Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Dear Reader,
In the latest salvo in the BDS wars, newspaper publisher Mortimer Zuckerman is pledging $100 million to attract postdoc researchers from Western countries to four Israeli universities. The move, which also strengthens U.S.-Israel ties at a fraught moment, is also intended in part of fight the "brain drain" of academics from Israel. Deputy managing editor Amy Sara Clark has the story.
International
$100 Million To Fight Israeli Brain Drain
Mortimer Zuckerman to fund STEM program to strengthen U.S.-Israel ties, counter BDS.
Amy Sara Clark
Deputy Managing Editor
Mort Zuckerman, right, with Hebrew Univ. Pres. Menachem Ben-Sasson, at The Harvard Club Monday. COURTESY OF HEBREW UNIVERSITYTo curb the Israeli academic “brain drain” and increase cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli scientific communities, newspaper publisher, businessman and philanthropist Mortimer Zuckerman has committed more than $100 million to attract postdoctoral researchers from Western countries to Israeli universities and lure Israeli academics back.
“This project will help bring back home some of Israel’s most brilliant sons and daughters, allow them to advance their own careers here and in so doing contribute to Israel’s growing scientific excellence,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video address during a news conference here Monday announcing the program, which provides fellowships and related educational activities in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, otherwise known as STEM. “It will also enable some of America’s brightest young scientists to conduct their research in Israel,” Netanyahu said.
The Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program will give the funds out over 20 years to four Israeli universities: Technion, Weizmann Institute, Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University. The level of funding puts it on par with the Rhodes Scholarships, which awards just over $5.9 million in scholarships a year, or $119 million over 20 years.
Professor Yaakov Nahmias, director of the Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told The Jewish Week that the university has a similar fellowship collaboration funded by the Helmholtz Foundation with a number of universities in Germany. He said the exchange runs “extremely well” and has greatly “tightened the ties” between researchers in the two countries. He said he expects the Zuckerman program to have similar outcomes, but on a vastly larger scale, since the funding for the Zuckerman program is "about an order of magnitude larger."
“A fellowship program [with the United States] has a remarkable potential of tightening the ties between the two countries,” he added.
“You can imagine that a postdoctoral fellow going to Israel and making connections is going to be much more in tune with Israeli researchers when creating his own lab,” he said.
The program has two main components: the Postdoctoral Scholars Program, which will support postdoctoral researchers from the United States and other Western countries at the four schools, and the Zuckerman Faculty Scholars Program, which is designed to bring Israeli academics back to the Jewish state by funding new labs, programs and projects at the Israeli institutions.
“We are pleased and grateful to have Mort Zuckerman as a partner in advancing two top national priorities in Israel — reversing brain drain and deepening the Israeli-American friendship. With the help of this new fund, Israel and the United States will forge a shared tomorrow of scientific and technological excellence,” Joseph Klafter, president of Tel Aviv University, said in a written statement.
A 2013 study by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel found that between 2008 and 2013, just over 1 in 5 faculty members at Israeli universities have left the country to work at American universities. Another study found that one in four Israeli scientists had left the country.
The latter figure has improved in recent years, according to a 2015 survey by the Israel National Brain Gain Program, which reported that the number of academics living abroad remained steady between 2012 and 2014 after years of rising steadily.
At a news conference Monday morning in a stately wood-paneled room at the Harvard Club, Zuckerman told the crowd of politicians, academics and reporters that he hoped the program would result in a “renewal” of America’s “spirit of innovation.” He added that he was moved to create the program to give back to the United States, the country that allowed the Canadian-born media and real estate magnate to build his fortune.
“Winston Churchill said it best: ‘We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give,’” he said.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo took time out from post-blizzard logistics to headline the event, praising Zuckerman as “one of Israel’s most effective advocates,” and the program as “critical” both for the future of science and technology, and in the fight against global terrorism.
“When you look at so many of the challenges that we’re dealing with now that will require solutions from science and technology: energy generation, military defense systems, weather management, climate change, food supply, all these riddles are going to have to be solved by science and technology,” he said, noting New York State’s efforts to improve STEM education at the university level, including Cornell Tech, the four-year-old collaboration between Cornell University and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, which is slated to open a permanent campus on Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island in 2017.
Moving the conversation to terrorism, Cuomo said that while New Yorkers used to feel insulated from global terrorism, in the post-San Bernardino era, “we’re feeling the day-to-day pressure and terrorism that Israel has felt for so many more years. ... That urgency of terrorism changes the entire feel and the entire body politic. Now is a moment to forge a collaboration with Israel [that is]stronger, bolder than ever before. ...
“But today’s announcement goes even further for me, because it’s not just about the STEM disciplines. Underlying it is the concept of collaboration, and of partnership, and of bringing two great powers together. And for those issues that the STEM disciplines can’t solve — issues like bringing different religions together, different cultures together and different countries together. That’s where the fellowship between Israel and America is going to be critical, and I believe it comes at a critical time.”
Academics, including three Nobel Prize laureates, praised the program for fostering both scientific collaboration and, as Nobel Prize Laureate Richard Axel put it, “a free and open dialogue” between researchers from both countries.
“What this program does is to allow a discourse between people, people who might disagree both intellectually, scientifically, politically, ideologically, but nonetheless, it is the university that in fact has the responsibility to allow this discourse,” he said. “The universities engaged in this program ... have provided for their students and their students the opportunity for free inquiry, and freedom of inquiry cannot be taken lightly.”
Officials also hope the program will provide some good PR for Israel on American campuses, where the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement continues to inspire not only student “die-ins” and rallies on the quad, but also campaigns for academic boycotts by faculty members.
Last week, Peretz Lavie, president of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and chairman of the Association of University Heads in Israel, said, during a Knesset Science and Technology Committee discussion on academic boycotts, that Israel needed to create “one address to coordinate this issue” because otherwise “the fire will spread,” according to The Jerusalem Post.
Earlier this month, 71 British doctors asked the World Medical Association to expel the Israeli Medical Association, accusing Israeli doctors of conducting “medical torture” on Palestinian patients. And in November, the American Anthropological Association voted 1040-36 to adopt a resolution to refrain from formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions (but not individual academics). The resolution will be voted on by the entire 12,000-membership in April.
Hebrew University’s Nahmias said the Zuckerman program will be a great help in attracting American postdocs because postdoctoral fellows in Israeli universities generally earn “much less” than their American counterparts and the cost of living in Israel is equivalent or higher to costs in the U.S. In addition, he said, the BDS movement is a deterrent. Although he maintained that the BDS movement is no bigger than other fringe groups on American campuses such as communists or neo-Nazis, it gets a disproportional level of media coverage.
“There are financial considerations and there are also PR issues,” he said.
While the headlines are ubiquitous, Nahmias says he’s never encountered any reluctance to collaborate from American academics.
“I think the BDS movement’s bark is worse than their bite. They are not a significant movement in any terms,” he said.
Technion’s Lavie agreed that the program will help Israel on the international relations, as well as the scientific, front.
“The new program will not only help improve scientific research at its highest level,” he said in a statement, “but will also serve as a new and important pillar supporting the foundation on which the ties between Israel and the United States will continue to prosper.” ---------------------
Editor Gary Rosenblatt reports on a Jewish Week Forum that brought together two leading columnists - Roger Cohen of The New York Times and Ari Shavit of Haaretz. Both detailed a kind of tough love toward Israel that chides the country's policies that alienate young Jews.
Gary Rosenblatt
Tough Love, Times Two
Prominent columnists chide Israeli policies that alienate young Jews.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Journalistic jousting: Roger Cohen, left, and Ari Shavit at Jewish Week Forum. Michael Datikash/JWRoger Cohen and Ari Shavit have much in common. They are both prominent columnists for their respective newspapers — Cohen with The New York Times and Shavit with Haaretz, the left-leaning Israeli daily. They each are the authors of recent, highly personal memoirs: in “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel,” a bestseller, Shavit writes of his strong Zionist feelings as well as what he sees as Israel’s moral shortcomings; Cohen’s “The Girl From Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family” traces his family’s displacement from Lithuania to South Africa to England, the U.S. and Israel, and the toll it took, particularly on his mother.
Both he and Shavit are seen as sharing left-of-center views on the Mideast; they are self-described Zionists who are highly critical of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu coalition for not being proactive on the peace front.
But the two men have their differences, as was evident at their first meeting, which took place last Wednesday evening. The setting was a Jewish Week Forum, titled “Can The Jewish Narrative Be Revived?” in front of several hundred people at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, sponsored in partnership with American Friends of Tel Aviv University.
Responding to the first question from moderator Linda Scherzer, director of The Jewish Week’s Write On For Israel program, on the controversial Iran nuclear deal, Cohen hailed the initiative and spoke of his “guarded hope” for its implementation. “I’m not naïve,” he said, noting that it could fall apart at any time. But he asserted that the agreement was a triumph of diplomacy over the prospect of military action, with Iran being scrutinized full-time by UN experts to ensure that it does not attempt to build a bomb.
“Explain to me,” he said to Shavit, “how this is bad for Israel.”
Shavit said his concern is not just Israel but the Western world. He characterized the deal as “the outcome of decades of failure by Israel, the U.S. and their Western allies,” a lack of leadership and willpower, and a product of pursuing the wrong war — in Iraq — rather than employing tougher diplomacy with Iran.
Looking forward, though, he emphasized that the U.S. and its allies must define clearly “the harsh red lines” beyond which Iran cannot pass. “Don’t let them cheat,” he said.
Cohen said he agreed with Shavit that major mistakes were made over the years, but he argued that red lines are already in place.
Turning to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Cohen said that President Obama, in his final year in office, “is not interested in a fig leaf” peace process that doesn’t lead to peace. “It’s illusory to think we’ll see serious negotiations” in the coming year, he said, and warned that Israel cannot remain both a Jewish and democratic state in the current scenario. He criticized Netanyahu for lack of “a good faith effort” to make real progress, especially when Salam Fayyad, the most moderate of Palestinian Authority leaders, was prime minister from 2007 to 2013.
When pressed by Scherzer, Cohen said he is willing to acknowledge that the Palestinians are equally to blame for the status quo standoff. “I don’t know how the leaders on both sides sleep at night,” he said.
Shavit spoke out against the U.S. and Western powers “turning a blind eye to reality, to tyranny and to fascism” in the Arab world. He said it is morally and politically wrong that “somehow [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas is sanctified” and Netanyahu demonized.
Still, Shavit, like Cohen, said that Israel cannot remain a Jewish and democratic state as long as the occupation continues.
He said “ultra-nationalists” in Israel are “destroying our home,” and asserted that “settlers are the ultimate anti-Zionists.”
Shavit said that even though there is no prospect for a full peace at this time, Israel should take several proactive steps to reduce tensions and enhance the climate for future talks. He called for the cessation of settlement building and the initiation of a Marshall Plan for Gaza, rebuilding homes and other businesses with the help of Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.
