Hadassah Magazine Jan/Feb 2022 by HadassahMag

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JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2022

Antisemitism: A Special Report Colleges Face Legal Challenges Social Media Makes It All Worse How One Teen Found Her Voice

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New from The Jewish Publication Society Night of Beginnings is a groundbreaking new haggadah for the Passover seder from acclaimed poet, translator, and liturgist Marcia Falk, beautifully designed and illustrated with original watercolor drawings by the author. Her blessings honor classical Jewish tradition while celebrating a modern ethos that is feminist and inclusive.

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 | VOL. 103 NO. 3

DEPARTMENTS 12 COMMENTARY Young Jews and climate change

13 ESSAYS

• Navigating antisemitism

IN EVERY ISSUE 4 President’s Column 6 The Editor’s Turn 8 Letters to the Editor 10 Cut & Post

(CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM) COURTESY OF IMDB TV; COURTESY OF JEWBELONG; COURTESY OF MADELINE CANFIELD

26 Hadassah Medicine 30 Hadassah News 43 Crossword Puzzle 55 About Hebrew 56 Question & Answer On the Cover

College students are joining the fight against antisemitism—especially online. Feature story begins on page 18. Illustration by Andy Potts.

Join the Conversation facebook.com/hadassahmag @HadassahMag @hadassahmagazine

THE WORLD’S OLDEST HATE In this special issue, we focus on how antisemitism is pervading society, from showdowns on campus to the entertainment industry and progressive social causes, and the impact it is having on younger generations.

16 ‘WE ARE SO GLAD THAT YOU’RE HERE’ By Malka Z. Simkovich “Thank you,” the author now says to her colleagues when they speak graciously to her about being the only Jew at the Catholic graduate school where she teaches. Her anger at having once been tokenized has been replaced by something more compassionate. She reminds herself that if she puts the weight of the Church on others’ shoulders, they will put the weight of Jewish peoplehood on hers.

18 BATTLING ANTISEMITISM ON CAMPUS By Rahel Musleah At the heart of the disturbing and changing climate on campus is the very definition of antisemitism and how it intersects with anti-Zionism, fueled by the hate that spreads rapidly on social media as well as in person. Though anti-Jewish hate on campuses continues to come from right-wing groups in the form of swastikas and defacing of Jewish spaces, much of it emerges as a form of left-wing progressive activism. A new legal strategy is available in the toolkit to fight this scourge, thanks to the expansion of Title VI to include antisemitism as a prohibited form of discrimination. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

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in high school

• Inheriting family trauma 24 HEALTH Medical residency is grueling for expectant moms

32 FOOD Claudia Roden, culinary icon

36 ARTS

• Bias against Jews and Israel breaches the art world

• TV judge Judy Sheindlin 44 BOOKS

• Poignant memoirs recall family histories and motherhood

• Helene Wecker’s golem and jinni return in The Hidden Palace

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Combating a Deadly Social Virus When it comes to antisemitism, we’ve gone anti-viral | By Rhoda Smolow

he past two years have altered our vocabulary, recycling words barely used and introducing new terms—from lockdown to Zoom, from flattening the curve to mRNA vaccines, from superspreader events to drive-thru testing. It has also reminded us that “virus” is still an apt metaphor to describe the spread of antisemitism. With the defeat of Nazi Germany and the post-war horror over the Holocaust in the decades that followed, the disease seemed contained. But just as with Covid-19, humanity’s antibodies have waned. As a result, antisemitic violence and rhetoric have surged in America and worldwide. We have seen the news reports of murderous attacks as well as the FBI statistics demonstrating the steady increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes. What is different today from the Holocaust era is that we have the opportunity to do something about the problem. It occurs to me, in fact, that Hadassah has a singular distinction. We not only have a medical center and laboratories for the fight against Covid; we also have an organizational lab and human network for combating a deadly social virus. This issue of Hadassah Magazine focuses on antisemitism, and I’d like to use this space to describe what Hadassah is doing about it in our policies, programming and partnerships, in our campaign for the passage of legislation and the adoption of international norms. What follows is an abbreviated accounting. Hadassah is a proud partner of the Combat Antisemitism Movement—a global coalition of more than 300

organizations—and I serve as co-chair of one of the Conference of Presidents committees to combat antisemitism. Hadassah has lobbied for the widest possible adoption, by governments and institutions, of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism. We can’t effectively fight something if we don’t define it. As of now, the definition has been adopted by 30 national governments. Though some United States government agencies have used the definition as a guideline, we are urging Congress to give it the force of law.

LIKE COVID, ANTISEMITISM CAN BE CONTAINED BUT IS UNLIKELY TO BE ERADICATED. We have advocated for filling two key roles in the government—White House liaison to the Jewish community and the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. President Joseph Biden appointed Chanan Weissman to the White House post last August and nominated historian and Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt to the State Department position. She awaits Senate confirmation. Hadassah has joined with the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federations of North America and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America in communicating to President Biden our

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

shared concern about the spread of antisemitism. Last year, the Never Again Education Act, which provides $10 million in grants for Holocaust education to American schools, was signed into law. Hadassah was a major force in having the legislation drafted and enacted. The grants, which are administered by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, help ensure that future generations learn the lessons of the Holocaust and the need to fight all kinds of hate and discrimination. In addition to raising public awareness and mobilizing elected officials, we are working to ensure that Hadassah’s members have the tools to advance our goals. We created a study guide, “Antisemitism: Define It, Defuse It,” for chapters and groups across the country to use for discussions. We also distribute a study guide on the IHRA antisemitism definition. We have conducted webinars for our own membership, and Judy Shereck, our Zionist Advocacy chair, has participated in ADL webinars focused on domestic and worldwide antisemitism. The lesson of our time is sobering. Like Covid, antisemitism can be contained but is unlikely to be eradicated. We treat this virus with education, organization and advocacy, determined to impede the spread of every variant. Combating hate is something we share with the generations that went before us, but we have advantages they didn’t have. We have many allies as well as the best tools that have ever been available for this fight. When it comes to antisemitism, we’ve gone anti-viral.

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ISRAEL IS READY TO WELCOME YOU! We’re thrilled to invite you to join us in Jerusalem for Hadassah’s 100th National Convention: Together in Israel: Our Pride. Our Purpose. There’s nothing like a Hadassah convention in Israel. This is our first in a decade and our best lineup yet! Meet top Israeli innovators and the people whose lives Hadassah has touched, experience Israeli culture, and leave invigorated and inspired. Take advantage of our special Early Bird discount, and save $250 per person when you register by February 28. ACT TODAY! Join us in celebrating our pride, passion and purpose at Hadassah’s 100th National Convention.

LEARN MORE TO REGISTER events.hadassah.org/100convention-reg-mag VIEW CONVENTION BROCHURE events.hadassah.org/100convention-brochure-mag QUESTIONS? Contact Stacey Horowitz, Director, Meeting Services, at meetingsandtravel@hadassah.org

HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. ©2022 Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. Hadassah, the H logo and Hadassah the Power of Women Who Do are registered trademarks of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc.

THE EDITOR’S TURN

CHAIR Marlene Post EXECUTIVE EDITOR Lisa Hostein DEPUTY EDITOR Libby Barnea SENIOR EDITOR Leah Finkelshteyn DIGITAL EDITOR Talia Liben Yarmush EDITOR EMERITUS Alan M. Tigay DESIGN/PRODUCTION Smash Studio, Inc. EDITORIAL BOARD Roselyn Bell Ruth G. Cole Nancy Falchuk Gloria Goldreich Blu Greenberg Dara Horn

Ruth B Hurwitz Carmela Kalmanson Francine Klagsbrun Anne Lapidus Lerner Curt Leviant Joy Levitt

Bonnie Lipton Marcie Natan Nessa Rapoport Sima Schuster Susan S. Smirnoff Barbara Topol

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(212) 355-7900 Hadassah Magazine is published in print bimonthly. © Copyright 2022, Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. issn 0017-6516. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Hadassah Magazine, 40 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005-1387. Subscription: $36.00. Member American Jewish Press Association Magazine Publishers of America Hadassah does not endorse any products or services advertised in Hadassah Magazine unless specifically noted. The acceptance of advertising in Hadassah Magazine does not constitute recommendation, approval or other representation of the quality of products or services, or the credibility of any claims made by advertisers including, but not limited to, the kashrut of advertised food products. Use of any products or services advertised in Hadassah Magazine is solely at the user’s risk and Hadassah accepts no responsibility or liability in connection therewith.

Recalling a Different Era on Campus Times have changed for Jewish students | By Lisa Hostein

nti-israel activity on college campuses is not new. As an undergraduate at Swarthmore College during the height of the first Lebanon war in the early 1980s, I saw plenty of it. My response as I sought to demonstrate my burgeoning love for Israel as well as understand its history and complexities was to co-found a group called Swarthmore Activists for Israel. I also organized an independent seminar, for credit, to study early Zionist thinkers. But whatever debates emerged over Israel’s actions, they always felt to me the way most discussions on college campuses felt—energized and passionate. I don’t remember ever feeling or witnessing any antisemitism. I suspect I’m not alone in recalling a very different era. But we all know that times have changed, and that it why it is critical that we understand the new dynamics. In “Battling Antisemitism on Campus” (page 18), Rahel Musleah delves into not only the problems facing Jewish students today but also some of the new strategies being employed to counter the disturbing trends. After you read the article, be sure to register for the Hadassah Magazine Discussion on January 20 at 7 p.m. ET—Antisemitism on Campus: What You Need to Know—which will feature attorney Alyza Lewin and prominent student activists who are fighting back. (Register at events. hadassah.org/magdiscantisemitism.) As troubling as the campus situation is, antisemitism in our society JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

today clearly doesn’t stop at the university gates, which is why we’ve devoted a good portion of this issue to the topic. We feature a professor’s tale of being the only Jewish faculty member at a Catholic institution (page 16); a look at the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that anti-Jewish bias is creeping into the arts world (page 36); a story about young activists taking to social media to show Jewish pride (page 10); a piece about Hadassah’s work to educate and combat the scourge (page 30); a Q&A with a marketing guru who has brought the fight to billboards across the country (page 56); and a roundup of new books on the subject (page 46). We also offer an inspiring essay by high-schooler Everett Rattray, who shares her own experiences in “Speaking Up Against Antisemitism and More,” the winning entry in our second annual teen essay contest, which we co-sponsor with jGirls Magazine (page 12). You’ll find more words of youthful wisdom by college student Madeline Canfield in “Our Culture, Our Planet,” timed to coincide with the shmita year of rest for the land and with Tu B’Shevat, which begins on January 16. (And enjoy the holiday crossword, page 43.) On a lighter note, you’ll find joy in reading Adeena Sussman’s profile of culinary icon Claudia Roden (page 32). When much in the world feels grim, we can always take comfort in food. I wish you all a safe, healthy and meaningful 2022!

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

THE GIFT OF LIFE The November/December 2021 articles about kidney donation (“A Perfect Match” and “Transplantation and Rebirth”) were not only inspiring but undoubtedly helped to demystify the process and educate the public about donorship. My husband, Chuck Winer, a Jewish war veteran, is in desperate need of a lifesaving kidney transplant after the damage done to those organs by the medical treatments he received after exposure to Agent Orange in

Vietnam. Several family members and a few close friends have been disqualified to donate. Now, time is running out. To read more about Chuck and our search for a kidney, please visit Kidney4Chuck.com. Debbie K. Winer Newton, Mass.

SEPHARDI JEWISH GEOGRAPHY I always look forward to receiving Hadassah Magazine. In the November/ December issue, Hannah Pressman’s essay, “Ladino as Sephardi Cultural Bedrock,” was of particular interest to me, as my maternal grandparents were Sephardi, having come from Turkey. Reading the article, I had hoped to find a familiar name—and

Galante was it! It turns out that my great-great grandmother was a Galante. Davida Ross Margate, N.J.

A FULLER TRUTH ON BULGARIA I would like to comment on “Sofia’s Serendipity,” from the November/ December issue, in particular the statement that Bulgarian authorities saved the country’s entire Jewish population during World War II—a statement that is not wholly accurate. As a reward for being an Axis regime, in 1941, Bulgaria was allowed by Germany to occupy most of Greek Thrace, Yugoslav Macedonia and Pirot County in eastern Serbia. In March

This is a wonderful Legacy and Sharing to benefit another family. “Seeing my daughter’s face as she looks out the window while riding is priceless. My eldest daughter said it best,

‘When you gave my sister the van, you gave her a new life!’” We provide vans for underprivileged special needs children, the elderly, and those with debilitating illnesses. This is indeed a “life-changer”, enabling a hassle-free way to doctor and therapy appointments, attending family events, socializing with friends...for many who live every day with loneliness.

Donate your Used Minivan or Wheelchair Van! or to Support our Mission www.MitzvahMobility.org Please send inquiries or comments to: MitzvahMobility@gmail.com Endorsed by

Be our partner in this vital initiative; helping those who aren’t able to do, what we often take for granted...

Donations of used vans in good condition are tax-deductible for full appraised value. 501c3 Tax ID 58-2550249

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1943, Bulgarian forces deported 11,343 Jews living in those occupied lands to Treblinka, where they were murdered in gas chambers or shot. Philip Sherman Coral Springs, Fla.

MOROCCO MEMORIES The July/August 2020 article “Morocco, Where Jewish Memory Live On” by Lisa Hostein had a tremendous impact on me, so much that I booked a trip to Morocco for 2021. I have now returned. I took Hostein’s article with me and walked in many of her footsteps. In Chefchaouen, we visited Abdullah at his market stall, where he weaves and sells baskets. In Marrakesh, we

TELL US ABOUT YOUR BAT MITZVAH In honor of the 100th anniversary of the first bat mitzvah ceremony on March 18, 1922, Hadassah is collecting stories from our members and supporters. Were you the first bat mitzvah in your family or in your synagogue? Did you share the experience with your mom or grandmother, who never had their own? Did you become an adult bat mitzvah through Hadassah, in a ceremony held at a national convention? Did you have your bat mitzvah during a momentous or difficult time—World War II, Israel’s independence, a major snowstorm or blackout, for example? All stories—and photos!—are welcome. Please email them to marketing@hadassah.org and include your name, city and state and chapter. Hadassah will be a sponsor of Rise Up/Bat Mitzvah at 100, a national initiative that will mark this historic milestone with a National Shabbat Celebration set for March 18-19, 2022. Stay tuned for more programming! walked to Miara cemetery and met watchman Otman Kanami and his brother Khalid. Although there are few Jews living in Morocco today, the extent to

which our Jewish heritage is alive in this Muslim land is indeed a wonderful memory for me. Deby Weinstein Madeira Beach, Fla.

Bennett Center for Judaic Studies LECTURES AND EVENTS: Spring 2022

A Semester of Free Learning

Joan and Henry Katz Lecture in Judaic Studies

Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Lecture in Judaic Studies

Bennett Lecture in Judaic Studies

“Too Long, Too Foreign. . . Too Jewish?: The Rise of Jewish Name Changing, 1917-1945”

“The Ancient ‘Gender Gap’: The Bible, Archeology, and Israelite Women”

Kirsten Fermaglich, PhD, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies Michigan State University; author, A Rosenberg By Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (2018).

Carol L. Meyers, PhD, Mary Grace Wilson Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, Duke University. Biblical scholar and field archeologist; author, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context.

Tzipi Livni, Israeli politician, diplomat, and lawyer, Former Foreign Minister, Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Justice and Leader of the Opposition of Chief Negotiator, IsraeliPalestinian Peace Talks.

Thursday, February 17 at 7:30 p.m.

Monday, March 7 at 7:30 p.m

- Free webinar

“Visions for the Future of Israel”

Monday, April 4 at 7:30 p.m. Quick Center for the Arts Free: In-person or watch Livestream

Registration is required at fairfield.edu/bennettprograms. For questions, contact the Bennett Center at bennettcenter@fairfield.edu or (203) 254-4000, ext. 2066 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

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POST

Never Forget That #everynamecounts A new initiative of the German-based Arolsen Archives, the largest repository of documents related to Holocaust victims and survivors anywhere in the world, is asking volunteers, especially students, to take to their computers to ensure that #everynamecounts. It’s a timely reminder with the approach of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is observed on January 27. Launched in March 2021, #everynamecounts (arolsen-archives.org/en) is an international crowdsourcing effort to create the largest digital memorial and searchable database of every victim and survivor of the Nazi regime. Beyond remembrance, noted Floriane Azoulay, director of the Arolsen Archives, is the chance

for younger generations to engage with this crucial history. All volunteers need is a computer and internet connection. Arolsen provides a web portal with instructions—in English, German, French, Spanish and Polish— on how to transcribe scanned materials from their archives into new database entries. “Young people are grateful for this opportunity to make a personal and lasting contribution to a meaningful initiative,” Azoulay said. “Every piece of information that is digitized is an expression of solidarity with the victims of the crimes committed by the Nazis.” Since the launch, more than one million documents, including concentration camp prisoner registration cards, train manifests and execution records, have been digitized, but the archives contain about 30 million more documents that reference the fate of almost 17.5 million people awaiting transcription. Azoulay said that the sheer scope of the work necessi-

A displaced person’s identity card, one of millions of documents in the Arolsen Archives

tates reaching out to communities worldwide, sometimes in coordinated virtual events. For example, during the “Long Night of the Digital Memorial” held on November 9 to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht, universities came together virtually to participate in an evening of uploading to the #everynamecounts database. In the United States, the Arolsen Archives has partnered with the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art to promote similar events. “Many of these names are not memorialized anywhere,” said Rachel Stern, the society’s director and CEO. “If we can build interest in even one person, then we can restore their dignity and humanity and help close the holes in our family histories.” —Cathryn J. Prince

COURTESY OF CAROBWAY

Tu B’Shevat, Shmita and the Carob Tree When I was a child, the Tu B’Shevat holiday—the new year for trees, which begins this year on January 16—was all about watching my grandfather bite into a hard black pod that he called bokser in Yiddish. Years later, I learned that bokser means carob—charuv in Hebrew. Five species of this flowering evergreen grow in Israel. Carob, a type of legume, primarily is used to make a cocoa substitute or locust bean gum, a common thickener in products such as ice cream and baby formula. Mentioned in Talmudic lore, today the carob is the subject of a research project by the Israeli company CarobWay and the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish

Food scientists are developing 14 products from carob.

