fraternities and sororities to change the culture from within.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 5 women in collegeexperience sexual assault or attempted sexual assault as undergraduates. There are fewer studies on men, but a 2007 exploratory study by the Department of Justice estimates that 1 in 16 men experience attempted or completed sexual assault while in college.
Although questions about the recent controversial Rolling Stone article about a women’s story of being gang raped at the University of Virginia has increased concerns about false reporting, a meta-analysis of studies on the topic by the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women puts the percentage of false sexual assault reports between 2 and 8 percent.
Through a Jewish Lens
Hillel is taking part in campus efforts to combat sexual violence with a collection of programsaddressing the issue. Two of the most prominent are a workshop on sexual assault as part of its Ask Big Questions program, and a partnership with Shalom Bayit that focuses on healthy relationship education and sexual violence through the lens of Judaism. Since 2011, Shalom Bayit has trained staff at more than 50 Hillels across the country about how to recognize and support survivors.“Rape doesn’t discriminate based on religion, and many of our students are impacted personally every single year,” said Sheila Katz, vice president for social entrepreneurship at Hillel International. “This is happening and we must respond.”
Zephira Derblich-Milea, Shalom Bayit’s youth program coordinator, oversees the workshops for Hillel staff. During one workshop, she posts six quotes from the Torah and discusses them in the context of both healthy relationships and sexual assault. Two of her favorites are: “To humiliate a person is as powerful as shedding blood,” and “You’re not expected to complete the task, but neither are you free to avoid it.”
Katz, who used to be an assistant director at North Carolina Hillel, said, “Students come to Hillel professionals to try to understand their assault through a Jewish lens. I’ve heard questions like: How can there be a God when this happened to me? Did this happen to anyone in the Torah, and what does it [the Torah] say about rape?”
But, she added, “While it’s clearly Hillel’s responsibility to support the work of Jewish students who are survivors of assault, it’s equally as important to have conversations about healthy relationships and rape culture, because we want to do our part in making sure that all the students and staff we work with are not part of the problem.”
Raising Awareness
One avenue Hillels and other Jewish organizations have found to begin those conversations is the screening of “Brave Miss World,” a documentary about former Miss Israel Linor Abargil, who was raped six weeks before being crowned Miss World. The film intersperses snippets of women across Israel and the U.S. telling their own rape stories, with Abargil’s own post-rape journey to Orthodox Judaism and law school.
Since the film was first released in 2013, more than two dozen Hillels, including the Columbia-Barnard Hillel, have shown it. Barnard student Dana Kukin organized the screening in 2013 after having seen the film herself the previous year.
“I was very, very moved by it. It really stayed with me, and I wanted to screen the film again,” she said.
Columbia University is where student Emma Sulkowicz brought widespread attention to the issue of campus sexual assault by lugging a mattress with her to symbolize, she says, the weight that is always with her as a result of an assault. (She says she will stop carrying the mattress when man she says attacked her leaves Columbia.) Hillel was one of 28 student groups that took part in the Carry That Weight National Day of Action in October, during which participants on campuses worldwide carried mattresses in solidarity with sexual assault survivors.
Julia Snyder, president of Columbia-Barnard Hillel, said her organization took part to show that they care about what’s happening on campus and to recognize that sexual violence is a problem even in Hillel’s “tight-knit community.”
“We have students who are vocal about being survivors,” she said. “Just because we’re Jewish doesn’t mean this doesn’t affect us.”
Not Our Issue
Indeed, the “this doesn’t happen to us” mentality is a continuing problem in Jewish communities, though less so as time goes on, said Derblich-Milea. “I sort of make a joke about it, especially when I first started doing this work: You walk into the Reform community and they say: ‘Oh well, I’m sure this is happening in the Orthodox community but not here.’ And then you walk into the Orthodox community and they say: ‘I’m sure this is happening in the Reform community but not here.”
“It’s hard to acknowledge when this stuff is happening within our own community — it’s scary,” Derblich-Milea added. “And I also believe that once we acknowledge it we have to do something about it.”
Bob-Waksberg also grew up with that kind of mentality. Once a teacher told her that what happened to Elizabeth Smart “could never happen to Jewish girls, because Jewish girls are too smart for that.”
“I don’t think I took that so literally to heart, but this idea that Jewish women are so strong and outspoken, that this could never happen to them. ... And then also just this idea that these nice Jewish boys are harmless. ... I think that’s an image that needs to be really questioned and unpacked,” she said.
“Because it’s encouraged to not touch before marriage, and because that’s the assumption, nobody is talking about the facts on the ground,” she said, adding that this expectation also increases the likelihood of blaming the victim.
Often, she said, “I think that there’s a misconception that women who don’t adhere to rabbinic guidelines in general deserve any unfortunate things that happen to them.”
Among non-Orthodox communities, Jewish Women International has also been addressing the issue head on. They’ve been working with two Jewish organizations, the fraternity Zeta Beta Tau and the sorority Sigma Delta Tau, to offer “Safe Smart Dating.” The program uses discussions, scenarios, news stories and videos to learn how to identify dating abuse and sexual assault, and how to intervene safely and effectively.
“Young men need to understand how to not only confront situations they know are wrong, but also to prevent such situations from arising in the first place,” said Laurence Bolotin, executive director Zeta Beta Tau’s national organization, in a written statement.
Changing Campus Culture
Training bystanders to intervene is an increasingly significant part of sexual assault prevention programs.
