Friday, January 8, 2016
Dear Reader,
Jewish Week editor and publisher Gary Rosenblatt reports in his weekly column that American Jewish leaders are increasingly talking, in private, about how hard it is to generate support for Israel among their constituents.
Gary Rosenblatt
Frustration With Israel Is Growing Here At Home
The hard fact is that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at odds with the next generation of Americans.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary RosenblattEven as Israel endures daily “lone wolf” attacks from young Palestinians prepared to die for the cause of spilling Jewish blood, American Jewish leaders confide that generating support for the Jewish state is becoming increasingly difficult these days — even within the Jewish community, and especially among younger people.
In contrast to the widespread emotional identification shown for Parisians and others around the world who have been attacked by Islamic militants, it is hard to find much empathy out there for Israelis seeking to go on with their lives amidst the prospect of violence they face each day.
In a series of private conversations in recent days with a variety of professionals who make their living advocating for Israel and Jewish causes, I was struck by a consistent theme I heard: deep concern about Israel’s future and its relationship with diaspora Jewry. There was a feeling that the political and diplomatic situation is getting worse as Israel is increasingly isolated on the international scene — even spied on by the U.S., we learned last week.
Closer to home, efforts by the last Knesset to liberalize positions on personal religious status — on such issues as conversion, marriage, divorce and women’s prayer at the Kotel — have been reversed by the current coalition in Jerusalem. That is one more signal to the great majority of American Jews, who are not Orthodox, that they are seen as second-class Jews in the eyes of the State of Israel they are urged to support.
I share these worries about a weakening of our identification with Israel. The hard fact is that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at odds with the next generation of Americans, including many Jews, who want to see greater efforts to resolve the Palestinian conflict and who put the onus for the impasse on Jerusalem. It is not only President Obama who feels that way. The fastest growing segments of American society — women, young people, blacks and Latinos — are less supportive of Israel than the previous generation, according to polls.
A young professional with extensive experience in countering the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel at colleges tells me, “It’s just not cool to be Jewish on campus today,” especially if that means identifying with Israel at a time when the Mideast’s only democratic state is cast as a pariah, accused of apartheid. Liberal students quick to respond to discrimination against blacks and other minorities somehow fail to identify with the only Mideast society that proudly supports rather than punishes gays and lesbians. That leaves little room for progressive Jewish students who back Israel’s right to exist. While some of their elders scorn them for criticizing Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians and the occupation of the West Bank, their classmates shun them for identifying with Israel at all.
Federation executives worry privately that when the generation of major funders who vividly remember Israel’s struggle for statehood and the anguish of the 1967 and 1973 wars passes from the scene, raising substantial dollars for the Jewish state will be that much harder.
“It’s very complicated” making Israel’s case, the execs say, and they’re right. In part that’s because Israelis are no longer seen as our poor cousins, asking for a handout. Indeed, their economy is booming, even though the huge gap between the “haves” and “have nots” is worrisome, especially given the ongoing and rapid growth of the Israeli Arab and charedi communities, lowest on the income scale.
In part it’s because Israel’s Chief Rabbinate seeks to set religious standards ever higher rather than show compassion for the hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking Israeli citizens who would seek conversion. The situation is creating a substantial threat to Israeli cohesiveness and damages the longstanding image of Israel as a compassionate society that mirrors our own Western values and Jewish ideals.
Of course these perceptions of Israel today are not the full picture. They do not credit a vibrant Israeli democracy functioning in a region that has become increasingly chaotic, lawless, violent and threatening since the woefully misnamed Arab Spring. These critical views do not account for: courageous young men and women who serve their remarkable IDF with skill and commitment; a society whose Arab and Israeli citizens, overall, coexist day to day with civility and respect; and a nation whose accomplishments in the areas of technology, medicine, science and water are the envy of the rest of the world.
But while many of us take pride in Israel as a Start-Up Nation, we cannot ignore that it is also known at home for its Lock-Up Leadership — soon to have a former prime minister joining a former president behind bars as a result of differing forms of corruption at the highest levels of government.
Israel is not a perfect society, and those of us who seek to make its case err when we try to portray the Arab-Israeli conflict in black-and-white terms. The more we recognize and acknowledge the complexity of the clash, and the fact that Israelis themselves are divided on how to resolve it, the more credibility we will have in putting forth Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
Whether or not it is fair, the strong perception today is that the Israeli government is moving further right, and intransigent, at a time when the rest of the world is fed up with the Israel-Palestinian impasse, seeing no hope for a resolution in the foreseeable future. (And bear in mind that there are no term limits in Israel, and no political figure left of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seen as capable of besting him at the polls.)
Jewish leaders here are expressing deep, if so far private, frustration over the lack of action on Jerusalem’s part to improve its image, if not its strategic position.
One national leader told me he’d like to fly to Israel, with a group of his top colleagues, to try to convince Netanyahu in dramatic fashion of the need for “a plan, any plan” to break the impasse.
But that is not likely to happen, and, of course, the views of American Jewish leaders have long been known to the prime minister. Netanyahu and his government will continue to make decisions based on their own narrow and immediate political interests, and we can only hope they will coincide with national interests as well.
Our job remains to show support for Israel, if not all its policies, and to emphasize its remarkable achievements and importance in a chaotic, hostile region. But our job is getting harder with each passing day.