National Fund (KKL-JNF). They’re using Israeli irrigation and pollination innovations to grow high-yield carob trees nationwide. “Carob is highly nutritious and flavorful, low in calories and high in energy. But its true potential has yet to be realized,” said CarobWay co-founder and CEO Udi Alroy. Indeed, the company’s food scientists are developing 14 products from carob. “Some carob species with a JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

higher sugar content and low glycemic index could provide viable sugar alternatives,” noted Alroy. “Other trees bear more seeds, well-suited for locust bean gum. The germ, or protein, of the flower is highly functional and can be used in the gluten-free market. Other parts of the plant are beneficial for gut health or oral health. Carob honey, for instance, is a good antibiotic mouth rinse.” Carob also has potential for

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weight-loss products because it provides a feeling of satiety, said Alroy. Meanwhile, KKL-JNF Chief Forest Officer Sohel Zedan explained that Israeli carobs are a “highly sustainable, low-maintenance crop, well acclimatized to extreme weather and other environmental changes.” All the carob trees for the research project were planted before Rosh Hashanah. That’s because the Jewish New Year 5782 ushered in a shmita year when the land is left fallow, and any produce grown must be shared rather than sold. Therefore, CarobWay will make carob honey from this year’s experimental crop and distribute it to schoolchildren through KKL-JNF’s educational arm. “The whole idea of Tu B’Shevat,” added Alroy, “is to plant what is native to Israel and compatible with its environment—fruits such as carobs, dates and olives.” —Jordana Benami

COURTESY OF JOHANNA GROSS/AROLSEN ARCHIVES

CUT

Young Jews Fight Back on Instagram and TikTok are using their platforms to tackle antisemitism, anti-Zionism and misperceptions about themselves, their community and Israel. But doing so comes with a cost. Their posts routinely attract thousands of negative comments as well as a few death threats— which is why the two women interviewed for this story chose not to share their last names or

LOOKING TO FOLLOW MORE PRO-JEWISH ACCOUNTS? HERE ARE SOME OF THE MOST POPULAR: @yourjewishlife @blackjewishmagic @jewishoncampus @challahbackgirls

@rootsmetal @jewishliberal @progressivejews @noatishby

@therealmelindastrauss @sj_rachel

@adielofisrael @frumjewishblackboy JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

Correcting misperceptions on social media, Chloe (above, @thatpersianjew) and Naomi (@jewishpridealways) tackle antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

where they attend school. Naomi, better known as @jewishpridealways across social media, originally intended to share “light-hearted content,” like cute memes, when she started her profiles in August 2020—but the fun was short lived. That same month, after the Chabad center at the University of Delaware was set on fire by arsonists, she quickly rebranded her feeds, which she used to lambast both the crime and what she perceived as a disheartening lack of coverage in mainstream media. “I wanted to contribute as a Jewish voice to social media—to be able to share more positivity about the Jewish community and stand against antisemitism,” said Naomi, a college student at a different university. “From then on, I have focused my accounts around spreading Jewish pride, positivity, knowledge and standing against antisemitism.” In one example, in a post during the fall, Naomi cautioned those on the left that “you’re not actually progressive if you’re antisemitic”—a message she signed, “A Jew who is tired of antisemitism being disguised, excused and even encouraged

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under the guise of ‘social justice.’ ” Similarly, @thatpersianjew, aka Chloe, who is also a college student, couldn’t have imagined what her online presence would become when she posted a video on TikTok from the 2020 Washington conference of the proIsrael group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), just days before Covid-19 changed life as we knew it. Almost instantly, the video—a clip featuring young Jews singing “Hatikvah” in an attempt to drown out proPalestinian protesters calling for an intifada—went viral. But that video, said Chloe, “led to hundreds and probably thousands of antisemitic comments.” Once pandemic lockdowns were enacted, she said, “no one had anything else better to do than make content and be antisemitic online, or respond to antisemitic comments. So I started creating content and started growing on TikTok.” “For the negative comments that I receive,” Naomi said, “I either ignore them, turn them into ‘learning’ moments or try to turn them into something positive.” —Jacqueline Weiss

COURTESY OF @THATPERSIANJEW (TOP) AND @JEWISHPRIDEALWAYS

With antisemitic incidents making up 57.5 percent of religious bias crimes according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2020 hate crime statistics, it’s no surprise that digital savvy young Jews are combating antisemitism in a forum native to them—social media. Indeed, many Jewish content creators and influencers

COMMENTARY

Our Culture, Our Planet Let’s make bold plans to protect the earth together By Madeline Canfield

COURTESY OF MADELINE CANFIELD

Gen-Z and Jewish Young activists, including the author (left), at a recent climate protest

was a seventh grader on Memorial Day 2015 as I watched the first in a series of rapidly intensifying “500-year floods” strike my home city of Houston. Then came the Tax Day Flood in 2016, Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019. Throughout my adolescence, the storms, floods and destruction statistically slated to occur only once in half a millennium arrived nearly every year, uprooting the lives of those around me. The storms so traumatized one peer that she would lock herself in the bathroom at school every time she saw lightning and heard thunder. After one close friend’s house flooded, she was separated for months from her single parent, living with different families until they could move back home. And when the grandparents of a classmate were killed in one of the floods, I watched him struggle to smile each morning at school. My Jewish community proved far from impervious to the climate devastation. Hundreds of homes in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Meyerland were waterlogged, major synagogues sported pools in their sanctuaries, the Jewish bakeries closed and the local Jewish community center scrambled to dole out funds and supplies. I was drawn to the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, a Gen Z-led effort to combat climate change and environmental injustice from a Jewish lens, because among this group, stories like mine are abundant. For Jews, the climate crisis is emerging

from a past in which our concern for survival transformed our traditions and culture into a way of life perpetually fixated on the existential. Today, there is no greater existential threat we face. We learn from peer movements, especially Indigenous leaders fighting for land sovereignty amid pipeline expansion and labor unions advocating for green jobs expansion, how to use the fight against all forms of oppression as the driving factor of climate justice work. So, too, must we Jews understand climate efforts as intertwined with the fight against antisemitism. This means proudly demonstrating our place and our stake as Jews within this movement, honoring our culture and applying the wisdom and resilience learned from millennia of persecution. In honoring that culture, we look to our tradition for guidance in protecting our planet and its peoples. One such tradition is shmita, the biblical practice of radical land rest for one year out of every seven— including our current Jewish year, 5782. Though the laws of shmita pertain specifically to the Land of Israel, throughout the centuries, Jews around the world have created various ways of marking the year. The Jewish Youth Climate Movement is leading a Shmita Campaign to reframe the ancient idea through systemic climate action. Just as the Bible notes for the shmita year “the land shall rest a Shabbat to God” (Vayikrah 25:2), we, too, must allow the earth to heal from centuries of

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fossil fuel extraction by ceasing all pipeline expansion and swiftly transitioning to renewable energy. Our goal as young activists is to make collective action toward climate justice a central, defining feature of what it means to be Jewish and to empower the next generation of Jewish youth to be leaders in the fight to build a sustainable and equitable world. We are building chapters in local Jewish institutions, training youth leaders, partnering with national Jewish and climate organizations, researching transformative public policy and planning protest actions to spur those in power to effect change. This shmita year, we celebrate Tu B’Shevat beginning the evening of January 16. Traditionally known as the new year of the trees, the day is also a way of measuring time by listening to the rhythms of the environment. Let us view this environmental holiday not just as a celebration of the earth, but also as the opportunity for Jewish organizations, communities and families to make bold plans to protect the earth. We are calling on all Jews to sign our Shmita Commitments, a pledge to educate, organize, protest and advocate for climate justice over the next decade. In the spirit of Tu B’Shevat, we hope you will join us. Madeline Canfield, a sophomore at Brown University, is the associate at the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, a project of Hazon. You can read more about the organization’s Shmita Commitments at jewishyouthclimatemovement.org/shmita-pledge.

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ESSAY

Speaking Up Against Antisemitism and More Together, the louder our battle cry will be | By Everett Rattray

• At a service, my school’s chaplain shared a New Testament verse that read “...the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders....” When a Jewish friend questioned the verse’s

content, a teacher denied its antisemitic connotation. • A student drew a Christmas card with a tree topped by a swastika that hung in a dormmate’s room. • My friends told Holocaust “jokes.” • I learned that one of the photographs that hangs in my school’s War Memorial Room is actually of a Nazi soldier. I could no longer stay silent. I cared enough about myself, my heritage and my school community to do something about the antisemitism. I met with the chaplain, the teacher and the head of school. The results were mixed. The teacher was defensive, failing to realize that saying “fear of the Jewish leaders” teaches hate, and my school’s head (who has since retired) refused to address the antisemitism. The chaplain, however, apologized for the hurtful reading and asked me to talk to his religion class about Judaism. While I wished for more, my experience of speaking up empowered me, making clear that when I advocate for what’s right, I can sometimes change people’s perspectives. I felt motivated to expose other truths and decided to volunteer for the Plain Sight Project, which researches the names of enslaved people who lived in and helped build the East End of Long Island, including my hometown of East Hampton, N.Y., in order to bring these individuals into the American narrative. Horrified by the number of enslaved people who

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Everett Rattray

were erased from history, I decided to extend that search to see if there were any links to slavery at my school. I learned that, indeed, the campus is located on the site of a former plantation, and that the family who ran it enslaved many people over generations. Barely anyone at my school was aware of that history. I spoke to the new head of school, who listened with interest when I pointed out the hypocrisy of teaching about American slavery without acknowledging the existence of it on our campus. I also met with the history department and members of our Black affinity groups to figure out how to bring awareness of this history to current students and to create a memorial so that future generations can learn about it. Before I spoke out about antisemitism, I was afraid, believing that I would offend someone if I shared my feelings. But then I realized that biased statements and willful blindness create and sustain bigotry, thereby harming people and undermining our communities. I realized that if even just one other person listened and joined the fight, my voice would be doubled. Together, the louder our battle cry will be. Everett Rattray is a high school senior from East Hampton, N.Y. Her essay is the winner of our 2021 teen writing contest, co-sponsored with jGirls Magazine, which asked girls: “Tell us about a time in your life when antisemitism affected you and how you responded.”

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GAVIN FRAZER

k...cool...thanks!” i cringed as I thought about the words that came out of my mouth after a classmate said, “The Holocaust was a good thing because it was God’s will.” Her words stunned me. Did she actually think the death of millions, including some of my own family members, was good? Why was I the only one who felt uncomfortable? I was ashamed for not saying something more. My grandfather’s earliest memory is hiding under the bed at the age of 3 because the SS was searching for his father, a neighborhood butcher who had been taken into custody by the local police to protect him from the Nazis. His family fled Germany that night, barely making it out alive. Other family members were not as lucky. It took me over a year to realize I should have said something in response to my classmate. I justified my silence by believing that I had no right to get angry because her statement reflected her beliefs. I pushed away my hurt and discomfort; I didn’t want to upset anyone. But then a series of incidents occurred at my private Episcopal boarding school on the East Coast that made me change my mind:

ESSAY

The Power and Danger of Secrets Hearing my great-aunt’s story lessened my shame By Sylvia Bodmer True

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF SYLVIA BODMER TRUE

ou are only as sick as your secrets,” I was told during my inpatient stint at McLean psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Mass. I remember feeling relieved because I didn’t have any secrets. This lack of secrets, I reasoned, would help me recover more quickly from my depression and allow me to get home to my newborn daughter. But what if there are family secrets that you don’t know exist? Can those make you sick? I had been depressed for most of my life, but it wasn’t something I was allowed to talk about. In my family, showing signs of mental weakness was forbidden, and my mother, Doris, had made her opinion of psychiatrists clear by telling me throughout my younger years that “no child of mine shall ever see one of those people.” When I felt miserable, I was told to stop being so sensitive. In my early 20s, sleeplessness and agoraphobia forced me to drop out of graduate school, where I had been studying biochemistry. I married my first husband, John, whom I had met in college, primarily because I was terrified to live on my own. During our first year of marriage, I knew I couldn’t manage a full-time job. I couldn’t even cook or do laundry without feeling overwhelmed. My depression worsened, and I decided the cure would be to have a baby. Erica was born on August 27, 1984. She was 10 pounds and the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

I felt cured—for about a week. But then the panic and depression returned with such force that I didn’t know how to survive. I finally called a psychiatrist and John drove me to the doctor’s office one night in November. When the doctor heard about my suicidal ideation, he reserved a bed for me at McLean.

will never forget standing at the steel door to the hospital ward, overwhelmed by fear on that cold, damp night. But I couldn’t go back to the bed where I couldn’t sleep, or to the kitchen that I couldn’t clean. Or to the back steps where the night before I had smoked a cigarette for the first time in over a year, hoping it would calm me. Instead, I had brought the burning tip, orange with specks of gray, to my wrist and allowed the ember point to singe my skin. That kind of pain was easier to bear. The admitting doctor at McLean asked me standard questions, including if there was ever any mental illness in my family. “No, absolutely not, they are perfect,” I answered. “I am the weak link.” As I began to feel stronger with the help of medication and therapy, my grandmother, Inga, whom I called Omama, came from Switzerland to visit. We drank tea in the patient dining room, and in stops and starts, she revealed a secret she had intended to take to her grave.

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The author as a new mother and today (top)

She had had a sister, Rigmor, who suffered from mental illness. The sisters had lived in the family home on the wealthiest street in Frankfurt am Main. They were Jewish but thought of themselves as Germans first. According to my grandmother, Rigmor was bright, beautiful and gentle. She spoke four languages, painted and was a talented pianist. In 1933, she started experiencing psychotic episodes, and the family decided to send her, then 24 years old, to Sonnenstein, a highly regarded German institution renowned for its curative treatments and where my grandmother knew one of the doctors. It was at this facility that Rigmor received the diagnosis of schizophrenia. It wasn’t long before the same acclaimed healing institution, under Nazi orders, quietly began to murder its patients. A variety of euthanasia methods were used: lethal injection, starvation and the release of carbon monoxide gas into a closed chamber outfitted to look like a shower room. This gassing technique used at Sonnenstein and five other facilities of the so-called Euthanasia Program was

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considered so efficient that it was later adapted for the killing of Jews and other prisoners in concentration camps. When Rigmor became ill with an infection sometime in 1937 or 1938, the doctor, my grandmother and her mother decided it would be better to give her a lethal injection and relieve Rigmor her of her misery. Meanwhile, Omama and my mother, then 2, fled to Switzerland— and they never spoke of having a mentally ill family member until I went to McLean.

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earing rigmor’s story lessened my shame. I was not alone. I also began to understand the power and danger of secrets. Like many children, I was a barometer of the family climate. I felt the unspoken emotions, turned them inward and carried them in the form of depression. My family thought they were protecting me by keeping Rigmor a secret. But their hidden fears of mental illness seeped into the family fabric and caused emotional havoc. Thankfully, I live in a time where help is more readily available and mental illness is less stigmatized. After years of treatment and confronting my own family history, I made tremendous progress. I was also fortunate to have a courageous grandmother who, by revealing her past, set me free.

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Sylvia Bodmer True’s new novel, Where Madness Lies, is based on her family history. She lives in Natick, Mass., and is the head of the science department at a local high school. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

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‘We Are So Glad That You’re Here’ And now I can say, ‘I’m glad to be here, too’ | By Malka Z. Simkovich

ANDY POTTS

ears ago, at one of the first work events I attended as a then associate professor of Jewish studies at a Catholic graduate school in Chicago, a middle-aged man whom I had never met made a lasting, albeit unintentional, impression on me. Toward the end of the evening, after the speeches had been delivered and people were mingling, this gentleman made eye contact with me from 20 feet away. Soon, he was marching toward me purposefully, holding a plate of desserts in one hand. “I just want to let you know,” he said after taking my hand and pumping it up and down, “that we are so glad that you’re here.” He spoke to me with a broad and eager smile. “Why, because I’m Jewish?” I heard myself, the only Jew on faculty, blurt out. After waiting a beat, and barely registering that his smile had frozen in confusion, I added, “Well if

so, then I thank you.” I walked away with my chin lifted and my cheeks burning. For the remainder of the event, I felt angry and alone, ashamed by my hostility and embarrassed by my failure to behave cordially.

fter the event ended, i went to my office to pick up my things and stopped by the office of a close colleague before heading home. I told him what had happened and waited for some rebuke about how I had messed up. Instead, my co-worker looked at me for a long moment and then broke into peals of laughter. As he doubled over, I started laughing, too, exhilarated and mortified by what I had done. We laughed at my defensiveness, my self-righteousness, my bottling up of the long suffering of the Jewish people into my psyche, of 2,000 years of history that had brought me to this Catholic institu-

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tion. We laughed for this poor fellow, who had only meant to be nice. We laughed at the absurd awkwardness of the situation, at my speaking the subtext in a place where subtext is rarely spoken out loud. We wiped tears off our faces and said good night. Every few months after this happened, the story would come up again one way or another. “I heard from one of my students the other day that he’s really enjoying your class,” my colleague said to me one morning as we stood in line waiting to buy coffee. “Why, because I’m Jewish?” I answered in a testy voice, and with that, we came undone. Colleagues standing behind us smiled, confused and curious, wanting to be in on the joke. “I forwarded you an email about an interesting conference you might want to attend,” he told me as we exited a faculty meeting. “Why, because I’m Jewish?”