“The idea is that each of us as individuals has a role to play in preventing this from happening,” said Ted Merwin, who directs the Hillel at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., (and also covers theater for The Jewish Week). “A lot of times a guy meets a girl at a party and a lot of the times there’s alcohol involved. And he kind of takes her up to his room ... so there are opportunities for other students to intervene, to say, ‘She’s drunk, don’t take her upstairs.’
“It’s about depending on other people to not let it happen,” he said.
Dickinson’s Hillel organized an interfaith service for survivors of sexual assault on Yom Kippur, modeled on the Yizkor service.
“So much of Yom Kippur is about not confessing individual sin but about confessing communal sin,” Merwin said. “We did that whole Al Chet focused on sexual immorality — but from a college student’s point of view, in the sense of the kinds of things that happen on college campuses.”
Merwin continued: “A lot of it has to do with changing the campus so that men don’t feel like they have the right to women’s bodies ... [and] that this is a really serious thing that women can be terribly, even permanently damaged by. And I don’t think a lot of men get that. I don’t think a lot of men want to get that, or want to think about it.”
'Yes Means Yes'
Indeed, a major component of changing campus culture is changing the entire idea of what consent means: from “no means no,” to “yes means yes.” That is to say, that a woman doesn’t have to say no. It’s an assault if she hasn’t said yes, not just once, but at each stage of an encounter. (For example, saying yes to kissing doesn’t give the green light for intercourse.)
This higher bar for approval for sexual contact, also known as affirmative consent, is increasingly becoming the standard in college ethic codes across the country. Since September, all state-funded schools in New York and California have adopted the policy.
Affirmative consent is the centerpiece of “Consent is So Frat,” a nonprofit launched by recent Wesleyan University graduate Matthew Leibowitz, a former member of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. The organization’s goal, summed up on its website, is “making consent and healthy relationships part of what it means to be a fraternity brother or sorority sister.”
Had yes means yes been the standard back in 2010, when Bob-Waksberg found herself in bed with the not-nice-after-all Jewish Harvard boy, the assault might never have taken place. Or if it had, she might have spared herself a lot of self-blame.
As it was, Bob-Waksberg — who started Brandeis Students Against Sexual Violence, revived the school’s feminist club and majored in women’s studies — blamed herself for what happened for a very long time.
It was only after interning at Shalom Bayit the summer after her assault, and taking a course on domestic violence back at Brandeis the next fall, that she came to understand why she was unable to say no, and why the fact that she didn’t does not mean that what happened was her fault.
“I was reading a theory piece about responses to sexual assault and ... [it] was talking about someone being assaulted and feeling like they were not in their body and they just kind of froze. And it’s kind of the way that a lot of people respond to that shock,” she said. “And for the first time I was like, ‘OK, that’s normal. ... It doesn’t mean that I was weak, or I was asking for it. That just was a normal response to trauma.”
At a Tipping Point
In the five years since Bob-Waksberg’s assault, the issue has moved to the front burner on campuses across the country. This is thanks to student activists including a wave who complaints to the U.S. Department of Education saying their schools’ sexually hostile environment violates the Title IX anti-discrimination law. Currently, 94 colleges are being investigated for Title IX sexual violence complaints, including, locally, Barnard, Hunter, SUNY Stony Brook, SUNY New Paltz, St. Thomas Aquinas and Sarah Lawrence colleges as well as Pace University. And, yes, Brandeis University, too.
As schools scramble to revise policies to comply with Title IX law, they’re making changes at a pace no one would have imagined five years ago.
“When I was a freshman, there was not really a conversation [about sexual assault],” said Victoria Jonas, a Brandeis senior and one of three student coordinators at the school’s new Rape Crisis Center. “I’ve sensed a huge social shift on campus.”
Brandeis’ Rape Crisis Center’s Sheila McMahon sees campus culture at “a tipping point.”
“In 2007, when I was implementing a bystander-training program, people thought I was a little nutty,” she said. A year later, schools across Boston were implementing them. Then came a steady stream of governmental changes, she said — the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the U.S. Department of Education telling colleges it was their responsibility to address sexual assault; the 2013 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act that mandated more transparent sexual assault reporting and mandated expanded survivor rights and prevention programs and one year ago, the creation of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
“I think we’re in a very special moment in the history of addressing sexual violence prevention in our country,” McMahon said. “It’s unprecedented.”
amyclark@jewishweek.org
And enhance your Shabbat and weekend with these words from Rabbi David Wolpe, who writes about what it really means to be "chosen" -- not what most folks think. MUSINGS
Choosing And Being Chosen
Perhaps no concept in Judaism has been more misunderstood than chosenness, Rabbi David Wolpe writes.
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special To The Jewish Week
Rabbi David Wolpe
Perhaps no concept in Judaism has been more misused and misunderstood than chosenness. It is not a doctrine of racial superiority, though some have interpreted it as such. The first statement in the Torah about human beings is that all are created in the image of God and all have a common ancestry. The choice is one of service, not of being served. And it does not preclude the notion that other nations too are chosen for other tasks.As Louis Jacobs writes, “Jewish particularism is never exclusive: Anyone can become a Jew by embracing the Jewish faith.” Some of our greatest teachers and scholarswere themselves converts or descended from converts. It is a choosing as well as a being chosen. And the responsibility is to live according to the Torah and so bring a model of God’s will into the world, however imperfectly realized.
