Hadassah Magazine Sep/Oct 2021

BLACK JEWISH VOICES | MENSTRUAL ACTIVISM | ISRAEL AWAITS US

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2021

SHANAH TOVAH!

May the light of a new Jewish year herald a return to safety and community

CONFRONTING ANTISEMITISM

What can we do?

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“HONEST, COMPELLING, INTRIGUING.” —DAN W. LUFKIN, Founder, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette

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The acclaimed play, The Lehman Trilogy, features Mayer Lehman, John Loeb’s great-grandfather. Discover the remarkable history of the

entire Lehman family in John’s comprehensive and beautifully illustrated memoir.

View the exclusive footage of John’s extraordinary 75th birthday celebration at Blenheim Palace on the bonus DVD, along with historic coverage of the event, and read David Patrick Columbia’s review of the party on page 647.

For more details, go to ambassadorloeb.com.

REFLECTIONS, MEMORIES, CONFESSIONS With more than 600 photographs

HARDCOVER ($29.99) and E-BOOK ($8.99) available from AMAZON, BARNES & NOBLE, and APPLE BOOKS

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TOGETHER, WE CAN HELP

ISRAEL’S

BUILDERS. NOW AND FOR THE NEXT 73 YEARS. Over more than 73 years, ordinary men and women devoted their lives to help build a new Jewish state. Many of these pioneers are now aging, frail, impoverished and alone.

They need our help.

With more than 7,000 volunteers and 110+ branches throughout Israel, Yad Sarah is dedicated to helping to provide for Israel’s less fortunate — especially those who have sacrificed so much, who have dedicated their lives to build a nation.

We provide home and health care support services that enable people in Israel to remain independent at home and in their own communities despite illness or frailty.

Return the favor of service to Israel's Builders by supporting Yad Sarah today.

Leah M. Teacher, Mother, Grandmother, Family Caregiver, Yad Sarah client

445 Park Avenue, Suite 1702 New York, NY 10022 Tel 212-223-7758

866.YAD.SARAH shalom@friendsofyadsarah.org

FriendsOfYadSarah.org @YadSarahFriends @Friends_Of_YadSarah

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 | VOL. 103 NO. 1

46

DEPARTMENTS 12 COMMENTARY 36

IN EVERY ISSUE 4 President’s Column

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT) ‘MINETTE’ BY CAMILLE PISSARRO/WADSWORTH ATHENEUM MUSEUM OF ART, HARTFORD, CONN., THE ELLA GALLUP SUMNER AND MARY CATLIN SUMNER COLLECTION FUND. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLEN PHILLIPS; YESCHEF © 2020; MICHAEL JACOBS/ALAMY

6 The Editor’s Turn 8 Letters to the Editor 10 Cut & Post 28 Hadassah Medicine 32 Hadassah News 49 Crossword Puzzle 67 About Hebrew 68 Question & Answer On the Cover

The Gates of the Grove (Shaarey Pardes) sanctuary at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, East Hampton, N.Y. Photo © Louis Davidson/Synagogues360. org (detail). From the book ‘Synagogues: Marvels of Judaism’ (Rizzoli), reviewed on page 50.

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

16 IS THIS OUR OLD/NEW NORMAL?

By Dara Horn American Jews have endured more physical attacks along with widespread vitriol online and in person, writes the author of People Love Dead Jews, and the public response is particularly instructive—not just the violence, but the gaslighting that now routinely accompanies that violence. The instant delivery of victim-blaming “context” serves to convince everyone that these attacks are in fact the Jews’ fault.

20 EXPANDING THE JEWISH BEAT

By Hilary Danailova Whether singing, speaking or writing, Rabbi Sandra Lawson both inspires and reflects the priorities of many progressive Jews, especially those who, like her, have racial or gender identities outside what has been perceived as the Jewish mainstream. As a result, Lawson has become one of America’s go-to Black Jews for comments on social justice issues.

Something is happening regarding antisemitism

14 ESSAY To forgive or not to forgive

36 TRAVEL Israel prepares to reopen

40 FOOD Stuffed challah for Sukkot

44 ARTS

• Black Jewish artists bridge two worlds • Looted art, from theft to recovery 50 BOOKS

• Spiritually renewing reads for the High Holidays • New Holocaust sagas from Pam Jenoff and Heather Morris • Reverse migration in Forget Russia

24 A RALLYING CRY FOR MENSTRUAL JUSTICE

By Sarah Yahr Tucker From United Nations panels to high school groups, from rabbis to lawmakers, the topic of menstruation is calling people into action across cultural and political spectrums.

In addition to destigmatizing menstruation, activists are focused on “period poverty,” the lack of access to products like pads and tampons as well as hygiene and reproductive education, which impacts millions of people globally.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

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PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

New Year, New Horizon The sense, and season, of renewal | By Rhoda Smolow

R

osh hashanah ushers in a season of renewal. When I look at how much the medical, social, commercial, political and emotional landscape has changed since early 2020, I can’t help thinking that we are on the verge of Rosh Hashanah Hagedolah—the Great New Year.

The most obvious change over the past few months is the post-pandemic reopening, with the United States and Israel in the vanguard.

With good reason, we always temper our celebration of the efficacy of Covid vaccines with the realization that the retreat of the virus does not mean total victory, that variants and billions of unvaccinated people around the world still represent risks. But after more than a year of huddling in our homes and venturing out only with great caution, the sense of renewed life is palpable.

The relief goes far beyond the immediate sensation of returning to a pre-pandemic normal. The mRNA vaccines that protect more people every day represent a medical revolution that will pay dividends in the future. Instead of the years or even decades it took to develop vaccines for smallpox, measles, typhoid, yellow fever, polio and other diseases, the mRNA process gave us a Covid shot in 11 months. It’s likely that the process will lead to better flu vaccines with quicker updates and perhaps longer protection. It may also accelerate the effort to develop vaccines for HIV, rabies and new viruses as unimaginable today as coronavirus was in 2019.

Building on involuntary experi-

ence, we are also likely to see lasting improvements in the organization and efficiency of health care, schools, commerce and the workplace. Though many of us may be tired of Zoom meetings, they will now coexist with more traditional options as a way of maximizing choice for the sake of efficiency.

If we learn the recent lessons of preparedness and stockpiling, we can avoid life-threatening shortages and distribution problems.

AS HENRIETTA SZOLD’S WISE WORDS REMIND US, ‘THERE IS NO ENDING THAT IS NOT A BEGINNING.’ In the past year, both Israel and the United States had a change of government, both elected by narrow margins. After four elections in two years, Israel’s new coalition embraces the full spectrum of the nation’s many parties—which obviously presents challenges as well as opportunities. In Washington and across America there is a new tone addressing health challenges and also combatting the spike in racist and antisemitic activity.

T

he sense of renewal is tangible for Hadassah and for me personally. Though the date is still uncertain, I am looking forward to my first trip to Israel in more than 18 months. Instead of the backdrop of home and office interiors

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

on computer screens, I want to walk the corridors of our hospitals, the narrow streets and open squares of Jerusalem and the beachfront in Tel Aviv. I hope all of you will make the journey soon.

Everywhere in Hadassah there is a sense of new beginning. The Hadassah Medical Organization, of course, never stopped working during the Covid lockdowns, but a welcome sign of both normal and renewal was the group of 20 new nurses—some right out of school, others coming from other institutions—that went through orientation at the Ein Kerem hospital in June.

Our Meir Shfeyah Youth Aliyah Village, which had to send most of its residents home during the worst of the pandemic and shift to virtual learning, saw more than 100 students graduate, the largest group in the village’s history.

And after a year of stops and starts, Hadassah’s headquarters in New York City are set to reopen three days a week in September. We have worked wonders in the virtual world, but as the reopening draws near, I feel an enormous weight falling from my shoulders.

We experience many renewals in life. They are mostly small steps, and they often make up for setbacks.

Much rarer are the giant-leap renewals like the ones we are living now.

As Henrietta Szold’s wise words remind us, “There is no ending that is not a beginning.” May Hadassah, America, Israel and the world make the most of the opportunities before us.

Shanah Tovah to all!

“T s R e n e p e t e k

–D H O a

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360 Rou

“The renovated and strategically designed Round Building will enable our dedicated nurses to more effectively treat patients in a safer environment with the love, care and expertise they are known for.”

–DR. RELY ALON Head of the Hadassah Medical Organization’s Division of Nursing and Health Professionals

Hadassah’s nurses paved the way for Israel’s modern health care system more than 100 years ago.

Today, Hadassah’s nurses are advancing this inspiring legacy.

With new, state-of-the-art Nurses’ Stations in the iconic Round Building, they will have cutting-edge technology and tools to bring world-class care to the people of Israel for 100 years to come.

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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

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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.

Spirit of the Season Balancing optimism and uncertainty

By Lisa Hostein

T

he high holidays are a time for hope and optimism, a time to heed the clarion call of the shofar and strive for a better version of ourselves and our society. Those aspirations feel especially salient this year as we teeter between a sense of vaccine-infused freedom and the uncertainty surrounding the newest wave of coronavirus surges and restrictions.

Many of the articles in this issue reflect a similar interplay between optimism and uncertainty. As we fret over the alarming uptick in antisemitic attacks, described by author Dara Horn in “Is This Our Old/New Normal?” (page 15), we can also learn from essayist Beth Kissileff, in “Something Is Happening,” about ways we can band together and refuse to allow this scourge to defeat us (page 12).

We offer stories about the achievements of Black Jewish women who face both resistance and welcome as they navigate their multiple identities.

Women like Rabbi Sandra Lawson, who is “Expanding the Jewish Beat,” as Hilary Danailova reveals in her profile, with outreach to previously marginalized segments of the Jewish community (page 20). Three other Black Jewish women are claiming their multiple identities through their artistic talent, as Danailova details in “Bridging Two Worlds” (page 44). While you’re in the Arts section, don’t miss Robert Goldblum’s “Looted Art’s Backstory” (page 46), a poignant review of a new exhibit at The Jewish Museum in Manhattan.

Also in the spirit of the chagim, we offer contrasting ways of looking at forgiveness in an essay by Amy SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

Klein (page 14); mouthwatering stuffed challah recipes recommended by our food columnist, Adeena Susman (page 40); a roundup of spiritual books by Leah Finkelshteyn (page 50); and a Sukkot-themed crossword puzzle (page 49) and About Hebrew column (page 67).

On the health front, we share two pieces that straddle the line between heartache and hope. Sarah Yahr Tucker’s “A Rallying Cry for Menstrual Justice” (page 24) explores efforts to both destigmatize menstruation and provide period supplies to those who can’t afford them. And in “Battling Cancer at Hadassah” (page 28), Wendy Elliman introduces us to three oncology patients whose lives have been saved by Hadassah’s heroic medical staff.

Speaking of which, a hearty mazel tov to our Hadassah hospitals, both of which were rated by Israel’s Health Ministry best in their class. Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem also made Newsweek’s list of the “World’s Best Smart Hospitals 2021” (page 29).

It’s time to start thinking about visiting Israel again, and the whole Israel travel industry is preparing for a return to pre-pandemic tourism, as Esther Hecht explores in “Destination Israel” (page 36).

Finally, we wish to express our deepest gratitude to those of you who have contributed to the Hadassah Magazine Circle. We thank you and honor you with our annual tribute (page 34.)

Wishing you all a happy and healthy 5782!

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MAGENV51

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

‘RE-EMERGING’ JEWS Thank you to Eliana Saks for referencing, in her article “Once Upon a Time in Nigeria” (July/August 2021 issue), the documentary ReEmerging: The Jews of Nigeria. The film, directed by Jeffrey L. Lieberman, is exceptional. I wish much naches to Saks and thank her for her stimulating article. I have experienced Jewish communities in a number of countries, including Japan and India, but learning about the one in Nigeria was especially heartening. I hope the Igbo Jews will continue to persevere, grow and thrive.

Ruth Heuberger Great Barrington, Mass.

THE HANDWRITTEN WORD After reading Dara Kurtz’s essay “Camp Is Not the Hilton Hotel” in the July/August issue, I felt that I had found a kindred spirit. Nothing captures the essence of a person like a handwritten letter.

My closet is filled with several bulky accordion files of cards from relatives, friends and co-workers that I have saved over the years.

Most precious of all are notes from my late father, a prolific letter-writer in several languages who “copied” everything he wrote by placing a piece of carbon paper between two blank sheets. I have wishes he sent me on several birthdays, a vote of confidence the morning I was to take my first driving test and words of reassurance the summer my friends and I were terrified by heinous New York criminal “Son of Sam.” And,

like Kurtz, I saved correspondence between me and my son when he attended sleepaway camp.

I shudder to think that letter-writing is a feature that will vanish from our shared experience.

Sara Ullman East Brunswick, N.J.

COMING FORWARD ON ABUSE While I applaud the commitment to “supporting the vulnerable” by Hazzan Alisa Pomerantz-Boro, cited in Rahel Musleah’s article “Childhood Abuse, Adult Reckoning” (July/ August issue), it is important to remind ourselves that anyone, child or adult, can be vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by malevolent opportunists, whether because of difficult life circumstances (think a sick child, loss of a loved one, financial difficulties, etc.), or to the powerful wiles of charming psychopaths. Such victims are often silenced by feelings of guilt, shame and self-blame.

Thank you to the Alpert sisters for coming forward with their story and to those in the religious communities who validated their experience and made clear that what was done to them was not their fault and is never O.K. Janet W. Wohlberg Williamstown, Mass.

The article “Childhood Abuse, Adult Reckoning” brought to light the horrible and prolonged sexual abuse by a family member and well-known cantor. It’s important to let trusted adults know when abuse occurs and then work toward bringing about justice. But there is a flip side to notifications of sexual abuse. The rabbi at my former congregation was accused of having molested an adolescent girl.

Eric Schneiderman, then attorney general of New York, where the abuse

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

allegedly occurred, brought very public charges against the rabbi. An investigation determined the molestation never happened and charges were dropped. But by that time, the congregation’s board and most of the members determined that the rabbi’s contract should be canceled; he was fired. Several of us did not believe that the rabbi was guilty and left the congregation.

When a statement of any type of abuse is made, the accuser should be listened to and an investigation should be made. If the accusation is determined to be true, the abused should be brought to justice. But when there is no evidence of abuse, what is the accused to do?

Lois Zeidman Tempe, Ariz.

How tone deaf of Hadassah Magazine to print a photograph of Cantor David Putterman flanked by Leonard Bernstein and Max Helfand in the article “Childhood Abuse, Adult Reckoning.” The point of the article was to remove Putterman’s honor and respect from the historical record. That should have precluded printing the photograph that gives him celebrity status by association.

Adrienne Fishman Acton, Mass.

CAPE COD BAUHAUS As the author of “The Golden Age of Jewish Architects” (Jewish Currents, Fall 2016), I had great pleasure in reading Hilary Danailova’s travel piece on Cape Cod and the prominent role that Jewish scholars and homeowners played in erecting and preserving Bauhaus-inspired houses (“Exploring Cape Cod’s Midcentury Moment,” July/August issue). When the Bauhaus school in Germany

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announced the importance of bringing design features to all city residents, the school immediately came within the crosshairs of the Nazis. It was one of the first intellectual institutions that Hitler closed upon seizing power. It is good to see that Bauhaus style is alive and well in Cape Cod. Abbott Gorin Springfield, N.J.

RESTORING DINAH’S VOICE In mentioning The Red Tent in “The Jewish Woman’s ‘Essential’ Booklist” (July/August issue), Sandee Brawarsky, the author of the piece, referred to Dinah as “the daughter of Jacob who, in the Bible, is sexually assaulted by a Canaanite prince.”

But Anita Diamant’s novel, told from Dinah’s point of view, was about a love story that did not involve assault. Her brothers decided it was an assault and murdered them all.

This is a central tenet of the book— that women are subject to the control and vengeance of the men, regardless of their own desires or wish for autonomy.

Melanie Hill Woodstock, N.Y.

know whether she is aware that the ancestors of Native North Americans as well as Native South Americans migrated across the Bering Sea ice bridge between Asia and North America many, many centuries ago.

Therefore, Native Americans do have immigrant roots.

Lewis Cohn Springfield, N.J.

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! We value your interest in Hadassah Magazine and welcome hearing from you about the content of the magazine. Please email letters to the editor to letters@ hadassah.org. To read more letters, visit us online at hadassahmagazine.org.

IMMIGRANT ROOTS In her President’s Column “Passing Liberty’s Torch” (July/August issue), Rhoda Smolow states: “With the exception of Native Americans, all of us have immigrant roots.” I do not

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POST

Meet Willow Zimmerman, ‘Super’ Jew DC Comics, forever associated with Jewish comic book legends Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and their brainchild, Superman, is set to debut its newest female Jewish superhero with the publication of E. Lockhart’s first graphic novel, Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero, in September. Lockhart modeled her teenage crime-fighting character, Willow Zimmerman, on the young women she knows from her own Brooklyn neighborhood.

“They’re so much more socially aware than I was growing up.

I’m impressed by their passion,” reflected Lockhart. Her heroine, 16-year-old Willow, is a budding social activist frustrated by an inability to effect real change.

When a villain menaces local community centers, Willow acquires a canine sidekick— Lebowitz, named for Lockhart’s real-life New York hero, writer Fran Lebowitz—and transforms into a superhero with the power to communicate with dogs and whistle for them to come to her even from blocks away.

But Whistle isn’t merely a story of good versus evil: Lockhart called it “a fun romp,” incorporating a love story, family drama and other relatable teen issues. Lockhart, who wrote her English Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University on the interplay of pictures and text, said that comics and graphic novels now tell complex stories that reflect American diversity. Indeed, Marvel Comics debuted its first Muslim superhero, Ms. Marvel, in 2013.