Shavit has spent a great deal of time in the U.S in the last two years, seeking out and speaking to young American Jews on college campuses in an effort to close “the dramatic generation gap” in terms of positive identification with Israel. While their grandparents and parents still support Israel out of memories of the Holocaust or Israel’s early wars, “those under 30 are different,” he said. “They want to love Israel” but its policies are “becoming gradually embarrassing,” and the Jewish state, once seen as David, is now viewed as Goliath.
Shavit said “90 percent of young American Jews are progressives, and Israel alienates them when it is supposed to inspire them.”
Cohen, who described himself as a progressive Zionist, said he agreed with Shavit’s assessment about American Jewish youth. “It is tragic,” he said, “that Israel’s success and vibrancy” in society is “hidden by the continuing occupation.”
At evening’s end, the last question posed during the Q-and-A session came from a young man in the audience who asked what liberal Jewish students can do for Israel. Shavit called on all Jewish organizations to combine Jewish identity with progressive values, like human rights, social justice and the environment, and he asserted that an international Jewish Peace Corps could embody those values, serving people from Detroit to the Third World.
Cohen emphasized the need for courageous leadership in the Middle East, noting the accomplishment of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in the Oslo peace agreement, and the example of black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela and President F.W. de Klerk in ending apartheid in South Africa.
“Put the future over the past,” Cohen told the student. “Look to the next half century.”
A final observation: Roger Cohen and Ari Shavit agree more than disagree on issues of Jewish sensibilities and Israel. But Cohen has a more critical, impatient tone while Shavit strives to highlight — and even embrace — complexity.
Cohen is a deeply thoughtful and luminous writer whose family history in apartheid South Africa and foreign correspondent experience covering the Balkans War have made him particularly sympathetic to the underdog; he sees the Palestinians in that role in the Mideast conflict, and he puts the onus for resolution on Israel. That perspective, and his insistence during a 2009 visit to Iran that the remaining Jews are more protected than captive, have made him suspect to many American Jews. But they do themselves a disservice if they don’t follow his nuanced Times columns dealing with foreign affairs, which appear regularly online — and may prove surprising to readers who think his views are predictable.
Ari Shavit has become the rock star of the American Jewish speaking circuit since the publication of “My Promised Land,” and he is admittedly “obsessed” with meeting and engaging Jewish college students about Israel. His words — written or spoken — resonate with his audiences because he is able to describe and transmit his fierce love for and identification with Israel while criticizing its government’s policies regarding the Palestinians. The implicit (and rarely heard) message: being “pro-Israel” is not a zero-sum game. You can be a proud Zionist without losing your moral compass; it’s OK to be both a fervent critic and defender of Jerusalem.
The importance of that point can’t be overemphasized, especially at a time when, as he said the other night, “proving to our young people that we are David, not Goliath” is “the most dramatic issue facing the Jewish people.”
Gary@jewishweek.org
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Also this week, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin remembers his mentor, the leading Jewish thinker and HUC Rabbi Gene Borowitz, who died last week at 91. Israel correspondent Joshua Mitnick reports on the latest wrangle over Israel's settlement policy, this one playing out in the West Bank city of Hebron. In the Arts pages, film critic George Robinson interviews one of Israel's leading filmmakers, Amos Gitai, about his new film, "Rabin: The Last Day," which opens here Friday.
New York
‘Gene Borowitz Taught Us How To Think’
Remembering HUC’s Rabbi Eugene Borowitz.
Jeffrey K. Salkin
Special To The Jewish Week
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, left, with his mentor, Rabbi Eugene Borowitz.Rabbi Eugene Borowitz, who died on Jan. 22 at his home in Stamford, Conn., a month before his 92nd birthday, is being recalled this week as a major force in Reform Jewish thought and American Jewish philosophy. He was a longtime faculty member of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, author of 19 books and founding editor of Sh’ma, the small but influential journal of Jewish ideas. And his influence on generations of rabbis is monumental.
I was fortunate to know him as his student, colleague, acolyte, rabbi and even teacher.
Let me offer some scenes in one of the most important relationships that I have ever had in my life.
Scene 1: I am 16 years old. Rabbi Borowitz was speaking at an adult education series somewhere on Long Island. My parents took me to hear him. The topic was over my head. But it inspired me.
Scene 2: I am a student in college, shaken by the leftist abandonment of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Rabbi Borowitz published my essay on the topic in Sh’ma, the journal he edited. With that small, generous act, he encouraged me to find my rabbinic avocation — becoming a writer. Years later, I would become his assistant at Sh’ma, and his lessons in editing are still with me today.
Scene 3: I became his student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. Rabbi Borowitz was a leader in the field of modern Jewish theology.
He was a demanding teacher. He inspired both love and awe. The major rite of passage for rabbinical students was to give a sermon, with a communal critique to follow. Rabbi Borowitz always had the (awaited and often feared) last word. He encouraged our allergy to pap and sentimentalism. He warned us about the ultimate penalty for intellectual mediocrity: our future thoughtful congregants would simply stop listening to us.
Gene (for it was always “Gene”) Borowitz taught us how to think. He taught his students: when you present the work of a thinker, you begin by making the best possible case for what that thinker was saying — and then, and only then, can you critique his or her thinking. How sad to note that this attitude of intellectual generosity is so missing from American public discourse today.
No one started more Jewish conversations than Gene Borowitz. He was among the first modern Jewish thinkers to articulate the issues regarding sexual behavior, and among the first to offer a critique and reflection on contemporary Christian theology. He was perhaps the first Jewish thinker to speak of the deep, internal contradictions within American Jewish life, as he did in his classic book, “The Masks Jews Wear.”
He was the intellectual father of contemporary Reform Judaism. He believed in a life lived in covenant; a life lived in the balance between the claims of the self and the claims of the tradition. He taught that Reform Jewish duty begins with a careful examination of the Jewish tradition and then choosing from among Jewish alternatives, based in commitment and knowledge. In our final conversation, a year ago, I asked him whether he believed that Reform Jews had lived up to his high expectations. He was silent for a while, and then said: “I will have to get back to you about that.”
Scene 4: I became the rabbi at the congregation that he founded — The Community Synagogue in Port Washington, L.I. It was a wonderful role reversal — I, as rabbi, he as student. He handled that transformation with grace, often attending our Torah classes, always gently participating and earning the love of his fellow students and neighbors.
Of the chasidic master, the Maggid of Mezrich, it was said:
“He pushed us and pulled us. He asked us questions and listened to us. He waited until each one of us told him his own story about what it was like to go out of Egypt and to cross the Red Sea. And he waited until each one of us told him his own story of what it was like to stand at Mt. Sinai and accept the Torah.”
That was Gene Borowitz.
Jeffrey K. Salkin is the senior rabbi of Temple Solel in Hollywood, Fla., and a writer and teacher. His most recent book is “The Gods Are Broken! The Hidden Legacy of Abraham” (Jewish Publication Society).
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Israel News
Hebron Puts Bibi At Settlement Crossroads
Expansionist moves set against policy ‘ambivalence.’
Joshua Mitnick
Contributing Editor
Jewish settlers gather their belongings last week after being evacuated by Israeli security forces from two homes.Tel Aviv — The abandoned stone building in the West Bank city of Hebron lies just steps from the Cave of the Patriarchs, a site holy to Muslims and Jews and infamous as a flashpoint of religiously inspired bloodshed.
Last week, the building became the site of the latest wrangle over Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank, as a group of settlers took up residence in the building claiming they had legally purchased the property. Establishing a toehold in the buildings would mean the most significant expansion of the tiny but highly fortified Jewish enclave that lives in daily tension with tens of thousands of Palestinians from Hebron.
But Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon balked and sent in riot police to extract the settlers until determining the transaction was legitimate and not forged. Amid political outrage from the government’s pro-settlement constituency (and despite criticism of the expansion among anti-settlement peaceniks), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that the evacuation would be just temporary.
“Hebron is a key part of the Jewish identity and narrative, and the Cave of the Patriarchs is a key foundational stone,” said Yishai Fleisher, the international spokesman for the Israeli community in Hebron. “The question is: Are Jewish people going to be in Hebron or not?”
It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu and Yaalon will authorize a new Jewish outpost in Hebron, but the political standoff has been accompanied by several other announcements suggesting a new expansionist trajectory in Judea and Samaria: the declaration of at least 380 acres of open territory northwest of the Dead Sea as “state land”; building authorizations for about 150 new housing units in West Bank settlements — the first in more than a year; and the expansion of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc southward to include an old church compound.
The struggle over the building highlights a seeming crossroads for Netanyahu’s direction on settlements. With no peace process on the horizon and a coalition dominated by pro-settlement politicians, will he give the green light for settlement growth that will mean the de facto end of the two-state solution by making a Palestinian state unworkable? Or, with U.S. and Europe complaints getting louder by the day, will he seek to limit building to settlement blocs rather than isolated enclaves like Hebron?
Whatever the answer is, there is one consensus that spans the Israeli political spectrum: When it comes to Israel’s policy on the West Bank, the prime minister lacks a clear strategic direction, neither annexing land, heading toward a two-state compromise or a unilateral compromise.
“Ambivalence is the zeitgeist of the day,” said Fleisher. “If we aren’t moving forward, we are moving backward. There is no status quo.”
Netanyahu has come under attack in the last two weeks both inside and outside the government for his approach. Education Minister Naftali Bennett of the pro-settler Jewish Home Party last week assailed Netanyahu and Yaalon for fossilized strategic thinking, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said that the U.S. is “perplexed and concerned” at Israel’s efforts to legalize unauthorized outposts and expropriate West Bank land as being out of sync with its declared policy of supporting a two-state solution.
“There’s a lack of strategic decision,” said Natan Sachs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who focuses on Israel.
Without an overarching strategy for the West Bank, Sachs says Israel’s policy in the settlements is led by “bureaucratic drift” and private initiatives of settler activists. Though Netanyahu himself is not a maximalist when it comes to settlements and would probably prefer to limit expansion to settlement blocs, he’s also not willing to waste political capital in fights with the settler lobby.
“What we’re seeing now is the influence of people in government that absolutely want to prevent a two-state solution, and want to build everywhere,” Sachs said. “The strategic vacuum allows things to move forward.”
Indeed, on Monday, Likud minister Yariv Levin criticized Yaalon for foot-dragging on the Hebron buildings, alleging in an Israel Radio interview that it is “discriminatory to create a situation where [settlers] have to wait for years to enter a place they bought lawfully.” In response to the political uproar, Netanyahu promised to establish a government committee on settlements that would make such decisions instead of just the defense minister — who is legally responsible for policies in Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank.
