Trump Taps Mussolini As Running Mate
Trumpville, Florida - Donald Trump announced today that Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader of Italy for two decades during the early 20th century, will be his vice presidential candidate this November.
Trump Taps Mussolini As Running Mate
Brashest teams with fascist: Mussolini led the Black Shirts, Trump seeks the White House. Credit for Trump: Getty Images
Trumpville, Florida -- Donald Trump announced today that Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader of Italy for two decades during the early 20th century, will be his vice presidential candidate this November.
“He made the trains run on time and had great style, real flair, nice boots, quite a guy,” Trump told a throng of supporters near his new Florida apartment-gym-and-garden complex, Trump Towers and Showers and Flowers. He also announced his newest Trump product, a spray tan, and boasted: “Obama was our first black president. I’ll be our first orange president.”
Discussing his vice presidential pick, Trump said: “I’ll be honest with you, I thought about running with Sarah Palin, she’s kinda sassy and brassy and she’s got, you know, big numbers – you can check the polls. And then there’s Hulk Hogan, great guy, major statesman, now able to make a big contribution. And of course there’s Kim Kardashian – would love to probe her domestic policies. But Il Duce is in his own league. Big fan. Huuuuge.”
Trump said that, several months ago, after he Tweeted a favorite Mussolini adage, “It’s better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” he was criticized for citing the Italian dictator. “But I looked into it and was impressed with his work and great uniform. People say he gave fascism a bad name, but he was a real leader. Believe me. You can check the polls.
Trump said he has improved on Mussolini’s slogan, and will produce it as a campaign bumper sticker: “It’s better to live 100 years lyin’ than a day as Bo Beep.”
“You figure it out,” he told the crowd with a shrug.
When fact-checkers from the media noted that Mussolini was executed in 1945, Trump said that would not be a problem. “I do most of the campaigning and speaking and inciting anyway,” he said, “and I don’t really believe anything the press tells me. You can check the polls.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda To Write New "Lewsical"
Following the success of the smash hit musical "Hamilton," chronicling the life and legacy of the "ten dollar founding father" Alexander Hamilton, creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda has already begun working on his next project: a hip hop musical about Jacob "Jack" Lew, the Secretary of the Treasury.
New York -- Following the success of the smash hit musical “Hamilton,” chronicling the life and legacy of the “ten dollar founding father” Alexander Hamilton, creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda has already begun working on his next project: a hip hop musical about Jacob “Jack” Lew, the Secretary of the Treasury.
Miranda said he found inspiration for the musical in learning that Lew, a Sabbath observer, leaves the office before sundown every Friday and is known for his “owlish glasses and low-key manner.”
“Not exactly high drama, but I love challenges,” Miranda said. “Plus ‘Lew’ rhymes with ‘Jew.’ It basically writes itself. And the story of a Jewish guy dealing with big bucks is totally fresh and unexpected. I can’t wait to hear what people think.”
Early drafts of songs include titles such as “My Schnapps,” “The Ten Real Commandments,” and “What’d I Miss (Over Shabbat).”
Steve Harvey To Announce Winner At Republican Convention
Steve Harvey, the entertainer who made an embarrassing gaffe at the 2015 Miss Universe pageant by accidentally announcing the wrong winner, has been selected to announce the Republican presidential candidate at the party convention here in August.
Miss(ed) Universe: Hey, everybody makes mistakes.
Cleveland -- Steve Harvey, the entertainer who made an embarrassing gaffe at the 2015 Miss Universe pageant by accidentally announcing the wrong winner, has been selected to announce the Republican presidential candidate at the party convention here in August.
Harvey said he is practicing already. “I know that if I don’t say `Trump’ there could be a riot. It’s been a tough year for me.”
A convert to Judaism, Harvey said he was fired after serving for five years as gabbai (sexton) at The Actors’ Synagogue in Times Square. He was abruptly dismissed from his post during last Saturday morning’s service after calling the wrong person to the Torah for an aliyah.
When Harvey announced Ben Stiller’s name, the famed actor ascended the bima and began to recite the Hebrew blessing. Suddenly, in the middle of the prayer, Harvey interrupted him.
“I have to apologize,” the gabbai said to the bewildered congregation. “This aliyah belongs to Ben Affleck, not Ben Stiller.”
Noting the look of dismay on the rabbi’s face, Harvey feebly tried to explain his error. “This is exactly what’s on the card,” he said. “Ben Affleck. I got my Bens mixed up. I take full responsibility for this. It was my mistake, and I promise it won’t happen again.”
That’s when Rabbi Shecky Yanu, the synagogue’s spiritual leader, yelled out, “You’re damn right it won’t happen again! Harvey, you’re fired!”
After congregants gave the rabbi a standing ovation, the chagrinned Harvey quietly removed his prayer shawl, stepped down from the bima, and walked out the back door.
“And don’t come back for kiddush!” Stiller yelled to him as he exited the building.
The synagogue’s board of directors said it will announce the name of their new gabbai at the Tony Awards on June 12th. Ironically, Harvey will emcee the show. “It’ll be good practice for Cleveland,” he said.
The Donald Wins Prominent Jewish Endorsement
Republican candidate Donald Trump gained in the polls this week after receiving a major endorsement from the League of Jewish Voters Who Love to Hear Goyish Candidates Speak Yiddish
New York — Republican candidate Donald Trump gained in the polls this week after receiving a major endorsement from the League of Jewish Voters Who Love to Hear Goyish Candidates Speak Yiddish.
“You see me?” Trump said upon hearing the news. “I’m kwelling! And these guys are influential. They’re big mockers. You can check the polls.”
Trump initially gained attention in the Yiddish arena last December during a campaign rally in Michigan, when he declared that Hillary Clinton “got shlonged” by Barack Obama in 2008.
The remark drew such prolonged laughter and applause that Trump continued to shpritz Yiddishisms on the crowd, calling the Grand Rapids audience “a bunch of Michiganers.”
Since then, the controversial candidate has frequently peppered his speeches with popular Yiddish words and phrases.
At one debate, Trump dismissed rival GOP candidate Ted Cruz as a “dumb smock who can kiss my big fat caucus.”
Recently, Trump won the support of Sarah Palin after greeting her with the phrase “Vus titsach,” which she took as a compliment.
Trump also said that he hoped he and Palin would “shlep together” soon.
“Come January,” Trump predicted, “you’ll see me sitting on the front shtups of the White House, eating a k’nosh.”
The Union of Orthodox Jewish Actors and Entertainers announced yesterday that it plans to boycott the 88th annual Academy Awards ceremony because no Orthodox Jews were nominated for their work in this year's crop of movies.
Hollywood — The Union of Orthodox Jewish Actors and Entertainers announced yesterday that it plans to boycott the 88th annual Academy Awards ceremony because no Orthodox Jews were nominated for their work in this year’s crop of movies.
“It’s a shanda!” (Yiddish for OMG), exclaimed UOJAE president and veteran actor Menashe Shulnik, speaking from the group’s headquarters in the basement of the Shill Shul, located at the corner of Challahwood and Wine.
“Frum actors matter!” Shulnik shouted, banging his hand emphatically on a shtender—a tall wooden lectern. “We’ve been abused by the Academy long enough! We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this anymore! Well, maybe just a little more, but then that’s definitely it!”
Shulnik gave several examples of what he perceived as injustices, including actors who were forced to change their names in Hollywood because they sounded “too Jewish.”
“Doniel Horowitz had to be clipped to Don Ho, just to break into this business!” Shulnik fumed. “Shlomo Barmitzvahpen was morphed to Sean Penn. And Don Nazihunter became simply Don Knotts. What chutzpah!”
Shulnik said the only way the UOJAE might cancel its boycott is if the Academy agreed to recite Kaddish following the “In Memoriam” video that pays tribute to actors who died during the past year.
The news conference ended abruptly when a reporter informed Shulnik that the 88th Academy Awards were held last month, making a boycott of the ceremony impossible.
“Gevalt!” Shulnik screamed as he stormed out of the shul, “Another Academy insult!”
Researchers at Tel Aviv University recently completed a three-year study of the Hebrew months and concluded that Adar is the punniest of all months.
Tel Aviv — Researchers at Tel Aviv University recently completed a three-year study of the Hebrew months and concluded that Adar is the punniest of all months.
Professor Playan Werdz, an Israeli linguist who headed the study, said that Adar was prone to more puns than all other months in the Jewish calendar combined.
“Our findings were an Adar success,” said Werdz. “There has been no Adar research like it anywhere.”
Asked how he felt about his team’s accomplishment, the professor replied, “I feel Adar this world, like I’m floating in Adar space. My fellow researchers are unquestionably Adar-able.”
The research team based their study on Adar II, a Jewish leap month that occurs seven times every 19 years. Werdz noted that the results would have been the same had Adar I been analyzed instead.
“It’s six of one and a half-dozen of the Adar,” the linguist stated.
The professor said that he tracked the research data closely, lest he make an error that might skew the results.
“That would have been an Adar disaster,” said Werdz.
The professor announced that his team’s next study will involve dairy cows. “After all, they also have two Adars,” he noted.
A new Sabbath and Holiday prayer book intended for all denominations of Judaism was released this week, the joint effort of scholars from Yeshiva University, Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, and Congregation Shalom al Yisroel, the noted LGBT synagogue.
Happy Purim!
New York -- A new Sabbath and Holiday prayer book intended for all denominations of Judaism was released this week, the joint effort of scholars from Yeshiva University, Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, and Congregation Shalom al Yisroel, the noted LGBT synagogue.
“The aim of this new prayer book,” explained its editor, Rabbi Shonda Charpa, “is to provide congregants of all backgrounds with the most user-friendly text possible.”
“For example,” the rabbi noted, “in the Orthodox portion of the siddur, the traditional Hebrew term for God—Hashem--has been changed to the more casual Shemmy.”
“And to appeal to youth, all the prayers are presented in rap,” the rabbi continued. “The Shma now goes, ‘Hear O Israel, Shemmy is One; Kiss your tzitzis, and now you’re done!’”
The Conservative section of the book is printed in the style of a Chinese menu, where users can pick and choose the prayers they would like to say. “We recommend at least one prayer from Column A and two from Column B,” the rabbi said, “but ultimately it’s up to each person to decide what to recite. And substitutions are allowed.”
The Reform section of the siddur consists of a call-in number for congregants too busy to attend services and an essay on “How To Say Tikkun Olam In Hebrew.”
The Reconstructionist section includes English transliteration of Hebrew prayers to help the non-Jewish spouse or partner of the officiating rabbi stay awake during services.
For LGBT users, the pages turn from the spine of the book rather than from the outer edges. “To show that we’re sensitive to those who do things differently,” the rabbi explained.
The new prayer book also includes a section for fervent interfaith congregants with instructions on the proper blessing when combining the hunt for Easter eggs with b’dikas chametz (the search for leaven) on the night before Passover.
“I remember part of the blessing,” said I.M. Now-Tribe, a recent convert. “I believe it says ‘asher bawchar bunny’ …
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Trump's tzuris at AIPAC; Adelson opens up; Kosher Wine Guide; Purim Spoof; more" The Jewish Week Connecting the World to Jewish News, Culture, Features, and Opinions for Wednesday, 23 March 216This week on TheJewishWeek.com
March 23, 2016
Dear Reader,
Donald Trump ran into trouble when he veered off script in his address to the AIPAC policy conference this week, resulting in a tearful AIPAC president admonishing the Republican hopeful and convention delegates. Staff Writer Stewart Ain has the story.National
Off-Script Trump Forces Rare AIPAC Rebuke
GOP frontrunner’s Obama dig leads to divisiveness.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, left, and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Getty Images
Despite a carefully crafted speech to the pro-Israel group AIPAC Monday in which Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump pledged that as president there would be “no daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, he again sowed divisiveness when he went offscript — prompting a rare rebuke from his host.
In a tearful statement she read at the beginning of Tuesday’s proceedings, AIPAC President Lillian Pinkus chastised not only Trump but also the delegates who applauded when Trump suddenly stopped speaking and let out a “Yay” after having just said that President Barak Obama has only one year left in office.
As the delegates cheered and applauded, Trump said: “He may be the worst thing to ever happen to Israel, believe me, believe me. And you know it, and you know it better than anybody.”
In her statement, Pinkus said that AIPAC does not “countenance ad hominem attacks, and we take great offense to those that are levied at the president of the United States of America from our stage. While we may have policy differences, we deeply respect the office of the president of the United States and our president, Barack Obama. We are disappointed that so many people applauded a sentiment that we neither agree with nor condone.”