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“I have to tell you about a great show on Netflix that I just started watching,” he said over lunch, sandwich in hand. “Why, because I’m Jewish?” The joke aged well, better than I could have imagined, and highlighted the increasing absurdity of my paranoia. A few years after the original incident, my colleague left the institution. Without him around, my memory of our joke as being hilariously funny began to dissipate until it no longer felt funny at all. When I did think about the joke, I thought less about my tart response and more about the man’s comment, “We are so glad that you’re here.” I began to realize that my retort was an impulsive reaction to his use of the word “we.” He was a nonfaculty member, and I found offensive his implication that he was part of the “we”—but I was not. If he was a board member or trustee or some affiliate of my institution, why was he more legitimately a member of the “we” than I was? But I wasn’t in the “we.” Indeed, I had never been part of the “we.”

othing like this will ever happen to me again. More than six years after that evening, and after assuming the chair of the Jewish Studies department, I am too practiced in the art of interreligious small talk. I am more polished and self-controlled than I was then. More than anything, I am now comfortable being the only Jew at the school, and I don’t expect my Catholic colleagues to see me as anything else. When they say the words “we” and “you” to me, I understand what they mean. In fact, people still say to me things like “we are so glad that you’re here.”

Sometimes these words should be taken literally, a heartfelt “thank you for being here.” But sometimes I suspect that what people are trying to articulate is a more complicated emotion. Perhaps my presence helps ameliorate the guilt of historic Jew hatred and oppression and embodies the Catholic Church’s efforts to reconcile past misdeeds against the Jews. Indeed, my presence affirms that the Church has a broadly positive relationship with the global

MY ANGER HAS BEEN REPLACED BY SOMETHING GENTLER AND MORE COMPASSIONATE, A REACTION THAT SETTLES ON THE SPEAKER’S SEARCH FOR THE RIGHT WORDS RATHER THAN MY OWN. Jewish community. At the same time, however, my work as a professor of Jewish studies often calls upon my Christian students to face a difficult legacy of Christian oppression and persecution of the Jewish people. Other times, I interpret the phrase kindly, thinking they are saying, “We see that you are sacrificing a part of your individuality in order to be tokenized, and that you are doing this in service not only to the Jewish people but to the Church. We see the sacrifice that you have made. It means something to us.” With the recent rise in antisemitic violence, the phrase has come to mean something else altogether. Antisemitism has brought new dimensions of loneliness into my

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professional work, and hearing this phrase now invokes a fresh subtext: not a gesture toward reconciling the theological anti-Judaism of the ancient past, but a gesture toward the palpable tension of a changing time. And that tension reminds me of the man at the event so many years ago, the man who took his hand and held it out to mine, the man who was trying to make an overture that was halfway between an apologetic admission of complicity and an invitation to be my full self. “Thank you,” I say to my colleagues now when they speak graciously to me about my Jewishness, and I mean it. My anger has been replaced by something gentler and more compassionate, a reaction that settles on the speaker’s search for the right words rather than my own. “I’m glad to be here, too.” I try to remind myself that if I put the weight of the Church on their shoulders, they will put the weight of Jewish peoplehood on mine. Still, I find myself looking among my colleagues for a friend with whom I can laugh at the absurdities in which we are all complicit, a friend who will not assess the meaning of my presence, who will not analyze the reasons why I have been brought into their lives. The friendship that I am searching for is one that takes my Jewishness for granted, that relishes the unlikelihood of our friendship, that doesn’t predicate it on a precondition and doesn’t seek to solve the problems that entangle our people. Until I find another friendship like that, I will be glad to sit with people who are happy that I’m with them. And I’ll thank them for having me. Malka Z. Simkovich, Ph.D., is the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

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Battling Antisemitism on Campus New strategies emerge as the climate heats up | By Rahel Musleah

ALAMY

hen max price entered Tufts University in 2018, excited to study international relations and economics, he did not expect that his college experience would include being intimidated, harassed and marginalized on the Medford, Mass., campus. In his years at the university, he has been slandered in the school newspaper, muted on a Zoom student government meeting and labeled “a white supremacist upholding settler colonialism” on social media—all on the basis of his Jewish identity and outspoken support of the State of Israel. Last winter, the campaign against him initiated by Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) escalated into an attempt to impeach and remove him from the student government. Price filed repeated complaints to the university administration with over 100 examples of documented evidence, but his efforts fell on

deaf ears. Ultimately, he found a champion in attorney Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a 10-year-old Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that today primarily works to combat the surge of antisemitism on college campuses. “Tufts University is legally obligated to protect Mr. Price from antisemitic harassment that targets him because of his Zionist identity and seeks to silence him,” stated a letter to the university administration demanding the impeachment process be stopped. Submitted by Lewin on February 3, 2021, on Price’s behalf, the letter, totaling 110 pages, with exhibits, invoked violations of the university’s own policy regarding freedom of speech as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which precludes discrimination on the grounds of race, color or national origin. In recent years, Title VI has been interpreted to include

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discrimination against religion on the basis of shared ethnicity and ancestry. Tufts SJP dropped the impeachment effort three weeks after the letter was sent, claiming that once the situation became public, its members no longer felt safe. “I decided with the Brandeis Center that the best way to stop the harassment was to put a spotlight to it,” said Price, now 22, who grew up in a Conservative Jewish home in Boston and has visited Israel twice. “I never thought of hiding my Jewish identity. I’m proud I fought and stood by my convictions.” He doesn’t fault his peers who are more reluctant to speak up. “It’s not an expectation we as a society can place on every Jewish student to be a warrior, nor should it be incumbent on American Jewry to push universities to protect our civil rights,” he said. “We need universities to stand up for Jewish students.”

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Taking a Stand ’We need universities to stand up for Jewish students,’ says Max Price.

Jassey, who grew up in a Conservative Jewish home in Dix Hills, N.Y., noted that one of the biggest challenges for the Jewish community is rethinking how it reacts to this type of antisemitism. “What has worked for the last 20 years is not working now,” she said. “It needs to be re-envisioned because antisemitism looks different now.” In her view, the change needs to include strong student voices fighting antisemitism on campuses and in social media spaces, backed by established organizations.

ecent numbers reveal the scope of the problem. Last April, a Brandeis Center-commissioned poll of 1,000 members of the predominantly Jewish fraternity and sorority Alpha Epsilon Pi and Phi reported that two-thirds of respondents experienced or were familiar with an antisemitic attack—either verbal or physical threats and assaults, on campus or in virtual settings—over the previous four months. More than 65 percent of those surveyed in that poll by the Cohen Research Group said they felt unsafe on campus due to physical or verbal attacks, and half felt the need to hide their Jewish identities. In a recent attack, for example, vandals broke into Tau Kappa Epsilon, a largely Jewish fraternity, at George Washington University on November 1, tore apart its Torah scroll and covered it in laundry

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detergent. The rest of the house was doused with hot sauce. Jewish students who are not actively engaged in Jewish and pro-Israel groups may never experience antisemitism, Lewin pointed out. But even those less active have told Lewin they will no longer hang a mezuzah or wear jewelry with Jewish symbols or T-shirts with Hebrew words because they are targeted when they do. “This is the kind of pressure students are feeling,” she said. Hillel International, which has chapters on 500 campuses globally, counted 244 incidents in the United States, including attacks on social media, during the 2020-2021 academic year, even though many campuses were physically closed due to the pandemic for most of that time. This marked a 34 percent increase from the year before. In 2013, only 30 incidents were reported. Its new collaborative initiative with the Anti-Defamation League to address this rise in antisemitism included a survey of students on 220 campuses last summer: A third said they had experienced anti-Jewish hate in the past year, but most did not report it. The 40 percent who did report it said they were not taken seriously by their school administrations. “Not every campus is burning, but it’s very challenging to imagine that students don’t encounter some form of hatred during their university life—whether in person, in the classroom, on the campus quad or on social media platforms,” said Rachel Fish, an historian of Israel, Zionism and Middle Eastern studies based in Waltham, Mass. The majority decide not to engage or report their experiences because they came to school to study and have fun, said Fish, whose new think tank, Boundless Israel, partners with

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COURTESY OF MAX PRICE

rice’s experience is one example of the antisemitism pervading universities across the country. The legal strategy employed by the Brandeis Center is relatively new in the evolving toolkit of fighting campus antisemitism, alongside several proactive initiatives begun in the past year and a half. At the heart of the disturbing climate on campus is the very definition of antisemitism and how it intersects with anti-Zionism, fueled by the hate that spreads rapidly on social media as well as in-person incidents. The overlapping intersectionality, diversity and inclusion movements are also sweeping anti-Israel sentiment into their causes. Though antisemitism on campuses continues to come from right-wing groups in the form of swastikas and defacing of Jewish spaces, said Lewin, much of it emerges as a form of left-wing progressive activism. Julia Jassey, 20, a University of Chicago student who has become a leading national figure in the fight against anti-Jewish activity on campus, put it this way: “Antisemitism is, by nature, a nebulous form of hate which is able to continue over time because it shifts in presentation. “Today’s rhetoric around Israel and accusations of ‘Jewish greed’ have been reimagined within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that transcend politics and are, undeniably, antisemitic,” continued Jassey, the CEO and co-founder of Jewish on Campus, a nonprofit started by six students last year as an Instagram page that has collected more than 1,000 anonymous stories of antisemitism and now has over 34,000 followers. “These tropes have existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years,” she added, “but these permutations are markedly modern.”

In Protest Pro-Israel advocates in Manhattan

SIPA USA VIA AP (TOP); JON CHERRY/GETTY IMAGES

(above) and pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Louisville, Ky., (left) take to the streets during the Israel-Hamas conflict in May.

community leaders to revitalize Israel education and combat Jew hatred. They don’t want to lose friends, alienate professors or be “canceled” for taking an unpopular stance. Meanwhile, the complex interface between antisemitism and anti-Zionism has not been adequately recognized by both the Jewish and university communities, said Lewin. “Anti-Zionism is not about criticizing Israel’s policies. It denies Israel’s right to exist—and that’s antisemitism,” she said. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, has a slightly different take. He said that while not all anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitism, anti-Zionism is antisemitic when either in intent or effect “it invokes anti-Jewish tropes; when it is used to disenfranchise, demonize, disparage or punish all Jews and/or those who feel a connection to Israel; when it equates Zionism with Nazism and other genocidal regimes; or when it renders Jews less worthy of sovereignty and nationhood

than other peoples and states.” Antisemitism from the right continues to pose a “serious and dangerous threat,” Greenblatt said, referring to both college campuses and American society in general, likening it to “the lethal category-5 hurricane threatening to bring immediate catastrophe. Antisemitism on the left, however, is more insidious, akin to climate change. Slowly but surely, the temperature is increasing. Often people don’t perceive the shift, or they choose to ignore it even in the face of once uncommon storms. But the metaphorical temperature is rising, and the conditions threaten to upend life as we know it.”

eing pro-israel is seen as being outside the realm of intersectionality, which merges progressive causes such as anti-racism, LGBTQ+ advocacy, climate change and Indigenous, labor and reproductive rights. “There are those who have highjacked the effort to fight racism and adopted a vision of the world as one of two categories—good and evil, oppressed or oppressor,” said Lewin. “In the progressive spaces on campus, the litmus test for how progressive one is begins with the question, ‘Does Israel have a right to exist?’ And the answer is no!” agreed Fish. “Israel is perceived as being

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born in sin, and to be on the ‘correct’ side of history, one must denounce those who engage and support Israel as they are deemed to be racist.” This dynamic freezes out Jewish students inclined toward progressive values. “Intersectionality ignores the Jewish voice for progressive causes,” said Blake Flayton, 21, a Manhattan-based columnist for the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles, who graduated last August from George Washington University. Anti-Israel activists reach out to Black student unions and other progressive organizations, intertwining their problems and oppressions. They assert that their strength will grow if they join forces, he explained. Flayton, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home in Phoenix, Ariz., speaks from personal experience. For his first three semesters at the university, until the pandemic shut down the campus in early 2020, Flayton spent every weekend at rallies for progressive causes—Planned Parenthood, criminal justice reform, a $15 minimum wage. He said he found “overwhelming hostility” to Israel in these spaces both on campus and off. Then he saw a video posted to a student’s Snapchat story showing another student advocating the bombing of Israel and then proceeding to spew blatantly antisemitic profanities about Jews. When a close friend at the time posted on his Instagram that Jewish students don’t stand up for anybody else on campus, Flayton had had enough. He described his campus experience in an opinion piece published in The New York Times on November 4, 2019. “This is our new normal,” he wrote. “On college campuses and in progressive circles across the country, it does not matter if you strongly

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Filing Complaints Attorney Alyza Lewin is holding schools accountable.

their homes in 1948,” asserted Eliza Schloss, 21, a journalism major at American University in Washington, D.C., who is co-chair of J Street U on her campus and also serves on its regional board. “I wouldn’t be so quick to label those who call Israel a settler colonial state antisemitic.” Schloss said that “when we loop criticism of Israel into the definition of antisemitism it becomes problematic.” However, she added, “when political criticism morphs into personal attacks labeling Jewish students as guilty for the actions of the Israeli government or military, that’s getting into what I believe is antisemitism.” Both Flayton and Jassey say their public fight against antisemitism has strengthened their Jewish identities. “Growing up, being Jewish was like playing soccer. I didn’t realize that in college I would be questioned about where my family is from,” said Jassey, whose maternal family fled Iraq and Yemen to find refuge in Israel, where her grandparents were born. Her father is of Russian and Polish heritage. When she faced an antisemitic comment at a campus French club and felt so insecure that she laughed along with it, she began to delve into her family history, which reaches back to Spain. “I’m alive because of Israel,” said Jassey, adding that she has faced “intense and frighteningly violent threats,” mostly on social media.

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“My ancestors fought through so much antisemitism, and I can’t turn my back on that,” said Jassey, a double major in political science and Jewish studies who also hosts the podcast Nice Jewish Girls, in which she interviews Jewish women who are breaking new ground in various fields. “I realized that I could run away from antisemitism because it’s too complicated to contend with—or that fighting it could be a source of strength.” The organization she co-founded, Jewish on Campus, announced a collaboration with the World Jewish Congress in October, focusing on education, grassroots activism, social media engagement and advocating for student protection. The partnership is one of several in which mainstream Jewish organizations are teaming up with burgeoning student-run groups and universities to help address the increasingly volatile climate.

reating a distinction between discrimination and free speech is a vital shift in the way students and campus organizations are now articulating their response to antisemitism. “Discriminating against religious expressions of identity like wearing a kippah or putting up a mezuzah is clearly recognized as unlawful,” said Lewin. Universities are usually quicker to respond with statements of condemnation in such instances, as George Washington officials did in the case of the desecrated Torah scroll in November. But, according to Lewin, “Discrimination based on a student’s support of Israel is more difficult to uncloak. “University administrators felt they were under no obligation to intervene in what they perceived as a political debate: one side supports

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ADIN HALBFINGER

oppose the right-wing leadership in Israel; if you are a Zionist, you are seen as the enemy…. If you call yourself a Zionist because your family fled to Israel from a Middle Eastern country as a means of survival, you are complicit in ethnic cleansing. If you call yourself a Zionist because your family fled Germany to escape a concentration camp, you are a colonialist. If you call yourself a Zionist because your family made aliyah to Israel because of their religious or spiritual beliefs, you are complicit in apartheid.” Flayton says that his Zionist identity was dormant until it was threatened. “I had heard that people complained about antisemitism on college campuses, but I never gave it a shred of thought,” he said. “And when I did, I thought those were right-wing Jews who can’t bear criticism of Israel.” His experience spurred him to co-found the New Zionist Congress, an educational and cultural organization whose name riffs off Theodor Herzl’s 1897 First Zionist Congress. The group, which has a thousand subscribers to its weekly newsletter and 5,000 followers on Instagram, has been providing virtual programming to strengthen the Jewish identity as a defense against antisemitism. It hopes to open in-person chapters soon. That strategy, he said, “is more effective than any BDS debate on campus, which is just a lot of screaming and calling people names.” What complicates the issue is that not all criticism of Israel is anti-Zionism, and some Jewish students who support Israel feel that not all anti-Zionism on campus is antisemitic. “Zionism is defined both by the establishment of a Jewish homeland as well as by the displacement of Palestinians from

the Palestinians; the other supports Israel,” Lewin continued. The “political debate” masquerades as free speech but in reality is a cover to “spread falsehoods and dispute Israel’s right to exist without any interest in discussion or dialogue,” Lewin said. It seeks to “marginalize, ostracize and ultimately exclude Jewish students who support Israel as a key component of their ethnic pride and identity.” Lewin’s goal is a sweeping one: Use the law to improve the climate on campuses and allow Jewish students to fully engage in campus life without hiding a part of who they are. “The law is a powerful motivator,” she said. “When you use the language of harassment and discrimination, universities pay attention. If they don’t comply, they have legal liability, and they don’t want to lose their funding.” No comprehensive list of legal letters or complaints exists, said Lewin. Complaints are only publicized if the complainant chooses to go public, and individuals and other organizations like the Lawfare Project, StandWithUs, the Zionist Organization of America and CAMERA have also filed complaints separately or jointly with the Brandeis Center. One case that garnered widespread attention involved Rose Ritch, a student at the University of Southern California who was elected vice president of the Undergraduate Student Government in February 2020. She was demonized publicly and privately on social media, including for her affiliation with the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. One post accused her of alienating Palestinian students on campus simply because she is a Zionist and urged: “Get rid of her.”

Joining Forces Julia Jassey’s group, Jewish on Campus, partners with Ronald Lauder and the World Jewish Congress.

