FORWARD>Fast Forward>The Word of God, Rewritten

The Word of God, Rewritten

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 29, 2008

On the upcoming festival of Shavuot, we commemorate the day when Moses carried the Torah — with its 613 rules, injunctions and guidelines on how to live a Jewish life — down from Mount Sinai. Some of its commandments, like “Do not murder” and “Love the stranger,” ring as true today as they did in the Sinai desert. Others, like “Destroy the seed of Amalek” and “Do not eat the flesh of an ox that was condemned to be stoned,” require a little creativity to remain applicable to the lives of 21st-century Jews.

So, two San Francisco-based artists have set up a Web site that allows Jews everywhere to apply their own brand of creativity and humor to the task. (RE)velation (http://revelation.xoxco.com) users “remix” the commandments, using colloquial English and a modern sensibility to reinterpret the lessons of the mitzvot. Thus, “Do not carry tales” becomes “Gossip magazines are not your friend,” and, in a rather unorthodox take, “Do not leave a beast that has fallen down beneath its burden, unaided” becomes “Mick Jagger just wants you to make love to him.” It’s sort of like a Talmud wiki.

“There’s nothing new about what we’re doing,” (RE)velation co-creator Ben Brown said. “There is a long tradition of scholarly interpretation and reinterpretation of the text. This is just a hyper-modern take on that process.” The Web site is only the first step in what ultimately will be a multimedia art installation that will be unveiled on Shavuot at the San Francisco-based DAWN festival.

DAWN was launched in 2005 as a new take on the Shavuot tradition of all-night Torah study: From late at night until the wee hours of morning, attendees partake in Jewish-themed musical performances, art installations, literary salons and religious discussions. This year, DAWN will mark the grand opening of San Francisco’s new Contemporary Jewish Museum, and (RE)velation will be one of the cornerstones of the event. Images of Mount Sinai will be projected onto a wall, and the text of the original 613 commandments, along with hundreds of their “remixed” counterparts, will descend from above. The voices of (RE)velation participants reading their commandments aloud will play from on high. A kiosk will allow visitors to offer their own reinterpretations, and their contributions will be integrated into the installation in real time. With lights and sound, the idea is that participants can “heavily re-imagine the experience of being at the foot of Mount Sinai while the commandments descend from above,” Brown said.

Skeptics might allege that when the God of Exodus said, “Do not muzzle a beast, while it is working in produce which it can eat and enjoy,” he most certainly did not mean “Go ahead — text during meetings. Really.” But some might say that’s exactly what he meant.

“You gotta be in conversation with the tradition,” co-creator Ari Kelman said. Besides, “I would hope God has a sense of humor.”

FORWARD>Schmooze>Play on Words: An Alternative Forward

Play on Words: An Alternative Forward

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 23, 2007

When members of San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav receive their synagogue’s newsletter, they get a copy of the Forward. The Jewish Gaily Forward, that is. Founded in 1977 as a synagogue for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and heterosexual Jews, together with partners, family and friends,” Sha’ar Zahav has the unique position of being a gay synagogue in what is arguably the nation’s gayest city. So it’s only fitting that its newsletter should evoke its Jewish-ness… with a twist.

“We always want to take creative energy into all of the elements of how we present ourselves,” said Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, editor of the JGF, as the newsletter is affectionately known. The newsletter is “changing the name of a Jewish institution in a way that’s sort of fun and positive and reminds people why change is needed in the Jewish world. We have to make sure that people of various sexual identities are included in mainstream Judaism.”

Like most synagogue newsletters, the JGF runs profiles of its members and reports on community events and initiatives. The publication features a rabbi’s column and a page for naches. Unlike most synagogue newsletters, the JGF also runs such pieces as “Transgender Celebration Shabbat a Wild Success!” and “CSZ Queer Torah Study Project.”

Kaiser, whose day job is senior editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, says the newsletter’s title is actually a double double-entendre. In addition to being a play on the title of this paper, it’s also a nod to an old gay joke. While out for a drive, some friends come to an intersection. “Should we go straight?” asks the driver. “Heavens, no!” answer the passengers. “Go gaily forward!”

Unfortunately, Kaiser says, the original Forward has less reach in the Golden State than it used to, and as a result, not everyone among her readership gets the other joke of the newsletter’s title. “Today on the West Coast, people don’t really get it so much,” she told The Shmooze. “But when you explain it to people, they think it’s hilarious.”

FORWARD>Fast Forward>Notes on Hanukkah: A Holiday Collection

Notes on Hanukkah: A Holiday Collection

How to Spell Chanukah… and Other Holiday Dilemmas
Edited by Emily Franklin
*Algonquin Books, 255 pages, $18.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
December 5, 2007

It looks like one of those throwaway little “gift books,” like “The Girlfriends Keepsake Book” or “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” that an unassuming shopper might pick up from a display rack while waiting on line at the bookstore. Like these fluffy books, the new holiday anthology “How to Spell Chanukah,” edited by Emily Franklin, contains the requisite series of uplifting moments and life lessons. Lest its diminutive size and blue-and-pink cartoon-lettered cover mislead, however, this is also a book packed with fine writing and provocative storytelling.

The standout pieces are, of course, the ones that are not what you’d expect from a Hanukkah anthology. In particular, “Traditions Break,” a graphic story by cartoonist Eric Orner, is a pitch-perfect tale of a young woman stranded in her dorm during her college’s winter break. By turns lonely and content, wise and naive, 20-year-old Sharon is not yet sure who she is or what she wants. When the story’s over, she still isn’t sure. But since she is narrating from the vantage point of adulthood, we know she will make it through with a few answers — but only a few. Joanna Smith Rakoff’s “Dolls of the World” is the complicated story of a family that manages to hold itself together even as it falls to pieces. It opens with the parents’ move to a retirement community; two lifetimes’ worth of stuff is shed for the occasion. The stuff becomes a portal for memories and things left unsaid, as well as a means for Rakoff and her mother to broach painful subjects that, like the “five-piece service for twelve, which would not have looked out of place at Edith Wharton’s most formal table,” had been collecting dust for far too long. Several of the essays are like prose poems, sermons or elegies: Peter Orner’s “Oak Street, 1981” and Laura Dave’s “Eight Nights” are both small but hauntingly lovely snapshots of moments in time when a child comes to understand something of adulthood. Even the most serious stories, however, are touched with humor, and some are laugh-out-loud funny. Joshua Braff’s “The Blue Team” features, to great comic effect, “sad, davening action figures,” and in “Creature Comfies,” Heeb magazine editor and publisher Joshua Neuman recounts his short-lived career as a stuffed-animal-cum-apparel salesman.

Of course, any 21st-century book about being a young, modern Jew will overflow with certain types of stories. And here, young parents, especially those grappling with how to avoid turning Hanukkah into a gluttonous blitz of consumerism for their children, are everywhere. A related genre that makes several appearances is the Jews-who-don’t-celebrate-Christmas vs. Jews-who-do vs. Jews-who-try-not-to-but-can’t-escape-it conundrum. There is a certain amount of navel-gazing in the selections, as well as, for my taste, one too many comments about how fattening latkes are. But even the most solipsistic of the essays features a wonderful moment of revelation at a debauched Seattle Hanukkah party: “Is this what our parents had in mind for us when they chauffeured us to day school, Hebrew school, and bat mitzvah lessons?” Elisa Albert asks in “Week at a Glance.” “Pornographic vegan cupcakes, Shabbos blunts…? I must say that I think so.”

Apropos of this question, as well as the ongoing Hanukkah-Christmas debate, I might add that this book may very well help to foster, in Albert’s words, “a roomful of young Jews claiming that identity in the context of countless other identities.” Why? Well, it makes the perfect stocking stuffer.