The world does indeed owe to the Jewish people the notion of one God and the ethical demands that God makes on human beings. Unlike other traditions, Judaism does not ask that one be Jewish to attain salvation. Chosenness is a blessing and a burden, a call to sanctity and a summons to goodness.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.Catch you on the other side,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
Andrew Fretwell
Special to The jewish Week
Last week, during New York’s non-historic blizzard, I took a stroll through snowy Brooklyn and reminisced about the winters of my childhood, when my family would sled down the hills of our uncle’s yard. I recall once when my mom pointed out to me a solitary tree on the hill, warning me to steer clear of it for my own safety; inevitably I slammed into it or narrowly missed every time. Was I such a terribly uncoordinated navigator? Maybe. But it was just as likely that when the tree was identified to me as dangerous, I stopped thinking about the rest of the slope and became fixated on it. And with my eyes fearfully glued to the tree, where else would the sled take me?
USY’s recent decision to rescind a ban on interfaith dating is a wise move for similar reasons. Jewish youth, teens, students and young adults of all backgrounds, denominations, political beliefs, socio-economic standings, ethnicity and nationality are used to hearing one thing from the generations before us: “Don’t marry a non-Jew!” These warnings and the lamentations with which Jewish community leaders react towards rising rates of intermarriage miss the point.
On that slope, what my mom meant to say was, “Look at the great space you have on this hill; if you really want to swerve around, great! Just mind what is in front of you as you go.” What I believe the Jewish community really wants to say to young Jews is this: “Living, and growing a family within the Jewish community is a rewarding and fulfilling endeavor we hope you choose.”
One of the great American rabbis who understood this was Mordechai Kaplan, who in Judaism as a Civilization declared that trying to remain a closed romantic community within an open society is as useless as fighting the tide, and that doing so is a waste of resources and vitality. Instead what we should do is create such a vibrant and inclusive community that when a Jew intermarries, his/her family is attracted and feels welcomed to join the Jewish community. If we create the right kind of community, intermarriage is not synonymous with assimilation and therefore not an existential threat.
Youth groups, Jewish summer camps, Birthright, Hillel, and day schools all create real identity-building experiences that inspire so many young Jews to continually rededicate themselves to their own Jewish journeys. USY’s move is significant, and it’s a part of a growing movement to lift the stigmatism of interfaith families. Increasingly, Jewish institutions are finding ways to welcome interfaith couples and families; prominent Conservative Rabbi Wesley Gardenswartz is openly considering how to more warmly welcome interfaith couples and families into Temple Emanuel in Newton, MA. Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, D.C. offers classes to interfaith engaged couples leading up to their wedding. URJ offers special online resources for Jewish parents and grandparents to talk about Jewish identity with interfaith children.
We must have the confidence that we can and are doing this without creating an unnecessary and counterproductive distraction. Instead of expending our breath on the perils of dating non-Jews, let’s invest it in welcoming their non-Jewish partner into our community. Succeeding means helping young Jews keep their eyes trained on all we have to offer them and not the pitfalls we fear they may hit.
"Andrew Fretwell lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and works full time in the New York Jewish community around engaging millennials and young Jewish adults. Andrew is also pursuing an MBA in Organizational Behavior at CUNY Baruch College and dabbles in local political organizing."
editor@jewishweeok.org
7 Reasons I Have a Jew Crush On Josh CharlesUSY’s recent decision to rescind a ban on interfaith dating is a wise move for similar reasons. Jewish youth, teens, students and young adults of all backgrounds, denominations, political beliefs, socio-economic standings, ethnicity and nationality are used to hearing one thing from the generations before us: “Don’t marry a non-Jew!” These warnings and the lamentations with which Jewish community leaders react towards rising rates of intermarriage miss the point.
On that slope, what my mom meant to say was, “Look at the great space you have on this hill; if you really want to swerve around, great! Just mind what is in front of you as you go.” What I believe the Jewish community really wants to say to young Jews is this: “Living, and growing a family within the Jewish community is a rewarding and fulfilling endeavor we hope you choose.”
One of the great American rabbis who understood this was Mordechai Kaplan, who in Judaism as a Civilization declared that trying to remain a closed romantic community within an open society is as useless as fighting the tide, and that doing so is a waste of resources and vitality. Instead what we should do is create such a vibrant and inclusive community that when a Jew intermarries, his/her family is attracted and feels welcomed to join the Jewish community. If we create the right kind of community, intermarriage is not synonymous with assimilation and therefore not an existential threat.
Youth groups, Jewish summer camps, Birthright, Hillel, and day schools all create real identity-building experiences that inspire so many young Jews to continually rededicate themselves to their own Jewish journeys. USY’s move is significant, and it’s a part of a growing movement to lift the stigmatism of interfaith families. Increasingly, Jewish institutions are finding ways to welcome interfaith couples and families; prominent Conservative Rabbi Wesley Gardenswartz is openly considering how to more warmly welcome interfaith couples and families into Temple Emanuel in Newton, MA. Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, D.C. offers classes to interfaith engaged couples leading up to their wedding. URJ offers special online resources for Jewish parents and grandparents to talk about Jewish identity with interfaith children.
We must have the confidence that we can and are doing this without creating an unnecessary and counterproductive distraction. Instead of expending our breath on the perils of dating non-Jews, let’s invest it in welcoming their non-Jewish partner into our community. Succeeding means helping young Jews keep their eyes trained on all we have to offer them and not the pitfalls we fear they may hit.
"Andrew Fretwell lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and works full time in the New York Jewish community around engaging millennials and young Jewish adults. Andrew is also pursuing an MBA in Organizational Behavior at CUNY Baruch College and dabbles in local political organizing."
editor@jewishweeok.org
Maya Klausner
Blueprint Editor
1. He worked with Robin Williams aka has been in the presence of a god. Which I’m pretty sure makes him an angel.
2. He is teaming up with my girl Sarah Silverman, in (plot twist) a drama.
3. He was in the sexiest movie of all time as the brooding, lovelorn Knox Overstreet in “Dead Poets Society.” O Captain! My Captain! indeed.
