Remembering Liz Swados
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Dear Reader,
The ongoing reports of scandal among rabbis and Jewish leaders have motivated more than 350 prominent rabbis, academics and community activists to sign on to a bold "declaration" calling for more accountability and transparency. My report focuses on how the effort came about, who is involved, and how several leaders of major Jewish organizations have responded.
Gary Rosenblatt
Seeing ‘Crisis’ In Jewish Ethics, Group Urges Reform
Rabbis, academics say recent breaches ‘make mockery of Jewish values’; offer new blueprint.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Fed up with ethical lapses among Jewish leaders that have “reached crisis levels,” more than 350 scholars, authors, rabbis, cantors and Jewish community activists have signed onto a “declaration” that is challenging individuals and organizations to act with more transparency and accountability, and in accord with Jewish values.
In the past several years, the New York Jewish community endured the embarrassment of prominent rabbis accused of sexual abuse; a leading Jewish communal official going to prison for accepting millions of dollars in a kickback scheme; and the financial collapse of FEGS, the mammoth social service agency that seemed to suddenly lose $20 million while no one was looking.
“Disturbing developments” like these, the strongly worded declaration states, “make a mockery of Jewish values, shatter the trust that we have placed in our community’s leaders, and alienate young people from Judaism.” News of the declaration is being reported here for the first time.
Rafael Medoff, a Holocaust historian and author in Washington, D.C., said he reached a tipping point a few months ago and felt he had to do something to “at least start a conversation in the Jewish community about ethical issues that will affect the future quality of American Jewry.”
He and several other academics have just launched a website (jewishleadershipethics.org) and a “Declaration on Ethics in Jewish Leadership,” a bold 10-point statement urging that “whistleblowers should be encouraged,” “excusing offenders’ conduct or blaming the victims for coming forward is intolerable,” and that “Jewish organizations should adopt term limits, to combat the phenomenon of entrenched and self-perpetuating leaders.”
A diverse group of prominent Jewish spiritual leaders and academics from around the country — including former Rabbinical Council of America president Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, Hebrew Union College demographer Steven M. Cohen, Holocaust historians Deborah Lipstadt and Deborah Dwork, Brandeis sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman, White Plains Conservative Rabbi Gordon Tucker and University of California Santa Barbara Jewish studies professor Elliot Wolfson — have signed on to the document, which has been circulating on a grassroots level for about three weeks.
Medoff said he is pleasantly surprised at the number, diversity and quality of people who have already added their names to the initiative, which is seeking additional signatures as it spreads the word, and hopes to become an ongoing presence.
The declaration, which Medoff describes as “an opening salvo,” is not aimed at any specific group or individual but encourages organizations of all “all denominations and factions to embrace” its “core principles of ethical behavior, which are anchored in the time-honored values we cherish as Americans and Jews.”
By citing the need for democratic elections of lay and/or professional officers, setting term limits, and resisting major donors from having undue influence in determining policy, the declaration may come to represent a test for a more authentic standard of accountability in organizational life. And it raises the question of who speaks for American Jews in a community that is voluntary and increasingly factionalized.
Until now insiders have acknowledged with a wink and a shrug the difference between open equality and “Jewish democracy,” where lay leaders — often generous donors — may be chosen in a closed-door, predetermined manner and policies passed in swift voice votes.
Giving Voice To The Majority
What prompted Medoff to act, he said, was a Letter to the Editor in The Jewish Week last June from Susannah Heschel, professor of religion at Dartmouth College, regarding the “sauna scandal” surrounding Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt of the Riverdale Jewish Center.
She wrote, in part, “if bringing boys and young men with him into the sauna was perfectly acceptable, why was it kept hushed by leaders of the congregation?”
“Susannah’s letter was my inspiration,” Medoff explained. “She made a powerful point about enablers — those, including leaders of the congregation, who had long known about the rabbi’s activities but had not acted on them.
“We are seeking to give voice to the overwhelming majority of Jews who are upset” with reports of rabbis and others in leadership positions who violate the communal trust, said Heschel, one of the founders of the site.
She and Medoff formed a small committee, which also includes Thane Rosenbaum, an author and professor at NYU Law School, and Shulamit Magnus, a professor of modern Jewish history at Oberlin College. In an interview this week, they said they are determined to speak out — including naming names and citing specific failings — as part of a moral obligation not to stand idly by in the face of ethical violations.
Their declaration asserts that “concealing evidence of unethical behavior is itself unethical and antithetical to Jewish values” and that “the leaders of Jewish institutions and organizations should not receive excessive financial remuneration.”
“Shining light on issues in the dark has a way of changing the landscape,” Rosenbaum said. “Calling attention to misdeeds among Jewish leaders has its own value.”
Agreeing In Principle
Asked to respond to the declaration, the professional heads of three major Jewish organizations responded positively, if a bit defensively, in noting that their groups already comply to high ethical standards.
David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, said his organization “welcomes any initiative designed to stress the ethical and moral imperatives of Jewish behavior, be it individual or organizational, and especially against the backdrop of distressing revelations” that have come to light in recent years.
“We take those imperatives very much to heart in how we conduct ourselves at AJC. That’s why we resonated to much of what this document aspires to, even if we might have some quibbles or questions here and there…”
Harris noted that AJC has a “constant set of checks and balances” between lay and staff, executive council leaders are subject to term limits, the president serves only one three-year term, and finances are subject to strict internal and external controls “aimed at maximum accountability and transparency.” He also noted that AJC has whistle-blowing and conflict-of-interest policies, as called for in the Declaration, as well as strict non-discrimination rules.
“That said,” Harris wrote in an email from overseas, “we shall always aspire to do even better,” well aware of the “sacred bond of trust” AJC is committed to uphold.
Jonathan Greenblatt, national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League since the summer, said in an interview that he understands the sense of urgency in the Declaration, given recent “challenges” in our community. But he expressed some concern that such basic principles of ethical behavior needed to be publicized in terms of adherence in the Jewish community.
“In principle I agree with the document,” he said, though he found some of the language ambiguous. “The act of re-stating some of these principles may have value in itself, reminding us of the importance of democracy, transparency and pluralism. I get that.”
Having served as special assistant to President Obama, dealing with issues of governance and best practice in the nonprofit world, Greenblatt noted that there is a wealth of material and a well-developed set of practices available to nonprofits on the issues raised in the declaration.
Beyond that, he observed that “we are the people of The Golden Rule, we live by 613 commandments, and ethics have been core to Jewish practice for millennia. So it is unfortunate that some of our leaders are not congruent with these practices,” adding that “ADL is at the front of the line” when it comes to setting and adhering to high ethical standards.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said he, too, agreed in principle with most of the declaration, noting that organizations have differing compositions and agendas. Lay leaders of the conference are chosen by a highly representative group of members, he said, and though there have been no two-person elections since the days of Rabbi Alexander Schindler, more than three decades ago, “the process is completely open and everyone gets a hearing with the nominating committee.”
Hoenlein added that he hopes “the same process” of ethical behavior “apply to Jewish media,” which he said has been known to publish “deliberate distortions.”
(Speaking off the record, he mentioned one publication — not The Jewish Week — by name.)
It is too early to say whether or not substantive change will come about as a result of the declaration. But it was heartening to see that each of the three major leaders I reached out to for comment responded in a timely manner and had mostly positive things to say.
They took the statement seriously and sought to show how their organizations follow ethical guidelines.
What happens next?
If the public signs on to the statement in impressive numbers; if more organizations review and respond — publicly or internally — to the principles set forth; if the committee that launched the initiative follows through and names those who do not meet their standards (as well as those who do); and if all of this activity leads to more reflection and discussion, positive change could take place.
It’s a long shot to disrupt a communal culture, but if our Jewish institutions want to remain relevant in the 21st century, they’d best be responsive to the voices of those who care most.
The declaration can be found at www.jewishleadershipethics.org.
Gary@jewishweek.org---------------------
Reporting from England, Staff Writer Steve Lipman describes how a local Muslim community helped save an aging synagogue, creating a unique bond between the synagogue president and a Muslim community leader.
National
UK Jews, Muslims Stand Firm Amid Ominous Currents
In a time of growing Islamist threat, members of the two faiths have carved out a unique relationship.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Rudi Leavor, left, Jani Rashid, right. Photos by Steve Lipman/JWBradford, England — The only remaining synagogue in this one-time textile hub was in danger of closing a few years ago — until the city’s Muslim community stepped in to save it.
Faced with an aging, declining membership base, a 135-year-old Moorish Victorian building in need of repairs and little money in the bank, the congregation’s leaders convened a meeting of the few dozen members, who decided to form a fundraising Friends of the Synagogue group.
An informal consortium of Muslim businessmen, a Muslim city official and the Bradford Council for Mosques raised more than $30,000, enough to repair the leaking roof and collapsing eastern wall, and keep the synagogue doors open.
“I was concerned that we would be losing a house of worship,” said Jani Rashid, until recently head of diversity and cohesion for the city’s Department of Children’s Services. A Muslim, he and some friends raised the bulk of the money for the Bradford Synagogue and began including it on school groups’ visits to local houses of worship.
On an overcast afternoon last May, Rudi Leavor, an 88-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany who has served as president of the congregation for several decades, sat next to Rashid on a pew in the dark, dank sanctuary. Long pieces of cloth were stretched over the rows of seats to protect them from falling plaster. Outside, scaffolding surrounded the synagogue, which is on a side street around the corner from the city’s main mosque.
Leavor and Rashid bantered with an easy familiarity, like a nephew and a favorite uncle. As a sign of respect for his work on behalf of the synagogue, Rashid was appointed last year to its board of directors — the first-known example of a Muslim individual in such a position in a Jewish house of worship.
Although the terrorist attacks in Paris two months ago were not aimed — this time — at specifically Jewish targets, they caused many Jews to view Muslims with increased suspicion. But in Bradford, Jewish-Muslim relations remain strong, Leavor said.
“Paris has in no way weakened the bond between ‘my’ Muslims and myself,” he said. “We just continue with our friendship.”
During Chanukah last month, several Muslims, including a pair of MPs and the president of the city’s Council of Mosques, took part in a holiday service at the synagogue.
Elsewhere in England, when hate crimes against British Muslims spiked seven years ago, London’s charedi-led Shomrim civilian patrol began protecting the areas around mosques in the heavily Orthodox Stamford Hill neighborhood, where Jews and Muslims are neighbors; the patrols remain in place today. In Manchester, the decade-old Muslim-Jewish Forum celebrated its anniversary a few months ago at a dinner at City Hall where the country’s chief rabbi and a prominent imam spoke.
And in late December, Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, recommended that Jewish schools teach Islam, saying that it would offer Jewish children an opportunity to learn about a “poorly understood religion,” according to news reports. The call comes as British schools, starting in September, will be required to teach at least two faiths as part of their general curriculum in religious studies. A few days after the rabbi’s call, the heads of a British network of Islamic schools announced that it will recommend that its members institute classes in Judaic studies.
At a time when radical Islam is on the rise in continental Europe, especially in France, where Jews are often the targets of physical and verbal attacks, Muslim-Jewish relations here offer an example of interfaith cooperation, observers say.
But there are other currents buffeting the relationship.
A mid-2015 Anti-Defamation League poll found that 54 percent of British Muslims “harbor anti-Semitic attitudes,” compared with 12 percent of the general population; more than a quarter of British Muslims sympathize with the terrorists who committed the fatal attacks on the Hyper Cacher supermarket and Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris a year ago, according to a new BBC poll; and recent surveys indicate that a growing number of British Jews — especially those in the heavily Jewish Hackney section of London — have experienced anti-Semitic incidents and are beginning to doubt their future in the country.
Following a few small but high-visibility rallies in recent years in London by neo-Nazis – including one last summer – it seems that such anti-Semitic expressions are finding a sympathetic audience among the country’s growing Muslim population.
“The Jewish-Muslim relationship is complicated,” said Philip Rosenberg, director of public affairs at The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the country’s central Jewish umbrella organization. On the whole, relations between the two religious communities are far better than in most European communities, and England’s Muslims tend to be more “moderate” than elsewhere in Europe, Rosenberg and a wide range of Jewish and Muslim representatives told The Jewish Week.
“This isn’t France” was an anthem repeated by both Jews and Muslims.
After last summer’s neo-Nazi rally, which officials shifted to central London from the multiethnic, heavily Jewish Golders Green neighborhood, Muslim groups joined with the Jewish community to launch an interfaith “Golders Green Together” campaign, he said.
Similarly, during Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in Gaza in the summer of 2014, the Board of Deputies and the Muslim Council of Britain issued a joint plea to “export peace” to the Middle East.
Following the terrorism attacks in Paris in January 2015, leaders of both faiths issued declarations against hate crimes. And the ISIS attacks in Paris in November did not lead to a “negative impact on Muslim-Jewish relations,” Rosenberg said, but rather “made certain activities more poignant,” like in November, when Rabbi Natan Levy, the Board of Deputies’ interfaith and social action manager traveled with Imam Mamadou Seydou Boccoum, director of the London-based Interfaith through the Arts, to Paris to show support for the U.N. Climate Change Conference.