FORWARD>The Schmooze>A Moustache to Kvell Over

A Moustache to Kvell Over

By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 21, 2007

Using his Jewish manhood to go for the gold, Los Angeles musician, DJ and fashion designer Alexander Antebi was recently named the World Imperial Moustache Champion at the 2007 World Beard and Moustache Championships, held last month in Brighton, England. Taking the top prize in the imperial (also known as handlebar) category, Antebi beat out competitors from all over the world to become the first Jewish person to win a prize at the championships and the first American to win in his category. “There are certain nuances to having a good moustache,” Antebi told The Shmooze. “When I get out of the shower, I wait until it’s still slightly damp. I use a moustache comb. Then I apply Hungarian moustache wax to my moustache evenly. If I get the timing wrong, then it is a nightmare.”

Musician and sometime-moustache-wearer Nick Cave judged the moustache categories. The judges select “the one they feel is most stylish,” said Steve Parsons, secretary for the Handlebar Club, which hosts the championships. “Alexander certainly has plenty of style!” he said. Antebi topped 11 other entrants in his category to bring home his trophy: a beer tankard with moustache guard.

Frontman for the L.A. funk-glam band Conquistador, Antebi, 26, said that his music is often inspired by his Sephardic heritage (his descendants were from Toledo, Spain) and that some of his songs incorporate Ladino lyrics.

Antebi first began growing a moustache four years ago. “It was something that allowed me to connect with antiquity,” he said. As his personal style tends more toward Renaissance Faire than Ralph Lauren (he describes his own clothing line, Alexander Antoinette, as “Southern Civil War Vermeer meets Rajasthani Rock ’n’ Roll eleganza”), this anachronism seemed appropriate. “Today’s man, the conventional idea of male beauty, is that of youth,” he said. “Hairlessness has become beautiful for men. I’m proud to be a man, and this is an extension of my manhood and also my individuality.”

FORWARD>International>In India, a Historic Community Watches Its Numbers Dwindle

In India, a Historic Community Watches Its Numbers Dwindle

By Beth Schwartzapfel
August 25, 2007

Alibag, India - In most other Jewish communities, Magen Aboth would be considered an understated synagogue. But here in Alibag — a sleepy, dusty town on the west coast of India where one- and two-room huts with thatched roofs dominate the landscape — it’s a magnificent, proud building. Two stories tall and trimmed in graceful curves and carved flowers, its concrete facade is painted in shades of blue, pillars fronting a mosaic-tiled portico.

The hazan, Jacob Elijah Dandekar, leads morning prayers at 7:30 and afternoon mincha at 5:30, but there’s rarely a minyan. The group must make do with the seven or so people who come regularly. Dandekar, 72, says that he usually spends the rest of day reading the Torah. (“Or else the paper,” he says with a chuckle.) On this morning, he sits on a bench in the cool shade of the portico, shooing away the neighborhood goats that wander into the courtyard.

Alibag and the surrounding villages and towns — Ravdanda, Panvel, Pen, Nandgaon, Navgaon, about 22 miles southwest across a gray-green harbor from Mumbai — were home to what was once a thriving and vibrant Jewish community known as the Bene Israel. So many Jews once lived here, in fact, that this dirt road is called Israel Lane. The facades of many of the houses along it still bear Stars of David and Hebrew lettering. Four families now remain, totaling about 20 people. Of those, Dandekar says, it’s not a question of whether they will leave, but when.

“If they get a nice price for their property, they will go,” he said. “They are waiting for money, or waiting for their children to finish their courses, and then they will go.”

Dandekar’s English is passable, but he’s more comfortable in his native Marathi, and his translator today was Ben Siyon Ghosalker, the caretaker of Knesseth Eliyahoo Synagogue in Mumbai. Ghosalker, a cheerful man of 68 with a toothless smile and seemingly endless energy, is so effusive about the sights to be seen here in Alibag that he convinced this traveler to endure three sweaty hours on a bumpy, overcrowded bus from Mumbai. Indeed, Ghosalker is deeply connected to Alibag. Two years ago, his nephew was bar mitzvahed here. It was probably Ailbag’s final bar mitzvah: Adeyal Wakrulkar, now 14, is the youngest Jewish person left here.

The Wakrulkar family members own the S. David Soda Water Factory, housed in a worn cement building at the crossroads of two dirt lanes. Hand-drawn lettering in crumbling, colorful paint on the walls outside its entrance informs visitors in Marathi and English that ice cream and cold drinks are available inside. Ghosalker’s sister, Norin Wakrulkar, lives here with her son and daughter-in-law Levy and Sinora, and the couple’s two sons. Levy Yoseph Wakrulkar, born here in Alibag, celebrated his bar mitzvah at Magen Aboth and raised his sons here — the sixth generation of the family to live both a traditionally Indian and traditionally Jewish way of life in this town.

In 1964, when Levy was born, there were some 30 Jewish families here in Alibag; teachers from Mumbai visited regularly to teach religious school to the children, a bar mitzvah was celebrated every year or two, and come prayer times it was easy to assemble a minyan. Mirroring the larger Indian migration patterns to urban population centers from rural ones, however, many Bene Israel have moved to the city from the villages and have established lives in Mumbai and in the nearby cities of Thane and Pune. But most have moved to Israel. Of the 65,000 Bene Israel, 4,000 live in greater Mumbai and 60,000 live in Israel.

“We feel sad,” Sinora said of life in Alibag without the friends and relatives who have left in large numbers. “But we have e-mail and messages on the Internet. They come to visit every one or two years. And we go to Thane, and Bombay, and Pune.” But the Wakrulkars, for their part, are staying put. “We like Israel,” Sinora said, “but we like India more. India is our home.”

Shalva Weil, an anthropologist who researches Indian Jewry at Hebrew University’s Research Institute for Innovation in Education, noted that the emigration phenomenon is particularly intriguing, since Jews in India never suffered from discrimination. There were trickles of immigration in the 1940s after Israeli independence, Weil said, but there was never much Zionist fervor among the Bene Israel, who felt too Indian. Immigration began in earnest in the 1960s, Weil said, when economic opportunities became available in Israel on a scale on which they weren’t available in India.

“Friends and family wrote letters and said, ‘We’re happy here,’” Ghosalker recalled of the pattern by which his own family — one sister and four cousins — began to leave. “So they went, too, and wrote letters to their friends and family.” The snowball effect has left families without appropriate marriage candidates for their sons and daughters, Weil said, and so the exodus continues as young people now leave to get married.

It’s a circuitous and 2,000-year-long journey that may well have landed them back where their ancestors started. Legends abound about the origins of the Bene Israel, but the most romantic, and the one that seems to have stuck, claims that a boatload of oil pressers, fleeing persecution by King Antiochus of Palestine in second-century BCE, was shipwrecked here in the year 175. Seven couples survived, and they became the forbearers of the Bene Israel — living peaceably with their new neighbors, speaking the local language, observing the local customs and dress, and assimilating into their new homeland without losing touch with a few basic tenets of their religion. For example, they observed the laws of kashrut and circumcision and rested on the Sabbath (in fact, in Marathi they were known as Shanwar Teli, or Saturday oil pressers, in recognition of their day of rest).

But because the Bene Israel were cut off from the rest of the Jewish Diaspora for many hundreds of years (and, as the story goes, their holy books and religious articles went down with their ship), the specifics of Judaism — the Hebrew language, for instance, and the Torah and Talmud — were lost to them. That is, until they were “discovered” in the 1700s by a Cochini merchant who then brought them into contact with the wider Jewish world and its teachings. At their peak, in the 1940s, Bene Israel numbered some 20,000 in India; they built large synagogues in Mumbai and Pune, and small ones dotted these villages on the coast. An ancient cemetery in the village of Navgaon is said to contain the graves of the shipwrecked couples; newer headstones, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are written in English, Marathi and Hebrew.

The cemetery is in a field flanked by coconut trees, blanketed with a thick layer of grass and wild mint. Headstones cropped up from amid the brush here and there, but more common were plain stones sunken into the earth, laid in the shapes of rectangles, roughly the size of the bodies that had long ago been buried there. “Here lie buried the ancestors of the Bene Israel community of India,” read the inscription on an imposing stone obelisk that the community had come together to build some years ago. The obelisk kept watch over the graves of those “who were shipwrecked on the shores of Navgaon nearly 2,000 years ago…. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, they have emigrated in large numbers to the State of Israel, where they are happily settled.”

