Kosher Parmigiano? No, Says The OU. The Jewish Week - The Jewish Week Newsletter Connecting the World with Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opnions for Friday, 7 August 2015

Kosher Parmigiano? No, Says The OU. The Jewish Week - The Jewish Week Newsletter Connecting the World with Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opnions for Friday, 7 August 2015


Dear Reader,
Here's why your stuck with sub-par stuff on your pasta. If the Italian authorities approve a parmesan, the OU won't, and vice versa. Kosher Parmigiano? Sorry, No, Says The OU

The cheese shelves of Empire Kosher, far from Parmigiano. Lauren Rothman/JW
Standards for authentic Italian regional products are incompatible with those of the premier kosher certifier.
Lauren Rothman
Jewish Week Online Columnist
Some kosher cheese lovers are about to be very disappointed.
A couple of months ago, they learned that a kosher-certified cheese factory in Italy, Bertinelli’s, was producing a new and authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano, the so-called “king of cheeses.” The hard, salty cheese would hit the market by the end of the year, according to news reports.
But then the Orthodox Union, the world’s largest kosher certifier, announced that it won’t be recognizing Bertinelli’s cheese as kosher. That could disappoint kosher cheese lovers and have a big impact on U.S. sales of the cheese maker’s new kosher offering, potentially cutting down on the number of buyers who currently make up a market that’s worth about $12.5 billion according to the kosher marketing consulting firm Lubicom.
Caseficio Colla, a “latticini” in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, makes a kosher parmesan that’s available stateside. Their “Gran Duca” line of both Parmigiano-Reggiano and Romano is certified by Shalom Elmaleh, a Chabad rabbi located in Milan. It’s for sale here in New York only at Zabar’s in Manhattan and Benz’s in Crown Heights – but it’s the only one.
“Our kosher shoppers are always on the lookout for better and better cheeses, and why shouldn’t they be?” said Olga Dominguez, the cheese buyer at Zabar’s. She said she was one of the first buyers of the Gran Duca line, and that while it’s proven very popular, Zabar’s shoppers would likely leap at the chance to sample another parm out of Italy. But at the moment, it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to try it.
That leaves them schlepping to Zabar’s or Benz’s; settling for kosher Romano cheese, easier to find than parmesan or settling for a bag of grated so-called “parmesan,” which may or may not taste like the real deal.
That’s why news of the Bertinelli cheese factory’s new kosher parmesan — first reported by Ha’aretz in April — piqued eaters’ interest.
But on June 10, the OU issued this advisory: “Recent media reports stated that there is a new Parmigiano Reggiano cheese made with kosher animal rennet which will be recognized as kosher by the Orthodox Union. These reports are inaccurate. The Orthodox Union reviewed the kosher status of animal rennet and determined that currently there is no animal rennet that meets OU kosher standards for the production of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. Parmigiano Reggiano cheeses made with animal rennet are, therefore, not considered kosher by the OU.”
The debate boils down to animal rennet. Like many European countries, Italy takes its native foodstuffs very seriously. A government agency vets products like wine, olive oil and cheese and assigns those that are authentic, and produced only under the most stringently traditional methods, an official label: denominazione di origine protetta. Authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano is D.O.P., and one of the requirements for that designation is that the cheese be set with animal-derived rennet, as per thousands of years of tradition.
And that explains why real-deal parm uses rennet — a coagulating agent that solidifies the liquid milk into a hard cheese — that’s made from enzymes that are found in ruminant animals’ stomachs. Microbial “rennet” — the fungus-derived rennet substitute that has increasingly been used in kosher cheese making over the past few decades —doesn’t fly in Italia. And so a tiny handful of producers has been certified by Italian rabbis to set their cheese with true rennet that comes from shechita, or kosher-slaughtered animals. But while in the grand scheme of things microbial rennet cheeses are brand-new — they’ve only become widely available over the past 20 years — in the U.S. they’ve almost completely replaced kosher rennet cheeses. And the OU errs on the side of caution by only certifying the fungus-derived kind.
“After the Bloomberg article ran, we were getting a lot of calls from people asking if this cheese really was kosher,” said Rabbi Moshe Elefant, the OU’s chief operating officer. “Understandably, people are anxious to enjoy this product. But we felt we had an obligation to the community to tell them that we wouldn’t be certifying this cheese.”