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union of Reform Judaism, said he was “heartened” by the statement. He said he and hundreds of other delegates — including many rabbis and cantors — chose to “respectfully” walk out of the arena as Trump entered and to congregate in the hall to study Jewish texts about affirming human dignity.
“While we were studying, we could hear loud applause and our discussion was drowned out by some loud cheering,” he told The Jewish Week.
He said he later learned that the cheering occurred when Trump disparaged Obama.
“The bipartisan foundation of AIPAC’s work was called into question,” he said. “The takeaway for too many people is that despite his hate and bigotry, he was warmly welcomed into the largest pro-Israel gathering in our country.”
Rabbi Jacobs noted that Trump has yet to respond to URJ’s request for a meeting “so he could hear our deep discomfort and outrage at the way he disparaged Muslims, women, immigrants, Mexicans and people with disabilities. ... It still seems that he does not share our values of equality, pluralism, and humility.”
But Rabbi David Nesenoff, founder of the newly launched Twitter account, @Rabbisfortrump, said he found the AIPAC statement upsetting because had the crowd “booed Trump, AIPAC would not have cared. It was a totally partisan statement. Since when can’t you speak for or against something in a public forum? Maybe it showed there is discontent among American Jews to what our president has done to Israel. … AIPAC cannot police individual people for their emotions when they hear the truth.”
The dustup over Trump’s comments appears to have overshadowed a day of speeches to the AIPAC Policy Conference by four of the presidential candidates.
Only Democratic Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, missed the event. He was campaigning in the West and was denied an opportunity to appear on video, something that candidates have done at previous AIPAC conferences. Instead, he sent a speech he had delivered that evening in Salt Lake City. And it was nothing like what the AIPAC delegates heard from the other candidates.
After affirming that he would “work tirelessly to advance the cause of peace as a partner and as a friend to Israel,” he said success can only be achieved if the U.S. is a friend to the Palestinian people, too.
“You can’t have good policy that results in peace if you ignore one side. ... Peace will require the unconditional recognition by all people of Israel’s right to exist. It will require an end to attacks of all kinds against Israel. Peace will require that organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah renounce their efforts to undermine the security of Israel. It will require the entire world to recognize Israel. Peace has to mean security for every Israeli from violence and terrorism.
“But peace also means security for every Palestinian. It means achieving self-determination, civil rights, and economic well-being for the Palestinian people. Peace will mean ending what amounts to the occupation of Palestinian territory, establishing mutually agreed-upon borders, and pulling back settlements in the West Bank, just as Israel did in Gaza — once considered an unthinkable move on Israel’s part. … Peace will also mean ending the economic blockade of Gaza.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the last Republican presidential candidate to speak, said many of the same things as his fellow Republicans and added that he would work to defund any university that supported the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.
And because he went last, he had the chance to correct Trump for using the word “Palestine” in his speech instead of referring to the Palestinian Authority. “Palestine has not existed since 1948,” he said.
He also took a swipe at Clinton, reminding the crowd of 18,000 that in 2014 Clinton had said Israeli rockets had occasionally hit civilian areas in Gaza during the Israeli war with Hamas because Gaza is densely populated.
“Well, Madam Secretary, with all respect, the reason the missiles are in schools is not because Gaza is small. The reason the missiles are in schools is because Hamas are terrorist monsters using children as human shields.”
[The speeches of Clinton, Trump and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are reported on The Jewish Week website, thejewishweek.com.]
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, said he found some of the candidates’ speeches “more understanding of the Arab war against Israel and what steps must be taken about it. One must look at the history and background of each candidate’s long-term record on Israel … and not rely on a single speech to a pro-Israel audience where pandering may well be a factor in what a candidate says. And one of the candidates fervently supported the Iran nuclear deal, which is a disaster for Israel and one that 90 percent of Israelis oppose.”
His reference was to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who said in her remarks that she believed the agreement is a good one but that as president she would ensure that Iran did not cheat.
Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University, agreed that “there is an element of cynicism” in the statements candidates make to a pro-Israel gathering.
“Both Hillary and Trump said the same things to win the AIPAC electoral base,” he said. “But Hillary Clinton has a mixed record on Israel and the image of her sitting quietly while Suha Arafat accused Israel of gassing Palestinians is still strong.”
The incident occurred in 1999. Suha Arafat is the widow of Palestinian President Yasir Arafat; Clinton was then first lady.
Steinberg said Clinton changed her positions on Israel and the Middle East between the time she served as a New York senator and when she became secretary of state. And he said recently released emails Clinton received while secretary of state included many from an adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, and others that espoused what he considered to be anti-Israel positions.
But Peter Joseph, a Democratic donor and Clinton supporter, discounted those emails and said she “hears from many voices and makes her own decisions. She is well-informed and a strong decision maker.”
He also discounted the “political rhetoric” heard from the other presidential candidates at the AIPAC conference, saying their words “are not an indication of their experience, depth of analysis and pro-Israel instinct. … I think there are grave differences among the candidates with respect to Israel, and so I think Israel is very much” an issue in the election.
After watching and providing commentary on the speeches for the Jewish Broadcasting Service, novelist Thane Rosenbaum said he believes everyone in the hall expected each candidate “to say the right things — that it is in America’s interests to treat Israel as a special ally.” Coming into the conference, he said, only Trump was the “wild card.”
“He has made for a charismatic candidate who was grossly ill-informed,” he said. “If you are just watching CNN and reading The New York Times, you may think it is all Israel’s fault. … He is staking his reputation on not being politically correct, but by doing so, he naturally alienates and frightens those who believe civility is an important ingredient in what we want as a president.”
The AIPAC event, Rosenbaum said, forced Trump to consult with others and for the first time as a presidential candidate write a speech and read it from a teleprompter.
“That forces a clarity -- you have to be very specific and unequivocal,” he said. “Enough improvisation. The audience wanted to hear declarative, unambiguous statements of support from a person having a full appreciation of the complexities of the Middle East. This audience was not to be persuaded with mere platitudes and empty clichés but wanted to know whether they have a full understanding of what happening in the region.”
In his AIPAC remarks, Trump made no reference to his previous position that he would remain neutral on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Asked about that, Rabbi Nesenoff, the Trump supporter, said: “After last night, the neutrality word will never be uttered again. Donald Trump realizes that the two most important things concerning Israel are Iran’s nuclear weapons and Islamic radicalization. … The Israeli-Palestinian situation is a non-issue. There is nothing to be discussed when Palestinians are stabbing and killing you.”ste
stewart@jewishweek.org
My column focuses on Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner and subject of much speculation as to which Republican candidate he'll support for president. He spoke of his philanthropic motives at a recent New York meeting with young Jewish professionals.Gary Rosenblatt
In Search Of Sheldon Adelson
Will he support Trump? ‘Why not?’ the mega-philanthropist says.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor And Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Sheldon Adelson, appearing wan and frail but in good spirits, had a simple message for an admiring audience of about 150 young Jewish professionals in Manhattan the other night:
“Do good and live a Jewish life,” said the controversial figure often referred to as a Las Vegas casino mogul, billionaire magnate and leading donor to Republican candidates.
All that may be true, but on this night he wore the mantle of “the world’s leading Jewish philanthropist,” as described by his devoted host, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who also called him “a full-out warrior [for Jewish causes] and one tough Jew.”
I had been invited to the event by Rabbi Boteach, whose World Values Network (WVN), promoting Judaism and Israel, is a recipient of major Adelson support. The evening’s program, with the rabbi moderating an informal discussion with Adelson, 82, and his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, was primarily for the WVN young leadership division.
I was told in advance by the group’s public relations team that the event would be “on the record,” but as a member of the press I was not to ask any questions.
I came mostly out of curiosity to see and hear this controversial couple up close, especially because their encounters with the media are rare. I was also hoping for a chance to reconnect with Adelson. I’d had a brief brush with him almost five years ago that began when he called me out of the blue one Friday afternoon, angrily complaining about a Jewish Week article. It contained criticism from a leading Jewish Republican about Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker who was an Adelson favorite and about to declare his candidacy for president in the 2012 election.
(The Adelsons, whose wealth, according to Forbes, is $31 billion, and who are dominant figures in the Super Pac era, subsequently pumped an estimated $15 million to $20 million into Gingrich’s ill-fated campaign.)
When I realized who was yelling at me on the phone, I started taking notes. Our free-wheeling conversation lasted 30 minutes, during which Adelson repeatedly defended Gingrich as a strong supporter of Israel, criticized The Jewish Week article as “biased and prejudiced,” and insisted that the Palestinian leadership was committed to destroying Israel.
“Can you make peace with people whose sole mission is to destroy you?” he asked, adding that Barack Obama was “the worst president” for Israel.
At first reluctant to let me publish those and other comments, Adelson agreed when I offered to check his quotes with him for accuracy before publication. When the interview appeared the next week (“Billionaire Adelson Defends Gingrich,” May 17, 2011), he called to tell me it was a fair story, a rare statement for someone highly wary and critical of the media.
I pressed my luck, asking for a chance to meet in person for a more in-depth interview. He said he rarely travels to New York. I said I’d be happy to come out to Las Vegas, where he is based. He said he’d think about it.
Over the next many months I emailed and called Adelson to follow up on my request. At various points I received calls from high-placed Jewish professionals telling me that Adelson had asked them whether I could be trusted as a journalist, and they said they told him yes.
Finally, I got the go-ahead that Adelson would agree to an interview. But then the trail went cold. My subsequent calls and notes went unanswered, and after awhile I gave up.
So sitting in the fourth row, on the aisle, at the WVN event was as close as I’d been to the elusive billionaire who, it should be noted, also backed Rabbi Boteach’s unsuccessful 2012 run for a congressional seat from New Jersey with $500,000. (In all, the Adelsons spent an estimated $92 million supporting losing Republican candidates that year.)
At present, there is much speculation about whom the couple favors in their effort to find a winning Republican presidential candidate in November, with support for Israel at the top of the Adelson’s priority list.
Four years ago, after keeping the Gingrich campaign funded long after the Georgian’s popular support had peaked, Adelson was criticized for hurting Mitt Romney’s chances that November, even though he ended up giving about $20 million to the Romney campaign.
This time, Adelson has held back his support, waiting to see who would emerge from the crowded pack of GOP hopefuls. Virtually every Republican presidential candidate made the trek to Las Vegas to meet Adelson to seek his support. There were reports he favored Marco Rubio, but now that the Florida senator is out of the race, the question is whether Adelson will back Donald Trump, who says he loves Israel but would be “neutral” in brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
“Why not?” Adelson said in response to that question put to him recently, but he did not elaborate.
I was curious to hear him discuss his political views at the WVN event, but Rabbi Boteach made a point of noting that he was avoiding the topic other than to assure the audience that Adelson would choose the candidate who is “best for Israel.”
Though known for his blunt and sometimes harsh style, Adelson seemed reflective on this night. He spoke in a soft voice of growing up poor in a Boston suburb, and of the profound impact the Holocaust had on him as a youth, hearing stories from his father, who recalled the oppression he endured growing up in Lithuania.
“Our job is to be stonemasons,” he told his young audience, “connecting Jews,” because without such efforts, “there won’t be any Jews in future generations except for the ultra-Orthodox.” He said that while he and his wife are not observant, they have Shabbat dinner on Friday nights with their two sons, 17 and 19, and encourage them “to live a Jewish life.”
Adelson focused on his concern for and commitment to Israel and his motivation in supporting Jewish causes. Among those he mentioned having recently received multimillion-dollar gifts were the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem; the Friends of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces); the Israel American Council (IAC), a fast-growing organization of Israelis living in America; the Maccabee Task Force, combating BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel) on campus; and Birthright Israel, with the Adelsons contributing $50 million a year to support free 10-day Israel trips for diaspora youth.
Adelson said he wanted to pay for five Iron Dome air defense systems for Israel, estimated at tens of millions of dollars each.
“If you are fortunate like we are,” Adelson explained, “what else are we going to do” with the funds he and his wife have?
“It should not be an obligation or responsibility but an honor to keep Judaism alive,” Adelson said several times. “You don’t have to be religious,” he added. “We cherish the customs and the traditions.”
He noted that his views, particularly on Israel, have been shaped largely by his wife of almost 25 years, an Israeli-born physician and expert on addiction. In a strong Israeli accent she spoke of her concern about “the lies and propaganda” that place Israel in a poor light, but asserted she trusts Israel to protect its people. “Deep in my heart I believe we will prevail,” she said.
Her husband, citing Newt Gingrich, said he still believes there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, a term he maintains is a myth by Yasir Arafat when he founded the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in 1964.