But, anti-Israel — and sometimes, anti-Jewish — sentiment remains present in some British Muslim circles, said Mohammed Amin, co-chair of Manchester’s Muslim-Jewish Forum. “There is no uniformity of views,” he said. “If you want to selectively read the Koran to be anti-Semitic, you can do it.”
“Everything is far from perfect in terms of integration of Muslims into British society and in Muslim-Jewish relations,” said Walter Ruby, who coordinates Muslim-Jewish programming for the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. “There are large numbers of Muslims in gritty, immigrant communities in East London, Birmingham and many other places who are jobless, alienated and open to radical appeals. A worrying number of young British Muslims went to join ISIS and there are many others susceptible to those appeals.”
With unrest in the Middle East often boiling over in areas where large numbers of Muslims – and opponents of Israel – live, British Jews are cautious. Many Jewish institutions discreetly identify their sites to avoid calling attention to their presence.
‘Mutual Respect’
Those caveats aside, Jews and Muslims in England in recent years have engaged in a series of unique cooperative programs including cricket and soccer games, a radio station, a comedy improv group, an interfaith women’s organization, a soup kitchen and a food drive. In Birmingham, half the students at the city’s community Jewish day school are Muslims whose parents see it as offering a high-quality education; inspired by American-style mitzvah-day programs, a London synagogue hosted an Eid celebration for a nearby Somali community whose mosque was destroyed in an arson attack; and Jewish and Muslim women last summer participated in a similar event hosted by London’s Jewish Museum.
England’s 300,000 Jews, several hundred of whom live in Bradford, are outnumbered by Muslims by about 10-to-1.
In a guide to the country’s national elections issued last year by the Muslim Council of Britain was a “pledge to undertake meaningful action to combat Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and all forms of racism.” In the weeks after the election, a Muslim member of Parliament wrote in an essay in the London-based newspaper The Jewish News that “it is important that politicians and community leaders remain focused on what we should do to reassure the Jewish community about its continued safety at home in Britain.” And a Muslim candidate in London’s mayoral race wrote an essay in The Jewish News headlined “I want to be a Muslim mayor who stands up for Jewish rights,” in which he declared he would “never stop fighting racism in all its forms, including anti-Semitism.”
Manchester’s Muslim-Jewish Forum, which has received several civic awards, was patterned after a similar group in London, said Heather Fletcher, the Manchester group’s co-chair.
While such Muslim-Jewish efforts are rare in continental Europe, or are typically limited to such political issues as the right to perform ritual slaughter of animals, and in the United States are concentrated at the leadership level, these joint efforts in England have a grassroots, hands-on character, often leading to personal friendships, members of both communities said.
Jews and Muslims told of invitations to each other’s weddings and holiday celebrations. “There is mutual respect here,” said Ian Sharer, a charedi member of London’s city council who spearheaded the Shomrim patrol of mosques. When Muslim residents began appearing in his Stamford Hill neighborhood 30 years ago, Orthodox Jews “were pleased to see religious people moving in,” he said.
“There appears to be a great deal more positive Muslim-Jewish interaction in the UK than in any of its continental neighbors,” Ruby said. “My sense is that the Brits … are in general, more pragmatic and open to doing what works. They are a lot less ideological than the French and other Europeans.”
Observers offer several possible explanations:
n The United Kingdom, which has a state religion (The Church of England), is not dogmatically secular like France, and the British are more comfortable exploring their religious practices and identities.
n Most of Great Britain’s Muslims come from Pakistan, India or Bangladesh, and are less intimately attuned to events in the Middle East than the Muslims of France, most of whom have roots in Arab North Africa.
n England’s Muslims are more integrated into and vested in the country’s culture and political system and less open to appeals to commit acts of violence.
n As a hybrid nation, formed by repeated waves of immigration, England does not share Germany’s narrow concept of “Volk” (native people), which has excluded groups like Jews during the Holocaust era and Muslims from Turkey in recent decades.
n An island nation, England has less-fluid borders than countries of continental Europe; everyone has to get along.
“We’re a less ideological country than France,” Amin said. The Israel and the Palestinian conflict doesn’t necessarily poison Jewish-Muslim ties here, Rosenberg said. “We don’t agree on everything, particularly the Middle East,” he said, “but it is sometimes possible to be very critical of certain Israeli government policies and yet be absolutely opposed to anti-Semitism.”
This is particularly evident in Bradford.
“Just because there is a problem in the Middle East doesn’t mean there should be a problem between Muslims and Jews in Bradford,” said Rashid.
The Bradford Muslims who learn about his role in the synagogue’s renovation “are very supportive,” Rashid said.
They’re also supportive of the synagogue itself. During the fundraising appeal, “the Muslims were the first among the people who gave,” Leavor said. Without them, he said, “the synagogue might have had no option but to sell.”
steve@jewishweek.org---------------------
While most of the anti-BDS efforts on campus have been aimed at students, Staff Writer Hannah Drefyus has the story on an effort among professors to counter the anti-Israel movement.
National
Attacking BDS From The Left
Academics counter ‘Orwellian’ linkage of Israel protests with other progressive issues.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
“We’re not just cheerleaders,” says historian Kenneth Waltzer.
As the BDS movement continues to roil college campuses around the country, the focus of attention in the Jewish community has largely been on students. High-profile and big-money efforts — $50 million from Las Vegas billionaire and Republican mega-giver Sheldon Adelson, $100 million from the Jewish National Fund — are underway to help arm Jewish students in fighting the campus wars aimed at delegitimizing Israel.
Missing in the loud and troubling debate in any significant way has been the voice of Jewish faculty.
That seems poised to change as fast-moving events on the college green are pulling Jewish faculty members off the sidelines of the BDS controversy and into the fray.
“Until this academic year, most of my concerned colleagues felt that not responding to every provocation was the best strategy,” said Sylvain Cappell, a math professor at New York University and a longtime critic of academic boycotts. “We were not interested in giving the cause free publicity or stoking the already confrontational atmosphere.”
But growing efforts to link Israel with a host of other hot-button issues on campus, including racial injustice and sexual assault, caused Cappell to re-evaluate. He referred to the current campus climate as a “turning point.”
“Promoters of BDS have been working overtime to embed themselves in the matrix of progressive concerns and student movements on campus,” said Cappell, who has argued against academic boycotts of Israel on CNN and public radio in the past. “We are at a point where we can no longer ignore the issue.” (See Opinion piece on page 41).
That strategy on the part of BDS supporters — “intersectionality,” it’s been called — is fueling a new counterpunch, as some well-known academics, many of them Jewish, are joining forces to press the case against boycotts.
The just-launched initiative, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), aims to unite academics around the country to facilitate constructive dialogue about Israel. Led by Mark Yudof, president emeritus of the University of California system, and Kenneth Waltzer, former director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University, the AEN hopes to combat “Orwellian efforts to link Israel with a multitude of issues, from the shootings in Ferguson to high levels of student tuition,” according to a statement announcing the network released at the end of last month. So far, a “couple hundred” people have signed on, Waltzen said.
Unlike previous right-wing groups that have organized efforts to combat BDS on campus, AEN stands on the left side of the spectrum — “center, liberal and progressive,” Waltzer told The Jewish Week Monday.
“I wouldn’t blanche at being called ‘pro-Israel,’ but we’re not just cheerleaders — we’re academics, we’re people who have critical perspectives. What we want is robust conversation,” he said. That conversation does not shy away from criticism of Israel, he said.
“We think, quite frankly, that if we’re going to make any headway on campus, we have to use a language that appeals to academics. We’re not interested in ‘safe spaces’; we’re interested in universities as free and open spaces for intellectual engagement.”
Though the majority of AEN members are Jewish, Waltzer said the network aims to engage faculty members from different traditions. Current board members who are not Jewish represent the “multicultural front” the network hopes to present.
Waltzer also stressed that the network is not just planning on becoming a “faculty listserv.”
“We’re interested in drilling down [to foster] active membership on campuses.” Those who sign on are expected to write, speak and intervene in administrative decisions of concern, he said.
“In the face of activities aimed at vilifying Israel, AEN members will facilitate robust and civilized discussions relating to Israel on campuses, promote academic freedom and freedom of expression, stand for human rights for Arabs and Jews, and engage colleagues and students to better understand these complex issues,” Yudof, the network’s chair, said in the statement. AEN is currently finishing up a manual entitled “Academic Freedom and BDS: A Guide for University Presidents and Administrators,” which they expect to disseminate soon.
Though some well-known academic organizations began embracing academic boycotts of Israel in recent years — notably the Association for Asian American Studies in April 2013 and the American Studies Association in December 2013 — last weekend the American Historical Association firmly rejected a resolution targeting Israel. The measure, defeated by a 111-50 vote, accused Israel of restricting Palestinian academic activities in Gaza and the West Bank. Jewish institutions lauded the defeat as a step forward.
Justin Cammy, associate professor of Jewish studies and comparative literature at Smith College, a private liberal arts institution for women in Northampton, Mass., joined the AEN because he believes boycotts run counter to the core academic principle of engagement. Though he considers himself on the political left, he finds the BDS movement’s resolution to boycott Israeli “institutions but not individuals” spurious and hypocritical.
“Every scholar is embedded in an institution,” Cammy told The Jewish Week. “Once you say you’re going to boycott an entire country worth of people, that goes beyond political decision making. That borders on bigotry.”
At Smith, like at several other liberal arts institutions, a “fair share” of professors signed on to an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, Cammy said.
“There are colleagues of mine who simply don’t understand that there is no place for illiberal strategies in liberal American education. Once you go to boycotting scholars or institutions of higher learning, you have transgressed the fundamental idea of what education is all about.”
Miriam F. Elman, associate professor of political science at Syracuse University and member of AEN, stressed the importance of an organization geared towards faculty, rather than students.
“Students are transient — faculty and administration are here for the long-term. We’re the ones setting the tone and ultimately driving student activism,” she said.
At Syracuse, which has the sixth largest population of Jewish students at a private university, according to HIllel International, the problem is largely faculty “steering students in an anti-Israel direction” and an administration that has “refused to intervene,” said Elman. Prior to the launch of the AEN, she and five other tenured professors — her untenured colleagues are “absolutely not willing” to take a pro-Israel stance for fear of retribution, said Elman — formed an ad-hoc committee to deal with individual events they found disturbing.
In one such incident, Josh Ruebner, a vehement critic of Israel who has been flagged by the Anti-Defamation League for his rhetoric, was invited to speak at the university on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Though Elman tried to organize a protest, the speech went on as planned. In another incident, Steven Salita, an American scholar whose anti-Semitic tweets during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict caused the University of Illinois to withdraw its offer of employment, was invited to speak on campus. According to Elman, she spent over 100 hours organizing a response; the event was eventually cancelled. Norman Finkelstein, the virulent critic of Israel who was banned from entering the country in 2008 was invited to speak on Israel Independence Day.
“I feel overwhelmed by what I’m required to do to keep up a healthy discourse about Israel on this campus,” Elman said, describing the throng of Jewish students who file into her office every semester seeking counsel on how to deal with professors who assign what they think are offensive readings or “shut them down” for voicing differing perspectives. Most students end up dropping the courses, she said.
“Professors need support just as much as students, if not more,” she said, a note of weariness in her voice. “We’re in the trenches here.”
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
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National
Non-Traditional Synagogue Network Launches, With Fellowship
To support fellowship, Jim Joseph Foundation grants $3.2 million.
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
Rabbi Noa Kushner. Via youtube.comWhat do a religious start-up, a spiritual cooperative and 570-plus households in a high school have in common?
They’re all part of the Jewish Emergent Network, comprised of seven communities that have been meeting together for two years to think about what the congregations of the future will look like, according to a Jan. 6 press release from Lab/Shul, which is also a member.
The network has worked together before, on a website about Chanukah, but now they’ve announced their existence more forcefully by also launching a long-term project: a rabbinic fellowship that will post new rabbis in each of the network’s seven members for a period of two years starting in June 2016.
“Many of the folks that engage in these communities were not engaged anywhere else in their adult lives,” said Dawne Bear Novicoff, an assistant director at the Jim Joseph Foundation, which is granting up to $3.2 million to fund the fellowship for four years. The Crown Family is also providing funding, and other organizations supported the network during its learning and discussion phase.
“The thing that captured our imagination was the network, the idea that innovation could be pushed out from there,” Novicoff added.
Synagogue membership outside the Orthodox community is declining; according to a 2012 report from the SK3 Synagogue Studies Institute, this is especially true among younger people. Their 2010 survey showed that young adults aged 18 to 34 made up only 8 percent of Conservative and Reform synagogue membership.
