How Not to Help the Ultra-Orthodox

Liberal democracies like Israel need and depend on pious people. But they don’t need to— and shouldn’t—subsidize grown men for not working.

By Peter Berkowitz for Mosaic Magazine
In the short space of 66 years, Israel has established a kind of polity never before seen in the Middle East, a polity that promises all citizens individual freedom and equality before the law. To an astonishing degree, particularly given the exceedingly dangerous neighborhood in which it dwells, the Jewish state has succeeded.

Not that the dangers, either from without or from within, should ever be discounted. Those from without (Iran, terrorism, the collapse of the Arab state system, stalemate with the Palestinian Authority, and so on) are well known; less so, those from within. Although the Israeli economy has made great strides in shaking off the remnants of its socialist roots, large sectors continue to underperform as government’s heavy hand impedes innovation and stifles competition. In addition, a restive Arab minority, approximately 20 percent of the citizenry, though generally aware that it enjoys the same freedoms enjoyed by Jewish Israelis—freedoms of which Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East can only dream—is increasingly impatient with the underfunding of its communities and its outsider status.

Continue reading.


Follow us on   

The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!

A reanalysis of last year’s important Pew Study contradicts persistent alarmism about ‘vanishing’ American Jewry

By Leonard Saxe for Tablet Magazine


Fifty years ago, Look magazine—the second most widely circulated magazine in America at the time—featured a cover story, “The Vanishing American Jew.” The headline screamed “[n]ew studies reveal loss of Jewish identity, soaring rate of intermarriage,” and readers were told “Judaism may be losing 70 percent of children born to mixed couples.” The now iconic title and headlines notwithstanding, buried in the story was that membership in Jewish congregations and enrollment in Jewish religious schools had reached record levels. But the narrative was unequivocally bleak. A half century later, dire forecasts are again front and center. The release last year of the Pew Research Center’s A Portrait of Jewish Americans has unleashed a tsunami of doom and gloom punditry. With headlines that could have been cut and pasted from “The Vanishing American Jew,” shrill warnings about the dangers of intermarriage and the decline of non-Orthodox forms of Judaism have given rise to a refreshed narrative of a dismal Jewish future. But it is a distorted story.

Ironically, Look magazine folded less than 10 years after “The Vanishing American Jew” appeared. In contrast, the Jewish population has grown and today is expanding at a rate that matches growth in the overall American population. There are now more than 7 million Americans who have Jewish parentage or who converted to Judaism and identify as Jewish. Moreover, the expansion of the Jewish population has been accompanied, particularly over the past 25 years, by substantial growth in the number of Jews who are engaged in Jewish religious life and/or have visited and are involved with Israel.

Continue reading.

Follow us on   

From rebbetzin to maharat

By Dina Brawer, The Times of Israel

Did I always want to be a rabbi? The answer is no. It never occurred to me.

Growing up I already had a defined, robust role for me to serve my community as a woman. As a Chabad teen, I aspired to be a shlucha emissary, a role that provided a clear path to spiritual leadership – regardless of marital status. As a result, I took up numerous communal responsibilities — from teaching to coordinating a Lag B’Omer parade to designing interactive educational exhibitions – all of them enjoyable and fulfilling. When I later married a rabbi, my position as a shlucha remained unchanged, as did my desire to serve my community. The reason the role of shlucha was so effective in enabling me to serve, therefore, was because it was understood, defined, and clearly labeled.

After five years on shlichut, my husband and I moved to the UK where he took up a position as a congregational rabbi. Over the next fifteen years we served two London congregations. As a rebbetzin, I led community development strategy, counseled congregants, taught Torah — and baked plenty of challah. And yet, while I clearly had carved out a communal role for myself, I couldn’t avoid the nagging feeling that if it weren’t for my husband, I wouldn’t have that role. I felt this most acutely when at events outside the Jewish community. People asked us what we did. My husband replied that he was a rabbi. But what was I? What could I say? A rebbetzin? A rabbi’s wife? That would just beg the question — what exactly does a rabbi’s wife do? My husband’s title could capture, in one word, who he was, whereas I had to spend fifteen minutes explaining what exactly I did.

Continue reading.


Follow us on   

Hamas, Inc.-How Hamas Amassed Its Wealth

Gazans suffer, while their leaders continue to pile up the loot

By Moshe Elad for Tablet Magazine

The idea that hardline Hamas political leaders like Mousa Abu Marzook and Khaled Meshal who order violence in the name of jihad are also canny businessmen who have assembled financial

Nor is the combination of political and military roles with business empires unique to Hamas, or to other Islamist organizations. When I started my job as the Israeli Military Governor of Tyre district during the first Lebanese war and asked to meet with the local police chief, I was told, “He is available only during the morning hours. In the afternoons he takes care of his businesses.” “Businesses?” I wondered. “Yes,” said my informant, “he has a supermarket chain.”