Some 800 Israelis live in a handful of enclaves inside of Hebron, a city with 200,000 Palestinians. Under the 1996 agreement to withdraw from the city, Israel’s army remained in about 20 percent of the city to protect the enclaves and the Tomb of the Patriarchs. In the Israeli-controlled zone, Palestinians must pass through army checkpoints to move around their neighborhoods. In some locations Palestinian vehicles are banned entirely.
“The settlers of Hebron continue with their messianic and violent mission of Judaization of the city of Hebron, while those who will pay for their bullying are IDF soldiers, Israeli citizens and Palestinian residents of the city,” read a Facebook statement from Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans, many of whom served in Hebron.
“We were part of the 650 soldiers who protect extremist settlements in Hebron on a daily bases, for decades. The new settlement will only bind more soldiers to missions of blocking roads, locking up shops and creating a sense of persecution amongst the Palestinian residents living in its midst.”
Yoaz Hendel, a former Netanyahu adviser, also agreed that settlement moves in the West Bank lack a clear vision.
“I wouldn’t call it a policy, but it’s a window onto what the government considers natural growth of the settlements in Judea and Samaria,” he said, referring to the settlement moves.
Hendel argued that the apparent momentum for pro-settler members of the government is the fault of the Obama administration, which allegedly undercuts Netanyahu’s political standing among right-wingers by refusing to accept building in Israel’s settlement blocs.
“The Obama administration has no intention to distinguish between Jordan Valley, and the north of the Dead Sea — which is part of the consensus — and Yitzhar,” he said. “This administration defines everything as illegal.”
Hendel said that Netanyahu remains opposed to a binational state, and would eventually seek to create a Palestinian entity on the parts of the West Bank that they already control — accounting for about 40 percent of the territory.
Dror Etkes, an independent settlement monitor, said all of Netanyahu’s moves are guided by a competition in the government to curry favor with the hard-right constituency. The land tract that was nationalized north of the Dead Sea has strategic value for Israel because of its proximity to the highway linking Jerusalem to the Allenby Bridge border crossing with Jordan.
“It’s a classic Netanyahu move. Domestically, he says ‘I’m a tough guy.’ To the international community, he’ll say, ‘What do you want, we haven’t changed anything.”
He continued, “This is another clear sign of a Netanyahu divorce of any kind of two-state solution. He is saying, ‘Hey, I’m not committed to any practical moves.’”
The upcoming year, with the U.S. focused on elections, and no peace talks, will put the current conservative-dominated settlement policy to the test, Sachs said. The Brookings analyst said he expected that Netanyahu would probably continue as he has done in the past, avoiding dramatic moves in either direction.
“His vision is much more of conservative, cautious one — I don’t think a grand move is in the cards,” he said. “What we have seen from Netanyahu in previous years is the best guide to what we will see in the coming year.”
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Theater
The Murder That ‘Broke’ Israeli Society
Amos Gitai reflects on the Rabin assassination, and what came in its wake.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
In the aftermath of the Rabin assassination, Gitai says, “We have lost the [shared] project of Zionism. Michael Datikash/JWDuring the period of the Oslo negotiations, Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai spent many hours interviewing Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. He didn’t know it at the time, but that experience would become a pivotal part of a docudrama, the story of Rabin’s assassination by right-wing settler Yigal Amir. The product of three years of work by Gitai and his production team, “Rabin: The Last Day,” which opens on Friday, Jan. 29, paints a grimly vivid portrait of the maelstrom that surrounded the events of November 4, 1995, events that Gitai says left Israeli society “broken.”
It is a little more than 20 years after that day, and Amos Gitai is sitting in the breakfast room of a Midtown Manhattan hotel, sipping from a glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice and trying to explain how his film’s shape echoes the damage done by Rabin’s murder. He is a big man who looks more than a little like Vincent D’Onofrio, graying at the temples, dapper in a black sports jacket and shirt.
“I liked [Rabin],” the filmmaker said quietly. “He was not a classical politician — he was very simple, very straightforward; he said what he believed and he was courageous. That is very rare in the world of politics.”
How did his murder “break” Israeli society?
“We have lost the [shared] project of Zionism, and we live in this place right now, losing any options of healing,” Gitai said. “The conflicts are heightened now. All the barriers are down, [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has put extremists in the judicial system, you have an over-excited minister of culture [Miri Regev], books are being banned.” (Gitai is presumably referring to Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who some in Israel believe holds strident views, and a novel about a love affair between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman, meant for high school students, that was censored by the Education Ministry.)
He waves a hand to indicate the panoply of increasingly violent schisms rocking his country.
“Netanyahu is very capable but also very cynical,” Gitai continued. “Using hate and prejudice he was re-elected. He sets Orthodox against secular, Ashkenazi against Mizrahi, Israeli against Palestinian. It’s very harmful.”
The film itself makes the continuity quite clear between the Charedi extremists of the ’90s and their even deadlier counterparts today. The characters depicted in the film speak only their own words, offering wildly eccentric interpretations of rabbinic Judaism that accuse Rabin of satanic influences, or suggesting crackpot faux-clinical diagnoses of his alleged psychotic states. Not coincidentally, the characters have explicit echoes in recent violence perpetrated by the so-called hilltop youth.
For Gitai, the problem is one of worldview that goes to the very heart of the Zionist project.
“It is a political project, the conclusion of the question of Israel’s sovereignty,” he said. “It’s not a religious project.”
For Gitai, the idea of Israel as a “broken” society suffering from severe internal disruptions finds it artistic expression in the way he tells the story.
“Since the assassination of Rabin broke Israeli society, I thought we had to break traditional forms. We could have structured the film chronologically, we could have structured it thematically, but it would have been wrong. A fragmentation of the storytelling is necessary.”
Despite that formal choice, Gitai’s film is easy for an audience to follow. Structurally, the film is marked by a significant absence, that of its title character. That was a carefully considered choice by the director and his co-screenwriter, Marie-José Sanselme.
Gitai explained, “Rabin is the black hole at the center of the film; it is marked by his absence. I didn’t try to cast actors as the key real-life figures; I used news footage.”
He also used the subsequent investigation of the murder by the commission headed by Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar as the armature on which the narrative is strung; the decision had interesting implications for the resulting movie.
“I went to see Shamgar in his home,” Gitai recalled, sipping at a small cup of plain yogurt. “He’s of the same generation as Rabin, he’s in his 90s; he’s a distinguished guy. I told him, ‘You did a lousy job, you only investigated the operational failures. You didn’t investigate the incitements that caused the killing.’ He said to me, ‘We were limited in our mandate.’”
Shamgar talked the director through the protocols governing the formal investigation and gave him unprecedented access to the transcripts of the commission’s hearings. That left it to Gitai and Sanselme to investigate the missing components of the story, and they drew on a wide range of ultra-rightist sources to recreate the lethal firestorm of anti-Oslo and anti-Rabin opinion.
“We didn’t invent anything,” Gitai said emphatically. “It’s all verbatim.”
Period-set films are never about only the era in which they ostensibly occur. Like any other such film, “Rabin: The Last Day” is about the time at which it was made, but it uses its historical setting as a lens through which to examine contemporary Israeli society.
Consequently, the film draws on 1995 footage of Netanyahu, then opposition leader, cheerleading crowds of screaming, jeering and nearly hysterical rightists with placards and effigies comparing Rabin to the SS. Those images are unmistakably a reflection on how Gitai views Israel’s current political leader.
“Netanyahu is a very smart guy, but the place is in danger of becoming provincial, of closing itself off to the world,” he said. “We are a fragile country in a very unfriendly neighborhood. Do we really need some more enemies?”
Ask him about comparisons of “Rabin: The Last Day” to the work of a master of political drama like Italian director Francesco Rosi, and Gitai wryly turns into a football coach poor-mouthing his team’s chances against the Little Sisters of the Poor.
“Oh, basically I’m just an architect; my references are seldom cinematographic,” he said with a smile. “Well, we did review Rosi and Costa-Gavras, particularly ‘Z,’ and I looked at Oliver Stone’s JFK film, [which convinced me] not to try to cast the important political figures.”
The film’s reception in Israel predictably broke down along political lines.
“It’s to be expected,” Gitai said. “I’m doing films that touch an exposed nerve in Israeli society. You do stuff because you want to leave a trace. I believe you have to be analytical, rational, or you close yourself off, and that is dangerous.”
Is he pessimistic about the future of Israel?
He shrugged, then said, “In a situation of conflict, you have to beware of becoming nihilistic; it’s not a good idea. Objectively there is good reason to be a pessimist, but you have to keep a level of optimism. I still believe in the power of ideas. If we [Israelis] didn’t live in ideas, we wouldn’t still be around.”
“Rabin: The Last Day,” directed by Amos Gitai, opens Friday, Jan. 29 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema (Broadway and 62nd Street). For information, call
lincolnplazacinema.com.
Theater
The Murder That ‘Broke’ Israeli Society
Amos Gitai reflects on the Rabin assassination, and what came in its wake.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
In the aftermath of the Rabin assassination, Gitai says, “We have lost the [shared] project of Zionism. Michael Datikash/JWDuring the period of the Oslo negotiations, Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai spent many hours interviewing Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. He didn’t know it at the time, but that experience would become a pivotal part of a docudrama, the story of Rabin’s assassination by right-wing settler Yigal Amir. The product of three years of work by Gitai and his production team, “Rabin: The Last Day,” which opens on Friday, Jan. 29, paints a grimly vivid portrait of the maelstrom that surrounded the events of November 4, 1995, events that Gitai says left Israeli society “broken.”
It is a little more than 20 years after that day, and Amos Gitai is sitting in the breakfast room of a Midtown Manhattan hotel, sipping from a glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice and trying to explain how his film’s shape echoes the damage done by Rabin’s murder. He is a big man who looks more than a little like Vincent D’Onofrio, graying at the temples, dapper in a black sports jacket and shirt.
“I liked [Rabin],” the filmmaker said quietly. “He was not a classical politician — he was very simple, very straightforward; he said what he believed and he was courageous. That is very rare in the world of politics.”
How did his murder “break” Israeli society?
“We have lost the [shared] project of Zionism, and we live in this place right now, losing any options of healing,” Gitai said. “The conflicts are heightened now. All the barriers are down, [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has put extremists in the judicial system, you have an over-excited minister of culture [Miri Regev], books are being banned.” (Gitai is presumably referring to Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who some in Israel believe holds strident views, and a novel about a love affair between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman, meant for high school students, that was censored by the Education Ministry.)
He waves a hand to indicate the panoply of increasingly violent schisms rocking his country.
“Netanyahu is very capable but also very cynical,” Gitai continued. “Using hate and prejudice he was re-elected. He sets Orthodox against secular, Ashkenazi against Mizrahi, Israeli against Palestinian. It’s very harmful.”
The film itself makes the continuity quite clear between the Charedi extremists of the ’90s and their even deadlier counterparts today. The characters depicted in the film speak only their own words, offering wildly eccentric interpretations of rabbinic Judaism that accuse Rabin of satanic influences, or suggesting crackpot faux-clinical diagnoses of his alleged psychotic states. Not coincidentally, the characters have explicit echoes in recent violence perpetrated by the so-called hilltop youth.