The foundation will formally grant the money to IKAR, the network member that has more than 570 households in its community. The religious start-up is The Kitchen in San Francisco; Kavana in Seattle calls itself a cooperative.
The group of seven congregations decided to create the fellowship because they heard from many younger rabbis and students who wanted to learn from them, and because the extra hands would help them more fully serve their own communities, said Rabbi Noa Kushner of The Kitchen.
“The bottleneck is around me,” she said. “I’m one rabbi. We are very blessed to have a full-time staff of four, but we’re serving thousands of people.”
The fellowship will accept applicants from any Jewish denomination, according to the press release. None of the member congregations officially affiliate with a denomination.
While receiving weekly supervision, the fellows will serve as rabbis. They will also travel as a group to each of the network organizations for conferences.
The network also includes Mishkan, a multi-site community, in Chicago; Sixth & I, a synagogue and cultural center in Washington, D.C. and in New York, Romemu, known for its Eastern-influenced services.
helen@jewishweek.org
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New York
Satmar And The ‘Last Lion’
The chasidic group’s longtime rebbe recalled, in memoir of aide who is both insider and outsider.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Rabbi Hertz Frankel, “the English Principal,” at his Bais Rochel school. Michael Datikash/JWIn the Carpathian Mountains, in early 1944, the Satmar rebbe was emperor of a Hungarian chasidic kingdom; in Brooklyn 1946, he was almost alone. Reb Yoilish (Joel) Teitelbaum couldn’t get 10 men for a minyan. In the Brooklyn dusk, his gabbai (assistant) asked passersby if they davened; the passersby kept walking.
The rebbe was then almost 60, old for his age, as most survivors were. In 1944, when leaves were turning green, the Nazis entered Hungary. When leaves turned brown, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were dead. And now, in 1946, with two children and a wife sleeping eternally across the ocean, and his only remaining child, a daughter, soon to die in Brooklyn, the rebbe hit bottom, or so it seemed. And yet, though no one knew it, his best was yet to be.
By the time the Satmar rebbe died in 1979 in Kiryas Joel, the all-Satmar shtetl he founded upstate, Reb Yoilish was leader of the largest, most uncompromising chasidic group in the world, more than 150,000 strong — and that, with contempt for outreach, dialogue or inclusion. To this day, Yiddish is their mother tongue; Zionism, their nemesis; and making Jewish life affordable, their passion. (Tuition ranges from $2,500 to $4,000, and is free for the poor. Satmar also offers heavily subsidized weddings, if one agrees to the standardized menu and the house band). If the test of a successful Jewish family is the number of Jewish grandchildren, nobody does it better. In Satmar shuls, one can see upwards of 80 cousins lining up on Friday nights to say “Good Shabbos” to their shared zeyde. The New York Times reported in 2006: “If the Satmar schools in New York were a public school system, it would be the fourth-largest system in the state, after those of New York City, Buffalo and Rochester.”
Rabbi Hertz Frankel, principal of Satmar’s Bais Rochel, says his school has 17 first grade classes for girls alone (boys have their own school). With 37,000 Satmar children — all of whom speak Yiddish during recess — he estimates that 15-20 percent of all Jewish children in Jewish schools are Satmar or an affiliate group.
The Satmar phenomenon is the subject of Frankel’s new memoir, “The Satmar Rebbe and His English Principal: Reflections on the Struggle to Build Yiddishkeit in America” (Menucha Publishers). Frankel, not a chasid, was ordained at the (non-Satmar) Yeshiva Torah Vodaath and just 26 when he met the rebbe in 1959. The rebbe told Frankel that he had experience running a boys’ yeshiva in Europe, but didn’t know how to run a chasidic school for girls; there were no such things in the town of Satmar. The rebbe needed help. He turned to Frankel, who remembers, “There I was, an Agudist in Satmar land, wearing a light colored suit and a new straw hat.”
Frankel’s book is not academic but more in the style of schmoozing on a Shabbos afternoon. The book demurely avoids scandal or innuendo, let alone several sexual abuse cases in Williamsburg, and stands in contrast to several recent memoirs from lapsed Orthodox authors (not Satmar), far more critical of their own corners of the charedi community. Frankel’s book also arrives when the city is investigating charges of substandard secular education in certain charedi yeshivas (though not Frankel’s Bais Rochel). He mentions that there were, in fact, Satmar families “who refused to have their children study secular subjects,” but the rebbe responded, “If people don’t want to send their children to ‘English’ [some frum Jews, similar to the Amish, use “English” as a catch-all for everything secular] let them go to the M’lochim,” a chasidic group whose schools don’t teach secular classes.
Frankel is still principal, but the book ends with the rebbe’s death in 1979, sparing Frankel from having to explain, or implicate higher-ups, in the 1999 federal fraud case (regarding the misuse of government funds) that saw Bais Rochel fined $1 million, and Frankel sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation. The community stood by him.
Even so, Frankel’s book offers a rare peek into the Satmar world from someone intimate with its inner sanctums, and yet slightly apart, even nicknamed “the goyish principal,” for such is “English.” Indeed, Frankel remained clean-shaven for years into his tenure.
A graduate of Brooklyn College (few Satmars go to college), Frankel spoke a fluent English, a skill eluding the rebbe’s interest and proficiency. He became not only the principal but, informally, the rebbe’s “secretary of state,” an intermediary with government officials and non-Satmars.
Settling in Williamsburg, the rebbe’s first project was childhood education, writes Frankel, but in a community of mostly destitute survivors, young Satmar men were told “to go to work … make a good living and be able to support their families and the community.”
The rebbe, said Frankel, directed that “a yungerman should wake up at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning, learn for two or three hours, and then go to work to earn a living. When he comes home from work, he should learn for another two or three hours. On top of that, he should also help his wife at home.” In Israel, the rebbe insisted that no Satmar individual or organization take any subsidy from the “Zionist” government; the safety net should be Satmar’s responsibility alone.
The rebbe was strict about the Bais Rochel yearbook, as well. There could no be pictures of the girls, and nothing about a girl’s appearance in any of the anecdotes.
Textbooks, writes Frankel, were censored, to avoid “inappropriate” influences. Frankel, though, soon recognized that the girls needed additional reading material, perhaps even a subscription to The Weekly Reader (a secular elementary-school news magazine), for current events. He even raised his voice to the rebbe: “How do you expect me to do my job?” One of the rebbe’s associates told him to calm down, but the rebbe disagreed, “Let him get excited. He has to get excited. He has to represent his department. If he doesn’t get excited and work hard for his department, then he’s not doing his job!” The rebbe gave permission for The Weekly Reader. “After all,” the rebbe said later, “he got so excited … we have to give him something!”
Frankel doesn’t deny that some children “go off the derech” [religious path]. “Approximately 7 to 8 percent of the students ... [could be classified as] problematic,” he writes, mostly referring to behavioral and emotional problems, leading to “a small percentage of dropouts.” Almost no one was ever expelled, and Frankel recalls the rebbe, with no surviving children, speaking with tenderness, one-on-one, to each student in trouble.
For the orphaned survivors flooding into Brooklyn after the war, the rebbe and rebbetzin (Feige, the rebbe’s second wife) became their father, mother and best friends. They quietly distributed money for tuition and Shabbos meals. The rebbetzin “married off countless orphans,” writes Frankel, “taking care of everything from matchmaking to finding the couple an apartment.” She would visit people “that had been neglected and forgotten about,” talking to the lonely, bringing food to the sick. The rebbetzin “was a role model for all the girls,” writes Frankel. In her memory, every morning dozens of Satmar women take subways and busses from Williamsburg to hospitals in every borough, bringing home-cooked Shabbos-style meals to any Jew (Satmar or not) who would like one.
The rebbe was famous, or infamous, for his relentless anti-Zionism. But over the phone, Frankel jokes, “Your friends on the Upper West Side ought to love Satmar. We were anti-Zionist before it was cool.”
The rebbe’s attitude toward Israel was complex. When Hubert Humphrey avoided the subject when meeting the rebbe in 1968, the rebbe later said, “Had Humphrey spoken to me in support of the Zionist state, it wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. We Jews have a Torah, which forbids us to have a state during the exile, and therefore we may not ask the Americans to support the state. But a non-Jew has no Torah, and by supporting the state he feels he is helping Jews. So, on the contrary, if an American non-Jew is against the Zionist state, it shows he is an anti-Semite.”
Frankel says, despite Satmar’s street demonstrations against Israeli religious policies, the rebbe “always insisted” that Satmar never demonstrate alongside Arabs “who sought Israel’s destruction. ‘We have nothing in common with these anti-Semites,’ he would always say. ‘Their cause is not ours.’” Frankel says the rebbe would never have approved of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta going in 2007 to an anti-Israel and Holocaust-denial event in Iran.
The rebbe, though, blamed the Holocaust on the “sin” of Zionism. On the eve of war, the rebbe scolded Jews against escaping to the Yishuv (pre-state Israel), before the rebbe escaped on a train (with 1,680 non-Satmar Jews), to Switzerland, as arranged by Rudolf Kastner, the leading Zionist (Jewish Agency) official in Budapest. Not only did Kastner bribe Adolf Eichmann with a small fortune for the transport, but Eichmann said in 1960 that part of the deal was Kastner keeping quiet about where all the other trains were going. Frankel doesn’t discuss the rebbe’s choices in the ethical fog of 1944, saying only, “I wish I had the courage to speak to the rebbe about the subject. I simply wasn’t brave enough …” The rebbe would only say that he was never saved by Kastner, only God — “to rebuild Yiddishkeit.” He landed in Brooklyn, where he turned nine men, less than a minyan, into 150,000 Satmars, the largest chasidic group in the world.
The story is told that when Noah was in the ark, the lion bit his hand when Noah was slow to feed him. The lion roared, “Do you know who I am? I am the last lion. Respect me.”
That was the Satmar rebbe, says Frankel, the last lion, with a bite and a roar that’s heard still.
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
---------------------
EDUCATION & CAREER
Education January 2016
Beating Back BDS Two approaches from ex-Brandeis president and new JCPA head. YU tackles changes in Jewish philanthropy. Luring English speakers to Israeli colleges
Tuesday, January 12, 2016 (All day)
Inside This Special Section
---------------------
MORE HEADLINES
Walking With King >>
Opinion
Walking With King
Arnold M. Eisen
Special To The Jewish Week
Arnold M. EisenJews attuned to the weekly cycle of Torah readings cannot help but have a special relationship to Martin Luther King Day. This is the time of year when we read the story of the exodus from Egypt that stands at the very core of Jewish tradition, as it does in the tradition of the African-American church from which King emerged. Over and over we Jews hear Moses demand of Pharaoh in the name of the Lord that he “send forth My people that they may serve Me.” Week after week, we are driven to ask ourselves what that call means in our day, and what we need to do to answer it.
It required no great leap of exegesis — though it was a masterful rhetorical move — when Abraham Joshua Heschel declared at the Conference on Religion and Race where he first met King: “At the first Conference on Religion and Race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses.” Heschel was only following the logic of the Torah — a Book that always calls Jews to action — when he added “the outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. ... The exodus began, but it is far from having been completed.” That is still true, I believe — over half a century since the March on Washington at which King inspired America with his dream of freedom for all God’s children. What would Heschel have marched for in 2016, I wonder. What would King have said today? What does the Torah command?
Those questions have become more immediate for me of late because of two books that crossed my desk and disturbed my sleep. The first — Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bestselling cri de coeur, “Between the World and Me” — argues with sorrow and anger that the American dream — King’s dream — has long disguised a cruel fact of life that confronts black people in our country every day: namely, that their bodies are not safe. Writing as a father to his son, Coates describes the fear he felt growing up on the streets of Baltimore, and feels still when he sees black Americans lose their lives to violence, some of it inflicted by the police forces of America’s cities. He worries that he himself — and, even more, his son — might one day fall prey to that injustice.
Coates wants his son to be proud that he lives “among a people whom I would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not always self-evident” — words that brought to my mind sermons given by a host of rabbis over the years in the face of discrimination and oppression suffered by Jews. But Coates finds no solace in the religious faith that sustained Jews and blacks alike for centuries, and sustains me: “The [G]od of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.” I draw exactly the opposite conclusion from the Exodus story in the Torah — but then again, none of my close friends has been shot dead on a suburban street by a police officer who claimed the young man had tried to run him over. (The officer was never prosecuted). “The entire episode,” Coates writes, “took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.”
Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University, argues forcefully in her bestselling book, “The New Jim Crow,” that the spate of such shootings in recent years is not coincidence: there is, she claims, a direct relationship between violence against African-Americans, lingering racism, and the mass incarceration of black men since the passage of stricter drug laws in 1982. A 1995 survey asked respondents in America to “close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me.” Ninety-five percent “pictured a black drug user” at a time when only 15 percent of drug users in the U.S. were African-American (about the same percentage as today).