Lockhart’s 12th young adult book was a departure for the novelist, who has won multiple

COURTESY OF DC COMICS

CUT

When the Right T-Shirt Makes a Big Difference In the fall of 2019, Harouche was diagnosed with a rare type of brain cancer. During the first of six rounds of chemotherapy at NYU-Langone’s Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital in Manhattan, he felt embarrassed that his hospital gown had to be lifted to access the medical port for the chemotherapy drugs. His mother, Jodi Harouche, ordered a special T-shirt that unzipped at the top to allow access, but, he said, it was expensive and uncomfortable.

Enter his grandmother Judy Harouche, who volunteered to make him another one. He chose a T-shirt that read, “My oncologist is SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

my hairdresser,” and she sewed in the zippers.

“I felt I was a normal kid wearing a normal T-shirt,” said Harouche, who is now in full remission.

From that beginning, Harouche founded JZips, a nonprofit organization that has received over 2,000 donations of new children’s T-shirts and redistributed them free of charge, zippers sewn in, to children in hospitals all over the country and to individuals by request. The sewing is the domain of Jordan’s mother, president of a technology communications company, and his grandmother,

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Jordan Harouche (above) provides special zippered shirts for pediatric cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy (left).

a former art teacher born in Budapest who learned to sew from her mother, Veronica Keri, a seamstress who survived Auschwitz and who is still alive at 98.

COURTESY OF JZIPS

At the age of 17, Jordan Harouche is already a cancer survivor, an entrepreneur and a philanthropist.

For each shirt they create, they recite a prayer that the child who receives it will overcome illness and be healthy. The teenage Harouche is the CEO, in charge of quality control, shipping, social media and marketing.

A resident of Great Neck, N.Y., and a freshman at Hofstra University, Harouche says he is “100 percent” motivated by tikkun olam to provide children and young adults undergoing cancer treatment with normalcy, comfort and dignity.

“It’s the little things,” he said, echoing the company’s motto, “that make the big things easier.”

—Rahel Musleah

Managing Our Digital Afterlives What happens after death is heavily debated in and out of the Jewish community, but one thing is certain: Nearly everyone who dies leaves behind a digital footprint. But not everyone knows what to do about it.

That became clear to Betsy Ehrenberg when she received a Facebook notification in 2016 prompting her to wish a deceased friend a “happy birthday.” She realized that her friend’s relatives likely never took steps to remove her digital footprint. A veteran in the software field, Ehrenberg had an idea of how to address this problem, and her business, Legacy Concierge, was born the following year.

Legacy Concierge secures over 160 digital assets after a person passes away by

organizing their data in an electronic vault. Digital assets are everything from emails and photos to social media activity; records of driver’s licenses, passports and voter registrations; and especially sensitive information such as financial statements that may contain social security numbers and other identifiers that could

be stolen by identity thieves. For example, cyber criminals could take advantage of a recent death by applying for new credit cards, filing for tax refunds and even taking over bank accounts.

Ehrenberg, a Hadassah member, said her digital estate planning team creates an empathetic relationship with

customers to avoid potentially costly issues and relieve stress in a trying time.

“We believe the digital afterlife is a person’s legacy,” said Ehrenberg, “and we use technology to manage the last wishes, the assets and the digital footprint.”

Legacy Concierge, with a cost of about $4,500 per estate, is part of the growing industry of digital estate planning.

Other emerging players in the field include Clocr, Mylennium, AfterVault and Protect myPlans, all of which offer similar asset inventories and digital vaults.

About 20 percent of Legacy Concierge’s clients are alive and involved in their own end-oflife planning. One of them is Gary Greenbaum of Arizona, who believes that “in order to plan for your timely demise, you have to take into account your tangible and digital assets.”

Getting his digital affairs in order has given him peace of mind, he said, which is all we can really ask for in the end.

—Jacqueline Weiss

A Groundbreaking Appointment

Gadeer Kamal-Mreeh with Isaac Herzog, the former Jewish Agency chairman who is now Israel’s president SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

America, say shalom to Gadeer Kamal-Mreeh. The first female Druze member of Knesset—where she served from April 2019 to April 2021—Kamal-Mreeh is scheduled to move to Washington by late summer to serve as the first Druze senior shlichah, or emissary, representing the Jewish Agency for Israel. The appointment, coordinated by the Jewish Agency and the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, makes Kamal-Mreeh a point person on strengthening local connections to Israel, encouraging Jewish social activism and supporting engagement efforts on college campuses throughout North America.

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SHUTTERSTOCK (TOP); DAVID SALEM/ZUG PRODUCTIONS

awards, including from Goodreads and the American Library Association. Past hits include We Were Liars, a thriller that has spent seven years on The New York Times best-seller list. Whistle also breaks new ground for DC Comics, the 87-year-old company that counts Wonder Woman among its stable of heroes. Lockhart, who is Jewish herself, pointed out that while other DC characters have been Jewish, the most popular one, Harley Quinn, “is still a villain.”

For Jewish girls, the character of Willow is a chance to see themselves positively in a format long known for exaggerated muscles and bosoms. Lockhart’s heroine is short, with “big curly hair and prominent features, elements people often associate with Jewish beauty,” the author said, referring to Manuel Preitano’s illustrations. “That kind of representation is a powerful thing.”

—Hilary Danailova

COMMENTARY

Something Is Happening Banding together to fight antisemitism | By Beth Kissileff

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pes tut zikh.” this

yiddish phrase, which I learned from my mother-in-law, means “something is happening.” As she explained to me recently when we were stuck in traffic for no reason that we could discern, it must be “epes tut zikh.” She gave me another example: When my late father-inlaw was a medical resident and stood outside a patient’s room with his fellow young doctors, the chief resident would say, “We have a grand case of epes tut zikh here. Can someone explain?”

Something is happening today regarding the spike in antisemitic acts in the United States, and there are no discernible reasons to explain why.

The questions are: What exactly is happening and what can we do about it? To address the first question, the vigilant among us can consult the Anti-Defamation League’s Tracker of Antisemitic Incidents, which provides up-to-the-minute data points of where, when and to whom “something is happening.” The second question is more difficult to answer.

It is hard not to feel afraid when we never know where and when danger will strike, whether from a mysterious virus with the capacity to disable our lungs or from another human who wants to do us harm only because of our faith.

The Talmud deals with this very issue—that there are places of danger—and accordingly teaches that daily prayers should be abbreviated in such circumstances. A Jew who is walking in a place of danger should recite a brief prayer that keeps the focus on the community by using

“us” instead of “me” (Berachot 29b). Why should community be paramount in a moment of potential personal danger? Further down on that same page in Berachot, we learn the answer: “At all times, a person should associate himself with the congregation [not pray for himself alone]. How should he say it? May it be Your will, Lord our God, that You lead us to peace.”

The solution of the Talmud, adjusting our behavior to be as proactive against danger as possible while fostering togetherness, seems like the correct one. There are many ways to express Jewish peoplehood if you are not a shul goer: take a Hebrew class, see an Israeli movie, have a Shabbat or holiday meal with other Jews, laugh at Jewish jokes. What is essential is gathering as a community.

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hese remedies don’t remove our basic sense of fear at present; there are many reasons to be afraid. So where to find hope?

One place is with our Jewish calendar, whose circularity is epitomized in the biblical expression “teshuvat hashanah,” the turning of the year, or for those who know Hebrew, the repentance of the year.

Despite multiple reasons for gloom, the Days of Awe, the High Holidays, bring us renewal. The Psalm traditionally read during Elul, the month preceding Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, instructs Jews to “let your heart be strong and of good courage and hope in the Lord” (Psalm 27:14). Strengthening ourselves can come in many forms, both physical and mental. As Jews

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there are many ways to connect to tradition: through learning Jewish languages like Ladino, Yiddish or Hebrew; performing Israeli dances; studying Jewish texts or joining a Jewish book group; and praying with a synagogue community. Countering hate against Jews requires defying the goal of the attacker—to destroy Jewish lives and values.

I have been thinking about these matters for the past three years. On the 18th of Heshvan, corresponding to October 24 this year, we will commemorate the third yahrzeit of the 11 Jews who were killed in their synagogue on a Shabbat morning.

There were three congregations— including New Light Congregation, where my husband, Jonathan Perlman, serves as rabbi—that shared space at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh.

Nine families are bereft of spouses and parents, children and cousins, grandparents and aunts and uncles.

As my family and others in Squirrel Hill anticipate the upcoming anniversary, I would prefer to spend as little time as possible thinking about that awful day. But the steep rise in the number of antisemitic attacks since then, and the effort of trying to battle it, force me to recall my own difficult experiences.

One of the many things that helped me cope with the tragedy was studying and writing about the weekly Torah portion. Another was teaching congregants how to

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chant haftarah, both to increase their knowledge and connections to synagogue life and to honor the three from the New Light Congregation who were killed that day, who were all regular haftarah chanters.

Yet another way to counter antisemitism is to let antisemites know we are present. When my father-inlaw was in medical school in the late

1950’s and Jewish quotas were still in effect at many institutions of higher learning in the United States, one of his Jewish classmates would tell him which professors and students were antisemitic and the offensive things they said. My father-in-law, Larry Perlman from Brooklyn, never hid his identity, but the classmate was from a family who had changed their name from the original Goldberg to something neutral. My father-in-law’s advice to his friend?

“Change your name back to Goldberg and you’ll never hear that stuff again,” he said, thinking the speakers would be too embarrassed to spout such hate to the face of a person who is clearly a Jew. Today, the answer is not so simple.

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In many cities in America, Jews who look obviously Jewish have become targets for violence. Still, the spirit of the sentiment is right. Let us be strong and strengthen ourselves in our understanding and practice of Judaism in whatever ways are important to us. And be of good courage; don’t be afraid to let those around us know our identities, while still diligently maintaining our personal safety.

And finally, we all need to take heed of the “somethings” that are happening around us, adjust our behavior and band together.

Beth Kissileff is co-editor of Bound in the Bond of Life: Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy and author of the novel Questioning Return.

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ESSAY

How to Forgive Forgive and forget—or just walk away? | By Amy Klein

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hat a year it’s been.

Last High Holiday season, we were coming off an awful spring and a slightly less awful summer, and awaiting what experts were warning would be a terrible winter. Many of us spent Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur alone or with our nuclear family and pod, if we were lucky enough to have them.

Thankfully, despite the uncertainty of the Delta variant, this year is looking somewhat better. About half of the population in the United States is vaccinated. Many synagogues were planning to be open this year, which means that we can observe the fall holidays as they are meant to be celebrated—as a community.

Still, at this time dedicated to introspection, soul searching and forgiveness, there are mixed emotions: grief for the people who passed; sadness and empathy for those who got sick, lost jobs and

suffered in quarantine. But what should we feel for people who refused to observe quarantine mandates or wear masks, who won’t vaccinate (for nonmedical reasons) or who spread disinformation about Covid-19? Or for those who perpetuated divisions in our society? What to do about all the emotions—even rage—at the stubborn ones who we think are responsible for our suffering?

I looked for answers to these questions about seeking forgiveness and forgiving others in two recently published books by Jewish authors—memoirist Susan Shapiro and the late Holocaust survivor and education activist Eva Mozes Kor, founder of CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Ind. “My childhood rabbi once explained that on Yom Kippur, the saddest day of the Jewish calendar,

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sins made before God in the past year were mercifully erased, but not offenses committed against fellow humans,” Susan Shapiro writes in The Forgiveness Tour: How to Find the Perfect Apology.

Judaism traditionally focuses on individual atonement and guides us in how to confess our misdeeds and seek forgiveness, Shapiro explains.

“Yet what if the one who hurt you refuses to express any regret?” she poses in her book.

Shapiro, a New York Times best-selling writer, was not referring to this pandemic year, but to a once-beloved mentor—a therapist who helped her beat addictions to drugs and cigarettes. But the therapist deeply hurt her by lying to her, gaslighting her about the lie and then refusing to apologize. In response to those feelings of hurt and betrayal, Shapiro decided to research the idea of forgiveness. In her book, she interviews 13 people—including Holocaust and other genocide survivors as well as victims of sexual assault, infidelity and cruelty—to discover very different takes on absolution, from “forgive but don’t forget” to those who feel that “forgiveness is overrated.”

The book also explores what she calls a billion-dollar forgiveness industry—books, films, programs and organizations that promote the ideal of complete exoneration, or radical forgiveness, a term popularized by the late Colin Tipping, a British author and speaker who founded a personal growth movement around the idea of forgiveness.

Indeed, in America we are taught that we must forgive and forget. The culture we live in seems to believe that if you don’t forgive someone— no matter what they did—you are only hurting yourself. No matter

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what others have done, they are expected to trot out the standard apology, maybe a few. In time, unless their actions were criminal, we, the general public, and those who were wronged, are expected to forgive them and eventually forget.

But is that expectation right—or even healthy?

Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor came to believe that it is. In her posthumously published memoir The Power of Forgiveness, Kor, who passed away in 2019, recounts how she and her twin sister, Miriam, became “Mengele’s twins” at age 10.

Dr. Joseph Mengele experimented on both in Auschwitz. While the rest of the family was murdered at the same concentration camp, Kor and her sister survived.

The Power of Forgiveness is not the story of her survival but what she does with her rage—at the Nazis, at her family’s decimation, at the health problems she and her sister experienced as the result of Mengele’s torture. “I was at odds with everything,” she writes. “And I was full of resentment—of course against the Nazis, who were responsible for it all. But also against myself because I couldn’t manage to free myself from these feelings.”

As a survivor, Kor felt bad about feeling bad. If someone who suffers the worst of the worst isn’t allowed to carry their rage, to be unforgiving, who in the world can?

The book describes her journey of forgiveness. She travels to Germany in 1993 and meets with a doctor who worked with Mengele. And Kor forgives him. “I didn’t need to get revenge, retaliation, or atonement in order to experience this sublime feeling—and I had never thought highly of the Old Testament approach of ‘an eye for an eye.’ I would forgive

Dr. Mengele and finally be free,” she writes in a letter to the doctor.

“I was no longer the victim, passive and helpless, but the active person. That made me feel powerful. I realized that forgiveness was freeing—not for the offender, but for the victim.”

There’s that theme again, that by forgiving others you become powerful and liberated, and that by holding on to rage, to anger, to anguish, you only hurt yourself. It’s like the quote, sometimes attributed to Nelson Mandela: “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

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love that mandela, presumably, could forgive those who perpetuated apartheid and jailed him for decades, that Kor could forgive the Nazis. However, I think it takes people of extraordinary character to rise above their past hurts and forgive. And it makes those of us who cannot—especially under less drastic circumstances—feel even worse about ourselves.

I reached out to Shapiro to ask her if, on her quest, she found an alternative to radical forgiveness.

“There’s a lot of contradictions about radical forgiveness,” she said.

In talking to so many people about their hurts and what they needed for an apology, she learned that there is no “one-size-fits-all” rule that

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works, she said. “The theme of my memoir is actually how idiosyncratic and nuanced hurt, atonement and forgiveness are.”

She personally empathizes with the attitude of family friend Manny Mandel, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen whom she interviewed for her book: “He never forgave the Nazis and found a way to thrive in his life out of spite,” she said of Mandel, a therapist who has counseled many trauma victims.

In Shapiro’s book, Mandel explains that his secret to survival is “10 percent rage and 90 percent ‘thank God we’re still alive.’ Being here and successful said to Hitler, ‘Up yours! We refuse to let you control our life.’ ” But there has to be something between living for spite and radical forgiveness, right? Between accepting rote apologies and holding on to resentment forever.

“I would say we need more sincere atonement, reparations and better, more concrete and effective apologies,” Shapiro told me. Maybe then people can consider forgiveness—not radical, not of Nazis, but of people who are actually sorry.

But what about people who refuse to apologize? How, in these Days of Awe, do we forgive unrepentant people, individuals as well as groups, for their trespasses?

Sometimes, Shapiro said, “we don’t.” Instead, we can “avoid them at all costs, to protect ourselves and our families.”

Perhaps that is the middle ground—between drinking the poison of resentment and complete absolution: Just walking away.

Amy Klein is the author of The Trying Game: Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant Without Losing Your Mind.

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Is This Our Old/ New Normal?

The re-emerging scourge of antisemitic violence

(CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT, THIS PAGE) RICK LOOMIS/GETTY IMAGES; GREGORY BULL/AP IMAGES; BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

By Dara Horn

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he third time there was a shooting attack against American Jews, The New York Times did not call me to ask for a quick op-ed, as they often did, and neither did anyone else. I presume this was because when something happens three times, it is no longer news. Perhaps these news outlets realized just how un-newsworthy this story actually was. People murdering Jews, as a 3,000-year-old global phenomenon, is pretty much the opposite of news. When no one called me, I felt profoundly relieved, because the things I wanted to say about it were no longer things that I could actually say.

The third shooting attack, the one in Jersey City, N.J., on December 10, 2019, and the dozen or so other physical attacks on American Jews that followed in rapid succession

after it—some barely reported—were what privately changed me, perhaps because that third shooting happened at a kosher grocery store about 20 minutes from my house.

Unlike after the synagogue attacks in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, and in Poway, Calif., near San Diego, on April 27, 2019, information on the Jersey City attack was slow to accumulate. The two assailants first killed a livery driver (it was later discovered that they had Googled his Jewish-sounding surname), then progressed to killing a police officer who had noticed their stolen U-Haul and then proceeded to attack the grocery store, resulting in a protracted gun battle in which the grocery’s owner, a customer and a store worker were killed, along with the two assailants, who were killed by police after an exchange of fire that lasted

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well over an hour. The scene in the city was dramatic: Entire neighborhoods swarmed with state troopers and the National Guard, and children in nearby schools were held in lockdowns until late into the night.

