The New York Jewish Week Newsletter Of New York, New York, United States Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Dear Reader,
The tragic fire last Shabbat that took the lives of seven siblings in Midwood cast a pall over the entire Jewish community. Staff Writers Amy Sara Clark and Steve Lipman report from the scene and on the rush to buy smoke alarms.
After Midwood Fire Tragedy, Stocking Up and Taking Stock
Residents buy up smoke detectors and try to come to terms with the loss of seven children in Shabbat blaze.
Steve Lipman and Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writers
Israel Shmaya prays for the family at the Bedford Avenue home where seven children died in a fire on Shabbat. Amy Sara Clark/JW
Four days after seven children died in a fire in a Midwood home, area Jews were grappling with the loss while stocking up on fire safety equipment to keep their families safe.
The fire was caused by a faulty hot plate left on to keep food warm over Shabbat, and a lack of smoke detectors on the first and second floors of the Bedford Avenue house allowed it to spread to the stairwell before anyone woke up, separating the mother from her children, sleeping on the other side of the stairs.
Area residents said the fire served as a wake-up call that brought residents to neighborhood hardware stores in droves.
“Half of our community, the first thing we did was check the fire alarms,” said Israel Shmaya, a 27-year-old yeshiva student who studies hospitality management at night. He came to the site of the fire Tuesday morning to pray for the family.
“Everybody’s taking more precautions. ... That way another tragedy doesn’t happen,” he said.
At Corner Hardware & Paint, an Ace Hardware franchise with a large number of Orthodox customers in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, there was “panic” as soon as the doors opened on Sunday morning, a manager said. Customers were buying batteries for smoke detectors and ladders for reaching out-of-the-way detectors, and asking questions about fire extinguishers and safe ways to heat food on Shabbat.
On Tuesday morning, two of the four shelves holding smoke detectors were bare. “There aren’t many left,” an employee said. “People have been buying them.” In front of the register a display of crock-pots and hot plates remained.
Rabbi Yosef Rapaport, a spokesman for Agudath Israel of America, said a small Borough Park housewares store told him it sold more than 20 smoke detectors in one day.
“If we multiply that to other similar establishments in Orthodox areas, it could be considered sort of a buying spree,” he said via email.
At the Flatbush Minyan, a prominent Orthodox congregation less than a mile away from the site of the fatal fire, Rabbi Meir Fund said he will devote part of his sermon this Saturday to matters of fire safety.
“Everyone was jolted by this,” he said.
There have been other fatal fires in Brooklyn’s Orthodox communities in recent years, but never of this magnitude. In 2000, a Shavuot fire in Williamsburg killed two people and two fires in Borough Park in 2002 killed three. In 2011, 13 people in Teaneck, N.J., were hospitalized for symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning after a defective stove was left on for two days during Shavuot.
But seven deaths in a single family in a single fire are unprecedented here.
“Never, these type of numbers,” said Louis Welz, CEO of Flatbush’s Council of Jewish Organizations. “When do you hear these types of numbers?” he asked, leaving the rhetorical question unanswered.
In the wake of the fire, several local Jewish organizations have begun fire safety education efforts.
The Flatbush COJO, in partnership with City Councilmember Chaim Deutsch, this week began an extensive fire safety campaign in the neighborhood, including a community-wide educational program, and the distribution of free carbon monoxide detectors.
The Jewish Community Relations Council is reaching out to day schools to encourage fire safety education in the classrooms and the New York Board of Rabbis is urging member congregations to distribute pre-Passover fire safety guidelines. And about 100 leaders of local Jewish organizations attended the annual FDNY safety briefing at the Department’s Brooklyn headquarters on Monday.
“This tragedy has taken the matter [of fire safety] to a new level. There is going to be a collective response,” said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the board’s executive vice president and the Fire Department’s Jewish chaplain.
Over the weekend, the New York Fire Department took to the streets of Brooklyn,distributing 200 smoke alarms, 16,000 batteries and hundreds of fire safety pamphlets in English and Yiddish.
Chai Lifeline organized a community gathering called “Making Sense of the Midwood Tragedy: Talking to Your Children, Understanding it Yourself,” launched a 24-hour helpline ([718] 855-3274) and posted guidelines for how parents could talk to their children about the tragedy on its website.
Agudath Israel’s Rabbi Rapaport said via email that the city needs to find new ways to get safety information to charedi families who “avoid general secular media, such as TV and secular mass circulation newspapers.”
In such charedi enclaves as Rockland County’s Monsey, and Lakewood and Passaic, N.J., rabbis were encouraging their members to install fire safety equipment in their homes and drill family members on fire safety procedures.
In the week before Passover, when many families conduct a pre-holiday burning of chometz items, and when large numbers of holiday candles are often lit in the home during the first days and last days of the holiday, these warning are especially timely, Jewish leaders said.
During Shabbat and major holidays, observant Jews, in accordance with the prohibition against turning on an oven or electrical device, will keep food warm using a “blech,” a metal sheet that covers a low-burning stove burner, or appliances such as crockpots and hot plates that are kept on throughout the period or switched on by a pre-set timer. These devices usually function without a problem; but when they don’t, the result can be fatal. Sparks from overloaded electrical outlets have also caused fires.
Members of the Orthodox community “are not going to change their operations” but they “are going to be a little more careful,” said Rabbi Hertz Frankel, a longtime administrator in the Satmar chasidic school system and frequent spokesman for the wider charedi community.
Several Midwood women interviewed Tuesday morning in front of the burned home agreed that hot plates and crockpots are not going away.
“Using hot plates, I don’t think this it’s going to stop, but I do think people are going to look into safer alternatives,” said Chana Kramer, who came to pray and write a note of condolence outside the boarded up two-story house at 3371 Bedford Ave. near Avenue L.
Rose, a Midwood mother of four who preferred that we only use her first name, stopped by the house a few minutes later. She said that while people are all for adding smoke detectors and other early warning systems, serving their families warm food over Shabbat was a must.
“Fire alarms, maybe, but calls [saying] ‘don’t use your hot plate’ — if it’s working properly, how else [can you keep food warm]? I think the hot plate is safer than the blech. ... I never knew this could happen with a hot plate,” she said.
The fire was also marked in the wider community. The Brooklyn Nets basketball team had a moment of silence before the team’s game Monday night and a makeshift memorial in front of the Sassoon home included offerings from both Jewish and non-Jewish residents.
Tony, who owns several apartment buildings in the area and asked that we only use his first name, brought over a bouquet of seven white roses on Sunday, and then returned to the home again to pay his respects on Tuesday. “It’s a tragedy. I can’t fathom it,” he said.
The tragedy galvanized the Orthodox community, both in Borough Park, where a funeral ceremony took place on Sunday at Borough Park’s Shomrei Hadas Chapels, and on Monday at Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot cemetery, where the Sassoon children were buried.
Hundreds of mourners crowded into the Brooklyn chapel, and into the surrounding streets, as Gabriel Sassoon, an Israeli who had come to the United States two years ago, eulogized his children — Elaine, 16; David, 12; Rivkah, 11; Yeshua, 10; Moshe, 8; Sara, 6; and Yaakob, 5.
Similarly, hundreds of people (thousands, according to some estimates) attended the Jerusalem burial in which Mayor Nir Barkat and Chief Rabbi David Lau participated. In his graveside eulogy, Gabriel Sassoon asked God why one korban, or sacrifice, from his family was not sufficient. Why, asked Sassoon, did He take seven?
Gabriel Sassoon was away from home at a religious conference when the fire took place. The two survivors of the blaze, Gayle Sassoon, Gabriel’s wife, and Siporah, the couple’s 15-year-old daughter were in critical condition early this week in area hospitals, being treated for burns and smoke inhalation.
The people who came for solitary prayer in front of the Bedford Avenue home Tuesday Morning said the tragedy affected them deeply.
“It wasn’t easy to come. I’m a mother, a fairly new mother. It’s shocking. It kind of hits you with a certain reality about what can happen,” said Kramer.
Shmaya, the 27-year-old yeshiva student, said he came to the house Tuesday morning to say Tehillim “for the people who are still alive, that they should have a bit of peace” and Mishnayot, “for the souls who are already passed away.”
“It just shook the community,” he said. “It shook us to a point where: We can’t do anything about it, they’re gone. So the only thing we could do is do good things in the name of their souls, so that way they rest in heaven in a good place.”
Rose also stood in front of the boarded up house, still smelling faintly of smoke, and prayed.
"The hardest part of all of this is what they [the family] may be going through. When one person in Am Yisrael is suffering, we're all suffering,” she said.
She said 10-year-old Yeshua was her son’s bus monitor. When he learned of the tragedy, the 6-year-old said, “Did his mommy know he was my bus monitor? He was such a good bus monitor, he always used to give me candy. I want to tell her that,” she said.
Her nephew, who was in the same class with 8-year-old Moshe, “was crying all day Shabbos — he was crying his eyes out,” she said.
And on Sunday her daughter wouldn’t let her out of sight. “It’s just so scary," she said. "For the first two nights. I brought my kids into my room.
“You appreciate your kids [more],” she added. “Even when they’re driving you crazy, you’re like, ‘thank God, they’re alive, they’re here and they’re breathing.”
After the fire, a friend in Israel told her about going to the Sassoon family for a Shabbat dinner.
“The mother was such a aishet chayil [woman of valor],” the friend told Rose. “She was in the kitchen serving, the kids were helping, the table was filled with zemirot [Shabbat songs] and divrei Torah [Torah discussions]. They were such a happy, nice family. Everyone used to go to them for Shabbat.”
Miriam Lichtenberg contributed to this report from Israel.
As the Washington-Jerusalem relationship continues to deteriorate, Staff Writer Stewart Ain talked to rabbis and others about how the crisis will impact on their seders; Nathan Jeffay in Jerusalem analyzes Netanyahu's mandate; Staff Writer Hannah Dreyfus on themood on campus; Associate Editor Jonathan Mark on why the media has it in for Netanyahu; Elli Fischer, writes that the view from Israel is more forgiving of the prime minister; and our Editorial blames both Obama and Netanyahu for the ugly rift.
At Passover This Year, Difficult Conversations About The Promised Land
A sharply divided community limps toward the Passover seder.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
With tensions between the United States and Israel running at a fever pitch, even the benign, ritually symbolic words of the Passover seder have suddenly become charged with divisiveness and political import.
For Susie Heneson Moskowitz, spiritual leader of Temple Beth Torah in Melville, L.I., reading the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” at the end of the seder next week will take on a whole new, and unexpected, resonance.
“We pray that there will continue to be a Jerusalem that reflects Jewish and democratic values — and is safe and secure,” said Rabbi Heneson Moskowitz.
Her statement, which seems to straddle liberal and conservative positions and reflect anxiety over controversial statements made by IsraeliPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Election Day, epitomizes the concerns of a divided American Jewish community: that Israel continues to be the homeland of the Jewish people, that it can one day move forward with a two-state solution that allows Israel to end the occupation of its Palestinian neighbors and that it remain safe within secure borders.
Rabbi Moscowitz was reflecting, in part, the concerns of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who warned on the Senate floor last week that President Obama’s treatment of Israel could endanger Israel’s safety by emboldening its “enemies to launch more rockets out of southern Lebanon and Gaza, to launch more terrorist attacks, to go to international forums and delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.”
Rubio was responding to Obama’s promise last week to “reassess” America’s relationship with Israel in light of Netanyahu’s pledge on the eve of last week’s election that a Palestinian state would not be established under his watch. (Netanyahu’s Election Day statement that Arabs were “voting in droves” met with widespread criticism in Reform and Conservative circles.)
Although Netanyahu clarified his pledge after the election — saying he is still committed to a two-state solution but that current conditions make that impossible — Obama dismissed them in a phone call to Netanyahu. He later told the Huffington Post: “I indicated to him that given his statements prior to the election, it is going to be hard to find a path where people are seriously believing that negotiations are possible. We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn’t happen during his prime ministership, and so that’s why we’ve got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don’t see a chaotic situation in the region.”
Such talk from the Obama administration continued this week, with his chief of state, Denis McDonough, telling a J Street conference Monday that Netanyahu’s election eve comment was “troubling.”
“We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made, or that they don’t raise questions about the prime minister’s commitment to achieving peace through direct negotiations,” he said.
At the State Department, deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters that the U.S. is now looking to Israel for “actions and policies that demonstrate genuine commitment to a two-state solution, not more words.”
And Obama repeated Tuesday that his dispute with Netanyahu is substantive and not personal.
“We believe that two states is the best path forward for Israel’s security, for Palestinian aspirations and for regional stability,” he said. “This is a matter of figuring out how we get through a knotty policy difference that has great consequences for both countries and the region.”
Rabbi Charles Klein of Merrick, a former president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said he had hoped that after the Israeli election the divide between the U.S. and Israel “would have been mended and healed. Unfortunately, it seems to be spinning out of control with each passing day.”
He noted that the Obama administration has “threatened diminished U.S. support for Israel in the United Nations … which affects the security of the state of Israel. No one in the Jewish community can be anything but alarmed about the increasing diplomatic isolation of Israel and what appears to be the decoupling of the [U.S.-Israel] relationship.”
Further inflaming tensions was a Wall Street Journal report Tuesday claiming Israel had spied on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations and passed on the information to members of Congress. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon heatedly denied the report.
The Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying: “Someone apparently has an interest in stoking conflict, or bringing a negative twist to relations between us, which are strategic relations from our perspective.”
Dan Mariaschin, executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International, said the “temperature needs to be turned down” and the U.S.-Israel relationship restored.
But the continuing schism in relations has Nancy Kaufman, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, concerned about the impact on young American Jews.
“I’m worried about our young folks totally checking out,” she told The Jewish Week. “I’m worried about them rolling their eyes and saying, `I don’t want to be engaged with Israel or go there or talk about it or read about it.’ … I’m seeing more and more people saying they will not focus on Israel. It’s very disturbing.”
Kaufman added that she is certain this will be a prime subject at seder tables.
“People are worried,” she said. “It’s easier to support the American Jewish World Service [which works to foster human rights and end poverty in the Third World] than those working in Israel.”
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said of Obama’s refusal to accept Netanyahu’s clarifying statement about a two-state solution: “Politicians say different things. The key is to judge any partner by deeds. … I think there has to be more openness on all sides, and the administration would be wise to figure out concrete ways we can work effectively for the things that are in the strategic interests of the United States and Israel.”
But Alan Elsner, a vice president of J Street, insisted that Netanyahu was being “duplicitous.”
“His attempt at clarification was unconvincing and unacceptable and was clearly designed to avoid or mitigate the flood of international condemnation that his original statement rightly provoked,” he said.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said his office has been in touch with officials in the Obama administration “in the hope we can put things back on track.”
“In the heat of campaigns in America, how many things are spoken that are later reconsidered?” he asked rhetorically.
Despite the rift, Nathan Diament, director of the Orthodox Union’s Institute for Public Affairs, said that while the U.S. is reassessing, “the fundamental security aid the U.S. gives to Israel continues.”
Several area rabbis said they have or will discuss the subject from the pulpit.
Rabbi Moshe Birnbaum of the Jewish Center of Kew Gardens Hills said the last time he could remember such tensions was in 1956 when President Dwight Eisenhower “threated sanctions against Israel” during the Suez Crisis.