4. He’s not afraid to hit girl muppets. Charles played Agent Barker in “Muppets from Space,” at one point becoming Miss Piggy’s captive. Lucky porker. (Also, subliminally I believe battling the lady bacon was Charles' way of expressing his suppressed desire to keep kosher and find a nice, Jewish girl to marry, I.e.- me).
5. He is a southpaw. Aka a lefty. Lefties are known to have an advantage in combat, (if you don’t believe me look up the Biblical story of God sending Ehud to free Israel from the oppressive rule of the Moabites … not to mention the Benjamites!) A man who can protect his kin is hot. A man who can take down an entire empire? Crush worthy.
6. He plays drums. A peg legged mongoose with a rotting pumpkin for a face could play drums and be appealing to the ladies. So in this case ... it’s really not even fair.
7. He's got cajones. Charles performed stand up comedy when he was 10 years old … After heckling a comic onstage.
Swoon City.
Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik
JW Online ColumnistI am not, as a rule, bothered by people who disagree with me, either publicly or privately. Were I to be, I would not have lasted for thirty-three-plus years in the pulpit rabbinate, and certainly not in the same synagogue. Almost by definition, rabbis who take strong positions on the issues of the day, be they moral/ethical or political, related to their own synagogues or to the world at large, will generate disagreement from those who look to them for guidance but see the situation differently. That is entirely the way it should be.
A rabbi who shies away from taking a stand on an important issue that he/she feels strongly about is not living up to the job definition of being a “religious leader.” And a congregant/reader who feels obliged to agree just because someone whom he/she respects is sharing an opinion is abdicating an important piece of his/her sense of self.
The issue that I am addressing here is not the right to disagree. It is, rather, how one chooses to disagree.
During this past week, I have followed a number of the online threads relating to the piece I wrote last week, strongly criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for accepting an invitation to address a joint session of Congress on the issue of stronger sanctions against Iran. A number of my colleagues shared the article on Facebook, others re-tweeted it, and their doing so, in turn, generated some very passionate debates online.
I was not at all surprised, or bothered, by the fact that there were people who thought I was in error. Particularly when it comes to Israel, feelings in theJewish community run strong and deep on even relatively inconsequential matters. So it should come as no surprise that, with regard to the prospect of a nuclear Iran and how to avoid that coming to pass, people would feel strongly.
But what I fail to understand, and find myself increasingly troubled by, is the degree to which discussions about Israel so quickly deteriorate into vitriolic disputation, and, perhaps most troubling of all, the insinuation that somehow, because one doesn’t hold to the hardest, most right-wing line when it comes to matters relating to Israel’s security, one somehow loves Israel less.
Regarding the harsh nature of some of the comments I saw … I’ve been called lots of things in my life, but ‘a reliable apologist for Hussein Obama, regularly recruited by the National Jewish Democratic Council … follow(ing) upon a good tradition in America dating from FDR of Jewish rabbis fronting for anti-Semitic presidents” is not something I recall hearing. Nor did anyone ever close a comment about me by saying “May his name be erased.” Of course, the person who offered these words did not sign his/her name …
Where does anger like this come from? I suspect that the Internet gives some people a feeling that all rules of social appropriateness are suspended in cyberspace. The fact that one can mouth off from the privacy of one’s home, in the middle of the night, with no one else around, eliminates the sense of shame that might otherwise accompany an offensive rant like that. Believe me when I say that my feelings were not hurt by what this person wrote. But what did hurt was my sense that something very precious had been lost, both from a Jewish and a general societal sense: a kind of twenty-first century iteration of lashon harah, malicious slander. Like the song says, “Haters gonna hate.” Decency in public discourse is going the way of the dinosaur.
But of course, people spewing hate on the Internet is hardly a “Jewish problem” alone. From cyber-bullying to ISIS videos, the Internet is fertile ground for all kinds of hatred, and Jewish values on what constitutes a proper exchange of ideas don’t always carry the day.
And as for the “who loves Israel more/better” issue, I am no less pained.
God knows that there is ample reason to be skeptical about the possibility any time soon of any kind of meaningful peace process, either with the Palestinians or with the Arab world as a whole, and there is even more reason to doubt the intent of Iran to make serious concessions on the issue of its nuclear development. Yes, all of this is true. The situation for European Jewry is bleak, the campuses in America are threatening, and the world looks like an angry place to us right now. All of this is true.
The operative question is how to respond to these multiple, asymmetrical threats. Do we consciously move to harden every position that we have, assuming that we have little to lose and it matters not at all whom we might offend in the process, or are we and, more importantly, Israel, challenged to think outside of the proverbial box and display some diplomatic agility? Yes, “Never Again” is not an empty slogan. But how are we to honor its charge to us?
Some of the people with whom I am closest, friends and family whom I love and respect, differ with me profoundly on how to answer these questions. I don’t for a moment question their right to do so, nor do I profess to be free of any ambivalence in the positions I stake out. But sincere and deeply felt differences such as these, instead of being constructive and potentially instructive, become debilitating and dangerous to Israel when voices other than the most strident are drowned out by accusations of being a “front for anti-Semitic Presidents.” That kind of talk serves no one in the Jewish community. And it doesn’t serve Israel either.
Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik is the spiritual leader of the Forest Hills Jewish Center in Queens.
THE ARTS
The Sounds Of Belarus, Reimagined In Brooklyn
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
He is a man who bestrides two worlds, with one foot in America, the other in Belarus. Or one foot in academia, the other in music. At the moment, though, Dmitri “Zisl” Slepovitch has both feet planted squarely in being a Daddy; his sleeping 20-month-old daughter is now safely entrusted to her nanny.
