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The Jewish ethics of hunting; a photographer’s journey to find her family in Israel; fighting Gaucher Disease; more from Tablet Magazine in New York, New York, United States for Wednesday, 2 November 2016 "Whoopi Goldberg's ugly Hanukkah sweater"November 2, 2016-------
Hunting for Deer—and Meaning
When I helped kill a deer for the first time, I turned to Jewish sages to help me understand my discomfort, and the ethics of the hunt
“Those who hunt for fun and games are like ‘madmen shooting flaming arrows of death.’”[Shabbetai Elhanan ben Elisha del Vecchio, b. 1707]
By
ANDREW BERNS“By hunting man succeeds … in renewing the primitive.”[José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting]
A few years ago this month, I hunted and helped kill a deer.
I was looking for an adventure. During my fall break at UCLA, where I was teaching history and Jewish studies, my wife, Mara, and I traveled from Los Angeles to the Methow Valley in north-central Washington state. My sister Sarah and her family live there. Her husband, Daren, is a smokejumper—the elite among wildland firefighters employed by the Forest Service; he parachutes 1,500 feet from airplanes flying 250 miles per hour to battle fires below. He also hunts. I asked him if he would take Mara and me hunting.
Just after dawn on the morning of the hunt, we met Daren at his modest home perched on the upper bank of the Methow River. He was dressed as he often is when not in a flight suit: worn Kevlar trousers, scuffed work boots, a faded sweatshirt featuring Washington State University’s mascot—a roaring cougar—and a baseball cap that had been through innumerable forest fires. For our hunt, his firearm of choice was a .22 caliber rifle, with a long, black, steel barrel and marbled wooden stock work. As we approached the woods on the outskirts of the property, Mara and I marched obediently behind Daren, trembling with anticipation, danger, and purpose.
A few hours later, we found our target.
That fall morning in the forests of Washington’s Methow Valley taught me more than the best way to stalk prey or handle a gun. It taught me how poorly most of us understand what procuring meat actually entails—especially we who live in cities or suburbs and buy our meat in grocery stores or at farmers’ markets. Hunting made me think hard about the effects of our isolation from the nonhuman natural world, and the importance of visceral confrontations with death. A bookish journey into centuries-old Jewish traditions helped shape these thoughts and achieve some clarity about them.
***
Hunting takes time and persistence; you don’t just lift your gun and start shooting. The pursuit is more thrilling than the capture. A hunter who stalks deer from a tree stand will regale the willing listener with tales of interminable mornings perched eagle-high in a pine grove while fighting a losing battle against an insufficiently elastic bladder, cruelly stretched by Thermoses of hot coffee meant to provide succor on crisp fall mornings. For those who perch in trees as for those who prowl the forests, patience and forbearance matter more than marksmanship. You will know this only if you talk to a hunter or go hunting yourself.
We covered a lot of ground that morning. Daren’s 6-foot-3 frame sped him along. Mara and I struggled to keep up and became more apprehensive with each mile covered. Where were the animals? We had been walking for only an hour, but wet shoes and overtaxed nerves hastened our fatigue and shortened our patience. Our lives as urban dwellers in Los Angeles were built on convenience and control. When we wanted meat, the only patience we had to summon was that demanded by Los Angeles traffic.
Stalking prey is both enervating and enlivening. The enervation comes from the mental effort of being hyperalert, like driving on a rainy night when your eyes strain to spot danger. “Don’t strain your eyes,” Daren warned us. Frantically scouring the woods for moving targets, he assured us, “will tire you, and you won’t see a deer that way.” He urged us to let our eyes move more slowly, to calmly scan our surroundings and let movement announce itself to us. This is where the enlivening charge of hunting comes from: the assonance of breath, heartbeat, and gait with sylvan sounds and motions. Mara and I did our best to become one with the woods.
Though we didn’t know it, we were honoring the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s promise that a hunter will be successful only if he imitates the animal he seeks and “integrates his vision with that of the pursued.” For Ortega, when man hunts he must be humble, renounce the supremacy of his humanity, and “lower himself toward the animal.” We did exactly that, emptying our brains of chatter and buzz, expanding our focus. Open to the life around us, we heard a sudden tone of urgency in Daren’s whisper: “There, on the near hillside, 50 yards away.” A doe, peacefully browsing a patch of grass, nibbled and swallowed, oblivious to our presence. We huddled around Daren, our hearts thumping. He raised the rifle and said calmly, “I have a shot.” We held our breath. The rifle exploded, our eardrums shook. The doe fell with a thump. No words were uttered, no glances exchanged; we simply jogged to the animal. When we arrived we encountered a heaving torso laboring to contain a restive soul.
I stood over the doe as she lay dying. Her chest heaved like the bellows of an accordion in the hands of a young child too weak to expand and contract the instrument. Blood seeped from the neck wound, mixed with the dusty earth beneath, and coagulated into a garnet paste. I crouched over the animal and knelt, placing my hand on the coarse fur of her neck. As I felt her heartbeat slow and fade I asked myself: How had this happened? Had I really just taken a life?
But then, a rush of thoughts and emotions came to me in unison: You must not waste this creature. I was prepared to be moved, but anticipated that my feelings would amount to guilt for having taken a life, or revulsion at the gory drama of death. For years I had fed on the pabulum of my generation: that industrial agriculture is evil, that sustainable farming is the only path forward, that slaughterhouses hide unspeakable horrors. In this moment, as I felt a heartbeat stop, I had little interest in the big picture of industrial capitalism’s ills. I wanted to honor this creature. The best way to honor her was to preserve as much of her as we could.