“Israel is so dependent on American support, and I think there is a concerted effort on the part of well-funded people to undermine American Jewish support for Israel,” he said.
Rabbi Aaron Benson of the North Shore Jewish Center in Port Jefferson, L.I., said he has congregants who blame Obama for the continuing tensions and others who blame Netanyahu.
“I am not so excited about what was said during the last day of the election,” he said. “I am more interested in what plays out going forward.”
Rabbi Steven Moss of Oakdale and president of the Suffolk Board of Rabbis, said he plans to focus in his sermon “not on the divisiveness we are experiencing in the world of politics and Netanyahu and Obama, but rather to focus on a sense of hope that the future will be better than today.”
Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said he believes “a lot of people are pained and embarrassed by the public fight and would rather it go back under wraps. The U.S. and Israel are longtime allies, and the idea of a feud causes people a lot of anguish. There is enough blame to go around in most people’s eyes. … I don’t think it’s going to have a lasting impact.”
But most people interviewed at random during a Hillel event Sunday at Stony Brook University laid the blame squarely on Obama.
Israel Kleinberg, 85, of Smithtown, said the rift stems from Netanyahu’s vociferous attack on what he called the “bad [nuclear] deal” being worked on with Iran.
“Obama takes the easy way out and the Israelis are standing up” to him, he said.
Laurel Hoffman, 61, of Smithtown, L.I., said she believes Obama is “changing U.S. policy to become anti-Israel.”
Shari Haber, 55, of Commack, said Obama is “setting a bad tone” that she fears “will have long lasting damage to the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
But Nathan Baum, 65, of Middle Island, L.I., said he blames Netanyahu because by addressing members of Congress to tell his concerns about a possible deal with Iran, he made Israel “a partisan issue in America.” And he said Netanyahu’s past actions belied the explanation he gave for his pre-election remarks about a two-state solution.
What Kind Of Mandate Does Bibi Have?
It might not be as sweeping as advertised, though White House should respect it more fully.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
Nathan Jeffay
Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party were over the moon this week, as they started pulling together the next Israeli government. But they should be careful — what they won wasn’t a resounding victory, it was a reprieve.
Yes, it’s true that while all the opinion polls predicted a victory for the rival Zionist Union, and the exit polls predicted a tie, in the end Likud ended up with a six-seat lead. It was certainly a victory within the peculiar Israeli electoral system, but it’s far from a sweeping endorsement.
And that is what’s important for Bibi and his party to remember as they set the tone for their next term, and as they decide how to build their next coalition — because at the moment all indications are that they have ideas above their electoral station. They appear to think that their strength is such that they can build a government giving away few of the key ministries to coalition partners.
Let’s take a break from the electoral stats and imagine a dinner party of 12 Israelis who went to the ballot box, representing a cross section of voters. Only three of them voted for Netanyahu’s Likud.
If you want to give Netanyahu extra credit, and say that voters of the Jewish Home party, and some other right-wing voters wanted him as prime minister, the Bibi contingency at the dinner party still only comes to around four of the 12 guests.
In fact, in broad terms (for we can’t halve or quarter guests), four guests voted right and four left, and two or so voted center and two voted haredi. Interestingly, this is hardly different from what we would have seen after the last election in 2013.
And while analysts never tire of saying that the election was an endorsement for Bibi, let’s keep this idea in some perspective. I spent Election Day traveling Israel, from the Galilee in the north to the Gaza border in the south, talking to normal citizens. And my tour illustrated with surprising clarity that even among the minority of Israelis who backed Bibi at the polling station, many have serious misgivings about him.
People never ceased to surprise me with the depth of these misgivings. During one conversation in Sderot, the Gaza-border community that was bombarded with rockets during the summer and in every previous round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, I was sure that a young man was about to back the Zionist Union. “History teaches us that with Bibi, every two years there is a war,” said Zohar Asapo, who works in transport, adding, “It’s the regime of Bibi that causes it.”
He then stated: “I vote Bibi but I know it won’t be different — but I vote Bibi because I don’t see another option.”
The figures and the feelings that are bringing Netanyahu back to power should have an impact on how he forms his government and how he relates to his nation. He should be generous with government ministries to other parties because only by doing so can he build a stable government, and only with a stable government can he serve the country. And he should return as a more humble, more modest prime minister — one who puts behind him an arrogant election campaign in which he patronized his electorate by failing to release a party platform and zig-zagged on policy, in order to give his citizens more respect and more credit.
Being a man of the right should not impede him in this. In fact, he has an excellent role model. President Reuven Rivlin, also an avowed rightist, has won the admiration of citizens across the political spectrum for his unifying influence, moral integrity and positive contribution to Jewish-Arab relations since he entered office. If Netanyahu is wise, he will be using his statutory consultations with Rivlin over coalition building to learn from him.
This is a commentary on Netanyahu’s victory, and a set of hopes for what he will make of it. Yet I don’t for a moment question his legitimate victory based on the Israeli people’s choice, and his right to be respected internationally as the elected leader of the only democracy in the Middle East — things that the White House would do well to illustrate a better understanding of.
The behavior of Barack Obama, who gives timely congratulations to leaders with far murkier reputations that Netanyahu following their elections, was childish and unacceptable. There are many question marks over Netanyahu’s conduct during the election campaign, and in a recent column I criticized Netanyahu for exploiting tensions with the White House for electoral gain. But when a democratic race is over, the leader of the free world needs to rise above everything and conduct himself as his position befits him.
In a similar vein, the zealousness of Obama’s staff in attacking Netanyahu’s doublespeak on the two-state solution has been bizarre.
Netanyahu’s conduct on the question of whether he supports a two-state solution has been lamentable, with his message constantly changing. But when does the U.S. administration ever go out of its way to give such strong rebuke to the Palestinian side, which is constantly sending out different messages on issues as important as what its real attitude is towards terrorism, and whether it really recognizes Israeli sovereignty in the state’s internationally agreed borders?
Even more importantly, why was the administration’s tone so combative — even as Netanyahu seemed to be trying to backtrack on his hardline position? If Obama felt he couldn’t meet Netanyahu before the election, he could invite him now for a joint press conference in which the Israeli leader would be asked to state his position.
The millions of Israelis who turned out to vote deserve constructive politics from their returning prime minister and constructive diplomacy from the United States.
Nathan Jeffay’s column appears twice a month.
Media Has It In For Netanyahu
Prime minister’s win seen more as triumph of fear than democracy.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Was there ever an election that left everyone feeling so lonely, even the winners? Especially the winners?
It was Israel’s “Dewey Defeats Truman,” except only the Chicago Tribune had to live that headline down while there was almost no one who foresaw, or could easily explain, the dynamics leading to Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory.
There’s nothing new about that. The mostly liberal American media never greeted the election of a conservative Israel prime minister with anything other than fear. When in 1977 Menachem Begin became prime minister, Time magazine introduced him to its readers, “Begin as in Fagin.” Some may like Begin, said a diplomat, “but that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.” In 1978 Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize.
This week, The New York Times headlined, Netanyahu “Further Divides U.S. Jews,” a divide that has been routinely pinned to every non-Labor prime minister. Shmuel Rosner, of the Jewish Journal (Los Angeles), pulled out the old clips. The British Guardian headlined of the newly elected Ariel Sharon: “Sharon Divides World Jews,” just as Netanyahu now “divides.” When Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, visited the United States, the Forward wrote, “for American Jews,” the visit “drove home the distance between the two great Jewish communities, not their closeness.” Even in 1958, before “everything,” American Jews were “troubled.” The day when we’re told that a conservative prime minister doesn’t “divide” American Jews will be the first.
Likud’s victory made some writers positively livid. Time magazine’s Joe Klein wrote, Netanyahu “won because he ran as a bigot,” based on two sentences in the final week. And Jews, writes Klein, have become as bad as their worst oppressors, “a great many Jews have come to regard Arabs as the rest of the world traditionally regarded Jews”… It is “an appalling irony that the Israeli vote brought joy to American neoconservatives and European anti-Semites alike.”
There was no end to the anti-Bibi hysteria. Harold Myerson, a Washington Post columnist who is Jewish, wrote that Netanyahu “might have called for stripping Israeli Arabs of the right to vote altogether. [He is] the Jewish George Wallace. … Perhaps Likud and the Republicans can open an Institute for the Prevention of Dark-Skinned People Voting.” Fact is, Netanyahu made no effort whatsoever to stop Arabs from voting.
Although Netanyahu’s campaign statements (since retracted) about a stalemated peace process and telling his followers that the Arabs were voting “in droves” were certainly controversial, Rosner, a former correspondent for Haaretz, writes, “American friends and critics, at least be sincere about this: You are not angry with two unfortunate statements — you are angry because Netanyahu managed to squeeze yet another electoral victory. You were angry with him before the election. You wanted him gone. And Israelis didn’t really care.”
Meanwhile, beyond the Times, serious mainstream American journalists were growing increasingly negative about Obama’s acting like a Disney stepmother to Netanyahu. Bob Schieffer, host of “Face The Nation” on CBS said this past week, “I can understand why the president would be upset” with Netanyahu’s campaign rhetoric. “Yet when the prime minister backed away from that Thursday, the White House reacted with pointed, even snarky skepticism — as if they wanted to keep the public fight going. I question that. …. It’s time to stop the back-and-forth and repair the alliance, quietly.”
When Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show, after Obama’s election, “I hope he fails,” Limbaugh was widely considered too surly and crude for decent company, lacking the graciousness we expect of political losers. But it seems there are plenty of Jews and journalists who are hoping Netanyahu fails. His victory was “ugly,” wrote a Times editorial. He was “racist,” “craven,” he laid bare his “duplicity, confirmed Palestinian suspicions.” But what of Israeli suspicions about the Palestinians, and trusting Obama?
The Times reported that Netanyahu’s “hard-line statements won him right-wing votes… but alienated allies in Washington and Europe.” How correct is that? Europe, Asian, even Arab leaders actually seem more than willing to let campaign bygones be bygones. Izzy Lemberg, a producer at CNN’s Jerusalem Bureau and now a columnist, noted in the Jerusalem Post, “The Arab League wrote off Netanyahu’s statements as ‘electioneering’ and appear to be cautiously unperturbed by them.”
India, on its way to being a world power, was quick to let Netanyahu know that he was loved in New Delhi. The Algemeiner reported that Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted in Hebrew — in Hebrew! — “Mazel tov, my friend Bibi… I remember our meeting in New York last September warmly.” And the European Jewish Pressreported that British Prime Minister David Cameron was among the first world leaders to congratulate Netanyahu: “As one of Israel’s firmest friends, Britain looks forward to working with the new government.” And Fulvio Martusciello, head of the European Parliament delegation for relations with Israel, declared after Netanyahu’s victory, “What is important at this stage is not to isolate Israel.” So are world leaders alienated from Netanyahu, or is that the Times’ wishful thinking?
How many newspapers or broadcasts reported on Hanin Zoabi, one of the Arabs elected to the new Knesset? During the campaign Zoabi told Lebanese media that Arab Knesset members represent the “Palestinian national project,” not the Israel in whose parliament she’ll serve. She has called for an Islamic uprising and defended the kidnapping and murder of the three teenaged Israeli boys last summer. She supports Hamas. She has proven to be so verbally flammable, in violation of laws, that only a Supreme Court decision (overseen by the Arab justice Salim Joubran) allowed Zoabi to remain on the ballot. Perhaps if more American journalists were as eager to report the anti-Israel anger of Zoabi and some others on the Joint Arab List (now the third largest party in the Knesset) it would have given American Jews a better understanding of why Netanyahu’s warning about Arab voters was taken in stride by many Israeli voters, rather than infuriating American Jews who no doubt knew little about the Arab slate.
That Zoabi, a pro-Hamas candidate, was allowed to stay on the ballot by the decision of an Arab judge, a ruling fully accepted by everyone including the prime minister, certainly went against the storyline of Netanyahu’s supposedly anti-Arab vote suppression.
On PBS, Charlie Rose assembled a wonderful post-election panel: Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic; Ari Shavit of Haaretz; Yossi Klein Halevi, author of “Like Dreamers”; Ronen Bergman of Yediot; Lisa Goldman, the Israeli-Palestine fellow at the New America Foundation; and Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End The Israeli Occupation. But of the six, not one was a “happy warrior” for Netanyahu, the winner.
Shavit said this was “a referendum on hope versus fear, and sadly fear won over hope.”
Is fear not a valid Israeli emotion when the “barbarians” (ISIS) are at the gate, they of the beheadings and burning alive? ISIS is a morning’s drive from Jerusalem and could easily consume a weak Palestinian state. To the west, the tunnels of Hamas. To the east, the nuclear plants of Iran. What’s not to fear?
If Israel has to go alone, so be it, writes The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephens: “Repay contempt with contempt. Mr. Obama plays to classic bully type. He is abusive and surly only toward those he feels are either too weak, or too polite, to hit back…. The Israelis will need to chart their own path of resistance…. Israel survived its first 19 years without meaningful U.S. patronage. For now, all it has to do is get through the next 22, admittedly long, months.”
Post-Election, An Unbecoming Sense of Doom
Elli Fischer
Special To The Jewish Week
Elli Fischer
On the morning after last week’s Israeli elections, Knesset member Zehava Gal-On wrote the following to supporters of Meretz, the left-wing party she chairs:
“Nobody in our camp should have the gall to say that the voters disappointed us. On the contrary: we disappointed them. … If the public chose to diminish Meretz’s power, if it chose to give Netanyahu another term, it is I alone who must draw conclusions…”
To say that Gal-On was disappointed in the results of the election is an understatement, and yet her mature and dignified response acknowledges that the left failed to offer a compelling alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. More than any recent election, this one was a referendum on the prime minister, and Israelis re-elected the incumbent because the challengers failed to convince voters to replace him. Gal-On did not blame Netanyahu’s “race-baiting” or “fear-mongering,” perhaps because she gives Israeli voters more credit than that. She did not rip Netanyahu for statements he made during the last lap of the election cycle or behave as though Netanyahu had just run over her dog.
In contrast, leading American liberal Zionist leaders refuse to consider why Netanyahu was re-elected; instead, they focus on Netanyahu’s campaign statements, questioning whether they can continue to love Israel, professing that it is easy to fall into despair, proclaiming the end of the Zionist dream, and calling on fellow progressive Zionists to punish — yes, punish — the Israeli government for rejecting a peace plan that they urge President Obama to articulate.
Two statements made by Netanyahu at the tail end of the campaign have come under close scrutiny. The first — “The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are going en masse to the polls” — was unquestionably alienating to one-fifth of Israel’s citizenry. But when one paraphrases this as “Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that Israel was endangered by Israeli Arabs exercising their right to vote,” shifting from “the right-wing government” to “Israel” being in danger, it is a distortion. Unprecedented Arab turnout indeed makes it more difficult for Netanyahu to form a right-wing coalition, a fact that he laments and others celebrate. As a last-minute election ploy, it was divisive, cheap and alienating, exposing some of the worst elements of Israeli society — bad enough without overstating the case.
As to Netanyahu’s statement that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch, one need not be a Talmud scholar to understand how it is compatible with his acceptance of the two-state principle. The reflexive interpretation of the doomsayers, under which Netanyahu never negotiated in good faith, is extraordinarily uncharitable. In fact, a majority of Israelis accept the two-state principle but as a pragmatic matter are very wary of an agreement during a period of regional instability and without certain safeguards. Understanding this position — which lies between the outright rejectionism of the hard right and the end-the-occupation-now voices on the far left — goes a long way to explaining Netanyahu’s appeal to Israeli voters.