“I’ve been building my entire schedule around her,” he says, laughing. “But that’s only natural.”
Slepovitch is the clarinetist and artistic director of one of the more unusual bands on the New York klezmer scene, Litvakus, and since the band’s first CD was released in October, he has been busy playing locally; on Feb. 10 Litvakus performs as part of theNew York Klezmer Series, and in March it appears at the JCH in Bensonhurst.
The Brooklyn-based, Minsk-born musician has a few other day jobs. He teaches Yiddish language and culture at the New School, works as assistant to the artistic director at the Folksbiene/National Yiddish Theater, and serves as a music consultant and occasional actor on period European-set films like “Defiance.”
Not bad for a guy who has only been in the United States since 2008.
“It felt like home pretty quickly,” Slepovitch says. “I had a seamless transition from ‘I’m on vacation’ to ‘I live here.’”
He’d been in North America before. Indeed he met his future wife, a transplanted Minsker herself, at KlezKanada. When he finally moved to the States, it was on a fiancé visa.
He has been in the same building in Brooklyn ever since.
Slepovitch claims an older set of American roots, only half-jokingly. Friends of his who work for Radio Liberty were doing a story on the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic in 2012, and showed him the names of the three Belarusians who survived. He immediately recognized one.
“It was my grand-aunt,” he says proudly. “She died in Brooklyn in 1951. So now I tell people that I came to America over a hundred years ago. It adds to my already strong sense of belonging here.”
For many years before and after his emigration, Slepovitch led a trio, the Minsker Kapelye, with a tsimblist and a cellist. But while he was working with the Folksbiene as clarinetist and rehearsal pianist for its production of “Gimpel Tam” he bonded with other members of the orchestra, and Litvakus was born.
“We continued the concept from Minsker Kapelye,” he says. “The concept was to represent the Litvak musical tradition. It’s an absolutely distinct sound: a mix of drones from Belarusian bagpipes with a recognizably Jewish idiom. It is a sound that is totally unknown anywhere else.”
It is also a sound that was all but forgotten even in Belarus. Slepovitch drew on traditional pieces he had encountered doing fieldwork in the region and on the collection of Sofia Magid, who compiled a formidable archive for the famous St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music.
Litvakus is a tightly woven ensemble that draws its talents and inspirations from a wide spectrum, starting of course with the Litvak (Belarusian Jewish) foundation. The sheer diversity of the band members’ backgrounds is, Slepovitch says, one of the group’s greatest strengths.
“These guys are amazing musicians,” he says. “Taylor Bergren-Chrisman [the bassist] plays a lot of Jewish music with Golem and in Yiddish theater, but that’s not what he does all the time. On the other hand, Josh Camp [the accordionist] is a composer who played for a production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” and that was his only connection to Jewish music” before the group formed.
What drew them together with Slepovitch, violinist Craig Judelman and percussionist Sam Weisenberg was a willingness to open their ears and minds to a different sound.
That sound evolved as the result of tight communal bonds between Belarusians and their Litvak Jewish neighbors, an almost hypnotic blend of high-pitched drones from the pipers, highly syncopated rhythms from percussion and handclaps and the strangely “oriental” harmonies of the Jewish modes.
As heard on the band’s first album, “Raysn: The Music of Jewish Belarus,” the sound is at once invigorating, a sort of acoustic Jewish/Eurasian dance music (but with a lot more rhythmic complexity), and appealingly exotic.
But a lot of the material has been reimagined by Slepovitch in ways that depart from the originals significantly. So, is it authentic?
Slepovitch is candid in his reply.
“[The music] is traditional in terms of inheriting certain cultural idioms, and expressing your belonging to the tribe through sophisticated means like academic study and performance,” he says. “To me it’s absolutely authentic [even] though I’m composing a lot of it. It all works towards one single goal, to portray ‘raysn,’” (which he describes in the album’s liner notes as an old local Yiddish term signifying Belarus as a concept, a homeland, a quality, rather than a mere name on the map).
Slepovitch readily admits that the explorations the band is performing are “a continuation of my own discovery of my Jewish identity.” But as music for performance, they must do more.
“It was essential for me to translate this culture, to convey the beauty and the sentiment of it, to make it work for people who were not born into that,” he says. “We’re authentic to ourselves and our time and the expressions we perform. To make people feel it, that makes it authentic.”Litvakus will be performing as part of the New York Klezmer Series at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue (30 W. 68th St.) on Tuesday, Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m. They will also be performing on Sunday, March 1, 4 p.m., at the JCH in Bensonhurst (7802 Bay Pkwy., Brooklyn). Their first CD, “Raysn: The Music of Jewish Belarus” is available from their website, www.litvakus.com.
“I’ve been building my entire schedule around her,” he says, laughing. “But that’s only natural.”
Slepovitch is the clarinetist and artistic director of one of the more unusual bands on the New York klezmer scene, Litvakus, and since the band’s first CD was released in October, he has been busy playing locally; on Feb. 10 Litvakus performs as part of theNew York Klezmer Series, and in March it appears at the JCH in Bensonhurst.
The Brooklyn-based, Minsk-born musician has a few other day jobs. He teaches Yiddish language and culture at the New School, works as assistant to the artistic director at the Folksbiene/National Yiddish Theater, and serves as a music consultant and occasional actor on period European-set films like “Defiance.”
Not bad for a guy who has only been in the United States since 2008.
“It felt like home pretty quickly,” Slepovitch says. “I had a seamless transition from ‘I’m on vacation’ to ‘I live here.’”