For Gitai, the problem is one of worldview that goes to the very heart of the Zionist project.
“It is a political project, the conclusion of the question of Israel’s sovereignty,” he said. “It’s not a religious project.”
For Gitai, the idea of Israel as a “broken” society suffering from severe internal disruptions finds it artistic expression in the way he tells the story.
“Since the assassination of Rabin broke Israeli society, I thought we had to break traditional forms. We could have structured the film chronologically, we could have structured it thematically, but it would have been wrong. A fragmentation of the storytelling is necessary.”
Despite that formal choice, Gitai’s film is easy for an audience to follow. Structurally, the film is marked by a significant absence, that of its title character. That was a carefully considered choice by the director and his co-screenwriter, Marie-José Sanselme.
Gitai explained, “Rabin is the black hole at the center of the film; it is marked by his absence. I didn’t try to cast actors as the key real-life figures; I used news footage.”
He also used the subsequent investigation of the murder by the commission headed by Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar as the armature on which the narrative is strung; the decision had interesting implications for the resulting movie.
“I went to see Shamgar in his home,” Gitai recalled, sipping at a small cup of plain yogurt. “He’s of the same generation as Rabin, he’s in his 90s; he’s a distinguished guy. I told him, ‘You did a lousy job, you only investigated the operational failures. You didn’t investigate the incitements that caused the killing.’ He said to me, ‘We were limited in our mandate.’”
Shamgar talked the director through the protocols governing the formal investigation and gave him unprecedented access to the transcripts of the commission’s hearings. That left it to Gitai and Sanselme to investigate the missing components of the story, and they drew on a wide range of ultra-rightist sources to recreate the lethal firestorm of anti-Oslo and anti-Rabin opinion.
“We didn’t invent anything,” Gitai said emphatically. “It’s all verbatim.”
Period-set films are never about only the era in which they ostensibly occur. Like any other such film, “Rabin: The Last Day” is about the time at which it was made, but it uses its historical setting as a lens through which to examine contemporary Israeli society.
Consequently, the film draws on 1995 footage of Netanyahu, then opposition leader, cheerleading crowds of screaming, jeering and nearly hysterical rightists with placards and effigies comparing Rabin to the SS. Those images are unmistakably a reflection on how Gitai views Israel’s current political leader.
“Netanyahu is a very smart guy, but the place is in danger of becoming provincial, of closing itself off to the world,” he said. “We are a fragile country in a very unfriendly neighborhood. Do we really need some more enemies?”
Ask him about comparisons of “Rabin: The Last Day” to the work of a master of political drama like Italian director Francesco Rosi, and Gitai wryly turns into a football coach poor-mouthing his team’s chances against the Little Sisters of the Poor.
“Oh, basically I’m just an architect; my references are seldom cinematographic,” he said with a smile. “Well, we did review Rosi and Costa-Gavras, particularly ‘Z,’ and I looked at Oliver Stone’s JFK film, [which convinced me] not to try to cast the important political figures.”
The film’s reception in Israel predictably broke down along political lines.
“It’s to be expected,” Gitai said. “I’m doing films that touch an exposed nerve in Israeli society. You do stuff because you want to leave a trace. I believe you have to be analytical, rational, or you close yourself off, and that is dangerous.”
Is he pessimistic about the future of Israel?
He shrugged, then said, “In a situation of conflict, you have to beware of becoming nihilistic; it’s not a good idea. Objectively there is good reason to be a pessimist, but you have to keep a level of optimism. I still believe in the power of ideas. If we [Israelis] didn’t live in ideas, we wouldn’t still be around.”
“Rabin: The Last Day,” directed by Amos Gitai, opens Friday, Jan. 29 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema (Broadway and 62nd Street). For information, call
lincolnplazacinema.com.
---------------------
Enjoy the issue.
The Editors.
Politics Takes A Rest In Iowa
Josh Tapper - JTA | In The Beginning
National
For Jewish Campaign Staffers, A Welcome Respite At Iowa Shabbat Dinner
Josh Tapper
JTA
A Bernie Sanders yarmulke seen at a campaign event in Marshalltown, Iowa, Jan. 10, 2016. JTA
Des Moines, Iowa – Some 50 presidential campaign staffers and volunteers, journalists and local movers and shakers from this capital city’s Jewish community munched on house salads inside a stately ballroom at the downtown World Food Prize building last Friday night as Aliza Kline welcomed them to Shabbat dinner.
Around the room, local prosecutors sat next to Planned Parenthood activists in Iowa to support Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Organizers for Clinton’s main challenger, Bernie Sanders, mingled with board members of the local federation.
It was an indubitably Democratic gathering, although at least one Republican – a 19-year-old Vassar College sophomore named Pieter Block who has been volunteering for the Jeb Bush campaign over winter break – braved attendance.
And yet there was a common denominator in the ballroom that Kline, the executive director of OneTable, a New York-based organization that helps Jews in their 20s and 30s organize Friday night meals, picked up on.
“I’m in a room with people who give a shit,” Kline exclaimed, “and that makes me happy.”
Founded in 2014 with support from a trio of Jewish nonprofits – the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life, the Paul E. Singer Foundation, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation – OneTable has facilitated 880 Shabbat dinners. Most have been in New York, but also in Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Boulder, Colorado.
On the same day OneTable landed in Des Moines, dinners took place at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival.
The initiative exhorts busy professionals to organize dinners not only to foster Jewish community but, more simply, for a much-needed change of pace – a manifesto that has particular resonance in Des Moines this time of year. With 10 days left before Iowans officially launch the presidential nomination process, statewide politicking, already clamorous in the lead-up to the Feb. 1 caucuses, only stands to intensify as campaigning draws to a close.
In a cheeky nod to campaign fatigue, OneTable organizers left gold-and-black sleep masks, inscribed “Sssshhhhabbat,” at each place setting.
Lisa Gerlach, 21, a scheduling and advance assistant for the Sanders campaign, acknowledged that her job is not conducive to drawn-out meals, let alone ones with three courses. So the dinner, she said afterward, was “definitely a good part of my week.”
After Kline finished her address and guests finished their appetizers, they tucked into plates of maple-glazed salmon and sautéed asparagus followed by an assortment of desserts – rugelach, halvah and cookies – supplied by the city’s lone kosher restaurant, Maccabee’s.
Next to the eye masks were cue cards with nonpolitical conversation starters (“French fries or tater tots?”), though discussions inevitably shifted to news of the day: Clinton’s planned address at the Jewish federation here, the merits of a national clean energy strategy, and so on.
The dinner was a success, Gerlach said, because during an election, “you never really get to interact with people on the other side of the aisle in a very human way.” And moreover, it is rare that people from across the political spectrum have the opportunity to sit down for dinner in a non-hostile environment.
On Friday, the discourse was notably civil, which is characteristic of Iowa in general, said Will Rogers, 46, the chairman of the Republican Party of Polk County and vice president of Tifereth Israel, the Conservative synagogue here.
“We don’t attack one another and we don’t beat each other up,” Rogers said. “It’s kind of like a big family rooting for different teams during the Super Bowl.”
Building off momentum from Friday’s dinner, OneTable’s hope is that similar affairs will pop up around the country over the course of election season. A dinner has been scheduled for Feb. 5 in Manchester, New Hampshire, four days before the primary there.
“I’d love to see lots of primary Shabbats,” said Kline, 44. “It’s one more opportunity for people to get involved and to get together on a Friday night. So that feels very win-win for us.”
With Sanders polling well beyond expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire, and reports that billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, is mulling a late bid as an independent, the field of candidates could take on an unusually Jewish patina in the months ahead.
Would OneTable try to involve the campaigns in future dinners? Probably not, said one of the organizers, Seth Cohen, a senior director at the Schusterman Family Foundation. Better to stay above the fray.
“These dinners,” Cohen added, “are about the people in the politics, not the politics themselves – or the politicians.”---------------------
In Warsaw, A Show Of Support For Israeli By Polish Christians
Steve Lipman | Lens
Lens
In Warsaw, A Show Of Support For Israel By Polish Christians
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Photos By Baruck KuligIn Warsaw, “march” came in January. A march in support of Israel, that is.
On a sunny, cold day, several hundred Poles, most of them Christians, made a nearly two-mile trek through the streets of the capital earlier this month to show their support for Israel during what the organizers called the current “third intifada.”
Coordinated by a coalition of national and local Christian organizations, the “March of Support for Israel” went from Grzybowski Square, where the city’s main synagogue and other Jewish institutions are located, to the Israeli Embassy. Along the way, the participants — “people of good will and Christians from all churches and communities,” according to organizers — sang and danced and prayed for Israel, carrying Israeli and Polish flags.
“We want to publicly show that Poles and Christians support Israel and oppose anti-Semitism,” one participant was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying.
“When Polish and European media report on events in Israel, it is often unreliable and negative for Israelis,” said Pawel Czyszek, editor of the Polish Jews Forum. “I walked in the march, carrying the flag of the State of Israel, to demonstrate my support for the country and convey to Israelis that they are not alone.”
A police escort accompanied the group, which along the way encountered a small rally of a nationalist group whose members were waving Palestinian flags.
“This is a group of Christians who are concerned with admitting to, and asking for forgiveness for, the sins of Europe and their ancestors,” Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis, above, the American-born emissary of the Shavei Israel organization in Katowice, in southern Poland, told The Jewish Week via email. “Many Poles are aware not only of the Jewish heritage of where they are from, but the connection to Israel as well.”
He spoke at the rally, and blessed the crowd, filling in for Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi.
“The atmosphere was light and happy,” Rabbi Ellis said. People “blew shofar and sang Israeli songs.”
steve@jewishweek.org---------------------
A World Of New Food Options
Hilary Danailova | Travel
Travel
A World Of New Food Options
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
A kosher McDonald’s in Buenos Aires. Wikimedia CommonsNote: This is the first of two stories on kosher travel.
Whenever she travels, Rhoda Farbowitz of Staten Island always packs a fallback kosher “meal” — a pack of tuna, cheese, challah rolls. “You just never know,” said Farbowitz. “You always have to carry something in your pocketbook.”
I agree, and never leave home without a cheese sandwich. Emergency rations aside, however, eating kosher away from home no longer requires the time-honored suitcase full of tuna. That was the grateful consensus from Jewish Week readers, who responded to my kosher travel query with a wealth of tips and advice.
“Here’s my philosophy,” wrote B. Lamdanit, an Upper West Sider who has maintained halachic standards and a full belly while roughing the African bush: Kosher travel anywhere “can be done if you want it badly enough — and if you’re willing to go without the exact foods and customs that you have at home.” Indeed, if there was one dominant theme in reader responses, it was this: Traveling while kosher is best accomplished when cuisine is not the focus.