***
Back in Los Angeles a few days later, I went on a different kind of hunt in order to understand my discomfort over killing a creature, and my determination not to waste it. I spent hours rummaging through the stacks of the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA looking for rabbinic works about hunting. I knew that Judaism condemned hunting, but didn’t know why. On a dusty shelf in a neglected corner of the third floor, something caught my eye: a Hebrew encyclopedia of Jewish law written in Italy 250 years ago.
It turns out that guns have a lot to do with Judaism’s disdain for hunting. In the encyclopedia, I discovered a cluster of Italian rabbis who disapproved of the profusion of guns in their time, and their use in hunting. The reason is simple: Gunshot wounds automatically render the animal forbidden for consumption (terefah), because an animal permitted for eating must be slaughtered with a special knife in the ritually prescribed manner.
By the 17th and 18th centuries, when these rabbis wrote, guns were common in northern Italy. One jurist pointed out that when Jewish tradition did permit hunting, it spoke of hunting with traps and nets. Nowadays, another Jewish sage lamented, hunting is done with guns and is “absolutely forbidden to any Jew.” Yet another learned rabbi morbidly wrote that those who hunt for “fun and games” are like “madmen scattering flaming arrows of death,” an allusion to a verse in the biblical book of Proverbs.
The encyclopedia’s editor, Isaac Lampronti—a physician and director of a religious academy—saw guns the same way his predecessors had: Firearms cheapened hunting, offering shooters unearned power. He worried that an activity that once demanded an intimate knowledge of local topography, geography, flora, and fauna, as well as deep familiarity with riparian law and property lines, now required merely a blunderbuss and an ego to match.
Lampronti helped make sense of my discomfort on that autumn morning in the Methow Valley. I had an empathic reaction to the doe’s suffering and knew the gun was to blame. The rabbi from Enlightenment-era Italy disliked guns, too. Clumsy gunmen who land a direct but nonfatal shot, Lampronti wrote, prolong the suffering of animals. Even worse, they sometimes waste life by failing to find their prey, which may stumble into dark groves and expire in a blood-deprived delirium, far from den or lair, alone. The search for a mortally wounded animal is one of the most exciting, tiring, and perilous phases of any hunt, ancient or modern; it is also the one at which hunters are most prone to fail. As a final flourish, Lampronti griped that participating in hunts was the equivalent of “walking in the ways of gentiles.”
But not all gentiles in the premodern world were passionate hunters; far from it. The notion that a gun gives its operator an undue advantage over other denizens of the animal kingdom has esteemed defenders in Christian as well as Jewish thought. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1517), written when primitive guns had just appeared in England, hunting is considered “beneath the dignity of free men.” More’s imaginary utopians foist the job onto slaves: To them, hunting is “the lowest and vilest part of butchery.” In a Latin epigram on the subject, More lamented: “O stony-hearted race, more savage than any wild beast, to find cruel amusement in bitter murder!” Centuries before More, the Greek philosopher Plutarch mused that because animals are rational, we are unjust if we kill them when they have not injured us. Plutarch permitted killing animals “in pity and sorrow” and acknowledged eating meat as an unfortunate necessity. I felt the sorrow Plutarch described, and understood why More scorned hunting.
Lampronti and his fellow rabbis spoke to me even more: I did not want to be a madman who shot “flaming arrows of death,” though that’s exactly what bullets are. Jewish jurists, dead for hundreds of years, helped me make sense of my emotions as I watched a doe die.
***
But killing, it turns out, is the easy part. Field-dressing the doe’s carcass after the kill thrust me into the world of Judaism’s most important legal text: the Babylonian Talmud.
After we killed the doe, she had to be skinned. The guts had to be disposed of: we left them on a nearby hill for eagles, turkey vultures, and coyotes to feast upon. The head had to be severed and discarded. And the mass of bone, tendon, and edible flesh had to be isolated, extracted, and kept clean of dirt and contaminants, which were everywhere on this dry patch of land, baking in the midmorning sun.
Half an hour later, the three of us had succeeded in dragging the deer to a nearby barn on Daren’s property, where it hung from rafters in the cool, shady air. Suspending an animal carcass creates a waxy casing that, within hours, begins to coat and shelter the meat like a spontaneous shroud. Thus protected, the animal is easily transported to a butcher, and then to fridges and freezers.
Shortly after the hunt, I was studying torts in the Babylonian Talmud, the collection of Jewish law and lore that stretches back to debates held between the second and sixth centuries of the Common Era in what is today Iraq, and what was then Sasanian Babylonia. Much of that law concerns ritual: marriage, divorce, celebration of holidays, and performance of mitzvot. But vast sections embrace a much different but no less important side of life: human interactions with the natural world. The Talmud speaks of animals that gore; pits dug in earth that cause injury; crop rotations; fertilizers and harvests; and the slaughter of animals. One Talmudic passage tells of a watchman tasked with supervising a herd. On his watch, one of the animals dies. The rabbis debate when the watchman is derelict in duty, and when he is blameless. If he is pardoned, it is on the grounds that the death was an unavoidable accident.
As is often the case in rabbinic jurisprudence, things are rather more complicated: The ancient rabbis debated who handles the retrieval, recovery, and processing of the corpse. Deuteronomy states that in an instance like this the “dead [animal] will be his.” In biblical Hebrew, as in English, it is not immediately clear to whom the possessive pronoun refers: the guard or the owner of the animal. A marginal gloss by the 11th-century commentator Rashi adds another layer of complexity: At issue is not only to whom the corpse belongs, but who will “take possession of it” and “busy himself with it.” I learned that morning in rural Washington state that a dead animal imposes immediate and onerous obligations. It is a time bomb of decomposition, posing a series of problems and challenges to whoever “busies himself” with the creature. How to skin the beast, and how to convert the hide to a lucrative—or at least not wasteful—end? How to dispose of its innards? How to separate the edible meat from the undesirable gore? How to transport this mass of flesh, blood, and bone, an unimaginable task in a preindustrial world without pickup trucks and winches.