Gary@jewishweek.org---------------------
Talk about Jewish geography! A chance conversation on Long Island reunites two women from the same Polish town who survived the same concentration camp, together, and then parted ways.
New York
Survivors Meet Again, Worlds From Sosnowiec
Steve Lipman
Ann Welner, left, and Bella Ellerton, center, natives of the same city in pre-Holocaust Poland. Hanie EllertonNearly 74 years ago, a pair of young Jewish women left their hometown in southwest Poland, on a transport to a Nazi concentration camp. Both survived the Holocaust, but went their separate ways after World War II.
A random conversation on Long Island last month led to their unplanned reunion.
Shanie Ellerton, a member of Chabad of West Hempstead, brought her mother, Roz Speiser, to one of the synagogue’s Sunday morning social programs for seniors for the first time a few weeks ago. Mother and daughter sat at a table next to a stranger, Ann Welner, a 90-year-old West Hempstead resident who regularly attends the events.
Ellerton detected an accent.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Poland.”
“Where in Poland?”
“Sosnowiec,” Welner answered.
“My mother-in-law is from Sosnowiec,” Ellerton said. “Maybe you knew her.”
Ellerton’s mother-in-law, Bella — maiden name, Baila Steiglitz — was at home that Sunday morning, but Welner remembered the name Baila Steiglitz from Sosnowiec. “You have to bring her,” Welner told Ellerton. She did, the next week.
While they hadn’t known each other growing up in their hometown, Welner (née Hanka Jerzy) and Steiglitz were together later.
“We were together on the transport, we were together in the camps,” Welner said.
Welner and Bella were on the first major deportation of Jews from Sosnowiec in May 1942. The pair of teenagers was sent to Waldenburg, a labor camp in what is now southwest Poland. They remained together until liberation came in early 1945.
The two women eventually found husbands, immigrated to the United States, had children and made careers. Several years ago they both moved to West Hempstead to be near their children. Although they live about a half-mile from each other, they never crossed paths.
Until Ellerton brought her mother-in-law to the Chabad seniors program.
When Bella was introduced to Welner, she “lit up,” Ellerton said. They started talking in Polish.
“I was just shocked. I didn’t think this was possible,” Welner said.
They’ve since gone back each Sunday, renewing their long-interrupted friendship.
What do they talk about?
They’re not telling. And since the conversations are in Polish, Ellerton doesn’t know. Probably not the war years. Bella never talks about that time, Ellerton said. She said her mother-in-law was born in 1922 or 1923. “No one knows.”
Bella’s memory about details of that time is fuzzy. “I don’t want to remember,” she said.
Ellerton has managed over the years to put together scraps of information about what happened to her mother-in-law during the war — a series of concentration camps and escape from a death march, a story that parallels Welner’s. Both women lost their parents in the Shoah.
Sosnowiec had a Jewish population of 28,000 in September 1939, at the start of the war. About 700 returned after, but most quickly left for the United States or Israel. Today, only a handful of Jews live there.
Both women enjoy the weekly reunion.
Watching the two women get together after all these decades is “an incredible feeling,” said Rabbi Yossi Lieberman, who has served as the Chabad emissary in West Hempstead for the past 14 years. If you do something to bring people together, sometimes they come together in surprising ways, he said.
Welner believes the reunion was not random.
“There are no coincidences,” she said. “Everything is being made above.”
steve@jewishweek.org---------------------
Also widely read on our website right now: Rabbi David Wolple's column about "Anger Management." Controlling our fury is one of the most important character-building tasks we can do, he writes.
Musings
Anger Management
Controlling our fury is one of the most important disciplines of character.
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeThe sages of our tradition were very wary of anger. “Rabbah, son of Rav Huna, said: “When one loses his temper, even the Divine Presence is unimportant in his eyes” [Nedarim 22b]. While not denying the possibility that righteous anger can exist, repeatedly the Rabbis warn against anger, which is like a boiling pot that overspills and scalds everyone nearby.
Anger exemplifies the wisdom of what Emerson teaches: “Our moods don’t believe each other.” We say things, and often do things, in anger that we would never do in calmer moments. Yet words spoken in anger cannot be recalled; forgiven perhaps, but rarely forgotten. Keeping a leash on our fury is one of the most important disciplines of character a human being can develop.
Anger arises within us but is like an invader, a force we do not control. We can learn to avoid reacting out of anger however, knowing that if we “count to 10” our words will be wiser and truer to our deep character. Anger blots out the sun, even, as Rabbah teaches, the Divine Presence. Wait out the rage until the light streams back in and your life will be better in the coming year.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book is “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press). ---------------------
Have a lovely weekend,
Helen Chernikoff
Web Director
Cauliflower Is Underrated
Bonus: The hearty crucifer is easy to find in winter.