He’d been in North America before. Indeed he met his future wife, a transplanted Minsker herself, at KlezKanada. When he finally moved to the States, it was on a fiancé visa.
He has been in the same building in Brooklyn ever since.
Slepovitch claims an older set of American roots, only half-jokingly. Friends of his who work for Radio Liberty were doing a story on the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic in 2012, and showed him the names of the three Belarusians who survived. He immediately recognized one.
“It was my grand-aunt,” he says proudly. “She died in Brooklyn in 1951. So now I tell people that I came to America over a hundred years ago. It adds to my already strong sense of belonging here.”
For many years before and after his emigration, Slepovitch led a trio, the Minsker Kapelye, with a tsimblist and a cellist. But while he was working with the Folksbiene as clarinetist and rehearsal pianist for its production of “Gimpel Tam” he bonded with other members of the orchestra, and Litvakus was born.
“We continued the concept from Minsker Kapelye,” he says. “The concept was to represent the Litvak musical tradition. It’s an absolutely distinct sound: a mix of drones from Belarusian bagpipes with a recognizably Jewish idiom. It is a sound that is totally unknown anywhere else.”
It is also a sound that was all but forgotten even in Belarus. Slepovitch drew on traditional pieces he had encountered doing fieldwork in the region and on the collection of Sofia Magid, who compiled a formidable archive for the famous St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music.
Litvakus is a tightly woven ensemble that draws its talents and inspirations from a wide spectrum, starting of course with the Litvak (Belarusian Jewish) foundation. The sheer diversity of the band members’ backgrounds is, Slepovitch says, one of the group’s greatest strengths.
“These guys are amazing musicians,” he says. “Taylor Bergren-Chrisman [the bassist] plays a lot of Jewish music with Golem and in Yiddish theater, but that’s not what he does all the time. On the other hand, Josh Camp [the accordionist] is a composer who played for a production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” and that was his only connection to Jewish music” before the group formed.
What drew them together with Slepovitch, violinist Craig Judelman and percussionist Sam Weisenberg was a willingness to open their ears and minds to a different sound.
That sound evolved as the result of tight communal bonds between Belarusians and their Litvak Jewish neighbors, an almost hypnotic blend of high-pitched drones from the pipers, highly syncopated rhythms from percussion and handclaps and the strangely “oriental” harmonies of the Jewish modes.
As heard on the band’s first album, “Raysn: The Music of Jewish Belarus,” the sound is at once invigorating, a sort of acoustic Jewish/Eurasian dance music (but with a lot more rhythmic complexity), and appealingly exotic.
But a lot of the material has been reimagined by Slepovitch in ways that depart from the originals significantly. So, is it authentic?
Slepovitch is candid in his reply.
“[The music] is traditional in terms of inheriting certain cultural idioms, and expressing your belonging to the tribe through sophisticated means like academic study and performance,” he says. “To me it’s absolutely authentic [even] though I’m composing a lot of it. It all works towards one single goal, to portray ‘raysn,’” (which he describes in the album’s liner notes as an old local Yiddish term signifying Belarus as a concept, a homeland, a quality, rather than a mere name on the map).
Slepovitch readily admits that the explorations the band is performing are “a continuation of my own discovery of my Jewish identity.” But as music for performance, they must do more.
“It was essential for me to translate this culture, to convey the beauty and the sentiment of it, to make it work for people who were not born into that,” he says. “We’re authentic to ourselves and our time and the expressions we perform. To make people feel it, that makes it authentic.”Litvakus will be performing as part of the New York Klezmer Series at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue (30 W. 68th St.) on Tuesday, Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m. They will also be performing on Sunday, March 1, 4 p.m., at the JCH in Bensonhurst (7802 Bay Pkwy., Brooklyn). Their first CD, “Raysn: The Music of Jewish Belarus” is available from their website, www.litvakus.com.
Where's The Outrage?
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish WeekIt’s been a long and tiring month. The new year did not start off well for us — not as Jews, not as human beings. The news out of Paris was staggering. It brought to the surface issues of hatred, racism, freedom of speech, freedom to protect and express religion, anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia and even, for us, some strange anti-women weirdness. When a few high-ranking females, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, were airbrushed out of a photo of the Paris protest in an Israeli ultra-Orthodox newspaper, satirists mocked the publication by creating a photo that airbrushed out all the male politicians. Needless to say, there weren’t many people left in the photo.
So where is the outrage? When people are tired, they don’t have the energy to be outraged. We are suffering moral fatigue. We don’t think there are any solutions to these vast, universal problems. We shrug. We wring our hands. In a word, we have given up.
Outrage in the dictionary is defined as “an extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation.” Outrage is a fierce emotion. It is the shrill cry of injustice. Where has our outrage gone?
I thought of this on a recent trip to Israel. My sister came with me in a taxi to pay respects to our beloved grandparents buried in Har Ha-Menuhot, a cemetery on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was overcast and raining. We paid for an hour of the driver’s time so we would not be rushed. He rushed. He then stopped short in front of an Egged bus, prompting me to say in Hebrew, “I want to visit Har Ha-Menuhot. I don’t want to live there.”
Apparently, I couldn’t live there if I wanted to. Local word is that they are running out of room. The cemetery was empty of living souls on a Friday afternoon, but a few days earlier its winding roads were overcrowded. The four French hostages who were murdered in Paris’ kosher grocery were buried there. People came by the thousands to show unity and anger. For a place called Mount of Eternal Rest, it should, given recent events, perhaps be renamed Mounting Anger. It was here that four of the five killed in the Har Nof synagogue massacre were also buried.