FORWARD>Arts & Culture>This (Televised) American Life

This (Televised) American Life

Radio Superstar Ira Glass Brings ‘Movies for Radio’ to … Television

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 16, 2007

Perhaps it’s a stretch to describe any public radio personality as a superstar. But if there were such a thing, Ira Glass, host of the weekly radio show “This American Life,” would be it. Glass, 47, is nerdy in a hip kind of way, and he unselfconsciously professes his love, in equal measures, for radio shock jock Howard Stern, the now-defunct television drama “The O. C.” and fellow National Public Radio personality Terry Gross.

For one hour each week, “This American Life” tells true stories about everyday Americans; the show’s Web site describes them as “movies for radio.” The stories are organized loosely around a theme — recent ones have included “Quiz Show” and “Houses of Ill Repute” — and manage to locate drama, humor, joy and sorrow in such unlikely places that listeners can’t help but fall in love with the elderly Brooklyn man whose house has become a haven for homeless prostitutes, or with the building superintendent who was part of a Brazilian death squad.

This week, Glass and “This American Life” make the leap from the airwaves to the small screen: The first episode of the brand-new “This American Life” television show airs March 22 on Showtime. Earlier this month, Glass and his colleagues went on a six-city tour, promoting the television program and producing a live version of the radio show that airs this week; the theme is “What I Learned From Television.” Glass sat down with the Forward’s Beth Schwartzapfel to talk about making radio and making television, and what he learned about storytelling from his childhood rabbi.

BS: So what have you learned from television? What did you find you could do on television that you couldn’t do on the radio?

IG: One of the basic things I didn’t expect from television is that there would be a power to seeing somebody’s face as they tell a story, that there would be a drama to it that could be as powerful as not seeing the person. When we went into it, I truly believed that the most powerful way to hear a story would be if the person’s invisible and they’re saying it on the radio. But actually, I think that there are moments in the story that are enhanced by seeing someone’s face. Their face carries a lot of feeling. It allows empathy, and it’s a different thing than the radio.

I [also] wasn’t sure, when we went into it, if the two kinds of moments that I think of as being at the heart of our radio show would survive into TV. One is the weird, digressive, funny moment that’s just in there because it amuses us. Another is the kind of moment where someone will have gone through a bunch of stuff, and then they’ll [reflect on] something that they now realize about the world. It’s a light moment, and then a super-reflective moment, and it wasn’t clear to me that those things would be able to be on TV and have the same kind of feeling. Now that we’ve done it, I feel like it’s more just a matter of taste. That people have never done it because it’s not their thing.

BS: What did you find you can do on the radio that you can’t do on television?

IG: In the first few years of the radio show, I felt like it detracted from the power of radio to actually ever see the person who was on the show. I still believe this. It’s more powerful if you don’t know what the people look like. The invisibility of radio is a part of what gives it its numinous power. The person on the radio isn’t an actual person; they’re more of an idea of a person.

I remember when I met Terry Gross for the first time. It’s not like it’s surprising who Terry Gross is: If you were to think about it, she is a glasses-wearing Jewish lady of a certain age. She’s a slim, well-put-together, East Coast smart person. She’s exactly what you would expect if you were to take a second to think about who would be that lady on the radio. But the fact is, I never even bothered to think, what does Terry Gross look like? To me, she was just a presence on the radio; she was just an intelligence, and a sensibility, and that is more powerful than her being any particular person.

For the first few years of the show, I never let myself be photographed. And truthfully, it made it hard to publicize the show, because America is dominated by a photographic fetish, and you literally can’t get into a newspaper or magazine in the United States of America unless you will give them a picture, or agree to sit for a picture.

[But] the overall feeling of the television show is as much like the radio show as could humanly be done. Hopefully the overall feeling of the television show is enough like the radio show that when I show up in it, it doesn’t seem jarring and strange. Inevitably, if people know me from the radio, the first moment they see me is going to be a bad moment. [He laughs.] Oh, that’s what he looks like? There’s just no way around that.

BS: One of the stories in the first season of the television show is about an atheist who poses as Jesus in a series of paintings. It seems like Jesus stories lend themselves so well to television — the iconography —

IG: They’re iconic, exactly.

BS: Do Jewish stories lend themselves, as well, to drama? Are there Jewish stories on the television show?

IG: There are Jews on the TV show, but there are no particularly Jewish stories. Christians are actually, to me, anyway, as a Jew, much more interesting in America. And weirdly, much more misunderstood. Evangelical Christians are the most incompetently portrayed group in America, in TV, in fiction, in the news. When Christians say that the media gets them wrong, Christians are absolutely right. Christian life in this country is really horribly documented, and way more interesting than is done. Generally, in the media, very religious Christians are portrayed as hardheaded doctrinaire knuckleheads. But in fact, from my experience, the most religious Christians I know tend to be incredibly thoughtful, complicated, generous to a fault, very principled and not knuckleheads. Actually, they’re sort of weirdly the opposite of the stereotype, and that includes people from the hardcore fundamentalist faiths.

Maybe it’s just that I am Jewish and I’m so familiar with being a Jew, and I went to religious school and that is so much more familiar. I certainly wouldn’t rule out doing a story about those different kinds of things that happen among Jews, but we don’t stumble on them in the same way.

[But] many of our contributors are Jewish, so many of the stories [on the radio show] are about Jewish-y things. People going back to understand the roots of their Holocaust past; we did an episode in Israel; we did numerous stories about going away to Jewish day camp. Adam Davidson did a story for us about how, when he was a kid, he decided that he wanted to become the prime minister of Israel, from reading David Ben-Gurion’s biography, and started keeping a diary like David Ben-Gurion did, knowing that one day this would be an important document like David Ben-Gurion’s diary. And David Rakoff did a story about working on a kibbutz one summer. It’s a regular feature of our show; it’s a very Jewish show. So much so that often, we’ll have a story, and we’ll just think, “Well, this is a great story, but let’s not run it this week because last week we did something that was so Jew-y, we can’t do a whole other Israel thing again this week! We just did one!” And so we don’t get into that problem with the Christian stories. It’s still a very Jew-y show, even if we don’t want it to be.

BS: Was being Jewish a big part of your upbringing?

IG: We went to Beth Israel, a Conservative shul in Baltimore, and went after school and Sundays for Hebrew school, and then after six years of that, we all went to Baltimore Hebrew College for another few years of after-school classes. And I have very fond feelings about all that.

In fact, the guy who was the rabbi at Beth Israel…was an incredible rabbi named Seymour Esrog, who just passed away two or three years ago. I remember he was such an amazing preacher. He was a total entertainment package — he was incredibly funny, and very moving, totally knew how to milk a story — and then he gave you a little “Now here’s what we’re going to take away from this today when we walk out of here.” He totally had that, too. He’d quote from movies and things he was reading, and I remember even the kids would stay for the sermon. And I remember thinking, as a kid: “That guy’s got the job, man. You get up there once a week, you say your thing to the people,” and it was much, much later that I realized, “Oh, I got that job!”

Also I remember, going back a few years ago, I’d figured out this whole way to tell a story on the radio. This story structure I came to totally from trial and error, where there’ll be the action part of the story at the beginning and then there’ll be a moment of reflection, and then an anecdote, and then a moment of reflection. Which doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but it was a big deal for me: a very different and more compelling way to tell a story than what most journalists do. And so, I sort of invented this thing sitting in an editing room at NPR, and tried it out in the field, and then built our radio show based on it. And so our radio show’s on the air for a couple of years, then I went back to Baltimore for High Holiday services, and we went and saw Rabbi Esrog. And I’m taking apart his Yom Kippur sermon, the structure of it — it’s been years since I saw him give a sermon — and at some point, I’m like: “Oh my God. The structure of this is exactly the structure of the radio show.” And I’ve talked to people who have been to seminary, and they’re like: “Yes, every sermon is that structure. Every single sermon you will ever hear is that structure — anecdote, moment of reflection, anecdote, moment of reflection.” And I’m like: “Did everybody know? Why did I have to invent this in a little room on M Street in Washington, D.C.?”