Cauliflower Is Underrated
Nigella Lawson
Food & Wine
Bonus: The hearty crucifer is easy to find in winter.A winter vegetable comes alive courtesy of spices, and pomegranate seeds. Courtesy of Flatiron BooksThis is one of my favorite suppers, although there’s nothing that says you can’t serve this as a vegetable side as part of a more conventional meal. And you could also bolster it further by crumbling in some feta. But for me, it is perfect just as it is: the tomatoes almost ooze into a dressing in the oven, and the cauliflower softens, but not soggily. For choice, I’d always use home-cooked chickpeas (I cook batches in my slow cooker and freeze them in 1 1/2-cup portions for everyday use), but otherwise I like the pre-cooked Spanish chickpeas in jars. Yes, they are more expensive than the canned variety, but the cheapest option is always to buy dried. Don’t feel bad about using chickpeas out of a can, though – I have been known to, myself. One can’t always be so organized to have the freezer stashed with cooked chickpeas, and so I am always well stocked with canned chickpeas. They do work here, it’s just that they won’t be as soft; but then, you don’t necessarily need them to be. The cauliflower and juicy tomatoes can stand some nubbliness.
The parsley is not a garnish – ugh, that word – but used, here, as a salad leaf. And this is also very, very good cold, so if you have some left over, it makes a fabulous box lunch, or provides instant gratification on those days you have to eat fridge-side, with your coat still on, you’re so hungry.
Hide Servings & Times
Yield:
Serves 2 heartily, or 1 with leftovers
Active Time:
30 min
Total Time:
1 hr 15 min
Hide Ingredients
1 small head cauliflower
3 tablespoons regular olive oil
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1 1/2 cups chickpeas, home-cooked or drained from a can or jar
1–2 tablespoons harissa, to taste (and depending on the heat of the harissa)
4 smallish ripe vine tomatoes (approx. 6 ounces total)
1 teaspoon sea salt flakes or kosher salt, or to taste
3–4 tablespoons pomegranate seeds
2 1/2 cups Italian parsley leaves
Hide Steps
Preheat the oven to 425ºF. Trim the cauliflower and divide into small florets.
Pour the oil into a large bowl, add the cinnamon and cumin seeds, and stir or whisk to help the spices disperse.
Tip in the prepared cauliflower and toss to coat.
Pour the contents of the bowl into a small oven pan (I mostly use a disposable foil baking pan measuring 12 x 8 inches) and place in the oven for 15 minutes. Don’t wash out the bowl you’ve been using just yet.
Add the chickpeas to this bowl, and add the harissa, tasting it first to see if you want both tablespoonfuls, and, at the risk of being repetitive, toss to coat.
Quarter the tomatoes and add them to the bowl, and shake or stir to mix.
When the cauliflower has had its 15 minutes, remove the pan, quickly tip the chickpeas and tomatoes over the cauliflower, and toss to combine before returning to the oven for a further 15 minutes until the cauliflower is tender.
When it’s ready, remove from the oven and sprinkle the salt over the vegetables, then (and this isn’t the last time) toss to combine with half of the pomegranate seeds before dividing between 2 bowls.
Divide the parsley leaves – without chopping them – between the 2 bowls and toss to mix. Scatter with the remaining pomegranate seeds.
Cool leftovers, then cover and refrigerate within 2 hours of making. Will keep in refrigerator for up to 2 days. Serve cold.
Books
A Bygone Gotham
Two new memoirs evoke an earlier New York.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Morris Dickstein, chronicles his intellectual awakening.Looking back over this year in New York City, with a new Whitney Museum, a new sculpture that shouts OY or YO, depending on what side of the East River you’re on, a new World Trade Center observatory back in use and a much-discussed new novel set here called “City on Fire,” I’m still drawn to an older New York, to pockets of time that are no more.
Two new memoirs beautifully evoke earlier Gotham days. Both by distinguished men of letters who came of age in the 1950s, Morris Dickstein’s “Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education” and Jack Schwartz’s “The Fine Print: My Life as a Deskman” are stories very well told. Dickstein writes of his trajectory from an Orthodox upbringing in a community of immigrants on the Lower East Side to the Ivy League and academia. Schwartz describes the pre-digital city with its many competing daily newspapers, and his journalistic career included stints at many of them.
A literary critic and professor, Dickstein, 75, chronicles his intellectual awakening; his book is also the story of his family, a love story (with his wife, who is called L), and an account of intellectual clashes and cultural shifts of the times. The title is a line from Robert Lowell’s introspective poem “Epilogue.”
In the opening scene of the memoir, Dickstein recalls a time when he was living in New Haven, newly married and studying at Yale, and finds himself in front of an apartment he had previously lived in, and filled with great curiosity. When no one answers the unlocked door, he lets himself in, feeling as though he is trespassing on his own life. That this past matters to him was clear. And in Dickstein’s fluent style, the incident reminds him of a favorite poem by William Wordsworth about time and memory.
Until he was 9, Dickstein lived on the first floor of a five-story walk-up on Henry Street on the Lower East Side, surrounded by quarreling relatives, with a row of eight or more shtieblach, or tiny synagogues, on the opposite side of the street. The family then moved to Flushing, where they lived across from and then above their dry goods store. (Later, he would review Bernard Malamud’s “The Tenants” and mention parallels with the tiny grocery described in "The Assistant"). The young Dickstein continued to attend the Orthodox Rabbi Jacob Joseph School on Henry Street, traveling by bus and subways on his own to get there. A happy, precocious kid who “spoke early and said clever things,” Dickstein felt loved, protected and worried about — but was not praised to his face for fear of attracting the evil eye.