The event was initially reported as a kind of perp chase gone horribly wrong, during which criminals outrunning cops ducked into a random store for cover. But antisemitic screeds found in the attackers’ vehicle and on their social media posts told a different story.

So did the tactical gear they wore, the massive stash of ammunition and firearms they brought along, and security camera footage showing them driving slowly down the street, checking addresses before parking and entering the market with guns blazing. Their real targets, authorities surmised, were likely the 50 Jewish children in the private elementary school at the same address, directly above the store—all of whom huddled in closets for the

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Jews in recent years occurred in Jersey City, N. J. (opposite page, top left and above); at the Chabad of Poway, Calif., where victim Lori Kaye was memorialized; and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where a young boy placed flowers to remember the dead.

entire gun battle, listening to their neighbors being murdered below.

The delayed clarity on what exactly happened in Jersey City muted some of the public empathy that instantly followed the previous attacks. So did the identities of the attackers, both of whom were Black, and their targets, who were Hasidic Jews—who, it has progressively become clear, many otherwise enlightened Americans view as absolutely fair game for bigotry.

This was obvious from reporting within hours of the attack, which gave surprising emphasis to the murdered Jews as “gentrifying” a “minority” neighborhood. This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, in fact came to Jersey City fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn.

More tellingly, as the journalist Armin Rosen has pointed out, the apparently

murderous rage against gentrification has yet to result in anyone using automatic weapons to blow away white hipsters at the newest Blue Bottle Coffee franchise. What was most remarkable about this angle, however, was how it was presented in media reports as providing “context.”

This “context” was breathtaking in its cruelty. As the Associated Press explained in a news report that was picked up by NBC and many other outlets, “The slayings happened in a neighborhood where Hasidic families had recently been relocating, amid pushback from some local officials who complained about representatives of the community going door to door, offering to buy homes at Brooklyn prices.” (Like many homeowners, I, too, have been approached by real estate agents asking me if I wanted to sell my home. I recall saying no, though I suppose murdering these people would also have made them go away.) New Jersey’s state newspaper, The Star-Ledger, helpfully pointed out that “the attack that killed two Orthodox Jews, an Ecuadorian immigrant and a Jersey City police detective has highlighted racial tension that had been simmering ever since ultra-Orthodox Jews

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was not able to find any similar “context” in media reports after the 2015 massacre at a Black church in Charleston, S.C, or the 2016 massacre at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Fla., or the 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, frequented by Latino shoppers—all hate-crime attacks that unambiguously targeted minority groups. In each of those cases, as was true in Jersey City, media coverage included sympathetic pieces about the victims, along with investigative pieces about the perpetrators, the latter focused on how perpetrators were drawn into violent, irrational hatred. But in reviewing media reports from the aftermath of these events, I found no coverage of how straight people in Orlando other than the perpetrator—in other words, reasonable, non-murderous, relatable “normal” neighbors—were understandably upset about gay couples setting up shop in the neighborhood and disrupting their “way of life,” or about how white people with deep family roots in Charleston felt understandably wistful about the

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SETH WENIG/AP IMAGES

In Cold Blood Murderous attacks against

began moving to a lower-income community”—even though the assailants never lived in Jersey City, and apparently chose their target simply through internet searches for Jewish institutions in the New York area. The Washington Post began its analysis of the murders by announcing that Jersey City “is grappling with whether the attack reflects underlying ethnic tensions locally and fears that it could spark new ones”— even though the rest of the article described in detail how “longtime Black residents and ultra-Orthodox implants alike say that they haven’t experienced significant ethnic tensions here.”

SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Remembering A vigil after the shooting at the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in April 2019

Black community’s “takeover” of certain previously white neighborhoods, or about how non-Latinos in El Paso felt “squeezed” by ongoing “tensions” with Latinos who had pushed for more bilingualism in schools.

No one covered this “context,” because doing that would be bonkers.

It would be hateful victim-blaming, the equivalent of analyzing the flattering selfies of a rape victim in lurid detail in order to provide “context” for a sexual assault. That doesn’t mean that intergroup tensions (or the problems with flattering selfies) aren’t ever worth examining. It simply means that presenting such analysis as a hot take after a massacre is not merely disgusting and inhuman, but also a form of the very same hatred that caused the massacre—because the sole motivation for providing such “context” in that moment is to inform the public that those people got what was coming to them.

The mental gymnastics required to get the Jersey City attack out of my head were challenging, especially when the Jewish community in the New York area was treated in the two weeks following this massacre to more than a dozen other assaults of varying degrees, most of them coming during the festival

of Hanukkah. These included Jews being slapped, punched, kicked and beaten on the streets by people who made their motives clear by shouting antisemitic insults, and many other variants on this theme that received much less attention. (One that shook me personally was when a young white man broke into my students’ dormitory at Yeshiva University at 4 a.m. and started a fire—using matches from the dorm lobby’s Hanukkah candle lighting.)

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his new normal culminated in another particularly horrifying attack on December 28, 2019, less than three weeks after the Jersey City shooting. A man entered a crowded Hanukkah party at a Hasidic rabbi’s house in Monsey, N.Y., wielding a four-foot machete. He stabbed or slashed five people, all of whom were hospitalized; one victim, a rabbi who fell into a coma, died several months later from his wounds. Stabbing Jews was apparently in vogue in Monsey, as this was the second antisemitic knifing in town in just over a month.

The previous attack’s victim was beaten and stabbed while walking to morning prayers, winding up in critical condition with head injuries.

Media coverage of these attacks

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also sometimes featured “context” (read: gaslighting), mentioning heated school-board or zoning battles between Hasidic and non-Hasidic residents—even after the perpetrator was identified as a resident of a town 40 minutes away. One widely syndicated AP article situated the previous week’s bloodbath by informing millions of readers that “The expansion of Hasidic communities in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Catskills and northern New Jersey has led to predictable sparring over new housing development and local political control. It has also led to flare-ups of rhetoric seen by some as antisemitic.” In other words, the cause of bloodthirsty antisemitic violence is...

Jews, living in a place! Who wouldn’t express frustration with municipal politics by hacking people with a machete?

After the first attack in Pittsburgh, I was devastated. After the second attack in Poway, I was angry.

But after the third attack near my home and the season of horror that followed, I simply gave up.

There was no way I could write about any of this for The New York Times, or any other mainstream news outlet. I could not stomach all the “to be sures” and other verbal garbage I would have to shovel in order to express something acceptable to a non-Jewish audience in 1,000 words or less. I could no longer handle the degrading exercise of calmly explaining to the public why it was not O.K. to partially amputate someone’s arm with a four-foot-long blade at a holiday party, even if one had legitimate grievances with that person’s town council votes. Nor could I announce, as every non-Jewish media outlet would expect, that these people whose hairstyles one dislikes are “canaries in the coal mine,” people

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They Came for Us This protester was one of thousands to stand up against antisemitism at the No Hate. No Fear. Solidarity March in New York City in January 2020.

millennia had been activated, and it was deep and real.

Of all the tedious and self-serving explanations for why this scourge was apparently re-emerging in American life (Guns! Trump! Trolls!

Twitter!), the most convincing was actually the most boring, and also the most disturbing: The last few generations of American non-Jews had been chagrined by the enormity of the Holocaust—which had been perpetrated by America’s enemy, and which was grotesque enough to make antisemitism socially unacceptable, even shameful. Now that people who remembered the shock of those events were dying off, the public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying, too. In other words, hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal. Now, normal was coming back.

Given the ugliness of recent months, normal seems here to stay.

As American Jews have endured more physical attacks along with widespread vitriol online and in person, the public response to these pre-pandemic attacks is particularly instructive—not just the violence, but the gaslighting that now routinely

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accompanies that violence. The instant delivery of victim-blaming “context” serves to convince everyone that these attacks are in fact the Jews’ fault. Hasidim are stabbed and maimed, the press informs us, because they manipulate and seize power on the town council; Jews who don’t want Israel to be bombed are bludgeoned and burned, Instagram tells us, because they thirst for the blood of innocent children.

These are remarkably unoriginal lies, the same absurd blood libels and nutjob conspiracy theories that hateful people have used to attack Jews for centuries. Jews have long inherited the communal historical memory of this ancient “normal.” What’s more painful to discover, though, is the equally ancient “normal” of the psychological attack—that millennia-long attempt to convince everyone, including the Jews themselves, that they deserve it.

Dara Horn is an award-winning author of five novels and a scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature who has taught at Harvard University, Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University. This essay is excerpted and adapted from People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. © 2021 by Dara Horn. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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GABRIELE HOLTERMANN-GORDEN/SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES

whose fractured skulls we all ought to care about because they serve as a warning—because when Jews get murdered or maimed, it might be an ominous sign that actual people, people who wear athleisure, might later get attacked! I was done with this sort of thing, which amounted to politely persuading people of one’s right to exist.

The thought of writing about this for Jewish media was difficult for a different reason. It was demoralizing to confront the American Jewish community’s ongoing and escalating panic, the completely justified intergenerational PTSD freak-out voiced constantly from every point on the political spectrum, the repetitive anxiety attacks expressed on social media, the nonstop discussion about whether this was like Berlin in 1935. This facile comparison was of course ridiculous on its face as well as insulting to the overwhelming majority of Americans who responded to these attacks in exactly the opposite fashion from the mass state-sponsored violence of Nazi Germany. If anything, this feels more like Paris in 2005—a place where there was no shortage of legal protections and official goodwill, but where one wouldn’t be crazy to occasionally hide a yarmulke under a baseball hat. Yet the thought of explaining this was exhausting, too, and also beside the point. Was I really going to expend energy delineating why this wasn’t like the Third Reich, but perhaps resembled, say, second-century Egypt or 10th-century Spain? To what end? To reassure everyone that “only” a few Jews were actually maimed or dead, so everything was cool? Nitpicking over sloppy historical analogies was a convenient distraction. The fact was that a communal memory of multiple

Expanding the Jewish Beat This queer Black rabbi plays by her own tunes

JORDAN CASSWAY (TOP); COURTESY OF SANDRA LAWSON

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By Hilary Danailova

or sandra lawson, one of the hardest things about becoming a rabbi was learning Hebrew in her 40s. At the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she was ordained in 2018, Lawson struggled with the new language until one day, she picked up a guitar and put the alephs and bets to music. “And that’s how I learned Hebrew,” Lawson said with a chuckle.

It’s just one example of how Lawson, 51, does Judaism her own way. In the process, she has become an increasingly visible and influential advocate and spokesperson for American Jews of Color. Earlier this year, Lawson, who grew up in a

Black, nominally Christian family, became the first director of Racial Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Reconstructing Judaism, the central organization of the Reconstructionist movement.

When we chatted virtually in May, Lawson sang the prayer Or Hadash, or New Light, to the tune of “This Little Light of Mine,” an African-American spiritual. As she strummed in her home office, surrounded by more guitars and a collection of cowboy hats, a dog leaped into her lap—one of three Lawson shares with her wife, Susan Hurrey, a court reporter whom she married in 2015. “I’m gonna let it shine,” Lawson sang, mixing

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the English lyrics with the Hebrew liturgy. Traditional Ashkenazi Jewish musical idioms, like klezmer, Lawson explained, “are not in my DNA. Rock, country, blues—that’s what resonates with me.”

Lawson’s own style clearly resonates with her legions of online followers on TikTok (30,000-plus) and other social media platforms. A self-taught musician, she accompanies her own singing on guitar or banjo and often posts the results.

Whether humming a prayer or speaking directly to the camera, Lawson might wear a T-shirt that reads “This is what Jewish looks like,” accessorized by a kippah and, in a nod to her queer identity, a rainbow tallit.

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inging, speaking or writing, Lawson both inspires and reflects the priorities of many progressive Jews, especially those who also have racial or gender identities outside what has been perceived as the American Jewish mainstream. While still in rabbinical school, Lawson was nicknamed “Snapchat Rabbi” and made the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s 2016 list of “10 Jews you should follow on Snapchat.”

Three years later, JTA named Lawson to its list of 50 Jews everyone should follow on Twitter (19,000 now do). And last year, after Lawson’s searing personal essay about experiencing racism in virtually every Jewish space became one of the year’s top-read articles in The Forward, the publication included her on its list of 50 essential Jewish voices of 2020.

The pandemic hardly slowed her down. A year ago, Lawson launched an online congregation called Kol HaPanim (Hebrew for All Faces) aimed at Jews of diverse backgrounds and funded by grants from the Center for Rabbinic Innovation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation’s Rise Up Initiative, which supports Jewish social justice projects. More than 100 people turned up for the first Kabbalat Shabbat. Kol HaPanim’s private

Her Way Since her ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2018 (opposite page, top), Lawson has used her music and her multifaceted identity to forge her Jewish path.

Facebook group reaches some 1,300 members from as far as Germany and Australia. Once a month, Shabbat services feature guests like Rabbi Mira Rivera, the first Filipino-American woman to receive ordination from the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary.

“Sandra is an incredibly effective communicator, which is why she’s so effective on social media,” said Rabbi Debra Waxman, president of Reconstructing Judaism, who tapped Lawson both for the new director position for racial diversity and as co-host of the current season of Waxman’s podcast, Hashivenu, about Jewish resilience.

Reconstructionist Judaism “is a smaller movement, and as such we’re deeply relational,” Waxman added. “Sandra leads from a place of connection and healing. She is about nurturing what is generative, rather than settling scores or shaming.”

In Lawson, Waxman also recognized a fellow pioneer. Waxman was the first woman and the first LGBTQ Jew to lead a Jewish movement and its seminary and knows well “that feeling of being the only woman, and the only queer person” in Jewish professional spaces. When considering Reconstructing Judaism’s new strategic plan—which includes promoting racial justice, equity and inclusion as one of five central goals—Waxman created Lawson’s position not only around her former student’s evident strengths but

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also her multifaceted identity.

Waxman said she hopes Lawson “will create policies that will make space for Jews of Color to rise up within their communities and into leadership across the movement.”

Among Lawson’s priorities is the creation of an online tool that the movement’s congregations can use to assess their progress on racial equity. Aware of her power as a role model, she has also begun mentoring the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College’s students of color through regular meetings. In June, the college appointed the first Jew of Color to lead a major American Jewish seminary—Amanda Beckenstein Mbuvi, a Bible scholar who is now the college’s vice president of academic affairs, the school’s highest post.

Lawson cited this hiring as a sign of progress toward the world she envisions—where Jews hardly blink at co-religionists of color, and nobody will endure the kinds of slights Lawson says remain routine for Jews who look like her and Mbuvi.

“There are a lot of synagogues where the first question I’d be asked is, ‘Do you know where you are?’

‘When did you convert?’ ” Lawson recounted. “Even wearing a kippah, I still don’t ‘track’ as Jewish, because people still rely on unreliable markers of what a Jew looks like.”

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ittle in lawson’s background suggested she would influence American Jewry.

Born in St. Louis to a military family that moved frequently, Lawson was unimpressed by religion as a child. “Homophobia, sexism and misogyny were very present in all the churches I was exposed to” periodically, she said. Her family has been supportive of her Jewish journey, she said: “My dad said I was the child

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COURTESY OF SANDRA LAWSON

Last year’s YouTube series, “Barefoot, Bluegrass and Blues on the Porch,” shot on the porch of her Burlington, N.C., home, featured the rabbi accompanying her low, reedy voice on guitar. The Torah of the Blues—her occasional blog—combines favorite southern tunes with reflections on the intersection of AfricanAmerican and Jewish narratives. One spring post drew parallels between Black slavery and the Passover story.

Creating a Culture During her tenure as Hillel chaplain at Elon University in North Carolina,

ANDREW BOWEN PHOTOGRAPHY

Lawson introduced regular Shabbat and holiday musical services.

who dared to be different, and this was just one more thing.”

After Lawson dropped out of college, her father, an armed forces recruiter, suggested she enlist in the military. For eight years in her 20s, Lawson served and thrived in the Army, mostly as a military police investigator. “I learned how to problem solve, how to accomplish goals and how to be seen as successful,” she reflected.

In 1999, Lawson left the Army to settle in Atlanta. “I just feel more comfortable in the South,” she said, explaining why she continues to work remotely for the suburban Philadelphia-based Reconstructing Judaism. “I can recognize the racism there. In the Northeast, it’s more subtle.”

Having completed her bachelor’s degree at Saint Leo University in Florida, Lawson earned a master’s in sociology from Clark Atlanta University. Her focus was environmental racism, the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color.

Throughout her 30s, Lawson also worked as a personal trainer. One of her early clients was Joshua Lesser, whom she was surprised to learn was a rabbi: “He was gay, and he had an irreverent sense of humor.” When she reminisced about Shabbat dinners she’d shared with Jewish ex-girlfriends, Lesser invited her to services at his Reconstructionist temple, Congregation Bet Haverim.

“I really liked it, even though I didn’t understand a word of it,” Lawson recalled. “It was the first time I was in any religious space where I felt safe being queer, where I felt I could be my whole self. And I had nothing better to do on Friday nights, so I just kept coming back.”

Lesser deliberately nurtured a congregation that welcomed those who felt marginalized in mainstream synagogues—people of color, non-Jewish partners, LGBTQ people.

In the 22 years he led the synagogue before retiring this year, he performed conversions more than any other life-cycle ritual; one of them, in 2003, was Lawson’s.

