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We Are One People

My friend Yehuda (not his real name) is one of the best souls I have ever met. When I see his name on my caller ID, a smile comes to my face, and I rush to answer because talking to him always makes my day better. His presence is infused with wisdom and thoughtfulness and kindness. If you asked him about me, I believe he would say similar kind words if for no other reason that the goodness within him allows him to see me in a more positive light than I probably deserve.

Yet, conventionally, our friendship is improbable. Yehuda is a self-identified ultra-Orthodox Jew. To label myself, I am an intermarried Jew that was raised as part of Secular Judaism at Workman’s Circle and now identify with the Reform Movement.

Last month, Pew Research Center has come out with its most recent study of American Jewry. As a sociology Ph.D. student, I am thrilled to be diving into the data and understanding who makes up our community. But as a communal Jewish leader, I am frightened. Because studies such as Pew place labels on us, force us into binary choices and result in a seeming competition between the segments of Judaism, it can reinforce the idea that we are a divided, polarized community.

Are Yehuda and I in competition? In every aspect of our friendship, should we wear our respective labels of denominational difference? Are we unknowingly at war, fighting for the future of American Judaism?

Well, that seems ridiculous. I honor Yehuda’s religiosity and commitment to Torah and Halachah (Jewish law). I have been enriched by his Jewish outlook on the world. I am a better person and a Jew because of our friendship. But even as I constantly grow within my faith, I am who I am. I am not halachically observant. I drive on Shabbat. I love a good cheeseburger.

Pew asked the participants how much they had in common with Jews from the various denominations. When Orthodox Jews were asked about how much they had in common with Reform Jews, 50% responded a lot or some. 48% responded not much or nothing at all. When

Alicia the question was asked of Chandler Reform Jews, 39% said they had a lot or some in common with Orthodox Jews. And 60% said they had not much or nothing at all in common. At first, these numbers appalled me. As Jews, we definitionally have something in common with each other. But then I wondered, five years ago, before I became friends

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with Yehuda, how would I have answered? When I used to drive my kids past the yeshivot to drop them off at preschool at Temple Emanu-El, did I believe I had something in common with the black-hatted children I saw walking along 10 Mile Road? Did I place lines, this Jewish community versus that Jewish community, instead of one diverse Jewish community?

INTRAFAITH DIALOGUE

While I am a proponent of interfaith engagement between the many diverse faiths that exist here in the United States, Pew shows we also need a commitment to intrafaith engagement. Within Judaism there is a diversity of religious beliefs, religious practices and religious identities. How much stronger would we be as a community if we could engage with each other? How much stronger would we be if we felt that we shared commonality with each other?

This is not to overlook the real difficulties that can exist. Before the first time Yehuda had my family over for Shabbos lunch, he honestly shared his struggle with me. “My children do not know that people like you exist.” I was not offended; I was honored that I meant enough to him to warrant grappling with the challenge that introducing a family like ours entailed.

For me, I struggle with the gender differentiation in Orthodox communities. I am uncomfortable praying in situations where a mechitzah (a partition between the sexes) is present and bristle at the notion that I simply do not count in a minyan because of my gender. However, this would never stop me from joyfully standing in the room with a mechitzah as I watched Yehuda’s son become a bar mitzvah. These challenges are not an impediment to our friendship; instead these challenges have deepened our friendship.

Today, if someone were to ask me if I had something in common with Yehuda, of course I would say yes. But holding community together is not just about two people. Holding community together means that each of us has to learn to break down the labels that are placed on us and push past our comfort zones to meet Jews who experience Judaism in ways that we may have never imagined. It is through these interactions that we will continue to build a more vibrant, richer, diverse American Jewish community.