BS: Do you still go to synagogue?

IG: I don’t believe in God, and so I feel like a fraud when I’m in a synagogue. I feel like somebody’s who’s in a theme park of my own childhood. I know all the songs, and it makes me feel really warm and nostalgic, and it’s incredibly comforting. But then I think that I don’t believe anything that’s being said here. And so, I have no business here. This is for somebody else. This is perfectly pleasant, but it seems a little sleazy — to be there, where other people are having a relationship with God, and I’m there because I like the music. [He laughs.] That seems like other people are putting on a show for me or something. That’s not right. That’s not what that’s for. It’s nice hanging around with other people, but, you know — I’ve got a wife for that.

FORWARD>Yiddish Special Section>Exhibit Marks Collection’s Debut

Exhibit Marks Collection’s Debut

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 2, 2007

Among the Jewish immigrants who arrived in America at the turn of the past century, most brought little in the way of material riches. Nonetheless, Cantor David Tillman said, “they brought with them tremendous culture.”

Sitting in the tiny Temple Judea Museum, located in suburban Philadelphia’s Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, Tillman motioned to the Yiddish playbills, theater posters, sheet music and LP sleeves that were on display in the glass cases. The millions of immigrants who crowded into New York City’s Lower East Side 100 years ago “had no money, so they couldn’t go to Carnegie Hall,” Tillman continued. “And even if they could have gone, they wouldn’t have understood any of it. Yiddish theater was their way of acculturation.”

This musical and theatrical heritage is on display through March 25 in the museum’s current exhibit Molly Picon, Fridl Braur and a Mishpocha of Yiddish Music, which marks the debut of the Eugene and Marie Buxton Collection of Jewish Music and the Performing Arts.

“Music is central to the Bible,” the museum’s director and curator, Rita Rosen Poley, told the Forward. “Music is central to who we are as Jews. I don’t want [Yiddish music] to be an artifact. I want people to come in here and use it.”

So, when Tillman and his friend and colleague Cantor Jack Kessler, music director for the band Klingon Klezmer, came in to browse the collection, Poley lovingly opened one of the cases and handed them a pile of handwritten sheet music by Israeli composer Gabriel Grad. The two men pored over the yellowing pile of inked and red pencil-scrawled paper, occasionally bursting into a niggun and banging the table. “Look at this,” Tillman said. “It’s a duet, for piano and tenor, and —” he squinted at the Yiddish, “—psanteran. Piano.”

The museum occupies some 400 mauve-carpeted square feet in the synagogue’s grand, airy lobby. Its offerings began as two private collections in the 1940s and ’50s: Rabbi Meyer Lasker of nearby Temple Judea and Rabbi Bertram Korn of Keneseth Israel were avid collectors of Jewish ceremonial items and artwork. After World War II, they traveled to Europe to rescue the remaining Jewish artifacts. When Temple Judea closed in 1984, the two collections were merged and, with a $150,000 endowment, the Temple Judea Museum was founded. Its collection now includes some 1,500 objects, two of which are the second-oldest American ketubah, dating from the 1700s, and a British circumcision set from the 1800s. Poley, a spunky redheaded grandmother and veteran art administrator, is the museum’s second professional director and its sole employee.

Two years ago, Marie Buxton, a Kneseth Israel congregant, donated $10,000 to begin a special collection for the museum, focusing on music and the performing arts. Poley used the gift to make the collection’s first acquisition — on eBay. At the time, she had never heard of Gabriel Grad, a Lithuanian-born musician and composer who founded a conservatory in Tel Aviv in 1925. But when she saw a collection of his papers available on eBay for $90, she thought she’d take a chance. The items that arrived were not just the handwritten sheet music and notes, but also his passport and those of his wife and son, insurance documents and a 1927 Certificate of Naturalization from the Government of Palestine. The collection was off to a promising start, and Poley still had more than $9,900 on hand.

From there, Poley went on to acquire a similar collection of papers and handwritten notes from Yiddish composer Michl Gilbert (who wrote the Yiddish words to “I Have a Little Dreidel”), original playbills from three stage productions starring legendary Yiddish actress Molly Picon (“A Majority of One,” “Milk and Honey” and “How To Be a Jewish Mother”), photographs, vinyl records, sheet music, books, broadsides, and programs and announcements for events in early Palestine (two programs announce the opening of Tel Aviv’s Habima Theater, in 1917). Many of the items were acquired on eBay for just $4 or $5. One songsheet, which features an art-nouveau-style drawing of a plump woman, is for the Yiddish song “Kolumbus, Ich Hob Tsav Dir Gor Nit,” or, “Columbus, You Have Done Me No Good.” An accompanying sign explains that the song was probably inspired by Gershon Rosenzweig’s 1894 novel, “Talmud Yankee” — “one of many satiric literary expressions of discontent with life in America… A Klug Tzu Columbus, [or] ‘A curse upon Columbus,’ was another phrase frequently used by Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants.”

About half the items in the current exhibition were purchased with Buxton’s original gift; Poley estimates that the Buxton collection now contains almost 300 items. Additional items, such as shofars, handmade Purim groggers and other decorative objects, were selected from the museum’s existing collection. And still others were donated by congregants. “I turn nothing down,” Poley said of the private donations, “because I don’t know how they’ll turn out or what they’ll be.”

One of the museum’s most enthusiastic supporters is a congregant who works as an antiques dealer (he is the reason that the museum owns the ketubah; he heard about it through the antiques grapevine, flew down to Pittsburgh to buy it, brought it home and donated it to the museum). Poley recalls one day when the dealer’s wife came in with a huge box of books. “She said, ‘Here, Rita, have this. My husband found it — he doesn’t even know where it came from’!” Inside the box, Poley discovered handwritten music by Aaron Friedmann, high music director of Berlin’s Royal Academy of Art. Friedmann served as chief cantor of Berlin’s Old Synagogue from 1882 until 1923.

Another congregant saw an invitation to the current exhibit and called the museum. “I got your invitation — you want some records?” he asked Poley. On display from his collection are the 1961 album “Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites” (an accompanying sign explains that Francis learned Yiddish when she got her start as a young performer at Grossinger’s, a Catskills resort) and an album by 1940s Yiddish radio personality Shaindele.

Chana Mlotek, music archivist of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, said a collection like the one on display at the Temple Judea Museum is very important. “Yiddish cultural life in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s is a culture of our American heritage, and [an exhibition like this] is a symbol of that culture,” she told the Forward. Physical representations of Yiddish music and theater, she said, are like “a window to our cultural treasures.”

The only problem with the museum is that it may be too small to showcase all the collection’s items. Between her knack for finding hidden treasures, and congregants’ donations of their own prized possessions, Poley said, “I could have filled a space three times the size of this place.”

FORWARD>Yiddish Special Section>Publisher Opens Final Chapter

Publisher Opens Final Chapter

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 2, 2007

Last month’s publication of “The Cross and Other Jewish Stories” by Ukrainian-born Yiddish author Lamed Shapiro marks both a new beginning and the beginning of the end for the New Yiddish Library Series.

“The Cross” is the seventh book of the series, a collaborative effort involving the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, the National Yiddish Book Center and Yale University Press. It is the series’s first publication in five years, and as such is a sign of its rebirth; a half-dozen more books are in the pipeline. But the series has also announced that it will close up shop in the coming year, after those half-dozen books are complete.

The New Yiddish Library Series was established in 1985, with the goal of commissioning new English translations of works of Yiddish literature: novels, novellas and short-story collections. In addition to a new translation, each book has a scholarly critical introduction and a glossary and notes. “There’s a blueprint,” series editor David Roskies told the Forward. “We’re trying to look at all of Yiddish literature and to select that which is the most important and of lasting significance. It’s a matter of covering the major geographical areas, the major writers, the major works.”