During my two years in Lebanon I learned that almost every local office-holder and officer, whether in the public sector, police, or army, owned a private business. The police commander in question, for example, recommended that citizens who approach the police for help should purchase food from his private stores. Because Western values such as conflict of interests, transparency, and public efficiency are less recognized and less respected in this part of the world, most political leaders in the Middle East see public office as a route to making a fortune, and most of their constituents accept this behavior—with the hope of sharing in even a small part of the leader’s wealth.

Continue reading.

Follow us on   

That Time I Picked Up a Hitchhiking Bubbe

By Shanna Silva for Raising Kvell

We know the rule: picking up hitchhikers is bad. It’s been drilled into our heads from a young age, along with other stranger-danger situations and how to avoid them. Parents and educators teach children to be wary of strangers, and try to impart a survival savvy that they hope will never be needed. And in addition to the parental and school warnings are the many movies and TV shows that reinforce these concepts. We know that when a scene features a naïve driver picking up a hitchhiker, it will not end well for someone. Needless to say, we’ve been warned.

So then, what possessed me to pull over for a hitchhiker on my way to work?

I rolled my window down, and there she was: a woman with salt and pepper colored hair, a brown cardigan, and orthopedic shoes. She was at least 75 years old, and seemed to be in distress. She explained that she’d missed her bus, and was going to be late for an important doctor’s appointment. She told me the address of her doctor, which was coincidentally near my office, and she asked for a ride. What else could I do? I told her to get in.

Continue reading.


Follow us on   

Arafat–Ten Years Later

by Elliott Abrams for Council on Foreign Relations
   
Yasser Arafat died ten years ago, on November 11, 2004.

I am posting this “appreciation” a bit early, and anticipating an outflow of mourning and praise for Arafat next week. In fact, he was a curse to Palestinians.

To measure the damage Arafat did as the Palestinian leader, let’s begin with a comparison. Just 9 days before Arafat’s death, on November 2, 2004, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan died. Sheik Zayed’s death was not greeted with the global mourning, nor with the ceremonies and speeches at the United Nations that Arafat got. This is grotesque, because he was the father of his country, the UAE, and a model of sober, responsible, constructive leadership. Born in 1918 in one of the Trucial States, he lived as a Bedouin for all his early years. Yet he was wise enough to understand the modern world that was growing up around him, and to see the need for the Trucial States to federate when the British left in 1971. So he negotiated and  then led the federation. The enormous success of the UAE today, and its role as a key U.S. ally, owe an incalculable amount to this man.

Continue reading.


Follow us on   

Forward 50: Susan Talve

Forward 50 annually publishes its list of the 50 American Jews who have had the most impact on our national story.

 When Rabbi Jill Jacobs, head of the rabbinic social justice group T’ruah, wanted to travel to Ferguson, Missouri to support protesters, she got in touch with Susan Talve.

Talve, 61, is rabbi and spiritual leader of Central Reform Congregation, located a few miles from Ferguson, in downtown St. Louis. Ever since the August death of black teenager Michael Brown, Talve has been the most visible Jewish religious presence in a movement led by local black youth.

A longtime activist on social justice issues, Talve was recognized as one of America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis by the Forward this year for her local work in St. Louis combating gun violence.

Talve has been a regular participant in the recent protests in Ferguson, but she describes her role as one of support rather than leadership. “I go pretty much every night,” she told Haaretz. “It’s young people protesting and clergy showing up to model nonviolence and to listen to what they have to say.”

Over the past several months, she and her colleagues have continued to put their bodies on the line. One day in October, after they tried and failed to get arrested at an action outside the Ferguson police station, the Forward reached Talve by phone as she rode to visit a group of jailed ministers. She described a young member of her synagogue who lives in Ferguson: “He just wants to go to school,” she said. “He also doesn’t want to be afraid that when he walks on the street at night, that he’s going to be provoked, profiled and harassed because of the color of his skin.”


Follow us on   

In Germany, a Jewish community now thrives

By Mike Ross for The Boston Globe

BERLIN

SINCE FIRST arriving in what would become Germany more than 1,800 years ago, Jews have searched for acceptance. No matter how desperate their attempts to demonstrate their standing as good German citizens — in some cases converting to Christianity, enlisting to fight in World War I, even trying to persuade their American counterparts to be less critical of the rising new leader Adolf Hitler — nothing brought them acceptance by their countrymen.