Alicia Chandler is pursuing her Ph.D. in sociology at Wayne State University. She is founder of Multifaith Life LLC, a consulting firm supporting the diversity of Jewish life today and co-founder of Nu?Detroit. A version of this article was previously published on Nu-Detroit. com.

poetry

Sign of the Times

When I was just a little girl, my momma said to me, Why do you cry, my child? You should be full of glee. Momma oh momma, if only you knew; It’s due to all I see. Can you help us live in harmony? I wish I could stop all the pain that people go through! Love, love, love will overcome; Believe. It’s up to you and you and you! A black cloud of evil hovers above us! That is all the fuss! Guns here, guns, there, guns everywhere! Bad people shoot without a care, just evil, I swear! People suffer, it is too much to bear! We know the chill exists, such a terrible scare! It’s a worry about our family and our friends, too! Such a terror on our shoulders; that’s why we are blue! The mentally ill are blamed, I’m not so sure that’s true! “Normal” people kill, without reason or a clue! What is happening in our world? It affects me and you! We pray and say: “God bless us on this day!” Please, lead the way. STOP the violence! Let us live in peace, And make the killings cease! I know you are listening and have all the power! I know you are blessing us, within this very hour! Your light is here, I see it clear … your love is strong; We can’t go wrong! I sing this song: Love, Love, Love! Darkness disappears! The holiest light is here!

— by Brenda Newman, Oak Park

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essay

Yoni Netanyahu: A Hero’s Story

Yoni Netanyahu, the famed hero of the Entebbe operation, was killed in action 45 years ago on July 4. Benjamin Netanyahu’s older brother was named Jonathan (Yonatan) and is usually remembered as Yoni. He died fighting anti-Israel terrorists on July 4, 1976, just as the world’s oldest democracy celebrated its Bicentennial. Yoni died in a heroic effort that successfully freed more than 100 hijacked Jewish hostages in Entebbe, Uganda.

America’s commemoration of liberty shared the world’s headlines with Israel’s celebration of the liberation of the hostages.

The daring of Israel’s commandos captured the world’s imagination like no other anti-terrorism action in history. Books and movies recall the Entebbe rescue, but there’s more to the story. Much more.

It is not widely known that Yoni Netanyahu was a hero long before he commanded the Entebbe operation. He played a key role in many other crucial Israeli security operations, exhibiting courage and valor in the most dangerous of circumstances. He was a living example to the world’s statesmen that terrorism can be beaten — if the nations of the world have the will to fight back.

Yoni was born in New York into a family of dedicated Zionists who greeted the news of the establishment of Israel by packing up and moving there in 1948. He returned to the U.S. in 1963 where his father, a distinguished Jewish studies scholar,

Benzion Netanyahu, (1910-2012), accepted a professorship in Philadelphia. After graduating high school in a suburb of Philadelphia in 1964, Yoni returned to Israel to join the army, and it was not long before he had worked his way up to the leadership of an elite paratrooper unit. The mid-1960s was a time Moshe Phillips of growing danger for Israel. The Palestine Liberation Organization, established in 1964 for the purpose of “liberating” all of “Palestine” from the Israelis, had begun mounting terrorist attacks across Israel’s borders — and those were precarious borders indeed. In those days, before the 1967 war, Israel was just 9 miles wide at its strategic midsection, and all of Israeli’s major cities were within striking distance of Yasser Arafat’s terrorists. Yoni did not fear the possibility of losing his life in the war to protect Israel from its enemies. “Death does not frighten me,” he wrote to a friend. “I do not fear it because I attribute little to a life without purpose. And if it is necessary for me to lay down my life to attain an important goal, I will do so willingly.”

BLACK SEPTEMBER

The path that led to Yoni’s renown within Israel’s commando ranks may have begun in 1971 battling the Black September Organization, founded by Arafat’s Fatah faction. One of Black September’s first attacks was the assassination of Jordan’s Prime Minister Wasfi Tal. One of the assassins earned a permanent place in the history of savagery by drinking their victim’s blood in full view of photographers.

In 1972, a Black September unit carried out the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at Munich’s Olympic Village.

Yoni was a member of a commando unit sent the night of April 19, 1973, to Beirut to attack the planners of the Munich Massacre.

Israeli commandos landed on a Lebanese beach and slipped into Beirut. Yoni and his unit made their way to the apartment of Black September leader Muhammad Youssef Al-Najjar (Abu Youssef). He had not been originally assigned to the mission; Yoni volunteered.