Here are a few more chilling statistics: In Washington, D.C., “it is estimated that 3 out of 4 young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.” In Chicago, the total population of current and ex-felons among black males “is equivalent to 55 percent of the black adult male population and an astonishing 80 percent of the adult black male workforce.” Nationwide, the rate of imprisonment for blacks on drug charges “dwarfs the rate of whites” — despite the fact that “people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates...”
Heschel and King were often reproached for bringing politics into the realm of religion. Preach the Torah or the Gospel, they were urged, and leave current affairs out of it. In response, both referred their interlocutors to the Torah or the Gospel, and quoted frequently from the Biblical prophets. The religious action that Judaism demands can certainly not be reduced to public policy — liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican. But neither can it be divorced from public policy.
Coates and Alexander do not have all the answers we require this Martin Luther King Day. But their hard questions should not be ignored. King’s memory should be a spur and a guide to justice.
Arnold M. Eisen is chancellor of Jewish Theological Seminary.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/opinion/walking-king#LaJy3j78vg0CXrFt.99
New York
Satmar And The ‘Last Lion’
The chasidic group’s longtime rebbe recalled, in memoir of aide who is both insider and outsider.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Rabbi Hertz Frankel, “the English Principal,” at his Bais Rochel school. Michael Datikash/JWIn the Carpathian Mountains, in early 1944, the Satmar rebbe was emperor of a Hungarian chasidic kingdom; in Brooklyn 1946, he was almost alone. Reb Yoilish (Joel) Teitelbaum couldn’t get 10 men for a minyan. In the Brooklyn dusk, his gabbai (assistant) asked passersby if they davened; the passersby kept walking.
The rebbe was then almost 60, old for his age, as most survivors were. In 1944, when leaves were turning green, the Nazis entered Hungary. When leaves turned brown, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were dead. And now, in 1946, with two children and a wife sleeping eternally across the ocean, and his only remaining child, a daughter, soon to die in Brooklyn, the rebbe hit bottom, or so it seemed. And yet, though no one knew it, his best was yet to be.
By the time the Satmar rebbe died in 1979 in Kiryas Joel, the all-Satmar shtetl he founded upstate, Reb Yoilish was leader of the largest, most uncompromising chasidic group in the world, more than 150,000 strong — and that, with contempt for outreach, dialogue or inclusion. To this day, Yiddish is their mother tongue; Zionism, their nemesis; and making Jewish life affordable, their passion. (Tuition ranges from $2,500 to $4,000, and is free for the poor. Satmar also offers heavily subsidized weddings, if one agrees to the standardized menu and the house band). If the test of a successful Jewish family is the number of Jewish grandchildren, nobody does it better. In Satmar shuls, one can see upwards of 80 cousins lining up on Friday nights to say “Good Shabbos” to their shared zeyde. The New York Times reported in 2006: “If the Satmar schools in New York were a public school system, it would be the fourth-largest system in the state, after those of New York City, Buffalo and Rochester.”
Rabbi Hertz Frankel, principal of Satmar’s Bais Rochel, says his school has 17 first grade classes for girls alone (boys have their own school). With 37,000 Satmar children — all of whom speak Yiddish during recess — he estimates that 15-20 percent of all Jewish children in Jewish schools are Satmar or an affiliate group.
The Satmar phenomenon is the subject of Frankel’s new memoir, “The Satmar Rebbe and His English Principal: Reflections on the Struggle to Build Yiddishkeit in America” (Menucha Publishers). Frankel, not a chasid, was ordained at the (non-Satmar) Yeshiva Torah Vodaath and just 26 when he met the rebbe in 1959. The rebbe told Frankel that he had experience running a boys’ yeshiva in Europe, but didn’t know how to run a chasidic school for girls; there were no such things in the town of Satmar. The rebbe needed help. He turned to Frankel, who remembers, “There I was, an Agudist in Satmar land, wearing a light colored suit and a new straw hat.”
Frankel’s book is not academic but more in the style of schmoozing on a Shabbos afternoon. The book demurely avoids scandal or innuendo, let alone several sexual abuse cases in Williamsburg, and stands in contrast to several recent memoirs from lapsed Orthodox authors (not Satmar), far more critical of their own corners of the charedi community. Frankel’s book also arrives when the city is investigating charges of substandard secular education in certain charedi yeshivas (though not Frankel’s Bais Rochel). He mentions that there were, in fact, Satmar families “who refused to have their children study secular subjects,” but the rebbe responded, “If people don’t want to send their children to ‘English’ [some frum Jews, similar to the Amish, use “English” as a catch-all for everything secular] let them go to the M’lochim,” a chasidic group whose schools don’t teach secular classes.
Frankel is still principal, but the book ends with the rebbe’s death in 1979, sparing Frankel from having to explain, or implicate higher-ups, in the 1999 federal fraud case (regarding the misuse of government funds) that saw Bais Rochel fined $1 million, and Frankel sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation. The community stood by him.
Even so, Frankel’s book offers a rare peek into the Satmar world from someone intimate with its inner sanctums, and yet slightly apart, even nicknamed “the goyish principal,” for such is “English.” Indeed, Frankel remained clean-shaven for years into his tenure.
A graduate of Brooklyn College (few Satmars go to college), Frankel spoke a fluent English, a skill eluding the rebbe’s interest and proficiency. He became not only the principal but, informally, the rebbe’s “secretary of state,” an intermediary with government officials and non-Satmars.
Settling in Williamsburg, the rebbe’s first project was childhood education, writes Frankel, but in a community of mostly destitute survivors, young Satmar men were told “to go to work … make a good living and be able to support their families and the community.”
The rebbe, said Frankel, directed that “a yungerman should wake up at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning, learn for two or three hours, and then go to work to earn a living. When he comes home from work, he should learn for another two or three hours. On top of that, he should also help his wife at home.” In Israel, the rebbe insisted that no Satmar individual or organization take any subsidy from the “Zionist” government; the safety net should be Satmar’s responsibility alone.
The rebbe was strict about the Bais Rochel yearbook, as well. There could no be pictures of the girls, and nothing about a girl’s appearance in any of the anecdotes.
Textbooks, writes Frankel, were censored, to avoid “inappropriate” influences. Frankel, though, soon recognized that the girls needed additional reading material, perhaps even a subscription to The Weekly Reader (a secular elementary-school news magazine), for current events. He even raised his voice to the rebbe: “How do you expect me to do my job?” One of the rebbe’s associates told him to calm down, but the rebbe disagreed, “Let him get excited. He has to get excited. He has to represent his department. If he doesn’t get excited and work hard for his department, then he’s not doing his job!” The rebbe gave permission for The Weekly Reader. “After all,” the rebbe said later, “he got so excited … we have to give him something!”
Frankel doesn’t deny that some children “go off the derech” [religious path]. “Approximately 7 to 8 percent of the students ... [could be classified as] problematic,” he writes, mostly referring to behavioral and emotional problems, leading to “a small percentage of dropouts.” Almost no one was ever expelled, and Frankel recalls the rebbe, with no surviving children, speaking with tenderness, one-on-one, to each student in trouble.
For the orphaned survivors flooding into Brooklyn after the war, the rebbe and rebbetzin (Feige, the rebbe’s second wife) became their father, mother and best friends. They quietly distributed money for tuition and Shabbos meals. The rebbetzin “married off countless orphans,” writes Frankel, “taking care of everything from matchmaking to finding the couple an apartment.” She would visit people “that had been neglected and forgotten about,” talking to the lonely, bringing food to the sick. The rebbetzin “was a role model for all the girls,” writes Frankel. In her memory, every morning dozens of Satmar women take subways and busses from Williamsburg to hospitals in every borough, bringing home-cooked Shabbos-style meals to any Jew (Satmar or not) who would like one.
The rebbe was famous, or infamous, for his relentless anti-Zionism. But over the phone, Frankel jokes, “Your friends on the Upper West Side ought to love Satmar. We were anti-Zionist before it was cool.”
The rebbe’s attitude toward Israel was complex. When Hubert Humphrey avoided the subject when meeting the rebbe in 1968, the rebbe later said, “Had Humphrey spoken to me in support of the Zionist state, it wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. We Jews have a Torah, which forbids us to have a state during the exile, and therefore we may not ask the Americans to support the state. But a non-Jew has no Torah, and by supporting the state he feels he is helping Jews. So, on the contrary, if an American non-Jew is against the Zionist state, it shows he is an anti-Semite.”
Frankel says, despite Satmar’s street demonstrations against Israeli religious policies, the rebbe “always insisted” that Satmar never demonstrate alongside Arabs “who sought Israel’s destruction. ‘We have nothing in common with these anti-Semites,’ he would always say. ‘Their cause is not ours.’” Frankel says the rebbe would never have approved of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta going in 2007 to an anti-Israel and Holocaust-denial event in Iran.
The rebbe, though, blamed the Holocaust on the “sin” of Zionism. On the eve of war, the rebbe scolded Jews against escaping to the Yishuv (pre-state Israel), before the rebbe escaped on a train (with 1,680 non-Satmar Jews), to Switzerland, as arranged by Rudolf Kastner, the leading Zionist (Jewish Agency) official in Budapest. Not only did Kastner bribe Adolf Eichmann with a small fortune for the transport, but Eichmann said in 1960 that part of the deal was Kastner keeping quiet about where all the other trains were going. Frankel doesn’t discuss the rebbe’s choices in the ethical fog of 1944, saying only, “I wish I had the courage to speak to the rebbe about the subject. I simply wasn’t brave enough …” The rebbe would only say that he was never saved by Kastner, only God — “to rebuild Yiddishkeit.” He landed in Brooklyn, where he turned nine men, less than a minyan, into 150,000 Satmars, the largest chasidic group in the world.
The story is told that when Noah was in the ark, the lion bit his hand when Noah was slow to feed him. The lion roared, “Do you know who I am? I am the last lion. Respect me.”
That was the Satmar rebbe, says Frankel, the last lion, with a bite and a roar that’s heard still.
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
---------------------
EDUCATION & CAREEREducation January 2016
Beating Back BDS Two approaches from ex-Brandeis president and new JCPA head. YU tackles changes in Jewish philanthropy. Luring English speakers to Israeli colleges
Tuesday, January 12, 2016 (All day)
Inside This Special Section
---------------------
MORE HEADLINES
Walking With King >>
Opinion
Walking With King
Arnold M. Eisen
Special To The Jewish Week
Arnold M. EisenJews attuned to the weekly cycle of Torah readings cannot help but have a special relationship to Martin Luther King Day. This is the time of year when we read the story of the exodus from Egypt that stands at the very core of Jewish tradition, as it does in the tradition of the African-American church from which King emerged. Over and over we Jews hear Moses demand of Pharaoh in the name of the Lord that he “send forth My people that they may serve Me.” Week after week, we are driven to ask ourselves what that call means in our day, and what we need to do to answer it.
It required no great leap of exegesis — though it was a masterful rhetorical move — when Abraham Joshua Heschel declared at the Conference on Religion and Race where he first met King: “At the first Conference on Religion and Race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses.” Heschel was only following the logic of the Torah — a Book that always calls Jews to action — when he added “the outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. ... The exodus began, but it is far from having been completed.” That is still true, I believe — over half a century since the March on Washington at which King inspired America with his dream of freedom for all God’s children. What would Heschel have marched for in 2016, I wonder. What would King have said today? What does the Torah command?
Those questions have become more immediate for me of late because of two books that crossed my desk and disturbed my sleep. The first — Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bestselling cri de coeur, “Between the World and Me” — argues with sorrow and anger that the American dream — King’s dream — has long disguised a cruel fact of life that confronts black people in our country every day: namely, that their bodies are not safe. Writing as a father to his son, Coates describes the fear he felt growing up on the streets of Baltimore, and feels still when he sees black Americans lose their lives to violence, some of it inflicted by the police forces of America’s cities. He worries that he himself — and, even more, his son — might one day fall prey to that injustice.
Coates wants his son to be proud that he lives “among a people whom I would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not always self-evident” — words that brought to my mind sermons given by a host of rabbis over the years in the face of discrimination and oppression suffered by Jews. But Coates finds no solace in the religious faith that sustained Jews and blacks alike for centuries, and sustains me: “The [G]od of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.” I draw exactly the opposite conclusion from the Exodus story in the Torah — but then again, none of my close friends has been shot dead on a suburban street by a police officer who claimed the young man had tried to run him over. (The officer was never prosecuted). “The entire episode,” Coates writes, “took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.”
Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University, argues forcefully in her bestselling book, “The New Jim Crow,” that the spate of such shootings in recent years is not coincidence: there is, she claims, a direct relationship between violence against African-Americans, lingering racism, and the mass incarceration of black men since the passage of stricter drug laws in 1982. A 1995 survey asked respondents in America to “close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me.” Ninety-five percent “pictured a black drug user” at a time when only 15 percent of drug users in the U.S. were African-American (about the same percentage as today).