“The issue is obvious,” Rabbi Elefant continued. “Since ancient times everywhere, and today in Europe still, the milk used in cheese making is coagulated with animal rennet. Microbial rennet is fairly new. But the stance of the OU is that there’s a real issue with using animal rennet in milk. I mean, mixing milk with meat is the number one sin in kosher law.”
Rabbi Elefant explained that while in ancient times animal rennet was used in kosher cheese making, there were strict Talmudic codes that dictated exactly how the rennet was processed. The animal stomachs used in cheese making had to be dried to an almost wood-like state, ground into a powder, then re-activated with an acid.
“In order for us to allow an animal rennet to be used, it would have to go through that process,” Rabbi Elefant said. “Reviewing it, it doesn’t quite meet our standards,” he said. In fact, the OU doesn’t currently certify any animal rennet cheeses.
Rabbi Zushe Blech is a kosher consultant, formerly of the OU, and the author of Kosher Food Production. An expert on kosher cheese making, he explained that the suitability of animal rennet kosher cheese is “a thousand-year-old question.”
“There’s a question of whether you can make kosher rennet in the first place,” Rabbi Blech said, “if for no other reason than you can’t mix milk with meat. This is an old question.”
The issue still divides the kosher community, Rabbi Blech explained. While some rabbis — like the ones who will presumably certify Bertinelli’s new cheese, for example, or like Rabbi Elmaleh, the Italian rabbi who certifies the popular Gran Duca line — give the a-ok to properly processed animal rennet cheeses, many others, like the OU, try to keep things simpler for the consumer by only certifying microbial rennet cheeses. Of the hard kosher cheeses available today, the vast majority don’t use animal rennet.
While the OU might not embrace today’s crop of animal rennets as kosher, many consumers certainly do.
“If the kosher supervision is legitimate and one that I hold by, then that’s fine for me,” Alyssa Kaplan of New Jersey, who regularly shops at Zabar’s, said. “I don’t only eat OU foods.” Kaplan is a big fan of the Gran Duco parm—“I love it, it’s the greatest,” she said–but she’d still be interested in trying out what a competitor has to offer.
Kaplan is an active member of the foodie discussion group Chowhound, where, on the Kosher board, cooks and eaters post about the best kosher products. The board’s members, who are heavily based in the tri-state area, tend towards adventurousness in their eating habits.
She said she’d definitely try to the Bertinelli cheese – but she and other kosher foodies might not get the chance.
The OU’s ruling on Bertinelli’s new parmesan could hurt its ability to get picked up by distributors in the U.S., according to Menachem Lubinsky, president and CEO of the aforementioned Lubicom.
“Having the OU certify a product opens that product to a broad market,” he said. “[Bertinelli] is not going to be able to reach a much broader audience.” So far, the kosher groceries in New York don’t seem to have heard of the Bertinelli cheese — buyers at Zabar’s, Benz’s and Pomegranate hadn’t heard of it — and without OU certification, these stores’ distributors might never get a hold of it.
“Rennet is traif,” said a woman who would only identify herself as Malka, on a recent weekday afternoon in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at Empire Kosher, a large grocery store on Empire Boulevard. The brightly lit cheese aisle was bustling, but there were no animal rennet cheeses to be found. “And I’m sure that if you asked around in the community, 99 percent of shoppers here make sure that the foods they buy have an OU certification,” Malka added.
The OU is famous for its rigor, Lubinsky noted.
“This is not an isolated incident,” he said. “The OU just has tougher standards. While you can often rely on certain leniencies in Jewish law, the OU takes the highest common denominator when it comes to certifying. And apparently, that’s what they’re doing here.”
Time will tell how widely Bertinelli’s parmesan gets distributed in the U.S., even without OU certification. After all, Lubinsky noted, it is a kosher-certified cheese, just not according to the OU. For that reason, there will likely market for the cheese, albeit a small one.
“It could very well be a niche-market item,” Lubinsky said, “but there will be people out there who want to try it.”
Sure, kashrut has lots of rules. But should dating? Our columnist says no, ditching the rules and embracing the awkwardness is the only way to really get to know yourself, and your date. Opinion
Time To Break The Dating Rules
Embrace the awkwardness: Communication is at the center of all relationships.
Beth Hait