That, however, may be changing. Seventy years after the Holocaust, as anti-Semitism churns across Europe, the Jewish population on the continent is plummeting to record lows. New strands of hatred foment seemingly justified by the policies of Israel — a sovereign country thousands of miles away. And yet Germany has suddenly reemerged as a home for Jews.


Ask Cilly Kugelmann, the vice director of the Jewish Museum Berlin. Kugelmann is the daughter of two Polish Holocaust survivors who, as it is said, “grew up sitting on packed suitcases.” Today, she says she can’t think of anywhere else she’d rather live than Germany. “Germany is one of the safest places for Jews worldwide,” Kugelmann said.

In preparing to visit Germany for the first time, nothing was further from my own beliefs. In the place where my father’s family was slaughtered, I assumed that no Jew would ever again see Germany as their home. How could they?

Continue reading.


Follow us on   


 

A love story

Cory Booker talks about growing up in Harrington Park, falling in love with Judaism

by Joanne Palmer for New Jersey Jewish Standard

Often it’s easy to pick out a non-Jewish candidate trawling for Jewish votes.

He’ll show up at a shul wearing a fancy crocheted kippah with his name spelled out along the edge; it’ll be pinned to cover the bald spot precisely. (Really, if you’re going to wear one, you might as well benefit from it, right?)

He’ll throw out Yiddishisms with abandon — mishuganeh here, mensch there, oy, oy everywhere. He’ll talk about getting a bagel with a schmear. (Do you know any Jew who has ever eaten one of those? Me neither.)

In order to show his deep, lifelong sense of connection to the Jewish community, he’ll pander so hard it must make his teeth hurt.

But if you are looking for an actual Judeophile, a non-Jew whose connection to the Jewish world is longstanding, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and clearly real, you would have to direct your gaze in another direction.

You’d find yourself looking at Cory Booker —New Jersey’s junior U.S. senator — who visited the Jewish Standard’s offices last week.

Instead of flinging out Yiddish malapropisms, he’ll quote from the machzor, in Hebrew; he’ll cite biblical chapter and verse, again in Hebrew, and he’ll launch into a spirited explanation of why he insisted on being a co-president rather than the only president of Oxford’s L’Chaim Society.

Continue reading.


Follow us on   

Has Argentina Turned Against its Jews?

For twenty years, the government of Argentina has failed to bring to justice perpetrators of one of the deadliest anti-Semitic terror attacks of all time. Now, it appears that it is no longer trying.

by Eamonn MacDonagh for The Tower

On July 18, 1994, a suicide bomber drove a van packed with explosives into the headquarters of the AMIA Jewish community organization in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The resulting blast killed 85 people and left hundreds injured. It was one of the worst incidents of anti-Semitic violence since World War II. The horrific attack is believed to have been ordered by the Iranian regime and executed by its terrorist proxies, and the ongoing betrayal of justice carried out by successive Argentine leaders who have failed to have the massacre properly investigated and prosecuted bears notable marks of anti-Semitism.

The criminal investigation into the massive terrorist attack was chaotic, plagued with accusations of cover-ups, witness tampering and bribery. In a particularly sordid climax, the investigating judge, Juan José Galeano, was removed from the investigation and now faces trial on charges arising from his handling of the investigation. A group of corrupt police officers, as well as a dealer in stolen vehicles, were eventually tried on charges of playing a secondary role in the attack. In 2004, they were all acquitted.

A subsequent Supreme Court decision revoked the acquittals of the stolen car dealer and some of the corrupt policemen. A new trial was ordered. It still hasn’t happened. The same ruling found that the initial investigation into the attack, flawed though it was, produced substantial valid evidence proving the attack was an act of terrorism.

Continue reading.


Follow us on    page.

The Sarajevo Hagaddah: Held Hostage in a Crumbling and Shuttered Museum

Priceless 14th-century manuscript from Spanish Jewry’s Golden Age survived inquisitions and the Holocaust, but now sits trapped in the shuttered Bosnian National Museum, barred from public display

BY ILAN BEN ZION for Times of Israel
SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — One of the most magnificent Jewish manuscripts, a book that survived two inquisitions and a Holocaust, is sitting trapped behind closed doors in Bosnia’s slowly crumbling National Museum, held captive by the dizzyingly convoluted politics of the Balkan nation.