Here are a few more chilling statistics: In Washington, D.C., “it is estimated that 3 out of 4 young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.” In Chicago, the total population of current and ex-felons among black males “is equivalent to 55 percent of the black adult male population and an astonishing 80 percent of the adult black male workforce.” Nationwide, the rate of imprisonment for blacks on drug charges “dwarfs the rate of whites” — despite the fact that “people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates...”
Heschel and King were often reproached for bringing politics into the realm of religion. Preach the Torah or the Gospel, they were urged, and leave current affairs out of it. In response, both referred their interlocutors to the Torah or the Gospel, and quoted frequently from the Biblical prophets. The religious action that Judaism demands can certainly not be reduced to public policy — liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican. But neither can it be divorced from public policy.
Coates and Alexander do not have all the answers we require this Martin Luther King Day. But their hard questions should not be ignored. King’s memory should be a spur and a guide to justice.
Arnold M. Eisen is chancellor of Jewish Theological Seminary.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/opinion/walking-king#LaJy3j78vg0CXrFt.99
---------------------
Taking On The Boycotters, With Jewish Authenticity >>
Taking On The Boycotters, With Jewish Authenticity
Frederick M. Lawrence
Special To The Jewish Week
Frederick M. LawrenceWhen the Israeli consul general in Boston was about to take up his new post, he was told that among his primary assignments was reaching out to college campuses and providing a strong and posi-tive vision of Israel for the Boston area’s many college students. The importance of this mission is clear and compelling. Our colleges and universities train our future leaders and opinion-leaders. Influences there have a significant multiplier effect. My view formed over decades on university campuses is that the case for Israel is best made in a positive manner, based on authenticity, inclusion and engagement, not a negative manner, based on attacking those who disagree.
The former is what I witnessed in my years at Brandeis and it’s what we built together on our campus — a spirit of authenticity that infused every corner of the campus, and began to transform it. I call it the “Brandeis Model.” With the help of the students, Jews and non-Jews, Americans and Israelis, we were able to grow this model that authentically embraced our Jewish roots on a non-sectarian campus. It turned out to be the most effective tool for limiting the impact of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on our campus. This Jewish authenticity as it turned out not only repelled BDS — it attracted non-Jewish students from across the country and around the globe who sought to belong to a place of deep values, intellectualism, authenticity and family, where questions of identity were real and positive.
In many ways, it all started with a campus-wide Yom Kippur break-fast. The fall before becoming president, I was on the Brandeis campus for Yom Kippur, among other things to lead the Kol Nidre service in the large campus theater, something that became a tradition during my tenure. After the end of the holiday, as my wife and I exited to go to a break-fast at the home of a trustee, we saw students lined up outside the kosher dining hall, waiting to swipe their meal card to get in. I then and there resolved to create a campus-wide breakfast. I was warned by some — who should have known better — that it would make many on campus feel excluded. In my experience, authenticity never excludes anyone — it embraces everyone.
Now it is a huge annual event. The more than 2,000 students who gather at the end of Yom Kippur on the Great Lawn include students from every part of campus — from the Brandeis Orthodox Organization who have just spent a day in prayer and fasting, to Jewish students from a range of other streams of Judaism, to students from across campus and around the world, many of whom had never been to a break-fast before.
I remember well a graduate student from Ghana who observed the flow of students coming to the break-fast — it seems that some services end a little later than others — and observing that this was an example of “communities within communities; the essence of community, Mr. President.” Though this young man came to Brandeis to study sustainability and international development, he learned much more and his views about and understanding of Jews and Israel changed forever.
Next my wife and I began hosting Shabbat dinners at the president’s home, which we had moved so that, for the first time in the history of the university, the president’s home was within walking distance of campus. Those in attendance for these dinners were by design a mixed group, many attending a Shabbat dinner for the first time, but I always made sure there were enough students who knew their way around a Shabbat table — they were my anchors. So many stories I could share, but in light of the recent tragic events in Paris I choose this one: a young woman from France, with a cross around her neck, who told me with moist eyes after dinner that her father had grown up in a French Jewish family during the Shoah and thereafter hid his background and faith. “He never spoke much about his childhood,” she said, “but after tonight I feel that I understand him so much better.”
Now we went out even further on the limb. My senior vice presi-dent for students and enrollment, in an exit interview with an African-American student leader, asked her what she wished she had known when she came to Brandeis. Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Boy, I sure wish I’d known what the heck ‘Shabbat’ is!” (She didn’t actually say ‘heck,’ but for this re-telling it will do.) So our next marker was a campus-wide Friday night dinner on the first Friday of the year. We held it also on the Great Lawn and celebrated the universal value of a dinner with family. Huge tables with mounds of challah were shared by thousands of students and everyone ended that night having had a Shabbat dinner.
There were many other components to what became a strategy of Jewish authenticity, allowing students from around the world to feel their own identity more deeply and keenly because the Jewish roots of the school were clearly articulated and, yes, celebrated. The Brandeis Model was based on everything I believed from my professional life as an educator and my personal life as a practicing Jew. I could cite the great scholars and rabbis who inspired me in this regard, but instead I will share the wisdom of my grandmother with her third-grade education who said that “you will always be more impressive and attractive to people as an authentic version of yourself, than some false version of what you think they want you to be.”
She was right. Since 2011, applications were up over 35 percent. International applications in particular increased, allowing campus to become increasingly global, with students from well over 100 countries. One story makes the point well. I met with an Indian parent in Delhi who was considering sending his daughter to Brandeis — no small thing for him to send his daughter halfway around the world. “We know about you people,” he said. “We know how you care about education and how you care about children, and that’s why we trust you with our daughter.”
But perhaps the most significant event that evolved was what came to be called “b-VIEW” — Brandeis Visions for Israel in an Evolving World. This program, a campus-wide, broad-based Israel discussion group with a yearly multi-university conference, was started by three IDF vets, whom we had recruited to Brandeis, and two American students. Their experiences immediately garnered the respect of their peers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. What they wanted was to create a forum for sharing a wide range of views on Israel in the context of love and determination for Israel’s survival and future. I was privileged to support it and help make it happen.
Speakers at the first b-VIEW conference included Aaron David Miller, and in subsequent years included Ido Aharoni, Israel’s consul general in New York, and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and many others.
Most important were the breakout sessions where students from colleges up and down the East Coast wrestled together with the situation confronting Israel. Whereas many campuses find themselves hosting a confrontational and adversarial discussion of Israel, Brandeis’ b-VIEW revolutionized discussions about Israel. The program goes beyond simplistic rhetoric and polarized debates. It invites participation by anyone who cares about Israel and the region, regardless of their political views, and encourages them to engage in constructive and mutually respectful conversation. It is a critically important way in which Brandeis has played a leadership role in how Israel is addressed and discussed. The b-VIEW approach is a model to be emulated on other university campuses.
By knowing who we were as an institution with deep roots in the American Jewish community, it became possible to base our discussions of Israel in a context that allows for a wide-ranging ex-change of views, not confrontation between adversaries.
I was often asked what Brandeis’ “position” was with respect to Israel. Universities, of course, are not political parties or political action committees or NGOs with a particular political mission. Our mission is the creation and discovery of knowledge and the dissemination of that knowledge through our teaching and our scholarship. So the question is actually a little tricky, and here is the answer I always gave: “We are inextricably connected with the State of Israel.” This inextricable connection is in fact a core piece of the Brandeis Model.
Among my areas of focus in our admissions strategy was an increase in the number of students from Israel. The impact that these students have on campus cannot be overstated. Israel Defense Forces veterans bring a great level of maturity and leadership to the student body. As I said, it was my Israeli students who were instrumental in creating b-VIEW. For so many members of the cam-pus community, these students presented the human face of what it means to be Israeli. Misperceptions formed from television or the like are best clarified by human engagement. Better than a lecture about Israel is the Israeli student who lives across the hall, or works across the lab bench, or plays on the same intramural soccer team.
These efforts to build human engagement included graduate students and faculty as well. I worked with the Henry Leir Foundation to support postdoctoral fellows from Israel in neuroscience. For faculty, Charles Bronfman and his foundation supported the highly successful Brandeis-Israel Collaborative Research Initiative, under which grants were made available to scholars in any field so long as the project was done in collaboration with an Israeli academic. Research projects in the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences were all supported, connecting our faculty with new Israeli academic partners. These types of collaborative research programs are especially significant now and will be a significant counterbalance to the increased efforts in the academic world to support BDS — within the past weeks, both the American Anthropology Association and National Women’s Studies Association have supported BDS resolutions.
The Brandeis Model worked. Those who feared that an authentic articulation of the university’s Jewish roots and a strong engagement with Israel would narrow the university’s appeal were wrong. As I said earlier, applications were up dramatically. Campus was the site of broad-based discussions of Israel from all sides. I will never forget speaking at the very first b-VIEW conference. I had prepared remarks that I never got to say. Instead, I was inspired as I looked out at the faces of so many students, who I knew to cover the spectrum, left, right and center, united by a sense of engage-ment with Israel, all under the banner of Brandeis University. “This,” I said, “could not take place at any other university campus. Our goal should be to see that someday it can.”
And there is virtually no BDS presence on campus. Needless to say, if a small number of students hand out leaflets describing Israel as an apartheid state at Brandeis, it becomes big news in the Jewish community. Sadly, that same community sometimes is less interested in a b-VIEW conference attended by hundreds of students from dozens of colleges and universities, or the largest end of the Yom Kippur break-fast in the world. They should indeed be interested because those accomplishments should be a source of enormous pride and an emblem of what is possible. Embracing the breadth of our community and the range of ways of engaging with Israel is the surest way to defeat BDS — negative efforts to stamp it out is the surest way to see it grow. The Brandeis Model was tried, and it works.
Frederick M. Lawrence, former president of Brandeis University, is senior research scholar at Yale Law School. A condensed version of this article appeared in the Jan. 1 issue.
Taking On The Boycotters, With Jewish Authenticity >>
Taking On The Boycotters, With Jewish Authenticity
Frederick M. Lawrence
Special To The Jewish Week
Frederick M. LawrenceWhen the Israeli consul general in Boston was about to take up his new post, he was told that among his primary assignments was reaching out to college campuses and providing a strong and posi-tive vision of Israel for the Boston area’s many college students. The importance of this mission is clear and compelling. Our colleges and universities train our future leaders and opinion-leaders. Influences there have a significant multiplier effect. My view formed over decades on university campuses is that the case for Israel is best made in a positive manner, based on authenticity, inclusion and engagement, not a negative manner, based on attacking those who disagree.
The former is what I witnessed in my years at Brandeis and it’s what we built together on our campus — a spirit of authenticity that infused every corner of the campus, and began to transform it. I call it the “Brandeis Model.” With the help of the students, Jews and non-Jews, Americans and Israelis, we were able to grow this model that authentically embraced our Jewish roots on a non-sectarian campus. It turned out to be the most effective tool for limiting the impact of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on our campus. This Jewish authenticity as it turned out not only repelled BDS — it attracted non-Jewish students from across the country and around the globe who sought to belong to a place of deep values, intellectualism, authenticity and family, where questions of identity were real and positive.
In many ways, it all started with a campus-wide Yom Kippur break-fast. The fall before becoming president, I was on the Brandeis campus for Yom Kippur, among other things to lead the Kol Nidre service in the large campus theater, something that became a tradition during my tenure. After the end of the holiday, as my wife and I exited to go to a break-fast at the home of a trustee, we saw students lined up outside the kosher dining hall, waiting to swipe their meal card to get in. I then and there resolved to create a campus-wide breakfast. I was warned by some — who should have known better — that it would make many on campus feel excluded. In my experience, authenticity never excludes anyone — it embraces everyone.
Now it is a huge annual event. The more than 2,000 students who gather at the end of Yom Kippur on the Great Lawn include students from every part of campus — from the Brandeis Orthodox Organization who have just spent a day in prayer and fasting, to Jewish students from a range of other streams of Judaism, to students from across campus and around the world, many of whom had never been to a break-fast before.
I remember well a graduate student from Ghana who observed the flow of students coming to the break-fast — it seems that some services end a little later than others — and observing that this was an example of “communities within communities; the essence of community, Mr. President.” Though this young man came to Brandeis to study sustainability and international development, he learned much more and his views about and understanding of Jews and Israel changed forever.
Next my wife and I began hosting Shabbat dinners at the president’s home, which we had moved so that, for the first time in the history of the university, the president’s home was within walking distance of campus. Those in attendance for these dinners were by design a mixed group, many attending a Shabbat dinner for the first time, but I always made sure there were enough students who knew their way around a Shabbat table — they were my anchors. So many stories I could share, but in light of the recent tragic events in Paris I choose this one: a young woman from France, with a cross around her neck, who told me with moist eyes after dinner that her father had grown up in a French Jewish family during the Shoah and thereafter hid his background and faith. “He never spoke much about his childhood,” she said, “but after tonight I feel that I understand him so much better.”