What to say? What not to say? Fotolia
Let’s talk about dating as it is practiced in some segments of our community, most notably among the Orthodox. #UpperWestSide #WashingtonHeights #QueensCollege #Stern. Are we happy with the current state of dating? Are we happy with The Dating Rules?
She works in advertising. Lives on 89th and Columbus. One Saturday night she meets a guy at a mutual friend’s birthday party and they connect on Facebook. Do The Dating Rules allow her to message him “Hey, really nice meeting you, want to grab drinks this week?” If not, do we want to change that?
In the close to two decades I spent working at Yeshiva University, and in my current practice as a Life Coach, I meet many young women and men who are bothered by The Dating Rules. Let’s go back to our Ad Gal. Say she asks him out: It’s a win-win. Either he’s interested, in which case he says yes, or he’s turned off that she was so forward and he declines. But does our Ad Gal really want to date a guy who was so turned off by her making the first move?
Now I know this is all much easier said than done. Social norms do not just change because it makes sense for them to. But they certainly will not change if we don’t start talking about them at our Shabbat tables and on our newsfeeds. Emma Watson, (of Harry Potter fame) in a recent interview talked about her experience paying for a date. She admits it was awkward, but then explained that confronting that awkwardness produced a more comfortable situation. I think in our community those conversations would be awkward as well. But, it was also probably awkward the first time a woman raised her hand in a Harvard Law School class back in 1950 or the first time a woman was seen in a police uniform. Not so awkward anymore. Watson’s suggestion was that it’s time we own the awkwardness instead of having it own us.
Communication is at the center of all relationships. When it comes to the dating relationship, let’s look at three basic questions: Who asks whom out on the first date? Who plans each date as the relationship is growing? Who pays for each date? Shouldn’t each individual feel at liberty to do each of these without any negative repercussions?
Breaking the rules is liberating for each person involved. Let me offer an example of yet another rule to prove the point. He works in chinuch (Jewish education) and lives in the Heights. One Saturday night he is on a first date that came from a setup. After the date he thought to himself, “She is really great, but 100 percent this is not a good match.” Nonetheless, according to the dating rules he must ask her out on a second date or risk being branded as someone who is not a mensch.
This whole idea seems unhealthy and unfair for both people. Does she really want to be on a date with a guy who’s not interested in her? If she is required to say yes to these second dates, then she has the same problem as him. If not, doesn’t that seem a little imbalanced? If we believe in equal pay in the workplace, and that it is important to share responsibilities on the home front, then why should it be any different when it comes to dating? Women and men both need to take some responsibility. And if either one is not ready for a change in these traditional roles, then that choice should be theirs, and nobody, whether they are changing the rules or keeping them, should be judged for their choices.
In some circles when two people are set up, go on the required two dates, and then one of them feels this relationship is not going to work out, they don’t even communicate this information with each other directly. Instead, the proper protocol is to go back to the person who set them up and tell that person who then conveys the message. The rationale I have been told for this is: why should they have this uncomfortable and slightly awkward talk? Neither one really wants to be having that phone conversation. While that is certainly true, it’s far from the point. The fact is that throughout life, relationships have awkward moments and awkward conversations that we need to learn to navigate. Avoiding those conversations may be desirable at the moment, but it prevents people from forming the necessary building blocks of communication. Uncomfortable conversations are a part of life. Do you really want your first uncomfortable conversation to be with your spouse?
Each relationship we are in should be a building block for the next relationship. That includes the fun conversations, the tough ones, and yes, the awkward ones. So how will the dating rules change? One awkward conversation at a time.
Beth Hait is the former assistant dean of students at YU/Stern College and is currently in practice as a Life Coach. Her website is www.bethhait.com and she can be reached at Dr.Beth.Hait@gmail.com

Jewish Week readers are once again loving Rabbi David Wolpe's weekly "Musings" column. In this one, he shares a powerful parable to make the point that nothing can replace a parent's love in a child's life.