Adelson spoke of the couple’s effort to combat the BDS movement through what he called the “modern-day Maccabees on campus,” starting with anti-BDS programs now being funded through pro-Israel groups at eight U.S. colleges “to see what works.” He also cited the work and growth of the IAC, now with 10 U.S. branches and a database of 250,000 names. Founded four years ago to promote Jewish culture and identity for Israelis living here, the group now has a lobbying arm, Adelson said, fueling speculation that his motive is to promote his hawkish political views.
But Adelson took exception to the commonly held view that his three-year-old Israeli newspaper, Yisrael Hayom (Israel Today), distributed for free and now the most widely circulated daily in the country, is a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Netanyahu. “It’s not a Bibi newspaper, it’s so neutral,” he said, noting that he instituted an ombudsman and fact-checking department. He blamed critics on the left for trying to damage the paper’s credibility. “Just give me honest reporting,” he said. “I don’t care about the orientation.”
One of the key messages both Adelsons wanted to convey to their young audience was to speak up and speak the truth on Israel, asserting that the historical facts make the best case for Israel’s moral legitimacy.
At evening’s end, Adelson, who has a neurological disease impairing his legs, leaned heavily on a member of his entourage as he was escorted out; I was unable to get his attention. Rabbi Boteach later assured me he had put in a good word with Adelson about my quest for an interview.
Three questions I would want to ask him are:
n What message would it send pro-Israel supporters if you, who insists Palestinians are out to destroy the Jewish state, fund a candidate who has said he would be neutral on Israel-Palestinian talks?
n Can Jewish Republicans be comfortable in a party that has moved toward nativism and isolationism?
n How can an aggressive “Maccabee” approach on campus to promote Israel and combat BDS have a positive impact on Jewish students, the great majority of whom are politically progressive?
If I hear from him, I’ll keep you posted.
Gary@jewishweek.org
After a 50-year-career as cantor at Lincoln Square Synagogue, Sherwood Goffin will be honored on his retirement this week. Associate Editor Jonathan Mark reflects on the art of the cantor.New York
The Art Of The Cantor
Fifty years on, Lincoln Square’s Sherwood Goffin lowers his voice.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Sherwood (“The Chazz”) Goffin has been hailed as a defender and passionate practitioner of nusach.Michael Datikash/JW
The nusach (liturgical mode) for Mincha on a late Shabbos afternoon is wistful, gentle, more reflective than the robust melodies of Friday night or Shabbos morning. “If Reuven Van Winkle,” said Cantor Sherwood Goffin, were to awake after a 70-year nap in the forest, and goes to the nearest shul, he should be able to immediately know whether it is Shabbos or Rosh HaShanah or Shavuos,” each with its own nusach, the time-honored mood for different times of day and year, as delivered by the chazzan (cantor).
Old friends, seeing “the Chaz” as he is affectionately known, sense something wistful, reflective, a mood of late afternoon in one of the greatest cantorial careers of modern times. Unlike a previous generation of cantors, he is less celebrated for his voice — strong, nevertheless — than for his intangible attributes. Like all great singers, when Goffin sings (and he is an accomplished Jewish singer, as well as cantor), when he prays, you believe him, you believe all the more in yourself, in the enchantment of prayer.
His retirement is being commemorated on March 27 at Lincoln Square Synagogue, where he’s been the chazzan since 1965. In the room will be everyone from Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the shul’s founding rabbi, to Paul Shaffer, once the musical director for “Saturday Night Live” and David Letterman. Dozens of boldface names were attracted to Goffin over the decades. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, for example, was Goffin’s student, Lincoln Square’s first bat mitzvah (bat Torah, the shul called it, in those pre-bat mitzvah days). He taught her Megillat Ruth for the occasion.
Morning rain darkens the wooden planks that replaced the windows of the old white shul, built for $1.25 million in 1970, waiting for the wrecking ball. About a hundred yards south, in a building $50 million away, is the shul’s new home. Like a new pair of shoes, not quite broken in, it still pinches though better fitting the needs of the congregation. The abandoned building holds lost friends and lovers, the oft-told stories, the small familiarities of a thousand mornings and twilights. Goffin carries his own private memories, simchas and family funerals…
For Goffin, the old shul is not even that white building but a first floor apartment at 150 West End Ave., where Lincoln Square Synagogue was cradled. Goffin was a student, working as a chazzan in a small shul in the northeast Bronx when Rabbi Riskin telephoned. He didn’t have a chazzan, nor enough members skilled enough to lead davening.
“We had worked together at Yeshiva University seminar weekends,” Goffin recalls. “I warmed up the crowd with the guitar, then he talked Torah.”
Goffin learned to play guitar while at Yeshiva University. Before long, “my room started filling up.” Then there was a major event at Yeshiva’s Lampert Auditorium when Goffin was the musical interlude, his debut. He sang Shlomo Carlebach’s ethereal “Haneshama Lach”; the Yiddish love song, “Tumbalalaika”; and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Strange, it now seems, no one just sang Jewish, as they might today, Goffin remembers, “not even Shlomo,” whom Goffin remembers singing “Going Over Jordan.” Goffin planned to sing a fourth Carlebach song, but “my mentor, Professor [Abraham] Hurwitz, father of puppeteer Shari Lewis, told me to stop at three, ‘leave them wanting more.’” In a scene out of “Broadway Danny Rose,” the professor “would take me to the International Guild of Prestidigitators — the magician’s union.” Every performance is a sleight of hand.
At a kumzitz (Jewish hootenanny) Goffin met a young woman, Batya, whose loveliness stayed with him.
Then they found themselves at the Pine View, a legendary Catskills hotel, “when Van Harris, the famous comedian (and the hotel’s entertainment director), asked me to be the lawn singer. I worked an hour a day. Batya did early education in the day camp. By Chanukah we were engaged.”
When Lincoln Square could still fit into that small apartment, Rabbi Riskin told him, “Someday, this will be the biggest shul in the world.” By 1970, the shul was being called “the flagship of Modern Orthodoxy,” and written about in “Time.”
Glenn Richter, an early member of the shul, was national coordinator of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, Yaakov Birnbaum’s second-in-command. Rabbi Riskin was SSSJ’s chairman. “I sang at the Jericho March in 1965,” the first major Soviet Jewry rally, Goffin remembers. He drove in from Long Island’s Jericho, which so delighted Birnbaum that he announced to the crowd that a special guest had come all the way from Jericho itself!
Glenn and Lenore Richter were one of the first weddings at Lincoln Square, or rather, at the apartment on West End. “The bride’s chair was in the lobby next to the doorman. The building couldn’t wait to get rid of us.”
Lincoln Towers, the complex within which 150 West End was located, offered a small parcel on Amsterdam Avenue. New York City, in the early 1970s, was in a downturn, and West Side rents were cheap enough for young people and artists, precisely the people that upstart Lincoln Square was happy to have, and the more established shuls were happy to let them.
On a relatively small lot, Rabbi Riskin had the idea of building a shul-in-the-round, if only because 500 could be seated in a steeped circle compared to 250 in “flat” pews. The intimate circular design put Goffin in the middle, easy for everyone to hear and see, all the easier to stimulate congregational singing.
“From 1970,” said Goffin, “the shul just exploded.” Latecomers would sit in the aisles. “On Simchas Torah we had to close off Amsterdam Avenue, close to 3,000 people dancing in the street. It was a phenomenal time.”
It had become a full-time job and Goffin figured, “I might as well learn how to do it right,” studying the cantorate in Yeshiva and from masters of the art.
“In those days,” said Goffin, “chazzanim never sang niggunim [popular inspirational melodies],” other than a few times, such as the Days of Awe melody wrapped around Borchu. “Until 1915, there was no congregational singing, anywhere. Young Israel (which had no rabbis or cantors in their first decades) created the idea of congregational singing, taking niggunim from wherever they could get it, even from Reform cantors, such as the Shema that everyone knows, and Ki Mitzayon.”
Goffin didn’t want to do the same niggunim every week, so “I started keeping track, eventually with a cycle of seven weeks.”
Congregational singing drew in young people, he said, “but now it has run amok, they throw anything in,” time-honored nusach discarded rather than understood as a possible musical relic of the Holy Temple or David’s harp. Goffin, who teaches at Yeshiva’s Belz School of Music, said, “My passion in life is teaching balabatim [lay leaders] how to daven properly. In Teaneck, 50 people came four weeks in a row to learn how to [lead] davening.”
Cantors are disappearing. Cantor Yanky Lemmer, who became Lincoln Square’s second cantor a few years ago, will succeed Goffin, but “too often when cantors retire, they’re not replaced,” Goffin said. “Partially because of Lincoln Square’s success with outreach and adult education, shuls hire assistant rabbis for that, but often can’t afford both a chazzan and an assistant rabbi. They figure they could always find someone to daven. The quality went down.”
Mati Lazar, director and conductor of the Zamir Chorale, hailed Goffin as “a defender and passionate practitioner of nusach, niggunim, Jewish folk music.”
Richter, a congregant since the apartment days, said, “Sherwood has been the unifying force at LSS through the best and most trying times for the shul, the consummate mensch, the gold standard of being a Jew. He and Shlomo Carlebach were the musical troubadours of the Soviet Jewry movement.”
On the ark-wall of most shuls are the Hebrew words, “Da lifnei …” (Know Before Whom You Stand), meaning God. “The chazzan,” adds Goffin, “also has to be aware of who stands behind him. Who is the congregation? What are their needs, their joys, their sorrows? What will appeal to them, touch their hearts? You need a strong tefillah antennae to sense when they are with you or not. If not, I can feel it right away.”
And what will it be like, after all these years, to daven alone? “I’m not davening alone,” he said. He’s part of a shul he loves. “I stand by my seat and sing harmony. It’s like singing duets.”
As he once told the congregation, “I have heard your prayers, and you have heard mine. … We have joined together all the tears, all the words of our hearts, all the dreams of our minds.”
jonathan@jewishweek.org
Also this week, The Jewish Week to partner online with Times of Israel; Brussels Jewish community on edge; who's more religious, Jewish women or men? Columbia U faculty pushback on BDS; Garland would be fourth Jew on Supreme Court; and two special sections: our 7th annual Kosher Wine Guide, with features and Top 18 Lists, and our annual Purim Spoof ("The Jewish Weak"), with the latest "news" in the spirit of the holiday.
New York
Jewish Week To Partner With Times Of Israel
Staff Report
The Jewish Week this week announced that it is becoming a local partner of The Times of Israel, the fastest-growing Jewish news site in the world.
The agreement, scheduled to go into effect this summer, is designed to boost the online presence of The Jewish Week with increased visibility. It will promote the newspaper’s award-winning content for Internet users in the New York area via the homepage and other pages of Times of Israel, known for its state-of-the-art website.
“We are very pleased to partner with Times of Israel, not only for its remarkable international reach, with 3.5 million unique monthly users, but also for its high-quality, thoughtful and thorough editorial content,” said Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of The Jewish Week.
The paper’s associate publisher and chief revenue officer, Richard Waloff, said, “The opportunities in this agreement are significant. It will greatly increase the digital footprint of The Jewish Week in New York State because Jewish Week’s content will appear in all Times of Israel New York State web pages.
“In addition to benefitting our advertisers in terms of added audience,” he said, “the agreement presents us with greater ability to communicate to online readers and e-newsletter subscribers, thanks to enhanced technologies.”
Times of Israel editor David Horovitz described The Jewish Week as an excellent newspaper, “serving the largest local diaspora community, and working with integrity and flair.” He said the partnership would ensure “far more people read The Jewish Week’s reporting online, complementing its award-winning weekly print edition.”
After four years of continued growth, The Times of Israel currently has some 20 million monthly page views; it publishes in French, Arabic, Chinese and Persian as well as English and has more than 150,000 daily email subscribers and over 5,000 bloggers.
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york/jewish-week-partner-times-israel#PzQlbj64HUBHaysW.99
International
Brussels Jewish Community On Edge
Lockdown after twin attacks kill at least 34; Netanyahu links Belgium, Istanbul attacks to Israel’s terror fight at home.
JTA
A view of bomb damage at Zaventem Airport in Brussels following Tuesday’s terrorist attack in the Belgian capital.
Jewish schools and other institutions in Antwerp and Brussels went into lockdown following attacks in Belgium that killed at least 34 people at the main airport and in the metro in Brussels.
At least 14 people were killed in the attack Tuesday morning at Zaventem Airport, according to the online edition of the Le Soir daily. Officials said a suicide bomber detonated the deadly charge.
About an hour later, another 20 people died in an explosion at a metro station in central Brussels, according to the daily. Several explosions were heard near the Maelbeek district, not far from the headquarters of the European Union.
Dozens were injured in both attacks.