With 33 minutes left to our taxi hour, our frugal Jewish DNA wondered what we should do with the leftover time. It would be a shame to waste it. “Want to go to see Rabbi Rubin’s shul?” my sister asked. This was the unofficial name of the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue, where the massacre took place. My sister had introduced Aryeh Kopinsky, one of the four rabbis who were killed there, to his wife. Everyone was still hurting. I shook my head no. I didn’t want to bring in Shabbat in Jerusalem with mental visions of blood across a sanctuary. I didn’t want to see the artificial flowersleft there as if to say, we will not forget you. I was tired.
The next day, I was angry at myself. I should have paid my respects, not tried to make it all invisible. In news terms, what happened in Har Nof already seemed like ancient history next to the anti-Semitism sweeping across Europe. Tragically, the massacre had been replaced in the media by fresh Jewish blood elsewhere. But in Har Nof, the anguish remains. Because new terror never eclipses old terror. It just adds to the hammering litany of injustice that we have somehow come to regard as unavoidable. I was wrong not to go to that shul and say a prayer for the dead and their families. It doesn’t matter if it’s painful. It was more painful for those who lived through it.
A Talmudic passage states that one shouldn’t pray in a ruin. Commentaries suggest that such places are dangerous. Ruffians may hide there. Anxiety may distract one from the appropriate mindfulness required. Here’s another possible interpretation: Prayer in a ruin somehow suggests that we can find God in a place no longer in use. Our relationship to the divine is not meant to be a relic, an object from a spiritual archeological dig. It must be living and vibrant, even when it’s painful. The minyan in Rabbi Rubin’s shul today is strong because no one can take away living holiness. Maybe God lives in our outrage. Maybe God lives in us when we give voice to those who cannot speak.
Perhaps as American Jews and American citizens we have become too complacent, too tired to protest terrorism and anti-Semitism. We have forgotten how to protest. Would we have been able to muster the throngs in Paris on our National Mall? I don’t know anymore. You don’t protest what you have come to accept.
We need more outrage because there is no more room in the cemetery on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
Erica Brown’s column appears the first week of the month. Subscribe to her weekly Internet essays at ericabrown.com.
From the first time he stepped onto the Bar-Ilan University (BIU) campus almost 50 years ago as part of his Bar Mitzvah celebration in Israel, Ronnie Stern knew that Bar-Ilan and its American Friends would always play an important part of his life and that of his family. When he was recently elected as the new President of the American Friends of Bar-Ilan University at its Board Meeting in New York, it was yet another seminal moment in the Stern Family's multi-generational support and leadership of a University that is near and dear to its heart.
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THE NEW NORMAL
Jewish Inclusion Made Easy and Inexpensive! Part 1Meagan Buren and Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi
Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the Fall, 2014 issue of The Journal of Jewish Communal Service, and is disseminated with the permission of its publisher, JPRO Network. Subscriptions at JPRO.org.
We are sharing this primer in three parts; first the introduction, followed by the action steps.
After centuries of persecution, we Jews have become deeply committed to developing one asset over almost everything else—our minds. This asset is the one thing we can take with us to a new country, and it has contributed to our survival.
This devotion to education and achievement has been good for us and for the world as is evidenced by the many Nobel Prizes won by Jews for discovering lifesaving breakthroughs.
But what does that mean for those of us in the community who are not destined for acceptance at the top colleges or to win a Nobel Prize? What about the child who is born with an intellectual, learning, mental health, or physical disability or the individual who acquires a disability?
The Jewish community, which values achievement so highly, can be an exceptionally harsh and lonely place for someone with a disability and for those who love them. Time and time again, we in the Jewish community shut our doors to people with disabilities, or we serve them in segregated institutions when separate is never equal. Sometimes this is done intentionally, but far more often it is done because we simply do not know how to truly serve all.
Studies show that 9 out of 10 women overall who take the test to discover if they are carrying a fetus with Down Syndrome choose to abort. What message does this send to people with Down Syndrome and their families, and what are we doing as a community to welcome them in our community as equal? What are we doing to embrace a family with disability issues when members of the Jewish community say to the mother of a child with Down Syndrome, “why didn’t you consider abortion?”
The impact of exclusion of people with disabilities goes beyond hurt feelings. It leads to isolation, fewer affiliated Jews, family disruption, and, all too often, even divorce. If we are going to bring everyone under the tent, then we must include people with disabilities.
According to the U.S. Census, 18.6% of Americans (approximately 1 in 5) have a disability. Because Jews carry genetic risks and on average have children later in life than any other demographic group in America, it is likely that the percentage of Jews with disabilities is higher than the national average. That is all the more reason why Jewish communal agencies, their staff, and lay leaders must welcome, accept, and support individuals dealing with disability issues. When people are welcomed, accepted, and treated equally, disability can actually be an asset to the community. We come to learn the true meaning of humanity and understand that, though everyone is different, all people were created in the image of G-d, “b’tselem Elokim bara oto.”
A nationwide poll fielded by RespectAbility of more than 3,800 Americans in the disability community (half of whom were people with disabilities, and half were family members and providers to people with disabilities) shows that Jews with disabilities are far less engaged religiously than are Catholics, Protestants, or Evangelicals.
Less than half of Jews surveyed answered that religion was “fairly” or “very important in their lives,” and nearly 40% reported that they rarely or never attend synagogue. Ahigher percentage of Jews do not attend services than in any other religious group polled. We can learn a great deal from how other faith groups welcome and serve people with disabilities and their families. For example, the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) has mandated that every one of its 24,000 congregations or institutions have an inclusion director/coordinator to ensure that people with disabilities are welcomed.