Dickstein became the orator of his Boy Scout troop, read from the Torah weekly in the family’s Flushing shul, and, toward the end of high school, discovered that if he tucked works of Shakespeare and other books he wanted to read into the large volumes of the Talmud during class, the teachers wouldn’t notice.
Others have written about growing up poor on the Lower East Side, and about exuberant summers working in the Catskills, but Dickstein’s eye is distinctive, with clear memories stretching back decades. I recognize my own grandparents’ colorful yet melancholy Henry Street neighbors in Dickstein’s accounts of his surrogate parents across the hall: a childless couple, he a wheezing bookie who doted on his petite wife who spoke her own version of English.
Columbia College was a leap from RJJ, but Dickstein flourished. Many who graduated from college even more recently than Dickstein will be struck by the detail with which he remembers his courses, themes that engaged him and his precise evolution of thought.
“The things I remember, I remember very powerfully, I almost hallucinate them,” he tells The Jewish Week. “My college studies were life changing experiences, not simply classes. I had very good teachers at Columbia College, who also provided a larger connection to the worlds of New York intellectuals.” Many of the people he studied with, like Lionel Trilling, remained a presence in his life.
“College set me on a path I continue to pursue. Not many stay on the same path. I remained in the university world.” At Columbia, he wrote for “The Spectator,” and then launched a literary review called “The Supplement.”
After his undergraduate years at Columbia (with courses at JTS) and graduate studies at Yale (where he earned his doctorate) with a term at Cambridge, he got his first teaching position at Columbia. He then moved to Queens College, and a few years later received an additional appointment to the Graduate Center at CUNY, where he is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Theatre.
This is a very personal memoir: He writes openly about love, sex, anxiety and psychoanalysis. “If you’re not doing anything that makes you uncomfortable, you’re not being truthful,” he says. “I was determined not to idealize, or to make myself the hero of my own story. He then quotes George Orwell, as he does in the book: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”
About how his yeshiva education shaped him, he says, “Probably more than I realize. You can say that literary interpretation and being book-oriented is related to the Talmudic discourses and interpretation that you do in Talmudic analysis.”
Through the book, even as he leaves aside certain Jewish rituals, he continues to observe kashrut. These days, he says he keeps “symbolically kosher,” still making certain distinctions that are meaningful to him that “preserve my connection to my parents and their world, as well as to the history of the Jews.” When his father died in 1992, he would go to shul to say Kaddish and discovered the morning minyan at Ansche Chesed, not far from his Upper West Side home. He wrote about that experience, calling the piece “The Law of Return.”
Dickstein, who has published the cultural histories “Gates of Eden” and “Dancing in the Dark” along with other literary works, recalls hearing playwright David Hare recently talk about publishing a memoir, and how he felt the weight of association with certain times and places. Writing was a way to offload them, to no longer be burdened. Dickstein agrees, “In a sense I’m parking my memories in a volume, both preserving them and detaching myself. “
♦Around the time that Dickstein was writing for “The Spectator,” Jack Schwartz was at City College, writing and editing The City College Campus while also working as a copy boy at The Daily Mirror, a tabloid that was then the flagship Hearst newspaper in New York. Over the next half century — through “the heyday of American print journalism” — he worked at the Daily News, the New York Post, Newsday, the Long Island Press and The New York Times, as well as the Paris Herald-Tribune.
His early days at the Mirror, as he recounts in “The Fine Print: My Life as a Deskman,” were peopled with Damon Runyon-esque characters, with lots of shouting, smoking and growling. It wasn’t uncommon for reporters and the men of the rewrite bank to keep a bottle of booze on their desks. One memorable night, he had to fetch a photographer from a nearby bar and race over to Radio City with him to photograph Marilyn Monroe.
Schwartz always has a great story, and he shares his insider’s view with great wit, understated erudition and deep insight. He worked his way up from copy boy, and served as reporter on many beats in newsrooms more dignified than the Mirror, foreign correspondent, creator and editor of a new book section at Newsday, and he worked the “backfield” all over The New York Times. Along the way, he befriended the linotype operators, copy-cutters and truck drivers.
Most of his career was spent as a “deskman,” an intermediary between the reporter and reader — assigning stories, supervising and shaping coverage, rewriting and polishing other people’s copy to the highest standards that they would be pleased to call their own.
“It was not a sentimental education in Flaubert’s terms,” he tells The Jewish Week. “At the beginning, it was a learning experience, and after a while a teaching experience, when I knew enough to impart whatever wisdom I had acquired to others. “
Schwartz, who retired from The New York Times in 2009, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and an International Affairs Reporting Fellow at Columbia and has taught at the Columbia School of Journalism and NYU, and served as a writing mentor at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a most affable guide and a terrific writer. Even as more news is read on computer screens from a range of sources, this is an important story of the people who continue to shape the news that’s fit to print.
editor@jewishweek.org
Well Versed
For The Time Being
Sandee Brawarsky
Installation view of "Using Walls, Floors and Ceilings: Valeska Soares." The Jewish Museum, NY. David Heald.So what do we mean when we talk about Jewish time? Always late by ten minutes? Days divided by requisite prayer services, weeks punctuated with the slowing down of Shabbat, years marked by yahrtzeits? Or is Jewish time always set in different time zones, as the Jewish people are dispersed throughout the world? Or, as my grandmother would ask, Are you keeping time with anyone? To her, time meant sharing hours and it meant being together, in sync.