Police advised civilians to remain indoors. Public transportation and flights to and from Zaventem were suspended.
Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying it was in response to Belgium’s participation in the U.S.-led coalition fighting against the group.
Among the wounded was an Israeli citizen who resides in Antwerp and was in Brussels for a wedding, according to Rabbi Pinchas Kornfeld, a community leader from Antwerp. He sustained injuries to his legs but is not in life-threatening condition, Kornfeld said.
Another Jewish person was moderately wounded, according to Samuel Markowitz, a paramedic for Hatzoloh, a local Jewish emergency services organization. Several dozen Jews were among the hundreds of passengers who were evacuated to a safe area near the airport, he added in an interview with the Joods Actueel Jewish monthly.
Shortly after the attacks, the Antwerp World Diamond Center canceled a Purim party it planned for tomorrow “out of respect for the victims and their families,” the center’s CEO, Ari Epstein, told Joods Actueel. Another Purim party by the European Jewish Association was canceled in Brussels, the group’s director, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, said.
The airport attack occurred at 8 a.m. near the American Airlines desk, according to the online edition of Joods Actueel. Kornfeld said many Jewish passengers were traveling between Antwerp, which has a large charedi Orthodox community, and New York.
“It was the right time and place to produce many Jewish casualties,” he said.
Le Soir reported that two explosions ripped through the airport. A federal prosecutor said at least one of the blasts came from a suicide bomber’s explosive vest.
Recess was canceled at dozens of Jewish schools in Antwerp and children were instructed to stay inside the buildings, Kornfeld said. On Tuesday, community leaders were discussing the possibility of canceling school on Wednesday and Purim street festivities planned for Thursday. Shortly thereafter, similar instructions went out from the Belgian government’s crisis center to all of the country’s schools. University students were instructed to refrain from coming to campus.
Witnesses told Joods Actueel that at the airport, they heard shouts in Arabic, gunshots and a massive explosion that tore through the ceiling and produced a thick cloud of white smoke and dust as hundreds of people fled from buildings there.
In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu linked the Brussels attacks to terror attacks in his country.
“The chain of attacks from Paris to San Bernardino, from Istanbul to the Ivory Coast and now to Brussels, and the daily attacks on Israel, this is one continuous assault on all of us,” Netanyahu said Tuesday morning in an address via satellite to the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C. “In all these cases, the terrorists have no resolvable grievances.
“What they seek is our utter destruction,” he said. “We won’t let that happen.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas strongly condemned the bombing attacks, and offered his sympathy to the families of those killed and injured, the Wafa Palestinian news agency reported. Abbas also “affirmed that the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people abhor terrorism and reject attacking civilians.”
The attack comes two days after a suicide bomber detonated himself near a group of Israeli tourists at a restaurant in Istanbul. Turkish reports said the bomber targeted the Israelis. Three of the four fatalities were Israelis.
Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, sent a condolence letter on Tuesday to King Philippe of Belgium.
“Terrorism is terrorism is terrorism, whether it takes place in Brussels, Paris, Istanbul or Jerusalem,” Rivlin wrote. “These horrific events once again prove that we must all stand united in the fight against those who seek to use violence to stifle individual liberty and freedom of thought and belief, and continue to destroy the lives of so many. I want to emphasize that this struggle that we all share is against this violent terrorism that continues to kill and maim so many, it is not a fight against Islam.”
Rivlin expressed his condolences to the people of Belgium.
“Sadly, we, in Israel, are no strangers to the horror and grief that follows such murderous attacks and can understand the pain you all feel now,” he said.
Israel’s minister of science, technology and space, Ofir Akunis, said in a Facebook post that European officials have been wasting their time worrying about labeling products produced in Israeli settlements instead of worrying about the growth of Islamic extremism in Europe.
“Many in Europe have preferred to occupy themselves with the folly of condemning Israel, labeling products, and boycotts,” he wrote. “In this time, underneath the nose of the Continent’s citizens, thousands of extremist Islamic terror cells have grown. To our sorrow, the reality has struck the lives of dozens of innocent people, powerfully and fatally.” New York
Who’s More Religious, Jewish Men Or Women?
Israel is the only country where a higher percentage of men than women engage in daily prayer, a Pew survey found.
Steve Lipman
Staff Writer
Israeli women pray in temple in Djerba, Tunisia, as part of annual pilgrimage. Getty Images
On the eve of a Jewish holiday that celebrates one Jewish woman’s contribution to Jewish survival, a major study this week offered some intriguing insights into the religious practices of Jewish women — and of a few billion Christian and Muslim women.
The Pew Research Center study, “The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World,” which concentrated on the world’s two largest monotheistic faiths, found that Christian women, as commonly believed, are, by many measures, more “religious” than Christian men, while the same disparity largely does not hold in the Muslim community.
And among Jews?
The findings are mixed.
According to the study, which was released on Tuesday — a day before the start of Purim, which centers around Queen Esther’s life-saving role in ancient Persia — Jewish men in Israel attend worship services more regularly and consider religion more important than do Jewish women.
“Only in Israel … does a higher percentage of men than women report engaging in daily prayer,” the report states. “Only in Israel and Mozambique [a southern African nation whose residents are a mixture of Christians and Muslims] are men more likely than women to consider religion very important to them personally.”
But in another category, religious self-affiliation, Jewish women come out slightly ahead of Jewish men.
The Pew study, which covers 192 countries and is based on several research surveys conducted over the last several years, does not offer definitive explanations for the apparently contradictory figures in Jewish circles, and often raises more questions than it answers, said Conrad Hackett, a Pew demographer. “There’s something different going on among Jews than among Christians and Muslims.”
One possible explanation for the higher prayer figure in Israel for Jewish men is that Israel, compared to the United States, has a higher percentage of Orthodox Jews, who consider daily prayer, especially in a synagogue, more binding on men than on women. But this fact does not explain why Jewish men in Israel are more likely than Jewish women to consider religion important.
“In the United States, the pattern of Jewish women being more likely than men to say religion is very important to them is similar to the same pattern seen among the general population of the country,” Hackett told The Jewish Week. “Among Orthodox Jews, women are 22 points more likely to say religion is very important [94 percent to 72 percent] and among Reform Jews there is a 10 point gap (22 percent to 12 percent].”
“The fact that women do not attend as frequently or participate as fully as men in some countries does not necessarily mean they are less pious,” the study cautions.
The Pew report’s Jewish statistics refer “to Jews who identify as Jewish by religion, as opposed to those who identify as Jewish only by culture or ancestry and not by religion,” the study states; it did not deal with people who consider themselves “spiritual” rather than “religious.”
“In the United States,” the study notes, “Jewish women are 8 percentage points more likely than men to say religion is very important to them.”
In other words, Jews in this country and Israel practice and view religion in different ways, which is not exactly news.
Interpretation of the Jewish statistics awaits further study, Hackett said. “Jews are complicated.”
steve@jewishweek.orgNew York
BDS Brawl At Columbia Ignites Faculty Pushback
Response aided by national campaign to unite campus faculty against Israel divestment.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
David Schizer, former dean of Columbia Law School.
In a demonstration of faculty resistance to Israel delegitimization efforts at Columbia University, more than 200 of the school’s professors and administrators, including former deans, signed a petition this week countering a new Israel divestment campaign sweeping the uptown campus.
The petition, which calls for university trustees not to divest from companies that conduct business with Israel, pushes back against another petition signed by 40 Columbia faculty members earlier this month; that petition urged the university to divest from companies that “supply, perpetuate, and profit from a system that has subjugated the Palestinian people.”
Aside from the faculty letter supporting divestment, the student-led campaign, titled “Columbia University Apartheid Divest,” has not made any significant headway, according to students. Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the student groups behind the divestment effort, did not respond to requests for comment.
David Schizer, the former dean of Columbia Law School who organized the responding petition, said that the action was necessary in order to “correct public misconceptions about the university.”
“People outside the Columbia community might think the majority of faculty here would like to see the university divest. That is absolutely untrue,” he said. While a previous strategy had been to “ignore this small but very forceful group,” the time had come for pro-Israel faculty members to speak out, he said. “It doesn’t serve the university well for people to think that those of us who disagree don’t care as much about the issue.”
Efforts by the Columbia faculty echo national efforts to unite professors against the fight to delegitimize Israel on campus. In January, Kenneth Waltzer, former director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University, launched the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), an initiative to encourage academics around the country to facilitate constructive dialogue about Israel. Unlike previous right-wing groups that have organized efforts to combat BDS on campus, AEN stands on the left side of the spectrum — “center, liberal and progressive,” Waltzer told The Jewish Week.
According to Walter, the AEN played a role in Columbia petition. “AEN faculty members at Columbia initiated and circulated the petition,” he wrote to The Jewish Week in an email, adding that members of his organization are “pleased with the outcome.”
In order to attract the widest support base possible, members of AEN faced the task of drafting a “balanced” letter to faculty, Schizer said.
“Issues around Israeli policy are complicated — it was a challenge to write something that enough people would feel comfortable signing,” he said. A letter that failed to recognize the “complexity of the situation,” could have compromised efforts, he said.
“We do not mean to suggest that we agree with every policy of the Israeli government . ... Yet it would not be just or principled to respond to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by disengaging from Israel or from companies that do business with Israel,” the letter reads.
Dorothy Denburg, former dean of Barnard College, said she signed the petition because it was “reasonable.”
“Unlike many statements, it didn’t claim Israel was 100 percent right or 100 wrong,” said Denburg, adding that she signed as a “private citizen,” though she understood the importance of using her official title. “I’m not wearing my Barnard hat—in no way do I speak for the college. It’s the first time I felt that I could sign something like this.”
Today, Denburg works as the director of college counseling at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School. She discusses parents’ fears about sending their children into a “hotbed of anti-Israel activity” every day, she said.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve mentioned school A, B or C in a family meeting only to have the parents say, ‘I could never send my kid there,’” she said. She blames the “over-simplification of the issues with a resulting un-nuanced criticism of Israel” for creating a situation of intimidation and fear on campus. “This is not going away so fast. It’s important whenever possible to push back with a reasoned, balanced response.”
Daniella Greenbaum, president of Aryeh, the Columbia student association for Israel, said the faculty petition amplified the student-run campaign “Invest in Peace,” which aimed to educate students about how divestment will only make it harder to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The faculty petition also follows a student-circulated declaration to condemn Apartheid Divest that garnered over 600 signatures from students, alumni, and faculty.
“The traction of these petitions demonstrate that BDS is a step too far,” said Greenbaum, a college junior. “It is not a solution to any problem that exists on the ground. Yes, there are professors here at Columbia who support divestment, but there are also many who think it’s a terrible idea.”
Judith Jacobson, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia Medical Center, described the collaboration between professors and students as unique.
“It is kind of shocking to me to find out that more than a decade after the first divestment push, both students and faculty are still feeling isolated about this issue,” said Jacobson, who played a lead role in circulating the petition. In 2003-2004, she was active in combating a similar campaign supporting divestment from Israel. She was pleased to see that “many new people” were interested in speaking out against divestment this time around.
Though her optimism for progress is checked by what she sees as a cyclical nature of the divestment campaigns, she is driven by a need to represent the “truth about Israel and about the real problems in the Middle East.”
“I can’t stand the lies,” said Jacobson, who said she is prepared for the “long haul” when it comes to this fight. “Though a lot of faculty and students oppose divestment, supporters of BDS are so much noisier. It’s time those who believe in Israel’s right to exist stand up and be counted.” National
Garland Pick ‘Testament To America’
Obama’s nominee, if confirmed, would be fourth Jew on High Court; Americans back Senate vote now.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Federal appeals court Judge Merrick Garland with President Obama last week after he was tapped for a seat on the High Court.Gett
President Barack Obama last week nominated to the Supreme Court a Jewish judge, Merrick Garland, who is currently the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. If confirmed, he would be the fourth Jew on the nine-member court.
“It is a remarkable testament to America that a fourth Jew can be nominated to the court and that his religion is not an impediment,” said Marc Stern, general counsel for the American Jewish Committee.
If confirmed, Garland would fill the seat held by Antonin Scalia, who died last month.
Stern said he believes it unlikely that Garland’s religion will “generate substantial opposition from those who would say there are too many Jews on the court. Nobody is threatening violence against the Jews, as happened in Europe when they thought the Jews were too powerful. … It’s unprecedented in the long history of the diaspora that you have an institution as powerful as the Supreme Court and that there could be four members who are Jewish when Jews constitute less than 2 percent of the population.”
“It’s remarkable to us, not to anybody else,” he added.
But it is likely to be politics and not anything else that derails Garland’s nomination. Just minutes after Obama finished announcing his selection in the White House Rose Garden with Garland at his side, Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor to affirm his commitment to block the nomination.