The series was the brainchild of scholar and Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz, who in the early 1980s raised a $100,000 endowment to create the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature. “The existing translations were haphazard,” fund director Neil Kozodoy, Dawidowicz’s literary executor, told the Forward. “Some were great, some were bad. The average reader had no way to tell which was which.” Dawidowicz died in 1990, and although Kozodoy has overseen a few other projects that utilized the fund’s resources — such as 1995’s English translation of Israeli scholar Jacob Katz’s autobiography “With My Own Eyes” — the New Yiddish Library Series has been its “main project and the main thing [Dawidowicz] wanted to focus on.”

Schocken Books, a New York-based Jewish publishing house, published the series’s first four volumes, beginning in 1987 with new translations, by Hillel Halkin, of Sholom Aleichem’s “Tevye the Dairyman” and “The Railroad Stories.” Over the next 10 years, “Tevye” was followed by a collection of short stories by Polish writer I.L. Peretz, S. Ansky’s classic “The Dybbuk and Other Writings” and “Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler,” a collection of novellas by Belorussian-born author S.Y. Abramovitsch.

The series went shopping for a new publisher when Schocken — which had been acquired by Random House — “lost interest in the series,” Roskies told the Forward. “They just turned down most of what we were interested in publishing, because it was just too obscure for them.” In 1997 the series moved to Yale University Press, whose publisher, Jonathan Brent, told the Forward, “My interest is in de-kitschifying this literature, helping to break it out of the ghetto in which it has largely found a home.” Obscure though the titles may be, Brent said, “that’s what a university press is all about. A university press specializes in lost causes.”

In 2002, Yale re-released the Peretz and Ansky works (Schocken retained the rights to “Tevye” and “Mendele”) and then published a new Sholom Aleichem volume — “Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor’s Son” — and a volume of poetry and prose by Galician author Itzik Manger, called “The World According to Itzik.”

Up to this point, Roskies said, the series had been a “one-man show”; Roskies (and before him, his sister, the first series editor, Harvard professor of Yiddish literature Ruth Wisse) was “chief cook and bottle washer,” and the series simply published the titles he thought were interesting or important. But a partnership, formed in 2002, with the National Yiddish Book Center changed all that.

In addition to raising tens of thousands of dollars to contribute to Dawidowicz’s endowment, the book center mandated that Roskies assemble a 10-person international editorial board. “The meetings of our board, a cross between a free weekend at Grossinger’s and a Zionist Congress, were especially fruitful,” Roskies said. The board created a list of seven additional titles, which, together with the six already published, represented America, Poland and Russia (“the three centers of Yiddish writing,” according to Roskies), and served as a map for the future of the series. The new Lamed Shapiro volume marks the first result of that effort. Yale redesigned the cover for Shapiro’s book, and the remaining volumes will, similarly, look more commercial than academic. The next volume will be “Everyday Jews,” a novel that Roskies characterizes as “the Polish ‘Call It Sleep.’” It was originally published in 1935 by Yehoshua Perle, a writer whose work has never before been translated into English.

Ultimately, however, “the readership for the series was not as great as we had hoped,” the book center’s executive vice president, Nancy Sherman, told the Forward. Yale’s Brent confirmed that although a number of colleges and universities, including George Washington University, Brandeis University and the University of Oregon, have included some of the volumes on course syllabi, none of the books has sold more than a few hundred copies. Dawidowicz’s endowment is dwindling, and the series cannot sustain itself without continued funding from the book center. As part of its 25th-anniversary restructuring, the book center decided to discontinue the project.

“We’ll remain committed to translating Yiddish books into English, possibly as individual volumes rather than a series, and we will continue to draw upon the same pool of advisers and scholars,” Sherman said.

The remaining six manuscripts on the list will be submitted to Yale in the coming year, and then the New Yiddish Library Series will be complete.

Roskies said he was disappointed by the decision, but he noted that the 13 volumes will ultimately be “a respectable lifespan for a project like this.”

Brent is also heartened by the courses that have adopted the books: “For an 18-year-old kid to be reading this stuff — that’s fabulous. That means that these works are entering a new generation.”

FORWARD>Arts & Culture>Warhol's Tribe

Warhol's Tribe

Beth Schwartzapfel
February 23, 2007

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol — as good a time as any to reminisce, in these pages, about the famed artist’s place in Jewish history. Although Warhol is best known for his portraits of such pop icons as Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy, in 1980 he also completed a set of 10 portraits of Jewish icons, commissioned by art dealer and gallery owner Ronald Feldman. By the time they collaborated on the series, Feldman and Warhol had been friends for almost 10 years. The two men met in the early 1970s, when Feldman and his wife opened Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in the Stable Gallery building on East 74th Street in Manhattan, where Warhol had first showed his famous Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. Even after Feldman’s gallery relocated to SoHo, Warhol would stop by every Saturday with his dachshund, Archie, to chat and ask for ideas.

Later in the 1970s, Feldman noticed that Warhol had been straying from his usual pattern of making 10 identical prints of the same image —10 Marilyns, 10 flowers, 10 Maos — and that he had been taking an almost cubist approach to his subject matter. Warhol’s Muhammad Ali series, for instance, which he had completed in 1978, consisted of four different prints, each of which showed a different view of Ali’s head or hand. “So that all of a sudden, he was making a fractured image of somebody. Instead of the one image in different colors but the same image, each element was a separate unit,” Feldman told the Forward.

When an Israeli art dealer called Feldman to ask whether Andy might paint 10 Golda Meirs, it was Feldman’s “aha” moment. “Ten Goldas just seemed so old as an idea,” after the fractured canvasses, Feldman said. “You can do a historic 10 — 10 different people — and he loved that idea.” Feldman commissioned Warhol to make 200 sets of the 10 silk-screened print folios — later, he commissioned Warhol to do a set of paintings, as well — and the two set to work creating a list of the subjects, whom Warhol referred to simply as his “Jewish geniuses."

They wanted a representative from a mix of eras and professions — actors, writers, politicians and scientists are all included. Karl Marx almost made the cut, until they realized that he had died in 1883, missing the 20th-century mark by almost two decades. They considered Bob Dylan, but he was jettisoned after they decided to include George Gershwin instead; plus, Dylan had become a born-again Christian, and Feldman and Warhol’s research had turned up the fact that Sarah Bernhardt, whom they had already settled on, had converted to Catholicism — “so we already had that,” Feldman said. In addition to Gershwin and Bernhardt, the geniuses are Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, Louis Brandeis, the Marx Brothers, Golda Meir and Sigmund Freud.

In 1980, an exhibit of the work, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, opened at the Jewish Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — and was promptly trashed by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer. “To the many afflictions suffered by the Jewish people in the course of their long history, the new Andy Warhol show at the Jewish Museum cannot be said to make a significant addition,” wrote Kramer in a review that ran the day before Yom Kippur. “But what it may do to the reputation of the Jewish Museum is, as they say, something else.”

Carrie Rickey, an art critic reviewing the show for Artforum magazine, was also initially put off by the whole concept of the series, seeing it as “Jewploitation” and quipping that the project’s “only raison d’être was to penetrate a new market: the Synagogue circuit.” But Warhol’s craftsmanship won her over. “Somehow this segregated ethnic segment — as offensive as it does sound — provided Warhol with enough referents to make the work successful,” she wrote. “The paintings of Jews had an unexpected mix of cultural anthropology, portraiture, celebration of celebrity, and study of intelligentsia — all at the same time."

The series, part of the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum, is currently on loan to the Park Avenue Bank as part of the bank’s Meet a Museum exhibition program. It runs through March 2.

FORWARD>Women’s Groups Split Over Texas Governor’s Vaccination Plan

Women’s Groups Split Over Texas Governor’s Vaccination Plan

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 16, 2007

In a surprise move, certain pro-choice women’s organizations — including the largest Jewish one — are joining Christian conservatives in criticizing the governor of Texas for requiring sixth-grade girls to be vaccinated against a cancer-causing sexually transmitted disease.