The unlikely pair mentored each other. Lawson pushed her client to compete in bodybuilding competitions, while the rabbi encouraged his trainer to explore Jewish life. “We’d have deep, philosophical conversations about social justice as we’d lift heavy weights,” Lesser recalled.

Feeling at home in synagogue, Lawson first became a Jew, then joined the shul’s board before applying to the Reconstructionist seminary.

“I wanted to see more leadership that looked like me,” she explained.

“I knew that to create change, I needed the title of rabbi.”

Lesser concurred. “I know as a gay man that it’s always more effective to have people speaking their own truths,” he said. “Change can’t just come out of the mouths of

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well-meaning folks who’ve done the work. We need the voices of Jews of Color to chart their vision of what Jewish community looks like.”

That such change was necessary, even within the historically liberal Reconstructionist movement, was evident as Lawson applied for rabbinic internships and pulpit positions.

Again and again, she recalled, she was politely turned down by congregations that gave excuses like, “Our community isn’t ready for a Black rabbi.”

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inally, lawson landed the job of Hillel chaplain at Elon University in North Carolina.

She was gratified that her students also bonded with Hurrey—a non-Jew who doesn’t practice religion, but who won over the Hillel crowd with homemade challah.

(Reconstructionism is the sole Jewish stream to permit rabbinic intermarriage, starting in 2015.)

When Lawson arrived at Elon, where about 10 percent of the roughly 7,000 students are Jewish, the Hillel didn’t offer Shabbat services. Lawson changed that, starting with monthly gatherings. By the time she left Elon to assume her new role at Reconstructing Judaism, she said, “we had created a weekly culture of musical services.” Another highlight of her tenure was the improvised pandemic High Holiday program, held online last year with record attendance. The observance included a Mourner’s Kaddish for Black Lives, which coincided with a Black Lives Matter Rosh Hashanah rally on campus, organized by some of Lawson’s Black Jewish students.

As Lawson advocates for racial justice both within the Jewish community and in wider society, she is asking the hard questions, including: Why does Jewish racism persist?

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Lawson thinks it is because, despite theoretical acknowledgement of the problem, “we’re still focused on the racism that happens somewhere else,” she said. “In order to cultivate empathy, sensitivity and awareness, people need to have actual relationships with people of color.”

Like most public Jews, Lawson has encountered her share of online antisemitism, much of it from “people claiming to be pro-Palestinian.” Israel, of course, is an increasingly contentious subject among American progressives—a quarter of Jews surveyed recently by the Jewish Electorate Institute, a nonprofit liberal group, called Israel an apartheid state—but Lawson refuses to take the bait from online

provocateurs. “I support the State of Israel, but I’m not invested in the political atmosphere of the State of Israel,” she said, adding that she supports “freedom and equality” for Palestinians as well as for Israelis. “I’m more concerned about the current struggles in our country.

I don’t even write about Israel.

But I get targeted just because I’m Jewish—because ‘rabbi’ is in all my usernames. So that’s just antisemitic.”

At the same time, Lawson contended, she faces antisemitism from Jews who are more politically conservative than she is. “If I don’t match their political ideology, they’ll try to strip my Judaism away,” she said. “They’ll say, ‘This is not Jewish and this is why she’s not Jewish,

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therefore whatever she says has no credibility.’ ” “Today, everything seems polarized and political, and people like to put belief systems on me,” the rabbi reflected. “But I live my life with a nuanced perspective.”

Increasingly, that perspective has made Lawson one of America’s go-to Black Jews for comment on social justice issues. “It can be exhausting,” she admitted a few weeks after she was interviewed on National Public Radio. “But this moment is unique.

If my presence makes it easier for the next Black queer rabbi, then it’s all fine.”

Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.

Bennett Center for Judaic Studies LECTURES AND EVENTS: Fall 2021

Diane Feigenson Lecture in Jewish Literature

“Here and There: The Parallel Worlds of Literature and Life” Nicole Krauss, award winning novelist and short story writer, including Great House (2010), Forest Dark (2017), and To Be A Man (2020).

Wednesday, September 22 at 7:30 p.m.

- free webinar

A Semester of Free Virtual Learning

Daniel Pearl World Music Days Concert

“Girls in Trouble: Songs about the Complicated Lives of Biblical Women” Alicia Jo Rabins, composer, singer, violinist, poet, writer, and Torah teacher performs from Portland, Oregon, her indie-folk song cycle “Girls in Trouble” Thursday, October 7 at 7:30 p.m.

- free virtual event

Virtual Events Registration is required for 9/22, 10/7 events at fairfield.edu/bennettprograms.

For questions, contact the Bennett Center at bennettcenter@fairfield.edu or (203)Virtual 254-4000, ext. 2066 Event

1073 NORTH BENSON ROAD, FAIRFIELD, CT 06824 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

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HEALTH

A Rallying Cry for Menstrual Justice Jewish women fight period poverty and stigma

By Sarah Yahr Tucker

I

COURTESY OF JENNIFER WEISS-WOLF (TOP); KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES

n a college lecture hall, a woman turns to her female neighbor and whispers, “Do you have… you know…a tampon?” When the helpful friend reaches into her purse, the first woman is aghast. “Not here!

Someone will see!” she exclaims. The exchange is from a 2019 Saturday Night Live sketch, which Anita Diamant describes in her new book, Period. End of Sentence. The scene is a spoof commercial for Tampax Secrets, an imaginary product that hides tampons inside other things considered less awkward to reveal in public. These things, according to the skit, include “a dead mouse, dog poop, a brick of cocaine and a copy of Mein Kampf.”

“It’s funny because it’s true,”

Diamant said in an interview with Hadassah Magazine. Behind the humor is the nearly universal taboo against exposing a healthy reproductive function that is experienced by half the world’s population: menstruation. “We were raised to be squeamish,” she added. “We were raised not to say anything about this, to whisper.” Diamant is not whispering now. Blending history, journalism and cultural criticism with personal stories gathered from around the world, Period. End of Sentence. has been hailed as a rallying cry for the social and political efforts known as the menstrual justice movement.

From United Nations panels to high school groups, from rabbis to lawmakers, the topic of menstruation

A Win for the Movement Melissa Berton (center) received an Academy Award for the documentary short she produced about a group of women who fight menstruation stigma in rural India.

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Fighting Taboos Jennifer Weiss-Wolf promoted menstrual justice at the 2019 Women’s March in New York City.

is calling people—including Jewish women—into action. In addition to destigmatizing menstruation, they are focusing on the issue of “period poverty,” the lack of access to menstrual care products like pads and tampons as well as hygiene and reproductive education, which impacts millions of people globally.

The problem is widespread, affecting both developing areas of the world and Western countries, including the United States.

In Kenya, for example, girls unable to afford menstrual products miss school when they are menstruating or drop out entirely, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Research on period poverty across the United States is scarce. A study published in 2019 by St. Louis University found that many low-income women in that city must choose between buying a box of tampons or food. A national study from George Mason University in 2021 found that one in 10 female college students experienced chronic period poverty.

Federal benefits, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), do not cover menstrual

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E

veryone who’s had a period “has a memory of being in school and being caught without something, stuffing your underwear with toilet paper and then trying to go take a test,” said Diamant, who is perhaps best known for her novel The Red Tent. “When you’ve had that experience and you read about young people, girls and women who really have absolutely nothing, or don’t know what’s going on, I think it’s visceral. It’s a wake-up call.”

Diamant’s best-selling novel, published in 1997, is a retelling of the biblical story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob, that imagined a community where menstruation takes place in a female sanctuary of comfort, respect and sisterhood—the titular red tent.

The fictional story resonated so deeply with the real-world struggles of menstruators that readers still tell Diamant they long for a tent of their own.

Central to Period. End of Sentence. and the menstrual justice movement itself is the issue of shame and the portrayal of periods as

Local Action Sharon Hox (far right), president of the Charleston chapter of Hadassah, has organized ‘period parties’ to collect pads and other supplies for schools and shelters.

dirty, embarrassing, even a “curse.”

Rooted in centuries of myth and misogyny, that message often can be cruel and absurd. Period. End of Sentence. mentions the principal of an unnamed American middle school who, in 2019, refused to provide free tampons because students would “abuse the privilege.” In an example of period-positive chutzpah, the kids staged a “cookie protest,” baking tampon-shaped treats complete with red frosting and a string.

After photos of the cookies gained attention on Twitter, the principal apparently relented. But often, stigma is only noticeable as an absence, the silence and invisibility around menstruation that persist despite decades of feminist progress.

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, an activist as well as the spiritual leader of The City Shul in Toronto, has been a prominent voice for reclaiming menstruation from its stigmatized history. Unable to find a blessing for menstruation in any Jewish source, Goldstein, a Reform rabbi, wrote one. She altered one of the morning blessings for men, which thanks God, “who has not made me a woman.”

Instead, Goldstein suggested, “Blessed

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are You, Adonai, our God…who has made me a woman,” to be said upon menstruating for the first time or even every month. Goldstein said she uses the blessing to counteract what she calls “the negative implications of Judaism and women’s bodies,” such as the traditional Jewish laws of family purity, which forbid physical contact between a menstruating woman and her husband until she immerses in a mikveh.

“A lot of people think the mikveh is because women are dirty, so they have to go get clean,” said Goldstein.

“I thought if we had some positive rituals around this, it would negate that and also make the mikveh a more positive experience.” Goldstein describes menstruation as “a monthly time of power where we are most spiritually connected with our ability to be life-givers and life-continuers.” Both Goldstein and Diamant are involved in the “open mikveh” movement, a decades-old effort to reimagine the mikveh as an inclusive space for Jewish spirituality, to celebrate life-cycle events and to heal from trauma.

Period. End of Sentence. draws its title from the 2019 Academy Award-winning documentary that

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COURTESY OF SHARON HOX

supplies, and they are rarely available at homeless or domestic abuse shelters, prisons or schools.

In recent years, the period underwear company Thinx joined with PERIOD, a menstrual justice nonprofit, to commission research among American teenagers. Their studies in 2019 and 2021 found that one in five teenage girls could not afford menstrual care products and one in four had missed class because of lack of access to products at school. Over 60 percent of those surveyed said these barriers had caused them to wear tampons or pads longer than recommended, putting themselves at risk for infection and Toxic Shock Syndrome.

HEALTH

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JOHNNY LOUIS/WENN.COM (TOP LEFT)

Anita Diamant

explores how a group of women in rural India fight deeply rooted menstruation stigma and, after the installation of a pad-making machine in their village, began making and marketing the pads themselves. The film’s producer, Melissa Berton, said that while she cherishes her Judaism and connects her activism to tikkun olam, traditional Jewish attitudes toward menstruation complicate things for her. “It’s hurtful to read that, according to Leviticus, there’s something about you that is unsanctified at the time of menstruation or gross or shameful,” she said, referencing the verses in the Bible that describe a woman who is menstruating as t’meiah, often translated as ritually unclean. “On the other hand, I feel a cultural acceptance and sisterhood with Jewish women that made it very open for me to be who I am.”

A high school teacher in Oakland, Calif., Berton learned about period poverty when she attended the 2013 Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations with a group of students. Compelled to take action, she began a school project to send the pad machine to India. The result for Berton was a six-year journey leading to the documentary and the creation of the nonprofit The Pad Project, where she is executive director.

“A period should end a sentence, not a girl’s education,” Berton announced to an Academy Award

audience of nearly 27 million viewers, referring to the brutal reality for girls in parts of India, Africa, some South Asian nations and elsewhere.

But Berton hopes Americans realize that period poverty is not a remote issue. “Two days after the Oscar win,” she said, “a person from Los Angeles wrote to us saying, ‘Please, can you help me? I have to stuff my underwear with socks or I can’t make it through the school day.’ ” As well as distributing pad machines and menstrual products in 11 countries, The Pad Project awards grants to schools, shelters, halfway homes and nonprofits in the United States to purchase menstrual supplies and host educational workshops.

ANITA DIAMANT LIVE: FROM ‘THE RED TENT’ TO MENSTRUAL ACTIVISM Join us for the next Hadassah Magazine Discussion Group on Tuesday, September 14 at 7 p.m. ET, when Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein will interview best-selling author and journalist Anita Diamant, whose most recent book, Period. End of Sentence., explores the cultural taboos and perceived shame surrounding menstruation— and champions an emerging generation of activists advocating for solutions.

Free and open to all. To register, go to hadassahmagazine.org.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

liminating sales tax on menstrual products, known as the “tampon tax,” is one of the movement’s major goals beyond supplying products to those in need and fighting taboos. Since the tax only applies to those who menstruate, advocates argue, it is a form of discrimination and therefore unconstitutional. Sales tax is governed at the state level, and while the Tax Free.

Period. campaign has made significant progress, 27 states still do not classify pads and tampons as “necessities,” which are tax exempt. In financial terms, the dollar amount seems small, but it puts these products further out of reach for those on a limited income.

And the tax can be seen as even more discriminatory when compared with other tax-free “essentials” like Viagra in Wisconsin (a state that taxes menstrual products).

Lawyer and policy advocate Jennifer Weiss-Wolf of Maplewood, N.J., is one of the driving forces behind eliminating the tampon tax.

After learning about period poverty through a product donation drive at her synagogue, Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel, in 2015, Weiss-Wolf co-founded the legal advocacy organization Period Equity, which focuses on improving access to and safety of menstrual products as well as fighting the tax. An executive and fellow at New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, Weiss-Wolf believes the state-by-state campaign is strategically crucial. It has produced concrete legislation around menstruation issues with bipartisan support. Indeed, WeissWolf has found common ground working with Republican lawmakers on menstrual equity, such as Steve Andersson, member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019. Illinois became one of the

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A still from the documentary ‘Period. End of Sentence.’

first states to eliminate the tampon tax in 2016 and later passed legislation requiring public schools to provide free menstrual products.

Weiss-Wolf outlined her approach in her 2017 book, Periods Gone Public, explaining that the menstrual justice movement needs both community-level action to provide free menstrual products at schools and other spaces as well as a big-picture agenda, which is a more equitable society overall. “One of the most amazing things about this issue,” said Weiss-Wolf, “is that it’s a microcosm of how to view any path to justice.”

COURTESY OF THE PAD PROJECT

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ith the extra financial strain of the pandemic, the impact of period poverty has only increased. The menstrual justice movement is striving to meet the growing need through nonprofits and donation drives across the country. In just over two years, the Hartford, Conn.,-based nonprofit Dignity Grows has transformed from a one-time event by the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford into a national organization with dozens of chapters. Founder Jessica Zachs says her ultimate goal is to eradicate the problem and be able “to close up shop.” She does not predict that will happen soon.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, the Charleston chapter of the Hadassah Southeastern region has partnered with The Homeless Period Project nonprofit to collect tampons, pads and other supplies and assemble them into packets for schools, shelters and food banks. The first “period party” event in 2020 was such a success that the Charleston chapter president, Sharon Hox, organized a second one in March 2021, using drop-off locations for safety during Covid, and has plans for two more.

As a Jewish woman, Hox said that she feels a special connection to the issue. “It’s about succoring people, the old-fashioned value to provide comfort,” she said. “And also women’s equality—you’re not equal if you’re stuck at home because you don’t have sanitary products.”

Learn more about our shared values and how you can help refugees at hias.org/highholidays

Sarah Yahr Tucker is a freelance writer and journalist based in Los Angeles.

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HADASSAH MEDICINE

Battling Cancer at Hadassah Oncology patients share their stories

By Wendy Elliman

COURTESY OF AYA GONEN

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ast october, early in the pandemic’s second lockdown, I answered the phone to be told I had thyroid cancer. Not, of course, in so many words. I had had a biopsy, and the message I received from my doctor’s office was to come in at once. So I was fairly certain of the biopsy results. After making an appointment for later that day, my first reaction was to get into the shower and repeat to myself: “I’ve got cancer.”

Thankfully, my story ended quickly and well. Today, 11 months after surgery, I am cancer-free. But I have new empathy for the 31,000 Israelis diagnosed with malignancies each year. And, as one of 3,500 new cancer patients treated annually at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, I now understand in my gut what the hospital means to its patients.

Hadassah’s 44-year-old Sharett Institute of Oncology at Hadassah’s Ein Kerem campus has set the benchmark for preventing, treating and researching cancer in Israel. “Its legacy of cancer care is very strong,” affirmed the Sharett Institute’s new director, Dr. Aron Popovtzer.

If his name sounds familiar, it’s because his father, Dr. Mordecai Popovtzer, headed nephrology at Hadassah from 1978, when he

Aya Gonen with her family

emigrated from Philadelphia, until retiring in 2002. The younger Popovtzer, 9 years old when the family made aliyah, specialized first in otolaryngology, then in oncology and radiotherapy and finally in head and neck cancers. With that career history, Dr. Popovtzer is now introducing to Hadassah innovative therapies that include diffusing alpha-emitters radiation therapy, whose laser-focused rays eradicate tumor cells while sparing surrounding tissue, and personalized radiation, which uses artificial intelligence to adapt radiotherapy to individuals.

“We’ve seen a 30 percent increase in patients this past year alone,” said Dr. Popovtzer, who became head of the Sharett Institute in July 2020. That number is in line with steadily increasing global incidence of cancer. “With almost 30,000 day visits, 40,000 in the clinics, 25,000 radiation oncology treatments and numbers still growing, we’ve run out of space.”

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A new oncology center, adjacent to the Sharett Institute, is in the planning stages. It will bring all resources together in a one-stop shop, from clinics and outpatient treatment to radiotherapy, surgery, laboratories and research. In addition, the center will house specialized units for treating colorectal and breast cancer and melanoma as well as departments for psycho-oncology, pain relief and early detection and prevention.