A fellow USC student launched an impeachment campaign against her. The Brandeis Center sent a letter to the USC administration on July 7, 2020, invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the university’s own bylaws, asking the university to protect Ritch from antisemitic harassment and immediately halt impeachment proceedings that are “unquestionably and deeply rooted in Jew hatred and unlawfully deny her an equal opportunity to participate in USC campus life.” Although the university suspended the impeachment proceedings, Ritch still resigned from the student body on August 5, 2020. It was “the only sustainable choice I could make to protect both my physical safety and mental health,” she wrote in a Newsweek opinion piece. The next day, USC President Carol Folt sent a message to the USC community citing Ritch’s “heartbreaking resignation letter” and stating that “anti-Semitism in all of its forms is a profound betrayal of our principles and has no place at the university.”

he majority of the complaints to universities about antisemitism take the form of letters sent to school administrations charging that the university has not taken steps to protect students. Some complaints are filed with the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Educa-

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

tion. In 2004, following anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of 9/11, the Department of Education extended protection to “Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and other religious groups” based on their shared ethnicity and ancestry. President Barak Obama’s administration adopted the stance in 2010, and in 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order expanding Title VI to all government agencies that disburse funds. There has been no actual lawsuit since Lawfare settled a case in March 2019 on behalf of students at San Francisco State University and California State University after Hillel was barred from a “Know Your Rights” campus fair in 2017. Brandeis Center’s letters, Lewin explained, seek not only to redress discrimination against individual students but also to educate administrations and to urge them to take proactive steps: issuing public statements recognizing that Zionism is an integral part of Jewish identity for many; revising their non-discrimination policies to include a prohibition on discrimination based on shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics, including antisemitism; conducting trainings for their university communities about the many manifestations of antisemitism; and adopting the non-legally binding International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which is used by the United States State Department (and has been strongly backed by Hadassah and other Jewish organizations). Contemporary examples that accompany the IHRA definition include “animus toward the Jewish State of Israel that may at times cross the line into antisemitism.” According to Marc Rotenberg, vice president of University Initiatives

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or max price, the legal strategy ended a months-long campaign to remove him from the student government. His case dates back to fall 2020, when he was elected to the Tufts Community Union Judiciary, part of the student government that oversees campus groups, Tufts SJP and Tufts for a Racially Equitable Endowment began negotiating on the wording of a referendum they wanted to place on a ballot in support of the Deadly Exchange Campaign. Deadly Exchange, launched

Zionist and Progressive Blake Flayton addresses the No Fear rally in Washington in July 2021.

nationally by the far-left Jewish Voice for Peace in 2017, blames Israel for white supremacy, racism and police brutality in the United States based on an exchange program between American and Israeli law enforcement. A Tufts police chief had participated in the exchange program before he retired. After Price took a stand against the campaign in his capacity as a member of the Tufts Community Union Judiciary and as president of Tufts Friends of Israel, Tufts SJP initiated an intense months-long harassment campaign claiming Price was “inherently biased.” The judiciary chair muted Price on a Zoom meeting, which included the third vote on the resolution in October 2020 (it had been voted down twice), but the harassment did not end: Tufts SJP called for a formal disciplinary hearing. That is when the Brandeis Center stepped in, sending the letter on Price’s behalf. It also condemned Deadly Exchange, saying that it “promotes a modern blood libel—the demonstrably baseless claim that Jews and Israel are somehow responsible for the tragic deaths of unarmed people of color by American police officers.” The Tufts administration did not respond directly to the Brandeis letter or intervene in stopping the impeachment trial. “We respect the TCU Senate’s independence regarding the conduct of its business according

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

to its policies and procedures,” Patrick Collins, Tufts’ executive director of media relations, wrote in a statement to Hadassah Magazine, referring to the Tufts Community Union. As to Price’s contention that his initial complaints got no response from university officials, Collins wrote: “We are not at liberty to discuss individual student cases or allegations. However, we take very seriously any concerns raised by students—regardless of their backgrounds and perspectives—of bias, safety, privacy and intimidation, whether by organizations affiliated or unaffiliated with Tufts.” This past fall, Tufts joined Hillel’s new Campus Climate Initiative, which is currently working with a cohort of 27 university administrations in a yearlong program to better understand the threats of antisemitism, take proactive steps to minimize them and directly counter them when they occur. As part of that effort, Tufts’ administration and trustees convened an Ad Hoc Committee on Antisemitism as well as focus groups. According to Collins, these steps were unrelated to the Brandeis Center letter or Price’s case. Although the resolution to support Deadly Exchange ultimately passed the student body in December 2020, Price, who is graduating in February, said he is “cautiously optimistic” about the steps Tufts is currently taking to address antisemitism. “I’m rooting for the administration to do better but I have good reason to be skeptical,” he said. “At the end of the day, it comes down to hard reforms on campus.” Rahel Musleah leads virtual tours of Jewish India and other cultural events and hopes to lead her first post-Covid in-person tour in November 2022 (explorejewishindia.com).

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COURTESY OF BLAKE FLAYTON

and Legal Affairs for Hillel, only a handful of university administrations have formally adopted the IHRA definition, including New York University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Florida State University; 26 student government groups have adopted it. Meanwhile, Lewin pointed out that all universities that receive public funds are subject to the IHRA definition irrespective of formal adoption. Shine a Light, a new national initiative to raise awareness of antisemitism that is made up of partner organizations, including Hadassah, launched its first campaign during Hanukkah 2021. About a dozen college and university administrations signed on, with many more continuing to join, according to Kate Blumm, a spokeswoman for the initiative. As part of the effort, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine requested that all university and college leadership in Ohio work with local public safety and law enforcement entities to ensure Hanukkah celebrations proceeded safely; find opportunities to speak out against antisemitism; and reach out directly to campus Jewish communities to create a safe environment for students, faculty and staff.

HEALTH

When Being a Doctor Risks Your Baby’s Health Residency remains grueling for expectant mothers By Dr. Suzanne Koven

FOTOSTORM

have no recollection of my husband and me deciding to have our first baby over 30 years ago, the year after I graduated medical school, when I was an intern and he a resident. We had not discussed timing the delivery with our preassigned vacations, futile as that effort might have been, or if we could afford childcare on our meager incomes. Near the end of my internship, on a rare Sunday afternoon when we both happened to be home, I looked at a calendar and counted 80 days since my last period. I went to the drugstore, bought a home pregnancy test and peed on the plastic wand. Then, like a crazed vampire slayer, I waved the dark-blue cross back and forth in front of my husband’s initially confused and then smiling face. It wasn’t unusual for me to arrive at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where I was interning, on a Monday morning, work without stopping until Tuesday evening and report again for work early on Wednesday. Some

months were even more punishing: 24 hours on, 24 hours off, week after week. The obscene fatigue that this schedule produced made me euphoric at times, depressed, irritable and nauseated at others, but always obsessed with sleep. I would stop at the grocery store on my way home from the hospital and glare at the cashier, resentful that she could go home to her own bed at night. I envied dogs I saw in the street because they could lie down when they chose. There’s no evidence that severe sleep deprivation made me a better doctor, but I could not have survived my entire residency if I had not believed it would. Attempting to stay energized when I was on call, I hit the vending machines for infusions of sugar— Snickers or stale Little Debbie cakes—on my way to the laboratory, blood bank or emergency room. I often chose the route that led through the surgical clinic, dark and deserted at night, in an unrenovated part of

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

the hospital with linoleum flooring from the 1960s that reminded me of my father’s old medical office in Brooklyn. Framed black-and-white head shots of past members of the surgical staff, nearly all men, going back to the 1920s mesmerized me. So, too, did the reproductions of oil portraits of Sir William Osler, one of the founding physicians of Johns Hopkins, and his disciples, and his disciples’ disciples that hung on the walls of the wards. Sometimes, I paused by one of these portraits and listed, in my mind, the string of medical “begats” that ran from Dr. Osler through his trainees and successors to me. I never once paused to consider that my professional ancestry included few women. Once I learned I was pregnant, I started taking prenatal vitamins and complied with all the recommended obstetrical visits, blood tests and ultrasounds. Still, I drifted through my last two trimesters in a kind of oblivion. I first felt my baby move early one morning as I stole a few minutes of rest on an empty patient bed in the coronary care unit. Strange as it sounds, being pregnant as a resident made me feel more macho. My swagger had a price. I spent the last six weeks of my pregnancy confined at home with preeclampsia, my dangerously high blood pressure no doubt caused by long work hours. After months of wanting nothing more than sleep, I was forbidden to leave my bed. At 40 weeks, a monitor detected fetal distress, and I had an emergency Cesarean section, delivering a healthy 5-and-a-halfpound girl. Another female resident tacked my daughter’s newborn photo onto the bulletin board in the room where we residents entered notes in patient charts and stole naps on a ratty couch.

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Dr. Suzanne Koven

told me that they’re deferring pregnancy— thus incurring greater risk of infertility— because they worry about jeopardizing careers or pregnancies by conceiving during residency. Several said that requests for accommodation in grueling work schedules during pregnancy would be seen as asking for special treatment, not being a team player. Still other physicians expressed fear that, even with an uneventful pregnancy and ample maternity leave, it might not be possible to juggle a medical career and parenting. This fear is validated by a 2014 study reporting that female physicians spend on average 8.5 hours more per week on childcare and other domestic responsibilities compared with their male partners. This discrepancy in nonprofessional responsibilities is, in large part, responsible for the 25 percent pay gap that persists between women and men in medicine (a gap that’s expanded recently due to the childcare crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic).

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

Why, when women now outnumber men in medical schools, is it still so difficult for doctors of childbearing age to bear—and raise—children? A key reason is that even though more women than ever before are entering medicine, as in other professions, we’re stuck on the lower rungs. We’re more likely than our male counterparts to linger for years as instructors, assistant professors and junior attendings and we’re far less likely to achieve positions of power and influence: department chairs, medical school deans, editors-in-chief of major medical journals. We’ll never achieve gender equity in medicine until more women hold these positions, and until more men recognize that their efforts to include women at the top will benefit both male and female physicians. Part of the difficult work is the dismantling of a deeply rooted and, in some ways, admirable medical culture in which caring for patients has long meant neglecting ourselves. Women can lead the way in shifting this narrative—if we have the chance to lead. True, there are more women today in leadership roles than when I was a resident, women whose portraits hang on the walls of hospital corridors. But they are not enough to effect meaningful change for the young female physicians who gaze up at them as they work through the night. Dr. Suzanne Koven is a primary care physician and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Koven, who has an MFA, is also the inaugural writer-in-residence at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Her writing has appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Boston Globe, The Lancet and other publications. This essay was adapted from her book Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life.

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PATRICK B. DUFFY

oday, as a primary care physician and a faculty member of Harvard Medical School, I ask myself why I was so unquestioning of a system that was hostile to women and certainly to mothers. So complete was my denial that when I recently looked at a photograph of my residency class, I was surprised to see that barely a quarter of its members were women. I’d have guessed closer to 40 or 50 percent. Medical training had been designed in the 19th century as a residency, which excluded women almost by definition: Male trainees were required to live together in the hospital and, in many programs, not even permitted to marry during residency until well into the 20th century. The fact that my residency program had no formal maternity leave policy, that it never occurred to my superiors—or to me—that I put my and my unborn baby’s lives in danger rather than risk jeopardizing my good standing by asking for a lighter schedule, speaks to how inimical this system was to women. I wish I could say that things are different today, that medical training and healthy pregnancy are no longer incompatible, as they were when I became pregnant at age 30 in the late 1980s. But this isn’t true. Two recent studies raised concerns about the reproductive health of female physicians in the United States: One revealed that one-quarter of all female medical doctors experience infertility (double the national average) and the other found that half of female surgeons have had a major pregnancy complication, with 42 percent suffering miscarriages (also twice the national average). A series of conversations I’ve had recently with female medical trainees both corroborated and explained these statistics. Young female physicians

HADASSAH MEDICINE

Helping Children Deal With Trauma Young victims of pandemic stress learn coping strategies By Wendy Elliman

SHUTTERSTOCK (TOP); COURTESY OF HADASSAH INTERNATIONAL

s if pandemic lockdowns and shuttered schools were not enough, 13-year-old Meirav was hit by a car near her home in Jerusalem in spring 2021. Her injuries were minor, but the emergency care physicians at the Hadassah Medical Organization who first saw the pale and silent teen diagnosed her with post-trauma and referred her for help. “It was quickly clear that Meirav’s trauma was not related to her accident but to what was happening at home,” said Dr. Esti Galili-Weisstub, head of Hadassah’s Herman Dana Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which has centers on both the Mount Scopus and Ein Kerem campuses. Meirav, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, and her four siblings had spent the months of remote schooling largely confined to their small fourth-floor apartment, Dr. Galili-Weisstub explained. Their father had lost his hotel job when the tourists stopped coming. Frustrated and volatile, he had dominated the living room, leaving the television on and blaring all day. Their mother’s attempts to engage the five children—even having the family sit down together for regular meals—proved futile. One of the siblings was previously diagnosed with ADHD, another has behavioral problems and all five were bored and squabbling. “The pandemic created a new and

very difficult reality for this family,” said Dr. Galili-Weisstub, a world-renowned expert in child trauma. “The same is true for many, many others. Covid-related restrictions, fear, stress and isolation brought an avalanche of mental health problems countrywide.” The psychiatry division, launched 20 years ago and today one of the most comprehensive psychiatric services in Israel, treats children from birth to age 18 and addresses developmental and neuropsychological difficulties as well as social and family problems. Throughout the pandemic to today, the division’s 14 inpatient beds—for those at risk for suicide or self-harm or who require monitoring due to an eating disorder—have been full, with a six-month

Dr. Esti Galili-Weisstub

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

waiting list for new patients. Its day clinics have been at capacity, too, fielding 17,000 patients in 2021 and a months-long waiting list just to get an appointment.

ating disorders are among the mental health issues that have risen worldwide among adolescents and young adults during the pandemic. One study conducted by Michal Grinstein-Weiss, director of the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis and a faculty member at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, together with Rami Benbenishty, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found that 24 percent of Israeli youngsters experienced disordered eating in 2021, almost double the number pre-pandemic. Food, explained Dr. Galili-Weisstub, becomes a coping mechanism, something that children feel they can control in a changing world. She recalls treating a 12-year-old girl with no previous history of psychological difficulties who began binge eating during lockdown. Her weight shot up, and she spiraled into depression and began shunning social interaction. Admitted to the division’s eating disorders clinic, the adolescent gained control of her eating and her mood aided by therapy as well as by contact with other young patients.

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She currently attends the clinic’s afterschool center, where therapists continue to treat her. Other patients were destabilized by school disruptions. One academically gifted but socially awkward student in junior high school developed suicidal ideation and was hospitalized for eight months. He had been looking

MIRROR IMAGES The pandemic reinforced global connectedness around health care—something long internalized by Hadassah Medical Organization’s child and adolescent mental health specialists. Dr. Esti Galili-Weisstub’s team has shared their experience in disaster-hit regions worldwide for decades, including training local mental health professionals following a tsunami in Sri Lanka and an earthquake in Mexico. “Israel is a global leader in teaching coping strategies to trauma victims,” she said. After the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, HMO therapists advised local Jewish schools on how to help their students cope. Several years ago, HMO also launched an initiative to train therapists closer to home. At a conference in Berlin some 20 years

forward to beginning a prestigious new school in September 2020, where he had hoped to find friends. Instead, at home for weeks because of the lockdown, “his social insecurity intensified, and he began urgently desiring to take his own life,” said Dr. Galili-Weisstub. A combination of therapy and anti-anxiety medications helped him learn to manage stress while he kept up with his studies via Zoom. He was also encouraged to create a support network of friends in his new school, which has fully reopened, as well as make time for hobbies. It has been six months since his discharge, and according to his therapist, he has had no thoughts of suicide. Adding to the challenges of treating children with emotional

ago, Dr. Galili-Weisstub joined mental health professionals from Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Jordan at a session on the impact of the Middle East conflict on children in the region. “We considered its effect on the developing brain, emotional capability, creativity and flexibility. In doing so, we perceived a mutual reality,” she said. That meeting was the beginning of ongoing relationships between Israelis and Palestinians in the field. Fifteen years later, these relationships evolved into the Binational School of Psychotherapy in Jerusalem. Under the aegis of HMO and jointly headed by Dr. Galili-Weisstub and Shafiq Masalha, an Arab Israeli clinical psychotherapist, the school’s purpose is to upgrade the skills of postgraduate Israeli and Palestinian mental health professionals in treating youngsters affected by war and terror. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

and behavioral disorders, Covid has disrupted the way Hadassah’s psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, therapists and dietitians evaluate and treat their patients. At certain times during the pandemic, many interventions went remote, but “therapy via Zoom is challenging,” said Dr. Galili-Weisstub. “The value of sitting in the same room with a patient can’t be overstated. Besides, an empty room with a closed door isn’t available to every patient, and not everyone, especially those in the haredi community, has access to a computer or smartphone.” Currently, Zoom sessions are no longer used, but staff and patients continue to be fully masked. This remains a challenge, added Dr.