That leaves room for pleasant surprises, though, since kosher dining options have proliferated around the globe on a scale unimaginable just a few decades ago. Rabbi Moshe Elefant, who oversees the Kashruth Department at the Orthodox Union, confirmed the globalization of halachically correct fare and credited two major factors — the expansion of Chabad to far-flung corners of the world, and mass outsourcing of food processing to foreign factories.
“The food market is no different than the garment market,” said Rabbi Elefant. Today, he explained, most U.S.-sold clothes are manufactured overseas; the same thing goes for crackers and hot sauce and fish sticks, which is why the OU dispatches a team of 600 rabbinic field representatives to certify plants in 80-plus countries, including China and India.
Thirty years ago, such places “weren’t even on our radar,” said Rabbi Elefant. “But the world has changed; it’s become a village. Nearly half the new facilities we certify today are outside the U.S.” The ripple effect has been that “every supermarket in the world, and I use the word very literally, has OU food,” added the rabbi.
That’s great news for hungry travelers, who once had to subsist on local fruits and salads — a lethargy-inducing experience that Rabbi Elefant, who likes a good steak, recalls well. Nowadays, he advised, look for canned goods and popular brands like Heinz, Hershey, Pringles and Ritz crackers.
Other kosher staples, especially for those headed off the beaten path: cereal, peanut butter, granola bars, oatmeal packets, and instant noodles. Matzah — durable, versatile and symbolic — is a universal favorite. And everyone I spoke to mentioned the new lightweight tuna pouches and Coca-Cola (which, at least for JW readers, may well be the great American contribution to world cuisine).
In big cities, travelers rely on Chabad as a one-stop Jewish resource. Chabad centers maintain websites with up-to-date local kosher information, welcome visitors for Shabbat dinner and help arrange elevator-free, walking-distance accommodations. Simply Googling “Jewish community” together with a destination name is often helpful; many prominent synagogues abroad have kosher restaurants, and some of those (especially in Asia) qualify as cultural and culinary highlights.
Many readers praised the ease of dining on major cruise lines. Get to know your maître d’ and chef, they advised, and these obliging folks will prepare double-wrapped kosher meals, store Shabbat items in a refrigerator (and reheat on request), or invite guests to inspect the hechshers on kitchen items. They’ll also provide plastic silverware and paper plates and handle electricity issues on Shabbat.
Tipping up front is essential, readers emphasized — and well worth the investment. Cruise staff “are taught to honor all requests, no more how odd they seem,” wrote Batsheva Winnig of Manhattan, who has a bowl and pitcher delivered for ritual hand-washing, no questions asked, alongside sealed kosher meals.
At one such Shabbat on board, “I heard the people at the next table commenting that it looked like a Passover seder,” recalled Winnig, who added that another Jewish couple ventured over to greet them. Hers was a story common among readers — many of whom, while observing Shabbat somewhere conspicuously out of place, have attracted the attention of fellow Jews.
Cruise ships may be easy, but hotels in the Caribbean or overseas can be challenging, travelers reported. For difficult destinations — or just to ensure a hot Shabbat dinner — many families pack frozen meals to reheat on a Foreman grill or portable griddle-crockpot. Farbowitz recommended the insulated bags from California Club, which can keep a chicken dinner frozen solid for at least 29 hours. (That’s the amount of time the dinners her lost luggage once traveled before reaching her — still rock-hard.)
Such measures are largely unnecessary in 2016, Rabbi Elefant assured me. “People don’t actually have to pack cans of tuna fish anymore,” he said. “But they still do. My wife,” he added with an affectionate sigh. “Her attitude is, ‘How can you go on a trip without having food with you?’ And mine is, ‘Why would you pack extra?’”
“So when we go together, we pack food. And when I go by myself, I don’t.”---------------------
The Murder That 'Broke' Israeli Society
George Robinson| Theater
Amos Gitai reflects on the Rabin assassination, and what came in its wake.
Theater
The Murder That ‘Broke’ Israeli Society
Amos Gitai reflects on the Rabin assassination, and what came in its wake.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
In the aftermath of the Rabin assassination, Gitai says, “We have lost the [shared] project of Zionism. Michael Datikash/JWDuring the period of the Oslo negotiations, Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai spent many hours interviewing Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. He didn’t know it at the time, but that experience would become a pivotal part of a docudrama, the story of Rabin’s assassination by right-wing settler Yigal Amir. The product of three years of work by Gitai and his production team, “Rabin: The Last Day,” which opens on Friday, Jan. 29, paints a grimly vivid portrait of the maelstrom that surrounded the events of November 4, 1995, events that Gitai says left Israeli society “broken.”
It is a little more than 20 years after that day, and Amos Gitai is sitting in the breakfast room of a Midtown Manhattan hotel, sipping from a glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice and trying to explain how his film’s shape echoes the damage done by Rabin’s murder. He is a big man who looks more than a little like Vincent D’Onofrio, graying at the temples, dapper in a black sports jacket and shirt.
“I liked [Rabin],” the filmmaker said quietly. “He was not a classical politician — he was very simple, very straightforward; he said what he believed and he was courageous. That is very rare in the world of politics.”
How did his murder “break” Israeli society?
“We have lost the [shared] project of Zionism, and we live in this place right now, losing any options of healing,” Gitai said. “The conflicts are heightened now. All the barriers are down, [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has put extremists in the judicial system, you have an over-excited minister of culture [Miri Regev], books are being banned.” (Gitai is presumably referring to Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who some in Israel believe holds strident views, and a novel about a love affair between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman, meant for high school students, that was censored by the Education Ministry.)
He waves a hand to indicate the panoply of increasingly violent schisms rocking his country.
“Netanyahu is very capable but also very cynical,” Gitai continued. “Using hate and prejudice he was re-elected. He sets Orthodox against secular, Ashkenazi against Mizrahi, Israeli against Palestinian. It’s very harmful.”
The film itself makes the continuity quite clear between the Charedi extremists of the ’90s and their even deadlier counterparts today. The characters depicted in the film speak only their own words, offering wildly eccentric interpretations of rabbinic Judaism that accuse Rabin of satanic influences, or suggesting crackpot faux-clinical diagnoses of his alleged psychotic states. Not coincidentally, the characters have explicit echoes in recent violence perpetrated by the so-called hilltop youth.
For Gitai, the problem is one of worldview that goes to the very heart of the Zionist project.
“It is a political project, the conclusion of the question of Israel’s sovereignty,” he said. “It’s not a religious project.”
For Gitai, the idea of Israel as a “broken” society suffering from severe internal disruptions finds it artistic expression in the way he tells the story.
“Since the assassination of Rabin broke Israeli society, I thought we had to break traditional forms. We could have structured the film chronologically, we could have structured it thematically, but it would have been wrong. A fragmentation of the storytelling is necessary.”
Despite that formal choice, Gitai’s film is easy for an audience to follow. Structurally, the film is marked by a significant absence, that of its title character. That was a carefully considered choice by the director and his co-screenwriter, Marie-José Sanselme.
Gitai explained, “Rabin is the black hole at the center of the film; it is marked by his absence. I didn’t try to cast actors as the key real-life figures; I used news footage.”
He also used the subsequent investigation of the murder by the commission headed by Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar as the armature on which the narrative is strung; the decision had interesting implications for the resulting movie.
“I went to see Shamgar in his home,” Gitai recalled, sipping at a small cup of plain yogurt. “He’s of the same generation as Rabin, he’s in his 90s; he’s a distinguished guy. I told him, ‘You did a lousy job, you only investigated the operational failures. You didn’t investigate the incitements that caused the killing.’ He said to me, ‘We were limited in our mandate.’”
Shamgar talked the director through the protocols governing the formal investigation and gave him unprecedented access to the transcripts of the commission’s hearings. That left it to Gitai and Sanselme to investigate the missing components of the story, and they drew on a wide range of ultra-rightist sources to recreate the lethal firestorm of anti-Oslo and anti-Rabin opinion.
“We didn’t invent anything,” Gitai said emphatically. “It’s all verbatim.”
Period-set films are never about only the era in which they ostensibly occur. Like any other such film, “Rabin: The Last Day” is about the time at which it was made, but it uses its historical setting as a lens through which to examine contemporary Israeli society.
Consequently, the film draws on 1995 footage of Netanyahu, then opposition leader, cheerleading crowds of screaming, jeering and nearly hysterical rightists with placards and effigies comparing Rabin to the SS. Those images are unmistakably a reflection on how Gitai views Israel’s current political leader.
“Netanyahu is a very smart guy, but the place is in danger of becoming provincial, of closing itself off to the world,” he said. “We are a fragile country in a very unfriendly neighborhood. Do we really need some more enemies?”
Ask him about comparisons of “Rabin: The Last Day” to the work of a master of political drama like Italian director Francesco Rosi, and Gitai wryly turns into a football coach poor-mouthing his team’s chances against the Little Sisters of the Poor.
“Oh, basically I’m just an architect; my references are seldom cinematographic,” he said with a smile. “Well, we did review Rosi and Costa-Gavras, particularly ‘Z,’ and I looked at Oliver Stone’s JFK film, [which convinced me] not to try to cast the important political figures.”
The film’s reception in Israel predictably broke down along political lines.
“It’s to be expected,” Gitai said. “I’m doing films that touch an exposed nerve in Israeli society. You do stuff because you want to leave a trace. I believe you have to be analytical, rational, or you close yourself off, and that is dangerous.”
Is he pessimistic about the future of Israel?
He shrugged, then said, “In a situation of conflict, you have to beware of becoming nihilistic; it’s not a good idea. Objectively there is good reason to be a pessimist, but you have to keep a level of optimism. I still believe in the power of ideas. If we [Israelis] didn’t live in ideas, we wouldn’t still be around.”
“Rabin: The Last Day,” directed by Amos Gitai, opens Friday, Jan. 29 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema (Broadway and 62nd Street). For information, call
lincolnplazacinema.com.---------------------
MORE HEADLINES:
Affairs Of The Heart, And
Nation >
Lens
In Warsaw, A Show Of Support For Israel By Polish Christians
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Photos By Baruck KuligIn Warsaw, “march” came in January. A march in support of Israel, that is.
On a sunny, cold day, several hundred Poles, most of them Christians, made a nearly two-mile trek through the streets of the capital earlier this month to show their support for Israel during what the organizers called the current “third intifada.”
Coordinated by a coalition of national and local Christian organizations, the “March of Support for Israel” went from Grzybowski Square, where the city’s main synagogue and other Jewish institutions are located, to the Israeli Embassy. Along the way, the participants — “people of good will and Christians from all churches and communities,” according to organizers — sang and danced and prayed for Israel, carrying Israeli and Polish flags.
“We want to publicly show that Poles and Christians support Israel and oppose anti-Semitism,” one participant was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying.