But even if Netanyahu lied, he would not be the first to lie in a campaign speech. Ariel Sharon promised while running for prime minister in 2002 that he would not unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip; in 2005 he did just that. Speaking at AIPAC on June 4, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency, declared: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” Two days later, he “clarified” the statement — “walked it back” in the current parlance: it would not be divided by barbed wire, and it would remain Israel’s capital and also be the capital of a Palestinian state. Obama’s White House has stuck to the clarified/revised position, condemning Israel whenever plans to build homes in Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem are approved at any level. What Netanyahu and Obama have in common, if nothing else, is that they are politicians, masters of exploiting ambiguities to allow for multiple subsequent interpretations and clarifications.
The shame of it all is that the self-fulfilling prophecies of estrangement of American Jews and their Israeli counterparts misread the Israeli political map. In these elections, Labor won more seats than in any election since 1999. Arab representation grew while the right remained the same size. That is, even those who loathe the Israeli right (and many Israelis held their noses while voting Likud) have plenty of Israelis with whom to connect. Netanyahu’s “landslide” gave his party a mere 25 percent of the Knesset as opposed to Labor’s 20 percent. So Israel is not a “red state.” If anything, it is a “swing state,” though in truth it is far more colorful than that.
Disappointment in the wake of Netanyahu’s unexpected victory is understandable, but statements like “How do you love a country whose government is not aligned with your core values?” seem fickle. Governments come and go, and the left — to one’s chagrin or delight — will rise again. As Meretz’s Gal-On concludes:
“Keep your heads up. … I know full well that politics ebb and flow. ... Maybe it seems distant … but we will return to the government. Not because we deserve it, but because we will work hard together to make change…”
Until then, and even then, Israel will always be much more than its politicians. Today, as always, Israel remains a vibrant, wildly democratic, infuriating, frustrating,argumentative, innovative, constantly evolving and downright wonderful little country.
Elli Fischer, who lives in Israel, is a writer, Hebrew-English translator and frequent contributor to these pages.
Double Standard, Selective Hypocrisy
Words matter.”
That’s what White House press secretary Joshua Earnest said the other day in explaining why President Obama was coming down so hard on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for seeming to renege on his 2009 declaration in favor of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Earnest added that every world leader understands the importance of the declarations they make regarding state policy. But what about the repeated statements the supreme leader of Iran makes calling for the end of the Zionist state, or his condemnation of the U.S. as evil? Do those words matter as well?
The same question could be asked about statements President Obama has made, and then backtracked on. One was his statement at the annual AIPAC conference in 2008, when he was first running for president. Then-Sen. Obama received an ovation when he declared, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” Two days later he clarified his remark, explaining that he meant Jerusalem would not be physically divided but would also be the capital of a Palestinian state.
Four years later, Obama pledged that any indication of Syria using chemical weapons in its civil war would cross a red line, calling for U.S. intervention. But he ignored his own commitment on learning less than a year later that Syria had indeed been using chemical weapons against its enemies. That moment signaled to Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other states in the region that the U.S. could not be relied on to take military action.
Words, indeed, do matter. The fact that the president, through his spokesman and is own comments, has been selective in pointing a finger of hypocrisy at Netanyahu, refusing to accept his attempts at clarification and apology, is itself an example of double standards. The focus on Israel’s level of commitment to a two-state solution omits the fact that it is the Israelis who have made the offers and compromises for more than two decades of on-again, off-again peace talks. It is the Palestinians who have, in the end and for whatever reason, rejected them all. Not to mention the problematic reality that a resolution of the conflict calls for a Palestinian state that reconciles the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which controls Gaza and is as big a threat to the PA as it is to Israel.
So while it is true that Netanyahu’s pre-election statement was a serious blunder at best and more likely a calculated political effort to secure a Likud victory, it is also true that Isaac Herzog of the Zionist Union shares the same belief that Israel lacks a serious partner on the Palestinian side and that without one there is no hope for resolving the conflict at present.
Netanyahu has been criticized widely, and deservedly so, for his mistake. But Obama’spersistence in publicly attacking the prime minister of America’s only democratic ally in the Mideast is an untoward act of revenge, beneath the dignity of his office. He appears to be jeopardizing Israeli security over a personal animus toward Israel’s democratically elected leader.
Surely one underlying reason for this anger is the different positions of Obama and Netanyahu on the all-important effort to ensure that Iran does not become a nuclear threat to the West in general and Israel in particular. It was Netanyahu who spoke out against the threat years before the U.S. focused on it, and it was Netanyahu who advocated economic sanctions when the administration resisted. Now thekey difference is that the U.S. talks about preventing Iran from having the bomb, while Jerusalem seeks to keep Iran from reaching a nuclear threshold and the ability to quickly produce a bomb.
Throughout this long debate over the best way to proceed, both Obama and Netanyahu have stated that no deal with Iran is better than a bad deal. Now, though, it seems clear that the U.S. very much wants a deal, convinced that through close monitoring and other means, Iran will comply. Netanyahu, for the reasons he stated clearly and emphatically in his speech to Congress, insists that the U.S. and its partners are about to sign on to “a very bad deal.”
It’s an honest difference that surely should have been dealt with more effectively in private than in public. Going forward, though, as Netanyahu puts together a ruling coalition and another deadline on the Iran talks nears, it is time for the president and the prime minister to put aside their personal differences and work together for the safety and security of their nations. There is too much at stake for them to fail.
Also this week, Israelis living in New York struggle with fitting in; a revival of "An American In Paris" puts new emphasis on the Holocaust; remembering Yehuda Avner, the former diplomat and author of "The Prime Ministers" who died in Jerusalem this week at 86; and our special Passover section, with gift ideas, recipes, and a roundup on new Haggadahs.
An Uneasy Family: Israel, Expats And American Jews
As Israeli-Americans come into their own, they’re forging stronger ties with their new home — and the one they left behind.
Orli Santo
Staff Writer
Oren Heiman, Chairman of Moatza Mekomit New York, speaking at ambassador Ido Aharoni’s (right) home reception.
So who are we now — to the country we left behind, to the people we are becoming a part of, and most importantly, to ourselves?
Earlier this month, representatives of the State of Israel, American Jewry and New York’s Israeli diaspora took a break from politics (if such a thing is possible in the run-up to the recent Israeli elections) and got together to talk about their relationship. Representing Israel was Ambassador Ido Aharoni, consul-general of Israel in New York. David Mallach, UJA-Federation of New York’s managing director of the Commission on the Jewish People, and Michael Foreman, a UJA board member, were stand-ins for American Jewry. Speaking on behalf of the Israeli-Americans were Oren Heiman, chairman of Moatza Mekomit NY, an umbrella organization for the region’s Israeli community, and an audience of 20-some prominent Israeli-Americans. The meeting, organized by Moatza, took place in Aharoni’s Upper East Side living room, giving it the feel of an oversized family therapy session.
This feeling is rooted in reality. Dynamics between the communities have often resembled those of a dysfunctional family, with Israel as the estranged motherland, American Jews the well-intended but ultimately clueless adoptive parents and us Israeli-Americans as the problem child caught in between.
Recently, however, things have been changing. In the past, Israel famously relinquished ties to its emigrants, denouncing us as deserters and betrayers of the Zionist dream — a “fallout of weaklings,” as former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin put it in a 1976 interview. But representing the country’s current mindset, Aharoni stated that “the state of Israel has changed its attitude to the whole issue of Israelis living abroad,” and that nowadays it views us as a viable part of Israeli society. This is an important distinction: While we are now going by the term “Israeli-Americans,” until very recently an Israeli living outside of Israel was nothing but a “Yored,” one who “goes down,” the opposite of an “Oleh” who rises up by moving to Israel.
Aharoni pinned Israel’s change of heart on the new technological era of global connectivity, in which nationality is a matter of self-identification rather than of geography. But more importantly, he admitted, it’s about Israel’s PR needs. “Whenever we talk about Israel, it’s always when Israel needs something, when Israel’s in trouble, when there’s some crisis that needs to be resolved,” said the ambassador. “We need to have a conversation about Israel that takes place in an entirely different context.”
Talking about “generating a Bingo moment” for Israel — a marketing term that describes the moment in which a product matches the interests of the consumer — Aharoni went on to explain how Israelis living abroad can now serve as Israel’s marketing partners on the ground, “penetrating the information bubbles” regarding Israel within their respective communities and “telling the story of Israel as a bastion of creativity, innovation, improvement.”
As an example of “the kind of relationships we would like to have with Israeli-Americans,” Aharoni mentioned the recent “Beyond” conference, a collaboration between New York’s Israeli consulate and New Jersey’s Mana Contemporary arts hub. The conference, which took place on March 10, featured Israeli and Israeli-American speakers in many fields, from famous chefs and artists to successful businessmen, who talked about their experiences of Israel solely “in the context of inspiration.”
Another example was a recent event organized by a local Israeli book club, which featured author Reuven (Ruby) Namdar, one of Aharoni’s guests that evening. Based in New York, Namdar is the first Israeli living outside of Israel to be awarded the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award — perhaps Israel’s clearest signal yet that it’s ready to redefine its relationships with its diaspora.
In its ties to American Jewry, UJA’s Mallach said that “the Israeli-American community is doing better, but still has a ways to go.” Mallach noted that for a variety of reasons — “part the fault of American Jewry, part the fault of the Israeli government, part the fault of Israeli-Americans” — Israeli-Americans have for a long time refused to see themselves as part of the Jewish-American community, and the Jewish-American community responded in kind. This too has been changing. Rising intermarriage rates and the younger generations’ declining interest in Jewish institutions have caused American Jews to reach out to the Israeli population, seeing it as “new blood” that could help revitalize the system. The Israeli diaspora, now entering its third generation, has finally recognized that their children’s children “will either be Jews, or they will not be Jews. They’re not going to be Israelis,” as Moatza’s Heiman put it.
But even though we are working together better now than in the past, the Israeli community is still far from being smoothly integrated into the Jewish one. It is a telling sign, said Mallach, that the only Jewish-American organization Israelis habitually donate to is Friends of the IDF.
This might just be a matter of time. “Other immigrant groups, like the Russian Jews, needed first to coalesce unto themselves, to figure out who they were, before they were ready to take the next step and join the broader community,” said Foreman.
Over the past two years, we have done some remarkable “coalescing unto ourselves.” The 2013 birth of the UJA-backed Moatza, followed by the opening of a New York chapter of the Israeli American Council, or IAC, the largest Israeli-American organization to date, had transformed the region’s once disparate Israeli population into a dynamic and effective network.
Judging by the audiences’ remarks, we are now in the midst of the “figuring out who we are” stage. Each person in the room seemed to weigh his Israeli/American/Jewish aspects differently: people referred to themselves as Israelis living in America, Americans raised in Israel, emigrants, immigrants, expats, in-betweeners, internationals; statements ranged from “No matter how much I try to be an American, I’ll always be the girl from Shuk Machne Yehuda,” through “there’s nothing for me in a synagogue,” to “I’m still a Jew, but I stopped being an Israeli when I left Israel.”
“[We are an] Israeli-Jewish diaspora, living in New York, treating New York as our physical home while keeping Israel as our spiritual home,” asserted Heiman, who is a lawyer by profession.
The one apparent point of consensus was the kids. “This is not about us — we know who we are, where we came from,” said Anat Levi Feinberg. “This is about our children. It’s our responsibility to make sure they have the tools to become part of the Jewish peoplehood, because if they do not, in the end of the day what will they stay with?” Feinberg, a program developer at the JCC of Fort Lee, is currently working on a bar/bat mitzvah program that will bring together Israeli and JewishAmerican families, which will study, celebrate and ultimately bridge the cultural differences.
Thankfully, even though we are all involved, hardly a word of politics was breathed throughout the evening. This is an encouraging sign: the elections may have affected relationships between Israel, America and American Jewry in myriad ways, but there is still a chance that the forming Israeli-Jewish-American identity will not be affected. Whoever we turn out to be, we are all and none of the above, and we have our own thing going. editor@jewishweek.org
Beefing Up The Backstory Of ‘An American In Paris’
Creators of revival seeking to convey the emotional toll of the occupation and the Holocaust.
Lonnie Firestone
Special To The Jewish Week
The cast of “An American in Paris.” The new script is rewritten “as a more complex narrative.” Angela Sterling
For Broadway producer Stuart Oken, there are few career moments as transformative as receiving an invitation from the Gershwin family. A lifelong fan of Gershwin’s standards and symphonic works, Oken jumped at the opportunity for a meeting where he was asked to adapt the 1951 film, “An American in Paris,” into a Broadway musical. However, as a producer specifically of new musicals, Oken was hesitant about developing a show that “felt like a revival”; in other words, that it felt old. Adding to that was the film’s vague storyline and tenuous historical context.
“An American in Paris” is ostensibly, he says, “the story of an end of a war and a group of people repurposing their lives in a devastating time.” But the film evaded its subject matter “by setting it in 1950 and making it in a backlot Hollywood environment. They took away anything authentic about the war.” If Oken agreed to produce the musical, he would have to find a way to make it new. And for Oken, the “new” element would be a more honest reckoning with history.
When “An American in Paris,” the musical, opens at the Palace Theatre on April 12, it will be more than 63 years after the film premiered, and more than 86 years after George Gershwin debuted his eponymous composition at the New York Philharmonic. In response to a commission from the conductor Walter Damrosch in 1928, Gershwin submitted a symphonic poem that captured his experiences on the streets of Paris during an extended visit that year. The piece, which he titled, “An American in Paris,” presented shifting musical motifs to demarcate his experiences in a foreign city. In the opening measures, Gershwin wrote, a visitor “absorbs the French culture,” followed by “rich blues” representing an episode of homesickness, and ultimately a conclusion in which “the street noises and French atmosphere are triumphant.”
The film, “An American in Paris,” produced more than two decades later and directed by Vincent Minnelli, situates the narrative at the end of World War II. At the start of the film, Gene Kelly’s character delivers his opening lines in voiceover: “This is Paris. And I’m an American who lives here. My name is Jerry Mulligan and I’m an ex-GI.” Choreographed by Kelly himself, the movie is the love story of Jerry and a French girl named Lise (Leslie Caron) set against a Technicolor background resembling Paris and featuring Gershwin’s 1928 composition, here presented as a lengthy ballet sequence that has become the most lauded part of the movie. (The film won sixAcademy Awards including Best Picture.)
For Oken, who has shepherded the new musical since its inception and holds the title of lead producer, the challenge in adapting this “perfect yet imperfect” film meant rewriting the script as a more complex narrative and finding a director who would make that vision come alive with the right performers. Oken signed Craig Lucas, a prolific playwright who collaborated on the 2003 Broadway musical “The Light in the Piazza,” as the book writer. In selecting a director, Oken felt that dance, being an essential narrative device in the story, necessitated a singular director/choreographer, particularly one who understood ballet. He took a risk and reached beyond the world of theater to venerated ballet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.
Wheeldon’s role as director would be to tell the story through dance, dialogue and song as the film does, and, transcending the parameters of the film, to convey the emotional toll of the occupation and the Holocaust. Just as ambitiously, he would need to reveal, through his characters, the healing power of art.