“We started as students in this school that treats Palestinians and Israelis equally,” said a Palestinian graduate of the school’s 2016 pilot cohort who asked to remain anonymous. That inaugural class included 14 child psychologists— Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza as well as Israelis Jews and Arabs from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. By the end of the program, we “acquired a wide variety of interventions and specializations in different, complex therapies and an understanding that both Palestinian and Israeli children are the eternal victims of wars and conflicts. “We and the Israelis are mirror images,” he added. “When they talk of their children’s suffering, they could be talking of our children.” Clinical psychologist Hadas Schroder Rahamim of Jerusalem is one of 29 professionals enrolled in the school’s second course,

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which began in fall 2020. “My encounter with Arab Israeli and Palestinian colleagues at the school has been important life exposure,” she said of the twoyear program. “It is making me more aware of cultural aspects of identity and refocusing emphasis on understanding culture and heritage in therapy.” During the program, therapists form close connections around a joint commitment to children’s well-being. Nevertheless, “we walk a kind of tightrope,” said Schroder Rahamim. “There is tension concerning our conflicting experiences of life in Israel.” Despite the obstacles and tensions, Dr. Galili-Weisstub believes that the school’s Israeli and Palestinian graduates can impact substantively on mental health in the region and, in her words, strengthen “a new generation to create a more peaceful Middle East.” —Wendy Elliman

HADASSAH MEDICINE

HADASSAH ON CALL Go behind the scenes at Hadassah Medical Organization with the Hadassah On Call: New Frontiers in Medicine podcast. Catch up on recent episodes, including a joint interview with Dr. Beatrice Uziely, head of oncology and ambulatory services at Hadassah’s Sharett Institute of Oncology, and Dr. Shani Paluch-Shimon, director of breast oncology at HMO, discussing the latest in breast cancer research and treatments. Sign up for new episode alerts at hadassah.org/hadassahoncall. Galili-Weisstub, since masks conceal facial expressions crucial to communication during treatment. Zoom therapy was not suitable

for Meirav, who suffered from posttrauma, so Dr. Fortunato Benarroch, director of the division’s Center for Pediatric Traumatic Stress, treated Meirav and her family in person. “I worked intensively with Meirav’s parents, helping them structure the day,” he said. “We had the older children teach the younger Covid rules—masks, handwashing.” He also guided the mother in involving her children in meal preparations, emphasizing the importance of a family meal at least once a day, and helped the father recognize his impact on his children. The family instituted “a daily movie time when they watched TV together, the children taking turns to choose the movie and make popcorn. This gave

their mother a precious 90 minutes to herself each day.” The changes in the family dynamics, plus a return in September to in-person schooling, created marked improvement in Meirav’s mood. Whether the trauma they suffer is through plague, family tensions, terrorism or natural disaster, “children try to give meaning to their experience and seek strength to come back to themselves,” said Dr. Galili-Weisstub. With its multiple approaches to overcoming trauma, Hadassah’s child and adolescent psychiatry division helps children find their way back to mental health. Wendy Elliman is a British-born science writer who has lived in Israel for more than four decades.

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HADASSAH NEWS

Members Advocate for a More Tolerant World Standing proudly as Jews and Zionists Stories compiled by Marlene Post

Hadassah leaders participated in the No Hate, No Fear Solidarity March in New York in January 2020.

Hadassah Mobilizes to Counter Antisemitism

ewish communities across the country are facing a sharp increase in antisemitic violence and hate speech—an alarming trend that demands swift action from lawmakers at every level of government and an unwavering commitment from us to stand proudly as Jews and Zionists. Hadassah is an influential leader on Capitol Hill, working hand in hand with members of Congress to pass bipartisan legislation that strengthens America’s capacity to

combat antisemitism at home and abroad. Hadassah advocates have been urging federal lawmakers to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism and are building support for bills that hold the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority accountable for the antisemitic and anti-Zionist curricula in United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)-run schools. In the last Congress, Hadassah members were instrumental in passing legislation supporting Holocaust education and enhancing the prestige and budget of the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.

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Hadassah knows that combating antisemitism requires robust action at the state and local levels, too. Just recently, armed with valuable information from his wife, Carol Rosenthal, a Hadassah National Board member, Hadassah Associate Stephen Rosenthal brought a request to Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota for her to adopt the IHRA definition, which she did by executive proclamation in coordination with Shine the Light, a new national initiative to spotlight antisemitism and bring together partners, including Hadassah, to educate and advocate. Over the last year, Hadassah members in Arizona, Massachusetts, Nevada and Ohio have appeared before state legislatures in support of mandates to include Holocaust education in schools. Through letters, interviews, opinion pieces and testimony before legislative committees, members are having a tremendous impact. For example, when Unilever-owned Ben & Jerry’s chose to align itself with the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), Hadassah members in Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas spoke up quickly to demand punitive action under anti-BDS statutes. The energy and enthusiasm of members who advocate for a more tolerant world is the lifeblood of our efforts in Washington and in state capitals. Engaging your elected officials is easier than you might think thanks to Hadassah’s Day in the District and Date with the State programs, when our members meet in person or virtually with federal and state legislators. To learn more about how you can get involved, email advocacy@hadassah. org or contact your region president.

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ost people who meet a centenarian ask the same question: What is the secret to a long life? The answers are seldom surprising, centering on healthy habits and genetics. But when you ask Ruth Fast, a Seattle woman who turned 101 last August, her answer is a little different. Fast credits Hadassah and its founder, Henrietta Szold, for saving her life when she immigrated to Palestine in 1936 as a member of Youth Aliyah. She was 15 at the time. Soon after German law limited the number of Jewish children attending German public schools, Fast learned about Youth Aliyah from a representative of the organization who visited her hometown of Stettin. “I was raised as a Zionist, so when Hitler came in, I felt immediately that we had to get out of Germany,” Fast recalled. “I told my parents, ‘I want to go to Palestine. I’m not going to stay in Germany, they don’t want us.’ ” In 1935, she traveled with her mother to Berlin for an interview at the Youth Aliyah offices and soon was accepted. Before the long journey by train and then ship to Haifa, Fast joined a group of 60 Jewish recruits from across Germany at a retreat near Berlin, studying Hebrew and learning what to expect when they reached Palestine, where they would live on a kibbutz. The following year, when Fast’s ship arrived in Haifa, Henrietta Szold was waiting at the pier to greet the children, whom she addressed in both German and Hebrew. But that was not the only time Fast had an opportunity to meet Hadassah’s founder. After the rest of Fast’s immediate family immigrated to

Ruth Fast

Jerusalem in the wake of Kristillnacht in 1938, they ended up living three houses away from Szold. After spending two years on Kibbutz Ein Herod with her Youth Aliyah group, Fast moved to Jerusalem to be near her family. In 1942, at age 21, she enlisted in the British Army, went to officers training school and performed a tour of duty in Egypt. Once World War II was over, Fast traveled to the United States to visit family and ended up meeting her

ZIONISM…DID YOU KNOW? For centuries, the Land of Israel has provided sanctuary to Jewish people around the world who face antisemitism in their countries of birth. In the 1560s, Doña Gracia Nasi—a wealthy and influential Portuguese Jew— and her nephew Joseph established a Jewish settlement in Tiberias as a refuge for Conversos fleeing Spain and Portugal. Eastern Europeans and Yemenite Jews comprised the First Aliyah (1882 to 1903). Also known as the Agriculture Aliyah, many immigrants became citrus farmers. The Second Aliyah (1904 to 1914) occurred in the wake of pogroms in Czarist Russia. The new olim built the first kibbutz, Degania, near the Kinneret and created the first Jewish self-defense group, Hashomer, in the region and established a suburb of Jaffa that became Tel Aviv. The Third and Fourth Aliyahs (1919 to 1928) were triggered by pogroms in Russia, Poland and Hungary. Aliyah Bet (1934 to 1948) rescued Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe and brought them, illegally, to Palestine. In 1932, Recha

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future husband, Alfred, in Portland, Ore. She remained in the United States. When members of the local Hadassah chapter in Portland learned there was a new neighbor from Palestine, they reached out to her. Fast joined the organization and became a popular speaker, even after she and her husband relocated to Seattle in the 1950s. She continues to give talks to this day, including at a recent West Coast fundraising event focused on Youth Aliyah, then and now. “I was devoted to Hadassah,” Fast said. “I still am devoted to Hadassah, because I felt it saved my life and it saved the lives of many, many people, and it still does wonderful work.” —Donna Gordon Blankinship

Freier conceived the idea of Youth Aliyah, while Henrietta Szold later brought the plan to fruition. Almost 50,000 Jews from Yemen were repatriated to Israel as part of Operation Magic Carpet from 1949 to 1950. Moroccan Jews began arriving in 1954 and today they and their descendants comprise the largest Jewish demographic from an Arab country. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Persian Jewry found safe haven in Israel. Beginning in the 1970s, Jews from Russian lands started to make aliyah and continued doing so well after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By 2006, more than 1.7 million Russian Jews had immigrated to Israel. Between 2000 and 2017, over 10 percent of the French Jewish community moved to Israel reportedly because of antisemitism. And last May marked the 30th anniversary of Operation Solomon, one of the clandestine Israeli airlifts that brought more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

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NOW YOU KNOW… MORE ABOUT ISRAEL AS SANCTUARY

COURTESY OF PERRY BLANKINSHIP

Ruth Fast, Witness to Zionist History

FOOD

Claudia Roden, Culinary Icon This influential food writer is ‘not nearly finished yet’ | By Adeena Sussman

JAMIE LAU/WAITROSE & PARTNERS FOOD (TOP)

hen claudia roden writes a cookbook, time is most certainly not of the essence. Consider the fact that by her own account, the legendary British-Jewish food writer spent a combined 25 years researching, traveling and cooking to produce her two most seminal works: A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968) and The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day (1996). “I never want to be pressured to finish a book. I want it to take shape the way it’s meant to,” Roden told me by phone from her home in the London neighborhood of Hampstead Garden Suburb. Credited with helping to introduce home cooks to ingredients like pomegranate molasses and preserved lemons decades ago—as well as popularizing a style of cookbook writing steeped in research—Roden is one of the most influential food writers alive today, Jewish or otherwise. “Along with other pioneers of Jewish-focused food scholarship like Joan Nathan and Gil Marks, Claudia paved the way for my generation of food writers,” said author Leah Koenig, whose most recent work is The Jewish Cookbook. “They opened doors to kitchens around the world and helped to share the diverse Jewish food traditions bubbling away on stoves inside them.” Roden’s status as a culinary icon

has been further cemented with the recent launch of Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean: Treasured Recipes from a Lifetime of Travel, her first book in a decade. Compared to the extended research schedules of the past, Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean took a mere six years to complete. While her signature cookbooks feel almost academic in approach, dense with chapters of historical detail and short on visuals, this one, while still packed with information, features an airy layout, highly stylized food photos and pictures of family dinners in her backyard. The beautiful book reads like a clothbound peek into your favorite college professor’s prolonged European vacation—if that professor was one of the best cooks on earth. Many of the recipes are meatless,

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and dishes like Lentils and Rice With Dates and Caramelized Onions and Chicken Baked With Olives and Boiled Lemon are simpler than you might expect. Indeed, they are designed by the 84-year-old Roden to be relatively easy to execute. “I am cooking for my age now,” said Roden, who, in recent years, has begun using canned chickpeas instead of ones she soaks overnight. She will also opt for frozen vegetables as long as they don’t sacrifice quality. “People want things to be easier in the kitchen, and I wanted this book to be all about pleasure.” When we spoke, Roden was still on a high from a glowing feature by food writer Melissa Clark—who had traveled to London to spend time with her last summer—that had been published in The New York Times the day before. “It really is fabulous because it’s all somewhat unexpected,” said Roden, still modest after her many years of success. “Claudia is extremely warm and generously hospitable,” Clark wrote to me in an email. “I think it would be physically impossible for her to receive a guest without offering lovely things to eat and drink. She has the ability to create an intimacy with you immediately. Maybe it’s the food and wine that break the ice. She’s an active, curious listener— analytical and brilliant but also compassionate and caring.” It’s precisely those dual traits—a

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deep passion for hospitality combined with a razor-sharp intellect—that Roden has utilized to fashion a career that connects the dots from her childhood in Egypt to her current life in London. Born into a privileged family in Cairo in 1936, Roden was raised in a food-centric Jewish home by Cesar and Nelly Douek, Syrian Jews who sent Claudia and her two brothers to local English-language preparatory schools and steeped them in secular arts and culture.

“We were very Europeanized, but also extremely close-knit and connected to our Jewish heritage,” Roden said of her family and the traditions and food her grandparents brought with them from Aleppo, Syria, in the 19th century. Roden’s grandparents were observant and kept kosher, but the women, she told me, never learned much about Judaism beyond the laws of kashrut. “We were always sitting upstairs or outside,” said Roden. “Our domain was the kitchen.”

Every gathering was marked by lavish meals that included intricate dishes like kibbeh—a mixture of meat and bulger wrapped around an aromatic meat filling—that reflected the greater Arab culture surrounding the Jews, as did the Egyptian dish of ful medames (mashed broad beans). “You have to understand that we felt as Middle Eastern as we did Jewish,” Roden explained. “Jews spent hundreds of years immersed in the cultures of the countries they

Chicken With Apricots and Pistachios Serves 4 eat with fruit is a legacy of ancient Persia that spread throughout the Arab world. When Teuntje Klinkenberg, a friend in the Netherlands, asked me for a medieval Persian recipe with chicken for the National Museum of Ceramics, I looked in a translation of a 13th-century Arab culinary manual. I was intrigued by a dish of chicken with apricots and pistachios, a combination familiar to my family and trending with chefs today. I invited my brother Ellis and sister-in-law Gill, who live nearby, to eat my modern interpretation. It was fascinating to find that the flavors of the past are still with us. Serve it with spiced saffron rice. 2 tablespoons sunflower oil 2 onions, chopped 8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs Salt and freshly ground black pepper 7 ounces soft dried apricots 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground coriander 1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses Juice of 1/2 a lemon Generous 1/2 cup pistachios, coarsely chopped

1. Warm the sunflower oil in a large sauté pan over low heat. Add the onions and cook, with the lid on, stirring often, for about 10 minutes, until soft and golden. Remove the onions and set them aside.

2. Put the chicken thighs into the pan, skin-side down, add salt and pepper and cook over medium heat, with the lid on, for about 10 minutes, until the skin releases its fat and the chicken pieces are well browned. Turn them over and cook the other side for 10 minutes, until browned, adding more salt and pepper.

3. Add the apricots and return JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

the onions to the pan, lifting the chicken pieces so that they sit on top of the apricots and onions.

4. Measure 3/4 cup water into a liquid measuring cup, stir in the cinnamon, coriander, pomegranate molasses and lemon juice

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and pour over the chicken. Cook, covered, over low heat for 25 minutes, until the chicken is very tender and cooked through and the liquid is reduced.

5. Serve the chicken sprinkled with the pistachios.

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM ‘CLAUDIA RODEN’S MEDITERRANEAN: TREASURED RECIPES FROM A LIFETIME OF TRAVEL’ BY CLAUDIA RODEN, COPYRIGHT © 2021. PUBLISHED BY TEN SPEED PRESS, AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE. PHOTO COPYRIGHT © 2021 BY SUSAN BELL

FOOD

his rich Levantine combination is immensely satisfying, with layers of flavor and aroma. The optional halloumi cheese makes it a meal in itself. Accompany if you like with Greek yogurt and cucumber and tomato salad. As with anything cooked with oil, leftovers can be eaten cold—but you’ll want to reheat if there is halloumi, as the cheese becomes rubbery when cold.

6 tablespoons olive oil 2 eggplants, trimmed and cut into 1 1/4-inch cubes

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste 10 ounces cherry or Santini tomatoes

2 onions, chopped 3 cloves garlic, chopped

2 1/4 cups bulgur 1 14-ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

1 teaspoon ground cumin 1 good pinch Aleppo

pepper

2 cups boiling water 2 8.8-oz packages

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

3 garlic cloves, chopped JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

2. In a large pan over medium

heat, warm 2 tablespoons olive oil and fry the onions for 8 minutes, stirring often, until soft and beginning to color.

halloumi cheese (optional)

olive oil in a sauté pan with a tight-fitting lid over medium heat. Add the eggplants and cook, turning the cubes over with a spatula so that all have a few minutes to get browned, season with salt and pepper, and put the lid back on so that they steam in their own juice for about 15 minutes. Add the tomatoes, turn them over with the eggplant, then continue to cook, covered, for about 8 minutes, until soft and beginning to release some juice.

3. Add the garlic and cook,

stirring, for 2 minutes, until the aroma rises and it begins to color. Take off the heat and stir in the

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bulgur and chickpeas.

4. Put the tomato paste into a

liquid measuring cup and add the cinnamon, allspice, cumin, Aleppo pepper and some salt. Pour in the boiling water and stir vigorously, then pour into the pan with the bulgur and mix well. Bring to a boil, cover, and cook over low heat for 15 minutes. Taste for salt, you will probably need more.

5. If adding the halloumi, cut the cheese into 1 1/4-inch cubes and cook quickly with the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, turning the pieces to brown them all over. Mix into the bulgur.

6. Turn the bulgur into a large baking dish and mix in the eggplant and tomatoes. Serve with the extra-virgin olive oil drizzled over.