The Sarajevo Haggadah, the most elaborately decorated codex remaining from Spanish Jewry’s Golden Age and today a keystone of Bosnia’s Jewish and gentile heritage, has been kept for the past two years from both the local community and tourists, despite grassroots and international efforts to put the treasure back on display.

The Bosnian government, experts say, is seemingly content to let the Haggadah continue to languish behind closed doors.

The book, which contains the story of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt — retold each year on Passover — is remarkable not only for its beautiful design, exquisite illuminated text, master-craftsmanship, and rare drawings from pre-Inquisition Spain, but also for its own remarkable exodus story.

Continue reading.


Follow us on    page.

A Simchat Torah Story

And it was morning and it was evening, the Seventh Game.

Gary Rosenblatt, Editor and Publisher of The Jewish Week


My favorite contemporary Simchat Torah story was told to me by a close friend who grew up in Pittsburgh. I offer it here in honor of Simchat Torah, which is celebrated this year on Thursday evening and Friday, and as the baseball season closes out this weekend. Nowadays, with the expanded Major Leagues, divisional playoffs and Wild Card teams, the World Series, long known as the October Classic, could very well linger until November. But when I was growing up, the World Series invariably fell out on the High Holy Days. (I used to imagine Ford Frick, the commissioner at the time, consulting a luach, or Jewish calendar, each year to pick the Series dates just to frustrate observant fans.) But it was just such a convergence of the baseball schedule and the Jewish holidays that led to the unique encounter described here …

This is a story about the faith and joy that can bring us together (all too rarely), about the ephemeral nature of man’s yearnings and the eternity of God’s words. Mostly, though, it’s just a story that always makes me smile.

The year was 1960, when Simchat Torah — that joyous day when we complete, and begin again, the reading of the Torah — was about to start, just as the long Major League Baseball season was about to end.

Continue reading.Check out Jvillage’s High Holiday+    page.

My Grandfather Collected Etrogs—To Be Passed Down to Future Generationse

More than an ephemeral part of Sukkot observance, the fruit also symbolizes the commitment of one generation to the next

By Benjamin W. Corn

On my mother’s glass-and-chrome étagère stands a sepia-toned photograph of a dapper-looking soldier, a captain in the tzar’s army. The young man, my maternal grandfather, wears his medals and other military regalia. The picture pleases the eye, startling the viewer only when background information comes to light: In addition to being a commanding officer, my grandfather was a rabbi.

I never met my grandfather, Benjamin W. Greenberg. He died several months before my birth. In compliance with Ashkenazic custom, I inherited his name. Still, having heard stories about this Renaissance man, I feel that I know him.

Like many rabbis, Grandpa amassed a vast collection of Jewish books, including rare folios and classical texts. Sixteenth-century Bibles, illuminated haggadahs, and anthologies of Yiddish poems stood among the bound volumes on shelf after shelf in his modest house, which he purchased in Brooklyn after he emigrated from Russia. Simply acquiring a treasure-trove of books, however, was too conventional to satisfy his eclectic tastes. He also cherished another object. Grandpa was an avid collector of etrogs.

Continue reading.


Check out Jvillage’s High Holiday+    page.  While you're at it, check out our High Holidays Holiday Spotlight Kit for ideas, crafts, recipes, etc.

Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald, and Their War on Israel

By Gabriel Schoenfeld in Mosaic Magazine

When it comes to Israel, The Intercept’s coverage crosses the line from opinion journalism to a crude and vile form of propaganda.

Pierre Omidyar, founder and chairman of the auction site eBay, became a billionaire at the age of 31. Having made his fortune (his net worth is somewhere in the ballpark of $8 billion), the French-Iranian-American entrepreneur wants to give back. A decade ago, he established the Omidyar Network, an institution that is part venture capital and part philanthropy, to help businesses and nonprofits that share a “commitment to advancing social good at the pace and scale the world needs today.”

Some of Omidyar’s investments do good by anyone’s definition: funding joint public-private educational projects in South Africa, or helping indigenous peoples around the world retain rights to the resources on their own lands. But for other investments, “social good” is in the eye of the beholder. Omidyar recently infused $250 million into a new journalistic venture, First Look Media, and has installed a respected mainstream journalist, a former managing editor of the Washington Post, as President, to help “develop the best ways to serve audiences as well as oversee the company’s editorial vision.” That vision encompasses a number of lofty objectives: ensuring that citizens are “highly informed and deeply engaged in the issues that affect their lives”; helping “to improve society through journalism and technology,” building “responsive institutions”; and supporting efforts to “hold the powerful accountable.”