That succinct comment by Rashi led me to these thoughts. I shared them during a Skype conversation with my Talmud teacher, Sol, an 85-year-old Orthodox rabbi and Semitic philologist who has been my tutor and study partner for over half a decade. He is happy to let my family in the Methow Valley illuminate our discussions of the Talmud. In the service of my Talmud study, I have turned to my brother-in-law for information about parturating cows, the feeding habits of bees, the effect of fire on stones and arable land, and many other topics. “Ask your brother-in-law,” Sol will often urge me, and when I do, Daren gives me brilliant and empirically tested insight that I bring back to my study sessions.
Sol disapproved of me hunting; after all, it is proscribed, according to Jewish law. He grew up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and ’40s, so hunting is as foreign to him as Borough Park would be to my brother-in-law. But when I spoke to Sol about what we did after the deer died, he immediately saw how relevant it was to our Talmud study. Now Rashi’s comment about “busying oneself” with an animal carcass made much more sense. Talking to Sol about field dressing and its attendant challenges made the verse in Deuteronomy, the Talmudic passage, and the medieval commentaries spring to life. For most of human history, anyone—even scholars— would have understood the quotidian context of literary and legal texts like these. To reclaim my place in that tradition, I had to get my hands bloody.
***
I went hunting in the Methow Valley because I was looking for excitement, a good story to tell friends over a beer. The experience was far more significant than that. The hunt generated powerful, primal feelings of exhilaration, discomfort, empathy, regret. The study I undertook afterward taught me about more than my feelings: It taught me about ancient history and religious tradition. I could not understand why Judaism prohibited hunting until I did it and read about it in the original Hebrew and Aramaic sources. In turn, the experience in Washington made Jewish texts come alive to me—and to my teacher.
The Italian rabbis I had studied were right about guns: Even when they are skillfully deployed, they cause suffering. I may go hunting again, though not with a gun. Still, those rabbis seem not to have known much about what hunting actually entails before or after the gunpowder explodes. Hunting may not be a particularly Jewish pastime, but it has positive existential side-effects: It brings you closer to nonhuman nature than any activity I have done before or since. The deepest parts of us do not desire to shoot “flaming arrows of death.” They yearn to walk in lockstep with the natural world, which can be challenging in our increasingly urbanized, postindustrial world.
In shooting an animal and causing her undue pain, we transgressed the Jewish law that prohibits excessive cruelty to animals (tza’ar ba’ale hayyim). But we would not violate another Jewish law by letting the animal go to waste (bal tashkhit). Guns had led us to sin, just as Rabbi Lampronti had warned. But we would make sure the creature did not die in vain. She did not: The doe we shot and field-dressed would feed my sister’s family of four through a long rural winter. And that doe taught me important lessons about my ancestral tradition, and about myself.
***
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VISUAL ART & DESIGN / BARBARA MENSCHThe Lost and the Saved
A photographic journey in search of an Israeli family she never knew she hadAunt Avigail and Aunt Aviva. (Photos: Barbara Mensch)
I woke as the airplane landed in Tel Aviv, where I was about to open a dark chapter of my own family history. It was a quest that began several years ago with an email from a stranger. In a warm introduction, this man, who called himself Nelli, wrote that he had been searching for me for years. We were, he said, not only both professional photographers, but cousins—related through our grandparents, who were brother and sister—and that his grandfather migrated to Mandate Palestine, while my grandmother found her way to America. He said his full name was Emmanuel—a tribute to our great uncle, the third sibling that our respective grandparents had left behind, and who eventually perished in the Holocaust.
I had no idea about any of it.
Nelli Sheffer, photographer and author of over 70 photo books.
For all of my life, I was denied this information. I was told by my grandmother Becky, reluctant to speak her entire life about those early years in Horodenka, that her siblings went to Palestine by ship, some of them walking on foot part of the way from southwestern Ukraine. There was never a mention of her oldest brother Emmanuel. Very little was spoken even about her own father and mother.
Was my own grandmother to blame? Was it her reluctance to share with others, including her immediate family, the worst most painful memories of her past? Was the need to assimilate into the American way of life in part to blame? Any family members who could possibly know the truth were now all deceased. Would my own life have been different had I understood that my family, in fact, had lost members, in one of the most savage events in modern history? Or that we—that I—had a root in Israel?
I obsessively consumed books and movies on this grim subject trying to get answers to impossible questions. I also began corresponding with Nelli, who gave me tidbits about the family I had never known. Most intriguing, he told me of the family elders that were still living, in particular, Nelli’s own mother, aunt, and uncle.
‘Uncle Poo Choo’ (Israel Wiesler), legendary Palmach soldier and author.
‘Aunt Aviva,’ retired University of Beersheba administrator.
Very soon, it dawned on me that they might be able to help piece together what had happened to my grandmother’s closest relatives during the early years of World War II. Over the winter, I journeyed to Tel Aviv in search of answers—and I took my cameras with me.
***
‘Aunt Avigail’ (Avigail Sheffer), matriarch of the family, and specialist in ancient ceramics and textiles from Masada.
The first of the elders that I met was Avigail, Nelli’s mother, who was turning 90 years of age. Avigail welcomed me at the door of her apartment with a warm smile. I was captivated by her piercing brown eyes and experienced an uncanny familiarity, as if I had known this person all of my life.
I noticed that among the stacks of reading material lining her apartment, were photography books authored by her son Nelli Sheffer. There were also rows of books on the topic of archaeology. I learned that in her prime, Avigail was a specialist in evaluating ancient Middle Eastern ceramics and textiles. One of her projects included a comprehensive analysis of the Shroud of Turin.