It is “about a principle and not about a person,” McConnell stressed.
He justified his decision by quoting a 1992 speech by then-Senate Democrat Joe Biden when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in which he said the Senate should not hold hearings to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in an election year. Biden insists the Republicans have misrepresented his position.
McConnell said he is convinced that Obama’s decision to announce a nomination knowing the Republican-controlled Senate would not consider it was made “to politicize it for the purpose of the election.”
A CBS-New York Times poll released this week found that 53 percent of Americans think the Senate should hold a vote on the Garland nomination; 42 percent say the Senate should wait for the next president to nominate a justice. Seventy-five percent of Democrats polled said the vote should be taken now, while 65 percent of Republicans polled said the vote should wait.
In a Gallup Poll, also released this week, 52 percent of Americans say Garland should be confirmed, while 29 percent oppose his confirmation.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) pointed out in a statement that Garland is a “thoughtful jurist with impeccable credentials who has already garnered overwhelming bipartisan support for a job that requires nearly the exact same criteria as a Supreme Court justice. He gets the impact of the court’s decisions on hardworking Americans in the real world. We hope the saner heads in the Republican Party will prevail” so that hearings can be held.
“If Merrick Garland can’t get bipartisan support no one can,” he added.
Nathan Diament, executive director for public policy for the Orthodox Union, speculated that should former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton win the presidential election in November, “you could imagine a scenario in which the Republicans would want to confirm him if he is perceived as a moderate and they are worried that Hillary might nominate someone who is more liberal.”
Asked what would happen should Republican New York businessman Donald Trump win the presidency, Diament replied: “As Yogi Berra once said, predictions are difficult, especially when they are about the future.”
But all of these political machinations appeared to be the furthest thing on his mind as Garland, 63, stepped before the microphone to accept Obama’s nomination. As he did so, he suddenly became overcome with emotion and, choking up, thanked Obama for “the greatest honor of my life.”
Born to a Jewish mother and a Protestant father, Garland, a Chicago native, was raised as a Jew. He has worked in Washington since the 1970s, first as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., then a private lawyer, an assistant U.S. attorney and, since 1997, a federal judge.
Garland is a Harvard Law School graduate who married a fellow Harvard graduate, Lynn Rosenman, in a Jewish ceremony in 1987. She sat next to their two daughters as he credited his family with his success.
He recalled that his grandparents “left the Pale of Settlement at the border of Western Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, fleeing anti-Semitism and hoping to make a better life for their children in America.”
Garland said they eventually made their way to Chicago and that his father, Cyril, ran a small business from their basement. His mother, Shirley, whom Garland said was watching the proceedings on television, headed the local PTA “all the while instilling in my sisters and me the understanding that service to the community is a responsibility above all others.”
His wife’s grandfather, Samuel I. Rosenman, was an advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II.
In accepting the nomination, Garland also spelled out his judicial philosophy, saying a judge “must be faithful to the Constitution and to the statutes passed by the Congress. He or she must put aside his personal views or preferences and follow the law — not make it. Fidelity to the Constitution and the law has been the cornerstone of my professional life, and is the hallmark of the kind of judge I have tried to be for the past 18 years.”
In announcing Garland as his nominee, Obama said he anticipated the Republican response but asked that they reconsider.
“I simply ask Republicans in the Senate to give him a fair hearing and then an up or down vote,” he said. “If you don’t, then it will not only be an abdication of the Senate’s constitutional duty, it will indicate a process for nominating and confirming judges that is beyond repair. It will mean everything is subject to the most partisan of politics, everything. It will provoke an endless cycle of more tit for tat and make it increasingly impossible for any president, Democrat or Republican, to carry out their constitutional function.”
“The reputation of the Supreme Court will inevitably suffer,” Obama added. “Faith in our justice system will inevitably suffer. Our democracy will ultimately suffer as well. … He is the right man for the job. He deserves to be confirmed. I could not be prouder of the work that he has already done on behalf of the American people. He deserves our thanks and he deserves a fair hearing.”
stewart@jewishweek.org
Kosher Wine Guide 2016
‘The Sweet Spot Is $65’
A Top-Chef Passover
Toys For The Oenophile
Plus The Top 18 Lists
Friday, March 18, 2016 (All day)
Inside This Special Section
- The One-Man Kosher Bordeaux Revolution
- ‘The Sweet Spot Is $65’
- New Moves For Napa’s Kosher Wine King
- A Top-Chef Passover
- You Gotta Know The Terroir-tory
- Toys For The Oenophile
- The Tastemakers
- ALL TOP WINES
- TOP ISRAELI WINES
- TOP RED WINES $25 AND OVER
- TOP RED WINES
- TOP RED WINES UNDER $25
- TOP ROSE, SPARKLING, SWEET WINES
- TOP WHITE WINES $18 AND OVER
- TOP WHITE WINES
- TOP WHITE WINES UNDER $18
- The One-Man Kosher Bordeaux Revolution ›
Purim Spoof 2016
Tuesday, March 22, 2016 (All day)
Inside This Special Section
- Trump Taps Mussolini As Running Mate
- Steve Harvey To Announce Winner At Republican Convention
- The Donald Wins Prominent Jewish Endorsement
- Lin-Manuel Miranda To Write New ‘Lewsical’
- Orthodox Actors Plan Oscars Boycott
- Scientists Find Adar The Punniest Month
- All-Denominational Prayer Book Published
- Uber Driver Accused Of Being Nazi
- Trump Taps Mussolini As Running Mate ›
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Check out our website any time for breaking news, blogs, opinion essays and more.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/?utm_source=March+23%2C+2016+Wednesday+JW+newsletter&utm_campaign=Wed+3%2F16+Newsletter&utm_medium=email
Purim Spoof 2016
Purim Spoof 2016
Tuesday, March 22, 2016 (All day)
Inside This Special Section
- Trump Taps Mussolini As Running Mate
- Steve Harvey To Announce Winner At Republican Convention
- The Donald Wins Prominent Jewish Endorsement
- Lin-Manuel Miranda To Write New ‘Lewsical’
- Orthodox Actors Plan Oscars Boycott
- Scientists Find Adar The Punniest Month
- All-Denominational Prayer Book Published
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Off-Script Trump Forces Rare AIPAC Rebuke
GOP frontrunner's Obama dig leads to divisiveness.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, left, and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Getty Images
Despite a carefully crafted speech to the pro-Israel group AIPAC Monday in which Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump pledged that as president there would be “no daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, he again sowed divisiveness when he went offscript — prompting a rare rebuke from his host.
In a tearful statement she read at the beginning of Tuesday’s proceedings, AIPAC President Lillian Pinkus chastised not only Trump but also the delegates who applauded when Trump suddenly stopped speaking and let out a “Yay” after having just said that President Barak Obama has only one year left in office.
As the delegates cheered and applauded, Trump said: “He may be the worst thing to ever happen to Israel, believe me, believe me. And you know it, and you know it better than anybody.”
In her statement, Pinkus said that AIPAC does not “countenance ad hominem attacks, and we take great offense to those that are levied at the president of the United States of America from our stage. While we may have policy differences, we deeply respect the office of the president of the United States and our president, Barack Obama. We are disappointed that so many people applauded a sentiment that we neither agree with nor condone.”
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union of Reform Judaism, said he was “heartened” by the statement. He said he and hundreds of other delegates — including many rabbis and cantors — chose to “respectfully” walk out of the arena as Trump entered and to congregate in the hall to study Jewish texts about affirming human dignity.
“While we were studying, we could hear loud applause and our discussion was drowned out by some loud cheering,” he told The Jewish Week.
He said he later learned that the cheering occurred when Trump disparaged Obama.
“The bipartisan foundation of AIPAC’s work was called into question,” he said. “The takeaway for too many people is that despite his hate and bigotry, he was warmly welcomed into the largest pro-Israel gathering in our country.”
Rabbi Jacobs noted that Trump has yet to respond to URJ’s request for a meeting “so he could hear our deep discomfort and outrage at the way he disparaged Muslims, women, immigrants, Mexicans and people with disabilities. ... It still seems that he does not share our values of equality, pluralism, and humility.”
But Rabbi David Nesenoff, founder of the newly launched Twitter account, @Rabbisfortrump, said he found the AIPAC statement upsetting because had the crowd “booed Trump, AIPAC would not have cared. It was a totally partisan statement. Since when can’t you speak for or against something in a public forum? Maybe it showed there is discontent among American Jews to what our president has done to Israel. … AIPAC cannot police individual people for their emotions when they hear the truth.”
The dustup over Trump’s comments appears to have overshadowed a day of speeches to the AIPAC Policy Conference by four of the presidential candidates.
Only Democratic Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, missed the event. He was campaigning in the West and was denied an opportunity to appear on video, something that candidates have done at previous AIPAC conferences. Instead, he sent a speech he had delivered that evening in Salt Lake City. And it was nothing like what the AIPAC delegates heard from the other candidates.
After affirming that he would “work tirelessly to advance the cause of peace as a partner and as a friend to Israel,” he said success can only be achieved if the U.S. is a friend to the Palestinian people, too.
“You can’t have good policy that results in peace if you ignore one side. ... Peace will require the unconditional recognition by all people of Israel’s right to exist. It will require an end to attacks of all kinds against Israel. Peace will require that organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah renounce their efforts to undermine the security of Israel. It will require the entire world to recognize Israel. Peace has to mean security for every Israeli from violence and terrorism.
“But peace also means security for every Palestinian. It means achieving self-determination, civil rights, and economic well-being for the Palestinian people. Peace will mean ending what amounts to the occupation of Palestinian territory, establishing mutually agreed-upon borders, and pulling back settlements in the West Bank, just as Israel did in Gaza — once considered an unthinkable move on Israel’s part. … Peace will also mean ending the economic blockade of Gaza.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the last Republican presidential candidate to speak, said many of the same things as his fellow Republicans and added that he would work to defund any university that supported the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.
And because he went last, he had the chance to correct Trump for using the word “Palestine” in his speech instead of referring to the Palestinian Authority. “Palestine has not existed since 1948,” he said.
He also took a swipe at Clinton, reminding the crowd of 18,000 that in 2014 Clinton had said Israeli rockets had occasionally hit civilian areas in Gaza during the Israeli war with Hamas because Gaza is densely populated.
“Well, Madam Secretary, with all respect, the reason the missiles are in schools is not because Gaza is small. The reason the missiles are in schools is because Hamas are terrorist monsters using children as human shields.”
[The speeches of Clinton, Trump and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are reported on The Jewish Week website, thejewishweek.com.]
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, said he found some of the candidates’ speeches “more understanding of the Arab war against Israel and what steps must be taken about it. One must look at the history and background of each candidate’s long-term record on Israel … and not rely on a single speech to a pro-Israel audience where pandering may well be a factor in what a candidate says. And one of the candidates fervently supported the Iran nuclear deal, which is a disaster for Israel and one that 90 percent of Israelis oppose.”
His reference was to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who said in her remarks that she believed the agreement is a good one but that as president she would ensure that Iran did not cheat.
Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University, agreed that “there is an element of cynicism” in the statements candidates make to a pro-Israel gathering.
“Both Hillary and Trump said the same things to win the AIPAC electoral base,” he said. “But Hillary Clinton has a mixed record on Israel and the image of her sitting quietly while Suha Arafat accused Israel of gassing Palestinians is still strong.”
The incident occurred in 1999. Suha Arafat is the widow of Palestinian President Yasir Arafat; Clinton was then first lady.
Steinberg said Clinton changed her positions on Israel and the Middle East between the time she served as a New York senator and when she became secretary of state. And he said recently released emails Clinton received while secretary of state included many from an adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, and others that espoused what he considered to be anti-Israel positions.
But Peter Joseph, a Democratic donor and Clinton supporter, discounted those emails and said she “hears from many voices and makes her own decisions. She is well-informed and a strong decision maker.”
He also discounted the “political rhetoric” heard from the other presidential candidates at the AIPAC conference, saying their words “are not an indication of their experience, depth of analysis and pro-Israel instinct. … I think there are grave differences among the candidates with respect to Israel, and so I think Israel is very much” an issue in the election.
After watching and providing commentary on the speeches for the Jewish Broadcasting Service, novelist Thane Rosenbaum said he believes everyone in the hall expected each candidate “to say the right things — that it is in America’s interests to treat Israel as a special ally.” Coming into the conference, he said, only Trump was the “wild card.”