MusingsRock Steady
Nothing can replace the certainty in a child’s life that her parents love her and are there for her.
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special to the Jewish Week

Rabbi David Wolpe
When I was young my father told me a story about a boy and his father who were walking along a road. The boy spotted a large rock. “Do you think I can move that rock?” the boy asked his father. His father answered, “I’m sure you can, if you use all your strength.” The boy walked over to the rock and pushed and pushed, but the rock didn’t budge. “You were wrong,” he said. “I tried as hard as I could, and I failed.”“No,” said his father. “You didn’t use all your strength. You didn’t ask me to help.”
In my years in the rabbinate I have seen repeatedly that there is nothing that can replace the certainty in a child’s life that her parents love her and are there for her. Those children deprived of parental love and support feel the lack forever, even though they often compensate in powerful and beautiful ways. Those who are lucky enough to have such parents, as I was, carry a golden legacy all their days.
Raising a child is like learning to play an instrument, except that practice and performance are the same and everything counts. We will all make a thousand mistakes. But deep love and genuine support can move the rock and lift the child.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.

Shabbat Shalom, everybody,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
BOOKSTHE ARTS

Breaking The Color Barrier
JTA

Philadelphia — Alex Bethea, the son of cotton and tobacco farm workers, was in sixth grade in 1965 when his family moved from Dillon, S.C., to the tiny town of Fairmont, N.C., where he attended a school called Rosenwald.

But it wasn’t until this week, 50 years later, that Bethea learned that his school was named for Julius Rosenwald, the Jewish philanthropist who is the subject of a new documentary by Aviva Kempner. The film tells the little-known story of Rosenwald’s contribution to African-American culture and education.

The revelation came at a July 14 session at the national convention of the NAACP, which drew several thousand delegates to Philadelphia. Bethea was one of some 70 people who attended a screening of the film, “Rosenwald,” which opens here next week.

“Julius Rosenwald had a great impact on my life, and I didn’t even know it,” said Bethea, now a vice principal at an elementary school in New Jersey. “This helps me put the pieces of the puzzle of my life together.”

The philanthropy Rosenwald invested in African-American causes in the early 1900s changed the course of education for thousands of children in the rural South and helped foster the careers of prominent artists, including writer Langston Hughes, opera singer Marion Anderson and painter Jacob Lawrence.

Rosenwald, who made his fortune at the helm of Sears, Roebuck and Co., also provided seed money to build YMCAs for blacks in cities around the country. In addition, he developed a huge apartment complex in Chicago to help improve living conditions for the masses who had migrated from the Jim Crow South.

“It’s a wonderful story of cooperation between this philanthropist who did not have to care about black people, but who did, and who expended his considerable wealth in ensuring that they got their fair shake in America,” Julian Bond, the renowned civil rights leader, says in the documentary.

Kempner told JTA that her new film on Rosenwald “celebrates the affinity between African-Americans and Jews” that started long before the civil rights movement and speaks to the powerful Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, or repairing the world.

Kempner joined Bond and Rabbi David Saperstein, the former head of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center who now serves as U.S. ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, for a discussion after the screening at the NAACP conference. It was while attending a public program 12 years ago on Martha’s Vineyard at which Bond and Rabbi Saperstein discussed black-Jewish relations that Kempner first learned of Rosenwald’s work for African-Americans.

She calls this film the last of a trilogy documenting the lives of “under-known Jewish heroes.” The first two were about baseball legend Hank Greenberg and radio and TV personality Gertrude Berg.

Interspersing archival footage with interviews with prominent African-Americans like Maya Angelou and U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), both of whom attended Rosenwald schools, the documentary tracks the ascent of Rosenwald, the son of German immigrants who rose to become one of the most powerful businessmen and philanthropists in early 20th-century America.

His father, Sam, who came to America in 1851, began, like so many Jewish immigrants of his time, as a peddler. He eventually settled in Springfield, Ill., where Julius grew up across the street from Abraham Lincoln’s home.