That time is so precious -- that we never seem to have enough of it -- echoes through the lobby of The Jewish Museum and is felt especially strongly at this beginning of another new year.
Valeksa Soares’s installation piece, “Time Has No Shadows,” is part of an ongoing series at the Museum, “Using Walls, Floors and Ceilings,” in which artists respond to the space, either architecturally, historically or culturally.
The scene is of times past, with a richly-colored vintage Persian carpet in what was the entry hall of a stately mansion from the early 1900s laced with Jewish history. Twenty-four antique pocket watches hang from above at varying heights with each set at a different hour. Even though one hand is missing from each, time is always moving on. It may move in cycles, like the coils of poetic phrases inscribed into the patterned carpet, but those cycles project us forward.
Soares, who was born in Brazil and lives in Brooklyn, has created a visual reminder of the ways we think about time and space, and how intertwined that is with Judaism.
Corresponding to each of the gold watches -- and to the hours in a day -– the twenty-four brief texts refer to time, including “Time has no shadows” as well as “Meanwhile,” “The moment after the moment,” “Not so long ago,” “Ask me tomorrow” and “Acquainted with the night.” The piece also speaks of transition. When families would move, whether across the globe or across the street, they’d roll up a carpet like this one and unroll it in their next home, as if it were a family scroll, transplanting their stories. Like the timepieces, it might be passed from one generation to the next, each time a bit more faded or worn, and even more precious.
“There’s a lot going on,” Kelly Taxter, assistant curator, tells The Jewish Week. “The elements are very engaging visually. There’s an inherent beauty to them.”
Visitors to the installation can feel free to walk on the carpet, handle the watches and linger in the lobby for more than a New York minute.
“Time Has No Shadows” is on view at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, through April 21, 2016.
Bonus: The hearty crucifer is easy to find in winter.A winter vegetable comes alive courtesy of spices, and pomegranate seeds. Courtesy of Flatiron BooksThis is one of my favorite suppers, although there’s nothing that says you can’t serve this as a vegetable side as part of a more conventional meal. And you could also bolster it further by crumbling in some feta. But for me, it is perfect just as it is: the tomatoes almost ooze into a dressing in the oven, and the cauliflower softens, but not soggily. For choice, I’d always use home-cooked chickpeas (I cook batches in my slow cooker and freeze them in 1 1/2-cup portions for everyday use), but otherwise I like the pre-cooked Spanish chickpeas in jars. Yes, they are more expensive than the canned variety, but the cheapest option is always to buy dried. Don’t feel bad about using chickpeas out of a can, though – I have been known to, myself. One can’t always be so organized to have the freezer stashed with cooked chickpeas, and so I am always well stocked with canned chickpeas. They do work here, it’s just that they won’t be as soft; but then, you don’t necessarily need them to be. The cauliflower and juicy tomatoes can stand some nubbliness.
The parsley is not a garnish – ugh, that word – but used, here, as a salad leaf. And this is also very, very good cold, so if you have some left over, it makes a fabulous box lunch, or provides instant gratification on those days you have to eat fridge-side, with your coat still on, you’re so hungry.
Hide Servings & Times
Yield:
Serves 2 heartily, or 1 with leftovers
Active Time:
30 min
Total Time:
1 hr 15 min
Hide Ingredients
1 small head cauliflower
3 tablespoons regular olive oil
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1 1/2 cups chickpeas, home-cooked or drained from a can or jar
1–2 tablespoons harissa, to taste (and depending on the heat of the harissa)
4 smallish ripe vine tomatoes (approx. 6 ounces total)
1 teaspoon sea salt flakes or kosher salt, or to taste
3–4 tablespoons pomegranate seeds
2 1/2 cups Italian parsley leaves
Hide Steps
Preheat the oven to 425ºF. Trim the cauliflower and divide into small florets.
Pour the oil into a large bowl, add the cinnamon and cumin seeds, and stir or whisk to help the spices disperse.
Tip in the prepared cauliflower and toss to coat.
Pour the contents of the bowl into a small oven pan (I mostly use a disposable foil baking pan measuring 12 x 8 inches) and place in the oven for 15 minutes. Don’t wash out the bowl you’ve been using just yet.
Add the chickpeas to this bowl, and add the harissa, tasting it first to see if you want both tablespoonfuls, and, at the risk of being repetitive, toss to coat.
Quarter the tomatoes and add them to the bowl, and shake or stir to mix.
When the cauliflower has had its 15 minutes, remove the pan, quickly tip the chickpeas and tomatoes over the cauliflower, and toss to combine before returning to the oven for a further 15 minutes until the cauliflower is tender.
When it’s ready, remove from the oven and sprinkle the salt over the vegetables, then (and this isn’t the last time) toss to combine with half of the pomegranate seeds before dividing between 2 bowls.
Divide the parsley leaves – without chopping them – between the 2 bowls and toss to mix. Scatter with the remaining pomegranate seeds.
Cool leftovers, then cover and refrigerate within 2 hours of making. Will keep in refrigerator for up to 2 days. Serve cold.