“He has made for a charismatic candidate who was grossly ill-informed,” he said. “If you are just watching CNN and reading The New York Times, you may think it is all Israel’s fault. … He is staking his reputation on not being politically correct, but by doing so, he naturally alienates and frightens those who believe civility is an important ingredient in what we want as a president.”
The AIPAC event, Rosenbaum said, forced Trump to consult with others and for the first time as a presidential candidate write a speech and read it from a teleprompter.
“That forces a clarity -- you have to be very specific and unequivocal,” he said. “Enough improvisation. The audience wanted to hear declarative, unambiguous statements of support from a person having a full appreciation of the complexities of the Middle East. This audience was not to be persuaded with mere platitudes and empty clichés but wanted to know whether they have a full understanding of what happening in the region.”
In his AIPAC remarks, Trump made no reference to his previous position that he would remain neutral on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Asked about that, Rabbi Nesenoff, the Trump supporter, said: “After last night, the neutrality word will never be uttered again. Donald Trump realizes that the two most important things concerning Israel are Iran’s nuclear weapons and Islamic radicalization. … The Israeli-Palestinian situation is a non-issue. There is nothing to be discussed when Palestinians are stabbing and killing you.”ste
stewart@jewishweek.org
JTA
Young Israelis celebrating Purim in the Nahlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem in 2014. Nati Shohat/Flash 90
It’s one of the biggest conundrums facing the Jewish community: How do we get millennial Jews excited about being Jewish?
As a millennial Jew myself, I think I have the answer: Purim.
If you’re scratching your head, bear with me. Erase the images of young girls with tiaras and little boys with drawn-on mustaches. Forget your memories of screeches and tears at the synagogue’s Purim carnival.
Instead, imagine groups of 20- and 30-something Jews — perhaps alongside a cadre of equally fun-loving non-Jews — having a blast. They’ll dress up in all sorts of costumes: some over the top, some funny, some sexy, some political. They’d meet up at their friends’ apartments, hang out and have a few drinks. Then they’d head out to parties at popular bars, meeting other friends and making new ones.
If that doesn’t sound like Purim to you, it’s at least what Purim could be.
The holiday involves retelling the story of Esther, who saved thousands of Jews from the deadly designs of an evil Persian vizier. There are synagogue services, costume contests for the kids, and the baking and eating of tasty three-cornered cookies known as hamantaschen. But few secular Jews seem to know that it’s also considered a mitzvah to drink on Purim — to drink so much, in fact, that one can no longer tell the difference between Haman, the story’s villain, and Mordechai, one of the Jewish heroes.
In Israel, in fact, Purim is the equivalent of the American Halloween. Religious and secular Jews wear costumes, party with their friends and generally let loose.
In other words, Purim is an excuse to party like it’s 500 BCE.
Theoretically, Purim should be one of the easiest Jewish holidays for young Jews to get excited about. It doesn’t involve fasting or an arduous amount of praying. So why don’t unaffiliated young Jews like myself go to Purim parties every year?
This doesn’t really happen — yet, anyway — because Purim lacks brand-name recognition in the United States, said Dina Mann, the national marketing and outreach manager for Reboot, an organization that aims to “rethink Jewish ritual in the 21st century.”
“It’s not really a part of the zeitgeist the way Chanukah is,” Mann said. (Which is pretty lame, since celebrating Purim can be way more fun than playing dreidel — just ask anyone over 5.)
“I think Purim is like the long-lost holiday of the Jewish people in many ways,” said Rabbi Avram Mlotek, a co-founder of Base Hillel, a Hillel International project that aims to engage millennials through low-key programming at the homes of two young New York rabbis. “The ingredients are all there, the recipe for a holiday that totally relates to our current times.”
Quietly, some groups that cater to millennials are getting the message. There are some young adult-oriented Purim parties in New York City this year, including a feast and party at the Manhattan Base Hillel house — Mlotek’s Union Square home — which opened last July.
Additionally, there are concerts at Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg and Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village — two venues with their fair share of hipster caché.
“Purim is one of the most joyous and fun holidays on the Jewish calendar,” Brooklyn Bowl founder Peter Shapiro told JTA in an email. “It’s really got the feel of a festival and we created Brooklyn Bowl to be a venue that feels a bit like a fun festival, so it’s a natural fit for us to celebrate the holiday.”
Shapiro’s venue will host Zusha, a chasidic group that combines religious vocal melodies with modern folk music. A Wa, a trio of Arab-Israeli sisters who made a splash with their electronic Yemeni music, will play at Le Poisson Rouge.
My friend Jonathan Katz, 24, will be at the A Wa concert, the first big Purim celebration he will be attending in years.
“In case you’re wondering, hipster Purim things are now happening!” he messaged me recently.
But if we are going to see Drake tweeting a photo of himself wearing a Purim mask — similar to what he does on Chanukah, when he shares photos of himself looking like the Jewish godfather — it may be up to millennials like me.
“The Jewish model for most events is from the top down,” said Rabbi Brad Greenstein, the rabbi and director of immersive learning at Moishe House, a nonprofit that funds Jewish programming at 85 apartments and houses around the world, where small groups of young Jews live together and host events.
In other words, most Purim parties are organized by synagogues and other Jewish organizations. They plan events and hope they’ll attract young people.
By contrast, Moishe House residents come up with their own party ideas.
“It’s on them to create the event that they want to see happen,” Greenstein said.
Some of the Purim parties planned at Moishe houses this year include an improv comedy bash in Beijing, a bar mitzvah-themed party in Palo Alto, Calif., and a wine tasting in Washington, D.C.
“Millennials and young Jews aren’t running to synagogues anymore; I don’t know if they ever were,” Mlotek said. “They want to go to a friend’s place.”
In theory, Purim’s timing — in the early spring, months past the endless round of holiday parties but well before anyone can realistically dream of summer — could be a benefit. But there are other obstacles to overcome.
“It seems like the Jewish Halloween,” said my friend Esther Schoenfeld, 23, who doesn’t mean this as a compliment. “So non-Jews wouldn’t celebrate that, and Jews who were secular and already get really into Halloween are like, ‘OK, we kind of already have this.’”
Purim, said Mann, is subject to an unfortunate feedback loop — because so few people know about Purim, it’s harder for it to break into the secular Jewish world.
Greenstein, however, sees potential in Purim. The holiday’s themes align with categories that he has seen resonate most with young Jews, especially social justice. The story of Queen Esther, he says, is ripe for a celebration of women’s rights.
But for those who may not describe a discussion of second-wave feminism as their idea of good time, Purim remains an untapped resource waiting for its mainstream moment. In our multicultural day and age, various holidays are increasingly embraced by American society at large. Practically everyone — Irish or not — celebrates St. Patrick’s Day. The Hindu holiday of Holi, which involves getting covered in colorful paint powder, is fast becoming part of the springtime party calendar.
And yet, Purim remains relegated to child’s play. And maybe that is just how it is meant to be. After all, there are always positives to flying under the radar.
“I personally like Purim when it is,” Mann said. “You can get discount Halloween costumes after Halloween.”
Fifty years on, Lincoln Square's Sherwood Goffin lowers his voice.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Sherwood (“The Chazz”) Goffin has been hailed as a defender and passionate practitioner of nusach.Michael Datikash/JW
The nusach (liturgical mode) for Mincha on a late Shabbos afternoon is wistful, gentle, more reflective than the robust melodies of Friday night or Shabbos morning. “If Reuven Van Winkle,” said Cantor Sherwood Goffin, were to awake after a 70-year nap in the forest, and goes to the nearest shul, he should be able to immediately know whether it is Shabbos or Rosh HaShanah or Shavuos,” each with its own nusach, the time-honored mood for different times of day and year, as delivered by the chazzan (cantor).
Old friends, seeing “the Chaz” as he is affectionately known, sense something wistful, reflective, a mood of late afternoon in one of the greatest cantorial careers of modern times. Unlike a previous generation of cantors, he is less celebrated for his voice — strong, nevertheless — than for his intangible attributes. Like all great singers, when Goffin sings (and he is an accomplished Jewish singer, as well as cantor), when he prays, you believe him, you believe all the more in yourself, in the enchantment of prayer.
His retirement is being commemorated on March 27 at Lincoln Square Synagogue, where he’s been the chazzan since 1965. In the room will be everyone from Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the shul’s founding rabbi, to Paul Shaffer, once the musical director for “Saturday Night Live” and David Letterman. Dozens of boldface names were attracted to Goffin over the decades. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, for example, was Goffin’s student, Lincoln Square’s first bat mitzvah (bat Torah, the shul called it, in those pre-bat mitzvah days). He taught her Megillat Ruth for the occasion.
Morning rain darkens the wooden planks that replaced the windows of the old white shul, built for $1.25 million in 1970, waiting for the wrecking ball. About a hundred yards south, in a building $50 million away, is the shul’s new home. Like a new pair of shoes, not quite broken in, it still pinches though better fitting the needs of the congregation. The abandoned building holds lost friends and lovers, the oft-told stories, the small familiarities of a thousand mornings and twilights. Goffin carries his own private memories, simchas and family funerals…
For Goffin, the old shul is not even that white building but a first floor apartment at 150 West End Ave., where Lincoln Square Synagogue was cradled. Goffin was a student, working as a chazzan in a small shul in the northeast Bronx when Rabbi Riskin telephoned. He didn’t have a chazzan, nor enough members skilled enough to lead davening.
“We had worked together at Yeshiva University seminar weekends,” Goffin recalls. “I warmed up the crowd with the guitar, then he talked Torah.”
Goffin learned to play guitar while at Yeshiva University. Before long, “my room started filling up.” Then there was a major event at Yeshiva’s Lampert Auditorium when Goffin was the musical interlude, his debut. He sang Shlomo Carlebach’s ethereal “Haneshama Lach”; the Yiddish love song, “Tumbalalaika”; and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Strange, it now seems, no one just sang Jewish, as they might today, Goffin remembers, “not even Shlomo,” whom Goffin remembers singing “Going Over Jordan.” Goffin planned to sing a fourth Carlebach song, but “my mentor, Professor [Abraham] Hurwitz, father of puppeteer Shari Lewis, told me to stop at three, ‘leave them wanting more.’” In a scene out of “Broadway Danny Rose,” the professor “would take me to the International Guild of Prestidigitators — the magician’s union.” Every performance is a sleight of hand.
At a kumzitz (Jewish hootenanny) Goffin met a young woman, Batya, whose loveliness stayed with him.
Then they found themselves at the Pine View, a legendary Catskills hotel, “when Van Harris, the famous comedian (and the hotel’s entertainment director), asked me to be the lawn singer. I worked an hour a day. Batya did early education in the day camp. By Chanukah we were engaged.”
When Lincoln Square could still fit into that small apartment, Rabbi Riskin told him, “Someday, this will be the biggest shul in the world.” By 1970, the shul was being called “the flagship of Modern Orthodoxy,” and written about in “Time.”
Glenn Richter, an early member of the shul, was national coordinator of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, Yaakov Birnbaum’s second-in-command. Rabbi Riskin was SSSJ’s chairman. “I sang at the Jericho March in 1965,” the first major Soviet Jewry rally, Goffin remembers. He drove in from Long Island’s Jericho, which so delighted Birnbaum that he announced to the crowd that a special guest had come all the way from Jericho itself!
Glenn and Lenore Richter were one of the first weddings at Lincoln Square, or rather, at the apartment on West End. “The bride’s chair was in the lobby next to the doorman. The building couldn’t wait to get rid of us.”
Lincoln Towers, the complex within which 150 West End was located, offered a small parcel on Amsterdam Avenue. New York City, in the early 1970s, was in a downturn, and West Side rents were cheap enough for young people and artists, precisely the people that upstart Lincoln Square was happy to have, and the more established shuls were happy to let them.
On a relatively small lot, Rabbi Riskin had the idea of building a shul-in-the-round, if only because 500 could be seated in a steeped circle compared to 250 in “flat” pews. The intimate circular design put Goffin in the middle, easy for everyone to hear and see, all the easier to stimulate congregational singing.
“From 1970,” said Goffin, “the shul just exploded.” Latecomers would sit in the aisles. “On Simchas Torah we had to close off Amsterdam Avenue, close to 3,000 people dancing in the street. It was a phenomenal time.”
It had become a full-time job and Goffin figured, “I might as well learn how to do it right,” studying the cantorate in Yeshiva and from masters of the art.
“In those days,” said Goffin, “chazzanim never sang niggunim [popular inspirational melodies],” other than a few times, such as the Days of Awe melody wrapped around Borchu. “Until 1915, there was no congregational singing, anywhere. Young Israel (which had no rabbis or cantors in their first decades) created the idea of congregational singing, taking niggunim from wherever they could get it, even from Reform cantors, such as the Shema that everyone knows, and Ki Mitzayon.”