Governor Rick Perry, who is generally seen as a staunch ally of the Christian right, last week signed an executive order making Texas the first state to require vaccination against human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes genital warts and in some cases is associated with the development of cell abnormalities and, later, cancer.

The order was promptly criticized by conservative Christian organizations. In subsequent days, many national women’s groups, including the largest Jewish one, Hadassah, also declined to support Perry’s initiative. In both camps, activists are couching their objections as a matter of protecting choice — a major fault line in the abortion debate, but a concept with the potential to unify erstwhile political enemies as states across the country debate whether to require the HPV vaccine.

Two exceptions are Jewish Women International and the National Council of Jewish Women, which, unlike Hadassah, are voicing support for Perry’s executive order.

“This is certainly something that NCJW is pleased about,” the council’s president, Phyllis Snyder, told the Forward. “This is responsible health and fiscal policy to provide these vaccines that are going to save lives. We congratulate [Perry] and commend him for choosing common sense over ideology.”

Many of the liberal organizations refusing to voice support for Perry, including the National Organization of Women, have been generally supportive of the vaccine but say they are averse to any government attempt to curb the freedom of choice, whether the issue is abortion or some other medical procedure.

“NOW has never agreed with any mandate on anything,” the organization’s press secretary, Mai Shiozaki, told the Forward.

Hadassah issued an informational statement on the vaccine, calling it a “breakthrough” and recommending “that you have a frank and open discussion with a health professional to make certain it is right for you or your loved one.”

The organization’s national public affairs director, Roberta Elliott, said that Hadassah was loath to be seen as endorsing any particular medical brand. When asked about claims that Perry’s executive order would limit the choices of families, she said, “All medical decisions are private decisions. The women’s choice issue is not one that we want the government involved in at any level.”

National and Texas chapters of Planned Parenthood and Naral Pro-Choice America did not return calls for comment.

The conservative Christian group Focus on the Family issued a statement in support of the HPV vaccine, but in opposition to making it mandatory. Cathie Adams, president of another conservative group, the Texas Eagle Forum, was quoted in the local press as saying she would fight to overturn the order.

“Would [girls who receive the vaccine] be more promiscuous? Chances are very good that they would be,” Adams told the Austin American-Statesman.

In Utah, conservative groups helped kill a similar bill that would have covered the vaccine for underinsured girls.

Perry has been seen as an ally of religious conservatives. In June 2005, he traveled to an evangelical school to sign an anti-abortion and an anti-gay-marriage bill. (In a botched attempt to include a Jewish voice, the governor’s staff invited David Stone, religious leader of Fort Worth’s “messianic Jewish” Congregation Beth Yeshua.)

Critics of Perry’s recent order note that his former chief of staff is now a lobbyist for Merck, the pharmaceutical company that produces the vaccine, known as Gardasil.

Approved last June, Gardasil provides almost 100% protection against four strains of HPV, which together account for 70% of cervical cancers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The vaccine is administered as three shots given over eight months, and it is effective for up to five years. It is approved for females aged 8 to 26, but the CDC specifically recommends vaccinating girls ages 11 and 12, in order to protect them before the start of sexual activity.

Merck stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars from mandatory-vaccination laws. The three-shot series of Gardasil costs $360; making the series mandatory ensures that the vaccine will be covered by the federal Vaccines for Children program and by state Medicaid programs for low-income children.

When the CDC includes a vaccine on its schedule of those recommended, state legislatures often choose to require that all schoolchildren be vaccinated before entering school, even if the disease is not passed by casual contact. Vaccination against the hepatitis B virus, for instance, is required before entrance to middle or high school in 45 states, even though the virus is generally transmitted sexually. Most such requirements include an “opt out” provision, allowing parents to choose not to vaccinate their children for religious or other personal reasons. Eighteen states are considering such legislation for Gardasil.

“Mandatory means making it a routine thing, committing government support to it,” Wendy Chavkin, professor of clinical population and family health at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, told the Forward. “It’s a way to ensure that it’s not just for the privileged, it’s not just for those with health insurance or private care. It’s a real advance.”

Responding to critics who are wary of a policy that might be seen as impinging on choice, Chavkin said, “Isn’t that a kind of rinky-dink understanding of choice? Cervical cancer is a really nasty disease.”

With reporting by Jennifer Siegel.

FORWARD>Fast Forward>Looking for Love in All the Right Books

Looking for Love in All the Right Books

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 9, 2007

For the involuntarily single and the recently dumped, Valentine’s Day has long been an opportunity to mope, feel sorry for oneself, and lick the wounds that others are salting with their roses and chocolates. However, three of this season’s new books may help keep hope alive. Aimed at the unattached, the single mother and the sexlessly wed, respectively, “Secrets of a Fix-Up Fanatic,” “Single Mom Seeking” and “Mating in Captivity” echo a certain politician’s inspirational (if ultimately unfulfilled) promise: “Help is on the way.”

Susan Shapiro’s “Secrets of a Fix-Up Fanatic: How to Meet & Marry Your Match” (Delta, 2006) is a chatty, readable book full of practical suggestions for those who are looking for their besherts. Her advice boils down to two key tenets: Love yourself first, and then ask someone you know and respect to set you up.

“Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates and Other Dispatches From the Dating World” (Seal Press), by Rachel Sarah, is a memoir of the first few years of a single mom who is actively seeking Mr. Right. Sarah has an infant daughter; her longtime boyfriend, Eric, her baby’s father, disappeared without a trace. Here’s the endearing and steamy, if slightly self-indulgent, story of Sarah finding her way back into the dating world.

In “Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic” (HarperCollins, 2006), couples and family therapist Esther Perel walks readers through the various causes of, and some strategies to combat, matrimonial bed-death. Using real-life examples from her New York City private practice, Perel hypothesizes that “it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire… desire is fueled by the unknown.”

Forward>Schmooze>Don’t Tell Bubbe: Gentile is Kosher Queen

Don’t Tell Bubbe: Gentile is Kosher Queen

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 9, 2006

A panel of experts convened in New York City last week to determine the country’s best kosher cook, and the results may come as a surprise: The winner was not Jewish.

Riding her delicious sweet potato encrusted chicken to victory, Candace McMenamin of Lexington, S.C., won the first-ever Simply Manischewitz Cook-off.

About 350 people packed into the Empire Room at the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square to watch McMenamin beat out five other finalists — all women, four Jewish and one non-Jewish. In preparation for the showdown, a rabbi was brought in to kasher all the ovens and supervise the purchase of all the ingredients. A representative from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office was there with a proclamation making it official: February 1, 2007, was Simply Manischewitz Cook-off Day.

The finalists began chopping like mad when the cook-off started. With dishes as diverse as Middle Eastern falafel stuffed peppers, whitefish and potato knishes, and pea and fennel Soup, the only common denominator among the competing recipes was that they were all kosher, could all be prepared within one hour and all contained at least one Manischewitz product. The stakes were high: The winner was to take home a brand-new General Electric Co. kitchen, worth $20,000, plus $7,000 in cash and prizes, and a $3,000 savings bond from Manischewitz.

The panel of eight judges — which included Susie Fishbein, author of the Kosher by Design series of cookbooks; several professional chefs, including Ritz Carlton Chef Jacques Sorci, and Nachum Segal, host of 91.1 WFMU’s daily radio program, JM in the AM — wandered the room while the women cooked. “I’m looking for something fresh,” Fishbein said. “Kosher cooking isn’t just your bubbe’s brisket anymore.”

At the end of an hour, the chefs presented their dishes to the judges, who sat at a round table with their clipboards. They were judging for taste (50%), ease of preparation (20%), appearance (15%) and originality and creativity (15%).