The creative team, including Wheeldon, Oken and Lucas, began by exploring each character’s circumstance and backstory. More specifically, they had to determine why each is in Paris at the start of story. Their decision to shift the year backward to 1945, a handful of years earlier than the film, proved subtle but significant. The occupation of Paris had just ended and there was an immediate sense of rebirth for Parisians able to see French flags displayed where Nazi ones had recently flown.
The American GI, Jerry, has just been discharged from military service and, feeling psychologically unprepared to return home, decides to stay in Paris and attemptto make money as a painter, his passion before the war. Lise is a Jewish-French girl who has lived in hiding during the war with a compassionate French family, the Baurels, whose son Henri has become a close companion to her. Both of Lise’s parents were killed — a detail that is glossed over in the film. Henri and Jerry are both attracted to Lise, as is Adam Hochberg, a Jewish-American composer who was injured in the war, and like Jerry, has stayed in Paris hoping to find income as an artist.
The songs these characters sing — “S’Wonderful,” “I’ve Got Rhythm” and “Our Love is Here to Stay” — are still joyous, but in this production, the characters reach out for empathy more than entertainment.
As Wheeldon sees the central narrative, “Lise yearns for true love; this yearning partly comes from a place of deep sadness over the loss of her parents. She is expected to marry Henri, whose family has protected her through the occupation, but she feels real passionate love for Jerry. Jerry yearns for true love also; he and Lise connect over their desire to leave the war behind them.”
Wheeldon’s insight into the musical comes with experience. In 2005 he choreographed the ballet from “An American in Paris” for the New York City Ballet. He also choreographed an earlier musical adaptation, written by the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein and directed by Sir Nicholas Hytner. But, according to Oken, the work never got to a place that satisfied the creative team. The current version is Wheeldon’s first attempt at directing a Broadway musical and his lead actors are theater newcomers as well: Leanne Cope (Lise) is a First Artist with the Royal Ballet, and Robert Fairchild (Jerry) is a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet.
The challenge for Wheeldon has been daunting but exhilarating. “I discovered that like most things in life, jumping in at the deep end is a great way to learn fast,” he says. “I tell stories in movement and have to find the right dance vocabulary to do that. In book scenes, the words are there already so it becomes about finding truth in the moment.”
In casting the show, Oken knew that Wheeldon would need “true quadruple threats [acting, singing, dancing, and pointe] and it would be easier to find people in the world of ballet who can sing and act as opposed to finding a theater actor who has training in ballet.”
Considering another challenge in the creative process, Oken wondered if audiences might have “Gershwin fatigue.” After all, Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” ran in 2012, as well as did another musical called “Nice Work If You Can Get It” that featured Gershwin songs. But as “An American in Paris” came together, and especially following the positive reception it receive in Paris, he has become more confident in its prospects for Broadway success. At the world premiere this winter at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, critics and audiences were rapturous. Sarah Crompton at the Telegraph wrote, “this is emphatically not a stage version of the much-loved 1951 film but a thorough-going rethinking.”
The soon-to-open production brings the buzz of advance critical praise combined with the audience-pleasing timelessness of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. In fact, the stage version of “An American in Paris” has much in common with shows like “South Pacific” and “The Sound of Music,” says Oken. There is the clash of two cultures, the experience of a foreign country, and the emergence of national identity. “So what happens,” he says, “is you tell personal stories set against larger landscapes.”
‘The Consummate Ambassador’
Remembering Yehuda Avner, confidante to prime ministers, former consul general in New York.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Ambassador Yehuda Avner shared a humorous anecdote at a Jewish Week Forum in April 2013. Michael Datikash/JW
Ambassador Yehuda Avner’s life story seems to encapsulate the 20th-century Jewish experience.
Avner, who died at his home in Jerusalem on Tuesday at the age of 86, made aliyah alone at 17 from Manchester, England, fought in the War of Independence, helped found Kibbutz Lavi in the Galilee, became a diplomat (including consul general of New York and ambassador to Great Britain and Australia), and served five prime ministers as senior adviser, speech writer and confidante. He was particularly close with Yitzchak Rabin and Menachem Begin.
Long after his retirement he compiled many of the careful notes he took at private meetings between Israeli leaders and heads of state, including several U.S. presidents, and turned them into the core of his 2010 best-selling memoir, “The Prime Ministers,” which later was made into a two-part film documentary.
“I was a naughty boy because I never threw away my scribbles,” he once told me. Finding those notes in a drawer in his Jerusalem apartment led to three years of work in writing the book, a 700-page tome that never lags as it describes poignant moments in Jewish history as well as the lighter, personal side of world leaders.
Avner, a charming, thoughtful and kind man, marveled at his second career, launched in his early 80s, which included authoring a recently completed novel.
“Young people come up to me as if I was some kind of rebbe,” he confided during one of his popular book tours to the U.S. And indeed he was both sage and mentor, often holding court at a coffee shop in the Rechavia neighborhood apartment complex where he lived. That’s how I met him in 2004 after reading a number of vignettes on Israeli and world leaders he published in the Jerusalem Post. He always had time to shmooze, take interest in my work and offer advice about whatever crisis was consuming Israel at the time.
One timely theme of Avner’s, which runs through “The Prime Ministers,” is that crises in U.S.-Israel relations have occurred since the days of David Ben-Gurion. He quoted often the eternal wisdom of King Solomon’s words: “This, too, shall come to pass.”
“There are still existential issues that accompany every prime minister,” he told me in 2010, when Prime Minister Netanyahu was under pressure from President Obama to extend Israel’s 10-month moratorium on settlement construction. (Netanyahu declined.) “There were times [over the years] when it was touch-and- go,” he recalled, noting that “many of the problems that the founders of the state confronted still remain, like borders and security.”
As the Iran negotiations dominate the news today, it’s fitting to quote the first of what Avner called his own 10 Commandments for the Jewish people:
“When an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him.”
His son-in-law, David Sable, a prominent New York businessman and member of The Jewish Week board of directors, called Avner “Begin’s Shakespeare,” an articulate champion of the Jewish people, and noted that his father-in-law dedicated his life to the State of Israel.
“He was a true servant of the Jewish people,” Sable wrote in a statement Tuesday. “In his role as adviser to the generation of legendary leaders of Israel he was never political, never took personal gain, never shied from conflict. With his bag always packed he went; listened, advised and wrote, giving voice to the prime ministers he served and voice to our cause and our people.”
Describing Avner as “the consummate ambassador,” Sable wrote that his father-in-law was “respected by friend and foe alike,” and that “his gift is his words, which will live on and continue to inspire generations around the world.”
May his memory be a blessing.
Freedom’s Bounty
Cool, eco-friendly, tasty and ritually minded gift ideas for Pesach.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
A gorgeous wooden bowl
For the polite Passover guest, it’s nice to show up with a dish or gift in hand. For those taking the latter route, here are a selection of gifts that have both beauty and meaning, with some fun, too.
This gorgeous wooden bowl looks like the fair trade, eco-chic version of my grandmother’s Passover chopping shissel. Hand-carved by artisans in Yanesha, Peru, the round bowl with two handles is made of sustainably sourced higuerilla wood from the Amazon rainforest. “Sobremesa,” the name of the company, means “over the table,” meant to capture the idea of savoring conversation and company at a meal — so inherent to the Passover seder.
$124. Magpie, 488 Amsterdam Ave. (646) 998-3002, Magpienewyork.com
The themes of the holiday align so closely with the life of President Abraham Lincoln. Buy tickets for guests and hosts to see the exhibitions “Lincoln and the Jews” at the New-York Historical Society and “Lincoln Speaks: Words that Transformed a Nation” at the Morgan Library, both in Manhattan, and take in his greatness. Read history or biographies, Jewish studies or fiction — or a Haggadah — and use this Abraham Lincoln brass bookmark for inspiration and to keep your place. And the closest thing to following in the footsteps of the 16th president may be to walk in these Lincoln socks (for men and women, green and black).
Abraham Lincoln Bookmark, $11.95; Abraham Lincoln Socks $10; New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, 170 Central Park West, (212) 485-9202,shop.nyhistory.org, Morgan Library, 225 Madison Ave.
Modern and traditional cooks have come up with endless varieties of charoset — the mix of fruit, nuts and spices meant to resemble mortar, served at the seder. Made by the Israeli pottery group A Half Cup of Sugar, this dish, especially made for charoset, features folkloric decoration along with a recipe in Hebrew printed on one side, with the English translation included.
$38 ($34.20 Jewish Museum members)
The symbolic foods at the centerpiece of the seder table can be shifted, reconfigured and made your own, with the Tangram Seder Plate, with its triangular and square-shaped dishes handmade in Israel by Studio Armadillo.
$288 ($259.20 Jewish Museum members)
To get the texture of this ceramic matzah plate to resemble the texture of matzah, artists Ran Amitai and Gilli Kuchik of Bakery Studio in Tel Aviv used actual matzah to make the original model and mold. The tactile handmade plate that really does feel like matzah can be used to serve sheets of the unleavened bread or other Passover specialties.
$115 ($103.50 Jewish Museum members) The Jewish Museum Shop, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3233, shop.thejewishmuseum.org
At the 2013 state dinner hosted by then-President Shimon Peres in honor of President Obama’s visit to Israel, Flam Blanc wine was served. Drink the same fine blend of sauvignon blanc and chardonnay from the Judean Hills at your seder.
Give the gift of discovering new kosher wine through a membership in the Kosher Wine Club, which features many fine Israeli wines. Each monthly shipment includes two bottles of featured wine with information about the vintages and the regions they come from, along with tasting notes — geared to novices, aficionados and connoisseurs.
Flam Blanc, $29.99 (free shipping if ordering a case), and at local wine shops.
Kosher Wine Club available at three levels: Discover. $34.99 monthly (plus shipping), Premium $59.99 monthly (free shipping), and “90+Rating.” $79.99 monthly, (free shipping). All orders include a $50 credit. Kosherwine.com
For 30 years, Jeannie Gesthalter has been selling hats in Cedarhurst, L.I., attracting customers from all over to Jeannie’s Dream. Now, Gesthalter is living out her real dream of opening a second shop in Manhattan, where she makes her home. Last month, she opened Jeannie’s Dream on West 72nd Street, with a collection of more than 500 handmade hats from New York, England and Italy. “Every hat is fitted to the person,” says Gesthalter, who has a good eye for creating one-of-a-kind hats by adding flowers, feathers and other decoration. They also sell all kinds of hair accessories. “It’s always a great time for a hat,” she says, noting that Passover marks the change of season, back to brighter colors and softer fabrics.
Hand-sewn, collapsible hat, with trim $279 (trim, as shown, an additional $109), Jeannie’s Dream, 245 W. 72nd St. (between Broadway and West End), (212) 595-0100, jeanniesdream.net
The goldfinch symbolizes new beginnings, appropriate as the month of Nissan is the first month of the Jewish new year (not to be confused with the month of Tishrei, the seventh month on the Jewish calendar and the time of Rosh HaShanah, when the year rolls over into the next). This detailed embroidery, designed in Brooklyn and manufactured in India, features a stunning goldfinch with an open door in the background. The piece is presented in a white wooden frame
$104. Magpie, 488 Amsterdam Ave., (646) 998-3002, Magpienewyork.com
Celebrate spring with an air plant that lives — and thrives — on air and water (no soil necessary). The graceful and petite hanging planters in glazed ceramic pots are handmade in Brooklyn by Cor Pottery.
$29. Magpie, 488 Amsterdam Ave., (646) 998-3002, Magpienewyork.com
“The easy-way-out-of Passover Cookbook” by Mindy Ginsberg (Gefen) presents simple, flavorful, contemporary recipes for the holiday, including hard-to-find staples and adaptations of year-round recipes. Ginsberg’s easygoing, flexible style is a boost in the stressful days leading up the holiday. And the book, with its spiral at the top, has a built in stand for convenient use in the kitchen.
$12.95 in bookstores. Gefenpublishing.com
Drawing on the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, a new line of “Desert Jewels” is inspired by the mountain people living in the deserts of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The hand-enameled bracelets and pendants allude to the colors of desert landscapes and painted tiles.
North African Openwork Charm Necklace, 24k` overlay, $375.
Berber enameled cuff, small, $225. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. (or one of its stores), (800) 662-3397, store.metmuseum.org
A startling statistic as we plan our Passover celebrations: Today, there are still some 30 million people who are slaves.
Rabbi Debra Orenstein of Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson, N.J., is leading a campaign to free people still held in slavery around the world, and to use the seder as an opportunity to discuss issues related to contemporary slavery. She calculates that if every Jewish person attending a seder were to donate $18 to Free the Slaves — anorganization working to end slavery and the conditions that allow it to exist — sufficient funds would be raised to free 75,315 people. That assumes an average cost of $950 to free a slave.
Free the Slaves works with community-based organizations in Africa, India and South America, freeing slaves and keeping them free, with resources they need to sustain themselves. Based on past experience, with $1800, Free the Slaves can rescue 1-2 people, provide services to three survivors, pay for protective services for 1-2 villages, educate about 65 people on how to protect themselves against traffickers and train one police officer or other government official.
As Rabbi Orenstein says, “There is no better expression of our gratitude or use of our freedom this Passover than to extend an ‘outstretched arm’ and free someone now enslaved.”
To make a contribution, FreetheSlaves.net/Judaism (free online seder resources are available here)
Gefilte Quenelles with Braised Leeks and Lemon Zest
The Morgans' gefilte fish, with a twist.
Jeff Morgan started his career in the 1980s as a Jewishly indifferent musician living it up in southern France. Yet in the early aughts, he found himself dissolved in tears across the dinner table from one of the biggest kosher winemakers, sobbing about “making the best kosher wine in 5,000 years.”
His movement from music to wine — becoming a husband and father along the way — has most recently produced a new cookbook, “The Covenant Kitchen: Food and Wine for the New Jewish Table” (Schocken), named after the 12-year-old kosher California winery he co-owns with his wife, Jodie, and another winemaker. Jodie and Jeff co-wrote the book, too.
“After growing up in assimilated, secular families, we have rediscovered our Jewish heritage while making kosher wine,” they write in the introduction to the book. “It has been a wonderful awakening.”
Jeff’s journey toward Jewish winemaking, and Judaism, began when as a 19-year-old studying the flute in France he realized that he had “been eating badly my whole life.” He started paying attention to the contents of his plate and his glass, and by the time he left France was oenophile enough to try his hand at winemaking back home at one of the early Long Island vineyards. Both Jeff and Jodie are native New Yorkers.
Jeff and Jodie’s daughters were born on the Island, along with a career for Jeff as wine journalist that culminated in a job as the Wine Spectator’s West Coast editor.
It was in Northern California that the Morgans had their world-changing encounter with Jewish winemakers. Jeff belonged to the tasting group “Jewish Vintners of Napa,” whose members were Jewish makers of non-kosher wine. He invited Eli Ben Zaken of Israeli winery Domaine du Castel to a meeting as his guest.
The other vintners liked Ben Zaken’s offerings from his own vineyard, which triggered in Jeff the ambition to make the best kosher wine in Jewish history — that’s what had him all verkelmpt at dinner with Nathan Herzog, whose Royal Wine Corp. is the largest kosher winemaker and importer.
