Q&A: ‘Mad Men’ Creator Matthew Weiner Talks LA Jews and the American Dream

By David Samuels for Tablet Magazine

If I could meet any Jew for a dry martini at the Carlyle Hotel, I would choose Matthew Weiner, the creator of the most influential iteration of the mid-century American story and one of the great show runners in the new golden age of television. So, I felt lucky when I got the chance to do just that a few weeks ago. But we met at 11 a.m., so the only drink available was a Bloody Mary. Still game, I ordered one for myself (vodka; extra horseradish), but Weiner just asked for a coffee with milk.

It wasn’t exactly how I imagined it, but we settled in to our comfortable surroundings and talked about the Jews for almost two hours, until he went off to have a more perfectly set-designed lunch, probably at the Rainbow Room or some other suitably mid-century modern midtown location. The version of our conversation that follows has been subjected to the moderate degree of editing appropriate to a publication that is read both by Jews and by the people who love them.

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Oliver Sacks on Facing Death

Will my last days be filled with gratitude or regret?

by Eliana Cline for aish.com

My tears surprise me. I am reading Oliver Sacks’ New York Times op-ed where he shares that his cancer has metastasized to his liver and in a few months he will leave this world.

These are not the tears I cry when I hear of a young mother stricken with incurable cancer, or a teenager plucked from this world tragically before his prime. In his 81 years Sacks has achieved dazzling success and acclaim as both a scientist and an author.  His ground-breaking discoveries in the field of neuro-science have transformed modern medicine's understanding of the brain. Hailed by The New York Times as “the poet laureate of medicine,” Sacks will leave the world of both medicine and literature infinitely richer.

It is the fullness of his life which moves me. It is specifically the fact that he stands facing death with not a whisper of regret in his words. Quite the opposite, his words are dripping with fulfilment and gratitude. Till his last day, he chooses to embrace the world: “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me,” he writes. “I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.”

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Can't Buy Jewish Continuity? Sell It Instead

ELI Talk - JDate

Sam Glassenberg, CEO at Funtactix

BE INSPIRED
Sam Glassenberg argues that the JDate model of selling desirable, high-quality, customer-driven experiences provides an effective template for how we address the Jewish world’s biggest challenges.  Next stop - Education.




 

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Orthodox feminists say they don’t want a revolution

Female rabbis and other religious Jewish feminists discuss the need for evolution and patience in the struggle for equal rights

By Amanda Borschel-Dan, The Times of Israel

Women were first counted in prayer quorums in liberal Judaism by the early 1800s. But it took until 1935 for the first female rabbi’s ordination — Regina Jonas in Germany — and another 37 years until the second.

Rabbi Sally Priesand was ordained through the Reform movement in the United States in 1972, followed by Reconstructionist Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso in 1974. By 1985, the Conservative movement followed suit, and there was an international domino effect of first female graduates from each denomination’s rabbinical schools.

For the young graduates, finding a receptive congregation and being hired for a pulpit position was the next hurdle. Even today this proves sometimes insurmountable in more conservative Jewish communities, often, ironically, in the Europe where the first female rabbi was ordained 80 years ago.

But now that women are the majority in seminary classes and lead hundreds of communities around the globe (albeit usually at lower salaries than their male counterparts), what about their sister suffragettes from Modern Orthodoxy who are just getting started on their feminist leadership journeys?

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BACKSTORY Emerson Swift Mahon: Canada’s first black Jew

Eiran Harris, Special to The CJN

In 1912, a young black man left Grenada in a quest for learning. His voyage led him to Canada and conversion to Judaism.

“May you be written in the book of life in the New Year,” says the greeting in Yiddish on the back of a photograph of a black man in a broad-brimmed hat (see picture on cover).

That man, Emerson Swift Mahon, Canada’s first black Jew, sent the picture with a brief letter to Rabbi Herman Abramowitz of the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue in Montreal.

The letter, dated Nov. 16, 1921, is one of many treasures discovered in the Allan Raymond Collection housed at the Jewish Public Library Archives of Montreal.  Raymond, a historical lecturer, retired from the insurance business to devote his time to the study and collection of Canadian and Canadian-Judaic history. Written in English and Hebrew, the letter is a fascinating glimpse of this remarkable man.

“It is to be regretted that I have neglected my study of Hebrew,” Mahon wrote from Winnipeg to the rabbi. “What with the busy whirl of life...I had almost forgotten the saying of the sage.”

That saying is written in Hebrew. “Whoso forgets one word of his study, him the scripture regards as if he had forfeited his life.”

To be black and Jewish in Canada nearly 100 years ago was both unique and challenging.  To be also literate in Hebrew and Yiddish was an indication of an unusual and determined personality.

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When grandpa was a Nazi

By Ben Sales for JTA

What do you do if you find out your grandfather was a Nazi officer?

That’s the crisis Jennifer Teege confronted in a Hamburg library in 2008 when she stumbled upon “I Have to Love My Father, Right?” The book was written by her mother, Monika Hertwig, and according to the dust jacket, Hertwig’s father was Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp.

Teege, now 44, remembered Goeth from the 1993 film “Schindler’s List,” where he was portrayed by the actor Ralph Fiennes.  As a student, she had taken a particular interest in the Holocaust an even spent four years in Israel. But until that day in the library, she had no idea her grandfather was a Nazi.

“It even got worse by getting this information, to realize that this was not a random man but someone who belonged to my family, someone I had a connection with,” Teege told JTA in an interview at the Jerusalem International Book Fair. “It felt like it was a bad dream.”

Teege’s struggle with her family history is the subject of “My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me,” a book she wrote in 2013 that is due out in English this year. Teege was born in southern Germany to a Nigerian father and German mother and the book chronicles her uncovering of her roots and subsequent struggle with what her ancestry means for her own life — particularly as someone whom the Nazis would have persecuted.

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Christians Have Fallen in Love With Queen Esther, Purim’s Jewish Heroine

In recent novels, sermons, and Bible-study guides, evangelicals and mainline Protestants alike find inspiration in the biblical tale

By Rebecca Phillips for Tablet Magazine

In Hadassah: One Night With the King, a popular 2004 novelization of the Book of Esther, the queen describes her first night alone with the king of Persia. Apparently she had a great time:

    … our mutual hunger raged unchecked—at no time did I even think of demurring or becoming submissive, for my desire for him was genuine. I had fallen in love with him. I had seen past his outer facade … and now I had reached his heart.

This isn’t the same meek, pure Esther most Jews are familiar with from the story of Purim, the woman Jewish girls throughout history have wanted to emulate. This Esther is a bundle of raging hormones, swept away by the handsome and powerful Xerxes (or as Jews know him, Ahasuerus).

But the Esther in this novel is different from the heroine we’re familiar with in another significant way. Later in Hadassah, Esther is depicted on her walk toward Xerxes to request a private banquet with the king and Haman. She teeters between life and death, as anyone who approached the king unbidden risked being put to death immediately. The original telling of this moment in the Bible portrays both Esther’s fortitude and her resignation to her fate: “If I perish, I perish,” she famously says. But in this novel, Esther seems to embrace her possible death:

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For more information, recipes and great ideas for Purim, check out Jvillage's Purim Holiday Kit. 

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