“When Polish and European media report on events in Israel, it is often unreliable and negative for Israelis,” said Pawel Czyszek, editor of the Polish Jews Forum. “I walked in the march, carrying the flag of the State of Israel, to demonstrate my support for the country and convey to Israelis that they are not alone.”
A police escort accompanied the group, which along the way encountered a small rally of a nationalist group whose members were waving Palestinian flags.
“This is a group of Christians who are concerned with admitting to, and asking for forgiveness for, the sins of Europe and their ancestors,” Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis, above, the American-born emissary of the Shavei Israel organization in Katowice, in southern Poland, told The Jewish Week via email. “Many Poles are aware not only of the Jewish heritage of where they are from, but the connection to Israel as well.”
He spoke at the rally, and blessed the crowd, filling in for Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi.
“The atmosphere was light and happy,” Rabbi Ellis said. People “blew shofar and sang Israeli songs.”
steve@jewishweek.org
---------------------
Rabbi David Wople's Musings >
Musings
You Can Take It With You
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeAs the Israelites prepare to leave Egypt, Moses remembers the promise to carry Joseph’s bones to the land of Israel [Exodus 13:9). The Rabbis note Joseph’s original double phrasing to his family: “Hashbeah Hishbiah” — “you shall surely promise” — because the promise is to be carried down through the generations.
A commitment can be taken with you, from one age to the next, with a sense of continuity and sanctity. Indeed, the oath sworn to Joseph does not end there. For Moses, who took upon himself the fulfillment of the task, would never have the privilege of entering the land of Israel. He had to trust those who came after would complete the undertaking that he had begun. The Talmud teaches that one who takes upon himself an obligation and fulfills it to the extent possible, even if unable to complete it, is credited with the mitzvah.
Every Jew is given the bones of his or her ancestors, the promise and the heritage, to carry forward. You cannot take material possessions with you after you die, but you can take the spiritual gifts of those who have died with you as you live.
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).
---------------------
The Right Way To Deal With A Sexual Advance >
Opinion
The Right Way To Deal With A Sexual Advance
Take the person in distress seriously, and help them speak when they can't speak for themselves.
Gillian Steinberg
Special To The Jewish Week
Gillian SteinbergTwenty years ago, my Hillel rabbi, a bearded man in a black suit with a velvet kipa who presented himself as a committed Orthodox Jew, invited me to the Hillel building one evening to hang out with him and some other students. When I arrived, the building was dark, and he and I sat down to wait for the others. We chatted for a while, but when the other students didn’t arrive, I suggested that I call them to see when they were coming.
The rabbi inched closer to me on the sofa and said, “They aren’t coming. I didn’t actually invite them.” Taken aback, I asked what he meant, and he said, “Would you like to go for a drive with me?” I said no, and he began to tell me that he was attracted to me, that he wanted to be close to me, that he’d like to spend time alone with me. He reached out to touch me.
I was a new graduate student, just out of college, and he was in his 50s. I knew his wife from Shabbat dinners, and his older children were my age. I had seen him as a religious role model: an observant Jew interested in music, connected to the modern world, deeply spiritual but also an intellectual. And he was trying to cheat on his wife with me on the Hillel sofa.
In that shocking moment, I had the presence of mind to tell him how uncomfortable I was; I pulled away from him and left the building, shaking.
I spent the rest of the evening thinking about what to do, and I decided not to do anything. I assumed no one would believe me, and I didn’t know whom I would tell anyway. The decision plagued me for weeks, but I decided that pushing aside my anger and sense of betrayal was probably the best solution. I stopped attending Hillel.
A couple of weeks later, at a meal with local synagogue members, I heard some of them praising the Hillel rabbi for his exciting programming and dedicated leadership. To their surprise, I reacted strongly: “I hate the rabbi. He’s an awful person!” I exclaimed, without adding any specific details.
That might have been the end of this story. Nothing might have happened; I might never have said another word to anyone. They might have ignored me or judged me or gossiped about that strange outburst. They might have defended him and moved on.
Instead, one woman from that group, whom I only slightly knew, said, “Can you come talk to me privately?” We stepped into a different room, and I told her, in tears, about that terrible night.
She didn’t say, “You must have misunderstood him” or “But he’s a wonderful rabbi” or “Are you sure?” She didn’t ignore me. She didn’t make me feel crazy or stupid. Instead, she said, “We have to do something about this right away.”
Later that week, I sat with her in her living room, facing the regional director of Hillels for the area, also an Orthodox rabbi. I told him the story while she sat beside me. He looked at me skeptically and said, “I think you must have misunderstood him” and “But he’s a wonderful rabbi” and “Are you sure?” As I cried, the woman said, “Gillian didn’t misunderstand him. She knows what happened. You need to do something.”
After some discussion, the regional director agreed to pursue the issue and, as a first step, would speak to the rabbi himself. A few days later, the regional director contacted me and said, “I spoke with the rabbi. He corroborated everything you said. He admitted it all, and he’s sorry.”
I don’t know what happened after that, but within a week or so, the rabbi had been fired from Hillel and a statement was released suggesting that he had committed some financial indiscretion. I was told privately that he was being prevented from working for any other Hillel and was being required — I’m not sure how or whether this was enforced — to go to counseling. I never heard from him or saw him again. I can still locate him on Google, and he seems only to have worked in non-rabbinic fields since that time. Shortly thereafter, an Episcopal chaplain affiliated with the university very kindly reached out to me, presumably at the request of the Hillel board, so that we could meet to process what had happened, and I was offered additional counseling, which I declined. After a few months, I barely thought about the event again.
As I read the stories in recent years of terrible abuse perpetrated by rabbis and hidden or ignored by their colleagues and acquaintances, I think more and more about my very different story. Of course, unlike the many children who have been abused by rabbis, I was a legal adult at this time and not a young child; I was approached with the possibility of a sexual relationship and not forced into one; the rabbi in my story told the truth rather than trying to discredit me.
But another important difference stands out as well: someone believed me. How easy it would have been for that woman to ignore my outburst. How simple to have dismissed this student whom she barely knew as “having a bad day” or “being too emotional.” But she didn’t. She listened to me and, when I couldn’t speak for myself, she spoke for me. She pressed for change to be made, and it was made.
I don’t know what would have happened if this ordinary woman, invited to an ordinary meal, had not taken the time she did to pursue justice. I would certainly have permanently stopped attending Hillel, and, since I met my now-husband at a regional Hillel event a few years later, that decision could have changed my life significantly.
On a more fundamental level, I never had to reckon with feeling betrayed by the Jewish community. I never had to doubt my own worth or veracity. I never had to face the man who attempted to abuse his power over me or hear him lie about me. I never had to rebuild my faith or lose it altogether. I was able to maintain my (I believe, accurate) sense that he was one bad person among a huge pool of good people. This incident has hardly touched my life since it happened. I felt, as all our young people should feel, as important to the Jewish community as this “important” rabbi was.
Ordinary people, like all of us, can pursue justice the way that wonderful woman did for me. We can save the Jewish community from itself if we listen, and if we make sure that every voice is heard. We can all learn not only from victims of abuse and their harrowing stories but also from situations in which sexual impropriety is handled correctly. That this man tried to abuse his power is a sad statement on humanity and, perhaps, on the Jewish community; that he was prevented from continuing to do so shows how much power we each have to change the world for the better.
Gillian Steinberg teaches English at SAR High School in Riverdale.---------------------
The Jewish Week
The Editors.
Politics Takes A Rest In Iowa
Josh Tapper - JTA | In The Beginning
National
For Jewish Campaign Staffers, A Welcome Respite At Iowa Shabbat Dinner
Josh Tapper
JTA
A Bernie Sanders yarmulke seen at a campaign event in Marshalltown, Iowa, Jan. 10, 2016. JTA
Des Moines, Iowa – Some 50 presidential campaign staffers and volunteers, journalists and local movers and shakers from this capital city’s Jewish community munched on house salads inside a stately ballroom at the downtown World Food Prize building last Friday night as Aliza Kline welcomed them to Shabbat dinner.
Around the room, local prosecutors sat next to Planned Parenthood activists in Iowa to support Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Organizers for Clinton’s main challenger, Bernie Sanders, mingled with board members of the local federation.
It was an indubitably Democratic gathering, although at least one Republican – a 19-year-old Vassar College sophomore named Pieter Block who has been volunteering for the Jeb Bush campaign over winter break – braved attendance.
And yet there was a common denominator in the ballroom that Kline, the executive director of OneTable, a New York-based organization that helps Jews in their 20s and 30s organize Friday night meals, picked up on.
“I’m in a room with people who give a shit,” Kline exclaimed, “and that makes me happy.”
Founded in 2014 with support from a trio of Jewish nonprofits – the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life, the Paul E. Singer Foundation, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation – OneTable has facilitated 880 Shabbat dinners. Most have been in New York, but also in Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Boulder, Colorado.
On the same day OneTable landed in Des Moines, dinners took place at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival.
The initiative exhorts busy professionals to organize dinners not only to foster Jewish community but, more simply, for a much-needed change of pace – a manifesto that has particular resonance in Des Moines this time of year. With 10 days left before Iowans officially launch the presidential nomination process, statewide politicking, already clamorous in the lead-up to the Feb. 1 caucuses, only stands to intensify as campaigning draws to a close.
In a cheeky nod to campaign fatigue, OneTable organizers left gold-and-black sleep masks, inscribed “Sssshhhhabbat,” at each place setting.
Lisa Gerlach, 21, a scheduling and advance assistant for the Sanders campaign, acknowledged that her job is not conducive to drawn-out meals, let alone ones with three courses. So the dinner, she said afterward, was “definitely a good part of my week.”
After Kline finished her address and guests finished their appetizers, they tucked into plates of maple-glazed salmon and sautéed asparagus followed by an assortment of desserts – rugelach, halvah and cookies – supplied by the city’s lone kosher restaurant, Maccabee’s.
Next to the eye masks were cue cards with nonpolitical conversation starters (“French fries or tater tots?”), though discussions inevitably shifted to news of the day: Clinton’s planned address at the Jewish federation here, the merits of a national clean energy strategy, and so on.
The dinner was a success, Gerlach said, because during an election, “you never really get to interact with people on the other side of the aisle in a very human way.” And moreover, it is rare that people from across the political spectrum have the opportunity to sit down for dinner in a non-hostile environment.
On Friday, the discourse was notably civil, which is characteristic of Iowa in general, said Will Rogers, 46, the chairman of the Republican Party of Polk County and vice president of Tifereth Israel, the Conservative synagogue here.
“We don’t attack one another and we don’t beat each other up,” Rogers said. “It’s kind of like a big family rooting for different teams during the Super Bowl.”
Building off momentum from Friday’s dinner, OneTable’s hope is that similar affairs will pop up around the country over the course of election season. A dinner has been scheduled for Feb. 5 in Manchester, New Hampshire, four days before the primary there.