As the world marks Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month in September and Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, we highlight the stories of three women fighting cancer with the help of the Hadassah Medical Organization.

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erusalem marketing executive Mia Rafaeli had thought her stomach pains were stress. Work was frantic, her 17-year-old daughter, Avishag, was in Mexico for a month and her mother had suffered a stroke.

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TOP HONORS FOR HMO Israel’s Health Ministry has given both Hadassah hospitals its coveted top recognition: Best in Class—Ein Kerem in the major hospital category and Mount Scopus in the small-campus hospital division. “With hard work, it is possible to achieve impressive results,” said Dr. Yoram Weiss, acting director-general of the Hadassah Medical Organization.

Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem also made Newsweek’s list of the “World’s Best Smart Hospitals 2021.”

Mia Rafaeli (left) with her daughter, Avishag

Not long after the malignant cyst was removed, Rafaeli was back in Hadassah’s operating room, this time for surgery to remove her uterus and ovaries, followed by six months of chemotherapy. “It was brutal,” Rafaeli said of the chemotherapy.

“I’d tell myself: ‘Just get through the next hour.’ And then I’d push myself through the hour after that. The Hadassah team was wonderful. They encouraged me to live as normally as I could. And I worked hard on myself. I chose life. There wasn’t a day I didn’t remind myself I was lucky to be alive.”

By early 2020, her chemotherapy course was completed, but coronavirus had arrived. “I was free of cancer but very weak, and had to be super careful,” recalled Rafaeli. “So, like much of the world, I went online.”

Using her marketing background, Rafaeli started a social media campaign on Mama-tzik, a private, Hebrew-language, women-only Facebook group with some 650,000 followers. In posts to the group that were widely shared, she encouraged awareness and promoted screening for ovarian cancer through a blood test or ultrasound. “I had a message to get out: ‘Check for ovarian cancer!’ And women listened. One, diagnosed as a result, wrote: ‘Your terrible experience has saved my life!’

The daughter of another told me: ‘My mom is alive because of you.’ ” Now, Rafaeli has started a second

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social media campaign, putting pressure on Israel’s Health Ministry to help women who cannot pay for their cancer treatments. “Not every anti-cancer drug is covered by the health funds. There are women with cancers for which there’s treatment, but they can’t afford it,” she said.

“That’s unacceptable, and I’m fighting to change it.”

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madar roll, an active 57year-old mother and grandmother from Karmiel in northern Israel, sees herself as a healthy person.

Trim and strong, she works, travels, exercises and gardens. She has also been battling cancer since 2012.

“I was never unwell and didn’t know what hit me when the headaches began nine years ago,” she said. “It was August. I was preparing for the coming year at the special education kindergarten where I work, and I couldn’t think straight. Then I couldn’t bear light, couldn’t eat, vomited, fainted.”

A CT scan at a local hospital showed a mass in her brain. “They had no neurology department, so I was transferred to a larger hospital,” recalled Roll. “Thirty-six hours later, I was in surgery.”

“The surgery went well,” said Roll. “My brain tumor was gone— but they identified it as secondary from cancer in my breast. Good news, bad news, right? I didn’t have brain cancer, but I did have breast cancer.” Her husband, Asher, went online to check for Israel’s best oncology center—“and that’s how we ended up at Hadassah.”

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women in the West, and Roll was one of 4,500 women in Israel newly diagnosed with it each year. While many breast cancers in Israel are linked with BRCA muta-

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COURTESY OF MIA RAFAELI

Her ex-husband was long gone.

“When the pain continued, I sought help, and a large cyst was found on my ovary,” she said. “I was more annoyed than alarmed. Hadassah took it out by keyhole surgery in June 2019. Avishag, back from Mexico and beginning her Israel Defense Forces service that same day, was seen off by her elder brother and sister.”

The pathology, which Rafaeli had assumed was “just ticking a box,” found that her excised cyst was not only malignant but contained a second mass carrying a far rarer and more virulent cancer. “At least I got it right statistically,” she said, ruefully.

“The average age for ovarian cancer is between 40 and 50. I was 45.”

There were more statistics for Rafaeli to learn: According to the World Cancer Research fund, ovarian cancer is the eighth most common malignancy in women worldwide (lifetime risk is 1 in 78) and ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women.

“Ovarian cancer is known as the silent killer,” said Dr. Shani Breuer, head of the Sharett Institute’s inpatient ward and onco-gynecology unit.

“It is not usually detected until it’s advanced, because in its early stage, it rarely causes symptoms.”

HADASSAH MEDICINE

tions (found in 1 in 40 Ashkenazi women compared with 1 in 700 non-Ashkenazim), Roll’s cancer resulted from an extra copy of the HER2 gene.

“HER2-positive cancer tends to be more aggressive than other types of breast malignancy, but its treatments are very effective,” explained Dr. Breuer.

“For two years, I did really well,” said Roll. “Then the chemotherapy drugs stopped working.” They put her on a second medication that became ineffective after a couple of years. Dr. Breuer then moved her to another intravenous medication.

Roll has recently switched to new chemotherapy drugs to prevent the cancer’s recurrence—a treatment that can be taken orally. “I’m lucky my cancer is common and being intensively researched, so there are always new solutions,” said Roll, who views her cancer as a chronic disease, like diabetes or high blood pressure.

“And I’m unbelievably lucky to have Shani. She tells me 40 percent of my treatment is from her, and the other 60 percent is my positivity.”

COURTESY OF SMADAR ROLL

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ya gonen was 30 when she was told she should terminate her pregnancy with her second child in order to treat the breast cancer that had spread to her brain: “My Hadassah neurosurgeon, Dr. Yigal Shoshan, held my hand when he said: ‘I know your daughter has waited eight years for a sibling, but if that means losing her mother, she wouldn’t want it. Your pregnancy is too risky.’ With the heaviest of hearts, I terminated.”

That was in 2017, and by then, Gonen had already fought off aggressive breast cancer four times in seven years. She was first diagnosed in 2010, at the age of 23. When she was seven

Smadar Roll with her granddaughter

months pregnant with her oldest daughter, Liya, “I felt a lump in my right armpit, which my family doctor connected to the pregnancy,” Gonen said. It was still there after Liya’s birth, and “my gynecologist referred me to a breast surgeon, who sent me urgently to the hospital. After a bunch of tests, I heard them say ‘malignant tumor.’ After that, I heard nothing.”

Mastectomy was followed by what Gonen called “the all-inclusive package”—chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. And then it was over. For the next two years, she cared for Liya, worked, grew her hair back and tried to reconcile what had happened to her. And then, early one morning, she went into convulsions.

She went back to Hadassah, where Gonen learned that her cancer had metastasized to her brain. At age 26, she was in surgery to extract the tumor, and then in radiotherapy.

Within the year, another brain metastasis brought her to the OR again. “I suggested that Dr. Shoshan put in a zipper in my head,” she recalled. Six months after that, there was a third.

And a year later, a fourth.

“I was caught in a loop in an unfair fight,” she said. “At times,

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it seemed simpler just to give up. I thought of making Liya a box with gifts and blessings for her bat mitzvah, IDF service, wedding—times I wouldn’t be with her—but then I forced myself to be positive.”

Despite the difficulties, Gonen and her husband, Tamir Ben-Yehuda, who live in northern Israel in Migdal HaEmek, were determined to give Liya a sibling. In 2018, using in vitro fertilization and a surrogacy agency in the country of Georgia, Shaya, their second daughter, was born.

Gonen has been disease-free for four years now, though she remains on preventative oral chemotherapy and immunotherapy that will likely be lifelong. Meanwhile, she has been lecturing throughout Israel, offering tools to use positive thinking to help manage illness as well as advising on navigating the unique challenges that cancer brings to relationships, motherhood and self-image.

“My message is that life is here and now,” she said. “While we can’t control what happens, we can choose how we cope with it.”

Wendy Elliman is a British-born science writer who has lived in Israel for more than four decades.

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LISTEN TO YOUR DOCTOR Go behind the scenes at Hadassah Medical Organization with the new season of the Hadassah On Call: New Frontiers in Medicine podcast, starting this September. Catch up on favorite previous episodes, including interviews with the team using stem cell therapy and deep brain stimulation to treat Alzheimer’s disease and the specialist leading a new, multidisciplinary clinic for those suffering from long Covid. Sign up for episode alerts at hadassah.org/ hadassahoncall.

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HADASSAH NEWS

Mission Moments

ZIONISM…DID YOU KNOW? We are celebrating the High Holidays and the start of a new Jewish year. Let’s explore how these occasions link us to the Land of Israel.

Harmonizing our efforts into one distinct voice Stories compiled by Marlene Post

H

SHUTTERSTOCK (BOTTOM)

adassah magazine has

received 10 Simon Rockower Awards, the annual prizes for excellence in Jewish journalism handed out by the American Jewish Press Association. The awards, for work published in 2020, were presented virtually on June 24 as part of the AJPA’s 40th annual conference.

Rahel Musleah won first place in the News Story category for “Buffalo Cantor Resigns as She Vows to Fight Sexual Harassment”; and second place in the Personality Profiles category for “Finding Her Voice,” about Abby Stein, a Hasidic rabbi turned transgender activist.

The magazine secured both first and second place awards in the category of Personal Essay with “The Fourth Player,” about learning to play mah jongg, by Stacy Gallop; and “The Blessings and Trauma of IVF” by the magazine’s digital editor, Talia Liben Yarmush, respectively.

Hilary Danailova won first place in writing about North American Jewish History for her feature “White Dresses, Yellow Roses and Activism,” about the centennial of women winning the right to vote. Danailova also earned an Honorable Mention in Writing About Women for “Hands-on Healing,” about Jewish nurses.

Hadassah Magazine garnered both first and second place honors for

Excellence in Covering Zionism, Aliyah and Israel, with “Groundbreaking Burial in Israel” by Uriel Heilman, which explores the unique challenges Israel faces in burying its dead, and “A Home for Life” by Wendy Elliman, about Israeli communities for people with disabilities.

Esther Hecht won first place for writing about Food and Wine for her story of Israel’s boutique wineries in “Vintage Israel.”

And finally, Menachem Wecker won an Honorable Mention for Arts Reporting for “A Night at the Museum for All,” which explores how Jewish and Holocaust museums provide access to visitors with disabilities.

2. What three Jewish holidays coincide with different harvests in Israel?

3. On which holiday do Jews begin to pray for rain for the year?

4. What is a “shabbat for Hashem”?

5. How do Jewish holidays connect us to the land?

ANSWERS: 1. Pomegranates, dates, honey, heads of lettuce and of fish 2. Sukkot marks the end of fruit harvesting and the agricultural year; Passover signifies the barley harvest; and Shavuot coincides with the wheat harvest 3. Shemini Atzeret 4. Shmittah, the sabbatical year. The Torah calls for Jews to work the land for six years and let it rest on the seventh. This new year on the Hebrew calendar—5782—is a shmittah year.

5. Jewish holidays, which are celebrated according to the lunar Hebrew cal endar, most often coincide with agri cultural cycles in the Land of Israel.

The Magazine Wins Big!

1. On Rosh Hashanah, what foods, most of which are native to Israel, have come to symbolize fertility and good fortune?

A League of Our Own

I

t’s time to order 2022 national Mah Jongg League cards! This year, participants must go online to order cards through National Hadassah, but chapters and regions

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

NOW YOU KNOW… about holidays and the Land of Israel will still receive their local subsidy.

To learn more about Hadassah’s program or to place an order, go to events.hadassah.org/mahjonggcards.

The website will remain active until December 31, 2021. Still have questions? Reach out to Hadassah National Operations Chair Jill Sapperstein (jsapperstein@hadassah.org).

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COMPASSION AND COMMITMENT

P

lacing paramount importance on the value of being together, almost 600 Hadassah members and Associates gathered virtually for the National Assembly meetings on July 25 and 26. Despite regret that these meetings were transpiring for a second year over Zoom, leaders, delegates and devotees of Hadassah reminded each other that at this organization, the “F” word means flexible—a definition they have lived up to in their successful efforts during the pandemic to further Hadassah’s advocacy and fundraising goals.

Indeed, as Hadassah National President Rhoda Smolow stressed to viewers, “We are powerful together, and together, we will make a difference.” Whether it is the scourge of rising antisemitism or living through almost 18 months of Covid-19, Smolow added, “We will conquer the challenges ahead of us.”

Over the two days, participants took part in lively sessions that included updates from the Hadassah Medical Organization; a Q&A with former Member of Knesset Dalia Itzik, chair of the HMO board; and reports from Hadassah International, Young Judaea and Youth Aliyah as well as the Philanthropy and Education and Advocacy Divisions. (Relive your favorite moments from the meetings by watching the recorded sessions at hadassah.org/ 2021JulyNationalMeetings.)

HMO Chair Diane Gottlieb along with Vice Chair Dr. Ann Karty and board member

Shelly Kaplan took viewers through the latest developments at our hospitals. After noting the departure of HMO Director-General Dr. Zev Rotstein and the appointment of Dr. Yoram Weiss as acting director-general, the three described short-term goals—including stabilizing finances after the end of HMO’s recovery agreement with the Israeli government and after a year of strained finances due the pandemic—and longer-term plans, such as capital improvements at both the Ein Kerem and Mount Scopus campuses.

Dr. Karty then outlined the hospitals’ many successes in treating and researching Covid. In a later session, participants learned that one floor of the Round Building at the Ein Kerem hospital would remain ready to receive Covid patients in the event of increased virus spikes in Israel.

D

uring the Philanthropy Division presentation, Chair Vivian Kovacs recounted Hadassah’s work on behalf of victims of the Surfside, Fla., building collapse to illustrate Hadassah’s “mission moments,” when “compassion meets commitment.” After the Champlain Towers South fell, Hadassah issued an appeal that raised over $23,000—100 percent of which was donated to the Jewish Federation of Miami’s Emergency Fund for the Surfside Building Collapse.

Among the top agenda items for the Education and Advocacy Division, reported its chair, Frieda Rosenberg, was the adoption of a new policy statement that demands accountability for antisemitic curricula and resources used in schools run by the United Nations Relief and

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

Looking ahead to next year, viewers heard about several opportunities to be “powerful together” in person, starting with a conference dubbed The Power of Purpose: A Day of Inspiring & Empowering Women set for January 9 in West Palm Beach, Fla., which will feature an array of female changemakers. And several presenters promoted upcoming Hadassah trips to Israel, beginning this fall and culminating with the 100th Hadassah Convention, slated to be held in Jerusalem from November 14 to 17, 2022.

And in an engaging special program, Janice Weinman, the recently retired executive director/ CEO of Hadassah, interviewed Hadassah Lieberman and Rebecca Lieberman, the wife and daughter, respectively, of Senator Joe Lieberman and successful career women in their own rights who are both Hadassah members. The conversation touched on the pillars of family and Jewish roots, each of which is explored in Hadassah Lieberman’s recent memoir, Hadassah: An American Story. She recounted a time on the national campaign trail with her husband when she realized that “it’s important to know who you are when you go out” to meet with Americans “and to bring honor to your people, to your roots.”

A return to the foundational roots of Zionism and healing underscored the messages of many Hadassah presenters, who emphasized the power that lies in members’ voices when they harmonize together to create “mission moments.” —Libby Barnea

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Hadassah Magazine Circle

T

he Hadassah Magazine Circle is an appeal to our readers to join us in our ongoing effort to meet rising publishing costs and still maintain the journalistic excellence you have come to expect—and deserve— from your favorite magazine.

We are pleased to present our annual honor roll of donors who have contributed to our campaign from June 2020 through May 2021. This list is also available on hadassahmagazine.org. Our heartfelt thanks to all who have donated, and we thank you in advance for your continuing support of the magazine.

To make your new contribution or join our loyal Circle, please visit hadassahmagazine.org and click “Make a Gift,” or use the donation coupon on page 7.

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TRAVEL

Destination Israel Signs of optimism for the return of tourism | By Esther Hecht

(ABOVE, FROM LEFT) YOSSI ZAMIR/FLASH90; SHUTTERSTOCK; YANIV COHEN/INPA

M

ay 2021 was among the cruelest months for Israel’s tourism industry. Just as citrus blossoms sweetened the air, tempting Israelis in the hospitality business to believe that their pandemic-imposed isolation was over, a political crisis erupted and flamed into the brutal conflict dubbed Operation Guardian of the Walls.

This was hardly the atmosphere for welcoming the return of tourism.

And it was a major blow for many in the business, including two Jewish hoteliers who had poured their hearts and savings into their establishments in Akko’s Arab-populated Old City.

In 2016, Evan Fallenberg had turned a 300-year-old ruin and its surroundings into Arabesque, a small hotel and artists’ retreat. Several years earlier, famed chef and restaurateur Uri Jeremias had transformed two decaying properties with a 1,500-year history into Efendi, a boutique hotel three minutes’ walk from Arabesque.

Both hotels were models of coexistence, staffed by Jews and Arabs.

Akko, said Fallenberg, “is as abroad as you can get in Israel” and “was and is the most welcoming city.

We heard it from all our guests.”

Then, in May, just as it looked like reopening for foreign visitors was

imminent, the political crisis sent Jews and Arabs, many of them youths, rampaging through Israel’s cities. In Akko, a mob of young Arabs torched Efendi as well as Jeremias’s legendary seafood restaurant, Uri Buri, and even damaged Flooka, an Arab-owned restaurant. Then the rioters broke into Arabesque and smashed every item that could be broken.