That is all well and good, but how are these high-minded goals working out in practice? The only product of First Look Media thus far is The Intercept, an online publication whose three founding editors are Jeremy Scahill, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald. The latter two are both individuals to whom Edward Snowden entrusted the top-secret documents he purloined from the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence bodies before he took refuge in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Jeremy Scahill is a self-described “progressive journalist” who has written extensively for the Nation and wrote the script for a 2013 documentary film, Dirty Wars, based upon his book of the same title, about America’s “global killing machine.”

Continue reading.

Follow us on    page.

18 Things You Should Do Before Rosh Hashanah

From Oy!Chicago

(This article might be from Chicago but there's no reason why you can't do most of these things in your own hometown.)

Not that we have anything against highs in the mid-70s, but as the calendar inches closer and closer to September (seriously, WHAT??), it’s kinda hard to believe that was it for summer this year. It’s been a joy pretending to live in northern California, but it’s time to face the truth, Oy!sters: fall and 5775 are fast-approaching, and with them sweaters, boots, and (even) cooler temps. We can practically taste the pumpkin spice lattes already.

That said, there are still a few weeks left to stock up on fresh air before you pack your bags for the suburbs or buy your plane ticket home for Rosh Hashanah and settle onto the couch for hibernation.

Chicago tradition dictates the aggressive enjoyment of nice weather until the LAST DAMN DAY WE CAN, right? With that in mind, from our rooftop barstool to yours, here are Oy!Chicago’s top picks for sending 5774 off with a bang:

Continue reading.


Follow us on    page.  

And while you're at it, check out our High Holidays Holiday kit with lots of wonderful ideas and suggestions to make your HHD fun and fulfilling.

Rosh Hashana, Circa 1919

By JOAN NATHAN for The New York Times

“SHALOM ALEICHEM!” Shiva Shapiro said in a heavy Yiddish accent to her visitors.

As she deftly stuffed cabbage leaves with rice and stewed tomatoes, and displayed other dishes she has made on her 1900 Beauty Hub coal stove, Ms. Shapiro drew her guests into her life.

“This is 1919,” she said. “Last year was the end of the influenza epidemic and the end of the war to end all wars. We’re a Jewish family and we’re keeping kosher in our home. I don’t read English, only Yiddish and Hebrew. My daughter Mollie learned about bananas at school. I think that bananas are mushy, but I take her to buy a hand of bananas for 25 cents.”

Mrs. Shapiro is actually Barbara Ann Paster, one of the actors here at the Strawbery Banke restoration, a living museum in which over 350 years of Portsmouth homes, stores, churches and history have been preserved. It is in Puddle Dock, which was a decrepit neighborhood destined to be razed under urban renewal until a campaign in the 1950s and ’60s led by the town librarian saved 42 houses on 10 acres to create the museum.

The area was first settled in 1623 by the English, who found a profusion of strawberries there. By the turn of the 20th century Italians, Irish, English, French-Canadians and East European Jews had come here to find work. Although most immigrants at that time settled in large cities, some settled directly in smaller towns like Portsmouth. By 1919, 152 Russian Jews made up about a quarter of the immigrant population of Puddle Dock and 18 of them were Shapiro relatives, according to the museum.

Continue reading.

Follow us on    page.

Watching ‘The Producers,’ Nearly 50 Years Later

Mel Brooks’ 1968 film evoked laughs in the face of the obscene. It still does today.

By Isabel Fattal for Tablet Magazine

When I sat down to watch The Producers last weekend, I was prepared for the humor to be somewhat obscene. Having already seen Spaceballs and History of the World Part I, I was familiar with Mel Brooks’ style. But The Producers reached an entirely new level. I love Brooks’ sense of humor, but still I wondered if it was OK to laugh—while wincing—when the female SS officers dance in a Swastika formation during the first performance of Springtime for Hitler. Still, my discomfort was short-lived, and I didn’t find it too difficult to decide to just laugh at and enjoy the film.

My proximity to the film’s subject matter perhaps helped make me feel more comfortable laughing along with The Producers. As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I felt like my personal connection somehow allowed me to be entertained rather than offended. After all, laughing at one’s own history and identity seems more appropriate than laughing at the plight of others. This seems to have been true for Brooks as well; watching the film, I wondered if another writer or director who didn’t share Brooks’ background as the descendant of German and Ukrainian Jews would have been able to take the film to its extreme levels of obscenity—the key to its success.

Continue reading.

Follow us on    page.