McMenamin, who is something of a veteran cooking contestant — she was a two-time finalist in the Pillsbury bake-off — first saw an ad for the contest in Cooking Light magazine. Her friends were befuddled by the thought of a non-Jewish entrant in a kosher cooking competition. “How can you do that?” they asked.

But McMenamin was not deterred, and in the end she ran up against only one major obstacle: Her usual grocery store, the Piggly Wiggly, didn’t carry Manischewitz products, so to gather the ingredients from the company — sweet potato pancake mix, poultry seasoning, apricot preserves, white grape juice and extra virgin olive oil cooking spray — she had to go across town to the local Publix.

Forward>Schmooze>A Swank Passover

A Swank Passover

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 26, 2007

While Jews everywhere are dipping their pinkies in kosher wine and chanting the names of the plagues that befell the Pharaoh and his people, multiplexes nationwide will be offering Hollywood’s latest twist on the story. “The Reaping,” starring Hilary Swank as a skeptic investigating an outbreak of plagues in a small Southern town, opens March 30 — three days before the first night of Passover.

Swank’s character, Katherine Winter, is a former Christian missionary who renounces her faith after the death of her family and devotes her life to scientifically disproving religious phenomena. When she arrives in Haven, La., to find a river of blood and a sky full of locusts, however, her atheism is put to the test.

Synchronicity with Passover notwithstanding, “The Reaping” has a decidedly Christian bent; its trailer (available at thereapingmovie.warnerbros.com) includes such images as a dangling cross pendant, a priest and a straw-hat wearing man, who, in a Southern drawl, says menacingly, “I understand you’re not much of a Bible reader… some folks just don’t want to go to heaven.” The movie’s tagline: “Evil has a savior.”

This is not the first time that Tinseltown has rolled out a new release with ties to what Jews are reading; “Babel,” starring Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt, was released immediately before the Sabbath when the Torah portion containing the story of the Tower of Babel was read. Although at the time, Paramount executives told the Forward that the release date was a coincidence, the film’s recent nomination for a best picture Oscar would seem to indicate that they might have been on to something.

As for “The Reaping,” Warner Bros. publicist Peter Dangerfield told the Forward that the company uses “many criteria to determine all release dates, and this was the best date for this particular film. Proximity to Passover was certainly noted, but it is not the sole reason for the date.”

FORWARD>Education>Jewish Studies Take Off, North of the Border

Jewish Studies Take Off, North of the Border
Academics Take Notice of a Uniquely Canadian Subject

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 19, 2007

‘Thirty years ago, the Jewish community of Canada was not a subject for winning tenure at a university,” said Ira Robinson, professor of Judaic studies at Montreal’s Concordia University. Now, all over Canada, scholarly journals, academic conferences, university institutes and endowed professorships are cropping up around a subject that might have seemed parochial a generation ago: Canadian Jewish Studies.

The University of Ottawa’s new Vered Program in Jewish Canadian Studies will enroll the first undergraduates in its minor this fall, and its first major publication, the bilingual “Traduire le Montreal Yiddish” (“New Readings in Yiddish Montreal”), will be put out by the university’s press next year. Toronto’s York University has an endowed chair for the study of Canadian Jewry. And the largest program of the lot, Concordia’s Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, has an endowed chair, 10 graduate students and a visiting-scholars program, and has already published four books, including “Canadian Jewish Studies Reader” from 2004 and, most recently, an English translation of the 1948 Yiddish novel “The Rich Man,” by Montreal writer Henry Kreisel.

Scholars across North America have taken note. Editors of the English-language international journal Jewish History recently entered into an agreement with Concordia’s Robinson and Richard Menkis of the University of British Columbia to edit a special issue on Canada, Robinson told the Forward. This publication comes in addition to the journal Canadian Jewish Studies, which has a circulation of some 200 academics and is published annually by the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies.

“There is increasing interest from Canadian Jews, who have finally attained the realization that we are interesting,” said Steven Lapidus, a graduate student at Concordia who is studying the development of the Orthodox rabbinate in Montreal. “We have long underplayed our appeal.”

Canadian Jewish Studies is a wide-ranging field. Typically, programs are interdisciplinary — built of shared appointments with professors in subjects such as history, religion, Canadian studies, literature and languages — and undergraduate courses are cross-listed. Professor Norman Ravvin, for instance, Concordia’s chair of Canadian Jewish studies, will teach a religious-studies class this spring titled “The Canadian Jewish Experience: Jewish Identity and Religious Life in Canada,” while University of Ottawa professor Seymour Mayne will teach a course in the Canadian Studies department called “Jewish Canadian Writers: The Making of a Tradition.”

The unique experience of Canadian Jews is rooted in the unique history of the country itself. Where America imagines itself as a melting pot, Canada’s immigrant mythology is that of a mosaic. “There’s no uniformity, no single approach to Canada,” University of Ottawa professor of history Pierre Anctil told the Forward; compared to the United States, “it’s a much more decentralized and multiple country.” Therefore, when Jews first started to immigrate to Canada in large numbers at the start of the 20th century, there was not as much of an emphasis on assimilation as there was in the United States.

Because Canada was a British colony, “Canadian Jews adopted, at the beginning of their history, a British vision of Judaism — which meant Orthodox,” Anctil told the Forward. In concert with the “mosaic” approach to difference, these Orthodox roots have caused Canada’s Jews to “remain more Jewish, more attracted to their own tradition,” said Anctil. “There is less intermarriage, more attachment to the community and to a Jewish education for the children.” Indeed, more than one-third of Jewish school-age children in Montreal attend Jewish day schools, compared to 12% in the United States.

If newly arrived Canadians’ vision of Judaism was British, their surroundings were often French; Jewish history in Canada straddles the country’s most distinctive cultural and linguistic divide. For most of the community’s history, Montreal was the capital of Canadian Jewish life. But the passage in 1980 of the “language laws” — which established French as the sole official language of Quebec, and coincided with the rise of the nationalist secession movement — caused many Jews to feel unwelcome and prompted a mass migration westward, to Toronto. The Jewish population of Montreal fell by almost 20%. Today, some 200,000 of Canada’s 350,000 Jews live in Toronto; 100,000 remain in Montreal, and 50,000 live elsewhere.

Canada has the sixth-largest population of Jews in the world, according to the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. Still, the absolute number of Canadian Jews is relatively small, which means that many students of Canadian Jewish Studies are not Jewish themselves. Anctil — who is not Jewish — says that this should not be surprising. Because Jewish immigrants were the first non-Christians to immigrate to Canada in large numbers, “to study Jews is to study the level of tolerance that Canadian society had toward people of different origins,” he said. “We cannot do a sound and valid history of Canada without doing the Jewish component.”

Furthermore, said Anctil, Jews have had much in common with French Canadians, particularly since Jewish life was centered in Quebec for so long. “One minority meets another minority, and there’s quite a lot to be learned,” he said. “The way that Jews have preserved their heritage is of interest to Francophones as well.”

Canadian Jewish history may date from more than a century ago, but the evolution of an academic field related to it is a more recent development. According to Concordia’s Robinson, “through the 1960s, the Canadian Jewish community was largely a community of immigrants or immigrants’ children.” It’s only recently, he said, that “it’s developed a much stronger sense of itself as its own community, and has a bit more of the perspective that allows it to examine itself.”

Many historians point to the 1983 book “None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948,” by historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper, as the first example of a truly singular Jewish Canadian scholarship. “It created a real splash within the Canadian academic community,” said Robinson. “This is one of the major signposts in this process.”

Shortly thereafter, with the passage of two Multiculturalism Acts, in 1988 and 1991, the Government of Canada made multiculturalism official policy. This moment, says Concordia’s Ravvin, marked “a shift in interest and willingness of universities, and also donors, that comes from the sense of Canada as a multiethnic place.” Some of the initiatives that followed, such as federal support for “ethnic university chairs,” provided funds for programs such as Concordia’s and York’s; both were established in 1997. Ottawa’s Anctil also points to the fact that “many of the Jewish communities have a strong ability to preserve and organize themselves. That’s a strong reason why we have these programs now, because they’re being supported by Jews — financially, and also in terms of [recognizing their] importance.”