As Fallenberg, who is also a novelist, literary translator and professor of creative writing and literary translation, mourned what seemed the end of a dream of coexistence, he was buoyed by support from people around the world and his Arab neighbors and friends. Both he and Jeremias were determined to rebuild and plan to reopen by the fall.

D

espite a rise in covid-19 cases and some new restrictions, Israel’s approximately 500 hotels are still eagerly awaiting the full reopening of the skies and the return of foreign tourists, though it will take time until the all-time record of incoming visitors—4.55 million in 2019—is met.

“The tourism branch is the first to be hit by the corona crisis and the last to recover,” said Amir Hayek, president of the Israel Hotel

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

Association. “Recovery is slow and cautious.” Nevertheless, he said, “our branch is very optimistic. We believe that in 2022 and as we approach 2023, we will see a full return” to previous levels.

Signs of that optimism can be found in the recent opening of several new hotels. Among them are two in Jaffa that evoke bygone eras: the Art Deco-style Elmina Hotel and the Marriott-owned Jaffa Hotel, a former convent and hospital whose lounge is situated in what was the nuns’ chapel. For the ecologically minded visitor who also prizes creature comforts, the luxurious Six Senses Shaharut resort and spa, an hour’s drive north of Eilat, offers stargazing, camelback trekking, desert vistas and private swimming pools.

In another positive development, at least for now, Israel’s famous hotel breakfast buffets, which were limited

by Covid-19 restrictions, are back, Hayek said. One of the problems for hotels, he added, is recruiting staff.

Eilat hotels are aiming to bring the number of Jordanian workers back to the pre-pandemic level. Elsewhere, hotels are employing Palestinians with work permits and are hoping to bring workers from the Philippines, all fully vaccinated.

Several iconic historical and cultural sites used the down time to spiff up. In Jerusalem, for example, the Tower of David Museum embarked on a $40 million renewal and conservation program. Among

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the additions to be completed by spring 2022 are a new permanent exhibition, improved access (including two elevators) and a new entrance pavilion with a café, right at Jaffa Gate.

In Tel Aviv, following a $100 million expansion and shift of focus, Beit Hatfutsot Diaspora Museum reopened as ANU, Museum of the Jewish People. Whereas the museum formerly concentrated mostly on Jewish history up to the founding of the State of Israel, the new focus is on the Jewish people and Jewish life today.

Tel Aviv, which brands itself as

the “nonstop city,” has resumed its year-round festivities, beginning with Cycle Tel Aviv, offering a variety of routes during Sukkot; a marathon in February; the Pride Parade in June; and a free opera-in-the-park performance in August.

Outside the cities, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority used the year to conserve heritage sites throughout the country and make them more accessible for those with disabilities.

“Conservation preserves the original finds for us and for future generations and presents them in the best way possible,” explained Zeev Margalit, the authority’s director of conservation and development. Under the supervision of professionals, the work also provided employment for

In Akko Uri Jeremias is working to reopen his celebrated Uri Buri restaurant and nearby hotel, Efendi, both of which were torched by Arab protesters in May. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

hundreds of Israelis who had been laid off because of the pandemic.

In ancient Caesarea, for example, a Roman-era theater originally provided the stage for classic Greek and Roman plays, with the Mediterranean Sea as the backdrop. In modern times, the theater has been the venue for the annual Caesarea Jazz Festival and for pop and rock performances. But the massive sound and lighting arrays for these concerts have taken their toll, so the stage had to be rebuilt.

At Masada, King Herod’s mountaintop fortress and palace near the Dead Sea, the Roman-era bathhouse had spa-like amenities, but they had deteriorated over time, Margalit said. Now the ancient hypocaust— the bath-house heating system that produced and circulated hot air under a floor that was supported by pillars—can be seen in almost its original state. The frescoes, with geometric patterns only, in keeping with Jewish tradition, are now as fresh and bright as they were in Herod’s day.

The same is true of the frescoes at Herodium, where Herod is said to be buried. There the frescoes include two nautical scenes—one of warships, their wind-filled sails billowing, and another of a boat with a mast and furled sail, propelled by oars.

At many sites, including Korazim in the North, with its magnificent first-century CE synagogue, and Avdat in the South, with its acropolis

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NATI SHOHAT/FLASH90 (BOTTOM)

Conserve and Protect Heritage sites around Israel have undergone restoration projects during the pandemic, including at (from far left) Herodium, Caesarea and Masada.

TRAVEL

SIX SENSES HOTELS & RESORTS (TOP); ISRAEL GOVERNMENT PRESS OFFICE

topped by a temple dedicated to a Nabatean king, paths have been improved to accommodate visitors with limited mobility, including those in wheelchairs.

At some destinations, the visitor centers have been revamped. “It’s a totally different experience,” said Amit Levakov, head of marketing at the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. At Megiddo and Herodium, for example, there are new multimedia presentations and computer-generated simulations. At Herodium, visitors now enter through the historic entrance to the palace, which dates from the Second Temple period.

And, Margalit added, a balcony is being built overlooking the remains of Herod’s presumed tomb and will be accompanied by a 3-D model of the tomb.

On the road to Jerusalem, the authority has opened a new interactive museum, the Khan Sha’ar Hagai—Bab el-Wad National Heritage Site. It is housed in a 19thcentury Ottoman inn where visitors

traveling from Jaffa on donkeys or in stagecoaches called “diligences” would stay overnight before the dramatic ascent to the Holy City. The museum chronicles the fierce battles to gain control of the road and end the siege of Jerusalem during Israel’s War of Independence. (Tickets to all the authority’s sites are available online at parks.org.il.)

A

s tourist restrictions begin to be lifted, airports and border crossings remain a bottleneck for incoming visitors.

When Israel reopened its gates to foreign tourists in May, initially, only groups were allowed and each individual member had to show proof of vaccination (with the exception of children) and undergo Covid testing upon arrival. At the end of June, the government announced plans for a permanent testing facility at Ben-Gurion International Airport.

Israel said it would allow individual travelers—those not part of a group tour—with proof of vaccination into

Now Boarding Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and pilot Nechama Spiegel Novak stand before her portrait at the ‘Hamsa Aleinu’ exhibit at Ben-Gurion International Airport.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

the country beginning on August 1, just as new quarantine measures were unveiled. (Travel restrictions are subject to change. Prospective visitors should check the governmental website corona.health.gov.il for the latest guidance.)

Despite these restrictions, the demand is there. In May, when Israel announced the pilot for group visits, the available slots were filled within nine minutes, according to a Tourism Ministry spokesperson. Some groups that had booked for 2020 simply rebooked for 2021 and 2022.

“The longing for experience and human interaction that so many of us feel is now translating into a massive pent-up demand for travel to Israel and beyond,” said Jeff Rubtchinsky, CEO of Ayelet Tours, Hadassah’s official travel partner. Rubtchinsky added that his company “has been working closely with the Hadassah Medical Organization to establish health protocols that ensure travelers can safely return to experiencing Israel.”

On June 6, as one of Reuven Rivlin’s last acts as president of Israel, he inaugurated “Hamsa Aleinu,” a new photography exhibit at the departures’ concourse at Ben-Gurion International Airport.

The exhibit, whose name evokes protection from harm as well as good luck, highlights the many rich partnerships within Israeli society and displays the mosaic of contemporary Israeli life through portraits, including ones of Nechama Spiegel Novak,

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Desert Oasis Luxury R&R at the new Six Senses Shaharut resort

the country’s first ultra-Orthodox female pilot, and Sanaa Mahamid, the first Muslim woman to drive a motorcycle ambulance.

“Over the last year, we have all dreamed of getting back to normal.

There have been too many painful, sad and even desperate moments,” Rivlin said at the exhibit’s opening.

He also lamented the violence that had erupted in May, when he noted that many Jews and Arabs “couldn’t see how the jigsaw pieces of Israeli society fit together into a bigger picture.” The photographs, which will be on display until the end of 2021, will help travelers “get to know the people who live and breathe true partnership,” Rivlin said.

For Akko hoteliers Evan Fallenberg and Uri Jeremias and their staffs—the living embodiment of this mosaic—the dream of true JewishArab partnership remains unbroken as they await the full return of visitors from abroad.

THINKING OF YOUR LOVED ONES DURING THE HIGH HOLIDAYS? HADASSAH’S PERPETUAL YAHRZEIT PROGRAM ENSURES THAT KADDISH WILL BE RECITED IN JERUSALEM FOR YOUR LOVED ONES. EVERY YEAR. FOREVER. PERPETUAL YAHRZEIT Kaddish will be recited annually for your loved one in perpetuity in the Fannie and Maxwell Abbell Synagogue at Hadassah Medical Center beneath Marc Chagall’s iconic stained glass windows.

Esther Hecht is a journalist and travel writer based in Jerusalem.

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

ADVANCE YAHRZEIT A reservation to ensure Kaddish will be recited for you and your loved ones upon their death. Available in standard and Enhanced Perpetual Yahrzeit.

hadassah.org/yahrzeit For further information, or to establish a Yahrzeit, call 877.212.3321 or email yahrzeit@hadassah.org.

HADASSAH ISRAEL TRAVEL To learn about future Hadassah excursions to Israel—including ones scheduled for October and November— visit hadassah.org/get-involved/ Israel-travel.

HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. ©2021 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 solicitation disclosure on page 60 is incorporated in this advertisement.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

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7/28/21 12:10 PM

FOOD

Sukkot, the Other Stuffing Holiday Challah with sweet or savory fillings

S

ukkot, the eight-day harvest festival that begins the night of September 20, is often marked by meals that feature filled and

Marzipan Challah Makes 3 loaves

CREDITS

RECIPE COURTESY OF LEHAMIM BAKERY; PHOTO BY DANIEL LAILAH

FOR THE DOUGH 5 3/4 cups all-purpose flour,

plus more as needed 1 tablespoon active dry yeast 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened 1 cup whole milk (or non dairy milk) 3 tablespoons warm water 2 eggs 1 tablespoon fine sea salt

stuffed foods. Traditionally served as a way to signal the abundance of the season, these dishes are also a harbinger of prosperity for the ensuing year

FOR THE FILLING AND TOPPING 10 ounces marzipan 1 cup sugar 1 3/4 stick (14 tablespoons)

unsalted butter, softened 1/4 cup flour 1 egg, beaten 1/2 cup coarsely chopped almonds

1. Make the dough: In the bowl

of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, combine the flour, yeast, sugar, butter, milk, water, eggs and salt and knead for about 10 minutes on medium-low speed until the dough is elastic and supple, adding extra flour by the tablespoon if necessary so the dough pulls away from the sides of the mixer bowl.

2. Lightly grease a large bowl, transfer the dough to the bowl, cover with a clean kitchen towel and let rise in a warm place until the dough doubles in volume, 1 1/2 hours.

3. Make the filling: In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the marzipan, sugar and butter and SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

as the High Holidays come to a close.

Lately, though, instead of sticking to the more expected memula’im (filled classics such as cabbage, toma-

beat at medium-high speed until creamy and incorporated, 2 minutes. Add the flour and continue to mix until a soft dough forms, 1 minute more. Transfer to a bowl, cover and refrigerate until firm, 1-2 minutes.

4. Divide the marzipan dough into 9 equal parts and roll each part into a thin log about 8 inches long; arrange on a large plate, cover and chill until ready to use.

5. Prepare the challahs: Divide the dough into 3 equal pieces, then divide each of those pieces of dough into 3 equal-sized pieces.

6. Shape each dough strip on a lightly floured work surface into 2 x 9-inch rectangles and place a marzipan strip in the middle. Seal the edges of the dough around the marzipan. Lightly roll the stuffed strip and repeat with the rest of the challah dough and marzipan logs. Braid 3 strips into a challah; repeat with remaining 6 strips to form 3 challahs.

7. Place the challahs on parchment-lined baking sheets, cover and let rise until almost doubled in volume, 45 minutes to 1 hour.

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During the last 15 minutes of rising, preheat the oven to 400°.

Brush the challahs with the beaten egg and sprinkle generously with almonds. Bake until golden, 25 to 30 minutes. Cool on a rack and serve.

Challah Stuffed with Mushrooms, Leeks and Za’atar Makes 2 small loaves

FOR THE FILLING 2 tablespoons extra-virgin

olive oil 1 leek, white and light green parts only, diced 10 ounces button or cremini mushrooms, stemmed and thinly sliced 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon za’atar 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt

FOR THE DOUGH 2 teaspoons active dry

yeast 1 cup lukewarm water (about 110°), divided 1/4 cup plus 1/2 teaspoon sugar

YESCHEF © 2020

Erez Komarovsky in his garden

By Adeena Sussman

Komarovsky, who is widely acknowledged as an originator of the trend, stuff a challah. It was at his house in the pastoral northern Israeli hamlet of Mattat, where much of his almost three acres of land is carpeted with a multilevel fruit, vegetable and herb garden. After feeding his chickens and assembling a basket of ripe produce, we returned to his rustic stone kitchen, where he proceeded to fill logs of challah dough with garlic that he had poached over low heat

earlier that day. Then, he braided the strands with edible flowers and scallions, let the loaves rise again and baked them to a fragrant, fluffy fusion of garden and gluten.

“There’s nothing better than a stuffed loaf of bread,” said Komarovsky, who helms a popular catering company, teaches private cooking classes from his home and serves as a judge on Israeli television’s top-rated Chef Games. He also sees this edible artform as a way to modernize one

3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour,

plus more for dusting 1 tablespoon kosher salt 2 teaspoons vegetable oil, plus more for greasing 2 tablespoons honey 2 large eggs 1 teaspoon za’atar

1. Make the filling: Heat the oil

in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the leek and sauté until soft and light golden, about 7 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook, stirring frequently, until they are deep golden and almost dry (mushrooms are 90 percent water, and you don’t want any moisture soaking the dough), about 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the za’atar and salt. Set aside to cool completely, then divide in half.

2. While the filling is cooling, start on the challah dough: Mix the yeast with 1/4 cup of the lukewarm water and 1/2 teaspoon of the sugar in a small bowl and let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes.

3. Put the flour in a large bowl.

Make a well in the center and pour the yeast mixture into the well.

4. Whisk together the salt, vege-

table oil, honey, the remaining 1/4 cup sugar, the remaining 3/4 cup lukewarm water and 1 egg in a separate medium bowl.

5. Gradually stir the liquid

mixture into the flour, about 1/2 cup at a time. When the dough becomes sticky and difficult to stir, turn it out onto a floured surface and knead by hand (adding a little more flour if necessary to keep it from sticking) until smooth and elastic, about 3 minutes.

6. Grease a large bowl with vegetable oil. Shape the dough into a ball and set it in the bowl. Cover with a damp kitchen towel and let stand in a warm place until it has doubled in size, about 40 minutes.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

7. Line a baking sheet with

parchment paper.

8. Gently punch down the dough and turn it out onto a floured surface. Divide the dough in half, then divide each half into three equal pieces (you’ll be making two loaves). Working with one piece and keeping the other two covered with a damp kitchen towel to prevent them from drying out, roll the dough into a 9-by-3-inch rectangle.

Position the rectangle with one long side facing you. Sprinkle 1/3 of your half-batch of mushroom mixture right down the center, leaving about 1 inch exposed on each end. Fold the long side closest to you over to meet the other side. Press the edges gently

I 41 I hadassahmagazine.org

to seal and roll so you have a rope. Be careful not to press too hard, so the filling stays inside the dough.

9. Repeat to create three filled ropes that are the same length.

10. Align the ropes side by side on the prepared baking sheet.

Squeeze and pinch the ends together at the top. Braid the ropes loosely—like you’re braiding hair—then pinch the ends together and tuck them underneath.

Repeat with the other dough and filling.

11. Cover with a damp kitchen towel and let sit until nearly doubled in size, 20 minutes or so.

Preheat the oven to 350°.

12. Lightly beat the remaining egg with 1 tablespoon water and brush it over the top of each challah. Sprinkle with the za’atar.

13. Bake the challahs for 25 to 30 minutes, rotating the baking sheet once halfway through the cooking time, until deep golden brown all over—check the bottoms as well. Let cool and serve at room temperature.

EXCERPTED FROM ‘SHUK’ BY EINAT ADMONY AND JANNA GUR (ARTISAN BOOKS). COPYRIGHT © 2019. PHOTOGRAPH BY QUENTIN BACON

toes, peppers and zucchini), chefs and bakers in Israel—and sabras living abroad—are adding a new culinary category to the Sukkot stuffing story: bread. Instagram food accounts and, increasingly, cookbooks, come replete with gorgeous loaves of challah and other baked goods that, when torn open, reveal fillings ranging from bitter greens to mushrooms and even marzipan.

I’ll never forget the first time I watched Israeli master baker Erez

FOOD

M

YESCHEF © 2020

Stuffed challah à la Erez Komarovsky

of the sacred cows of Jewish cooking. “Challah was always sort of untouchable. It was sesame seeds, poppy seeds or nothing. I wanted to change that.”

The most exciting part about eating a stuffed challah is slicing or tearing the bread open to discover the sweet or savory filling. “When you think about it, it is a form of glorified sandwich,” said Komarovsky, who will sometimes eat stuffed breads in lieu of a meal. “But let’s be honest— the best sandwich that ever existed.”

aking a stuffed challah is certainly a creative endeavor, but it also requires some skill and discipline. In most cases, the three strands of a challah are each “opened” so that a strip of filling can be arranged on top, then the filling is sealed inside the logs before braiding.

“Since it’s the ultimate combination of cooking and baking, you need to apply elements of both,” said Uri Scheft, owner of Tel Aviv’s influential Lehamim Bakery and author of the Breaking Breads cookbook.