“I’d love to see lots of primary Shabbats,” said Kline, 44. “It’s one more opportunity for people to get involved and to get together on a Friday night. So that feels very win-win for us.”
With Sanders polling well beyond expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire, and reports that billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, is mulling a late bid as an independent, the field of candidates could take on an unusually Jewish patina in the months ahead.
Would OneTable try to involve the campaigns in future dinners? Probably not, said one of the organizers, Seth Cohen, a senior director at the Schusterman Family Foundation. Better to stay above the fray.
“These dinners,” Cohen added, “are about the people in the politics, not the politics themselves – or the politicians.”---------------------
In Warsaw, A Show Of Support For Israeli By Polish Christians
Steve Lipman | Lens
Lens
In Warsaw, A Show Of Support For Israel By Polish Christians
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Photos By Baruck KuligIn Warsaw, “march” came in January. A march in support of Israel, that is.
On a sunny, cold day, several hundred Poles, most of them Christians, made a nearly two-mile trek through the streets of the capital earlier this month to show their support for Israel during what the organizers called the current “third intifada.”
Coordinated by a coalition of national and local Christian organizations, the “March of Support for Israel” went from Grzybowski Square, where the city’s main synagogue and other Jewish institutions are located, to the Israeli Embassy. Along the way, the participants — “people of good will and Christians from all churches and communities,” according to organizers — sang and danced and prayed for Israel, carrying Israeli and Polish flags.
“We want to publicly show that Poles and Christians support Israel and oppose anti-Semitism,” one participant was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying.
“When Polish and European media report on events in Israel, it is often unreliable and negative for Israelis,” said Pawel Czyszek, editor of the Polish Jews Forum. “I walked in the march, carrying the flag of the State of Israel, to demonstrate my support for the country and convey to Israelis that they are not alone.”
A police escort accompanied the group, which along the way encountered a small rally of a nationalist group whose members were waving Palestinian flags.
“This is a group of Christians who are concerned with admitting to, and asking for forgiveness for, the sins of Europe and their ancestors,” Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis, above, the American-born emissary of the Shavei Israel organization in Katowice, in southern Poland, told The Jewish Week via email. “Many Poles are aware not only of the Jewish heritage of where they are from, but the connection to Israel as well.”
He spoke at the rally, and blessed the crowd, filling in for Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi.
“The atmosphere was light and happy,” Rabbi Ellis said. People “blew shofar and sang Israeli songs.”
steve@jewishweek.org---------------------
A World Of New Food Options
Hilary Danailova | Travel
Travel
A World Of New Food Options
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
A kosher McDonald’s in Buenos Aires. Wikimedia CommonsNote: This is the first of two stories on kosher travel.
Whenever she travels, Rhoda Farbowitz of Staten Island always packs a fallback kosher “meal” — a pack of tuna, cheese, challah rolls. “You just never know,” said Farbowitz. “You always have to carry something in your pocketbook.”
I agree, and never leave home without a cheese sandwich. Emergency rations aside, however, eating kosher away from home no longer requires the time-honored suitcase full of tuna. That was the grateful consensus from Jewish Week readers, who responded to my kosher travel query with a wealth of tips and advice.
“Here’s my philosophy,” wrote B. Lamdanit, an Upper West Sider who has maintained halachic standards and a full belly while roughing the African bush: Kosher travel anywhere “can be done if you want it badly enough — and if you’re willing to go without the exact foods and customs that you have at home.” Indeed, if there was one dominant theme in reader responses, it was this: Traveling while kosher is best accomplished when cuisine is not the focus.
That leaves room for pleasant surprises, though, since kosher dining options have proliferated around the globe on a scale unimaginable just a few decades ago. Rabbi Moshe Elefant, who oversees the Kashruth Department at the Orthodox Union, confirmed the globalization of halachically correct fare and credited two major factors — the expansion of Chabad to far-flung corners of the world, and mass outsourcing of food processing to foreign factories.
“The food market is no different than the garment market,” said Rabbi Elefant. Today, he explained, most U.S.-sold clothes are manufactured overseas; the same thing goes for crackers and hot sauce and fish sticks, which is why the OU dispatches a team of 600 rabbinic field representatives to certify plants in 80-plus countries, including China and India.
Thirty years ago, such places “weren’t even on our radar,” said Rabbi Elefant. “But the world has changed; it’s become a village. Nearly half the new facilities we certify today are outside the U.S.” The ripple effect has been that “every supermarket in the world, and I use the word very literally, has OU food,” added the rabbi.
That’s great news for hungry travelers, who once had to subsist on local fruits and salads — a lethargy-inducing experience that Rabbi Elefant, who likes a good steak, recalls well. Nowadays, he advised, look for canned goods and popular brands like Heinz, Hershey, Pringles and Ritz crackers.
Other kosher staples, especially for those headed off the beaten path: cereal, peanut butter, granola bars, oatmeal packets, and instant noodles. Matzah — durable, versatile and symbolic — is a universal favorite. And everyone I spoke to mentioned the new lightweight tuna pouches and Coca-Cola (which, at least for JW readers, may well be the great American contribution to world cuisine).
In big cities, travelers rely on Chabad as a one-stop Jewish resource. Chabad centers maintain websites with up-to-date local kosher information, welcome visitors for Shabbat dinner and help arrange elevator-free, walking-distance accommodations. Simply Googling “Jewish community” together with a destination name is often helpful; many prominent synagogues abroad have kosher restaurants, and some of those (especially in Asia) qualify as cultural and culinary highlights.
Many readers praised the ease of dining on major cruise lines. Get to know your maître d’ and chef, they advised, and these obliging folks will prepare double-wrapped kosher meals, store Shabbat items in a refrigerator (and reheat on request), or invite guests to inspect the hechshers on kitchen items. They’ll also provide plastic silverware and paper plates and handle electricity issues on Shabbat.
Tipping up front is essential, readers emphasized — and well worth the investment. Cruise staff “are taught to honor all requests, no more how odd they seem,” wrote Batsheva Winnig of Manhattan, who has a bowl and pitcher delivered for ritual hand-washing, no questions asked, alongside sealed kosher meals.
At one such Shabbat on board, “I heard the people at the next table commenting that it looked like a Passover seder,” recalled Winnig, who added that another Jewish couple ventured over to greet them. Hers was a story common among readers — many of whom, while observing Shabbat somewhere conspicuously out of place, have attracted the attention of fellow Jews.
Cruise ships may be easy, but hotels in the Caribbean or overseas can be challenging, travelers reported. For difficult destinations — or just to ensure a hot Shabbat dinner — many families pack frozen meals to reheat on a Foreman grill or portable griddle-crockpot. Farbowitz recommended the insulated bags from California Club, which can keep a chicken dinner frozen solid for at least 29 hours. (That’s the amount of time the dinners her lost luggage once traveled before reaching her — still rock-hard.)
Such measures are largely unnecessary in 2016, Rabbi Elefant assured me. “People don’t actually have to pack cans of tuna fish anymore,” he said. “But they still do. My wife,” he added with an affectionate sigh. “Her attitude is, ‘How can you go on a trip without having food with you?’ And mine is, ‘Why would you pack extra?’”
“So when we go together, we pack food. And when I go by myself, I don’t.”---------------------
The Murder That 'Broke' Israeli Society
George Robinson| Theater
Amos Gitai reflects on the Rabin assassination, and what came in its wake.
Theater
The Murder That ‘Broke’ Israeli Society
Amos Gitai reflects on the Rabin assassination, and what came in its wake.
George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week
In the aftermath of the Rabin assassination, Gitai says, “We have lost the [shared] project of Zionism. Michael Datikash/JWDuring the period of the Oslo negotiations, Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai spent many hours interviewing Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. He didn’t know it at the time, but that experience would become a pivotal part of a docudrama, the story of Rabin’s assassination by right-wing settler Yigal Amir. The product of three years of work by Gitai and his production team, “Rabin: The Last Day,” which opens on Friday, Jan. 29, paints a grimly vivid portrait of the maelstrom that surrounded the events of November 4, 1995, events that Gitai says left Israeli society “broken.”
It is a little more than 20 years after that day, and Amos Gitai is sitting in the breakfast room of a Midtown Manhattan hotel, sipping from a glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice and trying to explain how his film’s shape echoes the damage done by Rabin’s murder. He is a big man who looks more than a little like Vincent D’Onofrio, graying at the temples, dapper in a black sports jacket and shirt.
“I liked [Rabin],” the filmmaker said quietly. “He was not a classical politician — he was very simple, very straightforward; he said what he believed and he was courageous. That is very rare in the world of politics.”
How did his murder “break” Israeli society?
“We have lost the [shared] project of Zionism, and we live in this place right now, losing any options of healing,” Gitai said. “The conflicts are heightened now. All the barriers are down, [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has put extremists in the judicial system, you have an over-excited minister of culture [Miri Regev], books are being banned.” (Gitai is presumably referring to Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who some in Israel believe holds strident views, and a novel about a love affair between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman, meant for high school students, that was censored by the Education Ministry.)
He waves a hand to indicate the panoply of increasingly violent schisms rocking his country.
“Netanyahu is very capable but also very cynical,” Gitai continued. “Using hate and prejudice he was re-elected. He sets Orthodox against secular, Ashkenazi against Mizrahi, Israeli against Palestinian. It’s very harmful.”
The film itself makes the continuity quite clear between the Charedi extremists of the ’90s and their even deadlier counterparts today. The characters depicted in the film speak only their own words, offering wildly eccentric interpretations of rabbinic Judaism that accuse Rabin of satanic influences, or suggesting crackpot faux-clinical diagnoses of his alleged psychotic states. Not coincidentally, the characters have explicit echoes in recent violence perpetrated by the so-called hilltop youth.
For Gitai, the problem is one of worldview that goes to the very heart of the Zionist project.
“It is a political project, the conclusion of the question of Israel’s sovereignty,” he said. “It’s not a religious project.”
For Gitai, the idea of Israel as a “broken” society suffering from severe internal disruptions finds it artistic expression in the way he tells the story.
“Since the assassination of Rabin broke Israeli society, I thought we had to break traditional forms. We could have structured the film chronologically, we could have structured it thematically, but it would have been wrong. A fragmentation of the storytelling is necessary.”
Despite that formal choice, Gitai’s film is easy for an audience to follow. Structurally, the film is marked by a significant absence, that of its title character. That was a carefully considered choice by the director and his co-screenwriter, Marie-José Sanselme.
Gitai explained, “Rabin is the black hole at the center of the film; it is marked by his absence. I didn’t try to cast actors as the key real-life figures; I used news footage.”
He also used the subsequent investigation of the murder by the commission headed by Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar as the armature on which the narrative is strung; the decision had interesting implications for the resulting movie.