The last to leave the apartment, Yoni grabbed a satchel of papers just as Lebanese police jeeps arrived. The papers contained operational plans for the PLO’s terrorist network throughout Israel. Yoni’s discovery undoubtedly saved hundreds of lives.

WIKIPEDIA

Last known photo of Netanyahu, taken shortly before his death leading Operation Entebbe

MORE HEROICS

Details of another example of Yoni’s heroism are to be found in Moshe Dayan’s autobiography Story of My Life. Dayan recalls how Yoni suffered a serious wound in the Six-Day War and yet had returned to his army unit and fought valiantly in the Yom Kippur War, despite his permanent injuries.

Yoni and his unit “stalked and killed more than 40 Syrian commandos who had landed behind our lines,” wrote Dayan.

After that, Yoni was responsible for an extraordinary mission that rescued Lt. Col. Yossi Ben Hanan from behind enemy lines. Again, Yoni volunteered. He had overheard a radio transmission about a severely injured tank officer and led his men on foot, braving a nonstop artillery barrage.

Recalling the Ben Hanan rescue, Dayan wrote: “I do not know how many young men there are like Yoni. But, I am convinced there are enough to ensure that Israel can meet the grim tests which face her in the future.”

Dayan’s memoirs were published before the Entebbe operation. Yoni’s last name is not revealed by Dayan in the book. His portrayal of Yoni seems visionary in retrospect.

Self Portrait of a Hero is a must read; it contains Yoni’s letters to family and friends from 1963, when he first entered high school in the Philadelphia suburbs, to just days before the rescue of hostages at Entebbe. His intellect, patriotism, compassion, dedication to duty and leadership are all on full display, amplifying the loss of someone who had just turned 30.

The book has had a profound effect on its readers for decades. If you have not yet read it, do yourself a favor and get a copy. You too will be forever changed by it.

Moshe Phillips is national director of Herut North America’s U.S. division.

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essay

South Florida and the Jewish Imagination

Until a 12-story building inexplicably collapsed in the middle of the night, placing the whereabouts and lives of 159 residents in doubt, few gave Surfside, Fla., very much thought. The town was, after all, a South Florida misnomer. There’s no surfing. The white caps on the Atlantic Ocean never provide enough tubular lift. The people of Surfside skew older. Nearly half its 6,000 residents are Jewish, and of those, many are Orthodox.

You can call Surfside sleepy, but even that wouldn’t describe it. Nothing truly special had ever happened there. Now, with a tragedy so titanic — and still unfolding — its name will become synonymous with misery.

To the casual observer, Surfside was a breakaway township from its more widely known neighbor, Miami Beach, just to its south.

Those over the border on Miami Beach, and in Bal Harbour, the village to Surfside’s immediate north, for many decades had good reason to regard themselves as South Florida’s very own Old City of Jerusalem — a mixed enclave with a major Jewish quarter, and a bit more decadence.

Surfside didn’t have the Art Deco Jazz Age sparkle or swinger elegance that the Eden Roc and Fontainebleau hotels offered back in the 1950s into the ’70s.

In Surfside, the Americana was the swankiest hotel. It once showcased a very young Jackson 5, long before any Billie Jean took notice of Michael. A rare excitement, but the town’s residents didn’t beg for more. Surfside enjoyed the stillness — on land and sea.

Thane Rosenbaum JTA

MIAMI BEACH ROOTS

I know about Surfside. I grew up on 74th Street on Miami Beach. The horrific spectacle that FEMA has now declared to be a national emergency site is on 87th Street. By the time the Champlain Towers were built in 1981, I had long decamped for college and then New York.

I frequently return to Miami Beach, but mostly in my imagination. Many of my novels have featured scenes with Miami Beach as the backdrop. My last one, How Sweet It Is!, selected by the city of Miami Beach as its Centennial Book, is a nostalgic return to 1972 — a valentine, I call it — when Miami Beach was, oddly, the center of the world.