After several hours of getting acquainted and being joyously interrupted by a steady stream of neighbors, friends, and intermittent phone calls from other family members, we sat down to speak.
I had gathered some information beforehand: The family origins could be traced back to the town of Horodenka, in what is now southwestern Ukraine. For centuries, this territory, known as Galicia, was steeped in political controversy, and religious and cultural differences. Endless border disputes, particularly with Russia, inspired ethnic groups of the region: Ukranians, Poles, Romanians, Germans, and marauding Cossacks on a path of violence and racism. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Moscow, animosity was particularly focused on Jewish populations living in the small communities spotting the region. Jews, accused of sympathizing with Communists, were scapegoated, becoming victims of the relentless pogroms.
I asked Avigail my first question. Who was my great-grandfather (Avigail’s grandfather) Israel Menachem Wiesler? Did any photographs of him exist? Were there any photos of the children? Were there any photographs at all?
“There were none,” Avigail replied, and began instead to share what she knew.
At the turn of the 20th century, a young master carpenter, Israel Menachem Wiesler lived a life of relative subsistence in Horodenka. Their existence was meager at best, dire at worst. Jews, as second-class citizens, were not allowed to own land and were restricted to working in specific trades. In spite of this, Avigail explained, her grandfather’s reputation as a carpenter was well-known and widely respected.
Avigail remarked that Israel Menachem Wiesler, although still a young man, died tragically while his wife was pregnant with their sixth child. After the birth, Israel’s wife, frail and exhausted, was destitute without her husband. She died soon after. Avigail had no knowledge of how they died. To this day, their deaths remain a mystery.
Left alone to fend for themselves and each other, the children looked to Emmanuel, their oldest brother, who they lovingly called “Manis,” to become the family’s new patriarch. Thankfully, Manis had learned well the skills of his father.
Avigail was clearly emotional as she looked down and fidgeted with her handkerchief. She continued: Not only did Manis absorb his father’s carpentry skills, she recounted, but he encouraged his younger brother Leibish, (Avigail’s father), to learn from him, so that one day in the future, he too, could be a family provider.
Avigail looked up, her big brown eyes filled with wisdom, directly locked with mine.
“Manis fell in love at a very young age and married a girl from the town of Sniatyn. His new wife convinced Manis to move from Horodenka, leave his brothers and sisters and resettle in her village.
“No one will ever know the grief that went into that decision,” Avigail remarked.
Manis’ three brothers and two sisters, with their lives at risk, fell into a desperate situation.
One by one, following their better instincts, the siblings left Horodenka, venturing into the unknown in an attempt to escape an uncertain fate.
“Your grandmother, by her own wits, found her way to America while still in her teens, while her other siblings followed Leibish, my father, and journeyed to Palestine.”
Once again we locked eyes. There was silence, and in that moment I realized something remarkable. Why did my grandmother make that fateful decision to separate from her siblings? By what means did she make it all the way to Hamburg, the seaport to the north, and board a ship making the long voyage to America? Was she alone? Was she terrified? How did she get the money for passage ? I was deeply saddened as I asked myself why I had never asked her those questions while she was alive.
Avigail continued with her story: Recently married, Leibish and his bride, Adel departed in 1918 from Istanbul and boarded a ship headed toward Palestine. As the ancient seaport of Jaffa came into view, Leibish looked on as he saw men in small boats rowing out to meet the ship. For a small fee, the local Arab fishermen would bring the exhausted passengers to shore. Avigail told me that her father gave up his only pocket watch to secure their entry. Once on land, her parents were processed as new immigrants by the British authorities.
Leibish’s wife, Adel, emerged as a force of will and determination. She encouraged her husband to aspire to great heights and to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, Manis. Using his skills as a carpenter, Leibish worked around the clock to underbid his competition and economize in every which way. Little by little, individual carpentry jobs evolved into larger construction projects, as Tel Aviv began its expansion. Indeed, the business thrived, and in the meantime, Adel bore him three children: Aviva, Israel, and the oldest, Avigail.
Tinsmith in the port of Jaffa.
By the time Avigail had finished primary school, it was the late 1930s. As tensions mounted in Europe and Hitler’s National Socialist Party was gaining in number and popularity, the family in Palestine beckoned Manis to join them. In this time period, the British severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, but Leibish’s wits, intelligence, and professional status enabled him to secure work visas: legal documents to bring his closest brother, his wife, and children back into the fold and save them from being trapped in an inevitable war. It was a noteworthy act of devotion.
Leibish reasoned that he could not trust to send the documents by post. Visas were too precious and valuable. Instead, his wife would be “dispatched” to Sniatyn, inexplicably taking Avigail as part of the plan to persuade Manis and his family to leave.
Adel and Avigail would make the long journey by freighter across the Mediterranean to Istanbul, boarding a train north, and would arrive in Sniatyn after several days, where Adel would safely hand Manis the papers.
Upon their arrival in Sniatyn, it dawned on Adel that her efforts might not be successful. Emmanuel’s wife would not leave her elderly parents, who as it turned out, had no work or travel visas, and Manis would not leave without his wife and children.
Adel began her unrelenting efforts to persuade them otherwise. It was 1939. Did they not know about Hitler claiming the Sudentenland or annexing Austria? Did they not know about his sworn hatred of the Jews? Did they not hear about the Kristallnachtand the destruction of many synagogues in Germany? Did they not know that the winds of war were about to shift in their direction, and Poland would be next? Manis and his wife balked.
To them, it was unthinkable that their lives would be seriously imperiled. In the town of Sniatyn, they interacted with their non-Jewish neighbors. They attended the same celebrations, sporting and political events, and even shopped in the same marketplace! Besides, the Ukrainians, the Poles, and the Romanians all hated the Germans … so they believed.