Even though the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, it has not ended discrimination in religious institutions, in part because they are exempt from its regulations if they do not accept federal money or services.
Therefore they have little legal obligation to serve or hire people with disabilities.
Unfortunately, this “pass” has hindered the implementation of simple accommodations such as accessible doors and ramps to enable people with physical disabilities to participate in religious services and programs. While these institutions are legally exempt, the same does not hold true for moral or religious obligations.
It is time for real participation in all aspects of Jewish life, including access to the bima, kiddushes, bar and bat mitzvahs, and all activities that say, “I am a welcome member of the community.”
In a study conducted by Mizrahi and Buren for the Foundation for Jewish Camp in early 2013, 46% of Jews with disabilities who attended overnight Jewish summer camp reported that they have been denied access to other Jewish institutions due to their disabilities. Given that most children with significant disabilities are not yet served by camp, it is likely that an even higher percentage of Jewish people with disabilities have been denied access to Jewish life.
A poll of 2,607 Jews conducted in September 2013 by RespectAbilityUSA.org and Jerusalem U shows that Jews, particularly young Jews, feel very strongly that Jews with disabilities need to be included in Jewish life. Fully 89% of the Jews polled strongly agreed that “Jewish events and organizations should be as welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities as everyone else.” An additional 9% somewhat agreed with the same statement. Indeed, they felt more strongly about inclusion of people with disabilities in Jewish life than about being connected to Israel, marrying someone Jewish, or having Jewish children. The gaps in intensity were more pronounced among young Jews.
The 2013 Pew study, A Portrait of Jewish Americans, in many ways paints a dismal picture of the Jewish communal future; smart, dedicated leaders are spending a lot of time and treasure to find the best ways to connect with unaffi liated Jews while at the same time many passionate Jews are being turned away based solely on their disabilities. This article provides guidance on how to serve Jewish children with disabilities and their families.
Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi is the president of RespectAbilityUSA.org, a nonprofit organization working to empower people with disabilities to achieve the American dream. She is dyslexic and as a proud parent knows what it means for her child to be denied access to Jewish institutions due solely to disabilities. Meagan Buren is the Vice President of RespectAbilityUSA.org and is also the President of Buren Research and Communications. She is an expert in public opinion research and strategic communications. Free resources from RespectabilityUSA are available at http://respectabilityusa.com/resources/jewish-inclusion.
WELL VERSED
Borscht And Belly Laughs
The Borscht Belt still draws crowds.
Martha Mendelsohn
The Borscht Belt still draws crowds.
Slush and sleet on a recent evening couldn’t keep a group of Catskill buffs away from “Echoes of the Borscht Belt,” a Yeshiva University Museum exhibition of photographs by Marisa Scheinfeld. The gallery visit was followed by a screening of “When Comedy Went to School” and a discussion led by the documentary’s host and narrator, comedian and actor Robert Klein.
Scheinfeld, 34, who grew up near the Concord, has been acclaimed for her non-airbrushed, haunting full-color images of resort ruins.
In one photo, the doors in a hallway at Grossinger’s eerily open on long-vacant rooms. Another image shows empty room key slots at the Pines Hotel, behind a grimy, teetering music stand. In others, an indoor pool, now outdoors, is surrounded by lush vegetation and algae mixed with unbiodegradable tufts of lobby upholstery.
An unmade double bed and a phone off the hook in a guest room at Tamarack Lodge, on which Herman Wouk based the theater camp in his novel “Marjorie Morningstar,” easily evokes Marjorie on the rumpled blanket, receiver in hand, plotting a lakeside tryst with the drama director Noel Airman.
“When Comedy Went to School” traces modern comedy to the routines of Jewish Borscht Circuit headliners like Jerry Lewis, Jackie Mason and the late Sid Caesar. In Uggs and a long scarf, Robert Klein, looking more like a downtown art dealer than a former Catskills comic, praised the political satire of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but bemoaned today’s unrestrained profanity.
“The pendulum has swung too far,” Klein said. “The liberty is being abused.”
Jokes that might now be bleeped, such as “Take my wife—please!,” which were rife in the movie, provoked chuckles, but at least one couple who met in the mountains, still seemed like starry-eyed newlyweds.
Judy and Andy Gold have been married for more than 50 years. Now they spend weekends at their vacation home in a “high-end community” in Sullivan County.
When they revisited the Concord not long before its demise, the hotel seemed stuck in a time warp. “It was still aqua and pink,” said Judy, who described Scheinfeld’s photographs as “sad but beautiful.”
Was there a dissonance between the humor in the movie and the images of destruction and decay?
Jacob Wisse, director of Yeshiva University Museum, doesn’t think so. “There’s a reclamation of life, of nature and new forms of self-expression by graffiti artists and paintballers.” He sees Scheinfeld’s pictures as “descendants of those biting jokes.”
"Echoes of the Borscht Belt: Contemporary Photographs by Marisa Scheinfeld" Is on on view at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street in Manhattan through April 12th 2015. Scheinfeld will speak at the Center for Jewish History on February 11th and March 11th at 6 pm and will also participate in a panel discussion on the “Borscht Belt: Past, Present and Future,” with historian Jenna Weissman Joselit on March 26that 7 pm. The exhibition next travels to the Yiddish Book Center in April.
Martha Mendelsohn frequently writes about the Catskills. Her novel for young adults,"Bromley Girls," is coming out in April. Slush and sleet on a recent evening couldn't keep a group of Catskill buffs away from "Echoes of the Borscht Belt," a Yeshiva University Museum exhibition of photographs by Marisa Scheinfeld.
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