Goffin didn’t want to do the same niggunim every week, so “I started keeping track, eventually with a cycle of seven weeks.”
Congregational singing drew in young people, he said, “but now it has run amok, they throw anything in,” time-honored nusach discarded rather than understood as a possible musical relic of the Holy Temple or David’s harp. Goffin, who teaches at Yeshiva’s Belz School of Music, said, “My passion in life is teaching balabatim [lay leaders] how to daven properly. In Teaneck, 50 people came four weeks in a row to learn how to [lead] davening.”
Cantors are disappearing. Cantor Yanky Lemmer, who became Lincoln Square’s second cantor a few years ago, will succeed Goffin, but “too often when cantors retire, they’re not replaced,” Goffin said. “Partially because of Lincoln Square’s success with outreach and adult education, shuls hire assistant rabbis for that, but often can’t afford both a chazzan and an assistant rabbi. They figure they could always find someone to daven. The quality went down.”
Mati Lazar, director and conductor of the Zamir Chorale, hailed Goffin as “a defender and passionate practitioner of nusach, niggunim, Jewish folk music.”
Richter, a congregant since the apartment days, said, “Sherwood has been the unifying force at LSS through the best and most trying times for the shul, the consummate mensch, the gold standard of being a Jew. He and Shlomo Carlebach were the musical troubadours of the Soviet Jewry movement.”
On the ark-wall of most shuls are the Hebrew words, “Da lifnei …” (Know Before Whom You Stand), meaning God. “The chazzan,” adds Goffin, “also has to be aware of who stands behind him. Who is the congregation? What are their needs, their joys, their sorrows? What will appeal to them, touch their hearts? You need a strong tefillah antennae to sense when they are with you or not. If not, I can feel it right away.”
And what will it be like, after all these years, to daven alone? “I’m not davening alone,” he said. He’s part of a shul he loves. “I stand by my seat and sing harmony. It’s like singing duets.”
As he once told the congregation, “I have heard your prayers, and you have heard mine. … We have joined together all the tears, all the words of our hearts, all the dreams of our minds.”
jonathan@jewishweek.org
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For Ethiopians Left Behind, Another Wrongful Delay OpinionFor Ethiopians Left Behind, Another Wrongful Delay
Joseph Feit
Operation Solomon was a covert Israeli military operation to airlift Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991. Wikimedia Commons
Last November 15, the Israeli government unanimously decided to bring to Israel approximately 9,000 Ethiopians, 70 percent of whom have first-degree relatives in Israel. Left behind because they were only paternally linked, these people returned to Judaism years ago. All will undertake a full conversion, like the more than 50,000 Ethiopians who arrived after Operation Solomon. Even ministers from the charedi Shas party voted for the resolution.
But three weeks ago, the government refused to commence aliyah, as required by the resolution, claiming no budget for 2016. Instead, it said it is willing to bring about 500 sick and/or elderly people as “humanitarian” cases. Since almost all of the 9,000 refugees endure unimaginable suffering, all should be eligible as “humanitarian” cases.
The government also stated that a new law retroactively nullifies the resolution with respect to aliyah in 2017 and 2018. Infuriated, an Ashkenazi charedi member of Knesset, Moshe Gafni, said the law must be revoked if interpreted to preclude bringing these paternally linked Jews.
In fact, the government’s argument that the law applies retroactively is nonsense; the statute itself provides effective dates that fall after the November 2015 decision.
The new law was adopted one week after the government resolution. Is it imaginable that the ministers passed a resolution, knowing it would be void in seven days? Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit and then Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein were present when the aliyah resolution passed; why didn’t they speak up? And if the law is retroactive, why doesn’t the government invalidate other cabinet decisions? Should retroactivity apply solely to decisions benefitting Ethiopian Jews?
Thousands of Ethiopians demonstrated last Sunday to protest the government’s wrongful and unlawful action; they have not seen their parents, brothers, sisters and children for many years. Two Likud Knesset members, having spent years negotiating the resolution the government abrogated unilaterally, have threatened to leave the coalition, which could threaten the government’s 61-59 majority.
While reversing course, the Israeli government has recognized two diaspora communities in Ethiopia, frozen their aliyah and declined to provide the destitute community with desperately needed assistance. Israel has not even asked the Jewish Agency or the Joint Distribution Committee to provide aid.
Thus, preventing a humanitarian catastrophe falls by default on diaspora Jewry. But so far American Jewish institutions have not stepped up to the challenge. Like children, they are waiting patiently for permission from Israel.
UJC (United Jewish Communities) says it is “waiting to hear from the government of Israel as to what their direction is and we will work with the Jewish Agency as that becomes clear,” translated as no assistance until UJC receives orders from Prime Minister Netanyahu. Only last week, Natan Sharansky, head of the Jewish Agency, said the same thing publicly in New York. For 25 years, the Joint has provided medical assistance in Ethiopia only to those Beta Israel Ethiopians approved by Israel. UJA-Federation of New York previously charted a proactive independent course on Ethiopian issues but its current CEO, Eric Goldstein, though caring and compassionate, is new to the issue and is consulting with others. But time is running out. What should we do?
American Jewry should consult with Israel on issues relating to diaspora Jews but not feel bound by its directions, particularly when they are generated by political, not Jewish concerns. Diaspora communities assisted one another before the State was founded. Our charitable institutions breach their fiduciary duty when they fail to be guided by the views of their American Jewish donor base.
Diaspora Jewry should determine who is a Jew in the diaspora, not Israel. If the Jewish Agency and the Joint continue to refuse to provide assistance before Israel unfreezes aliyah, UJC should provide funds to those organizations willing to assume the burden.
A 2011 peer reviewed journal stated that stunting, a growth disorder often caused by malnutrition, affected 37.2 percent of all the Beta Israel children in Gondar. And that was when the community was receiving assistance. Stunting can cause serious mental and physical effects often irreversible. Moreover, there is a good chance food prices will become increasingly unaffordable. The severe famine in Gondar province has not yet directly hit the Beta Israel area but it is likely food shortages in adjacent famine stricken areas will increase the price they pay for food.
If you agree that American Jews can make their own moral and religious judgments without relying on Israel, and that we have an independent obligation to lessen the pain of fellow diaspora Jews, let the leadership of UJC, and your local federation know -- repeatedly and emphatically.
We have seen this movie too many times. Ultimately the 9,000 Beta Israel will make aliyah despite the current freeze. Israel only controls how long the community will remain trapped in an unending “Groundhog Day” of pointless misery. But how damaged the children will be when they finally arrive in the Jewish homeland is up to American Jewry, which can do a great deal to alleviate suffering by providing humanitarian assistance immediately.
Joseph Feit, a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, first traveled to Ethiopia in 1988.
A Warrior For Israel, Taking Risks To The EndIsrael News
A Warrior For Israel, Taking Risks To The End
Legendary spymaster Meir Dagan countered Bibi on Iran.
Nathan Jeffay
Contributing Editor
In an age of image consultants, Meir Dagan just jumped in and spoke his mind. Getty Images
Meir Dagan, Israel’s top spy during much of the most important intelligence-gathering on Iran’s nuclear program, was buried on Sunday; he died last Thursday after a four-year battle with liver cancer.
“All of your acts were tied to the Israeli people and its fate,” said Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin at the funeral, held in the Galilee town of Rosh Pina.
Dagan headed the Mossad, Israel’s covert intelligence agency, from 2002 until 2011, and had unprecedented powers and resources to investigate, and try to set back, Iran’s nuclear exploits. This was his final appointment of a long security career, which included stints as a top government security adviser and more than three decades in the Israel Defense Forces.
The current Mossad director, Yossi Cohen, said at the funeral that Dagan, who was 71, was among Israel’s “greatest warriors” and paid tribute to his daring which, he said, left a deep mark on his organization.
Dagan’s heroics began during his army days, and included an incident in the early 1970s when a terrorist was about to attack his unit with a hand grenade. Dagan pounced on him and stopped him from pulling the pin. For this, he won the Medal of Courage.
Dagan’s unit at the time was a new entity called Sayeret Rimon, and he was put in charge of it by Ariel Sharon, who was then head of the army’s southern command. The objective was to stamp out terror in Gaza, which it did with surprising effect. “The commandos used disguise and cunning to infiltrate every corner of the terrorists’ world,” wrote military historian Samuel M. Katz in his book on Israeli counterterrorism.
“They ate in the restaurants where guerrilla commanders held court; they shopped in markets controlled by the various terrorist groups. Dagan’s commandos assembled highly detailed and far-reaching dossiers on the men and women they hunted.”
When the same man who appointed him to Sayeret Rimon appointed him, in 2002, to head the Mossad, it was an unpopular choice in the organization. Despite the confidence that he inspired in Sharon, who was by this point prime minister, Dagan was an outsider, not one who had risen through the Mossad’s ranks, and was viewed by its staff with some skepticism and suspicion. He clashed with several longtime Mossad employees, and when he did he could be ruthless, sidelining them.
Yet as he made his mark on the Mossad, it was hard for anyone to say that it wasn’t a positive one. People familiar with internal operations say that he reinvigorated it and made numerous changes that made it run more smoothly and effectively. Much of the intelligence that Israel has today on the Iranian nuclear threat comes from the Dagan era, during which it became the agency’s No. 1 priority. The fight against Israel’s longstanding terrorist foes also continued.
Foreign media attributed several assassinations of Palestinian or pro-Palestinian terror targets to the Mossad during Dagan’s tenure. All attracted rebuke from international voices that objected to targeted killings; one such killing generated further controversy.
In 2010, a top Hamas military man, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, died in a Dubai hotel. It turned out that cloned passports had been used by his killers, who were believed internationally to have been Mossad agents. This angered the countries that issued the passports, especially Britain, which had a diplomat removed from Israel’s London embassy as a punitive measure.
When it came to the Iran work that Dagan oversaw, almost all of the details remained top secret, though the general assessment of the seriousness of the threat filtered down to politics and to public discussion.
Upon Dagan’s retirement in 2011, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who went to great lengths to try to kill the Iran nuclear deal, faced a strange situation: the Knesset opposition was hardly active in challenging his position on Iran, but the man who had the most detailed knowledge of the threat suddenly became his most vocal public opponent on the issue. He used blunt language, even calling the idea of a strike on Iranian nuclear reactors “stupid.” Reports suggested that, together with then-director of the Shin Bet domestic security service, Yuval Diskin, and then-military chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, he had refused an order from Netanyahu to put everything in place for a possible Iran strike back in 2010.
Dagan’s diagnosis of liver cancer, in 2012, made him more determined to leave his mark on the way that Israelis think, and this one-time Likud election coordinator spoke not only of what he saw as the need to exercise restraint and caution regarding Iran, but also the need to reach a compromise with the Palestinians.
I found myself wondering this week how many more figures like Dagan Israel will produce — security chiefs who retire as heroes and then risk marginalizing themselves by speaking the truth as they see it, even if it isn’t a popular message. In an Israel where public life is increasingly choreographed by image consultants and pollsters, Dagan just jumped in and spoke his mind.
As the burial was taking place, I talked to Eli Beer, founder of the volunteer medical organization United Hatzalah. For the last two years Dagan — who was already suffering from liver cancer — sat on its board. Beer told me that Dagan was excited to get involved, and particularly driven by the fact that while the organization was established by charedim, it now brings together Jews of all religious stripes, as well as Arabs. Keen to carry on contributing to its life-saving work even when Dagan was very sick and couldn’t leave his house, he hosted board meetings so he could attend.
Dagan’s life started with tragedy. He was born to parents who were fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust, and this drove him in everything that he did — he kept a picture of his grandfather, Ber Erlich Sloshny, kneeling before Nazis just before being murdered in Poland in 1942. His life was dominated by battles — by actual battles and by the ongoing battle to secure the State of Israel. And at its end, even as his health prospects were grim, his life also became about promoting healing. A fitting biography for a Jewish warrior.
Nathan Jeffay’s column appears twice a month.At AIPAC, Trump Vows 'No Daylight' Between U.S. And IsraelNational
At AIPAC, Trump Vows ‘No Daylight’ Between U.S. And Israel
AIPAC speech seems to pivot from earlier comment on neutrality on Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the AIPAC conference in Washington, DC today. Getty Images
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump pledged Monday that if elected he would “send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and its most reliable ally, the State of Israel.”
“The Palestinians must come to the [negotiating] table knowing that the bond between the U.S. and Israel is absolutely unbreakable,” he told delegates at the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington. “When I become president, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on day one. … I will meet with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu immediately. I’ve known him many years and will work with him to bring stability and peace to the region.”