In 1878, his parents sent the 16-year-old Julius to New York to apprentice with his uncles in the men’s clothing manufacturing business. He returned to Illinois to start his own manufacturing company, and through some business and family connections ultimately partnered with Richard Sears, one of the founders of Sears, Roebuck and Co. After Rosenwald took over the company in 1908, it became the largest retailer in the country.

Outside his business life, Rosenwald was heavily influenced by his rabbi, Emil Hirsch, the spiritual leader of the Chicago Sinai Congregation, and he became a major benefactor of Jewish causes.

The film’s historians document the parallels Rosenwald drew at the time between the pogroms against European Jews and violent attacks on blacks in America. He was particularly moved by the race riots in 1908 in Springfield, which are said to have sparked the founding of the NAACP. Hirsch was one of the original leaders of the NAACP, and Rosenwald sponsored its first meetings at his temple.

He was also influenced by the writings of Booker T. Washington, a prominent black leader at the time, and became a funder of Washington’s Tuskegee University in Alabama.

When Rosenwald gave a $25,000 gift to Tuskegee, Washington suggested taking a few thousand dollars to build six schools for young children. Until then, most black children didn’t attend school, but instead spent their time working in the fields alongside their parents. The few schools that did exist were primitive shacks staffed mostly by untrained teachers.

Rather than donating all the money for the schools, Rosenwald gave one-third of the funds needed and challenged the local black community to raise another third and the local white community to contribute the rest. In the end, some 5,300 schools were built with seed money from the Rosenwald Fund.

The fund soon switched focus and began supporting promising black artists, helping catapult dozens onto the national stage.

The Rosenwald Fund “was the single-most important funding agency for African-American culture in the 20th century,” poet Rita Dove says in the film.

Kempner calls Rosenwald one of the greatest exemplars of American Jewish philanthropy, and says she hopes her film — whose official opening in theaters is scheduled for mid-August — will motivate others to continue that tradition.

“Not all of us can be Julius Rosenwald,” she said, noting that he gave away a total of $62 million in his lifetime, but “we can all do something.”

“Rosenwald” opens Aug. 14 at the Sunshine Cinema, 143 E. Houston St., (212) 260-7289, landmarktheatres.com. It opens Aug. 21 at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington, L.I., 423 Park Ave., (631) 423-7611, cinemaartscentre.org.

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FOOD & WINE

Yes, Wine Shortages Are A Thing
Joshua E. London And Lou Marmon
Jewish Week Online Columnists

In our age of sheer abundance and seemingly endless variety, it is difficult to wrap one’s head around something like a possible wine shortage.

There are tens of thousands of wineries across the planet, after all, including nearly 9000 in the US alone, with nearly half of those just in California. Apparently, though, the global thirst for wine is not so easily quenched. According to a recent Vinexpo and the IWSR drinks industry report, annual wine consumption will increase to 273 billion cases by 2018. As pointed out by Wine Spectator magazine, that is equivalent to 32.8 billion bottles or enough to flood Manhattan. That’s a lot of wine.

Producers seem all too eager to try and meet demand, however. So despite wine being a remarkably tough business to succeed in, the number of new wineries and wine brands being started and the sheer acreage of cultivable land being newly planted with wine grapes are steadily increasing the world over.

Of course, when we recall that wine, not in the abstract but in the particular, necessarily comes from this or that place in a fixed point in time, shortages seem less farfetched. Thus, late last month came news that the world may soon run out of Prosecco. As USAToday reported, “a shortage of the Italian bubbly could occur as a result of high demand and rainy weather, according to Roberto Cremonese, the export manager of the popular prosecco manufacturer Bisol.”

Prosecco is a sparkling wine made in the Friuli, Venezia, Giulia, and Veneto regions of northeastern Italy. There are some lovely, jolly good, kosher Proseccos on the market. Consider, for example, the Deccolio Prosecco ($11; sold at Whole Foods Markets), which offers floral, green apple, and tangerine aromas that develop into honey, pear, and lemon flavors in a medium bodied, nicely effervescent frame with hints of mineral and spice in the finish.