During that summer, Miami Beach hosted both the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions. Unlike the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, the Miami Beach police somehow avoided clubbing the heads of Vietnam War protesters.

Jackie Gleason, who no longer had his TV variety show — once filmed live on Miami Beach — was palling around with his buddy, Frank Sinatra, who had recently retired — for the first time. You could find them drinking in hotels along Collins Avenue, recapturing the easy camaraderie of their younger days at Toots Shor’s saloon near the Theater District in Manhattan.

Meyer Lansky, the notorious Jewish gangster who two years later would be fictionalized in The Godfather Part II, had, in 1972, just been extradited from Israel back to Miami Beach to stand trial for tax fraud.

He would spend his days at Wolfie’s Restaurant on 21st Street surrounded by an aging crew of Jewish wise guys still smarting over Fidel Castro’s takeover of their Havana casinos in 1959.

BERNARD GOTFRYD PHOTOGRAPH CCOLLECTION/LIBRARY OF

Miami Beach, Florida, April 1974.

I.B. SINGER IN SURFSIDE

All of them appear in How Sweet It Is! (yes, Gleason’s signature signoff), reimagined, of course — along with one more special guest. The Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, not long thereafter a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was spending the winters in Surfside. While there, he unsparingly fictionalized the Jews of Poland before the Holocaust, and those who survived and lived in New York thereafter, capturing their comical lives of heartbreak, betrayal and loss.

Ensconced just over the Miami Beach city line, situated right in between two Jewish enclaves populated with those who had fled or escaped one hardship or another, Singer made a canny choice for a writer with a gravitational pull for the shortcomings and desperate moral choices of humankind.

One wonders what Singer might have written about the Champlain Towers today, a short distance from his own apartment.

All the avenues of Surfside were named for American and British authors. (Just west of the Champlain are

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Carlyle, Dickens, Irving and Emerson avenues.) Eventually a street would be named for him. He must have enjoyed the irony that some of the hotels of Surfside once restricted Jews. One shamelessly boasted, “Always a view, never a Jew.”

Singer strolled the sunbaked landscape in a white suit and impish teardrop fedora. Always taking notes, he fiercely studied and measured the patterns of these transplanted Jews: melting snowbirds and Holocaust survivors looking to the sun to cure memories of more ashen, cloudier days; widows and divorcees looking for a male ticket back to the Northeast or out of loneliness; young families tired of the transit strikes and crime waves of New York; hasidim who dressed in the sweltering Sunshine State as if still in Lublin; and vaudevillians wearing makeup suitable to the burlesque surroundings of Miami Beach.

All of them immortalized in Kodak color, or in the pages of My Love Affair with Miami Beach, a book of photos by Richard Nagler, for which Singer wrote the introduction in 1990. Imagine them as Singer once did: plotting affairs, swatting tennis balls, staring at stock tickers, clacking mah jong tiles, gliding discs along shuffleboard courts and gesturing wildly about socialism.

“For me, a vacation in Miami Beach was a chance to be among my own people,” Singer wrote.

He found them sitting on the Broadway medians and inside the cafeterias on the Upper West Side, too, of course. But the Jews from Miami Beach were somehow of a different species — and not only because they were more prone to skin cancer.

It was a Shangri-La of Jewish misadventure, a shtetl still trembling but without Cossacks, the Chosen People out of choices, the detour of a once wandering tribe — finally at rest in and around sleepy Surfside.

And now it is home to new waves of Jews, reflecting the area’s diversity: retirees, of course, but also younger and wealthier Jewish families, many drawn to a booming Chabad; a large cohort of Hispanic Jews with feet in North and Latin America; a smattering of Israelis; and more Sephardic Jews than the national average.

Miami Beach has served as a refuge for some, and as a playground for others. An infinite coastline of condos always seemed to be rising from the sand. Today, unimaginably, we know that one can come crashing down.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, the author of “How Sweet It Is!,” “The Golems of Gotham,” “Second Hand Smoke” and “Elijah Vislble,” among other works of fiction and nonfiction.