1. Warm 3 tablespoons of the

Bulgur Pilaf with Chickpeas, Eggplants and Tomatoes Serves 6 to 8

lived in, and we really considered the larger traditions our own.” Life along the Nile was, by all accounts, idyllic, until her family, along with the rest of the Jewish community, was expelled in 1956, caught up in a wave of Arab nationalism and Egypt’s conflict with the fledgling State of Israel over access to the Suez Canal. Leaving all their possessions behind, the Doueks immigrated to London, where their daughter attended St. Martin’s School of Art and became a painter. Memories of life in Cairo and a deep longing to recreate the flavors of the Levant soon drove Roden to her kitchen, where she began documenting, archiving and testing the recipes that would inform her early cookbooks. “It was a way to connect to her past and bring it into her present, and she is still always looking for that connection,” said Clark. Claudia Douek married Paul Roden and the couple had three children—Simon, Nadia and Anna, who all live in London—before divorcing in 1974. After her children left for college, she stepped up her world travel, notebook and pen in hand. (To this day, Roden does not use a computer for her research, and the only numbers programmed into her cellphone are those of her children and grandchildren.) Her bibliography reflects her wanderlust, with some of her books exploring Italian and Spanish cuisine. The new book, she says, is something of a homecoming. “It is a lot about memory,” said Roden. “It touches on magic moments of traveling around the Mediterranean for 30 years, and the little bit of myself I saw in every place I went. I found a bit of Alexandria in Marseilles—a quality of life, type of conviviality, a type of pleasure

of living and eating that I remember from my youth.” To vet the recipes for the new book, Roden hosted small groups of friends and family several times a week to taste and critique, a process she had never employed with her previous cookbooks and with which she became deeply enamored. “I didn’t want it to end because I was having so much fun,” said Roden. Covid-19 brought the gatherings to a halt, but she used her time in isolation to retest and refine the 120 recipes that eventually made it into the book. Today, Roden stays relatively close to home and loves walking through her neighborhood’s storied parks and making frequent visits to the nearby,

heavily Jewish suburb of Golders Green, where her parents first made a home after immigrating. “I feel like I am walking around Israel when I am there,” said Roden, who has traveled extensively in Israel. Energized by the positive response to the new book, Roden is considering her next endeavor. Perhaps another Middle Eastern cookbook, or maybe a memoir covering her 60-year career? “There is certainly a lot to tell,” she said. “It has been a very full life, and I am not nearly finished yet.” Adeena Sussman is the author of Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors from My Israeli Kitchen and co-author of Gazoz: The Art of Making Magical, Seasonal Sparkling Drinks. She lives in Tel Aviv.

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Order Today at www.SweetSeidners.com • (203) 850-7711

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ARTS

A Place at the Diversity Table Anti-Jewish bias is spreading in arts and culture | By Hilary Danailova

OLIVIER FITOUSSI/FLASH90 (LEFT); FROM ‘HAPPIER THAN EVER,’ MASON POOLE/DISNEY

here is little doubt that antisemitism in America has intensified recently. In the world of arts and culture, it may be more subtle than a scrawled swastika or a torched synagogue, but anti-Jewish bias in that realm is nonetheless a growing phenomenon. This bias plays out in multiple ways, according to those looking at culture through a Jewish lens. One of the most recognizable is the marginalization—even demonization—of Israel, with Israeli narratives and artists who perform in Israel targeted by cultural boycotts. At the same time, debate persists among academics and media industry professionals about the degree to which Jews and Jewish stories are excluded from current diversity conversations. Controversies around Israel “happen every year,” observed Shayna Weiss, the associate director of Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and a scholar of Jews in popular culture. “I

think we see it more now because it’s easier to find these things online.” A prime example is the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), in whose name pro-Palestinian activists have bullied entertainers who perform in Israel for years. Yet today, we watch the backand-forth in real time on social media platforms that weren’t as popular, or weren’t around, back when the movement first emerged in the early 2000s. Announcements of a November concert in Israel by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas were met with instant boycott calls on Facebook and Twitter. And last July, singer/songwriter Billie Eilish’s Instagram account was targeted by antisemitic trolls after she promoted the launch in Israel of her album Happier Than Ever. Social media has amplified other recent dustups, including popular Irish author Sally Rooney’s refusal to allow an Israeli publisher to translate her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, into Hebrew;

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

comedian Sarah Silverman calling out “Jewface,” a neologism to describe non-Jewish actors playing Jewish roles, in a September podcast; and in spring 2021, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators issuing, and then apologizing for, a statement that condemned antisemitism.

he entertainment community for the most part is very liberal. And on the left, unfortunately, if you support Israel, you’re being pushed out of those spaces,” said Ari Ingel, director of Creative Community for Peace, a nonprofit arts industry group that combats antisemitism, specifically the cultural boycott of Israel. Ingel is among those who bemoan a progressive tendency to critique Israel’s complex, multicultural society in terms of America’s charged racial paradigm—“white oppressors, brown victims,” he said, with Israeli Jews cast as the oppressors. “It has been lumped into: If you’re a Zionist, that

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Eilish (opposite page, right) was attacked on social media after she announced the release in Israel of her new album; and there were boycott calls when Black Eyed Peas co-founder will.i.am, here with former bandmember Fergie in an earlier concert in Israel, announced a 2021 show in the country.

means you’re a colonizer. When you have Israel labeled a genocidal state and 90 percent of Jews in America support Israel, then all of a sudden Jews support genocide.” At a time when racial issues dominate American discourse, this perception has led to the increase in anti-Jewish sentiment. “We’ve seen these views emanate online from influencers in the entertainment community,” Ingel added. In 2020, rapper Ice Cube tweeted antisemitic images of a mural with large-nosed men playing Monopoly on the backs of Black people. The same year, Nick Cannon, host of the reality competition show The Masked Singer, shared classic antisemitic conspiracy theories on his podcast, asking why “we give so much power to the ‘theys,’ and ‘theys’ turn into Illuminati, the Zionists, the Rothschilds.” In response, ViacomCBS canceled Cannon’s improv comedy television show, Wild N’ Out. The entertainer apologized and engaged in dialogue with the Jewish community. His show is now back on the air. Ingel said his organization pro-

vides “balance” to what is often a strongly anti-Jewish discourse, supporting entertainers and sports figures who work in Israel. Last October, the group published an open letter protesting a boycott of TLVFest, the annual Tel Aviv International LGBTQ+ Film Festival. The 200 entertainment industry signatories included actors Neil Patrick Harris, Billy Porter and Helen Mirren (who, for her upcoming film role as Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, has been showered with antisemitic hate online). And nearly 50,000 artists have signed the group’s online petition against the cultural boycott of Israel since 2012, when Creative Community for Peace was founded by David Renzer, then CEO of Universal Music Publishing Group, and Steve Schnur, who heads the music division of Electronic Arts, the world’s largest video game company. Such high-profile signatories “demonstrate to the public that there’s still broad-based support for understanding and dialogue,” Ingel noted. “Where politics can be so divi-

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n a different sector of the arts world, anti-Israel sentiment sparked internet outrage last June when the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, one of the largest international children’s literature organizations, apologized to its Palestinian and Muslim members after they objected to a post declaring that Jews should have the “right to life, safety, and freedom from scapegoating and fear.” The original

Haley Neil holding her debut novel

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COURTESY OF TLVFEST (TOP); SOPHIE MACDONALD

BDS Targets The 2021 TLVFest (above) was the focus of anti-Israel activists; singer/songwriter Billie

sive, arts, sports and music can really bring people together.” Some observers like Weiss, the Brandeis scholar, suggest that BDS and its offshoots may be louder than they are successful. “Israeli culture has unprecedented amounts of money and attention,” said Weiss, citing Israeli shows that have become international hits—Tehran, Fauda and Shtisel among them—as well as the many Israeli series optioned for American remakes. “Money talks, and there’s a lot of money to be made working with Israeli films and television. “It’s easy to freak out about Sally Rooney, but that is one book versus thousands that are translated into Hebrew every year,” Weiss continued. “The internet loves outrage, but these things have to be taken in context.”

ARTS

statement was posted on Facebook in response to a surge in antisemitic violence in the United States; it asked readers to join “in speaking out against all forms of hate, including antisemitism,” and made no mention of Israel or its war with Hamas that same spring. Even so, pro-Palestinian members of the society complained that the “painful” lack of a parallel denunciation of Islamophobia amounted to taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—an argument that caught the attention of the children’s literature community on Twitter and Facebook. Several weeks later, Lin Oliver, the society’s executive director, apologized on Facebook to everyone in the “Palestinian community who felt

COURTESY OF THE ANNE FRANK CENTER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

USING ANNE FRANK TO DISCUSS RACE Could Anne Frank be the key to educating Gen Z Americans about antisemitism—even if they’ve never met a Jew? The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is betting yes. In September, it launched a partner institution in the United States, the Anne Frank Center at the University of South Carolina. Although the new center, set in the heart of the American South, will likely have a largely Christian audience with little experience with Jewish culture, Doyle Stevick, the center’s executive director, thinks the Holocaust’s most famous diarist can educate modern youths about racism and discrimination through parallels to contemporary issues. In many schools’ Holocaust curricula, Anne Frank is often “the only child you get to know in detail, and in her own voice,”

unrepresented, silenced, or marginalized.” (The society declined repeated requests for comment.) The controversy led to the resignation of the society’s chief equity and inclusion officer, April Powers, who is Black and Jewish. It also prompted many Jewish writers to voice discontent over their exclusion from industry diversity conversations and heightened their concerns about being targeted on social media. Helen Estrin, a past president of the Association of Jewish Libraries, said this marginalization occurs because Jews, who are historically well represented in cultural industries, “are seen as having enough privilege and power that they don’t need support. It is unconscious—

Stevick explained, noting the popularity of the diary on school reading lists. An associate professor at the university’s College of Education, Stevick, who is not Jewish, had been working with the Anne Frank House since 2013 and, with the university, has brought exhibits about Anne Frank to South Carolina schools. “Anne’s words help us appreciate how young people have the potential to bring out the best in one another,” he said. To that end, student volunteers lead nearly every visitor through the center’s exhibition “Anne Frank: A History for Today.” Four rooms with photos, videos and original artifacts are divided between Holocaust history and its relevance to the American racial landscape—incorporating stories like that of economist Milton S.J. Wright, the only Black American known to have met Hitler. The two met in 1932 in Germany, when Wright was pursuing his doctorate JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

people aren’t walking around, for the most part, with swastikas—but I absolutely think it’s antisemitism.” What Jewish authors notice in particular, Estrin said, is that they are excluded from minority grants and diversity programs, such as the ones run by the society, and that they are frequently harassed online. Authors also have complained that mainstream publishers reject Jewishand Israel-themed books, a topic often discussed in the Jewish Kidlit Mavens Facebook group that Estrin administers with Susan Kusel. “Frankly, we feel gaslit,” said Kusel, a member of the society whose most recent book is The Passover Guest. Jews are not being included

Her Voice The University of South Carolina’s new Anne Frank Center (inset); a view of the exhibit inside

at the University of Heidelberg. Hitler’s tirade against Wright, the exhibit explains, found echoes in the racist words that mass murderer Dylann Roof was reported to have said, about Black people “taking over the world,” as he attacked Black congregants

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Continued on page 40

at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015. Like Anne and her fellow Jews, those worshipers were targeted primarily for their ethnicity, not their religion. Stevick said audiences are surprised to learn that that Nazis considered “Jewish” a racial rather than a religious category. “We use one example to address another,” he explained. “It’s all part of a common conversation.” —Hilary Danailova

JUDY SHEINDLIN: FROM ‘JUDGE JUDY’ TO ‘JUDY JUSTICE’ By Curt Schleier

What was your Jewish life like growing up in Brooklyn? My family was what I call community observant, which means that we went to temple on the High Holy Days. We did not keep a traditional kosher home, but our extended family

got together on holidays. My grandmother cooked. We all lived at 226 Parkside Avenue, on two different sides of the same building. My grandfather would spend Yom Kippur in temple. Our tradition was that my family would go to temple at the end of the day and walk home with him. My grandparents lived on the seventh floor, or maybe the ninth. The building had an elevator but my grandfather, who was in his 60s—the equivalent of being in your 90s today—would walk the stairs. When I asked him why, he said it was to atone for his sins. That translated to me as, “If I don’t do anything bad all year, I could always take the elevator.” How did your upbringing help form the person you are today? My father and mother were very moral people, and the message I got from them was that you try to do the right thing all the time. That doesn’t mean you’ll have a perfect outcome all the time. But you can be pretty damn sure that if you do the wrong thing— take someone’s bike, scratch someone’s car— and not take responsibility, it may not come back at you that day, but eventually karma has a full circle. I don’t think that’s particularly Jewish. I think this country is made of moral people who wouldn’t consider taking someone else’s property.

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How do you account for Judge Judy’s tremendous popularity? I’m a good storyteller. Also, the viewing audience has to love you or watch you because they hate what you do. I prefer that you like me, but as long as you watch, I don’t care. I think the vast majority of people in this country believe that rules are being blurred without consequences. For an hour a day, you see the rule of order, something people find a little comforting, a little nostalgic. Sometimes I’m not quite PC, but I’m always truthful. And if you don’t like it, change the channel. One of my favorites cases on Judge Judy was when you ruled on the ownership of a dog. Your process was almost Solomonic. How did you come to your decision? One man said his dog had been stolen from his yard. The woman said she’d bought the dog. As a dog owner, I know that when I come home after being away—although she loves the people who take care of her—my dog runs to me and doesn’t leave my side. So I had the clerk bring the dog into the courtroom, and the dog ran to the man. Clearly the dog favored him despite the fact that he’d been living with the woman for six months. I was just using common sense. Curt Schleier, a freelance writer, teaches business writing to corporate executives.

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MICHAEL BECKER FOR IMDB TV

Judy Sheindlin rode her reputation as a no-nonsense New York City prosecutor and judge to the top of the Nielsen ratings. For the last 25 years, she starred in Judge Judy, the CBS courtroom series that featured the jurist arbitrating real-life cases in what was often the highest-rated program on daytime television. She was awarded three Daytime Emmys and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and became among the highest-paid hosts on daytime television, earning $47 million per year. After tensions with CBS over ownership of the show’s reruns, she renamed the program and moved it to IMDb TV, the free streaming arm of Amazon. Judy Justice debuted in November and features the same type of small-claims cases that made Judge Judy so popular, from landlord-tenant conflicts to sales disputes. Sheindlin, 70, was born Judith Susan Blum in Brooklyn, N.Y., and received her graduate degree from New York Law School. Before taking her brassy personality to television, she was a prosecutor in family court and was later appointed by legendary Mayor Ed Koch as a judge in criminal court and a supervising judge in family court. I started our interview by reminding Sheindlin about a comment she’d made to the Hollywood Reporter last May, that she was not ready to retire or to learn mah jongg. I told her if she changed her mind, my wife had a mah jongg opening on Thursdays. She laughed and we were off to the races. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

ARTS

in the kidlit space is wonderful,” said Tzivia MacLeod, a Canadian-Israeli author who has won awards from PJ Library (which published two of her titles) and is a regional adviser for the Israeli chapter of the society. “But it has created questions and resentment for authors.” Jews, she said, “need to start demanding a place at the [diversity] table for our own unique

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

and underrepresented background, whether from North Africa, the Middle East or Europe.”

ensions around presence and visibility complicate issues like “Jewface,” according to Shaina Hammerman, associate director at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. With its reference to the history of white entertainers putting on blackface, Jewface refers not only to non-Jews cast as Jewish characters, but also to particular mannerisms or references that are uncomfortably close to ethnic caricature—roles “where Jewishness is front and center,” the Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman said, addressing the topic in the much-debated September episode of The Sarah Silverman Podcast. The Jewface complaint also highlights how frequently non-Jews are cast in high-profile Jewish roles—especially those involving conventionally attractive or refined characters, like Midge Maisel and her parents in the Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, or historically important figures, like Helen Mirren as the titular character in an upcoming biopic of Golda Meir

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COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS

in the diversity conversations, she believes, because their non-Jewish colleagues feel that “Jews do not need the boost. At the same time, we’re being persecuted as a minority.” Even before her debut young adult novel, Once More with Chutzpah, was published, writer Haley Neil confronted a torrent of online hatred for her story of a girl grappling with Jewish identity on a trip through Israel, which she based on her experiences growing up Jewish in an interfaith home. “This book supports genocide” is typical of many antisemitic comments Neil found about her book on Goodreads, a major online book platform that features early reviews of upcoming titles. “I worried my book would never reach an audience, because people who haven’t read it made false accusations about its contents,” Neil said of the novel, due out this February. “The increasing focus on diversity

But Are They Jewish? On her podcast,

KAST MEDIA

Sarah Silverman (above) discussed issues around ‘Jewface,’ when non-Jews are cast as Jewish characters, such as Rachel Brosnahan as Midge Maisel and Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle as Midge’s parents in ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ (opposite page).

or Felicity Jones as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the film On the Basis of Sex. In his recent book Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity, which discusses anti-Jewish bias in media and culture, British television personality David Baddiel calls the issues around Jewface a “passive” antisemitism. “Look for the absence: the absence, in this case, of concern” and outrage in the public discourse, he writes, when non-Jewish actors play Jewish characters. Indeed, on her podcast, Silverman insisted she was not calling for change so much as pointing out an uncomfortable double standard: Authentic representation is now de rigueur for virtually every minority group but Jews. Unlike other minority groups, however, Jewish actors have found work playing a range of characters. “It’s been really important to make sure that a Native American

plays a Native American character, or that an Asian play an Asian, because otherwise, historically, they weren’t getting jobs,” Hammerman, of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, noted. “But Jewish actors are cast all the time to play non-Jews.” In Hammerman’s view, how a Jewish character is written—as “a rich and interesting human”—is more critical than who plays the role. The larger question, she added, is how to ensure that Jews and antisemitism remain part of American conversations around racism and ethnic discrimination. For many in the arts world, “it’s hard to hold in your mind at the same time that many Jews in this country have power and access— and also, that antisemitism is real,”

Hammerman reflected. “The more we can address this complexity, the better off everybody is.” Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.

LOOKING FOR MORE ARTS COVERAGE? Go to hadassahmagazine.org/arts and read about the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s newest productions: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a new opera about an aristocratic Jewish-Italian family on the eve of World War II, and Harmony: A New Musical, created by Barry Manilow, based on the real-life story of a German harmony ensemble whose fame was cut short by Nazi racial laws.

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5. Caruso et al.