In truth, this “shortage” may also just be a marketing wheeze to drive up prices — note the “could occur” turn of phrase. By contrast, The Drinks Business, a trade publication, days ago reported: “News of an upcoming Sauvignon Blanc shortage has been confirmed by New Zealand Winegrowers as the 2015 vintage is almost one third smaller than last year.” The quality of the 2015 vintage is expected to be great, due to a fabulous summer creating excellent conditions for ripening grapes, but the crop yields were diminished by 27 percent due to an unexpected spring frost.

So while Prosecco “may” experience a shortage, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc will definitely suffer a shortage, so expect prices to increase. Fans should buy and drink now, while the price and weather is right.  A great kosher New Zealand option is the classically composed Goose Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2013 ($20) that opens with citrusy floral aromas and hints of grass with peach, herbal, and melon flavors in a smooth frame nicely balanced with lemon and green apple.

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JEW BY VOICE

Back of the Book

What Are You Waiting For?
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish Week
Erica Brown
What are you waiting for right now? About this time of the year, a whole lot of parents are waiting for school to start. A whole lot of kids aren’t. We might be waiting for the exact right time to start a project, start a diet, get really serious about dating, moving, finding a job — the list goes on. Voltaire once said, “We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.”
There seem to be two kinds of waiting: waiting as a condition of in-between-ness and waiting as an active state of anticipation. The first category is the pause between events or activities. We wait in airports. We wait for buses. We wait for good news. We wait in lines. If you grew up in Russia, waiting was a cultural phenomenon. Even the most impatient of us expects to spend a lot of time in this life waiting.
The Norwegian philosopher, Lars Svendsen, describes this kind of waiting as a state of modern boredom in his book “A Philosophy of Boredom.” Today many wait stations — airports, bus stops and even gas stations — try to minimize the boredom associated with waiting with TV screens and stores. Although these may prove distracting, no one is going to an airport to watch TV or go shopping.
Then there’s the kind of waiting that involves non-activity but is soaked in positive or negative anticipation because at the end of this wait lies transformation or redemption of some kind. We wait for an acceptance letter, for a job offer, for a doctor to share the results of a biopsy, for someone to say yes. This kind of waiting is usually harder because it involves tension and may not result in the desired outcome. We’re waiting for something to happen. It might not happen. But it just might.
Sometimes we can’t wait fast enough.
In this modern age, we have lost the art of waiting, waiting in both senses of the word. Collectors used to wait years, sometimes decades, in anticipation of locating a special book, piece of art or object. Now it’s a search engine click away. Waiting was part of the hunt. It was its own pleasure, and it made the outcome that much more tantalizing and fulfilling.
Today, we get impatient when computers take a few extra seconds to follow a cue. We get worried or angry when someone doesn’t respond to an e-mail fast enough. Everything from ERs to mail delivery is about reducing wait times, which has made our wait muscles flabbier than ever.
Here’s a great illustration. I asked my sister-in-law in Israel what to buy for my nephew’s wedding. After investigating, she e-mailed me with what they still needed. I got the e-mail, went online and found the gift — with two-day shipping. Perfect. I wrote back to her in under five minutes. It was a one-word e-mail and one I send frequently when completing tasks because it makes me happy. Done.
This was speed-dating for wedding registries, and it was highly satisfying. She wrote right back. “Done?” It seemed impossible. “Can you get moshiah [the messiah] to come this quickly?”
My response: “If moshiah were available on Amazon Prime, believe me, I would put in an order right away.”
Speaking of moshiah, many of us are acquainted with a song about waiting built on one of Maimonides’ 13 principles: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he may tarry, I will wait every day for his arrival.” The waiting itself is holy.
My grandfather taught me a maudlin tune to this song that he heard repeatedly in Auschwitz as people were marched to their deaths. There are groups today that are told to stop singing this song on visits to concentration camps. One tour leader was fined 100 zlotys (about $350) because he didn’t restrain his group from singing this song about our ultimate waiting.
We don’t know who composed the sad tune. Legend has it that Rabbi Azriel David Fastag was inspired with the tune on a train to Treblinka. A person who escaped that train taught it to his rebbe, and the tune stuck.
Perhaps we have to re-learn how to wait. We have to acquire the difficult wisdom to know when to wait with active anticipation and make the future happen and when to have the patience to sit back and allow life to unfold. Patience does not mean that we are doing nothing. Waiting is power when it helps us understand when to act on our beliefs and when to hold back. Too early, and we may lose it all. Too late, and we may have lost it already. One day we may just figure it out. I can’t wait.
Erica Brown’s column appears the first week of the month.Read More
Featured on NYBLUEPRINTDavid (Yarus) Vs. Goliath

Screenshot of JSwipe app. C/o Jswipe founder David Yarus

Dating website Jdate has filed a lawsuit against the Jswipe app, proving that the two are probably not each other’s beshert

Carly Stern
Editorial Intern

In terms of online Jewish dating, love is a battlefield.