The kosher controversy at Sainsbury's speaks to a profound problem: acquiescence to anti-Semitism

Brendan O'Neill in Mosaic Magazine

Were you outraged by a Sainsbury's store's decision over the weekend to hide away its kosher foods in an attempt to placate anti-Israel protesters? You should have been. For this incident, though seemingly a one-off, speaks to a profound problem in Europe today – the respectable classes' acquiescence to anti-Semitism; their willingness to accept anti-Semitic sentiment as a fact of life and to shrug it off or, worse, kowtow to it.

The kosher incident took place at the Sainsbury's in Holborn in London. When a mob of anti-Israel protesters gathered outside the store, the manager took the extraordinary decision to take all kosher products off the shelves lest the protesters target them and smash them up. Kosher foods, of course, are Jewish not Israeli; they are part of the Jewish dietary requirement, not part of any kind of Israeli food corporatism. To shamefacedly hide away such foodstuffs in order to appease a gang of hot-headed Israel-haters is an attack on a religious people and their rights, not on the Israeli state. That in Britain in 2014 we have store managers taking kosher foods off public display should be of concern to anyone who hates prejudice and racism.

So does this mean Sainsbury's is anti-Semitic? No. It doesn't even show that anyone at the Sainsbury's in Holborn is anti-Semitic. But it does shine a light on the modern phenomenon of acquiescence to anti-Semitism, the rank unwillingness of influential people and institutions to face up to anti-Semitic sentiment and their preference for moulding the world around it rather than challenging it. Imagine if a Sainsbury's manager suggested that the best way to deal with a racist in his store was to remove the black employees who were offending him. There would be outrage. Yet this weekend, in central, apparently civilised London, a manager decided that the best way to deal with people possessed of a possibly anti-Semitic outlook was to hide away the Jew stuff, lest they see it and feel disgusted by it.

Continue reading.

Follow us on    page.

I’m Turning into My Mother-in-Law & I Think I Like it

By Stacy Reiber for Raising Kvell

“Mah Jongg is an old lady game.”

I tried to block out those words as I carried the small red suitcase of tiles to my first lesson. I had fully assumed I wouldn’t like it, but honestly, once I understood the whole “crack bam dot” business, it was a blast. Challenging, fast moving and competitive, all of the qualities I like best in a game.

“So I like Mah Jongg,” I told myself, “doesn’t mean I’m old.”

Then came the Danielle Steel novels. My kids and I were at the library and I had to choose my books while simultaneously making sure they didn’t put their hands in the newly-installed waterfall (easier said than done since the librarian had already warned me once after catching them in the act). Wanting something light and mindless that I knew I could read on the beach, I chose Danielle Steel (my book club would be horrified). That was the day I realized I’m not only getting old–I am turning into my mother-in-law.

Continue reading.


Follow us on    page.

Is Schindler a Projection of Spielberg Himself?

‘Schindler’s List’ is a story of redemption—for both the film’s protagonist and its director

By Gabriel Sanders for Tablet Magazine

In a 1994 New Yorker profile that appeared a few months after the release of Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg spoke candidly about how his Holocaust epic had transformed him.

In the past, he told the magazine’s Stephen Schiff, there had been projects he’d done for the money—things like the Indiana Jones sequels and Jurassic Park. “But,” he added, “these days I’d rather make the more difficult choices. I was just so challenged by Schindler’s List and so fulfilled by it and so disturbed by it. It so shook up my life, in a good way, that I think I got a little taste of what a lot of other directors have existed on all through their careers.”

Schindler’s List is also a story of transformation—of a hunger for money giving way to a higher calling. At its outset, Oskar Schindler is a dissolute, if charismatic, figure: a womanizer, a war profiteer, an opportunist. It’s more than an hour into the film before the girl in the red coat prompts his course-altering epiphany, and then another hour before the compilation of the list that secures his place in history.

Spielberg has often used characters who serve as stand-ins for himself: Roy Neary, the everyman visionary of Close Encounters; Upham, the brainy cartographer of Saving Private Ryan. Schindler fits squarely into this tradition. He’s a showman, a stager of spectacles, a Mitteleuropean P.T. Barnum. His talents, he tells Ben Kingsley’s Itzhak Stern, lie not so much with work but with “the presentation.” It’s perhaps no coincidence that the name by which Schindler goes most frequently is “Herr Direktor.”

Continue reading.

Follow our    page.

Word of the Day / Hamas: The terror movement that didn't do its Hebrew homework

It's quite the coincidence that 'Hamas' the terror group is spelled differently from 'hamas' the nasty act, but both originate from an Aramaic word for 'hard'

By Shoshana Kordova for Haaretz

It’s pretty safe to assume that the Islamic terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip didn’t conduct market research on the meaning and resonance of the organization’s name in Hebrew before choosing to call itself Hamas.