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Israel’s Ancient Top Crops

BOOKS

Seeking Shelter Unearthing family secrets, celebrating connections

The Boltons (from right) Harold, Judy, John, Matilde and Carol, circa 1966

NONFICTION

COURTESY OF JUDY BOLTON-FASMAN

Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets By Judy Bolton-Fasman (Mandel Vilar Press) In this tender, poetic and suspense-filled memoir, Judy Bolton-Fasman examines the gaps in her parents’ pasts, trying to unlock the essential mystery of her life: her father. His enigmatic presence haunts the pages of her vivid and unstinting portrait of a family burdened with secrets and colliding cultures. Her improbably matched parents— Ashkenazi, Yale-educated K. Harold Bolton, and Cuban-born, Ladinospeaking Matilde Alboukrek— married when he was 40 and she was 24. A naval officer during World War II and fervent patriot who found a career as an accountant after the war, Bolton orchestrated summer cookouts in red, white and blue plaid shorts. Meanwhile, her “scary yet irresistible” and emotionally abusive mother tutored neighborhood kids in Spanish, learned Portuguese from women she met on the bus and went on to earn a degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. At the nexus of these two worlds, Bolton-Fasman belonged to neither. Growing up with her two siblings, John and Carol, she developed a host of physical and emotional issues, from sleepwalking

to a panic disorder and crises of faith in part because of the secrets that had, in her words, “saturated the air” in her home. The book opens with an adult Bolton-Fasman receiving a long letter from her father, who had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The letter, she feels, is a portal to his “trastiendas,” a word her mother had used to mean secrets, adapted from the Spanish term for storage room. Just as she is about to open the letter, her father calls and instructs her to burn the letter— which she does without reading it. Consequently, she is forced to keep turning over her family’s narratives and inexplicable silences about his life before his marriage. “My parents were an accumulation of random details that mostly pointed in diverging directions: culture, nationality, age,” she writes. “Their union made them unique and, ultimately, incomprehensible. Like the household budget, their stories never added up.” And so, she felt compelled to reconcile their stories. “I had to reconcile them in my mind as a couple, and as my father and my mother. They were exotic, mismatched, yet perfectly matched. I needed to get to the bottom of the murky story of how they eventually married. They activated a curiosity and a need to build a world that made sense to me.” No exploration is too much to unearth the answers to her burning question: Did her father live a hidden life in Latin America during and immediately after the war? She tracks

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

down his old friends and requisitions government records through the Freedom of Information Act. Even reciting the Kaddish for her father after his death in 2002 becomes an opportunity to engage with him. Bolton-Fasman’s childhood home at 1735 Asylum Avenue in West Hartford, Conn., gives her memoir its title. The roadway was named for the institution once located there: The Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, since relocated and renamed the American School for the Deaf. The title not only reflects the author’s hyphenated, complex family, but also her search for sanctuary, shelter and healing. Dense with intrigue, frustration, discoveries, dead ends and paths not taken, Bolton-Fasman’s book is above all a fierce search for parental love, solace and inner peace. —Rahel Musleah Rahel Musleah leads virtual tours of Jewish India and other cultural events and hopes to lead her first post-Covid in-person tour in November 2022 (explorejewishindia.com).

Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir By Aileen Weintraub (University of Nebraska Press) Can a high-risk pregnancy, a marriage on the rocks, financial problems, a falling-down house in the middle of stalled renovations and lingering grief for a beloved dead father add up to a riotously funny read? The answer is yes, at least

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when the author is the gifted humorist Aileen Weintraub. Knocked Down chronicles her months of bed rest awaiting the birth of her first child in week-by-week chapters with tonguein-cheek titles like “Bras on Fire” and “Blame It on the Cossacks.” Weintraub, an award-winning writer and journalist, is also a commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl notorious in her family for quitting her Brownies troop and Hebrew school. At 18 weeks pregnant, her doctor instructs her to stay on bed rest for five months if she wants to keep her baby. But can she do it? And what if that bed is located in a run-down farmhouse in the upstate New York countryside beloved to her new husband, but alien to Weintraub? And what if that new husband, struggling with his own problems—a failing business and failing home repairs—is a quiet, self-possessed non-Jew entirely different from Weintraub’s loud and loving Brooklyn family? Through the weeks and months, as Weintraub waits, and prays, to become a mother, she repeatedly asks her beloved dead father for advice. Sometimes she feels him answer: “This is not Brownies. You don’t get to quit on my grandchild.” In the end, it’s her mother who teaches Weintraub about patience, love and motherhood. Whenever Weintraub is at her lowest during those long five months, her mother arrives on the bus from Brooklyn with a suitcase full of meat, bleach for the laundry and her own potato

peeler. If this were fiction, Weintraub’s mother might read like a caricature. But this is truth, and as Weintraub’s mother cleans and cooks, she shares secrets from her own marriage, detailing what it means to stick it out through hard times and be a mother. I won’t spoil this book by revealing too much of the ending but suffice it to say that a lot of Brooklyn Jews bearing food (“any kind of fish you can put on a bagel”) arrive in the countryside for a celebration that I won’t mention, and their cars get stuck in the mud. To find out more, you’ll have to read—and laugh and learn—for yourself. —Elizabeth Edelglass

Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor with decades of documents amassed in his attempt to reclaim the building, Kaiser picks up the long-abandoned legal battle. That leads him on a convoluted adventure, filled with unexpected and profound revelations. On a visit to Poland, Kaiser decides to find the family’s apartment building. He only spends one day in Sosnowiec but, consumed by his late grandfather’s unfinished legal battle, he hires a local lawyer known as “The Killer” to pursue the case. She estimates the building’s worth in the mid-six figures but warns him not to “mess everything up” by going for a visit. In his surreal

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer, poet, and book reviewer living in Connecticut.

Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure By Menachem Kaiser (Mariner Books) It’s been more than three-quarters of a century since World War II ended, but improbable and confounding stories continue to emerge. In Plunder, seasoned journalist Menachem Kaiser skillfully and humorously unfolds six years of painstaking research in his quest to prove ownership of a building that belonged to his family before the war in the Polish city of Sosnowiec. At the same time, he raises questions about inheritance, family legacies and how we relate to the past.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

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ONE BOOK, ONE HADASSAH Join us Thursday, February 17, at 7 p.m. ET, as Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein interviews Rachel Sharona Lewis about her debut novel, The Rabbi Who Prayed With Fire. Set in Providence, R.I., Lewis’s story, an homage to the Rabbi Small mysteries by Harry Kemelman, introduces readers to a compelling new character in the clerical-sleuth genre: Vivian Green. The young, queer assistant rabbi at Congregation Beth Abraham, a Conservative congregation, investigates the strange happenings at her synagogue as she wrestles with Jewish tradition, contemporary issues—from antisemitism to racism to intergenerational conflicts—and local politics. The event is free and open to all. To register—and read our review of the book—go to hadassahmagazine.org/books.

BOOKS

first encounter with the Polish legal system, Kaiser needs to prove that his great-grandparents—killed in the Holocaust and who would be 130 to 140 years old today—are actually dead. The search for documentation of their deaths stalls the case. The family property was purchased in 1936 by the author’s great-grandfather Moshe Kajzer and Moshe’s brother, Shia. Both brothers and most of their children

were murdered by the Nazis. By Polish law, the building should have passed to the brothers’ surviving heirs, in this case, Moshe’s son, Maier Menachem, who died eight years before Menachem Kaiser was born and for whom he was named. In Sosnowiec, Kaiser ignores his lawyer’s advice and sets out to interview tenants in the building. After one tenant, the daughter of a former city planner, shares official city maps

dating back decades, Kaiser makes a startling discovery. His family had focused on the wrong building; the one that actually belonged to his family was a few feet away. And while studying his family records, Kaiser discovers something else. His grandfather’s first cousin was Abraham Kajzer, a well-known survivor of eight camps who published one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs. Abraham had been a slave laborer

CALLING OUT JEW HATRED

Antisemitism on the Rise: The 1930s and Today Edited by Ari Kohen and Gerald J. Steinacher (University of Nebraska Press)

Several new books explore the scourge of antisemitism Conspiracy U: A Case Study By Scott A. Shay (Wicked Son Publishing) Author Scott A. Shay looks at his own beloved alma mater, Northwestern University, and asks how well-established scholars on the campus could buy into and disseminate conspiracy theories and political propaganda—from Holocaust denial to antiZionist rhetoric. Calling these theories “the direct descendants of far left (communist/ Soviet) and far right (fascist/Nazi)” ideologies “that should have been discredited long ago for the absurdity of their claims and their murderous legacies,” he uses a case study of two specific professors to explore the systemic nature of the biases and offers approaches for redressing them.

Leading historians, philosophers and theologians compare the rise of antisemitism in the 1930s and 1940s to current disturbing trends, examining how the historical progression of this type of hate has had an impact on modern culture. The book is composed of two collections of essays. Part one looks at the ideology and culture behind Jew hatred in Germany in the mid-20th century. Part two includes reflections on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel and how to approach Holocaust education in both Jewish day schools and public schools in the United States.

Contending With Antisemitism in a Rapidly Changing Political Climate Edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Indiana University Press)

Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity By David Baddiel (TLS Books) Comedian, writer and British television personality David Baddiel argues that one type of racism—Jew hatred—has been left out of the fight for diversity and racial equality. First published in the United Kingdom to widespread praise, Jews Don’t Count was originally written in response to the antisemitism of Jeremy Corbyn, former head of the Labour Party. In a fast-paced and witty style, Baddiel points out examples of antisemitism creeping into media and pop culture, in both subtle and obvious ways, and “how antisemitism is a racism that often shows itself in codes and tropes and assumptions” and therefore traps and “sneaks past you.” JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

In his newest book, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, chair of Jewish studies at Indiana University and founding director of the university’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, collects scholarly essays on antisemitism set against, as he describes in the introduction, “a backdrop of rising nationalism and illiberalism on the right, new forms of intolerance and anti-liberal movements on the left, and militant deeds and demands on the part of political Islam.” Among the topics examined are the application of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHNRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism; the different forms of antiJewish sentiment on college campuses; and the impact of this type of hatred in Hungary, Poland and Britain. —Leah Finkelshteyn

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on Germany’s Project Riese, a series of massive tunnels dug into Silesia, a province on the border between Germany and Poland. He secretly wrote a journal of his experiences in Yiddish and, after the war, published it in in Israel, where he was living, to little notice. When his diary, Behind the Wire of Death, was published in Polish, it became a guidebook for those who thought the tunnels hid everything from Nazi-looted gold to futuristic weapons and proof of aliens. A large section of Plunder is dedicated to Kaiser’s discovery of Abraham’s story and the group of quirky treasure hunters who befriend him in the present day. “I felt a bizarre kinship with these treasure hunters,” he writes. “I can’t really

explain it. Our ambitions were obviously very different but on some level I think I felt they rhymed.” The Silesian treasure hunters, weekend hobbyists who dress like commandos, use metal detectors and satellite imaging to search for hidden places where Nazis stored their loot. They take Kaiser through the tunnels and drink with him around campfires. Surprisingly, Kaiser writes, they are not overtly antisemitic—even as they excitedly show him scavenged Nazi memorabilia decorated with swastikas. Abraham is a mythological figure to this group. Indeed, on a tour of the tunnels, Kaiser hears the guides call Abraham “one of the most important men who went through the war, Jew or Pole.” New legends about

Abraham emerge, too. “Very quickly the story became that I was his grandson…because that is the better story,” Kaiser writes. He also discovers that he has more relatives alive today on that side of the family, namely Abraham’s nieces and nephews. As for family ownership of the building in Sosnowiec, the Polish court has not issued a ruling in the case. The book doesn’t have “the ending I’d hoped for,” Kaiser writes, but perhaps in its inconclusivness, “it’s a truer, more appropriate ending.” —Stewart Kampel Stewart Kampel was a longtime editor at The New York Times.

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BOOKS

LIVE IN-PERSON STAGE PRODUCTIONS

World Premiere

FICTION

Limited Engagement January 19 - 30, 2022 This production is made possible, in part, with funding from The David Berg Foundation

National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in association with Ken Davenport presents

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BRUCE SUSSMAN

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WARREN CARLYLE ADDITIONAL PRODUCERS:

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In her strangely immersive historical epic The Books of Jacob, Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish-born Catholic turned atheist, dramatizes a slice of Jewish history you almost certainly never learned about in Hebrew school: the true story of the infamous false messiah Jacob Frank (1726-1791). At close to 1,000 pages and divided into seven “books,” this deeply researched tome is fascinating, but not for the faint of heart. Nevertheless, its portrait of a society in upheaval—shown through the eyes of an expansive network of characters—has the power to both enlighten and unnerve, especially in its eerie reflection of the rampant prejudices and inequalities that roil our world today. The Books of Jacob, first published in Poland in 2014, begins in 1752 in the town of Rohatyn—in what was then Poland but is today Ukraine—with a magic spell cast from an amulet. The amulet had been swallowed by an elderly Jewish women named Yente, who spends the duration of the book in a mystical all-seeing state, hovering over and sometimes commenting on the messianic quests of the different members of her extended family. At the center of her mishpacha is her grandson, Jacob Frank. It is from Yente’s omniscient perspective that we view the devastating poverty, antisemitic persecution and cabalistic yearning for the world beyond that helped render all too appealing—and ultimately appalling—Frank’s transgressive allure. Tokarczuk describes how Frank preached a redemption that could only be achieved through the defilement of the laws set out in the Torah and the Talmud. “The old rules no longer applied; the commandments we had once followed to the letter had lost their logic,” explains Nahman Samuel ben Levi, Frank’s most ardent supporter and chronicler. Instead, they must be turned inside out. Two examples: feast, rather than fast, on Yom Kippur; Olga Tokarczuk upend moral norms by engaging

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LUKASZ GIZA

The Books of Jacob By Olga Tokarczuk. Translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead Books)

TOP TEN JEWISH BEST SELLERS FICTION 1. Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart (Random House) 2. Three Sisters by Heather Morris (St. Martin’s Press) 3. The Cellist by Daniel Silva (Harper) 4. The Forest of Vanishing Stars by Kristin Harmel (Gallery Books) 5. Eternal by Lisa Scottoline (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) NONFICTION 1. All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business by Mel Brooks (Ballantine Books) 2. Yearbook by Seth Rogen (Crown) 3. Unstoppable: Siggi B. Wilzig’s Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend by Joshua M. Greene (Insight Editions) 4. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn (Norton)

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5. By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream by Dan Grunfeld (Triumph Books) We are saddened by the passing of Larry Mark, editor and creator of myjewishbooks.com as well as the longtime compiler of the Top Ten Jewish Best Sellers for Hadassah Magazine. Mark passed away in October at the age of 61. May his memory be for a blessing.

ENHANCED PERPETUAL YAHRZEIT Kaddish will be recited for your loved one daily for 11 months after burial, after which Kaddish will be recited annually.

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in all manner of sexual misbehavior. In keeping with this world turned upside down (and, perhaps, as a nod to books written in Hebrew), Tokarczuk paginates the book in reverse. The first page of the book is marked as 959; the final page, 1.

For their beliefs, the real-life Frank and his followers were condemned—and excommunicated—by the rabbis as renegade apostates. But that did not deter thousands of Jews from Poland, Greece, Bohemia and Germany from

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following the charismatic preacher in renouncing Judaism and converting to Catholicism. In a matter of just a few generations, Tokarczuk relates, many of those converts assimilated and melded into Christian society, with their earlier identities forgotten, demonized or hidden from public view. It is the centuries-long intersection between Jewish and Polish Catholic history that most interests Tokarczuk, and for which the Nobel Prize judges applauded her when she received the 2018 award for her body of work. Among her acclaimed books available in English translation are Flights, a series of vignettes that ruminate on both travel and the human body, for which she became the first Polish winner of the Booker Prize, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a mystery that was shortlisted for the international award. In particular, the judges praised her exploration of “the crossing of borders as a form of life”—a citation that highlighted the diverse characters in many of her novels. In The Books of Jacob, they are multicultural by any definition, featuring members not just within the Jewish community but also the Catholic Church, the Polish government and the ruling courts of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, along with representatives of every strata of society. Such is the globalized world of 18th-century Poland that Tokarczuk recovers from history. It is one in which marketplaces buzz with different languages and where people from diverse backgrounds cannot avoid influencing each other even as they clash, intermingle and sometimes meld with each other. The book was a best seller in

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2022 Tour Dates Adult Group Tours 13-DAY & 16-DAY TOURS

Tokarczuk’s home country, winning Poland’s top literary prize, the Nike Award. However, for some in contemporary Poland, which is now ruled by a populist right-wing government and where anti-immigrant and antisemitic bias is on the rise, the uncovering of this shared Jewish-Polish past was unwelcome. Tokarczuk was sent threats and harassed on social media, and for a time, her publishers had to hire bodyguards to protect her. Yet such opposition to the truth of history only underscores Tokarczuk’s larger theme: We cannot come to terms with the past until we understand it. —Diane Cole

FAMILY OWNED & OPERATED SINCE 1980

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The Hidden Palace: A Novel of the Golem and the Jinni By Helene Wecker (Harper) As readers plunge into Helene Wecker’s rich follow-up to her 2013 debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, which won Hadassah Magazine’s Harold U. Ribalow Prize, they may ask themselves whether the writer has crafted a work of fantasy, historical fiction, modernday mythology or even romance. One of the delights of The Hidden Palace is that the book traverses

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Guide to Jewish Literature Order these books directly through the Hadassah Magazine website! Just go to Hadassahmagazine.org and click on Guide to Jewish Literature.

CONSPIRACY U: A CASE STUDY Scott A. Shay

Take a deep-dive into the world of anti-Zionist conspiracy theories and how they are spread in academia. Learn the difference between a theory and a conspiracy theory in Shay’s third book, Conspiracy U: A Case Study. Dr. Erica Brown at the Mayberg Center calls it “a wellresearched and compelling book.” Unpack anti-Zionist conspiracy theories that embed themselves in our schools, media, and in normal discourse. Hardcover, 304 pages. To purchase go to www.scottshay.com.