Trump read his 25-minute address from a teleprompter, for the first time he has read prepared remarks since he launched his presidential campaign last June. He made no mention of remaining “neutral” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a position he first articulated during one of the presidential debates.
And he did not amplify on a line in the speech saying that the United States had a “useful role” to play in the quest for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Campaign aides said Trump had worked on his speech with Jewish advisers. He touched on all the hot button issues, including pledging to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which he described as Israel’s “eternal capital.” And he said the Palestinians must stop the daily terror attacks against Israelis that have occurred since October, and “must accept Israel as a Jewish state — and it will forever exist as a Jewish state.”
At another point, he said flatly: “You cannot achieve peace if terrorists are treated as martyrs.”
Trump made no mention of the many empty seats that were noticeable in the arena — seats vacated by delegates who wished to express their disgust with the tone of Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign, which several Jewish groups called racist and bigoted. And the applause for Trump was more muted than the sustained and standing applause delegates gave to the comments of the other presidential candidates who also spoke to at the conference. A number of delegates noticeably refrained from clapping.
But Trump received notable applause when he trashed the Iran nuclear deal, saying his “number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”
“I have been in business a long time. I know deal making. Let me tell you, this deal is catastrophic for Israel, for America and the whole Middle East. We rewarded the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism with $150 billion and we received nothing in return. I studied this deal in great detail — more than anyone else, believe me. It's a bad deal.”
He noted that just by waiting until the deal expires, Iran would be able to build a nuclear bomb because it was not forced to dismantle its nuclear machinery.
Trump promised that as president he would “stand up to Iran’s push to dominate and destabilize the region. … We will totally dismantle Iran’s terror network, which is big and powerful but not powerful like us. They have terror cells everywhere, including in the Western hemisphere very close to home, and we will work to dismantle that reach, believe me.”
Noting that Iran recently fired three ballistic missiles that each traveled 1,250 miles, Trump said they “designed to intimidate and frighten Europe — and maybe even hit the U.S. We will not let it happen — and we not let it happen to Israel, believe me. Painted on those missiles in Hebrew and Farsi were the words, `Israel must be wiped off the face of the Earth.’ You can’t forget that. What kind of demented minds write that in Hebrew? Testing those missiles did not violate the deal we made, but the tests violated United Nations resolutions and nobody has done anything about it. We will. I promise, we will.” [The U.S. brought the matter to the U.N. Security Council but Russia blocked any discussion.]
Returning to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Trump rejected suggestions by President Barak Obama to allow the U.N. to outline a possible agreement between the two sides.
“The U.N. is not a friend of democracy, not a friend of freedom or the U.S., where it has its home, and surely not a friend to Israel,” he maintained. “The U.S. must oppose this resolution and use its veto, which l would use 100 percent. That is not how you make a deal. Deals are made when parties come together. … It will only further delegitimize Israel and be a catastrophe for Israel. It’s not going to happen folks.”
He said the U.S. “can be a facilitator” to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, but it is “preposterous” to impose a resolution on the two sides. And Trump said he knows that Israel has repeatedly said it is willing to sit and negotiate an agreement without any preconditions, but that the Palestinians have on three occasions since the Camp David summit in 2000 rejected all peace proposals.
Earlier, he told The Washington Post that the U.S. should reconsider its involvement in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because it costs too much money and said the U.S. should stop “nation building” around the world and concentrate instead on building the American infrastructure. NATO has been the cornerstone of the Western security alliance since World War II.
In explaining his noninterventionist approach to foreign affairs, Trump told the newspaper’s editorial board: “We have $19 trillion in debt. We’re sitting, probably, on a bubble. And it’s a bubble that if it breaks, it’s going to be very nasty. I just think we have to rebuild our country.”
Trump also for the first time named his foreign policy advisers, a five-member team chaired by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the only senator to endorse him.
Just as Trump began to speak, a number of delegates stood and walked out. Among them was Rabbi Irwin Zeplowitz, spiritual leader of The Community Synagogue in Port Washington, L.I.
“I feel a statement has to be made,” he said minutes before Trump entered the arena. “I know many people feel we don’t want to insult a candidate or embarrass AIPAC, and I respect their right to invite him. But I don’t believe I have to listen to him. I want to make a statement that his rhetoric has no place in the political system.”
Rabbi Zeplowitz said he told others in his row that he planned to stand when Trump walked in and then turn his back and walk out. “One person said, ‘Shame on you,’” he said.
Even before Trump entered the hall, hundreds of the 18,000 AIPAC attendees walked out. They were led by an organized group of several hundred Conservative and Reform rabbis.
In addition, the Reform movement prepared and distributed to its 1.5 million members — including several thousands attending the AIPAC Policy Conference — sacred texts about human dignity to be studied before and after Trump spoke.
Minutes before Trump spoke, Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the movement’s Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, told The Jewish Week that those outside the arena planned to study the Jewish text and listen to Trump’s speech on speakers in the hallway.
“We will listen to his speech and talk about it,” he said. “It is not that we are not willing to engage.”
But he said the best way to express their disgust with the inflammatory language Trump has used in the campaign against women, immigrants, Muslims and those with disabilities was to remain outside the arena.
“We don’t want to sit quietly in the room” when Trump speaks, Rabbi Pesner said, adding that they chose to leave ahead of Trump’s remarks in order not to “diminish AIPAC or the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
“We are not trying to make a statement in the room, but outside of the room,” he added. “That is why we are mobilizing 1.5 million souls spread across North America and want them to be part of the discussion, too.”
He said other delegates he has spoken with chose to remain in the arena and to sit silently.
In addition to Trump, the other two Republican candidates for president, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, also spoke.
In a powerful speech, Kasich told the conference that he remained “unwavering in my support for the Jewish state and in the partnership between the U.S. and Israel.” He said that as president he would want to “strengthen and expand the relationship with Israel.”
He called also for “canceling the Iran nuclear deal in response to Iran’s recent ballistic missile tests” because they are a violation of the agreement. He noted that one of the missiles had printed on the side in Hebrew, “Israel must be exterminated.”
Speaking from a prepared text he held on the podium, Kasich said that as president he would work to fight racism, anti-Semitism and attacks against Israel, “particularly at international bodies.”
And he received a standing ovation when he said: “We must work to eliminate and condemn all attempts to delegitimize Israel,” and said he was “concerned about the rising attacks against Israel and Jewish students on our college campuses.”
He made no mention of his opponents for the presidency, but took an obvious swipe at Trump when he said: “I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land. I will not do it.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner for president, addressed the pro-Israel lobby in the morning. Her Democratic opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, was campaigning in the West and chose not to interrupt his campaign schedule to appear at the Washington event. He offered a video address instead, but AIPAC officials turned him down.
Instead, Sanders delivered a foreign policy speech to a crowd in Salt Lake City. He sent copies to AIPAC and asked that it be distributed to delegates.Jewish Group On Brussels Attacks: 'Shots At The Heart Of Europe'International
Jewish Group On Brussels Attacks: ‘Shots At The Heart Of Europe’
JTA
The aftermath of an explosion in a metro train in Brussels, March 22, 2016. JTA
Jewish groups expressed shock and anger following a series of attacks that left at least 34 dead in the Belgian capital.
Kenneth Bandler, director of media relations for the American Jewish Committee, linked the attacks to the slaying of four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in May 2014.
“What began with the jihadist fatal attack on the Jewish Museum nearly two years ago has now reached the airport and metro,” he wrote in an email about the Tuesday morning attacks in Brussels.
Two explosions at Zaventem Airport, including one by a suicide bomber, killed at least 14 people, and was followed by an explosion at the Maelbeek metro station, where another at least 20 died, the Het Laatste Nieuws daily reported on its online edition.
Mehdi Nemmouche, a French national in his 30s who is said to have fought with jihadists in Syria, is currently on trial in Brussels for the May 2014 museum shooting.
“This is yet another shocking, appalling and deadly attack on innocent Europeans by radical terrorists,” European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor said in a statement. Kantor called the attacks “shots at the heart of Europe” that he said should galvanize counterterrorist actions.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, said his organization is “united in prayers at this hour with the families of the victims and the injured.”
Goldschmidt called the attacks, whose perpetrators have not yet been publicly identified, the “latest act of war of Islamic fascism against the capital of Europe,” adding: “As in the biblical story of Esther, which will be read in all the synagogues later this week, evil can and will be destroyed only by recognizing it and fighting it.”
Sources from a Belgian intelligence agency said the attacks may have been carried out as revenge for the arrest Friday in Belgium of Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old French Islamist whom authorities suspect had a key role in a series of deadly attacks that killed 130 people in Paris in November. An unnamed intelligence source told the Het Laatste Nieuws daily that the attacks must have been planned a long time ago but may have been carried out earlier than planned to retaliate for the arrest.At AIPAC Conference, Improved Inclusion Efforts For People With DisabilitiesThe New Normal
At AIPAC Conference, Improved Inclusion Efforts For People With Disabilities
Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi
As all organizations know, it is much easier to say you will be inclusive than to actually become inclusive. Real inclusion is intentional, not accidental. It takes real leadership and implementation efforts. Thankfully, during the past two years, AIPAC has made huge strides in this arena.
Two years ago, the policy conference lacked both captioning and sign language interpreters for people who are hard of hearing. RespectAbility raised the issue in the New York Jewish Week, and last year, AIPAC had live captions during the main plenaries. This was a big step forward.
Sadly, however, this year, as the largest Jewish gathering in the United States welcomed the presidential candidates, including Trump, to speak to its 18,000 delegates, the conference again lacked live captioning – both in person and on the official Jewish Life TV live stream for thousands of people watching from home.
Scooters and wheelchairs were available in the convention center, but not in the Verizon Center where the major speeches take place. Still, however, there were noticeable improvements in other areas of inclusion that must be commended. The conference had a help desk and brochure of services for “delegates with disabilities” seeking accessibility services in both locations—the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and the Verizon Center—are ADA accessible. Wheelchairs and scooters were available at the Convention Center’s help desk. In addition, people could pick up listening devices from the help desk or sit in a special section available in each location for people who are deaf or hard of hearing with an ASL interpreter.
However, for Naomi Adler, the Jewish Federation of Philadelphia’s CEO, that is not enough. During Sunday night’s opening session, she tweeted out her dismay at the lack of captioning. “As someone who just witnessed a wonderful session on Israel innovation by a company transforming disability access, I am very distressed that those who cannot hear all of the wonderful presentations are not seeing captions at the #AIPAC2016 plenary sessions,” Adler followed up Monday morning. “Providing a sign language interpreter is NOT enough. The most inclusive way to address this issue is to use captioning and I call upon the leadership of AIPAC to rectify this situation immediately!”
RespectAbility agrees that people with disabilities should not have to sit in a segregated section when it is not needed.
However, the conference showcases many efforts of inclusion that we should all be very proud of -- and they did it from the main stage in front of 18,000 people. This is a major breakthrough that is worthy of note.
Early Monday morning, AIPAC highlighted two Israeli groups offering innovations for people with disabilities – Softwheels’ acrobat wheel for wheelchairs and Tikkun Olam Makers (TOM) by the Reut Group, a community with goal of developing affordable assistive technology for people with disabilities. Later at the conference they also showcased Unit 990 in the IDF that recruits, tr
ains and employs people with Autism. In so doing AIPAC put disability inclusion on the stage front and center.
Additionally, in the AIPAC Village there were places that showcased innovations like Softwheels and TOM in a wonderful way. ALUT, an Autism organization from Israel, and Unit 990 also had booths and experts as well. Delegate were able to experience how these technologies and efforts work first-hand and meet people on the front lines of creating these technologies and systems changes.
Still, while TOM’s featured products were innovative and will help people with disabilities around the world, the video generally only included captions when the speaker was speaking in Hebrew.
By including captions throughout the entire video, AIPAC would have been much more inclusive.
Inclusion can be a process. We are moving in the right direction. AIPAC is doing better and it is setting the tone for other groups to do so as well. With 18,000 pro-Israel Americans from all 50 states – including 4,000 college students – attending this year’s policy conference, AIPAC has the opportunity and the responsibility to lead by example.
The Jewish community is a stronger community when it lives up to our values--when we are welcoming, diverse, moral, and respect each other. AIPAC’s inclusion is not perfect, but it has improved greatly. Because of its large size, the conference battles unique accessibility issues and the inability of the shuttle busses between the two venues to accommodate people with disabilities needs to be addressed. By doing so – and ensuring that live captions are included on both the in-person and live-stream videos, AIPAC can serve as a role model in shaping opinion and policies for years to come.
Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi is the president of RespectAbilityUSA which includes many resources for inclusion.---------------------
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