The Arabic name of the group is widely described as an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (“Islamic Resistance Movement”) as well as an Arabic word meaning “zeal.” But unlike "Islamic Jihad," say, or "Al-Qaida," the name “Hamas” is not just an Arabic term or an English translation of one. It also happens to be a Hebrew word meaning “violence,” among other things.

Hamas – or rather, the lowercased hamas – has been around since antediluvian times. In fact, it was one of the reasons God flooded the earth, according to Genesis: “And the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence [hamas]” (6:11).

Continue reading.

Follow our    page.

Tayyip Erdogan Vows To Protect Turkish Jews

Premier Says Israel Harms Jewry With 'Fraudulent Policies'

By JTA

Turkey will keep its Jewish citizens safe, but the Jewish community should denounce Israel, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a Turkish newspaper.

“Jews in Turkey are our citizens. We are responsible for their security of life and property,” Erdogan told the Daily Sabah.

He added: “I talked with our Jewish citizens’ leaders on Thursday and I stated that they should adopt a firm stance and release a statement against the Israeli government. I will contact them [Jewish leaders in Turkey] again, but whether or not they release a statement, we will never let Jewish people in Turkey get hurt.”

He said, according to the newspaper, that the Jewish leaders in Turkey should criticize “Israeli aggression,” and that the Israeli government “abuses all Jewish people around the world for its fraudulent policies.”

Erdogan on Friday criticized the United Nations for being “silent” on Israel’s operation in Gaza and said that Turkey has had difficulty delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza because of Israeli restrictions.

In an interview with CNN, Erdogan said that “If Israel is sincere on establishing a cease-fire, we will convince Hamas [to do the same].”

Follow our    page.

What’s Wrong with Fiddler on the Roof

Fifty years on, no work by or about Jews has won American hearts so thoroughly. So what's my problem?

By Ruth R. Wisse in Mosaic Magazine

No creative work by or about Jews has ever won the hearts and imaginations of Americans so thoroughly as the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which this year is celebrating its 50th anniversary and next year will have its fifth Broadway revival.

Everyone enjoys this show, whose musical numbers—“Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “To Life,” “Matchmaker,” and others—not only enliven Jewish weddings but are commonly understood to represent something essential about Jews and Jewishness. Jeremy Dauber opens his new biography of Sholem Aleichem with Fiddler because Fiddler is how the beloved Yiddish author is known—if he is known at all—to English readers. “Forget Sholem Aleichem,” writes Dauber, “there’s no talking about Yiddish, his language of art, without talking about Fiddler on the Roof. There’s no talking about Jews without talking about Fiddler.” And Dauber ends the book by tracing the stages through which Sholem Aleichem’s stories of Tevye the Dairyman and his daughters were transformed by successive translators and directors into what, by the time the movie version of Fiddler was released in 1971, the New Yorker’s normally severe critic Pauline Kael would call “the most powerful movie musical ever made.”

Soon after the stage production opened in 1964 (music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein, with Zero Mostel in the title role), I was urged to see it by my teacher, the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, who had just completed his History of the Yiddish Language. Unlike some purist defenders of Yiddish culture who were expressing mixed feelings about a classic work being hijacked for the American stage—and in contrast to several highbrow Jewish intellectuals, offended by what Irving Howe blisteringly called the play’s “softened and sweetened” nostalgia—Weinreich was delighted that Sholem Aleichem’s masterwork would be accessible to audiences who could never have come to know it in the original. He even defended as legitimate some of the changes that had been introduced in order to appeal to an American audience. I, too, loved the show, not least because Yiddish literature had become my subject of study, and I appreciated the boost.

Continue reading.

Follow our    page.

Town In Spain Changing Name, Building Jewish Studies Center To Remember Sephardic Background

From KosherPress.com

Castrillo Matajudíos, Spain – A Spanish town is in the process of changing its name due to the anti-Semitic translation, in addition to focusing on Jewish studies to remember the town’s history.

Castrillo Matajudíos contains words meaning, “kill Jews.” Reported on VIN news earlier this year, the town has voted to change the name to Castrillo Mota Judias, which means “Camp Jews Hill,” and to also open a Jewish studies center to bring light to the Sephardic history of the town reports Radio Arlanzón (http://bit.ly/1wspWU9).

Mayor Lorenzo Rodriguez met with the representative of the Board and President of the County Council to also discuss beginning archaeological digs to educate others on the history of the town and how it got its name.