To that end, Scheft—whose spicy, feta-stuffed challah appears in my book, Sababa, and who created an iconic marzipan-filled challah that he sells at his bakery around the High Holidays (recipe on page 40)— adheres to some simple rules.

“Make sure to start with an excellent, elastic and pliant challah dough recipe,” he said. “And never overstuff. Too much filling disturbs the balance and the filling can leak

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or burst, then burn.” Rather than making the third challah from his classic recipe, which makes three loaves, he reserves the final piece of dough and incorporates whatever ingredients he has lying around his bakery or home kitchen. “Caramelized onions, garlic, cheeses, herbs—the combinations are only limited by your imagination.”

Popular Israeli baker Bat-Chen Diamant, who studied the craft at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, first created what has become one of her most popular recipes, a za’atar-stuffed laffa bread, when her daughter returned from their garden clutching a large handful of herbs. (Laffa is a pita-like flatbread that is ubiquitous in Israel.)

“Israelis love abundance, and stuffed foods are the epitome of that,” said Diamant, who leads baking classes from her home in Moshav Ein Vered in central Israel.

“We love filling things with other things, it’s a huge part of our culinary culture.” Diamant recommends using bread flour or pizza flour—each with higher levels of gluten than all-purpose flour—for laffa. “Those flours make doughs that are more forgiving and stronger at the same time.”

With Sukkot feasts in mind, New York restaurateur and author Einat Admony suggests serving the mushroom- and leek-stuffed challah from her cookbook, Shuk, as a side or even a main course.

“It could be an entire brunch on its own,” said Admony. Or try the recipe, shared on pages 40 to 41, as a light lunch in your sukkah accompanied by a bowl of soup or a salad.

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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‫ז כ ר ה ו ע ל ה י ין‬

ARTS

‘Queen Esther’

Bridging Two Worlds Black and Jewish identities converge in art

By Hilary Danailova

COURTESY OF AYEOLA OMOLARA KAPLAN

B

arely out of college, Ayeola Omolara Kaplan has been surprised at the demand not only for her provocative visual art, but also for her perspective as a Black Jew in America. Kaplan, 23, a painter and illustrator, has been featured in Jewish publications and she spoke about the relationship between her art and her activism at a panel at the 2020 Gershman Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival. In October, she and her art are slated to appear at the Suncoast Black Arts Collaborative in Bradenton, Fla., an event highlighting art and racial justice.

“It’s been mostly Jewish people, Jewish feminists, who have been supportive,” said Kaplan, a 2021 graduate of the New College of Florida who today lives in her hometown of Atlanta. “That surprised me because growing up, I felt a little on the outside. I was the only Black girl in Jewish spaces.”

Kaplan is part of a generation of

Black Jewish women, many of them Millennials or Gen Xers, who are using art—paintings, drawings, multimedia works and film—to share and explore their multiethnic perspectives.

She and others, including filmmaker Rebecca S’manga Frank and sculptor and multimedia artist Olivia Guterson, are doing so at a moment when Jewish attention is trained on diversity within the Jewish community, an issue amplified by last year’s murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the ensuing national conversation around social and racial justice.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

Ayeola Omolara Kaplan

These young artists’ productions often feature Black themes more prominently than Jewish motifs. “I think there’s a lot more demand for work that deals with the Black experience than for art about the Jewish experience,” asserted Sarah Anita Clunis, curator of African Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

Part of that has to do with heightened racial awareness. But Clunis, who was born and raised in Jamaica by a Sephardic Jewish mother and a father of African ancestry, also notes the traditional Jewish religious prohibition against representational art. Historically, Jewish-themed art was more likely to be Judaica—decorative ritual objects and illuminated manuscripts—rather than fine art or portraiture. In addition, prior to the 20th century, which saw a profusion of secular Jewish artists like Marc Chagall and Mark Rothko, relatively few Jews had prominent artistic careers.

In contrast, Clunis said, “there is a vibrant African tradition of creating representational art,” which extends to the murals found in many Black communities and the street art associated with hip-hop culture. Indeed, the figures in Kaplan’s paintings are representational on multiple levels; her works feature Black civil rights activists Malcolm X and Angela Davis as well as figures—often nude women—advocating for social and political issues, including Black Lives Matter, legalizing marijuana and prison reform.

Kaplan (ayeola.org) emphasizes her message using saturated hues, curved lines, bold iconography and accompanying text—a style reminiscent of tattoo and street art. In It Is Right to Rebel, for example, a sword (emblazoned with the word “reparations”) and serpentine tails adorn a woman wearing a face mask who has

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R

ebecca s’manga frank (rebeccasmangafrank.com) can also recall the moment her Black and Jewish identities crystallized in her art. The 33-yearold spent six months in 2019 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she was cast for the first time as a Jewish character, the dual role of Manke, the Jewish prostitute and love interest, and Dorothee, the actress who plays her, in Paula Vogel’s play Indecent, about the production of Sholem Asch’s 1918 Yiddish play God of Vengeance. In rehearsal, recalled the filmmaker and actor who lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, she “told Jewish stories for the first time. There was lots of interaction with the local

Rebecca S’manga Frank (right) in ‘Indecent’

Jewish community; we’d have Shabbat dinners together.”

It was Frank’s first engagement with Jewish life since her bat mitzvah almost 20 years earlier. She grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., with her Ashkenazi Jewish mother, a University of Southern California professor who had separated from Frank’s father, a linguist and diplomat from the Kingdom of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland).

Frank’s theater work shifted into film during the pandemic. This spring, as a 2020-2021 New Jewish Culture fellow in the arts organization Brooklyn Jews, Frank filmed an adaptation of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, which she titled My Blewish Wedding, using themes in the classic Yiddish play about the possession of a young woman by the soul of a dead person to process her feelings about police violence. The film is slated to be shown by Brooklyn Jews in February 2022 (brooklynjews.com).

Frank’s film explores the death of Elijah McClain, a Black man who died after a 2019 encounter with the police. Elijah is the “dead soul” who possesses a woman on her wedding day.

Similar to The Dybbuk, this ultimately leads to a trial between the living and

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

the dead—inspired by the trial of Derek Chauvin, convicted for killing George Floyd. Frank recalled “waiting for the verdict, like the Jews waiting for the Ten Commandments at Sinai,” she said.

Frank is also a fellow at LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture at New York’s 14th Street Y, where she is developing a performance piece about relationships through the lens of Jewish texts, starting with Eve. “I used to be pretty much the only Black Jew I knew. Now that’s changing,” said Frank, who has found peers through the online community Black Jewish Liberation Collective and through Ammud, a Jewish educational organization for Jews of Color. “I’m being seen through my art instead of as a token. And I can help make that bridge because I am one.”

T

he intricate lattices of black and white in Olivia Guterson’s paintings and sculptures reference not only her biracial parentage, but also both her maternal grandmother’s Hebrew-embroidered lacework and the filigree brooches Guterson saw at Black churches growing up.

“I think there’s so much complex-

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JENNY GRAHAM

a Star of David on her forehead, a partial self-portrait of the artist. “No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police” says a swirl around her head.

“I never create anything just to be beautiful. I want it to say something,” explained Kaplan, who grew up in a Reform Jewish community. While Kaplan’s Black references are ubiquitous and explicit, the Star of David shows up in several other pieces, too.

And paintings like Queen Esther— portraying the Purim heroine in hoop earrings and fishnet stockings, guzzling wine labeled “Haman’s Tears”— draw on her Jewish upbringing.

Kaplan was inspired to sketch as a child by Japanese anime. But it wasn’t until college that she refined a style that combines activism with Jewish spirituality. In a class on Judaism and ecology, Kaplan had an epiphany about the way Judaism cherishes the natural world. “I’m inspired by the way religion plays into social justice movements,” she said. “Fighting for a better world doesn’t have to be a secular act.”

ARTS

COURTESY OF OLIVIA GUTERSON

ity in black and white, and the expanse of what’s in between,” explained Guterson, 30, who lives in Detroit. High contrast art, she noted, also requires greater “precision, intentionality and focus.”

Those qualities have been evident in her art since she left a series of corporate jobs to focus on painting two years ago. She has exhibited at Art Week Miami, Detroit’s Shinola Hotel and ROI gallery in Jerusalem.

Her murals grace both indoor and outdoor spaces around Detroit.

Guterson (midnightolive.com) has also completed several notable projects for the Jewish arts and culture organization Reboot, including an oversized illuminated menorah and last year’s installation At Our Table at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The latter reimagined, in single-use plastics, the Passover table Guterson grew up with—contrasting

the renunciation of bread and plastic as contemporary staples of life.

Guterson’s African-American Catholic mother and Ashkenazi Jewish father met in their native Seattle, raising their daughter with both religious traditions. As a child on the New Mexico Navajo reservation where her father taught, she was immersed in the stimulating local culture. “The Southwest has so many incredible landscapes, plants and textile patterns,” said the self-taught artist. “And because it was so poor, community was vital.”

Today, Guterson said, her work reflects the commonalities she observed as a child of a hybrid background. “How these pieces connect is a part of me,” she reflected. “And art is how I can incorporate all that.”

Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.

Olivia Guterson in her studio

Looted Art’s Backstory Shifting focus from theft to recovery

By Robert Goldblum

T

he two paintings on prominent display are like sisters yanked apart by family misfortune, one orphaned here, the other there, with no direction home.

Henri Matisse created the lusciously hued Girl in Yellow and Blue with Guitar and the sensuous Daisies in the ominous year of 1939—the year the Nazis invaded Poland and the world convulsed. The paintings were housed together for a fleeting time in the collection of the noted French Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who fled Nazi-occupied Paris in 1940, leaving behind thousands of artworks. The two works were plundered by the Nazis, shipped off to the Louvre, then a Nazi storage depot for stolen art. Girl in Yellow and Blue with Guitar ended up in the hands of Hitler henchman Hermann Göring. After the war, the Matisses were recovered and returned to Rosenberg by the Allies. He sold the pieces, and they were shuttled through the art world in the hands of private collectors and somehow found each other again, more than six decades after the war, at the Art Institute of Chicago. The two paintings are survivors, of a kind. They have borne witness.

The backstory of these two paintings’ journeys—and how the weight of history bears on Nazi-looted works of art—forms the mandate of “Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art,” slated to run

August 20 through January 9, 2022, at The Jewish Museum in Manhattan (thejewishmuseum.org). If you have followed the legal and ethical twists and turns of looted art cases in the courts in recent years, the show can almost feel ripped from the headlines.

(Stories like the one centering on Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, made into the 2015 film Woman in Gold, have proliferated of late.) The exhibit’s concept, employing the literary device of a narrative arc through time and space, is a daring one for a museum exhibition.

With 53 works of art, including some from the masters of Modernism, 80 Jewish ceremonial objects and a range of photographs and archival documents on loan from many leading cultural institutions, the show is a revelation. It shifts the focus from theft to recovery, and it places a special emphasis on the actual physical spaces through which the stolen art moved. Storage depots and collection points set up by the

Allies in Munich and Offenbach that acted as way stations take on a moral weight, as do the men and women who cared for and cataloged them.

“Afterlives” gives fresh meaning to the phrase “a sense of place,” place becoming synonymous with refuge and sanctuary.

The viewer, for example, sees a wall-size archival photo of “The Room of the Martyrs” in Paris, the former Jeu de Paume gallery used by the Nazi art-looting outfit to store 22,000 stolen “degenerate” works— and alongside it, miracle-like, three of the very paintings recovered from it.

T

he jewish museum’s own role as a depot for Judaica from devastated European synagogues, a story that has not been told until now, comes into sharp relief, as does the work of the organization Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., which collected and distributed heirless Jewish property in the United States and worked with

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

Robert Goldblum is the former managing editor of The Jewish Week.

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© SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), N.Y./IMAGE PROVIDED BY THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Plundered ’Girl in Yellow and Blue with Guitar’ (left) and ‘Daisies,’ both by Henri Matisse, were taken by the Nazis from the collection of French Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg.

The Jewish Museum in the process.

In the spirit of William Faulkner’s line about the South—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”—“Afterlives” brings the theft-and-recovery story arc into the present. Its curators, Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff, commissioned four contemporary artists, Maria Eichhorn, Hadar Gad, Dor Guez and Lisa Oppenheim, to create works that reflect the themes of presence and absence raised by the exhibition.

Using archival photos showing sites where looted art was housed, Gad, for example, who lives in Israel, creates poignant paintings of stacks of yellowing books piled like discarded waste. Guez, whose family blends Christian Palestinian and Tunisian Jewish strands, weaves his background into objects and photographs that speak of memory and identity. Featured in his piece is a letter in an ancient Judeo-Arabic dialect—bearing a blue water-damage mark, like an abstract watercolor— written during his grandparents’ perilous journey from Nazi-occupied Tunisia to Israel.

In discussions about the exhibit, co-curator Alexander likes to talk about the “front of a painting” and the “back of a painting.” When viewers come upon Girl in Yellow and Blue with Guitar and Daisies, the front of the paintings, i.e., their dazzling sense of color and lyrical lines, will be strikingly apparent.

What won’t be, and what “Afterlives” provides in both heartbreaking and redemptive ways, are their backstories, the history-tossed, harrowing journeys they took to end up, side by side, two sisters back together again on a museum wall in New York City.

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CROSSWORD

The Ultimate Alfresco Jewish Holiday

Answers on page 62

The Alfresco Jewish Holiday

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©MIKHAIL ROZANOV, FROM ‘SYNAGOGUES: MARVELS OF JUDAISM’ (RIZZOLI)

Faith and Dispersal Yearning for sacred spaces | By Leah Finkelshteyn Synagogues: Marvels of Judaism

By Leyla Uluhanli (Rizzoli) In this celebration of the beauty and variety of Jewish religious architecture, Leyla Uluhanli, an award-winning interior designer, brings together examples of Jewish sacred spaces, both ancient and modern, from throughout the Diaspora. Her oversized coffee-table

book—the large format is necessary to showcase the magnificent photography within—opens with a primer on Jewish history and the development of the synagogue by Aaron W. Hughes, an historian and professor of Jewish studies at the University of Rochester.

His introduction links the services and sanctuaries of today to the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem—

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and their destruction—as well as to subsequent expulsions of the Jews from the Land of Israel. Indeed, worship, tradition and dispersal are reappearing motifs in Synagogues.

They connect the 60 featured buildings despite a rich variety of architectural styles and far-ranging locales from East Hampton, N.Y., to the Caucasus area of Russia.

Each section of Synagogues, which is organized geographically, opens with an essay about the local Jewish community and the influence of regional arts, culture and customs on synagogue design. Painted floral medallions and hanging lamps that adorn the Yu Aw Synagogue in Herat, Afghanistan, built in the 14th century and currently used as a school for local children, reflect the splendor of nearby mosques.

The Great Synagogue of Wlodawa in Poland, now part of a museum, was built in the grand Baroque style common among local churches in the 18th century. Its elaborate painted and gilded plasterwork ark was installed in 1936 after a fire destroyed the previous one. It is one of the best-preserved large synagogues in Poland.

Other featured synagogues remain active houses of worship, such as The Fannie and Maxwell Abbell Synagogue at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, a sacred space gloriously lit by Marc Chagall’s stained-glass windows depicting the 12 tribes of Israel. Then there is the light-filled Gates of the Grove (Shaarey Pardes) sanctuary at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons (shown on the cover of this issue), built in 1989. Architect Norman Jaffe’s cedar interior is a reference to the once-prevalent wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe, and the distinctive angling and staggering of

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the woodwork, according to Jaffe, is meant to remind worshipers of a Jew “bent in prayer.”

“Each of these historic buildings has been hallowed by spiritual journeys, communal prayers, meditations, and songs,” photographer Judy Glickman Lauder writes in the foreword, “by candles kindled, Torah portions chanted, rituals enacted, and milestones marked.”

Synagogues takes readers on a journey, too, a pilgrimage of distinct Jewish spaces near and far and the tenacious threads of history, faith and community that unite them all.

ONE BOOK, ONE HADASSAH Join us Thursday, October 28, at 7 p.m. ET as Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein interviews Judy Batalion, author of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, our October One Book, One Hadassah selection. The New York Times best seller, our first nonfiction pick, brings to life little-known stories of rebellion and bravery by Jewish women who acted as couriers, spies, smugglers and saboteurs in the ghettos of Poland. The event is free and open to all. To register, go to hadassahmagazine.org.

READING FOR INSPIRATION: BOOKS THAT SUSTAIN AND UPLIFT ewish tales, from the sacrifice of Isaac, recited during Rosh Hashanah, to Jonah and the whale, read during Yom Kippur, provide spiritual insights that sustain us through the year. A few new books, including a biography of a religious and civil rights leader, essays from Israeli women sharing their personal struggles and stories from a pastoral counselor, continue in that tradition, telling powerful tales that inspire us not just during the holiest time on the Jewish calendar but throughout our lives.

Among them are Gabi (only first names are disclosed), who shares her decades-long struggles with eating disorders; Ahava Emunah, who fought ovarian cancer and passed away weeks before the book’s publication; and Yaffy, an AfroLatina Jew who shares her stories about growing up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Florida as well as her fears as a young wife married to an active-duty officer in the Israel Defense Forces.

Their stories, and the others in the book, are inspiring, heartbreaking, intimate and, yes, layered reflections of the lives of observant Jewish women today.

Layers: Personal Narratives of Struggle, Resilience, and Growth from Jewish Women

By Shira Lankin Sheps (Toby Press)

Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement

By Julian E. Zelizer (Yale University Press)

About four years ago, Shira Lankin Sheps, a social worker and amateur photographer, began The Layers Project as a space on social media for religiously observant Jewish women to share stories about their personal challenges and discuss taboo or stigmatized topics around health, family, religion and careers in a supportive community. The Facebook page expanded into an online magazine (thelayersprojectmagazine.com) featuring longer profiles and articles around issues affecting Jewish women.