Now we went out even further on the limb. My senior vice presi-dent for students and enrollment, in an exit interview with an African-American student leader, asked her what she wished she had known when she came to Brandeis. Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Boy, I sure wish I’d known what the heck ‘Shabbat’ is!” (She didn’t actually say ‘heck,’ but for this re-telling it will do.) So our next marker was a campus-wide Friday night dinner on the first Friday of the year. We held it also on the Great Lawn and celebrated the universal value of a dinner with family. Huge tables with mounds of challah were shared by thousands of students and everyone ended that night having had a Shabbat dinner.
There were many other components to what became a strategy of Jewish authenticity, allowing students from around the world to feel their own identity more deeply and keenly because the Jewish roots of the school were clearly articulated and, yes, celebrated. The Brandeis Model was based on everything I believed from my professional life as an educator and my personal life as a practicing Jew. I could cite the great scholars and rabbis who inspired me in this regard, but instead I will share the wisdom of my grandmother with her third-grade education who said that “you will always be more impressive and attractive to people as an authentic version of yourself, than some false version of what you think they want you to be.”
She was right. Since 2011, applications were up over 35 percent. International applications in particular increased, allowing campus to become increasingly global, with students from well over 100 countries. One story makes the point well. I met with an Indian parent in Delhi who was considering sending his daughter to Brandeis — no small thing for him to send his daughter halfway around the world. “We know about you people,” he said. “We know how you care about education and how you care about children, and that’s why we trust you with our daughter.”
But perhaps the most significant event that evolved was what came to be called “b-VIEW” — Brandeis Visions for Israel in an Evolving World. This program, a campus-wide, broad-based Israel discussion group with a yearly multi-university conference, was started by three IDF vets, whom we had recruited to Brandeis, and two American students. Their experiences immediately garnered the respect of their peers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. What they wanted was to create a forum for sharing a wide range of views on Israel in the context of love and determination for Israel’s survival and future. I was privileged to support it and help make it happen.
Speakers at the first b-VIEW conference included Aaron David Miller, and in subsequent years included Ido Aharoni, Israel’s consul general in New York, and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and many others.
Most important were the breakout sessions where students from colleges up and down the East Coast wrestled together with the situation confronting Israel. Whereas many campuses find themselves hosting a confrontational and adversarial discussion of Israel, Brandeis’ b-VIEW revolutionized discussions about Israel. The program goes beyond simplistic rhetoric and polarized debates. It invites participation by anyone who cares about Israel and the region, regardless of their political views, and encourages them to engage in constructive and mutually respectful conversation. It is a critically important way in which Brandeis has played a leadership role in how Israel is addressed and discussed. The b-VIEW approach is a model to be emulated on other university campuses.
By knowing who we were as an institution with deep roots in the American Jewish community, it became possible to base our discussions of Israel in a context that allows for a wide-ranging ex-change of views, not confrontation between adversaries.
I was often asked what Brandeis’ “position” was with respect to Israel. Universities, of course, are not political parties or political action committees or NGOs with a particular political mission. Our mission is the creation and discovery of knowledge and the dissemination of that knowledge through our teaching and our scholarship. So the question is actually a little tricky, and here is the answer I always gave: “We are inextricably connected with the State of Israel.” This inextricable connection is in fact a core piece of the Brandeis Model.
Among my areas of focus in our admissions strategy was an increase in the number of students from Israel. The impact that these students have on campus cannot be overstated. Israel Defense Forces veterans bring a great level of maturity and leadership to the student body. As I said, it was my Israeli students who were instrumental in creating b-VIEW. For so many members of the cam-pus community, these students presented the human face of what it means to be Israeli. Misperceptions formed from television or the like are best clarified by human engagement. Better than a lecture about Israel is the Israeli student who lives across the hall, or works across the lab bench, or plays on the same intramural soccer team.
These efforts to build human engagement included graduate students and faculty as well. I worked with the Henry Leir Foundation to support postdoctoral fellows from Israel in neuroscience. For faculty, Charles Bronfman and his foundation supported the highly successful Brandeis-Israel Collaborative Research Initiative, under which grants were made available to scholars in any field so long as the project was done in collaboration with an Israeli academic. Research projects in the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences were all supported, connecting our faculty with new Israeli academic partners. These types of collaborative research programs are especially significant now and will be a significant counterbalance to the increased efforts in the academic world to support BDS — within the past weeks, both the American Anthropology Association and National Women’s Studies Association have supported BDS resolutions.
The Brandeis Model worked. Those who feared that an authentic articulation of the university’s Jewish roots and a strong engagement with Israel would narrow the university’s appeal were wrong. As I said earlier, applications were up dramatically. Campus was the site of broad-based discussions of Israel from all sides. I will never forget speaking at the very first b-VIEW conference. I had prepared remarks that I never got to say. Instead, I was inspired as I looked out at the faces of so many students, who I knew to cover the spectrum, left, right and center, united by a sense of engage-ment with Israel, all under the banner of Brandeis University. “This,” I said, “could not take place at any other university campus. Our goal should be to see that someday it can.”
And there is virtually no BDS presence on campus. Needless to say, if a small number of students hand out leaflets describing Israel as an apartheid state at Brandeis, it becomes big news in the Jewish community. Sadly, that same community sometimes is less interested in a b-VIEW conference attended by hundreds of students from dozens of colleges and universities, or the largest end of the Yom Kippur break-fast in the world. They should indeed be interested because those accomplishments should be a source of enormous pride and an emblem of what is possible. Embracing the breadth of our community and the range of ways of engaging with Israel is the surest way to defeat BDS — negative efforts to stamp it out is the surest way to see it grow. The Brandeis Model was tried, and it works.
Frederick M. Lawrence, former president of Brandeis University, is senior research scholar at Yale Law School. A condensed version of this article appeared in the Jan. 1 issue.
---------------------
'Halacha Is Not Only About Kashrut And Shabbat" >>
‘Halacha Is Not Only About Kashrut And Shabbat’’
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Rabbi Sokol with students on the Touro campus.The recent corruption convictions of two prominent Orthodox Jewish leaders here — former Assemblyman Sheldon Silver and William Rapfogel, former head of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty — highlight the disconnect between ethics learned in the classroom and that which is practiced in the real world.
“It doesn’t just pertain to Orthodox Jews,” said Rabbi Moshe Sokol, dean of the Lander College for Men in Kew Gardens Hills. “Madoff was hardly an Orthodox Jew and Skelos is not Jewish.”
Bernard Madoff is the former stockbroker and investment counselor who is now serving a 150-year prison sentence for committing the largest financial fraud in U.S. history. Dean Skelos is the former majority leader of the State Senate who was convicted last month of corruption.
“There is a general [ethical] failing in the world at large, and as Orthodox Jews we have to be particularly concerned about the behavior of our own community and how we educate our students,” Rabbi Sokol explained.
As a result, the Lander College for Men has made it a requirement since 2013 that all students take an ethics class before they graduate. Although other colleges may teach ethics courses, Rabbi Sokol said he knows of no other that makes it a graduation requirement.
“It is not just a generic class in ethics but rather one geared to a student’s career,” he stressed. “So those entering the health profession — physicians, dentists physical therapists, nurses, podiatrists — must take a class in ethical and halachic [Jewish law] issues related to the health profession. Students going into law will take a course in business. We also have courses for those going into psychology, and we plan to expand to other areas as well.”
Rabbi Sokol stressed that it was not a particular event that caused the college to require an ethics class “but rather an awareness that there are failings in the community — that people are compartmentalizing their lives. They close the siddur [prayer book] after they have finished davening [praying] and then go into the business world and treat it as an entirely different universe. What we want to do is shatter the walls of those compartments so that they [the students] are taught that the real world of halacha and ethics has a great deal to say about how they live their lives in the real world.”
The chair of the college’s psychology department, Dr. Alan Perry, has said that “not a day goes by in his professional practice that he is not confronted with ethical and halachic issues — such as relating to parental or spousal issues,” Rabbi Sokol pointed out. “Sometimes the recommended therapeutic practice may not adhere to halachic standards. For instance, halacha says you have to honor your parents, but the therapist may feel that honest confrontation may be invaluable. How do you reconcile that?”
Rabbi Aaron Glatt, a physician who teaches the ethics course for those entering the medical field, said he has found that there is “frequently a lack of understanding from people as to the complexity of the issues. I try to give them an overview of the medical and ethical issues they will be facing. I present common, interesting and theoretical subjects for them to learn about. I sometimes use specific cases as a jumping-off point.”
Thus, he said, the course covers complex end-of-life issues such as whether a person should be intubated, or have a feeding tube inserted, the definition of what is considered appropriate medical therapy and what is halachic therapy, and what to do if there are differences between what the secular world advises and what halacha prescribes.”
Rabbi Glatt said that because there are sometimes “divergent opinions among the rabbis about halacha, every person should go to his own Orthodox rabbi. Sometimes the halacha allows a person to make a choice. There are gray areas and differences of opinion. Ethics of the Fathers says make for yourself a rabbi — and a person has to have fidelity to halachic advice.”
Students are also taught that it is important to stay current on medical and halachic issues not because halacha is changing “but because the application of halacha is dependent on the question asked and the technology available.”
“How does halacha deal with technology — such as with the use of computers on Shabbat,” Rabbi Glatt asked rhetorically. “There is never a simple answer. When dealing with life threatening usage it is permissible. When it is non-life threatening, it is more complex. … It is a wonderful course that is very popular with students.”
Rabbi Sokol pointed out that the college faculty consists of rabbinic scholars and practitioners who have worked in their fields of expertise. And there are occasional guest lectures from experts in the field.
“The students need to know the field from the grassroots, and in constructing the curriculum we asked [the professors] to merge it with the real life challenges they confronted in their profession.”
Asked the reason for the emphasis on ethics, Rabbi Sokol said it was believed that by teaching it, the college could “make a difference” in the world.
“It speaks to what we are all about,” he said. “We provide an intensive yeshiva program and a rigorous academic program. We educate young men in Talmud, and our students enter the profession in very large numbers. The problem is that there is a gap between halacha and the theory they get in classical yeshivas — which is profoundly theoretical and very, very important.
“We felt we needed to marry the two in a very practical sense. So after studying the tractate dealing with damages, the student must be taught the implications of applying that teaching in the real world.”
As for the corruption convictions of Silver and Rapfogel, Rabbi Sokol was asked why there was such a big difference between what was studied and what was practiced; he suggested that financial and social pressures are major factors.
“It’s easier to leave behind the high standards of Judaism when you get into the real world. Generally, Orthodox Jews tend to be very careful about halacha. We want them to understand that halacha is not only about kashrut and Shabbat, but that it is also about business and their professional lives and social interactions. … We want our students to model this integration of kodesh and chol — of the sacred and the mundane.” ---------------------
Travel
A Mayan Paradise
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
The Mayan pyramid at Caracol. Wikimedia CommonsI remember being confused when I started hearing about Belize. Everyone was going there, and the name sounded sort of familiar, but where was it? Why couldn’t I place it?
It turned out I wasn’t crazy. Belize didn’t exist when I was born; back then it was British Honduras, and I guess my schoolbooks were out of date, because the Central American country actually gained full independence in 1981, well before my seventh-grade geography class.
The tiny, multiethnic nation — slightly bigger than Israel, if a good deal less populous — is making up for lost time when it comes to name recognition. If you haven’t yet been to Belize, you surely know people who have. In addition to the gorgeous, unspoiled beaches and warm turquoise waters you’d expect of a tropical coastline, Belize offers a (mostly) English-speaking oasis in a region dominated by the Spanish language, as well as the continent’s finest barrier reef and some of its most impressive Mayan ruins.
About that reef: Belize, wedged between Mexico and Guatemala on the Caribbean Sea, is a paradise for nature lovers. If your idea of a tropical getaway involves chic shopping and a vibrant arts scene, Belize is not for you.
And while Belize is very popular with Jewish vacationers, the only evidence of Jewish community is a tiny Sephardic cemetery; Miami Beach, this is not.
If, however, your idea of fun involves ogling exotic parrots and monkeys, hiking around rainforests and exploring ancient caves, or snorkeling a crystalline undersea world, Belize may be your ticket this winter. Given the short distance, adventurous travelers frequently tack on an excursion to Guatemala for cultural contrast (or for Shabbat dinner; Guatemala is your nearest Chabad House).
This is not to say that Belize is without culture. The country is a jumble of distinct, intermingled ethnic minorities, including a number of Mayans, many of whom still speak indigenous languages — and whose ancestors built the Mayan pyramids that today are the most popular cultural attraction. Few would consider a Belize trip complete without a visit to one of the green, jungly Mayan settlements.