That’s because JDate, the website that has been helping chosen people find their beshert since 1997, is suing newcomer app JSwipe for two allegations, using its patented technology without a license as well as infringing on its trademark, the letter “J.”

“If someone comes along and infringes on our trademark, creating confusion in the market, and steals our technology, we, like any business, must defend ourselves,” wrote Michael Egan, the CEO of JDate’s parent company, Spark Networks, which also owns other dating websites such as Christian Mingle and Black Singles, in an email to The Jewish Week.

According to its website, Spark Networks has a patent on any technology that has a “method and apparatus for detection of reciprocal interests of feelings and subsequent notification.”  Meaning, the company essentially owns the technology that matches users confidentially and informs them of those with mutual interest.

Furthermore, the website lists a selection of Spark Networks’ registered trademarks, which includes “JBlog,” “JDate,” “JMag,” “JPicks,” and “JMom.” Notably absent from the online list is “JSwipe” or the letter “J” on its own.   

gan claims that Spark Networks sent a cease and desist notice to JSwipe in early 2014, which was ignored, before taking further legal action against the dating app.

According to court records, a complaint was first filed against JSwipe on November 12, 2014.

David Yarus, the founder of JSwipe, argues that though he understands his app, which launched during Passover of 2014, and JDate both service the Jewish community, no further similarities exist between the two entities.

“To us, the letter J stands for Jewish, as it does with hundreds of organizations across the world,” he said. “To us, it belongs to the Jewish community.”  

While other Jewish dating apps that begin with the letter J exist, and technology that pairs people confidentially and informs them of matches is present in almost every dating website and app in existence, Spark Networks is currently only targeting Jswipe with legal action.

Egan explains that this is the case because, “When these types of issues pop up, we typically reach out to companies and attempt to work things out. Others have licensed technology that they are using from JDate.”

However, there is speculation that JDate’s motive behind this lawsuit is in fact a business venture.

In July of 2014, the L.A. Times reported that Spark Networks had net losses totaling $29 million over the course of three years. This may be due to the rise of dating apps including JSwipe, who unlike JDate, do not require a subscription fee. During its first year in existence, JSwipe has attracted more than 375,000 users across the globe, making it one of the only Jewish dating services to rival JDate’s 750,000-person membership.

Though it is unclear what may happen in the case between JDate and JSwipe, which is set to resume in August, one intellectual law professor who chose to not be mentioned by name because of an unfamiliarity with Spark Networks’ specific patent, believes that based on past patent law cases, JSwipe has the odds in its favor.

“The courts in recent years routinely reject as ‘abstract’ claims to methods of doing with computers what was once done by hand,” he said. “Unless there is some new technology involved, I’d be surprised if it’s valid.”

In the battle of the Js, he speculates that JSwipe will similarly come out on top.

“Given Ipods, Iphones…I cannot see how one can claim trade protection for the letter I, and were it possible, I'd have thought Apple would have done it," he said.