Jeff had an investor, winemaker Leslie Rudd of Oakville Estate, but what he didn’t have was the Shabbat-observant winemaking crew necessary to secure kosher certification for his product. Jeff planned to produce his wine in a part of Northern California where there was no Orthodox synagogue. Royal’s winery is further south. Jeff asked Herzog to lend him — a potential competitor — his crew. Maybe it was beshert?
“He said, ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you meshuggeneh’”? when Jeff started crying. But then he said the Morgans could use his crew, if Royal could distribute their wines in New York and New Jersey, a handshake deal still in effect.
“Some kind of Yiddishkeit chord had been touched,” Jeff said.
Now it’s a symphony. What started out as a winemaking challenge has become a religious experience. Making kosher wine has transformed the Morgans’ lives, Jeff said.
“I learned about Mincha, Maariv and something called davening,” he said. “I’d barely been in a synagogue my whole life. I started reading about Judaism and teaching myself Hebrew.
It was a pretty steep learning curve, but I got connected.”
He became a bar mitzvah at 56 and at 61, he joined Beth Israel, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Berkeley, where he had moved the winery in 2013. He drives his grapes from Napa to Berkeley in a truck and makes the wine — 14 different kinds — in a 7,000-square-foot building that used to be a factory. Covenant Wines crushed 150 tons of grapes last year.
“We turned that building into the first functional urban kosher winery to exist since Prohibition,” he said. “There’s a kitchen in the winery; it’s kosher. And we’re kosher at home.”
Indeed, the new book has the imprimatur of the Orthodox Union, whose kashrut arm is the country’s premier certifying agency. The OU also certifies Covenant’s wines. OU Kosher’s chief executive officer, Rabbi Menachem Genack, wrote the first of the book’s three introductions.
Like a more traditional kosher cookbook, “The Covenant Kitchen” designates each recipe meat, dairy or pareve; it also has instructions for how to keep kosher at home. But it also expands that template. There’s information about wine varietals, suggested pairings and a focus on a Mediterranean-inspired cuisine that includes Jewish classics and gives them and all the other dishes a Bay Area flavor. Fish Soup with Matzo Balls and Aioli, anyone?
“The Morgans, so experienced and knowledgeable in their fields, have been on a path of discovery of the laws and traditions of kosher, or kashrut,” he wrote. “Integrating this information into a contemporary cookbook is not an easy task, and “The Covenant Kitchen” is a masterful expression of how one can create modern recipes without sacrificing the standards of a kosher home.”
Jeff’s grandmother Alice Solomon used to make gefilte fish from the fresh northern pike that Jeff’s grandfather Lester would catch in the lake outside their summer cabin in Wisconsin. Alice’s gefilte fish bore little resemblance to the store-bought gefilte fish dumplings typically seen at Passover, but they did resemble the light-textured fish quenelles — or fish dumplings — we have often enjoyed in France. Which is how we came up with this recipe.
Don’t wait for Passover to enjoy them. They make a wonderful year-round first course or main course. Leftovers are great for lunch too. A hint of ginger, fennel, and coriander adds a subtle, exotic touch. (Horseradish is not recommended.) These quenelles can be served chilled or at room temperature.
For best results, prepare these pink-hued salmon dumplings a day in advance and let them soak, refrigerated, in their broth. They can be plated in minutes.
Pair with a refreshing, chilled white wine such as Sauvignon Blanc, Roussane, Chenin Blanc, or Chardonnay. Fruity Riesling or Gewürztraminer would be good too.
Slideshow
Yield:
Serves 6 as a main course, 10-12 as a first courseActive Time:
1 hr 30 minTotal Time:
3 hrs 45 minHideIngredients
Gefilte Quenelles with Braised Leeks and Lemon Zest
2 pounds salmon fillets, skinned, cut into 1-to 2-inch cubes
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
1/4 cup chopped onion, plus 1 onion, sliced
2 eggs
2 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
3 carrots, cut into ¼-inch-thick rounds
1 fennel bulb, trimmed and sliced into ¼-inch-thick crescents
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 bottle (750 ml) or 3 cups dry white wine
6 cups water
1 bay leaf
6 to 12 leeks (white part only), well washed (Allow 1 leek per individual portion.)
2 tablespoons finely chopped lemon zest
Place the fish, half the chopped garlic, the ginger, chopped onion, eggs, lemon juice, and 1 teaspoon of the salt in a food processor. In pulse mode, finely chop (but do not puree). Transfer the fish mixture to a large nonreac¬tive bowl. Stir with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula until all the ingre¬dients are well incorporated. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight. (If the fish is not cold enough, it will not hold its shape when you mold it into balls. You can speed up the cooling process by putting the fish in the freezer. But be careful not to let it freeze.)
While the fish is chilling, in a large pot, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the sliced onion and remaining chopped garlic and sauté, stirring occasionally, until the onion is translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the carrots and stir to coat with the oil. Add the fennel and stir until it is coated as well. Continue to sauté, stirring occasionally, until the fennel is soft and fragrant, about 10 minutes. Stir in the thyme, coriander, and the remaining 1 teaspoon salt. Add the wine, water, and bay leaf. Bring the liquid to a boil over high heat, reduce the heat to medium, and simmer, uncovered, for 45 minutes.
Remove the pot from the heat and let the broth cool slightly, about 15 min¬utes. Strain the broth through a fine-mesh sieve and reserve the vegetables from the broth in a covered container and refrigerate. Divide the strained broth between 2 large pots or deep-sided skillets.
Roll the chilled fish mixture into 10 to 12 balls and arrange them on a flat surface covered with wax paper. (If necessary, wet your hands occasionally with cold water to prevent sticking.) Bring the broth in the pots to a boil over high heat. Use a large spoon to gently lay the quenelles into the broth, dividing them between the 2 pots so that they have room to cook without touching each other. Reduce the heat to medium and if the quenelles are not completely submerged, spoon a little broth over the tops. Cover and braise (which means simply to cook in any liquid — in this case the vegetable broth) for 15 minutes.
Turn off the heat, uncover the pots, and let the quenelles cool slightly in the broth for 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer the fish and the broth together to a large covered container and refrigerate overnight or up to 2 days.
A few hours prior to serving the fish, prepare the leeks. Fill a large deep-sided skillet or pan with about ½ inch water and bring to a boil. Lay the leeks in the pan, cover, and cook until they are tender, about 10 minutes. Remove the leeks from the liquid and let cool for 10 or 15 minutes. Cover and reserve in the refrigerator until ready to use.
To serve, halve each leek lengthwise. On individual plates, lay 2 leek halves in an “A” or “teepee” shape, touching at the top but leaving a wide space at the bottom. Set 1 quenelle in between the leeks for a first course; 2 quenelles for a main course. Place a spoonful or two of the reserved broth vegetables around the sides of the fish. Garnish the quenelles with additional juice from the fish broth, the lemon zest, and pepper to taste.
This Year’s Models: More Creativity, Less Commentary
The new crop of Haggadahs tend to the artsy and quirky, not the scholarly.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Haggadahs for baseball lovers, and for Canadians, are among the new offerings for this year’s seders.
A trend in Haggadah publishing is deepening: Out, for the most part, are the commentary-centered Haggadahs that dominated the field for several decades, featuring interpretations of the holiday’s readings and rituals. In, to a growing degree, are individualistic, often artistic versions of the Haggadah.
This year’s crop includes a medieval Catholic Church-sponsored Haggadah study guide, an illuminated version on display at a Manhattan museum, and one based on baseball.
The Unorthodox Haggadah: A Dogma-free Passover for Jews and Other Chosen People. By Nathan Phillips. Designed by Jessica Stewart (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 88 pages. $9.99).
A New Hampshire-born convert to Judaism and advertising agency creative director in New York City, Phillips has produced a Haggadah that contains the traditional parts of the Haggadah, but in barely recognizable form.
Designed for people who find a traditional seder boring, a seder conducted according to Phillips’ Haggadah will be irreverent, irreligious, rude or funny — but never boring. He’s kept the skeleton, and fleshed out the holiday’s readings and rituals in the manner of someone who has a background in comedy. Which Phillips — a veteran of improv — does.
In the Haggadah are the author’s takes on the Israelites’ experience in ancient Egypt (“Years after Moses skedaddled, life in Egypt really sucked for the Jews.”), on matzah (“It’s not very good, but that’s the point. It’s hard to think about suffering with a mouthful of blueberry pie.”) There’s also Phillips’ humorous interpretations of The Four Questions, the biblical plagues, the afikoman and the rest of the Haggadah. All accompanied by equally iconoclastic illustrations.
The only thing missing from the seder’s standard 15 steps is the blessing after the meal. Some Hebrew blessings are included, but with the author’s not-literal translations.
“I wrote ‘The Unorthodox Haggadah’ for people who want to participate in weird rituals, without the hassle of dogma,” Phillips writes in the introduction. ‘If there is a God, he doesn’t want you to follow rules. He wants you to soul clap and battle with swords.”
The Haggadah will be of most use to a seder participant who has some familiarity with the usual Haggadah contents that Phillips’ gently parodies.
He has led seders for several years at home and at the 92nd Street Y.
In his irreverence is reverence for Jewish tradition, he said, calling his Haggadah “an official Jewish document,” fit for use at a Pesach table. “It’s a very Jewish book … a comprehensive celebration of tradition.”
And, he added, “It happens to be a little bit silly.”
The Lieberman Open Orthodox Haggadah. By Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld (Gefen Publishing. 160 pages, $19.95).
At Rabbi Herzfeld’s childhood seders in Staten Island, the people sitting around his family’s holiday table would read commentaries from a wide selection of Haggadahs — “30, 40 … 50 different” Haggadahs — and engage in Passover-related discussions of current events.
The rabbi, for a decade spiritual leader of Ohev Sholom – The National Synagogue in the capitol, wrote his Haggadah with these memories in mind. Essays and commentaries devoted to a wide range of contemporary, often progressive, social issues are designed to foster conversations.
Rabbi Herzfeld, who was ordained by Yeshiva University and served on the staff of Rabbi Avi Weiss at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, wrote his Haggadah as a proponent of Rabbi Weiss’ brand of “Open Orthodoxy” — hence, a “guest voice” by a non-Jew who buys his synagogue’s chametz for Pesach, and readings on such topics as agunot, “fertility challenges,” the kol ishah prohibition of men listening to women’s singing voices, the role of women in Orthodox congregations as spiritual leaders, the Women of the Wall debate, and interaction with “our Christian neighbors.”
For each step of the seder: thought-provoking questions and illustrative drawings.
The rabbi’s central question: “What does it mean to be redeemed?”
The Mosaic Haggadah: Themes of the Passover Haggadah. By David Silberman (Haggadah Publishing, 197 pages. $33).
Silberman’s seders at his Houston home a few decades ago were brief, guided by his young children’s attention span and level of understanding. As they grew older, his seders grew longer, with additions of readings from an eclectic selection of Jewish and non-Jewish sources, including rabbinic scholars and political leaders.
His readings have grown into a Haggadah that features color-coded excerpts divided into six themes that Dr. Silberman, a dentist who grew up in Oklahoma City, found popular among his family members and guests at his annual seders.
The themes are freedom, Israel, gratitude, redemption, family and community. Silberman encourages people using his Haggadah to devote each night’s seder to one theme; he has done the legwork for Jews who invite seder participants to bring such readings but lack his creative touch or organizational skills.
The Haggadah offers the traditional text in Hebrew and English, with readings by such individuals as Winston Churchill, Bob Dylan, Abraham Lincoln, Natan Sharansky and former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
He is at work on a second edition of the Haggadah, with new themes, maybe with artwork.
A Monk’s Passover Haggadah. Edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies and Sarit Shalev-Eyni (Pennsylvania State University Press, 296 pages. $79.95).
A facsimile edition of a manuscript written more than five centuries ago as an educational tool for Catholic clergy, it is intended as an educational tool for contemporary scholars.
“It is the only such document known to exist, a sustained description of a Passover seder and Haggadah as understood by a Christian in the late Middle Ages,” Stern writes in an introduction.
The manuscript was most likely the product of 15th-century monks who produced it (it included a Latin prologue) to teach fellow members of the Church about unfamiliar Jewish traditions.
Though written for a Christian readership, the manuscript was in most regards faithful to the Haggadah’s traditional text, unlike Haggadahs of modern “messianic Jews” who reinterpret Jewish text in the light of putative Christian fulfillment of Judaism.
“It is,” Stern writes, “an authentic Haggadah meant for Christians, not for Jews.”
The Baseball Haggadah: A Festival of Freedom and Springtime in 15 Innings. By Sharon Forman; illustrations by Lisa J Teitelbaum (Self-published, 56 pages. $10.79).
In the weeks before Passover last year, one of Rabbi Sharon Forman’s sons brought an unusual complaint to her. “I can’t find a baseball Haggadah on Amazon,” he said.
Rabbi Forman, a part-time spiritual leader at the Westchester Reform Temple, explained the fundamental differences between America’s Game and Judaism’s holiday of freedom. “There should be a baseball Haggadah,” her son concluded.
So Rabbi Forman, the mother of two Little Leaguers who served on the staff of Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan before moving to Scarsdale a decade ago, created a Haggadah that combines and contrasts some concepts of baseball and Pesach.
Once she started working on the Haggadah, illustrated by a lawyer friend, “the parallels were raining down on me,” the rabbi said.
She says her book is best used as a supplement to a fuller Haggadah at a seder, or as the primary text at a model seder.
The Rose Haggadah. Illustrations by Barbara Wolff, calligraphy by Izzy Pludwinski. Part of exhibition “Hebrew Illumination for our Time: The Art of Barbara Wolff,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., through May 3.
A veteran botanical and natural science illustrator and manuscript illuminator, Wolff created her first Haggadah on commission for the family of Manhattan philanthropists Daniel and Joanna S. Rose. It’s 68 pages of evocative, lavishly illustrated — with Hebrew words by a noted Israeli calligrapher – watercolor drawings that accompany much of the Haggadah text. On vellum parchment, with gold leaf and silver leaf, are renderings of ancient Egyptian scenes and other Pesach themes.
The entire work is a “visual commentary … a visual Midrash” on the Haggadah, based on extensive research and created over two and a half recent years, said Wolff, an Upper West Side resident who made the Haggadah for the private use of the Rose family.
In the style of wealthy families who for centuries commissioned their own Haggadah, the Roses wanted a personal one that would be a work of art. “We are told of the great Hebrew illuminated manuscripts … that survived the fires of the Inquisition and the bonfires in Paris and Rome,” Joanna Rose writes in a foreword to her family’s Haggadah. “They trace our survival as a people. What better way to honor [earlier generations] and their journey to freedom than to commission an illuminated Haggadah for the 21st century?”
Wolff studied several medieval Haggadahs as background.
After the Morgan exhibition of her works ends next month, her Haggadah will be bound for use of the Rose family and a facsimile version will be available for scholarly use at the Museum and in PDF-form online (themorgan.org). A documentary on the making of Wolff’s Haggadah, “An Illuminated Haggadah for the 21st Century,” will be screened at the Museum during the exhibition.
A Different Night: The Family Participation Haggadah. New edition, with storyteller’s supplement. By Noam Zion and David Dishon (Shalom Hartman Institute, 204 pages. $18.95).
In recent years many Haggadahs have included and featured stories — of famous and little-known people — about Passover or reflecting the holidays’ themes. The stories that now supplement the authors’ instant-classic Haggadah are superstar stories that deserve to be classics in themselves.