I was in a spell as Avigail continued with her story.
“My mother was in a panic.” News of impending war did not stir the anxiety of the villagers, and her sister-in-law seemed intractable in her views, as Avigail recalled. Adel’s instincts guided her to a local priest to get a sense of the political and social temperature. Taking Avigail by the hand, they entered the church, which was “pin-drop quiet” and the air “filled with musk.” The priest looked up from his paperwork, as Adel took a seat and began asking questions. Cleaning his spectacles and looking uncomfortable, the priest beseeched her to “take your family and leave … now!” Avigail explained that the priest’s response was short and abrupt, hoping that his message could save them all.
It was getting late and maybe she was getting tired. Avigail was struggling to remember a painful part of her story, which involved the local train station.
I kept pushing her to remember what happened next.
Adel was hoping that Manis would be able to persuade his family to leave, especially after hearing what the priest had said. She instructed them “to wait for us at the railway station.” In the meantime, Adel hurriedly gathered enough food and clothing to sustain the family on the long trip. She brought Avigail to a local bath house where they carefully packed all these goods (including Avigail’s favorite blouse) into their single suitcase.
At the station, Avigail watched as the iron locomotive ground to a halt, its billowing smoke rings swirling through the crisp air of the September afternoon. As Avigail and her mother waited and waited, the anticipation was mounting. Reluctantly, Adel’s face turned white as she boarded the train holding Avigail’s hand. At the last moment, Manis appeared with the look of a defeated man. There was no family at his side.
Adel remained silent, her sad eyes following the suitcase as she passed it through the window into the large rugged hands of Manis. Avigail remembered that she pushed her head out the window as Manis, frozen in time, motionless, was left holding the suitcase. As the train departed, Avigail watched as Manis became smaller on the horizon until he disappeared into the distance. This memory, she said, was as vivid today as it was more than 75 years ago.
Adel and her daughter Avigail headed to Istanbul, boarding a freighter to Palestine. It was during their voyage home that they learned theirs was the last ship to depart before the Nazi blitzkrieg of Poland. They, too, could have been trapped. Instead, they headed to Palestine to build a new life and a new country.
Manis, his wife, his wife’s parents, and their children would disappear. History records that by 1942, the entire Jewish population of Sniatyn was brutally murdered in the nearby forest, or sent to their death in Belzec concentration camp.
***
‘Cousin Mika’ (Mika Sheffer), school administrator and educator.
I met many family members when we gathered together for a party a few days later. One by one, the family arrived at Avigail’s home. My Israeli cousins varied in shapes, sizes, ages, and points of view. I was struck by their colorful personalities and varied occupations, which included artists, music composers, military figures, retired university administrators, authors, teachers, and architects. Some were young mothers and fathers.
‘Cousin Galia’ (Galia Offri), artist.
There was strength and joy in discovering my new family, although for them the circle felt complete. They were tightly knit, and family gatherings held a special importance.
“Distances,” my cousin Nelli remarked in a recent email, “are minor.” I hope so.
Women at the Wailing Wall.
***
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Barbara Mensch is a photographer living in Manhattan. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Fundacion Televisa of Mexico City, the Biblioteque Nationale, and the Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
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FOOD / JOAN NATHAN
How To Make a Salad That Captures the Smoky Flavors of the Mediterranean
Video: It starts with a simple grilled eggplant, but the toppings—pomegranate seeds, feta, and tahini—make it a sophisticated dishBurnt Eggplant Salad
In his authoritative 1891 book on Italian cooking, La Scienza in Cucina e l’arte di Mangiar Bene (The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well), Pellegrino Artusi wrote: “Forty years ago you could hardly find either eggplant or fennel in the markets here in Florence, because they were considered Jewish food and abhorred.” Artusi was correct that Jews, who knew about eggplants from Baghdad and Iran, brought this member of the nightshade family to Italy and other countries. But as I walked through the streets of Florence this week, after a delicious Italian Jewish lunch at the Mama Florence Cooking School, I could see how attitudes about eggplant have changed in northern Italy. Today, few Italians “abhor” eggplant, which is now a staple of Mediterranean cooking.
Throughout my life of eating in homes and restaurants around the world, I’ve always ordered eggplant where I’ve found it on the menu, and I often beg the cook for the recipe. This burnt eggplant salad, which I adapted from Israeli chef and cookbook author Erez Komorovsky and Toto Restaurant in Tel Aviv, looks beautiful on the plate and has a lovely, smoky flavor from the flames of the grill, gas stove, or open fire. Like the eggplant itself, the toppings can easily adapt to suit your own tastes.
***
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Video: It starts with a simple grilled eggplant, but the toppings—pomegranate seeds, feta, and tahini—make it a sophisticated dishBurnt Eggplant Salad
In his authoritative 1891 book on Italian cooking, La Scienza in Cucina e l’arte di Mangiar Bene (The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well), Pellegrino Artusi wrote: “Forty years ago you could hardly find either eggplant or fennel in the markets here in Florence, because they were considered Jewish food and abhorred.” Artusi was correct that Jews, who knew about eggplants from Baghdad and Iran, brought this member of the nightshade family to Italy and other countries. But as I walked through the streets of Florence this week, after a delicious Italian Jewish lunch at the Mama Florence Cooking School, I could see how attitudes about eggplant have changed in northern Italy. Today, few Italians “abhor” eggplant, which is now a staple of Mediterranean cooking.
Throughout my life of eating in homes and restaurants around the world, I’ve always ordered eggplant where I’ve found it on the menu, and I often beg the cook for the recipe. This burnt eggplant salad, which I adapted from Israeli chef and cookbook author Erez Komorovsky and Toto Restaurant in Tel Aviv, looks beautiful on the plate and has a lovely, smoky flavor from the flames of the grill, gas stove, or open fire. Like the eggplant itself, the toppings can easily adapt to suit your own tastes.