Books
A Bygone Gotham
Two new memoirs evoke an earlier New York.
Sandee Brawarsky
Culture Editor
Morris Dickstein, chronicles his intellectual awakening.Looking back over this year in New York City, with a new Whitney Museum, a new sculpture that shouts OY or YO, depending on what side of the East River you’re on, a new World Trade Center observatory back in use and a much-discussed new novel set here called “City on Fire,” I’m still drawn to an older New York, to pockets of time that are no more.
Two new memoirs beautifully evoke earlier Gotham days. Both by distinguished men of letters who came of age in the 1950s, Morris Dickstein’s “Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education” and Jack Schwartz’s “The Fine Print: My Life as a Deskman” are stories very well told. Dickstein writes of his trajectory from an Orthodox upbringing in a community of immigrants on the Lower East Side to the Ivy League and academia. Schwartz describes the pre-digital city with its many competing daily newspapers, and his journalistic career included stints at many of them.
A literary critic and professor, Dickstein, 75, chronicles his intellectual awakening; his book is also the story of his family, a love story (with his wife, who is called L), and an account of intellectual clashes and cultural shifts of the times. The title is a line from Robert Lowell’s introspective poem “Epilogue.”
In the opening scene of the memoir, Dickstein recalls a time when he was living in New Haven, newly married and studying at Yale, and finds himself in front of an apartment he had previously lived in, and filled with great curiosity. When no one answers the unlocked door, he lets himself in, feeling as though he is trespassing on his own life. That this past matters to him was clear. And in Dickstein’s fluent style, the incident reminds him of a favorite poem by William Wordsworth about time and memory.
Until he was 9, Dickstein lived on the first floor of a five-story walk-up on Henry Street on the Lower East Side, surrounded by quarreling relatives, with a row of eight or more shtieblach, or tiny synagogues, on the opposite side of the street. The family then moved to Flushing, where they lived across from and then above their dry goods store. (Later, he would review Bernard Malamud’s “The Tenants” and mention parallels with the tiny grocery described in "The Assistant"). The young Dickstein continued to attend the Orthodox Rabbi Jacob Joseph School on Henry Street, traveling by bus and subways on his own to get there. A happy, precocious kid who “spoke early and said clever things,” Dickstein felt loved, protected and worried about — but was not praised to his face for fear of attracting the evil eye.
Dickstein became the orator of his Boy Scout troop, read from the Torah weekly in the family’s Flushing shul, and, toward the end of high school, discovered that if he tucked works of Shakespeare and other books he wanted to read into the large volumes of the Talmud during class, the teachers wouldn’t notice.
Others have written about growing up poor on the Lower East Side, and about exuberant summers working in the Catskills, but Dickstein’s eye is distinctive, with clear memories stretching back decades. I recognize my own grandparents’ colorful yet melancholy Henry Street neighbors in Dickstein’s accounts of his surrogate parents across the hall: a childless couple, he a wheezing bookie who doted on his petite wife who spoke her own version of English.
Columbia College was a leap from RJJ, but Dickstein flourished. Many who graduated from college even more recently than Dickstein will be struck by the detail with which he remembers his courses, themes that engaged him and his precise evolution of thought.
“The things I remember, I remember very powerfully, I almost hallucinate them,” he tells The Jewish Week. “My college studies were life changing experiences, not simply classes. I had very good teachers at Columbia College, who also provided a larger connection to the worlds of New York intellectuals.” Many of the people he studied with, like Lionel Trilling, remained a presence in his life.
“College set me on a path I continue to pursue. Not many stay on the same path. I remained in the university world.” At Columbia, he wrote for “The Spectator,” and then launched a literary review called “The Supplement.”
After his undergraduate years at Columbia (with courses at JTS) and graduate studies at Yale (where he earned his doctorate) with a term at Cambridge, he got his first teaching position at Columbia. He then moved to Queens College, and a few years later received an additional appointment to the Graduate Center at CUNY, where he is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Theatre.
This is a very personal memoir: He writes openly about love, sex, anxiety and psychoanalysis. “If you’re not doing anything that makes you uncomfortable, you’re not being truthful,” he says. “I was determined not to idealize, or to make myself the hero of my own story. He then quotes George Orwell, as he does in the book: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”
About how his yeshiva education shaped him, he says, “Probably more than I realize. You can say that literary interpretation and being book-oriented is related to the Talmudic discourses and interpretation that you do in Talmudic analysis.”
Through the book, even as he leaves aside certain Jewish rituals, he continues to observe kashrut. These days, he says he keeps “symbolically kosher,” still making certain distinctions that are meaningful to him that “preserve my connection to my parents and their world, as well as to the history of the Jews.” When his father died in 1992, he would go to shul to say Kaddish and discovered the morning minyan at Ansche Chesed, not far from his Upper West Side home. He wrote about that experience, calling the piece “The Law of Return.”