Zion, a longtime research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and Dishon, co-founder of the Institute’s Charles E. Smith High School, are master teachers and authors — this expanded edition of “A Different Night” is a fitting addition to their list of books. The stories, printed on light blue pages and displayed in the book’s attractive layout, can be read before the seders, as preparation, or, for best effect, on Pesach night itself, to magnify the seder themes.
In the early text of the published-earlier Haggadah, prefacing stories about the Jewish experience in Iraq and in Nazi Europe, the authors write that “Reading aloud one of the following stories may help us focus on the meaning behind the Kiddush on Passover.”
The supplement includes stories about, and excerpts from, such diverse people as Theodor Herzl, Vaclav Havel, Jimmy Carter, civil rights activists, Ethiopian Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors.
Other new Haggadahs include:
The Gateways Haggadah: A Seder for the whole Family. Rebecca Redner (Behrman House. $9.95). Geared to families of special needs individuals, the Gateways Haggadah combines the biblical exodus story and “picture communication symbols” and photographs of the steps of the seder and simple directions broken down into small steps and seder hints to make the night’s readings and rituals accessible to people who deal with mental, physical and other challenges. The book grew out of a guide that Boston-based Gateways, a program that serves students with special needs, created for its clients.
Seder Talk: The Conversational Haggadah. By Erica Brown (Alef to Tav. $24.95). With a combination of commentary and holiday-themed essays, Brown, who writes the Jew By Voice column for The Jewish Week and is a community scholar for the JCC in Manhattan, includes art and poetry to trigger conversation. She also uses a series of questions and “life-homework” exercises, and ideas by an eclectic group that includes the Vilna Gaon, Stephen King and the Harvard Business Review.
The Sephardic Family Haggadah. Edited by Rabbi Yamin Levy (Kodesh Press. Twelve for $49.95). Rabbi Levy, senior spiritual leader of Great Neck’s Congregation Beth Hadassah – Iranian Jewish Center and an authority on Sephardic practice, has put together a pamphlet-sized collection of his community’s unique holiday practices and commentaries.
The Medieval Illuminated Haggadah: Family Edition. David Holzer (Holzer Seforim, 177 pages, no price given). A companion piece to last year’s Medieval Illuminated Haggadah, which featured extensive commentary based on the lectures of the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and a wide range of images from medieval manuscripts, this volume is less bulky, but contains 70 additional beautiful pieces of artwork. The author, a rabbi who worked with “the Rav” for several years, published this version to make it more usable at a family’s seder table.
Canadian Haggadah Canadienne. By Rabbi Adam Scheier and Richard Marceau (Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, 168 pages. $20). How is this Haggadah different from all other Haggadahs? First, it’s in English and Hebrew and French. Second, it’s full of Canadian/Canadienne holiday-related content — like historical photos from Canadian-Jewish history, and commentary by a wide range of Canadian rabbis. “Canadian Jewry has an identity that distinguishes it from Jewish communities in other countries,” the authors write in the introduction.
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Remember that our website is the place to go for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, features, op-eds, advice columns, and more. Check it out.
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Between The Lines
Sharing The Blame As Fault Lines Deepen
Obama, Bibi have overreached in current crisis; concern over impact on younger Jews.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to appeal directly to Israel’s nationalist camp in the final days of the election campaign appears to have paid off, at least in the short term. He won a decisive victory last Tuesday and is now in the process of forming a coalition of right-wing and charedi parties as he had hoped in calling for new elections in December.
But the repercussions of his actions, beginning with his decision to break U.S. protocol and address the U.S. Congress without the invitation of the president, are profound and continue to resonate with the White House and many American Jews. High-level Washington-Jerusalem diplomatic relations, now marked by rancor and mistrust, are at the brink, perhaps only one U.S. abstention away from a UN vote on Palestinian statehood and permanent damage for Israel.
While Netanyahu has much to be accountable for, President Obama is to blame as well. He has made his ire with the prime minister pointed, public and persistent, appearing to allow his personal frustration with Israel’s leader to drift into foreign policy against the Israeli people. The issue has been exacerbated by relentlesscoverage in the mainstream press, particularly The New York Times, which has published a steady stream of front-page stories on White House anger with Netanyahu day after day.
‘Makes Our Job Tougher’
In pledging in blunt terms not to permit a Palestinian state during his tenure and suggesting that a large turnout at the polls by Israeli Arabs was worrisome, Netanyahu succeeded in convincing Israelis on the right to vote for his Likud party rather than smaller rightist parties so as to ensure his victory. As a result Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party, which is pro-settler, and Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel, Our House), made up largely of Soviet immigrants and whose leader, Avigdor Lieberman, has called for Israeli Arabs to take a loyalty oath, were the big losers. Many of their would-be votes were siphoned off to Likud.
That accounted for the last-minute surge that saw Likud handily beat the Zionist Union led by Isaac Herzog of Labor and Tzipi Livni of Hatnua. It should be noted, though, that the right-left split in Israeli elections has held firm for decades, and this time was no different. What changed was that voters on the right, hoping to ensure Netanyahu’s election as prime minister, coalesced around Likud rather than split their votes among the other rightist parties. Perhaps as proof of Israelis’ low expectation of politicians keeping their word, there seemed to be less outrage there than here over Netanyahu’s off again/on again statements on the two-state solution.
Closer to home, the crisis has put American Jews, including those in Congress, in a bind, feeling the need to choose between their government and the Jewish homeland.
The Jewish establishment, caught unaware by the Netanyahu pre-election controversy, is in an awkward position, striving mightily to balance its frustration with Netanyahu and its ongoing commitment to advocate for Israeli government positions. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, issued a statement congratulating the prime minister on his victory while noting that “this campaign was too often marked by extreme and divisive statements by candidates.” There was no singling out of Netanyahu, and the group’s national director, Abraham Foxman, offered a Talmudic parsing of the prime minister’s contentious comments. “He didn’t say he opposed a two-state solution, he said it won’t happen on his watch,” Foxman told me, noting that Herzog has also said it was unlikely an agreement on the Palestinian issue could be reached anytime soon.
Foxman added that Netanyahu “didn’t say the Israeli Arabs couldn’t vote,” but rather that a large turnout of Israeli Arabs would hurt his chances. The ADL leader acknowledged that the presumed coalition Netanyahu is forming would be “right of center and charedi,” which “will make our job tougher.
“We’ll have to explain more and defend more,” he said, “not only to the administration in Washington but to American Jews, 80 percent of whom, he noted, voted for Obama.
“What keeps me up at night,” said Foxman, who will step down from his post this summer, “is Israel’s dependence on the U.S., including the Jewish community, which is a significant asset.” He said most American Jews are “not comfortable with a polarized government” in Israel and would have preferred a national unity government.
Those sentiments were reflected on Sunday at the annual reunion of The Conversation, The Jewish Week-sponsored retreat for a wide variety of Jewish thought leaders. More than half of the 90 alumni in attendance chose to take part in a discussion on how to improve the U.S.-Israel relations going forward. Many participants expressed their deep disappointment, if not disillusionment, with Netanyahu as a leader mandated to follow democratic principles. And they worried that many young American Jews, already distant from Israel, will be further put off by the policies of the next Jerusalem government.
‘The Other Israel’
For all the concern among American Jews about Israel’s commitment to democratic values, those values were on display in last week’s election, an occasion particularly impressive because so many Israelis emigrated from countries with no tradition of social equality and human rights.
The results of the election brought home to American Jews that we are too little aware of “Second Israel,” the segment of society made up of Sephardim, Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, charedim, and the poor who comprise most of the Jewish population. It was they who made the difference in Netanyahu’s victory.
Many of us who think we know Israel are familiar with Jerusalem and its historical sites, Tel Aviv with its pulsing culture, and the “Start-Up Nation” accomplishments of young entrepreneurs in the areas of business, technology and high-tech. But the truth is that there are far more Israeli have-nots than haves in a country whose unequalsociety is second only to the U.S. among Western countries in terms of income disparities.
The Zionist Union campaign focused on this problem as well as on vital domestic issues like the economy, housing and jobs. But in the end, Netanyahu’s message of the need for security, particularly in facing up to the impending threat of a nuclear Iran, trumped the opposition’s call for making the home front the national priority.
For now, American Zionists must continue to emphasize that Israel has an open, vibrant, if often fractious, democracy. Indeed, Arab citizens have more say in government policy in Israel than Arab citizens in just about any Arab state. Such points are important to make, especially at a time when Jerusalem will come under increasing U.S. and international pressure to show some kind of progress in easing the tension with the Palestinians. (While the Palestinian Authority, which has consistently rejected every Israeli offer of compromise for decades, gets a free pass.)
Veteran Israeli diplomat Aryeh Mekel wrote the other day that in choosing Netanyahu rather than Herzog, Israelis indicated their primary concern for security. They voted, in effect, for life itself over quality of life issues, he said. It’s a shame to be faced with that choice, but that’s the way the majority of Israelis saw it. And we have to appreciate and respect the decision of those who put their lives on the line.
That’s democracy.
MUSINGS
The Torah’s Practical Bent
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special To The Jewish Week
Judaism may seem abstract, but the things that keep it alive are very concrete. If you cannot pay for food and clothes, for the lights and the rooms, the desks and the books, the ideas have nowhere to take root. This deep truth is expressed in a powerful story about Rabbi Hiyya.
The Talmud relates that once, in frustration, Rabbi Hanina said to Rabbi Hiyya, “How can you argue with me? If the Torah were ever forgotten from Israel, I could reconstruct it with my logic.” Rabbi Hiyya’s reply? “Perhaps, but I ensure it will not be lost. I cultivate flax, spin thread, twist ropes, and prepare traps by means of which I catch deer. The flesh of these I distribute among poor orphans, and I use the hides to make parchment, on which I write the Torah. Provided with this I go to places where there are no teachers, and instruct the children” [Ket. 103b].
Rabbi Hiyya reminds us that Torah requires a practical bent. Synagogues and schools depend upon contributions. Ideas need homes just as people do. We can understand why the author of the Mishna, Rabbi Judah the Prince, exclaimed “How great are the works of Rabbi Hiyya!”
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 UniversityPress), has recently been published.
Museum To Tell Overlooked Shoah Story
Rabbi Sholom Friedmann reveals why the world needs another Holocaust museum, the first under charedi auspices.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Rabbi Sholom Friedmann: Museum that will emphasize Holocaust experience of Orthodox Jews will tell their story.
A ceremony marking the groundbreaking for the Kleinman Family Holocaust Education Center, a museum and research institute in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, took place Sunday. The facility, which is being housed in theupper floors of an existing building and is scheduled to open in the fall of 2016, is billed as the first major Holocaust museum in this country under charedi auspices. The Jewish Week interviewed its CEO, Rabbi Sholom Friedmann, by email. This is an edited version of the transcript.
Q: There is no lack of Holocaust museums and research centers. Why do we need another one, especially geared to one small part of the Jewish community?
A: I am taken aback by the question. When Nassau County built its Holocaust museum, they weren’t asked why another Holocaust museum; the same holds true for Rockland County. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest museums, but no one asks why the Brooklyn Museum of Art was built.
The uniqueness of the KFHEC is that it will present the story of the Holocaust on three levels: 1) The German policy against the Jews — all Jews; 2) The conditions faced by the Jews under German or Axis domination — conditions faced by all Jews; and then — and only then — 3) the particular experience of Orthodox Jews who went through their ordeals committed to Torah and mitzvot and seeing what they endured through the prism of faith.
A significant percentage of those who went through the Holocaust were Orthodox Jews, in origin, practice and outlook. Their story is underrepresented in almost all Holocaust museums. And many museums are not particularly responsive to some of the religious needs of the charedi community.
How will your museum differ from other Holocaust museums in terms of artifacts on display or your message?
We will tell much of the same story. But within that story, we will also convey the experience of religious Jews. While more secular museums might tell the story of refugees establishing the “Fourth Reich” and “Frankfurt on the Hudson,” we will emphasize Kahal Adas Yeshurun [the German-Jewish community] in Washington Heights or the escape of yeshivas to Shanghai. We will tell the story of the JDC [The Joint Distribution Committee] but also the story of the Vaad Hahatzalah [Orthodox rescue organization] that is often overlooked.
Does the wider Jewish community understand what happened to Orthodox Jews during the Shoah, and how they reacted?
I think it is fair and accurate to say, no! The Israelis dramatized the story of resistance and the efforts of Zionists — mostly secular Zionists. Secular museums geared primarily to non-Jewish visitors included the Orthodox experience but did not highlight it or deal with it in a substantial manner.
What are some of your most memorable artifacts?
We initiated a search for artifacts of all kinds, especially those that relate to the unique experience of religious Jews — a tefillin shel rosh [head tefillin] used in Mauthausen by Rabbi Isaac Avigdor, a child’s tzitzit from a Hungarian ghetto, and aDisplaced Persons camp Mishnayos [Torah commentary] aptly labeled the property of “Kollel Kiddush Hashem.”
Do you see yourself in competition with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Yad Vashem or the other Holocaust museums?
We don’t see ourselves in competition with these important Museums but in cooperation with them, with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, even with the museum at Auschwitz. We will share material, share and borrow artifacts, make archives available and learn from each other. We are working with survivors’ testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and also the USHMM.
We are engaged in a joint project to record testimonies of religious Jews and to work with the testimonies that have been gathered elsewhere. We would hope that a visitor to the MJH might come to visit us and vice versa, a visitor to the KFHEC would say, now let me see the Museum of Jewish Heritage and/or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A visitor to the Met would also visit the Brooklyn Museum, or MoMA or, in Paris, the Louvre.
View over Cuidad Juarez from El Paso. Hilary Larson/JW
TRAVEL
South By Southwest
Hilary Larson
Travel Writer
Strolling around the pretty Spanish plaza at the heart of Old La Mesilla, Texas, watching children play and families chat in the public square, I thought: Why aren’t there more places like this in the U.S.?
It was a question I kept asking myself as Oggi and I drove across the southern U.S. on Interstate 10, stopping alternately at charming, historic tourist towns and sterile, chain-blighted commercial zones off the highway.
We spent hours navigating the sprawl east of Los Angeles — a vast, car-choked landscape of drive-thru fast food and strip malls — and then reveled in the aesthetic oasis of Palm Springs, where the affluent saunter through an attractive city center. From Santa Monica to New Orleans to La Mesilla, people love cities with walkable cores and a genuine, singular sense of place — and they love them so much that they are now rare, pricey commodities. So I wondered: Have human-scale towns and cities become just another luxury item?
The answer around Las Cruces, N.M. — at the intersection of the Texan and Mexican borders — was, apparently, yes. Occupying a scenic plain in the shadow of the Doña Ana Mountains, the greater Las Cruces metro area is a sad wasteland of downscale outlets and broad, faceless boulevards.
But La Mesilla, on its southern outskirts, is a picturesque glimpse of a pretty town of the Old West could have looked like — and a worthwhile stop just off I-10.
Centered around a 19th-century plaza, where the Basilica of San Albino was first erected in 1855, La Mesilla is a pueblo of low-scale adobe dwellings, tiny local shopsand cafés along narrow, dusty streets. We browsed in stores selling colorfully painted DÃa de los Muertos masks, piñon coffee and fiery New Mexican chilies.