***
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Joan Nathan is Tablet Magazine’s food columnist and the author of 10 cookbooks includingQuiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France
Joan Nathan is Tablet Magazine’s food columnist and the author of 10 cookbooks includingQuiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France
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New York Conference Raises Awareness for Gaucher Disease According to the National Gaucher Foundation, one out of every 10 Ashkenazi Jews are carriers for the rare genetic disorder by Rachel Delia Benaim
In 1979, a year after graduating from Quinnipiac University, and newly married, Suzanne Krupskas began to suffer from what she describes as incredible pain. “We were playing tennis,” she recalled, when she felt what was like “thick nails going through my legs and hips—I fell down.”
Krupskas, a native New Yorker, spent the next two years seeing different doctors and specialists who could not accurately diagnose. Finally, a couple years later, she learned she had Gaucher Disease (pronounced Go-SHAY), a rare genetic disorderthat causes fat to accumulate in cells and organs like the liver, spleen, and brain due to an enzyme deficiency. For individuals who make it past infancy with the disease, the disease can cause severe bone pain, an enlarged spleen and liver, and anemia, among other symptoms.
According to the National Gaucher Foundation, one in 40,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Gaucher annually, but the percentage is much higher for Jews of Eastern and Central European descent: one in 450 Ashkenazim are diagnosed. One in 10 Ashkenazi Jews are carriers (i.e. someone who can pass on the illness to their children if their spouse is also a carrier). Krupskas is of Polish, Austrian, and French descent.
Krupskas traveled to the Yale Club this past Sunday to partake in the fourth annual symposium hosted by the National Gaucher Foundation, Inc. and the Yale Lysosomal Disease Center and Gaucher Disease Treatment Center. There, the two organizations presented the latest Gaucher research and community innovations and took the opportunity to bring the Gaucher community together in the U.S.’s most Jewish city. While much of the conference’s information is available online and there are discussion forums for the approximately 7,000 people who suffer from the disease nationally, “these meetings,” Krupskas said, “are the only true way to interact well. You lose something on the Internet.”
Over a catered kosher lunch of teriyaki salmon, vegetables, and an assortment of desserts, a group of around 80 individuals listened eagerly and actively engaged with Brian Berman, the President and CEO of National Gaucher Foundation, and Dr. Pramod Kumar Mistry, the leading expert of Gaucher Disease, each addressed topics that no doubt hit close to home: Many of those in the audience were either living with the disease or have a family member who suffers from it. “My brother has Gaucher,” said Avraham, an ultra-Orthodox Jew from Lakewood, who asked Tablet not to use his last name because of stigmas about genetic diseases prevalent in the ultra-Orthodox community. The audience listened to Berman recount his personal story of being the first person ever successfully treated for Gaucher Disease. He began treatment when he was 4 years old. Now 36, he’s married with five children of his own. “They help me with my injections,” he said of his children. “I wouldn’t be able to do it without them.”
Berman, who took the helm of the National Gaucher Foundation earlier this year, is easing into his new position. He explained that he had resistance to becoming an activist for this community: “I felt the disease stole my childhood.” But he sees the importance of using his skills and experience to help others and the community.
Colorful glossy brochures provided information on everything anyone could want to know as an introduction to the disease. The most basic pamphlet explained that there are three forms of Gaucher Disease: types 1, 2, and 3. Type 1 is currently the only form that is treatable and is the most prevalent form of Gaucher Disease found in Ashkenazi Jews. Though Type 1 Gaucher Disease has been treatable since 1991, there is no cure and those who suffer from the disease are constantly on meds and often in pain. Babies born with Types 2 or 3 die in infancy, due to severe early onset brain damage. There is still work to be done, Berman explained, in the fields of “education and awareness.” This venture will be carried out mostly on social media, he explained, with videos and a new campaign called #SpitHappens, which is set to launch November 9. He is also working on a new initiative to be able to provide psychological support for families with children with Gaucher Disease.
A few patients mentioned that some of their symptoms have not been identified as being in line with the current research on Gaucher. For example, many attendees noted that they have severe joint pains as a symptom of their disease, though it is not yet accepted as having scientific ties to the disease. Moreover, some people, like Krupskas, noted that they were initially misdiagnosed as having Leukemia, because general medical professionals have not traditionally been trained to look for Gaucher.
This is where the work needs to be done, to fill in these gaps and make sure suffering is alleviated. For those with the disease, Krupskas is unequivocal: “Treatment is imperative. I don’t want anyone to go what I went through with 8 hip replacements [because my bones were so weak.]” For those would-be parents who are considering having children, Krupskas has another piece of valuable advice: “Don’t put on blinders,” she said. “Educated yourself and get [genetically] tested,” which is free through the end of the year.
Related: Tinder for Tay-Sachs
A Case for Genetic Jewishness
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This Christmas, Whoopi Goldberg Invites You to Spend $139 on a Hanukkah Sweater Because who needs bubbe when you’ve got Whoopi? by Jonathan Zalman
Whoopi Goldberg, who ruled in Sister Act, is apparently hawking sweaters these days, as celebrities do. Turns out, she’s into Christmas sweaters, or “ugly” holidays sweaters, as they have so affectionately been named, and has decided to lend her brand to another brand, which happens in a society with an appetite for attention and money.-------
New York Conference Raises Awareness for Gaucher Disease According to the National Gaucher Foundation, one out of every 10 Ashkenazi Jews are carriers for the rare genetic disorder by Rachel Delia BenaimIn 1979, a year after graduating from Quinnipiac University, and newly married, Suzanne Krupskas began to suffer from what she describes as incredible pain. “We were playing tennis,” she recalled, when she felt what was like “thick nails going through my legs and hips—I fell down.”