Dickstein, who has published the cultural histories “Gates of Eden” and “Dancing in the Dark” along with other literary works, recalls hearing playwright David Hare recently talk about publishing a memoir, and how he felt the weight of association with certain times and places. Writing was a way to offload them, to no longer be burdened. Dickstein agrees, “In a sense I’m parking my memories in a volume, both preserving them and detaching myself. “
♦Around the time that Dickstein was writing for “The Spectator,” Jack Schwartz was at City College, writing and editing The City College Campus while also working as a copy boy at The Daily Mirror, a tabloid that was then the flagship Hearst newspaper in New York. Over the next half century — through “the heyday of American print journalism” — he worked at the Daily News, the New York Post, Newsday, the Long Island Press and The New York Times, as well as the Paris Herald-Tribune.
His early days at the Mirror, as he recounts in “The Fine Print: My Life as a Deskman,” were peopled with Damon Runyon-esque characters, with lots of shouting, smoking and growling. It wasn’t uncommon for reporters and the men of the rewrite bank to keep a bottle of booze on their desks. One memorable night, he had to fetch a photographer from a nearby bar and race over to Radio City with him to photograph Marilyn Monroe.
Schwartz always has a great story, and he shares his insider’s view with great wit, understated erudition and deep insight. He worked his way up from copy boy, and served as reporter on many beats in newsrooms more dignified than the Mirror, foreign correspondent, creator and editor of a new book section at Newsday, and he worked the “backfield” all over The New York Times. Along the way, he befriended the linotype operators, copy-cutters and truck drivers.
Most of his career was spent as a “deskman,” an intermediary between the reporter and reader — assigning stories, supervising and shaping coverage, rewriting and polishing other people’s copy to the highest standards that they would be pleased to call their own.
“It was not a sentimental education in Flaubert’s terms,” he tells The Jewish Week. “At the beginning, it was a learning experience, and after a while a teaching experience, when I knew enough to impart whatever wisdom I had acquired to others. “
Schwartz, who retired from The New York Times in 2009, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and an International Affairs Reporting Fellow at Columbia and has taught at the Columbia School of Journalism and NYU, and served as a writing mentor at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a most affable guide and a terrific writer. Even as more news is read on computer screens from a range of sources, this is an important story of the people who continue to shape the news that’s fit to print.
editor@jewishweek.org
Well Versed
For The Time Being
Sandee Brawarsky
Installation view of "Using Walls, Floors and Ceilings: Valeska Soares." The Jewish Museum, NY. David Heald.So what do we mean when we talk about Jewish time? Always late by ten minutes? Days divided by requisite prayer services, weeks punctuated with the slowing down of Shabbat, years marked by yahrtzeits? Or is Jewish time always set in different time zones, as the Jewish people are dispersed throughout the world? Or, as my grandmother would ask, Are you keeping time with anyone? To her, time meant sharing hours and it meant being together, in sync.
That time is so precious -- that we never seem to have enough of it -- echoes through the lobby of The Jewish Museum and is felt especially strongly at this beginning of another new year.
Valeksa Soares’s installation piece, “Time Has No Shadows,” is part of an ongoing series at the Museum, “Using Walls, Floors and Ceilings,” in which artists respond to the space, either architecturally, historically or culturally.
The scene is of times past, with a richly-colored vintage Persian carpet in what was the entry hall of a stately mansion from the early 1900s laced with Jewish history. Twenty-four antique pocket watches hang from above at varying heights with each set at a different hour. Even though one hand is missing from each, time is always moving on. It may move in cycles, like the coils of poetic phrases inscribed into the patterned carpet, but those cycles project us forward.
Soares, who was born in Brazil and lives in Brooklyn, has created a visual reminder of the ways we think about time and space, and how intertwined that is with Judaism.
Corresponding to each of the gold watches -- and to the hours in a day -– the twenty-four brief texts refer to time, including “Time has no shadows” as well as “Meanwhile,” “The moment after the moment,” “Not so long ago,” “Ask me tomorrow” and “Acquainted with the night.” The piece also speaks of transition. When families would move, whether across the globe or across the street, they’d roll up a carpet like this one and unroll it in their next home, as if it were a family scroll, transplanting their stories. Like the timepieces, it might be passed from one generation to the next, each time a bit more faded or worn, and even more precious.
“There’s a lot going on,” Kelly Taxter, assistant curator, tells The Jewish Week. “The elements are very engaging visually. There’s an inherent beauty to them.”
Visitors to the installation can feel free to walk on the carpet, handle the watches and linger in the lobby for more than a New York minute.
“Time Has No Shadows” is on view at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, through April 21, 2016.
MORE HEADLINES
Calling Herself 'Rabbi'
National
First Yeshivat Maharat Graduate To Call Herself ‘Rabbi’ Hired By Orthodox Synagogue
JTA
Rabbi Lila KadeganThe first graduate of Yeshivat Maharat to take the title “rabbi” said she has been hired by an unnamed American Orthodox synagogue.
Lila Kagedan, who was ordained this summer by the seminary created by Open Orthodox Rabbi Avi Weiss to train Orthodox female clergy, told the London-based Jewish Chronicle this week that she was recruited to join the staff of a congregation she declined to name.
Graduates of the New York seminary have so far eschewed taking the title rabbi, though the school is explicit that its mission is to train female Orthodox “clergy.” Most have taken on the title maharat, an acronym that translates roughly to female spiritual leader. Kagedan reportedly is the first graduate to call herself a rabbi.
In the interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Kagedan, a native of Canada, acknowledged that “change is difficult and frightening. We are very much used to a certain aesthetic when we say ‘rabbi.’”