Las Cruces has a Reform congregation and a Chabad center, but La Mesilla positively breathes Spanish Catholicism — from plaques outside the basilica commemorating papal visits to monuments proclaiming against abortion. Still, the atmosphere here is diverse, a cultural mash-up of Mexican, Native American and Western American influences. Men wandered by wearing sombreros or ten-gallon hats; Mexican guitar players crooned and strummed by the gazebo on the square.
As I surveyed the scene, I wondered why La Mesilla couldn’t have simply expanded outward, incorporating more walkable lanes into nearby neighborhoods, instead of ending up as a marginalized tourist attraction. But when we continued on to El Paso — the biggest city in Texas that nobody has ever been to — we saw how a well-organized downtown can starve from neglect.
The entrance to El Paso from the I-10 is visually dramatic, cutting along the hilly Mexican border; across from Texas, the peaks and valleys of Ciudad Juárez sprawl in what appears to be a vast, endless metropolis of jumbled pastel dwellings. It’s a panorama at once stunning and disquieting in its sweep and evident poverty.
I learned that El Paso and Ciudad Juárez — among the continent’s safest and most dangerous large cities, respectively — together represent the largest bilingual, binational work force in the Western Hemisphere. The fluidity of this exchange over the Rio Grande Rift, which constitutes a natural division through the city, is evident in the many signs in Spanish and in the arrows pointing to foot crossings.
With its hilltop perch and neighborhoods of pretty 1920s houses, El Paso is an attractive city. Historic brick buildings and tidy sidewalks lend the city center a feeling of solidity. So I thought it rather a shame to encounter here yet another American urban downtown so badly in need of revitalization: those sidewalks were empty, and many central blocks had no evident commerce at street level.
But downtown is worth a stop for its museum district, where city planners have organized an ambitious array of cultural institutions. I was impressed at the breadth and quality of exhibitions at the El Paso Museum of Art, which, predictably, has strong collections in Western, Mexican and Native American art dating back a half-millennium. When we stopped by, a show of works by Kandinsky and Franz Marc onloan from the Guggenheim Foundation were on view, as well as paintings from the “Migrant Series” by Don Coen, an artist whose work casts an engaging spotlight on the quotidian reality of America’s farm laborers.
And I was hardly surprised to stumble upon the National Border Control Museum. What I did not expect to find was the nearby El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center, prominently occupying a nearby corner.
We learned that the museum was founded in the 1980s by local survivor Henry Kellen, opening first near the Jewish Community Center on the city’s West Side, and then, after a fire in the early 2000s, moving into its current home. With 5,000 square feet of permanent exhibition space, El Paso’s is one of just 13 freestanding Holocaust museums in the U.S. and the first in the Lone Star State.
As we left El Paso, we watched the sun set over the mountains of Ciudad Juárez, reflected on what a strange and fascinating corner of the country this is, and set off for the Texas Hill Country.
Eyes On Jerusalem 2015
The Israel Museum At 50; The Pulse Of Jerusalem; The YouthfulAncient City
INSIDE THIS SPECIAL SECTION
After Midwood Fire Tragedy, Stocking Up and Taking Stock
Residents buy up smoke detectors and try to come to terms with the loss of seven children in Shabbat blaze.
Steve Lipman and Amy Sara Clark
Staff Writers
Israel Shmaya prays for the family at the Bedford Avenue home where seven children died in a fire on Shabbat. Amy Sara Clark/JW
Four days after seven children died in a fire in a Midwood home, area Jews were grappling with the loss while stocking up on fire safety equipment to keep their families safe.
The fire was caused by a faulty hot plate left on to keep food warm over Shabbat, and a lack of smoke detectors on the first and second floors of the Bedford Avenue house allowed it to spread to the stairwell before anyone woke up, separating the mother from her children, sleeping on the other side of the stairs.
Area residents said the fire served as a wake-up call that brought residents to neighborhood hardware stores in droves.
“Half of our community, the first thing we did was check the fire alarms,” said Israel Shmaya, a 27-year-old yeshiva student who studies hospitality management at night. He came to the site of the fire Tuesday morning to pray for the family.
“Everybody’s taking more precautions. ... That way another tragedy doesn’t happen,” he said.
At Corner Hardware & Paint, an Ace Hardware franchise with a large number of Orthodox customers in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, there was “panic” as soon as the doors opened on Sunday morning, a manager said. Customers were buying batteries for smoke detectors and ladders for reaching out-of-the-way detectors, and asking questions about fire extinguishers and safe ways to heat food on Shabbat.
On Tuesday morning, two of the four shelves holding smoke detectors were bare. “There aren’t many left,” an employee said. “People have been buying them.” In front of the register a display of crock-pots and hot plates remained.
Rabbi Yosef Rapaport, a spokesman for Agudath Israel of America, said a small Borough Park housewares store told him it sold more than 20 smoke detectors in one day.
“If we multiply that to other similar establishments in Orthodox areas, it could be considered sort of a buying spree,” he said via email.
At the Flatbush Minyan, a prominent Orthodox congregation less than a mile away from the site of the fatal fire, Rabbi Meir Fund said he will devote part of his sermon this Saturday to matters of fire safety.
“Everyone was jolted by this,” he said.
There have been other fatal fires in Brooklyn’s Orthodox communities in recent years, but never of this magnitude. In 2000, a Shavuot fire in Williamsburg killed two people and two fires in Borough Park in 2002 killed three. In 2011, 13 people in Teaneck, N.J., were hospitalized for symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning after a defective stove was left on for two days during Shavuot.
But seven deaths in a single family in a single fire are unprecedented here.
“Never, these type of numbers,” said Louis Welz, CEO of Flatbush’s Council of Jewish Organizations. “When do you hear these types of numbers?” he asked, leaving the rhetorical question unanswered.
In the wake of the fire, several local Jewish organizations have begun fire safety education efforts.
The Flatbush COJO, in partnership with City Councilmember Chaim Deutsch, this week began an extensive fire safety campaign in the neighborhood, including a community-wide educational program, and the distribution of free carbon monoxide detectors.
The Jewish Community Relations Council is reaching out to day schools to encourage fire safety education in the classrooms and the New York Board of Rabbis is urging member congregations to distribute pre-Passover fire safety guidelines. And about 100 leaders of local Jewish organizations attended the annual FDNY safety briefing at the Department’s Brooklyn headquarters on Monday.
“This tragedy has taken the matter [of fire safety] to a new level. There is going to be a collective response,” said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the board’s executive vice president and the Fire Department’s Jewish chaplain.
Over the weekend, the New York Fire Department took to the streets of Brooklyn,distributing 200 smoke alarms, 16,000 batteries and hundreds of fire safety pamphlets in English and Yiddish.
Chai Lifeline organized a community gathering called “Making Sense of the Midwood Tragedy: Talking to Your Children, Understanding it Yourself,” launched a 24-hour helpline ([718] 855-3274) and posted guidelines for how parents could talk to their children about the tragedy on its website.
Agudath Israel’s Rabbi Rapaport said via email that the city needs to find new ways to get safety information to charedi families who “avoid general secular media, such as TV and secular mass circulation newspapers.”
In such charedi enclaves as Rockland County’s Monsey, and Lakewood and Passaic, N.J., rabbis were encouraging their members to install fire safety equipment in their homes and drill family members on fire safety procedures.
In the week before Passover, when many families conduct a pre-holiday burning of chometz items, and when large numbers of holiday candles are often lit in the home during the first days and last days of the holiday, these warning are especially timely, Jewish leaders said.
During Shabbat and major holidays, observant Jews, in accordance with the prohibition against turning on an oven or electrical device, will keep food warm using a “blech,” a metal sheet that covers a low-burning stove burner, or appliances such as crockpots and hot plates that are kept on throughout the period or switched on by a pre-set timer. These devices usually function without a problem; but when they don’t, the result can be fatal. Sparks from overloaded electrical outlets have also caused fires.
Members of the Orthodox community “are not going to change their operations” but they “are going to be a little more careful,” said Rabbi Hertz Frankel, a longtime administrator in the Satmar chasidic school system and frequent spokesman for the wider charedi community.
Several Midwood women interviewed Tuesday morning in front of the burned home agreed that hot plates and crockpots are not going away.
“Using hot plates, I don’t think this it’s going to stop, but I do think people are going to look into safer alternatives,” said Chana Kramer, who came to pray and write a note of condolence outside the boarded up two-story house at 3371 Bedford Ave. near Avenue L.
Rose, a Midwood mother of four who preferred that we only use her first name, stopped by the house a few minutes later. She said that while people are all for adding smoke detectors and other early warning systems, serving their families warm food over Shabbat was a must.
“Fire alarms, maybe, but calls [saying] ‘don’t use your hot plate’ — if it’s working properly, how else [can you keep food warm]? I think the hot plate is safer than the blech. ... I never knew this could happen with a hot plate,” she said.
The fire was also marked in the wider community. The Brooklyn Nets basketball team had a moment of silence before the team’s game Monday night and a makeshift memorial in front of the Sassoon home included offerings from both Jewish and non-Jewish residents.
Tony, who owns several apartment buildings in the area and asked that we only use his first name, brought over a bouquet of seven white roses on Sunday, and then returned to the home again to pay his respects on Tuesday. “It’s a tragedy. I can’t fathom it,” he said.
The tragedy galvanized the Orthodox community, both in Borough Park, where a funeral ceremony took place on Sunday at Borough Park’s Shomrei Hadas Chapels, and on Monday at Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot cemetery, where the Sassoon children were buried.
Hundreds of mourners crowded into the Brooklyn chapel, and into the surrounding streets, as Gabriel Sassoon, an Israeli who had come to the United States two years ago, eulogized his children — Elaine, 16; David, 12; Rivkah, 11; Yeshua, 10; Moshe, 8; Sara, 6; and Yaakob, 5.
Similarly, hundreds of people (thousands, according to some estimates) attended the Jerusalem burial in which Mayor Nir Barkat and Chief Rabbi David Lau participated. In his graveside eulogy, Gabriel Sassoon asked God why one korban, or sacrifice, from his family was not sufficient. Why, asked Sassoon, did He take seven?
Gabriel Sassoon was away from home at a religious conference when the fire took place. The two survivors of the blaze, Gayle Sassoon, Gabriel’s wife, and Siporah, the couple’s 15-year-old daughter were in critical condition early this week in area hospitals, being treated for burns and smoke inhalation.
The people who came for solitary prayer in front of the Bedford Avenue home Tuesday Morning said the tragedy affected them deeply.
“It wasn’t easy to come. I’m a mother, a fairly new mother. It’s shocking. It kind of hits you with a certain reality about what can happen,” said Kramer.
Shmaya, the 27-year-old yeshiva student, said he came to the house Tuesday morning to say Tehillim “for the people who are still alive, that they should have a bit of peace” and Mishnayot, “for the souls who are already passed away.”
“It just shook the community,” he said. “It shook us to a point where: We can’t do anything about it, they’re gone. So the only thing we could do is do good things in the name of their souls, so that way they rest in heaven in a good place.”
Rose also stood in front of the boarded up house, still smelling faintly of smoke, and prayed.
"The hardest part of all of this is what they [the family] may be going through. When one person in Am Yisrael is suffering, we're all suffering,” she said.
She said 10-year-old Yeshua was her son’s bus monitor. When he learned of the tragedy, the 6-year-old said, “Did his mommy know he was my bus monitor? He was such a good bus monitor, he always used to give me candy. I want to tell her that,” she said.
Her nephew, who was in the same class with 8-year-old Moshe, “was crying all day Shabbos — he was crying his eyes out,” she said.
And on Sunday her daughter wouldn’t let her out of sight. “It’s just so scary," she said. "For the first two nights. I brought my kids into my room.
“You appreciate your kids [more],” she added. “Even when they’re driving you crazy, you’re like, ‘thank God, they’re alive, they’re here and they’re breathing.”
After the fire, a friend in Israel told her about going to the Sassoon family for a Shabbat dinner.
“The mother was such a aishet chayil [woman of valor],” the friend told Rose. “She was in the kitchen serving, the kids were helping, the table was filled with zemirot [Shabbat songs] and divrei Torah [Torah discussions]. They were such a happy, nice family. Everyone used to go to them for Shabbat.”
Miriam Lichtenberg contributed to this report from Israel.steve@jewishweek.com, amyclark@jewishweek.com 
NEW YORK
At Passover This Year, Difficult Conversations About The Promised Land
A sharply divided community limps toward the Passover seder.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
With tensions between the United States and Israel running at a fever pitch, even the benign, ritually symbolic words of the Passover seder have suddenly become charged with divisiveness and political import.
For Susie Heneson Moskowitz, spiritual leader of Temple Beth Torah in Melville, L.I., reading the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” at the end of the seder next week will take on a whole new, and unexpected, resonance.
“We pray that there will continue to be a Jerusalem that reflects Jewish and democratic values — and is safe and secure,” said Rabbi Heneson Moskowitz.
Her statement, which seems to straddle liberal and conservative positions and reflect anxiety over controversial statements made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Election Day, epitomizes the concerns of a divided American Jewish community: that Israel continues to be the homeland of the Jewish people, that it can one day move forward with a two-state solution that allows Israel to end the occupation of its Palestinian neighbors and that it remain safe within secure borders.
Rabbi Moscowitz was reflecting, in part, the concerns of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who warned on the Senate floor last week that President Obama’s treatment of Israel could endanger Israel’s safety by emboldening its “enemies to launch more rockets out of southern Lebanon and Gaza, to launch more terrorist attacks, to go to international forums and delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.”
Rubio was responding to Obama’s promise last week to “reassess” America’s relationship with Israel in light of Netanyahu’s pledge on the eve of last week’s election that a Palestinian state would not be established under his watch. (Netanyahu’s Election Day statement that Arabs were “voting in droves” met with widespread criticism in Reform and Conservative circles.)
Although Netanyahu clarified his pledge after the election — saying he is still committed to a two-state solution but that current conditions make that impossible — Obama dismissed them in a phone call to Netanyahu. He later told the Huffington Post: “I indicated to him that given his statements prior to the election, it is going to be hard to find a path where people are seriously believing that negotiations are possible. We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn’t happen during his prime ministership, and so that’s why we’ve got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don’t see a chaotic situation in the region.”
Such talk from the Obama administration continued this week, with his chief of state, Denis McDonough, telling a J Street conference Monday that Netanyahu’s election eve comment was “troubling.”
“We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made, or that they don’t raise questions about the prime minister’s commitment to achieving peace through direct negotiations,” he said.
At the State Department, deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters that the U.S. is now looking to Israel for “actions and policies that demonstrate genuine commitment to a two-state solution, not more words.”
And Obama repeated Tuesday that his dispute with Netanyahu is substantive and not personal.
“We believe that two states is the best path forward for Israel’s security, for Palestinian aspirations and for regional stability,” he said. “This is a matter of figuring out how we get through a knotty policy difference that has great consequences for both countries and the region.”
Rabbi Charles Klein of Merrick, a former president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said he had hoped that after the Israeli election the divide between the U.S. and Israel “would have been mended and healed. Unfortunately, it seems to be spinning out of control with each passing day.”
He noted that the Obama administration has “threatened diminished U.S. support for Israel in the United Nations … which affects the security of the state of Israel. No one in the Jewish community can be anything but alarmed about the increasing diplomatic isolation of Israel and what appears to be the decoupling of the [U.S.-Israel] relationship.”