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BLOGS
WELL VERSED
Dancing To A Different BeatEva L. Weiss

Courtesy Noga Dance Company
Noga, Israel’s first modern dance company to give the stage to religious women performers, brings to life the dance between Jewish spirituality and contemporary choreography.
They recently presented two new pieces created by prominent Israeli choreographers at the Gerard Behar Theater in Jerusalem and the program will be repeated at the annual Karmiel Dance Festival later this month.
Noga is an all-women troupe founded in 2009 under the auspices of Orot Teacher’s College, which established Israel’s first academic dance program in 2007 dedicated to cultivating the artistic talents of religiously observant women. Noga dancers adhere to the strictures of religious observance, and eschew many aspects of the discipline often associated with a “secular” career in dance, such as the intense focus on physique and the deferral of motherhood to later years. Noga performs in front of women-only audiences and costumes reflect a deliberate balance between an appreciation of the female form and a culture of physical modesty.
The program, “Racing Heart” (Merotz Halev) offered two original works by Israeli choreographers, with seven dancers from the troupe. In the first piece, “The Women’s Section” (Ezrat Nashim), created by Dafi Altabeb, the dancers interpreted the space of women’s prayer through fluid and abrupt movements. They performed solo, in pairs and as a troupe with steps and rhythms that expressed their strivings to connect with themselves, one another and God.
The second piece, “Geometry of Transcendence" (Hitalut shel Geometria), created by Sharona Florsheim, was inspired by a verse from the biblical book of Isaiah and offered a physical interpretation of the Hebrew letters and words and their meaning.
The two pieces offered musings on religious experiences from a feminine perspective. Sharona Florsheim, artistic director of Noga, notes that the “Racing Heart” program was an exception in that most original Noga works are created by the religious members of the company. Often, they reflect the dancers’ interpretations of universal themes of life and nature (and not solely religious themes).
The choreography is most often inspired by contemporary European expressionism and provides few traces of Jewish folk dance or music. This challenges the audience to cipher passionate, religiously inspired dance in unfamiliar modern and postmodern forms. The Noga Dance Company is clearly charting unfamiliar territory, but they take the creative leap with a valiant energy that strikes a receptive chord with their female audiences.
Performers who combine spiritual inspiration with their art are gaining ground on the Israeli cultural scene. A religious men’s dance troupe (Kol Atzmotai Tomarna, “All my bones will call out”) has created its own public profile and other religious women’s dance troupes are following in Noga’s steps. This summer, at Israel’s annual Karmiel Dance Festival (July 28-30) there will be a locale devoted to dance studios and workshops for women only on July 29, and a repeat performance of “Racing Heart.”
Eva L. Weiss is a writer and editor who lives in Jerusalem; she is the author of a newly released children’s book, “I am Israeli.Read More

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POLITICAL INSIDER

Bibi Breaks His Own Rule

Douglas Bloomfield

Prime Minister Netanyahu has unswervingly – and correctly -- insisted that the Iranian nuclear threat is a global problem and should not be allowed to be portrayed as an Israeli issue.  Shifting the focus to Israel would be harmful to the Jewish state and undermine the campaign to de-nuke the ayatollahs, he said.

Good advice.  So why didn’t he take it? 

Netanyahu, more than anyone, deserves credit for putting the issue atop the international agenda and convincing the United States to lead a worldwide campaign to impose economic, diplomatic and military pressure, marked by a tough sanctions regime, designed to get the Iranians to the negotiating table.  Always in the background was the threat of Israeli military action.

But when that strategy succeeded and Iran said it was ready to talk, Netanyahu quickly had second thoughts and began piling on demands that he knew the Iranians – and the world powers -- would never accept.

He has hammered home his views with his Wile E Coyote cartoon at the United Nations and in speeches, talk shows and media interviews.

Yet as effective as he has been in sounding the alarm, no one has done more damage to his cause than Netanyahu himself. 

Starting long before he even knew what was in the deal he declared his unequivocal opposition – easy to do since he knew his demands were unrealistic and could never be met.  His attacks were consistently strident, frequently inaccurate and sometimes borderline hysterical.

He squandered an opportunity to influence the outcome not only of the Big Power negotiations but the subsequent public debate as well. His plunge into American partisan politics seriously damaged his effectiveness.

In the process, he so dominated the discussion that he made the Republicans look like foot soldiers marching to his orders with AIPAC and other Jewish organizations in tow.

He has done exactly what he warned against – making this an Israeli issue instead of a global problem.

Playing divisive, partisan politics he brought Israeli-US relations to a new low. 

Along the way he has undermined bipartisan Congressional support for Israel by alienating the Democratic Party and left a deeply divided Jewish community drifting away from Israel. And that could prove far more damaging than any Iranian bomb.

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