The president of the Provincial Corporation, Cesar Rico, said that the idea sounds good and that the project will be interesting in both the recovery of priceless artifacts and learning about Sephardic culture.

The mayor stated that the Jewish studies center would focus on the significance of the Jewish community in that area during the time when they were expelled from Spain by Catholic Monarchs.

All of the projects could also lead to economic improvement for the town the mayor explained to the council.

Want to know more about Jewish Travel? Follow our board    page.

The Nazi Doctor Who Got Away With Mass Murder, Fled to Cairo, and Became a Muslim

‘The Eternal Nazi’ tells the gripping story of the hunt for Aribert Heim, and the German detective who relentlessly pursued him

By David Mikics for Tablet Magazine

“Everything would have been different if I had come from a happy home with people who cared about me,” Josef Mengele wrote in the 500-page autobiography discovered after his death. Mengele’s autobiography offers a disturbing spectacle: the pathetic whining of a pampered, sadistic murderer, interlaced with sermons on racial superiority and odd little drawings of bunnies and wooden cabinets. Mengele is a prime case of the perpetrator’s urge to see himself as a sufferer, a common syndrome among war criminals. In Auschwitz he was a petty god dispensing death; after the war, he became a weakling.

When Mengele drowned in 1979 while swimming off the coast of Brazil he became the most famous Nazi to escape judgment for his crimes. But there was another Nazi fugitive who lasted much longer: Aribert Heim, who like Mengele was both a doctor and a genocidal killer. Tall, athletic, and good-looking, Heim served in the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen in 1942 and 1943, where inmates called him “Dr. Death.” After the war, he played for a time on a German hockey team in Bad Nauheim, then became a successful gynecologist in Baden-Baden, and finally escaped to Egypt, where, after living in solitude for years and then converting to Islam, he died in 1992. Most of the Third Reich’s evildoers lived undisturbed, comfortable lives in postwar Germany. Heim too might have escaped the net of justice had he not drawn attention to himself by fleeing from the Bundesrepublik, whose citizens were all too eager to gloss over his crimes.

Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet tell Heim’s story in The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim, and it’s a horrifying one. Heim apparently enjoyed injecting gasoline directly into the hearts of inmates, especially Jews. Sometimes he would cut off the head of a corpse and, after baking the flesh off, give the skull to a friend or display it as a trophy. He once told a 12-year-old Jewish boy, before giving him a fatal injection, that his death was merited because the Jews had started the war.

Continue reading.

How Magic Can Help Underprivileged Israeli Teenagers Get Ahead

When is a trick more than a trick? When Ophir Samson uses it to teach confidence, leadership, and work-related skills

By Iris Mansour for Tablet Magazine

Ophir Samson was sitting with a friend last year at one of his favorite restaurants in Jaffa when a young waiter approached the table, reached behind Samson’s ear, and pulled out a gold coin. After a brief moment of confusion, Samson smiled as he managed to place him: Over eight weeks in early 2012, Samson had taught magic tricks to a group of 15 teenagers at Jaffa’s Arab-Jewish Community Center. More than a year had passed, but this former student clearly remembered what he’d been taught.

The kids at the Community Center, Samson said, were typical teenagers: hard to control but energetic and engaging. They’d call their British-born teacher “Harry Potter” but would quiet down at the chance to learn a trick and the subtle steps and technical skills—practiced for hours, yet unnoticed by an audience—that turn a rusty amateur into a confident magician. To perfect the coin trick, for instance, your fingers have to move faster than the audience’s eyes, and you have to be able to direct someone else’s gaze where you want it to go.

Through the Smadar School for Young Magicians, Samson has taught dozens of Jewish and Arab Israelis, as well as refugees and children of undocumented parents living in Israel, to pull coins out of ears, make handkerchiefs disappear, and levitate banknotes. Held at places like Save a Child’s Heart, which provides life-saving medical procedures to children from the developing world, or Bialik-Rogozin, a school for children of asylum seekers and undocumented workers, Samson’s classes are meant to get teenagers fired up about magic, as well as build their confidence, develop their leadership skills, and get them used to speaking in public. “The purpose is to show them these skills are transferable in other areas,” said Samson. “Magic has done a huge service to me and developing my career.”

This summer, funded by a $1,000 grant from the Schusterman Foundation, Samson and four volunteers will be teaching four-week magic programs to more children at Bialik-Ragozin, a WIZO foster home, and kids living with their mothers at a shelter for battered women in Herziliya. Samson said: “I’m really excited about reaching new communities.”

Continue reading.