Further inflaming tensions was a Wall Street Journal report Tuesday claiming Israel had spied on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations and passed on the information to members of Congress. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon heatedly denied the report.
The Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying: “Someone apparently has an interest in stoking conflict, or bringing a negative twist to relations between us, which are strategic relations from our perspective.”
Dan Mariaschin, executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International, said the “temperature needs to be turned down” and the U.S.-Israel relationship restored.
But the continuing schism in relations has Nancy Kaufman, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, concerned about the impact on young American Jews.
“I’m worried about our young folks totally checking out,” she told The Jewish Week. “I’m worried about them rolling their eyes and saying, `I don’t want to be engaged with Israel or go there or talk about it or read about it.’ … I’m seeing more and more people saying they will not focus on Israel. It’s very disturbing.”
Kaufman added that she is certain this will be a prime subject at seder tables.
“People are worried,” she said. “It’s easier to support the American Jewish World Service [which works to foster human rights and end poverty in the Third World] than those working in Israel.”
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said of Obama’s refusal to accept Netanyahu’s clarifying statement about a two-state solution: “Politicians say different things. The key is to judge any partner by deeds. … I think there has to be more openness on all sides, and the administration would be wise to figure out concrete ways we can work effectively for the things that are in the strategic interests of the United States and Israel.”
But Alan Elsner, a vice president of J Street, insisted that Netanyahu was being “duplicitous.”
“His attempt at clarification was unconvincing and unacceptable and was clearly designed to avoid or mitigate the flood of international condemnation that his original statement rightly provoked,” he said.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said his office has been in touch with officials in the Obama administration “in the hope we can put things back on track.”
“In the heat of campaigns in America, how many things are spoken that are later reconsidered?” he asked rhetorically.
Despite the rift, Nathan Diament, director of the Orthodox Union’s Institute for Public Affairs, said that while the U.S. is reassessing, “the fundamental security aid the U.S. gives to Israel continues.”
Several area rabbis said they have or will discuss the subject from the pulpit.
Rabbi Moshe Birnbaum of the Jewish Center of Kew Gardens Hills said the last time he could remember such tensions was in 1956 when President Dwight Eisenhower “threated sanctions against Israel” during the Suez Crisis.
“Israel is so dependent on American support, and I think there is a concerted effort on the part of well-funded people to undermine American Jewish support for Israel,” he said.
Rabbi Aaron Benson of the North Shore Jewish Center in Port Jefferson, L.I., said he has congregants who blame Obama for the continuing tensions and others who blame Netanyahu.
“I am not so excited about what was said during the last day of the election,” he said. “I am more interested in what plays out going forward.”
Rabbi Steven Moss of Oakdale and president of the Suffolk Board of Rabbis, said he plans to focus in his sermon “not on the divisiveness we are experiencing in the world of politics and Netanyahu and Obama, but rather to focus on a sense of hope that the future will be better than today.”
Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said he believes “a lot of people are pained and embarrassed by the public fight and would rather it go back under wraps. The U.S. and Israel are longtime allies, and the idea of a feud causes people a lot of anguish. There is enough blame to go around in most people’s eyes. … I don’t think it’s going to have a lasting impact.”
But most people interviewed at random during a Hillel event Sunday at Stony Brook University laid the blame squarely on Obama.
Israel Kleinberg, 85, of Smithtown, said the rift stems from Netanyahu’s vociferous attack on what he called the “bad [nuclear] deal” being worked on with Iran.
“Obama takes the easy way out and the Israelis are standing up” to him, he said.
Laurel Hoffman, 61, of Smithtown, L.I., said she believes Obama is “changing U.S. policy to become anti-Israel.”
Shari Haber, 55, of Commack, said Obama is “setting a bad tone” that she fears “will have long lasting damage to the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
But Nathan Baum, 65, of Middle Island, L.I., said he blames Netanyahu because by addressing members of Congress to tell his concerns about a possible deal with Iran, he made Israel “a partisan issue in America.” And he said Netanyahu’s past actions belied the explanation he gave for his pre-election remarks about a two-state solution.
stewart@jewishweek.org
Media Has It In For Netanyahu
Prime minister’s win seen more as triumph of fear than democracy.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Was there ever an election that left everyone feeling so lonely, even the winners? Especially the winners?
It was Israel’s “Dewey Defeats Truman,” except only the Chicago Tribune had to live that headline down while there was almost no one who foresaw, or could easily explain, the dynamics leading to Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory.
There’s nothing new about that. The mostly liberal American media never greeted the election of a conservative Israel prime minister with anything other than fear. When in 1977 Menachem Begin became prime minister, Time magazine introduced him to its readers, “Begin as in Fagin.” Some may like Begin, said a diplomat, “but that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.” In 1978 Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize.
This week, The New York Times headlined, Netanyahu “Further Divides U.S. Jews,” a divide that has been routinely pinned to every non-Labor prime minister. Shmuel Rosner, of the Jewish Journal (Los Angeles), pulled out the old clips. The British Guardian headlined of the newly elected Ariel Sharon: “Sharon Divides World Jews,” just as Netanyahu now “divides.” When Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, visited the United States, the Forward wrote, “for American Jews,” the visit “drove home the distance between the two great Jewish communities, not their closeness.” Even in 1958, before “everything,” American Jews were “troubled.” The day when we’re told that a conservative prime minister doesn’t “divide” American Jews will be the first.
Likud’s victory made some writers positively livid. Time magazine’s Joe Klein wrote, Netanyahu “won because he ran as a bigot,” based on two sentences in the final week. And Jews, writes Klein, have become as bad as their worst oppressors, “a great many Jews have come to regard Arabs as the rest of the world traditionally regarded Jews”… It is “an appalling irony that the Israeli vote brought joy to American neoconservatives and European anti-Semites alike.”
There was no end to the anti-Bibi hysteria. Harold Myerson, a Washington Post columnist who is Jewish, wrote that Netanyahu “might have called for stripping Israeli Arabs of the right to vote altogether. [He is] the Jewish George Wallace. … Perhaps Likud and the Republicans can open an Institute for the Prevention of Dark-Skinned People Voting.” Fact is, Netanyahu made no effort whatsoever to stop Arabs from voting.
Although Netanyahu’s campaign statements (since retracted) about a stalemated peace process and telling his followers that the Arabs were voting “in droves” were certainly controversial, Rosner, a former correspondent for Haaretz, writes, “American friends and critics, at least be sincere about this: You are not angry with two unfortunate statements — you are angry because Netanyahu managed to squeeze yet another electoral victory. You were angry with him before the election. You wanted him gone. And Israelis didn’t really care.”
Meanwhile, beyond the Times, serious mainstream American journalists were growing increasingly negative about Obama’s acting like a Disney stepmother to Netanyahu. Bob Schieffer, host of “Face The Nation” on CBS said this past week, “I can understand why the president would be upset” with Netanyahu’s campaign rhetoric. “Yet when the prime minister backed away from that Thursday, the White House reacted with pointed, even snarky skepticism — as if they wanted to keep the public fight going. I question that. …. It’s time to stop the back-and-forth and repair the alliance, quietly.”
When Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show, after Obama’s election, “I hope he fails,” Limbaugh was widely considered too surly and crude for decent company, lacking the graciousness we expect of political losers. But it seems there are plenty of Jews and journalists who are hoping Netanyahu fails. His victory was “ugly,” wrote a Times editorial. He was “racist,” “craven,” he laid bare his “duplicity, confirmed Palestinian suspicions.” But what of Israeli suspicions about the Palestinians, and trusting Obama?
The Times reported that Netanyahu’s “hard-line statements won him right-wing votes… but alienated allies in Washington and Europe.” How correct is that? Europe, Asian, even Arab leaders actually seem more than willing to let campaign bygones be bygones. Izzy Lemberg, a producer at CNN’s Jerusalem Bureau and now a columnist, noted in the Jerusalem Post, “The Arab League wrote off Netanyahu’s statements as ‘electioneering’ and appear to be cautiously unperturbed by them.”
India, on its way to being a world power, was quick to let Netanyahu know that he was loved in New Delhi. The Algemeiner reported that Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted in Hebrew — in Hebrew! — “Mazel tov, my friend Bibi… I remember our meeting in New York last September warmly.” And the European Jewish Pressreported that British Prime Minister David Cameron was among the first world leaders to congratulate Netanyahu: “As one of Israel’s firmest friends, Britain looks forward to working with the new government.” And Fulvio Martusciello, head of the European Parliament delegation for relations with Israel, declared after Netanyahu’s victory, “What is important at this stage is not to isolate Israel.” So are world leaders alienated from Netanyahu, or is that the Times’ wishful thinking?
How many newspapers or broadcasts reported on Hanin Zoabi, one of the Arabs elected to the new Knesset? During the campaign Zoabi told Lebanese media that Arab Knesset members represent the “Palestinian national project,” not the Israel in whose parliament she’ll serve. She has called for an Islamic uprising and defended the kidnapping and murder of the three teenaged Israeli boys last summer. She supports Hamas. She has proven to be so verbally flammable, in violation of laws, that only a Supreme Court decision (overseen by the Arab justice Salim Joubran) allowed Zoabi to remain on the ballot. Perhaps if more American journalists were as eager to report the anti-Israel anger of Zoabi and some others on the Joint Arab List (now the third largest party in the Knesset) it would have given American Jews a better understanding of why Netanyahu’s warning about Arab voters was taken in stride by many Israeli voters, rather than infuriating American Jews who no doubt knew little about the Arab slate.
That Zoabi, a pro-Hamas candidate, was allowed to stay on the ballot by the decision of an Arab judge, a ruling fully accepted by everyone including the prime minister, certainly went against the storyline of Netanyahu’s supposedly anti-Arab vote suppression.
On PBS, Charlie Rose assembled a wonderful post-election panel: Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic; Ari Shavit of Haaretz; Yossi Klein Halevi, author of “Like Dreamers”; Ronen Bergman of Yediot; Lisa Goldman, the Israeli-Palestine fellow at the New America Foundation; and Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End The Israeli Occupation. But of the six, not one was a “happy warrior” for Netanyahu, the winner.
Shavit said this was “a referendum on hope versus fear, and sadly fear won over hope.”
Is fear not a valid Israeli emotion when the “barbarians” (ISIS) are at the gate, they of the beheadings and burning alive? ISIS is a morning’s drive from Jerusalem and could easily consume a weak Palestinian state. To the west, the tunnels of Hamas. To the east, the nuclear plants of Iran. What’s not to fear?
If Israel has to go alone, so be it, writes The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephens: “Repay contempt with contempt. Mr. Obama plays to classic bully type. He is abusive and surly only toward those he feels are either too weak, or too polite, to hit back…. The Israelis will need to chart their own path of resistance…. Israel survived its first 19 years without meaningful U.S. patronage. For now, all it has to do is get through the next 22, admittedly long, months.”jonathan@jewishweek.org
Bibi Complicates Jewish Student Life
Jewish students dealing with leader’s remarks and start of Israel Apartheid Week.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
At the Columbia/Barnard Hillel, students hung up thousands of pro-Israel posters Monday night. Hannah Dreyfus/JW
On Monday night, 100 students associated with the Columbia/Barnard Hillel sprinted around campus papering bulletin boards with more than 6,000 pro-Israel flyers.
The flyer campaign, entitled “Speak The Truth,” was intended to combat Israel Apartheid Week, an annual campaign criticizing Israel and promoting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), which began Monday on college campuses across the U.S.
“We’ve had our flyers vandalized and removed; it’s been more vicious and disrespectful than we’re used to,” said Daniella Greenbaum, a sophomore at Barnard and a board member of Aryeh (formerly LionPAC), the largest Israel advocacy group on campus.
Though tensions surrounding Israel have peaked during Israel Apartheid Week in the past, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pre-election comments last week were seen as fanning the flames. As Hillel students and faculty struggle to present a unified front, the prime minister’s comments left many questioning how to respond.
“The task of defending Israel was already hard — now it’ll be much harder,” said Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, executive director of the Bronfman Center at NYU, a reference to Netanyahu’s comments about Arab voters turning out in “droves.” (Netanyahu has since apologized to Arab voters.)
According to Sarna, tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups on campus are on a “slow boil.”
“Pressure has been steadily increasing for the past two years — images from the war in Gaza, the Ferguson protests being linked to the Palestinian cause — these have all raised the temperature. Netanyahu’s comments have turned up the heat one more notch.”
At Columbia, students from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a pro-Palestinian college student activism organization, countered Hillel with flyers of their own. Many of them featured direct quotes from Netanyahu’s Election Day speech reversing his position on a two-state solution. (Netanyahu has since qualified his statements.)
This year, in a first on the Columbia campus, no pro-Zionist student group has a table near SJP to protest its stance, according to Greenbaum. In past years, a member of Aryeh has stood near the Columbia library at the center of campus waving an Israeli flag and protesting the makeshift wall SJP erects, echoing the security barrier between Israel and the West Bank.
SJP booked both spots with Columbia administration far in advance, Greenbaum said. Though Hillel requested one spot to balance the conversation, SJP instead gave the spot to Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which promotes BDS and considers Israel an apartheid state.
“This is the first time the student body is realizing that Zionism is not the only Jewish voice on campus,” said Chris Godshall, one of the founding members of Columbia’s JVP chapter. Godshall, whose mother is Jewish, went to Israel for the first time on the Birthright Israel program. He described witnessing “disturbing” racism towards Lebanese Arabs while in Israel. “Israel is full of divisions, and so are Israel supporters,” he said, standing in front of the Columbia library shortly before SJP erected the wall.
God shall added that Netanyahu’s recent reversal of his position on a two-state solution helped their case. “It’s not the sole focus of our campaign, but it’s definitely relevant,” he said.
Without an SJP chapter, things are quieter at Queens College, whose 4,000 Jewish students represent about a quarter of the student body. But apathy, said Uri Cohen, executive director of the Queens Hillel, is a problem.
“Absolute disinterest among students is what’s going to hurt Israel far more than anything Netanyahu says to win an election,” he said.
According to NYU student leader Laura Adkins, the situation in Greenwich Village is somewhere between Columbia and Queens College.
“Groups which are outspokenly hostile towards Israel will always be critical of Israel, no matter the political climate,” Adkins, president of Torah PAC, NYU’s Pro-Israel advocacy organization, wrote in an email.
Though she said it was “unfortunate” that Netanyahu’s remarks coincided so closely with Israel Apartheid Week, she believes anti-Israel groups would have pushed to boycott Israel no mater what.
“Anti-Israel groups would continue to hate Israel, whether Netanyahu or [Labor party leader Isaac] Herzog had been democratically elected, because they are against the very existence of the Jewish state,” Adkins wrote.
Still, according to Martin Raffel, a former top official at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the tensions between the U.S. and Israel, which seem to have deepened after the Israeli election, “makes life very uneasy for the Jewish community, students and community activists included.”
For Barnard’s Greenbaum, agreeing with every decision Israel makes is not central to supporting the state. “Even among Israel advocates, there is a large spectrum of opinions,” she said, noting that many were deeply disappointed by the prime minister’s comments. Still, a strong U.S.-Israel relationship remains the priority.
“We’re going to oppose Israel Apartheid Week, no matter who the prime minister is,” she said. “And when they rip down our flyers, we’re going to put them up again. And again.”hannah@jewishweek.org 
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