GEORGE WASHINGTON NEVER SLEPT HERE William A. Gralnick

Traveling throughout Virginia, one would think that George Washington slept everywhere. So sing the signs: “George Washington slept here.” One place he did not sleep was on the ground dedicated to become the university named after him. This book, the second in my humorous memoir trilogy, holds out to the reader the universal mishaps, misplays, and mayhem that went on in six years at GW. As Levy’s used to say, “Try it. You’ll like it.” Available on Amazon.com paperback or e-book.

FROM DUST, A FLAME

Rebecca Podos

From Lambda Awardwinning author Rebecca Podos comes a stunning new contemporary Jewish novel about love, loss, and legacy. When Hannah’s mother disappears on her birthday, Hannah and her brother venture on a journey to find help, and along the way discover a family and history they never knew existed and secrets that will change their lives forever.

Available from epicreads.com.

MY FINE FELLOW Jennieke Cohen

Food and romance abound in this delightful historical romance by Jennieke Cohen, acclaimed author of Dangerous Alliance. In a reimagined 19th century England, culinarians— elite chefs—are the pinnacle of society. Can two friends team up and turn a humble street vendor into society’s top chef? Make sure to read with snacks: this clever take on My Fair Lady is sure to leave you hungry!

Available from epicreads.com.

HOW TO HUNT A BEAR

Revital Shiri-Horowitz

Based on a true story, this historical WWII novel follows the life of the Hauzer family, as they are expelled by the Nazis from their village in Poland, and exiled across the Russian border as their unbelievable journey through the Soviet Union begins. Shiri-Horowitz is a bestselling author, and this is her fourth book.

Available on Amazon. More information at https://revital-sh.com.

BUBBIE’S BABY: 15TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Elaine Serling

A musical story celebrating and honoring the special relationship between grandparents and a grandchild. This new re-designed hardcover edition features fresh lyrics, a toe-tapping memorable melody and colorful illustrations that mirror moments of joy this special bond brings. Use the digital download code printed inside the book to download the song. Reading, listening and singing together, will create memories that will last a lifetime!

Available from www.elaineserling.com. 800-457-2157; $19.95 + $3 shipping.

HIP SET

Michael Fertik

“Fast paced with an original, exotic setting, Hip Set is an unstoppable read from first page to last.” Faye Kellerman, best-selling author. A noir thriller set in modern-day Tel Aviv, Hip Set begins with what appears to the police to be a simple murder but swiftly takes our heroes through the hidden lives of Sudanese refugees and the violent underground economy of Russian gangsters, in search of an ancient mystery, lying untouched in the desert for millennia, that has been troubling scholars since it first appeared in the Old Testament itself. Available on Amazon.

FOOD, FAMILY AND TRADITION: HUNGARIAN KOSHER FAMILY RECIPES AND REMEMBRANCES

Lynn Kirsche Shapiro

Gourmand World Cookbook Award Winner for Best Historical Recipes in the USA. This cookbook/memoir brings to life the culture of Eastern European Jewry and celebrates the courage and resilience of Holocaust survivors through recipes and stories. More than 150 original family recipes— appetizers to entrees, desserts and wine recommendations—and memories with fullcolor photographs and techniques updated for today’s cooks. Recipes are enriched by priceless remembrances—sweet, bitter and bittersweet—placing food in the context of the rich Jewish life before the Holocaust. Inspire your family memories and traditions, and bring the mouthwatering food of yesterday to your table today!

$35 Hardcover, 280 pages. Available for purchase online at thecherrypress.com, Amazon, and at Jewish and select bookstores. For more information, group prices or events, email lynn.thecherrypress@gmail.com.

THE 36

WITH AND WITHOUT HER: A MEMOIR OF LOSS

Josh Evenchen

The “Jewish Da Vinci Code”! A special agent and his estranged Hasidic brother race through Israel’s holy sites, deciphering riddles, while the enigmatic “36” test their limits with physical and spiritual challenges. They must find their father, the Temple’s artifacts… and themselves. A captivating journey through Israel’s landscape, interwoven with Jewish insights. Join their mystical quest, where answers to the present lie hidden in the past.

Available as paperback and eBook on Amazon or via author’s website: https://jevenchen.wixsite.com/website/36 or email: jevenchen@gmail.com

SHATTERED FAITH: THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM Dr. Larry S. Milner

Milner takes us to the closing period in Abraham’s life after the Akedah, when told by YHWH to prepare to sacrifice Isaac. It was after this event that Abraham, amazingly, lost faith. After the Akedah, when it was not Isaac who died, but Sarah, Abraham did the unexpected; he married a pagan. Milner presents Abraham’s story in the format of a play, through dialogue. Ideal for teachers and group leaders, this story can easily be presented in a live format for all ages. ISBN 978-1946124-883, 148 pages. Available on Amazon.

SHATTERED TRUST: THE DEATH OF MOSES Dr. Larry S. Milner

Milner analyzes when Moses punished the Israelites with a death penalty, not Godapproved, that this prohibited him from entering Israel and how this punishment was consistent with the principles of Divine Justice found in the Torah. Then Milner examines when Moses strikes, rather than speaking to the rock at Meribah, the event thought to be the reason Moses couldn’t enter the Land. He presents the view that this reason was a late addition to the Torah, intended to rehabilitate the reputation of Moses. ISBN 978-1946124-869, 774 pages. Available on Amazon.

Beth Simon Rosenschein

Life is peaceful for a middle-class Jewish family in Minnesota in the 1970s. Then the young mother suffers a devastating stroke, and nothing is as it was. Her eldest daughter must find a way to grow up as best she can. This memoir tells the story of a family’s struggle through physical and mental illness, loss, and shattered expectations towards endurance and healing.

Available on Amazon in paperback and e-book formats.

LEAVING THE BRONX: A NOVEL

Zee Abrams

Become a teacher, get married, have children - these were the expectations for Jewish girls in the 1950s. If you wanted something more, there were problems. Based on memories of the Bronx neighborhoods of Pelham Parkway and Parkchester, the feel of the time and place are recaptured. “Wonderfully vivid” - Richard Lederer, best-selling author and columnist.

Available on Amazon.

THE LOST ART OF DATING: A DATING COACH’S STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO FINDING LOVE AT ANY AGE

Judith Gottesman, MSW, with Maria De La O.

The owner of Soul Mates Unlimited™, Judith Gottesman, MSW, is a dating coach & Jewish matchmaker. Dating in today’s app-happy, fast-tracked world can be annoying, confusing, & even scary. The Lost Art of Dating: A Dating Coach’s Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Love at Any Age, is both for those overwhelmed by dating & want to take on the challenge with the right tools & techniques, but also experienced daters who want to try a new approach. Rich with tips and tricks, The Lost Art of Dating is the masterful guide to finding a date ... and everlasting love.

Buy her books at SoulMatesUnlimited.com or on Amazon.

FISH OUT OF WATER

Joanne Levy

Fishel (Fish) Rosner doesn’t like regular “boy” things. He hates sports and would prefer to read or do crafts instead. When he asks his Bubby to teach him to knit, she tells him to go play outside. When he begs his mom to take him to Zumba, she enrolls him in water polo instead. Why does everyone else get to decide what Fish should or shouldn’t do?

Ages 9-12. Available in paperback or e-book at your favorite retailer.

SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS Joanne Levy

Evie Walman thinks about death a lot. But only because her family runs a Jewish funeral home. One day her parents ask her to help with Oren, a boy her age who was in a horrific car accident that killed both his parents. Oren hasn’t spoken a word since, but Evie is determined to help him deal with his loss and find his voice again.

Ages 9-12. Available in paperback or e-book at your favorite retailer.

BROKEN PROMISES: THE STORY OF A JEWISH FAMILY IN GERMANY Bonnie Suchman

My father-in-law, who emigrated to America from Nazi Germany in 1937, shared very little with his family about his former life in Germany. So it came as quite a surprise to discover long after his death that he had lost a grandmother and two aunts, as well as other relatives, in the Holocaust. This discovery led me to research the family’s history to learn why. Broken Promises tells the story of the rise of the family’s fortunes, beginning in the late seventeenth century, and the fates of individual family members after the Nazis came to power.

Available on Amazon and BN.com, and available for order at local book stores.

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many genres as it continues the tale of the unlikely friendship between Chava Levy, a golem, a creature of Jewish kabbalistic folklore brought to life through earthen materials, and

Ahmad al-Hadid, a jinni, an Arab and Muslim supernatural being made of fire and air that can take human or animal form. Set mostly in New York City in

IT’S TIME TO START PLANNING! MOROCCO Casablanca • Marrakech • Fes • Rabat • Atlas Mountains • Sahara Dessert MAY 5-15, 2022 Scholar: Aziz Mikdar

GERMANY Munich • Leipzig • Nuremberg • Dresden • Berlin • Hamburg MAY 19-31, 2022 Scholar: Fred Rosenbaum

THE BALTICS Lithuania • Latvia • Estonia • Finland July 7-18, 2022 Scholar: Raquel Orensztajn

Ariel Goldstein has over 20 years experience organizing and leading tours to more than 30 countries

www.tiyuljewishjourneys.com • 510.847.4519 ariel@tiyuljewishjourneys.com

A N S W E R S Crossword Puzzle on page 43

K N O B B E D

O I L L A M P

P W A W H I S S T O W

H E R E

P R I O R T O

O V A L

E O M R M E A S G R I A B T E A S

S E V E E N O L E G R O V T I D E E Y C O R O O O A D S G O I E G R A N A S K T I E S E L S E E L S O N E G A G G I G A A V E L M E

N A E

P O T S N H A L O D A T I I A T E W C I C A N U R G R R V E T E R Y D E S

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

E V A C U E E

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the early years of the 20th century and told in serial form, the novel is at its strongest when it touches upon the dislocation of many of its characters, for the most part Jewish and Christian Syrian immigrants who strive to make a go of it in the New World. Will they cling to their religious traditions? Will they learn English or continue to speak in their native tongues? To what extent will they make accommodations, perhaps subsume their identities, to fit into American society? These and other crucial questions are thoughtfully addressed in Wecker’s deft hands. The golem and the jinni are perhaps avatars of many of our forebears, who struggled with all they had lost—families and communities left behind—as they set sail over turbulent waters to make better lives for themselves and their children. History buffs with a particular interest in turn-of-the-century New York City will appreciate Wecker’s detailed descriptions of the city’s “constant newness, its own unending cycle of reinvention”: the building of the various subway lines, the opening of the original Penn Station, the construction of the Manhattan Bridge and neighborhoods and institutions of yesteryear, such as Little Syria and the Asylum for Orphaned Hebrews. The Hidden Palace is a gem deserving of wide readership. —Robert Nagler Miller Robert Nagler Miller writes frequently about the arts, literature and Jewish themes from his home in Chicago.

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Looking for more great books? Read our essay on the works of awardwinning, Israeli-born science fiction writer Lavie Tidhar at hadassahmagazine.org/ books.

ABOUT HEBREW

Every Family has a Secret.

All Hail A princess, a guardian angel and a Zionist folk hero By Joseph Lowin

SHUTTERSTOCK

Sir Moses ords matter, as readers of Montefiore this column surely know. And, as readers of the Bible, newspapers and history books also know, words about power and those who hold it may matter even more. Take the example of two closely related Hebrew roots, ‫ה‬-‫ר‬-‫( שׂ‬sin, resh, heh) and ‫ר‬-‫ר‬-‫( שׂ‬sin, resh, resh), both of which mean to rule over, to strive with. Let us begin with what may be the most important Hebrew word in the Bible: ‫( יִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל‬yisra’el), Israel. According to The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, this proper noun was originally a verbal exhortation, Yisra’el, meaning “Let God reign,” with the suffix “el” originally being the name of a Canaanite deity. In Hebrew scripture, Yisra’el is forefather Jacob’s second given name; the name for the northern half of the Israelite kingdom; and the term for a Jewish “layman,” i.e., neither a Cohen nor a Levite. According to American Bible scholar Jon Levenson, the changes of name made by God in Genesis connote a change in destiny for the matriarch or patriarch involved. The Talmud explains in Berachot 13a that before her name was changed to ‫( ָשׂ ָרה‬sarah), “She rules [over the nations of the world],” our foremother was just called ‫( ָשׂ ַרי‬sarai), which means “princess,” but only of a local tribe. Following his famous wrestling match, Sarah’s grandson Jacob is told that because ‫וַ תּוּכָ ל‬...‫ית ִעם ֱאל ִֺקים‬ ָ ‫( ָשׂ ִר‬sarita im elokim... va-tukhal), “You successfully struggled with God,” you will have an entire nation—‫( יִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל‬yisra’el)—named after you. A midrash on the Exodus story euphemistically and mystically uses ‫( ַשׂר ֶשׁלָ ֶהם‬sar shelahem), “their prince,” to refer to the Egyptians’ guardian angel, whose necessary drowning would prefigure the fate of the Egyptian army. The old-new word ‫( ִמ ְשׂ ָרה‬misrah) runs the gamut from the Book of Isaiah’s ascription of “abundant authority” to the Messiah to a modern-day worker looking for a ‫( ִמ ְשׂ ָרה ְמלֵ ָאה‬misrah mele’ah), full-time job. Hebrew slang of the 1950s gave us ‫( יִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל ַה ְשּׁנִ יָ ה‬yisra’el ha-sheniyyah), The Second Israel, a reference to impoverished Israeli development towns of that era. And then there is the Zionist folk hero, Sir Moses Montefiore. He is immortalized in a Haim Hefer poem sung by superstar Yehoram Ga’on in the 1970s. The song’s refrain, ‫( וְ כָ ל ַהכָּ בוֹד לַ ַשּׂר‬ve-khol ha-kavod la-sar), “All hail to our prince,” sings the praises of the supreme Jewish leader of his day for using the power he has accumulated to intervene on behalf of the Jewish people. Given the popularity of that song in Israel even today, we might say that lyrics matter, too.

Joseph Lowin’s columns for Hadassah Magazine are collected in the books HebrewSpeak and HebrewTalk. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

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Where Madness Lies is a story of redemption and the healing power of truth. Rigmor, a young Jewish woman, is sent to a reputed premier psychiatric institution. But the tide of eugenics, and the Nazi’s campaign to sterilize and euthanize the mentally ill, put Rigmor in mortal danger.

“A dramatically captivating and historically edifying novel.” —Kirkus Reviews “A powerful, heartbreaking novel.” —Foreword Reviews

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Archie Gottesman Calling out Jew hatred—with a billboard By Debra Nussbaum Cohen

COURTESY OF ARCHIE GOTTESMAN

ntisemitism—and the way the american jewish community generally responds to it—makes archie Gottesman mad. She addresses it by placing pink, attention-grabbing billboards around the country, from Times Square in New York City to San Francisco. Before Gottesman launched the nonprofit organization JewBelong, which is behind the billboards, she was already in the zeitgeist-capturing business as the brand manager for Manhattan Mini Storage, which she made famous for its edgy and amusing ad campaigns. When she left the firm in 2016 to co-create JewBelong (jewbelong.com) with Stacy Stuart, her impetus was to give disaffected Jews online resources to connect them with their heritage. JewBelong also began putting catchy, often provocative messages on public ad spaces. One said, “Even if you think kugel is an exercise for your vagina…JewBelong,” which so upset someone that they spray painted over the body part reference. Last May, amid a surge of anti-Zionist, antisemitic rhetoric around Israel’s conflict with Hamas, JewBelong pivoted to focus on antisemitism. Gottesman, 58, is the mother of three daughters in their 20s and lives with her husband in Summit, N.J. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Why did you start JewBelong? When my husband converted to Judaism 28 years ago, I started seeing Judaism through his eyes. There was a marketing problem with the way Judaism portrays itself. We don’t live in shtetls. People are free to choose. Yet we don’t work to sell ourselves. So many people assimilate. You don’t leave something you think is terrific. I decided to rebrand Judaism. Why turn JewBelong’s focus to antisemitism? When Israel’s conflict with Hamas re-started in May 2021, I was watching our community get the shit kicked out of it. I couldn’t believe the amount of venom and misinformation. I was appalled by the lack of reaction in the Jewish community. Kids in school were being told, “Hitler should have finished the job, you’re killing baby Palestinians every day.” And still Jewish organizations were sharing challah recipes, carrying on what they’d been doing. Our audience said, “What the hell is going on? I’m trying to correct the

narrative, trying to explain that of course I want humane treatment of Palestinians—and all I’m being met with is hostility.” We started by putting up 800 billboards throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and in New Jersey. One said, “Let’s ask everyone who’s wondering if antisemitism is real to wear a yarmulke for a week and then report back.” Another said, “We’re just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out Jew hate isn’t an overreaction.” How effective are the billboards and what campaign is next? We know they’re effective because of the responses we get from Jews and non-Jews, especially on social media, where people post photos of our billboards and comment. We have almost 400,000 people visit the website a year, with an increasing number signing up for our newsletter. The JewBelong website continues to provide resources about Jewish traditions and practices, but for now the focus of our work will continue to be

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

the antisemitism campaign in New York and elsewhere. It doesn’t look like antisemitism is going anywhere soon, so we are sticking with this important battle. We are going to bring it to some college campuses next. That’s a real pain point for the Jewish community, with so much casual antisemitism happening there. Last August, you appeared on The Real Housewives of New York City. How did that come about? Cast member Eboni Williams and I are friends. She’d been to my house for Shabbat dinner. She pitched my appearance to the producers. Of course I said yes, because it was genius. Eboni is a non-Jewish Black woman, but her last boyfriend was Jewish. Judaism doesn’t get into pop culture often or positively enough. It was great. I was glad I did it and would do it again. Debra Nussbaum Cohen, author of Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant, is a journalist in New York City.

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Hadassah Magazine Jan/Feb 2022

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