Krupskas, a native New Yorker, spent the next two years seeing different doctors and specialists who could not accurately diagnose. Finally, a couple years later, she learned she had Gaucher Disease (pronounced Go-SHAY), a rare genetic disorderthat causes fat to accumulate in cells and organs like the liver, spleen, and brain due to an enzyme deficiency. For individuals who make it past infancy with the disease, the disease can cause severe bone pain, an enlarged spleen and liver, and anemia, among other symptoms.
According to the National Gaucher Foundation, one in 40,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Gaucher annually, but the percentage is much higher for Jews of Eastern and Central European descent: one in 450 Ashkenazim are diagnosed. One in 10 Ashkenazi Jews are carriers (i.e. someone who can pass on the illness to their children if their spouse is also a carrier). Krupskas is of Polish, Austrian, and French descent.
Krupskas traveled to the Yale Club this past Sunday to partake in the fourth annual symposium hosted by the National Gaucher Foundation, Inc. and the Yale Lysosomal Disease Center and Gaucher Disease Treatment Center. There, the two organizations presented the latest Gaucher research and community innovations and took the opportunity to bring the Gaucher community together in the U.S.’s most Jewish city. While much of the conference’s information is available online and there are discussion forums for the approximately 7,000 people who suffer from the disease nationally, “these meetings,” Krupskas said, “are the only true way to interact well. You lose something on the Internet.”
Over a catered kosher lunch of teriyaki salmon, vegetables, and an assortment of desserts, a group of around 80 individuals listened eagerly and actively engaged with Brian Berman, the President and CEO of National Gaucher Foundation, and Dr. Pramod Kumar Mistry, the leading expert of Gaucher Disease, each addressed topics that no doubt hit close to home: Many of those in the audience were either living with the disease or have a family member who suffers from it. “My brother has Gaucher,” said Avraham, an ultra-Orthodox Jew from Lakewood, who asked Tablet not to use his last name because of stigmas about genetic diseases prevalent in the ultra-Orthodox community. The audience listened to Berman recount his personal story of being the first person ever successfully treated for Gaucher Disease. He began treatment when he was 4 years old. Now 36, he’s married with five children of his own. “They help me with my injections,” he said of his children. “I wouldn’t be able to do it without them.”
Berman, who took the helm of the National Gaucher Foundation earlier this year, is easing into his new position. He explained that he had resistance to becoming an activist for this community: “I felt the disease stole my childhood.” But he sees the importance of using his skills and experience to help others and the community.
A few patients mentioned that some of their symptoms have not been identified as being in line with the current research on Gaucher. For example, many attendees noted that they have severe joint pains as a symptom of their disease, though it is not yet accepted as having scientific ties to the disease. Moreover, some people, like Krupskas, noted that they were initially misdiagnosed as having Leukemia, because general medical professionals have not traditionally been trained to look for Gaucher.
This is where the work needs to be done, to fill in these gaps and make sure suffering is alleviated. For those with the disease, Krupskas is unequivocal: “Treatment is imperative. I don’t want anyone to go what I went through with 8 hip replacements [because my bones were so weak.]” For those would-be parents who are considering having children, Krupskas has another piece of valuable advice: “Don’t put on blinders,” she said. “Educated yourself and get [genetically] tested,” which is free through the end of the year.
Related: Tinder for Tay-Sachs
A Case for Genetic Jewishness
-------
This Christmas, Whoopi Goldberg Invites You to Spend $139 on a Hanukkah Sweater Because who needs bubbe when you’ve got Whoopi? by Jonathan ZalmanAnd we will wear these sweaters, Jews and Christians and hispters and fashionistas alike, sometimes ironically, sometimes by mistake, sometimes on purpose, and then we will post pictures of the special moments we enjoy in our sweaters on Instagram, like when we spill that dastardly latke oil on the threads that cover our sternums, and share them with friends and family and people we don’t know but appreciate nonetheless because they are our “followers,” which in turn makes us feel better about our sartorial choices, and thus our life decisions, and therefore ourselves, all because of Whoopi Goldberg.
So yes, by all means, spend that $130 plus tax on a sweater at Lord & Taylor with an octupus menorah on it and be the life of the party. #YoloHanukkah.
Previous: The End of an Era in Hanukkah Sweaters
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In Attempt at Fiscal Transparency, Ukrainian MPs Publicly Open Their Coffers Ukrainian citizens have expressed shock at the vast wealth of their political representatives, many of whom carry millions on hand by Vladislav Davidzon
Tens of thousands of Ukraine’s elected officials had until the end of the last weekend to declare their 2015 income and assets to an open access public database. A part of the International Monetary Fund’s efforts to increase fiscal transparency in the severely corrupt and oligarchic dominated economy, the archly resented law was essentially imposed on the political system and on the Ukrainian parliament by its Western partners.
The creation of the e-declaration system had been plagued with technical issues in the course of its formation. The deadline for the declarations was this past Sunday, and the system almost crashed several times during the crunch of last-minute filings as Ukrainian politicians unhappily scrambled to fulfill their legal obligations. In some Ukrainian journalistic circles it became a jocular topic of debate to wonder whether or not the very wealthiest and most high profile MPs would file, and how much of their actual holdings would be exposed to the world’s scrutiny. Ukrainian politicians are also known for declaring themselves impoverished while living in mansions owned by their wives or brothers and driving luxury automobiles owned by their cousins.