There is one pyramid fewer these days: Unbelievably, a road crew bulldozed one of the largest monuments in 2013, seeing a pile of free gravel where others saw a 2,000-year-old world heritage site. But more than a half-dozen Mesoamerican pyramids remain — and even with a growing number of cruise-ship passengers coming to see them, they still lack the crowds of their Mexican counterparts.
Whether or not you’re a swimmer, a boater, a diver or a water-sports enthusiast, water will be a central feature of your Belize vacation. The coastline is dotted with tiny islands, coral atolls and “cayes” (pronunciation is closer to “keys”); many are home to exclusive resorts where guests relax, surrounded by the sea.
Some resorts, like those at Thatch Caye and St. George’s Caye, even boast the kind of overwater bungalows rare in the Caribbean — they’re a feature more often associated with the South Pacific — where guests can peer through translucent floors to the marine life below. Indeed, luxury resorts, many with an ecotourism focus, have sprouted around Belize over the past decade; the area’s topography, with its reefs and atolls, lends itself to intimate, secluded hideaways.
From New York, you will probably change planes en route to Belize City, the largest city and international hub. Once there, you’ll be unlikely to linger. Belize City has that seedy drabness unique to the urban Caribbean, a weird visual clash between tropical sunshine and run-down infrastructure. But the city makes a good jumping-off point for two of the best Mayan ruins — Altun Ha and Lamanai — both within a few hours’ drive.
Many travelers make a beeline north for Ambergris Caye, the largest of Belize’s islands and a place where it feels like everyone is on vacation. Travelers can catch a small plane or a fast ferry from Belize City to San Pedro, a pretty beach town full of brightly colored buildings, and indulge in all kinds of water sports.
The other popular strategy is to head south. Placencia, a small, idyllic town on a southern peninsula, has quietly developed into the laid-back alternative to lively San Pedro. Surrounded by gentle waters and mangrove swamps, Placencia boasts 16 miles of sandy beaches with a seafront promenade, plenty of cafés serving fresh fish, a sprinkling of art galleries, and a local industry that caters to snorkelers.
It’s all so relaxing that many vacationers never go home. Among those birdwatchers and sunbathers are plenty of retirees, drawn by the combination of sun, tax perks, English-speaking convenience and an existing community of North American expats. Belize may not yet be Miami — but for a growing number of cold-weather refugees, it’s paradise enough.
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
New York
‘To Argue Over Justice’
Remembering the genre-busting Elizabeth Swados.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Swados, above, “was profoundly Jewish in her worldview and her sympathy for the underdog,” says Swados’ literary executor.Elizabeth Swados brought to the stage the unexpected, combining musical styles, dance, ritual and poetry, often collaborating with young people to bring their voices to the mix. Underlying much of her bold work was a commitment to social justice as well as to Judaism.
A writer, composer, musician, choreographer and theater director, Ms. Swados died last week in New York City from complications following surgery for esophageal cancer. An influential force in musical theater for more than 35 years, she was 64.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of “Hamilton,” posted these words online: “Liz Swados was using hip-hop on Broadway in 1978, ahead of EVERYBODY. A colossus, singular, unequaled.”
Ms. Swados’ wife, Roz Lichter, said, “Liz was an artist. It’s not that she was ahead of her time. She was on Liz time.”
She was 27 when she wrote, choreographed and directed “Runaways,” created by, cast with and based on the lives of 18 troubled young men and women. The show moved from the Public Theater to Broadway in 1978, earning five Tony nominations.
In a 1998 interview, she told The Jewish Week, “I had a lot of struggle when I was young. I love to see people who don’t have a chance work their way out — to see that they can do something.”
“‘Runaways’ is the most Jewish piece I’ve ever done,” she said, “My version of being an observant Jew is to try to bring good to other people and to work hard and to argue over justice.” She said that the late Joseph Papp would tell her that there was a Jewish song in every one of her productions, even her rock opera about Vietnam.
“She was an original, a true genius who wore it lightly,” painter Tobi Kahn, a close friend of Swados’ since the 1980s, said. He collaborated with Ms. Swados, including work on her musical “Jonah,” when they turned the set and theater into the inside of a whale. “Working with her was heaven. She was the most creative human being I’ve ever met.”
Judith Ginsberg, also a close friend for decades and her literary executor, said, “Although she wasn’t traditionally observant, she was profoundly Jewish, in her worldview and her sympathy for the underdog, her desire to improve the world, her bringing different talents together.” Ginsberg worked with Swados when she headed the Covenant Foundation to launch “The Hating Pot,” a musical with city teens about racism and anti-Semitism. That show was performed off Broadway, in schools and broadcast on PBS.
Ms. Swados grew up in Buffalo, where her father, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was a prominent attorney. Her mother, an actress and poet, suffered from depression and took her own life. Her brother Lincoln had schizophrenia and died in 1989. She chronicled her family’s story in her 1991 memoir, “The Four of Us.”
At Bennington College, Ms. Swados studied music and creative writing. Her first experience of working with “kids on the borders, those at risk” was in Africa, when she was 20 and touring with Peter Brook’s theater group. Her job was to go out into the villages with her 12-string guitar and engage the local children before the actors arrived. She was part Pied Piper and part troubadour: She’d exchange noises with them and teach them songs. Once they were interested, their parents would join them outside, and the troupe would have an audience for their performance.
During her student days, she began working with Ellen Stewart at LaMama in New York City and later with Papp at the Public Theater. She collaborated with Gary Trudeau on the musicals “Doonesbury,” based on his comic strip, and “Rap Master Ronnie,” a rap music satire of the Reagan administration.
She also wrote and directed “Missionaries,” an opera about the four churchwomen killed in El Salvador in 1980, and “The Story of Job,” a biblical musical based on the biblical book and depicted by clowns. For the Public Theater, she created “Alice in Concert,” a musical adaptation of the works of Lewis Caroll, and then adapted it for television as “Alice at the Palace,” with both productions starring Meryl Streep. She adapted S. Ansky’s “The Dybbuk” for the stage and composed 20 original songs for “Nightclub Cantata,” an evening highlighting the writing of Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda and others. Her multi-language oratorio “Jerusalem,” based on Yehuda Amichai’s poetry, was inspired by a trip to Jerusalem, when the poet was her guide. She performed in many of her works, including “Bible Women.”
“For Liz, the stories of the Bible were the best stories in the universe,” Lichter said.
Among other projects with teens are “Sosúa: Dare to Dance Together,” with the voices of Dominican and Jewish teens, sharing their own stories and the history of Jews given refuge during the Holocaust in the Dominican Republic, and “The Reality Show,” a musical comedy PSA she created with NYU students, featuring rock music, dance and frank talk about issues like sex and depression.
Lichter, an entertainment lawyer, said that many of the young people Ms. Swados worked with stayed in her life. “Her email was filled with young people updating her. She thought of them as people who were following their own music. She would never say she influenced then, she would just listen to what they were doing. She was very unpretentious.”
“Her joy was in making her own sounds and making her own words, very much in the present,” Lichter said. They have been together since 1989.
A decidedly downtown New Yorker, Swados was the recipient of three Obie Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Award. Described by friends as always working on several artistic projects at once, she also scored other musicals, and wrote screenplays and music for several ballets. In addition, she published novels, works of non-fiction, children’s books, a theatre textbook and poetry. She made an animated film based on her memoir “My Depression,” which was presented at the Tribeca Film Festival and broadcast on HBO last summer.”
Her final novel, “Walking the Dog,” will be published this summer by The Feminist Press at CUNY.
One of her most recent projects was directing “Guns: A Cabaret,” a rock concert in cabaret style, blending comedy, tragedy and outrage.
“Her heart’s language was music,” writer Nessa Rapoport, a longtime friend, said. “Every musical idiom engaged her, and she mastered — and could be playful with — the most complex and sophisticated sounds from all over the world. She loved sound — birdsong, clicking, folk music; any culture on any continent was immediately accessible to her.
Rapoport, who is married to Tobi Kahn, added, “She had a plumb-true intuition for Jewish authenticity and, unlike many renowned contemporary artists who are Jews, never viewed her Jewishness as provincial, but as her unshakable identity and a source of infinite interpretive riches.”
At many family events that Kahn and Rapoport hosted, Ms. Swados performed with a chorus of singers from diverse backgrounds. As Rapoport recounts, she concluded each performance with her gospel composition of “Holy, holy, holy/The whole earth is filled with His glory.”
At these brief concerts, I was struck by Ms. Swados’ seriousness of purpose, energetically and lovingly conducting her singers and also having great fun. Her work was experimental, empathetic, accessible and as eclectic as her reggae “Song of Songs.”
Jenny Lyn Bader, a playwright and author, first saw “Haggadah,” Ms. Swados’ theatrical version of the seder, as a child. “In that production, theater became pageant and ritual and event, the way it’s supposed to be,” she said. “She mixed ancient and modern texts, music with puppetry, making a familiar story new, creating a world that felt momentous, moving, timeless. That play forever changed the way I think about theatrical experience.
Bader continued, “I love that she wasn’t someone who made distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow art; she took elements she needed from different categories and unified them. In my experience, she also didn’t make distinctions between people.”
In a new development, City Center has announced that it will present “Runaways” in the summer of 2016, directed and choreographed by students of Ms. Swados, cast with an open call to high school students. Artistic director Jeanine Tesori said that she had always wanted to present something by Swados and “Runaways” was on top of her list.
“Since we can’t do “Runaways” with her, we’ll now do it for her.”
A memorial service for Swados is planned for next month.---------------------
The Jewish Week
‘Halacha Is Not Only About Kashrut And Shabbat’’
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Rabbi Sokol with students on the Touro campus.The recent corruption convictions of two prominent Orthodox Jewish leaders here — former Assemblyman Sheldon Silver and William Rapfogel, former head of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty — highlight the disconnect between ethics learned in the classroom and that which is practiced in the real world.
“It doesn’t just pertain to Orthodox Jews,” said Rabbi Moshe Sokol, dean of the Lander College for Men in Kew Gardens Hills. “Madoff was hardly an Orthodox Jew and Skelos is not Jewish.”
Bernard Madoff is the former stockbroker and investment counselor who is now serving a 150-year prison sentence for committing the largest financial fraud in U.S. history. Dean Skelos is the former majority leader of the State Senate who was convicted last month of corruption.
“There is a general [ethical] failing in the world at large, and as Orthodox Jews we have to be particularly concerned about the behavior of our own community and how we educate our students,” Rabbi Sokol explained.
As a result, the Lander College for Men has made it a requirement since 2013 that all students take an ethics class before they graduate. Although other colleges may teach ethics courses, Rabbi Sokol said he knows of no other that makes it a graduation requirement.
“It is not just a generic class in ethics but rather one geared to a student’s career,” he stressed. “So those entering the health profession — physicians, dentists physical therapists, nurses, podiatrists — must take a class in ethical and halachic [Jewish law] issues related to the health profession. Students going into law will take a course in business. We also have courses for those going into psychology, and we plan to expand to other areas as well.”
Rabbi Sokol stressed that it was not a particular event that caused the college to require an ethics class “but rather an awareness that there are failings in the community — that people are compartmentalizing their lives. They close the siddur [prayer book] after they have finished davening [praying] and then go into the business world and treat it as an entirely different universe. What we want to do is shatter the walls of those compartments so that they [the students] are taught that the real world of halacha and ethics has a great deal to say about how they live their lives in the real world.”
The chair of the college’s psychology department, Dr. Alan Perry, has said that “not a day goes by in his professional practice that he is not confronted with ethical and halachic issues — such as relating to parental or spousal issues,” Rabbi Sokol pointed out. “Sometimes the recommended therapeutic practice may not adhere to halachic standards. For instance, halacha says you have to honor your parents, but the therapist may feel that honest confrontation may be invaluable. How do you reconcile that?”
Rabbi Aaron Glatt, a physician who teaches the ethics course for those entering the medical field, said he has found that there is “frequently a lack of understanding from people as to the complexity of the issues. I try to give them an overview of the medical and ethical issues they will be facing. I present common, interesting and theoretical subjects for them to learn about. I sometimes use specific cases as a jumping-off point.”
Thus, he said, the course covers complex end-of-life issues such as whether a person should be intubated, or have a feeding tube inserted, the definition of what is considered appropriate medical therapy and what is halachic therapy, and what to do if there are differences between what the secular world advises and what halacha prescribes.”
Rabbi Glatt said that because there are sometimes “divergent opinions among the rabbis about halacha, every person should go to his own Orthodox rabbi. Sometimes the halacha allows a person to make a choice. There are gray areas and differences of opinion. Ethics of the Fathers says make for yourself a rabbi — and a person has to have fidelity to halachic advice.”
Students are also taught that it is important to stay current on medical and halachic issues not because halacha is changing “but because the application of halacha is dependent on the question asked and the technology available.”