This fall, the Rabbinical Council of America, the main modern Orthodox rabbinical group, formally adopted a policy prohibiting the ordination or hiring of women rabbis.
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
National
First Yeshivat Maharat Graduate To Call Herself ‘Rabbi’ Hired By Orthodox Synagogue
JTA
Rabbi Lila KadeganThe first graduate of Yeshivat Maharat to take the title “rabbi” said she has been hired by an unnamed American Orthodox synagogue.
Lila Kagedan, who was ordained this summer by the seminary created by Open Orthodox Rabbi Avi Weiss to train Orthodox female clergy, told the London-based Jewish Chronicle this week that she was recruited to join the staff of a congregation she declined to name.
Graduates of the New York seminary have so far eschewed taking the title rabbi, though the school is explicit that its mission is to train female Orthodox “clergy.” Most have taken on the title maharat, an acronym that translates roughly to female spiritual leader. Kagedan reportedly is the first graduate to call herself a rabbi.
In the interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Kagedan, a native of Canada, acknowledged that “change is difficult and frightening. We are very much used to a certain aesthetic when we say ‘rabbi.’”
This fall, the Rabbinical Council of America, the main modern Orthodox rabbinical group, formally adopted a policy prohibiting the ordination or hiring of women rabbis.
editor@jewishweek.org---------------------
NYC To Spend $20M For Security At Private, Parochial Schools
New York
NYC To Spend $20M For Security At Private, Parochial Schools
JTA
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Wikimedia CommonsNew York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a bill providing up to $20 million for security at non-public schools.
The measure that de Blasio signed Tuesday will help “keep our communities safer,” he said, according to several New York media outlets.
Approved overwhelmingly last month by the City Council, the law is expected to benefit New York’s many yeshivas and Jewish day schools, along with other private and parochial schools. It has drawn criticism from the New York Civil Liberties Union, whose leaders have said it violates the Constitution’s separation of church and state.
Councilman David Greenfield, a Brooklyn Democrat whose district includes heavily Jewish neighborhoods, introduced the bill last year.
It provides funding for a security guard at private schools with more than 300 students. Private schools with more than 500 students will receive an additional guard.
The Orthodox Union advocated heavily for the bill.
“Now more than ever, with families increasingly concerned about security, all kids deserve a safe learning environment, and this bill helps provide that,” said Maury Litwack, director of state political affairs for the O.U.
editor@jewishweek.org
New York
NYC To Spend $20M For Security At Private, Parochial Schools
JTA
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Wikimedia CommonsNew York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a bill providing up to $20 million for security at non-public schools.
The measure that de Blasio signed Tuesday will help “keep our communities safer,” he said, according to several New York media outlets.
Approved overwhelmingly last month by the City Council, the law is expected to benefit New York’s many yeshivas and Jewish day schools, along with other private and parochial schools. It has drawn criticism from the New York Civil Liberties Union, whose leaders have said it violates the Constitution’s separation of church and state.
Councilman David Greenfield, a Brooklyn Democrat whose district includes heavily Jewish neighborhoods, introduced the bill last year.
It provides funding for a security guard at private schools with more than 300 students. Private schools with more than 500 students will receive an additional guard.
The Orthodox Union advocated heavily for the bill.
“Now more than ever, with families increasingly concerned about security, all kids deserve a safe learning environment, and this bill helps provide that,” said Maury Litwack, director of state political affairs for the O.U.
editor@jewishweek.org
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Lena Dunham Show 'Girls' To End After 6th Season
'Son of Saul' Nominated For Golden Globe
JTA
Film & Television, Television
Blueprint
Holocaust film 'Son of Saul' gets Golden Globe nomination for foreign-language movies
The Jewish Week
Holocaust film 'Son of Saul' gets Golden Globe nomination for foreign-language movies
The searing Holocaust film “Son of Saul” is one of five foreign-language movies nominated for a Golden Globe Award.
The Hungarian movie is also an early favorite in the foreign-language Oscar race, which includes entries from 81 countries.
In “Son of Saul,” the character of Saul Auslander is a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau who is forced to cremate the bodies of fellow prisoners gassed by the SS. In one corpse, Saul believes he recognizes his dead son.
As the Sonderkommando men plan a rebellion, Saul vows that he will save the child’s corpse from the flames and find a rabbi to say Kaddish at a proper funeral.
Saul is portrayed by the Budapest-born Geza Rohrig, the founder of an underground punk band during Communist rule. Moving to New York, he studied at a Hasidic yeshiva and graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary. The film was funded in part by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Another entry bearing on the Holocaust, the German film “Labyrinth of Lies,” failed to make the cut. Set in the post-war 1950s, when most Germans preferred to deny or ignore the Holocaust, “Labyrinth” focuses on a young German prosecutor determined to bring the Nazis who ran Auschwitz to trial before a German court.
The winners will be presented at the usually wild and unpredictable Golden Globe ceremony on Jan. 16.
Winners and nominees, picked by a small group made up of members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, gain publicity but none of the prestige reserved for Academy Award winners.
Recognizable Jewish names among Golden Globe nominees include writer Aaron Sorkin, nominated in the Best Screenplay category for the film “Steve Jobs.”
The Jewish Week
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