Ukraine’s Jewish Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman—who contrary to the proclamations of numerous media outlets is not the first but rather Ukraine’s second Jewish PM (Yukhym Zvyahilsky)—revealed cash holdings of more than total of $1.2 million in cash as well as a stockpile of luxury watches. Dozens of MPs likewise declared millions in cash, luxury cars, jewelry, land and industrial holdings, and rare bottles of wine. Unsurprisingly, the most fervently populist members of parliament, such as Radical party head Oleh Lyashko, who once showed up in parliament with a pitchfork, held some of the most impressive hoards of cash.
The revelations have sent Ukrainian politics into paroxysms of mutual recriminations. When American writer Sophie Pinkham, author of an excellent recently published memoir of post-Maidan Ukraine, saw the Reuters headline“Ukrainians shocked as politicians declare cast wealth,” she commented that she “thought [it] was an Onion article.” The tenor of Ukrainian social media was one of outrage. In a Facebook post, journalist Kristina Berdynskykh publicly asked colleagues who see Poroshenko bloc MP Andrei Pavleno to ask him where he lives because left that part of his e-declaration blank. “Does he live in the Rada itself?” she retorted, wondering about a man known to have multiple watches.
Ukraine’s political class is infamous for its venality. Many members of parliament are representatives of big business who entered the Verkhovna Rada for the express purpose of siphoning resources from the state budget or to acquire parliamentary immunity against possible prosecution. Ironically, the reverse side of Ukraine’s widespread kleptocracy is its puritanical public relationship to wealth that is a leftover legacy of Soviet communism. Ukrainians’ income has been slashed by a war-driven recession, and their buying power has been further reduced by the twin scourges of a depreciation of the currency against the dollar and sharply rising inflation.
In a defensive Facebook post published Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Groysman’s press secretary accused Fatherland party leader Yulia Tymoshenko of making a salary five times higher when she had served as prime minister about a decade ago. In an unrelated but particularly bad case of timing, Ukraine’s parliament is now in the midst of voting in a retroactive pay raise that would more than double their salaries. Many skeptical local political observers as well as international experts of the declaration process pointedly wondered why any member of the ordinary Ukrainian population should be expected to entrust the banking system with his life savings when large swathes of the political elite choose to keep their wealth tucked under their mattress or in the form of expensive wine bottles. That is a reasonable question to ask as Ukraine struggles to create strong public institutions and cleanse its public sphere of corruption.
Previous: Ukraine’s Post-Soviet Identity Through the Murky Lens of Its Statues
At Babi Yar Memorial, a Tenor of Somber Acknowledgement
Vladislav Davidzon, Tablet's European culture correspondent, is a Russian-American writer, translator, and critic. He was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and lives in Paris.
Tablet Magazine
The creation of the e-declaration system had been plagued with technical issues in the course of its formation. The deadline for the declarations was this past Sunday, and the system almost crashed several times during the crunch of last-minute filings as Ukrainian politicians unhappily scrambled to fulfill their legal obligations. In some Ukrainian journalistic circles it became a jocular topic of debate to wonder whether or not the very wealthiest and most high profile MPs would file, and how much of their actual holdings would be exposed to the world’s scrutiny. Ukrainian politicians are also known for declaring themselves impoverished while living in mansions owned by their wives or brothers and driving luxury automobiles owned by their cousins.
Ukraine’s Jewish Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman—who contrary to the proclamations of numerous media outlets is not the first but rather Ukraine’s second Jewish PM (Yukhym Zvyahilsky)—revealed cash holdings of more than total of $1.2 million in cash as well as a stockpile of luxury watches. Dozens of MPs likewise declared millions in cash, luxury cars, jewelry, land and industrial holdings, and rare bottles of wine. Unsurprisingly, the most fervently populist members of parliament, such as Radical party head Oleh Lyashko, who once showed up in parliament with a pitchfork, held some of the most impressive hoards of cash.
The revelations have sent Ukrainian politics into paroxysms of mutual recriminations. When American writer Sophie Pinkham, author of an excellent recently published memoir of post-Maidan Ukraine, saw the Reuters headline“Ukrainians shocked as politicians declare cast wealth,” she commented that she “thought [it] was an Onion article.” The tenor of Ukrainian social media was one of outrage. In a Facebook post, journalist Kristina Berdynskykh publicly asked colleagues who see Poroshenko bloc MP Andrei Pavleno to ask him where he lives because left that part of his e-declaration blank. “Does he live in the Rada itself?” she retorted, wondering about a man known to have multiple watches.
Ukraine’s political class is infamous for its venality. Many members of parliament are representatives of big business who entered the Verkhovna Rada for the express purpose of siphoning resources from the state budget or to acquire parliamentary immunity against possible prosecution. Ironically, the reverse side of Ukraine’s widespread kleptocracy is its puritanical public relationship to wealth that is a leftover legacy of Soviet communism. Ukrainians’ income has been slashed by a war-driven recession, and their buying power has been further reduced by the twin scourges of a depreciation of the currency against the dollar and sharply rising inflation.
In a defensive Facebook post published Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Groysman’s press secretary accused Fatherland party leader Yulia Tymoshenko of making a salary five times higher when she had served as prime minister about a decade ago. In an unrelated but particularly bad case of timing, Ukraine’s parliament is now in the midst of voting in a retroactive pay raise that would more than double their salaries. Many skeptical local political observers as well as international experts of the declaration process pointedly wondered why any member of the ordinary Ukrainian population should be expected to entrust the banking system with his life savings when large swathes of the political elite choose to keep their wealth tucked under their mattress or in the form of expensive wine bottles. That is a reasonable question to ask as Ukraine struggles to create strong public institutions and cleanse its public sphere of corruption.
Previous: Ukraine’s Post-Soviet Identity Through the Murky Lens of Its Statues
At Babi Yar Memorial, a Tenor of Somber Acknowledgement
Vladislav Davidzon, Tablet's European culture correspondent, is a Russian-American writer, translator, and critic. He was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and lives in Paris.
Tablet Magazine
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