FORWARD>Education>Doors Open for Disabled Kids

Doors Open for Disabled Kids
Programs for Students With Special Needs Join Forces

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 19, 2007

Each week, Michelle Alkon tried to light Shabbat candles with her family. But each week, when her son Ben saw the burning candles he would sing “Happy Birthday” and blow them out. “I wanted to have a happy Jewish home, [but] after week after week of trying to teach him that [Shabbat] was a special and wonderful thing, we just gave it up,” Alkon recalled.

Ben is autistic; his parents had tried to enroll him in Hebrew school at their synagogue in Newton, Mass., but found that the school was not equipped to deal with his special needs. Then, five years ago, the family connected with a program where Ben could attend Hebrew school and even become bar mitzvah. Today, said Alkon, everything has turned around for Ben, now 15: “He says the blessings over the candles, he says the blessing over the challah, and he says the whole kiddush. He doesn’t just do borei p’ri hagafen—he does the whole thing.” Ben had his bar mitzvah in 2005.

The program that helped Ben is Etgar L’Noar, a Boston-area nonprofit founded by parents in 1999 to provide supplementary religious education to moderately and severely disabled children who are unable to attend Hebrew school at their local synagogue. Etgar L’Noar recently merged with the Jewish Special Education Collaborative, also founded in 1999, which provides support for students with special needs in day schools. The newly merged organization is called Gateways: Access to Jewish Education.

“As a merged organization, [we can] extend our reach — to serve more kids, to be more effective, to be more excellent,” said Arlene Remz, who was executive director of Etgar L’Noar and now holds the same title at Gateways. Etgar L’Noar and JSEC will maintain their separate names and discrete programming while operating under the Gateways umbrella, but they will share administration, fund-raising and other infrastructure. The merger has created an organization with four full-time and 35 part-time staffers and a combined budget of $900,000.

Merger talks began three years ago, when the Boston-area Combined Jewish Philanthropies funded three local day schools to pilot innovative programs and curricula as part of its $45-million Peerless Excellence Initiative. When none of these funds were specifically earmarked for special-needs kids, members of the Jewish special-education community convened a task force and applied for additional funding under the Initiative; they got $2.5 million. A portion of the money went to Etgar L’Noar to begin providing services in day schools, and a portion went to JSEC to develop its infrastructure. Members of the two groups soon realized that “there was a possibility that we would start to have an overlap of services, and we did not want that,” recalled Remz. “The fact that both of us got very generous grants, it sort of turbocharged us toward each other.” The merger became final on July 1, 2006.

Twice per week, Etgar L’Noar students gather at Hebrew College in Newton Centre, Mass., for classes, groups and activities. Between the various programs, there are 45 students from some 40 different synagogues, with a range of denominational affiliations; families come from as far away as New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Etgar L’Noar is designed for kids with moderate to severe disabilities; “kids with milder disabilities, such as learning disabilities and ADHD, are starting to be served better in our local Hebrew schools,” said Remz. “For the most part, the kids that we have at Etgar, their Hebrew schools are not able to modify or provide the support that they need.”

About 50% of Etgar participants have autism; there are also children with cerebral palsy and pervasive developmental delay, or mental retardation. There are kids who are blind, deaf and in wheelchairs, and some are nonverbal. In addition to the Hebrew school and b’nai-mitzvah-preparation programs, Etgar also offers a program called Mitzvah Mensches, for teenagers post-b’nai mitzvah, and a tots program for 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds and their parents. Classes typically contain between five and 10 students, each of whom is paired with a teen volunteer; classes are led by a special educator and one or more specialists, such as a music therapist. Each child has his own individualized learning plan, which is developed in conjunction with his parents, teachers and the Etgar staff.

Where Etgar L’Noar offers supplementary education, JSEC is integrated into the day-school setting. Operating in nine Jewish day schools in and around Boston, JSEC brings speech and language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists and learning and reading specialists into the schools to provide support to 125 children whose disabilities range from mild to moderate, who otherwise might not be able to remain enrolled. “All of these are services that, if a child were in a public school and had an [individualized education program], they would be eligible to get for free,” said Remz. “And in fact, many of the kids in the day schools were accessing those services for free in their local public school. What that meant was that Mommy or Daddy had to go pick up the child at 10 o’clock at the day school, drive them across town to the public school, get your half-hour of speech-and-language therapy, drive back to the day school, go back to your class, and you’ve just missed an hour and a half of reading.”

In addition to supporting the students, JSEC staff also provides coaching and professional development for teachers. Jane Taubenfeld Cohen is the head of school at South Area Solomon Schechter Day School in Stoughton, Mass., which has been involved with JSEC since 2001. “It makes the teachers better teachers for every student,” she told the Forward.

Cohen estimates that 25% of the school’s 200 students are involved in JSEC. They range from kids without any formal disabilities, who simply need some extra support, to kids who require several hours a week of additional instruction and therapy. “We have kids who could have been okay. But then you have kids who really need a special way of learning. Those kids, in general, were being counseled out of day schools and going to public schools,” she said. In general, JSEC students are not as significantly disabled as the kids in Etgar L’Noar, and JSEC kids are largely integrated into classroom settings with their more typically developed classmates. Remz says that within the next two years, Gateways hopes to pilot a day-school program with self-contained classrooms for more significantly disabled children.

Tuition for Etgar L’Noar is $950 per session per year; children who attend the once-per-week Hebrew-school classes and the once-per-week b’nai-mitzvah classes, for example, would pay $1,900.

For JSEC, tuition varies according to the services a child requires and is paid in addition to whatever tuition the family pays to the day school. Costs range from $600 for a year of weekly half-hour group-therapy sessions to $4,800 for three hours of weekly individual therapy. The fees work out to about $45 per hour, which, although it is more than families would pay in a public-school setting, is far less than they would pay for private therapists.

“We want to make it affordable, so we’re really subsidizing the cost to parents, and we also do offer scholarships,” said Remz. The schools also pay membership fees, which range between $1,800 and $5,400 per year, depending on how many students are enrolled in JSEC. This year, JSEC is piloting a new program for kids who have more intensive needs; for a flat fee of $5,000, a child receives additional remedial instruction, case management and an inclusion aide in the classroom.

Ultimately, the merger of Etgar L’Noar and JSEC is about choices, said Alkon, who is on the Gateways board of directors. “Philosophically, we now are able to say to parents who are coming in: You want your child educated Jewishly. What does that mean for you? If it means they want to be part of their local synagogue community, but have their kids educated in public school, we can do that. If it means they want to be in a day school, we can do that.”

Speaking as the parent of a child with special needs, Alkon concluded, “That sense of having a choice is not one that most of us have ever had before.”

FORWARD>Arts and Culture>Rembrandt Revised

Rembrandt Revised
Was the Dutch Master Really a Philo-Semite?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 5, 2007

As Jewish devotees of Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn are fond of noting, he lived and worked in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter during the “Golden Age” of the 17th century. He painted dozens of portraits of Jews and had a relationship with at least one prominent Jewish figure — Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel. As conventional wisdom goes, he must have had a deep connection to his Israelite neighbors.

Not so, says a new exhibit at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum.

Called “The ‘Jewish’ Rembrandt,” the exhibit aims to differentiate “what is myth and what is fact,” according to its curator, Mirjam Alexander. “We don’t think there’s any factual evidence to support this idea that Rembrandt was a special friend to the Jews,” she told the Forward. Part of the Netherlands’ yearlong Rembrandt 400 Festival, in honor of the artist’s quadricentennial birthday, the exhibit runs through February.

“Their take is absolutely right,” said Steven Nadler, author of “Rembrandt’s Jews” (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s been this myth of Rembrandt as this extraordinarily sympathetic philo-Semite who lived among the Jews because he had this deep feeling of identification with them,” he told the Forward. “In fact, he moved into what was the Jewis