“How does halacha deal with technology — such as with the use of computers on Shabbat,” Rabbi Glatt asked rhetorically. “There is never a simple answer. When dealing with life threatening usage it is permissible. When it is non-life threatening, it is more complex. … It is a wonderful course that is very popular with students.”
Rabbi Sokol pointed out that the college faculty consists of rabbinic scholars and practitioners who have worked in their fields of expertise. And there are occasional guest lectures from experts in the field.
“The students need to know the field from the grassroots, and in constructing the curriculum we asked [the professors] to merge it with the real life challenges they confronted in their profession.”
Asked the reason for the emphasis on ethics, Rabbi Sokol said it was believed that by teaching it, the college could “make a difference” in the world.
“It speaks to what we are all about,” he said. “We provide an intensive yeshiva program and a rigorous academic program. We educate young men in Talmud, and our students enter the profession in very large numbers. The problem is that there is a gap between halacha and the theory they get in classical yeshivas — which is profoundly theoretical and very, very important.
“We felt we needed to marry the two in a very practical sense. So after studying the tractate dealing with damages, the student must be taught the implications of applying that teaching in the real world.”
As for the corruption convictions of Silver and Rapfogel, Rabbi Sokol was asked why there was such a big difference between what was studied and what was practiced; he suggested that financial and social pressures are major factors.
“It’s easier to leave behind the high standards of Judaism when you get into the real world. Generally, Orthodox Jews tend to be very careful about halacha. We want them to understand that halacha is not only about kashrut and Shabbat, but that it is also about business and their professional lives and social interactions. … We want our students to model this integration of kodesh and chol — of the sacred and the mundane.” ---------------------
Travel
A Mayan Paradise
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
The Mayan pyramid at Caracol. Wikimedia CommonsI remember being confused when I started hearing about Belize. Everyone was going there, and the name sounded sort of familiar, but where was it? Why couldn’t I place it?
It turned out I wasn’t crazy. Belize didn’t exist when I was born; back then it was British Honduras, and I guess my schoolbooks were out of date, because the Central American country actually gained full independence in 1981, well before my seventh-grade geography class.
The tiny, multiethnic nation — slightly bigger than Israel, if a good deal less populous — is making up for lost time when it comes to name recognition. If you haven’t yet been to Belize, you surely know people who have. In addition to the gorgeous, unspoiled beaches and warm turquoise waters you’d expect of a tropical coastline, Belize offers a (mostly) English-speaking oasis in a region dominated by the Spanish language, as well as the continent’s finest barrier reef and some of its most impressive Mayan ruins.
About that reef: Belize, wedged between Mexico and Guatemala on the Caribbean Sea, is a paradise for nature lovers. If your idea of a tropical getaway involves chic shopping and a vibrant arts scene, Belize is not for you.
And while Belize is very popular with Jewish vacationers, the only evidence of Jewish community is a tiny Sephardic cemetery; Miami Beach, this is not.
If, however, your idea of fun involves ogling exotic parrots and monkeys, hiking around rainforests and exploring ancient caves, or snorkeling a crystalline undersea world, Belize may be your ticket this winter. Given the short distance, adventurous travelers frequently tack on an excursion to Guatemala for cultural contrast (or for Shabbat dinner; Guatemala is your nearest Chabad House).
This is not to say that Belize is without culture. The country is a jumble of distinct, intermingled ethnic minorities, including a number of Mayans, many of whom still speak indigenous languages — and whose ancestors built the Mayan pyramids that today are the most popular cultural attraction. Few would consider a Belize trip complete without a visit to one of the green, jungly Mayan settlements.
There is one pyramid fewer these days: Unbelievably, a road crew bulldozed one of the largest monuments in 2013, seeing a pile of free gravel where others saw a 2,000-year-old world heritage site. But more than a half-dozen Mesoamerican pyramids remain — and even with a growing number of cruise-ship passengers coming to see them, they still lack the crowds of their Mexican counterparts.
Whether or not you’re a swimmer, a boater, a diver or a water-sports enthusiast, water will be a central feature of your Belize vacation. The coastline is dotted with tiny islands, coral atolls and “cayes” (pronunciation is closer to “keys”); many are home to exclusive resorts where guests relax, surrounded by the sea.
Some resorts, like those at Thatch Caye and St. George’s Caye, even boast the kind of overwater bungalows rare in the Caribbean — they’re a feature more often associated with the South Pacific — where guests can peer through translucent floors to the marine life below. Indeed, luxury resorts, many with an ecotourism focus, have sprouted around Belize over the past decade; the area’s topography, with its reefs and atolls, lends itself to intimate, secluded hideaways.
From New York, you will probably change planes en route to Belize City, the largest city and international hub. Once there, you’ll be unlikely to linger. Belize City has that seedy drabness unique to the urban Caribbean, a weird visual clash between tropical sunshine and run-down infrastructure. But the city makes a good jumping-off point for two of the best Mayan ruins — Altun Ha and Lamanai — both within a few hours’ drive.
Many travelers make a beeline north for Ambergris Caye, the largest of Belize’s islands and a place where it feels like everyone is on vacation. Travelers can catch a small plane or a fast ferry from Belize City to San Pedro, a pretty beach town full of brightly colored buildings, and indulge in all kinds of water sports.
The other popular strategy is to head south. Placencia, a small, idyllic town on a southern peninsula, has quietly developed into the laid-back alternative to lively San Pedro. Surrounded by gentle waters and mangrove swamps, Placencia boasts 16 miles of sandy beaches with a seafront promenade, plenty of cafés serving fresh fish, a sprinkling of art galleries, and a local industry that caters to snorkelers.
It’s all so relaxing that many vacationers never go home. Among those birdwatchers and sunbathers are plenty of retirees, drawn by the combination of sun, tax perks, English-speaking convenience and an existing community of North American expats. Belize may not yet be Miami — but for a growing number of cold-weather refugees, it’s paradise enough.
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
New York
‘To Argue Over Justice’
Remembering the genre-busting Elizabeth Swados.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Swados, above, “was profoundly Jewish in her worldview and her sympathy for the underdog,” says Swados’ literary executor.Elizabeth Swados brought to the stage the unexpected, combining musical styles, dance, ritual and poetry, often collaborating with young people to bring their voices to the mix. Underlying much of her bold work was a commitment to social justice as well as to Judaism.
A writer, composer, musician, choreographer and theater director, Ms. Swados died last week in New York City from complications following surgery for esophageal cancer. An influential force in musical theater for more than 35 years, she was 64.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of “Hamilton,” posted these words online: “Liz Swados was using hip-hop on Broadway in 1978, ahead of EVERYBODY. A colossus, singular, unequaled.”
Ms. Swados’ wife, Roz Lichter, said, “Liz was an artist. It’s not that she was ahead of her time. She was on Liz time.”
She was 27 when she wrote, choreographed and directed “Runaways,” created by, cast with and based on the lives of 18 troubled young men and women. The show moved from the Public Theater to Broadway in 1978, earning five Tony nominations.
In a 1998 interview, she told The Jewish Week, “I had a lot of struggle when I was young. I love to see people who don’t have a chance work their way out — to see that they can do something.”
“‘Runaways’ is the most Jewish piece I’ve ever done,” she said, “My version of being an observant Jew is to try to bring good to other people and to work hard and to argue over justice.” She said that the late Joseph Papp would tell her that there was a Jewish song in every one of her productions, even her rock opera about Vietnam.
“She was an original, a true genius who wore it lightly,” painter Tobi Kahn, a close friend of Swados’ since the 1980s, said. He collaborated with Ms. Swados, including work on her musical “Jonah,” when they turned the set and theater into the inside of a whale. “Working with her was heaven. She was the most creative human being I’ve ever met.”
Judith Ginsberg, also a close friend for decades and her literary executor, said, “Although she wasn’t traditionally observant, she was profoundly Jewish, in her worldview and her sympathy for the underdog, her desire to improve the world, her bringing different talents together.” Ginsberg worked with Swados when she headed the Covenant Foundation to launch “The Hating Pot,” a musical with city teens about racism and anti-Semitism. That show was performed off Broadway, in schools and broadcast on PBS.
Ms. Swados grew up in Buffalo, where her father, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was a prominent attorney. Her mother, an actress and poet, suffered from depression and took her own life. Her brother Lincoln had schizophrenia and died in 1989. She chronicled her family’s story in her 1991 memoir, “The Four of Us.”
At Bennington College, Ms. Swados studied music and creative writing. Her first experience of working with “kids on the borders, those at risk” was in Africa, when she was 20 and touring with Peter Brook’s theater group. Her job was to go out into the villages with her 12-string guitar and engage the local children before the actors arrived. She was part Pied Piper and part troubadour: She’d exchange noises with them and teach them songs. Once they were interested, their parents would join them outside, and the troupe would have an audience for their performance.
During her student days, she began working with Ellen Stewart at LaMama in New York City and later with Papp at the Public Theater. She collaborated with Gary Trudeau on the musicals “Doonesbury,” based on his comic strip, and “Rap Master Ronnie,” a rap music satire of the Reagan administration.
She also wrote and directed “Missionaries,” an opera about the four churchwomen killed in El Salvador in 1980, and “The Story of Job,” a biblical musical based on the biblical book and depicted by clowns. For the Public Theater, she created “Alice in Concert,” a musical adaptation of the works of Lewis Caroll, and then adapted it for television as “Alice at the Palace,” with both productions starring Meryl Streep. She adapted S. Ansky’s “The Dybbuk” for the stage and composed 20 original songs for “Nightclub Cantata,” an evening highlighting the writing of Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda and others. Her multi-language oratorio “Jerusalem,” based on Yehuda Amichai’s poetry, was inspired by a trip to Jerusalem, when the poet was her guide. She performed in many of her works, including “Bible Women.”
“For Liz, the stories of the Bible were the best stories in the universe,” Lichter said.
Among other projects with teens are “Sosúa: Dare to Dance Together,” with the voices of Dominican and Jewish teens, sharing their own stories and the history of Jews given refuge during the Holocaust in the Dominican Republic, and “The Reality Show,” a musical comedy PSA she created with NYU students, featuring rock music, dance and frank talk about issues like sex and depression.
Lichter, an entertainment lawyer, said that many of the young people Ms. Swados worked with stayed in her life. “Her email was filled with young people updating her. She thought of them as people who were following their own music. She would never say she influenced then, she would just listen to what they were doing. She was very unpretentious.”
“Her joy was in making her own sounds and making her own words, very much in the present,” Lichter said. They have been together since 1989.
A decidedly downtown New Yorker, Swados was the recipient of three Obie Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Award. Described by friends as always working on several artistic projects at once, she also scored other musicals, and wrote screenplays and music for several ballets. In addition, she published novels, works of non-fiction, children’s books, a theatre textbook and poetry. She made an animated film based on her memoir “My Depression,” which was presented at the Tribeca Film Festival and broadcast on HBO last summer.”
Her final novel, “Walking the Dog,” will be published this summer by The Feminist Press at CUNY.
One of her most recent projects was directing “Guns: A Cabaret,” a rock concert in cabaret style, blending comedy, tragedy and outrage.
“Her heart’s language was music,” writer Nessa Rapoport, a longtime friend, said. “Every musical idiom engaged her, and she mastered — and could be playful with — the most complex and sophisticated sounds from all over the world. She loved sound — birdsong, clicking, folk music; any culture on any continent was immediately accessible to her.
Rapoport, who is married to Tobi Kahn, added, “She had a plumb-true intuition for Jewish authenticity and, unlike many renowned contemporary artists who are Jews, never viewed her Jewishness as provincial, but as her unshakable identity and a source of infinite interpretive riches.”
At many family events that Kahn and Rapoport hosted, Ms. Swados performed with a chorus of singers from diverse backgrounds. As Rapoport recounts, she concluded each performance with her gospel composition of “Holy, holy, holy/The whole earth is filled with His glory.”
At these brief concerts, I was struck by Ms. Swados’ seriousness of purpose, energetically and lovingly conducting her singers and also having great fun. Her work was experimental, empathetic, accessible and as eclectic as her reggae “Song of Songs.”
Jenny Lyn Bader, a playwright and author, first saw “Haggadah,” Ms. Swados’ theatrical version of the seder, as a child. “In that production, theater became pageant and ritual and event, the way it’s supposed to be,” she said. “She mixed ancient and modern texts, music with puppetry, making a familiar story new, creating a world that felt momentous, moving, timeless. That play forever changed the way I think about theatrical experience.
Bader continued, “I love that she wasn’t someone who made distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow art; she took elements she needed from different categories and unified them. In my experience, she also didn’t make distinctions between people.”
In a new development, City Center has announced that it will present “Runaways” in the summer of 2016, directed and choreographed by students of Ms. Swados, cast with an open call to high school students. Artistic director Jeanine Tesori said that she had always wanted to present something by Swados and “Runaways” was on top of her list.
“Since we can’t do “Runaways” with her, we’ll now do it for her.”
A memorial service for Swados is planned for next month.---------------------
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