“I went to see Shamgar in his home,” Gitai recalled, sipping at a small cup of plain yogurt. “He’s of the same generation as Rabin, he’s in his 90s; he’s a distinguished guy. I told him, ‘You did a lousy job, you only investigated the operational failures. You didn’t investigate the incitements that caused the killing.’ He said to me, ‘We were limited in our mandate.’”
Shamgar talked the director through the protocols governing the formal investigation and gave him unprecedented access to the transcripts of the commission’s hearings. That left it to Gitai and Sanselme to investigate the missing components of the story, and they drew on a wide range of ultra-rightist sources to recreate the lethal firestorm of anti-Oslo and anti-Rabin opinion.
“We didn’t invent anything,” Gitai said emphatically. “It’s all verbatim.”
Period-set films are never about only the era in which they ostensibly occur. Like any other such film, “Rabin: The Last Day” is about the time at which it was made, but it uses its historical setting as a lens through which to examine contemporary Israeli society.
Consequently, the film draws on 1995 footage of Netanyahu, then opposition leader, cheerleading crowds of screaming, jeering and nearly hysterical rightists with placards and effigies comparing Rabin to the SS. Those images are unmistakably a reflection on how Gitai views Israel’s current political leader.
“Netanyahu is a very smart guy, but the place is in danger of becoming provincial, of closing itself off to the world,” he said. “We are a fragile country in a very unfriendly neighborhood. Do we really need some more enemies?”
Ask him about comparisons of “Rabin: The Last Day” to the work of a master of political drama like Italian director Francesco Rosi, and Gitai wryly turns into a football coach poor-mouthing his team’s chances against the Little Sisters of the Poor.
“Oh, basically I’m just an architect; my references are seldom cinematographic,” he said with a smile. “Well, we did review Rosi and Costa-Gavras, particularly ‘Z,’ and I looked at Oliver Stone’s JFK film, [which convinced me] not to try to cast the important political figures.”
The film’s reception in Israel predictably broke down along political lines.
“It’s to be expected,” Gitai said. “I’m doing films that touch an exposed nerve in Israeli society. You do stuff because you want to leave a trace. I believe you have to be analytical, rational, or you close yourself off, and that is dangerous.”
Is he pessimistic about the future of Israel?
He shrugged, then said, “In a situation of conflict, you have to beware of becoming nihilistic; it’s not a good idea. Objectively there is good reason to be a pessimist, but you have to keep a level of optimism. I still believe in the power of ideas. If we [Israelis] didn’t live in ideas, we wouldn’t still be around.”
“Rabin: The Last Day,” directed by Amos Gitai, opens Friday, Jan. 29 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema (Broadway and 62nd Street). For information, call
lincolnplazacinema.com.---------------------
MORE HEADLINES:
Affairs Of The Heart, And
Nation >
Lens
In Warsaw, A Show Of Support For Israel By Polish Christians
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Photos By Baruck KuligIn Warsaw, “march” came in January. A march in support of Israel, that is.
On a sunny, cold day, several hundred Poles, most of them Christians, made a nearly two-mile trek through the streets of the capital earlier this month to show their support for Israel during what the organizers called the current “third intifada.”
Coordinated by a coalition of national and local Christian organizations, the “March of Support for Israel” went from Grzybowski Square, where the city’s main synagogue and other Jewish institutions are located, to the Israeli Embassy. Along the way, the participants — “people of good will and Christians from all churches and communities,” according to organizers — sang and danced and prayed for Israel, carrying Israeli and Polish flags.
“We want to publicly show that Poles and Christians support Israel and oppose anti-Semitism,” one participant was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying.
“When Polish and European media report on events in Israel, it is often unreliable and negative for Israelis,” said Pawel Czyszek, editor of the Polish Jews Forum. “I walked in the march, carrying the flag of the State of Israel, to demonstrate my support for the country and convey to Israelis that they are not alone.”
A police escort accompanied the group, which along the way encountered a small rally of a nationalist group whose members were waving Palestinian flags.
“This is a group of Christians who are concerned with admitting to, and asking for forgiveness for, the sins of Europe and their ancestors,” Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis, above, the American-born emissary of the Shavei Israel organization in Katowice, in southern Poland, told The Jewish Week via email. “Many Poles are aware not only of the Jewish heritage of where they are from, but the connection to Israel as well.”
He spoke at the rally, and blessed the crowd, filling in for Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi.
“The atmosphere was light and happy,” Rabbi Ellis said. People “blew shofar and sang Israeli songs.”
steve@jewishweek.org
---------------------
Rabbi David Wople's Musings >
Musings
You Can Take It With You
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David WolpeAs the Israelites prepare to leave Egypt, Moses remembers the promise to carry Joseph’s bones to the land of Israel [Exodus 13:9). The Rabbis note Joseph’s original double phrasing to his family: “Hashbeah Hishbiah” — “you shall surely promise” — because the promise is to be carried down through the generations.
A commitment can be taken with you, from one age to the next, with a sense of continuity and sanctity. Indeed, the oath sworn to Joseph does not end there. For Moses, who took upon himself the fulfillment of the task, would never have the privilege of entering the land of Israel. He had to trust those who came after would complete the undertaking that he had begun. The Talmud teaches that one who takes upon himself an obligation and fulfills it to the extent possible, even if unable to complete it, is credited with the mitzvah.
Every Jew is given the bones of his or her ancestors, the promise and the heritage, to carry forward. You cannot take material possessions with you after you die, but you can take the spiritual gifts of those who have died with you as you live.
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).
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The Right Way To Deal With A Sexual Advance >
Opinion
The Right Way To Deal With A Sexual Advance
Take the person in distress seriously, and help them speak when they can't speak for themselves.
Gillian Steinberg
Special To The Jewish Week
Gillian SteinbergTwenty years ago, my Hillel rabbi, a bearded man in a black suit with a velvet kipa who presented himself as a committed Orthodox Jew, invited me to the Hillel building one evening to hang out with him and some other students. When I arrived, the building was dark, and he and I sat down to wait for the others. We chatted for a while, but when the other students didn’t arrive, I suggested that I call them to see when they were coming.
The rabbi inched closer to me on the sofa and said, “They aren’t coming. I didn’t actually invite them.” Taken aback, I asked what he meant, and he said, “Would you like to go for a drive with me?” I said no, and he began to tell me that he was attracted to me, that he wanted to be close to me, that he’d like to spend time alone with me. He reached out to touch me.
I was a new graduate student, just out of college, and he was in his 50s. I knew his wife from Shabbat dinners, and his older children were my age. I had seen him as a religious role model: an observant Jew interested in music, connected to the modern world, deeply spiritual but also an intellectual. And he was trying to cheat on his wife with me on the Hillel sofa.
In that shocking moment, I had the presence of mind to tell him how uncomfortable I was; I pulled away from him and left the building, shaking.
I spent the rest of the evening thinking about what to do, and I decided not to do anything. I assumed no one would believe me, and I didn’t know whom I would tell anyway. The decision plagued me for weeks, but I decided that pushing aside my anger and sense of betrayal was probably the best solution. I stopped attending Hillel.
A couple of weeks later, at a meal with local synagogue members, I heard some of them praising the Hillel rabbi for his exciting programming and dedicated leadership. To their surprise, I reacted strongly: “I hate the rabbi. He’s an awful person!” I exclaimed, without adding any specific details.
That might have been the end of this story. Nothing might have happened; I might never have said another word to anyone. They might have ignored me or judged me or gossiped about that strange outburst. They might have defended him and moved on.
Instead, one woman from that group, whom I only slightly knew, said, “Can you come talk to me privately?” We stepped into a different room, and I told her, in tears, about that terrible night.
She didn’t say, “You must have misunderstood him” or “But he’s a wonderful rabbi” or “Are you sure?” She didn’t ignore me. She didn’t make me feel crazy or stupid. Instead, she said, “We have to do something about this right away.”
Later that week, I sat with her in her living room, facing the regional director of Hillels for the area, also an Orthodox rabbi. I told him the story while she sat beside me. He looked at me skeptically and said, “I think you must have misunderstood him” and “But he’s a wonderful rabbi” and “Are you sure?” As I cried, the woman said, “Gillian didn’t misunderstand him. She knows what happened. You need to do something.”
After some discussion, the regional director agreed to pursue the issue and, as a first step, would speak to the rabbi himself. A few days later, the regional director contacted me and said, “I spoke with the rabbi. He corroborated everything you said. He admitted it all, and he’s sorry.”
I don’t know what happened after that, but within a week or so, the rabbi had been fired from Hillel and a statement was released suggesting that he had committed some financial indiscretion. I was told privately that he was being prevented from working for any other Hillel and was being required — I’m not sure how or whether this was enforced — to go to counseling. I never heard from him or saw him again. I can still locate him on Google, and he seems only to have worked in non-rabbinic fields since that time. Shortly thereafter, an Episcopal chaplain affiliated with the university very kindly reached out to me, presumably at the request of the Hillel board, so that we could meet to process what had happened, and I was offered additional counseling, which I declined. After a few months, I barely thought about the event again.
As I read the stories in recent years of terrible abuse perpetrated by rabbis and hidden or ignored by their colleagues and acquaintances, I think more and more about my very different story. Of course, unlike the many children who have been abused by rabbis, I was a legal adult at this time and not a young child; I was approached with the possibility of a sexual relationship and not forced into one; the rabbi in my story told the truth rather than trying to discredit me.
But another important difference stands out as well: someone believed me. How easy it would have been for that woman to ignore my outburst. How simple to have dismissed this student whom she barely knew as “having a bad day” or “being too emotional.” But she didn’t. She listened to me and, when I couldn’t speak for myself, she spoke for me. She pressed for change to be made, and it was made.
I don’t know what would have happened if this ordinary woman, invited to an ordinary meal, had not taken the time she did to pursue justice. I would certainly have permanently stopped attending Hillel, and, since I met my now-husband at a regional Hillel event a few years later, that decision could have changed my life significantly.
On a more fundamental level, I never had to reckon with feeling betrayed by the Jewish community. I never had to doubt my own worth or veracity. I never had to face the man who attempted to abuse his power over me or hear him lie about me. I never had to rebuild my faith or lose it altogether. I was able to maintain my (I believe, accurate) sense that he was one bad person among a huge pool of good people. This incident has hardly touched my life since it happened. I felt, as all our young people should feel, as important to the Jewish community as this “important” rabbi was.
Ordinary people, like all of us, can pursue justice the way that wonderful woman did for me. We can save the Jewish community from itself if we listen, and if we make sure that every voice is heard. We can all learn not only from victims of abuse and their harrowing stories but also from situations in which sexual impropriety is handled correctly. That this man tried to abuse his power is a sad statement on humanity and, perhaps, on the Jewish community; that he was prevented from continuing to do so shows how much power we each have to change the world for the better.
Gillian Steinberg teaches English at SAR High School in Riverdale.---------------------
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