Sheps’s latest project is Layers, a collection of personal stories from 34 Israeli women, many of whom she met through The Layers Project.

It is likely not an exaggeration to say that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is one of the most often cited Jewish figures today. The iconic picture of the rabbi standing with civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., at the Selma civil rights march in 1965 has been featured in numerous articles and discussions about the Jewish contributions to racial justice. How Heschel came to symbolize “a seamless connection that some believed existed between the Jewish tradition and social activism,” as author Julian E. Zelizer writes in his prologue, is the focus of a new biography.

Born in Warsaw, influenced by

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Hasidism and trained in Orthodox institutions, Heschel became one of the leading religious thinkers of the 20th century. The book describes his time as a professor of mysticism at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary and how his fiery spiritual rhetoric inspired others to join the fight for a more equitable world. It also describes his activism in the context of his time—an era when many religious leaders were called to social justice—as well as how he wrestled with the religious implications of the Holocaust. For Heschel, religion and piety, in the service of justice, were the answer to the existential questions of his time—a piousness he connected with wonder at the world. “Our goal should be to live life with radical amazement…. get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted,” Heschel famously wrote. “Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

Reaching for Comfort: What I Saw, What I Learned, and How I Blew it Training as a Pastoral Counselor

By Sherri Mandell (Ben Yehuda Press) In her latest book, writer Sherri Mandel shares her deeply personal journey to becoming a pastoral counselor—a relatively new profession in Israel. Through short vignettes describing her interactions with patients and staff at different

hospitals in Jerusalem, including Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, she recounts the lessons she learns about how to talk to and offer “small moments of comfort” to the sick or grieving.

Mandell has three goals in pursuing her new profession: “To be able to help those who suffer. To understand my own suffering and how I can use it to help others. To be able to pray.”

The American olah is acquainted with loss and grief. Twenty years ago, her oldest son, Koby, was murdered by Arab terrorists at age 13 outside the West Bank town of Tekoa. Throughout the book, she describes how that loss continues to color her encounters as a pastoral counselor and how she nevertheless learns to use her pain to help others express their own grief. She writes of her amazement at the hope and deep connections she observes while visiting grieving mothers, both Jewish and Arab; sitting beside sick children; and counseling men and women steadfastly standing vigil over their ailing loved ones. “I had witnessed that devotion again and again, as families cared for their loved ones in the hospital,” she writes. “That love transcended the fragility of the body.”

Leah Finkelshteyn is senior editor and book editor of Hadassah Magazine.

NONFICTION

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

By Dara Horn (W.W. Norton) Dara Horn’s new book is not for the faint-hearted. Appropriately timed to confront the worrying rise in antisemitism, its unnerving title reflects Horn’s thesis that individuals

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both Jewish and nonJewish are obsessed with selective memories of the past that focus on a “dejewing” process in many parts of the world without paying much attention to the Jewish present— which she calls a “profound affront to human dignity.”

A Hebrew and Yiddish scholar and the author of five novels, Horn got an early start as a published writer: The essay she alludes to in her introduction about visiting concentration camps was originally printed in Hadassah Magazine when she was a teenager. In People Love Dead Jews, Horn continues her exploration of “the strange and sickening ways in which the world’s affection for dead Jews shapes the present moment, leaning into the “distorted” public interest in past Jewish suffering, which she writes she had previously mistaken as a sign of respect for living Jews.

With brutal honesty, she bursts treasured myths like the changing of Jewish names at Ellis Island and tackles international icons like Anne Frank, whose appeal, she posits, lies in her lack of a future. “An Anne Frank who lived might have told us what she saw at Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and people might not have liked what she had to say…. The most devastating fact of her posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden, is [that] we know what she would’ve said, because other people have said it, and we don’t want to hear it.”

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Fiercely, ferociously, courageously and backed with meticulous research, Horn challenges readers to confront the reasons for the fascination with Jewish deaths, titling each chapter after a different type of dead Jew that few people know about: the “Frozen Jews” of Harbin, China—thousands of Russian Jewish entrepreneurs who were imported to populate a junction on the Trans-Siberia Railway until White Russian thugs and occupying Japanese seized their property and rendered them penniless in one generation; and “Executed Jews”—Soviet Jewish artists and actors like Benjamin Zuskin who were baited by the system with support and recognition, later forced to denounce their Jewish identity or culture in order to be accepted, then murdered by Stalin in 1952.

At its core, People Love Dead Jews (an excerpt starts on page 16) is a meditation on time and identity in which Horn ultimately reasserts the vitality of Jewish life, finding some measure of redemption in traditional religious practice and study.

—Rahel Musleah Rahel Musleah leads “NamaStay at Home,” virtual tours of Jewish India and other cultural events (explorejewishindia.com).

“To save one life is to save the world entire.”

— The Talmud

This High Holiday season, as we seek spiritual and physical renewal for ourselves and our loved ones, let us also remember those in Israel who nurture and renew life every day. Whether it’s treating civilians wounded in terror and rocket attacks or vaccinating them against Covid-19, no organization in Israel saves more lives than Magen David Adom.

Magen David Adom is not government-funded. Its 27,000 volunteer EMTs and paramedics and 4,000 full-time professionals rely on support from people like you for the vehicles, supplies, and equipment they need to perform their lifesaving work.

From Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind All-of-a-Kind Family

by June Cummins with Alexandra Dunietz (Yale University Press)

No gift will help Israel more this coming year. Support Magen David Adom. Shanah tovah.

Five sisters, each two years apart in age, gamboled through the streets of New York City’s Lower East Side in the early 20th century, clad in identical dresses sewn by their fastidious Mama so that they would be “all of a kind.” These beloved characters are, of course, Ella, Henny, Sarah, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

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Charlotte and Gertie Brenner, whose adventures and misadventures were chronicled with loving simplicity by author Sydney Taylor, born Sarah Brenner. The daughters of a poor immigrant family, they were the first young Jewish characters from a mainstream publisher to be introduced to American children.

The series was semi-autobiographical, based on Taylor and her own sisters, whose actual names are given to the quasi-fictional

characters (although author Sarah morphed into Sydney during her adolescence). The books emphasized the importance of Jewish ritual and experience as well as the urge toward “Americanization.” These tandem themes are ably explored by the late June Cummins in her impeccably researched, scholarly biography of Taylor that is as readable and engrossing as Taylor’s own delightful stories. (Cummins, who suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, passed away in 2018 before her work on the biography was completed. A debt of gratitude is owed to her academic colleague Alexandra Dunietz, who brought Cummins’s work to fruition.)

“Taylor was a transformational

figure not only in American children’s literature but in American Jewish life as well,” Cummins writes. She brought Jewish culture and themes into the American mainstream, “enlarging the public’s understanding and increasing its acceptance of American Jews.”

Taylor’s parents, Morris and Cecilia Marowitz Brenner, emigrated from Germany in 1900, moving into a crowded Lower East Side packed with multigenerational immigrant families. Tribute is paid in the biography to the impact the dedicated educators of the city’s public school system had on the young children of poor immigrants. Similar attention is paid to the settlement house movement, a social, educational and

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cultural organization that opened new worlds to Jewish immigrants of all ages. Cummins, an honest biographer, observes that while Taylor’s fictional Mama is portrayed as compassionate and understanding, the actual Brenner mother exuded “Germanic superiority” and was aloof, critical and demanding. She hypothesizes that the Mama of the tales was based on Lillian Wald, the much loved founder of the Henry Street Settlement, which Taylor frequented.

The family eventually left the Lower East Side for the Bronx, where Sarah attended Morris High School and reinvented herself as Sydney—a name she considered more American (i.e., less Jewish).

New social and intellectual awareness catapulted her into the world of socialist affiliations, including membership in the Young People’s Socialist League and taking courses at the leftist Rand School. After a series of adolescent romances, she married a budding pharmacist, Ralph Schneider, in 1925, in a civil ceremony at Brooklyn’s City Hall.

He later changed their surname from the Yiddish schneider, which means tailor, to the more American-sounding Taylor.

The marriage was a difficult one, their home devoid of what Taylor herself described in her diary as “… the inner glow of my childhood days when the observance of the ancient and time worn customs played

so important a part in my life.”

And Cummins describes Taylor’s strained relationship with their only daughter, Joanne. However, Taylor’s publishing success, as well as her visits to libraries and schools throughout the country, afforded her gratification and pleasure.

Even as adults, summers brought the Brenner sisters, who remained close throughout their long lives, to Camp Cejwin in Port Jervis, N.Y., where Taylor wrote and produced dramatic plays designed to “…expand the children’s understanding of the spirit and culture of Judaism.” Despite her own Jewish ambivalence, she spent 40 summers at Cejwin, often prioritizing her commitment to the Jewish summer

“Dara Horn has an uncommon mastery of the literary essay.”

—Tom Reiss

“A searing investigation of modern-day antisemitism, in all its disguises and complications.”

—Ruth Franklin

“An extraordinary story— so cadenced and so moving.”

—Edmund de Waal

“Grippingly told—a wonderful melding of the personal and the political, the family and the historical.”

—Philippe Sands

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camp over the writing and publicizing of her wildly successful books.

From Sarah to Sydney is a long literary journey through early 20th-century Jewish life, from the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side to the relative affluence of the Bronx, from the joys of a successful career to the dilemmas of assimilation.

As children, Jewish and nonJewish alike, continue to read the All-of-a Kind-Family stories, so adult readers will also gain both pleasure and knowledge from this honest and unflinching biography of the woman who created them.

—Gloria Goldreich Gloria Goldreich’s latest novel is The Guests of August.

FICTION

The Woman with the Blue Star

By Pam Jenoff (Park Row) Pam Jenoff’s latest historical novel set during the Holocaust is a tribute to courage and the Jewish will to survive.

Her carefully crafted and well-researched story focuses on the surprising relationship between two young women: Sadie Gault, a Jew who hides from the Nazis with her father and pregnant mother in

the sewers of Krakow, Poland; and Ella Stepanek, an affluent Catholic living in the city with her widowed stepmother. As the story of their increasingly intertwined lives unfolds, the book alternates chapter by chapter between the two friends’ perspectives.

Ella is wandering around Krakow and worrying about her fiancé, who has joined the Polish Resistance, when she spies Sadie peeking out from a sewer grate. The two eventually begin talking and take a liking to each other. Realizing Sadie and her family’s desperate straits, Ella decides to supply them with food. It is a dangerous decision. If Ella’s despised stepmother, who has taken a fancy to German officers, finds out about the

It’s the Hanukkah event of the season… and the feud of the century.

“The Matzah Ball had me laughing out loud… an all-around terrific read.”

—DEBBIE MACOMBER,

#1 New York Times bestselling author

Pick up your copy today in print, ebook or audio.

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7/12/21 10:38 AM

“I broke into the house I grew up in to steal back my childhood.”

–The Orphan’s Daughter Named to Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2020

arrangement, both young women’s lives, and those of the Jews hiding in the sewers, would be at risk.

Jenoff describes the sewers’ dank and squalid conditions, the encroaching rats and the need to keep silent in order to avoid discovery as well as the persistent hunger, thirst and psychological pressures.

The Gaults, who are not observant, share their hiding place with the Rosenbergs, an Orthodox Jewish family, and Sadie falls in love with Saul, the son. As the war continues, the two families’ tenacity in such wretched conditions as well as Ella’s efforts to help them are stark reminders that even in dire circumstances, compassion and goodness can sometimes counter despair and hopelessness.

An epilogue to Sadie and Ella’s stories brings the action to the present, offering a few unexpected twists—and a meaningful conclusion to this heartbreaking but uplifting story.

As Jenoff acknowledges in an author’s note, The Woman with the Blue Star, her eighth book, owes a debt to a 30-year-old nonfiction book, In the Sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall, which describes how Jews hid for months in the ancient sewers of the Ukrainian city, enduring appalling conditions in their will to survive.

—Stewart Kampel Stewart Kampel was a longtime editor at The New York Times.

Three Sisters

By Heather Morris (St. Martin’s Press) There are clear similarities between Heather Morris’s newest novel, Three Sisters, and her two previous best sellers, The Tattooist of Auschwitz

and Cilka’s Journey.

They are all set, in large part, in the AuschwitzBirkenau camps and all are based on true stories.

All three also center on innocent young people caught in horrendous circumstances. In Three Sisters, the harrowing plight of the protagonists takes readers on an emotional roller coaster—despite what can best be described as the author’s pedestrian, workman-like prose.

It is 1929 Slovakia, and Menachem Meller is about to undergo what proves to be fatal surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his neck, a souvenir of his time as a soldier in World War I. He gathers his daughters—Cibi, then 7; Magda, 5; and Livi, 3—and presciently makes them promise they will always care for each other, “to stay together, no matter what.”

That promise unites the three as, 12 years later, Livi and Cibi are taken to Auschwitz by the invading Nazi forces. Magda, who had hidden in the forest, is later captured and transported to the camp, where she reunites with her sisters.

The three find Good Samaritans among the staff, kapos—fellow prisoners assigned by the SS to supervisory duties—and even German officers who take pity on them, providing food and easier work assignments. Later, on a forced death march from Auschwitz, they are saved by Russian soldiers led by a Jewish officer. Is all this possible?

The book is based on real events and the experiences of actual survivors,

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A father’s life in the Hebrew National Orphan Home colors his daughter’s life in Jewish Baltimore.

“Engrossing, humorous, and heartfelt.”

—The Jewish Book Council

“Epic and indelible."

—Kirkus Reviews (*starred review)

jancherubin.com

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but despite an author’s note at the end, it is difficult to say which of the incredible details actually happened and which are dramatic license.

Does it really matter? Probably not, because there is enough real pain here: the rancor from neighbors and former friends who hurl “rotten fruit and stale bread at their heads, yelling their joy” as the Jews are marched off to the camps; the disease (typhus is a repeat visitor) in the camps; the violence, the cold, the hunger. The uncertainty about what misstep will lead to the crematorium. The tension is palpable, so that even when things look up for the sisters, we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.

As fascinating as the novel is,

the story of how Morris came to discover the women whom she based her plot around is equally compelling. Real-life survivors Livi and Magda are sisters living in Israel. (Cibi, the oldest of the three, passed away in 2014.) Livi’s son brought her a copy of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and she immediately knew it was about Lale, the man who had tattooed her in the camp.

They contacted Morris, who had been on a book tour in South Africa.

She took a detour to visit the sisters, discovering their story and, voila, another best seller.

—Curt Schleier Curt Schleier, a freelance writer, teaches business writing to corporate executives.

Forget Russia

By L. Bordetsky-Williams (Tailwinds Press) In her debut novel, poet and memoirist L. BordetskyWilliams mines her own family history to present the little-known story of reverse migration—the tens of thousands of Americans, immigrants or descendants of immigrants who fled the Great Depression for the nascent Soviet Union and the dream of helping build a new Communist state.

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Bordetsky-Williams’s multigenerational saga follows one such Jewish immigrant family: Sarah and Leon Vitsky and their descendants.

The novel is told from two alternating points of view—Sarah, who emigrated from Russia to the United States only to briefly return a decade later, and her American granddaughter Anna, who yearns to find out more about the country where her grandmother was born. Sarah’s story opens with a vivid scene of the brutal rape and murder of her mother in 1920, when Jews were caught in the shifting tides of the Russian Revolution. Sarah flees to America alone, finding shelter in a quick marriage to Leon, another Russian immigrant.

However, she carries the sadness of

her tragic loss, keeping it a secret from her family through two difficult childbirths and the Great Depression.

In 1931, Leon brings his family to Leningrad with hopes of escaping the economic downturn and curing his wife’s melancholy as well as with enthusiasm for the Communist state.

“At least in the Soviet Union, everything’s getting better and better, even if it’s happening slowly,” he says.

Within a year, his hopes are dashed, and the family is lucky to escape back to America before the Soviet doors lock shut.

About 50 years later, in 1980, Anna decides to leave her comfortable American college for a semester in Cold War Moscow. “Your problem is you have a Russian soul,”

Anna’s mother tells her, disapproving of her choice. Anna plans to study the Russian language, search for her family’s roots and perhaps understand the cause of her grandmother’s lifelong sadness. On a visit to Moscow’s only synagogue, Anna connects with a group of refuseniks who shared her grandparents’ dreams of a better life but have given up hope of creating that better life on Russian soil.

Both Sarah and Anna find disappointment in Mother Russia— not just in the broken promises of freedom and prosperity for all, but also in its antisemitism, poverty, hunger and fear. Anna’s discovery of information about her own background during her time in Moscow

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feels a bit contrived, enabling Bordetsky-Williams to tie up loose ends. Nevertheless, Forget Russia enthralls in its exploration of Jewish ties to the country that so many once called home.

—Elizabeth Edelglass

through Jewish Eyes.

Calendar of Art now in its 7th year

jewisheyeart.com and on Amazon

CHARITABLE SOLICITATION DISCLOSURE STATEMENTS HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. 40 Wall Street, 8th Floor – New York, NY 10005 – Telephone: (212) 355-7900 Contributions will be used for the support of Hadassah’s charitable projects and programs in the U.S. and/ or Israel including: medical relief, education and research; education and advocacy programs on issues of concern to women and that of the family; and support of programs for Jewish youth. Financial and other information about Hadassah may be obtained, without cost, by writing the Finance Department at Hadassah’s principal place of business at the address indicated above, or by calling the phone number indicated above. In addition, residents of the following states may obtain financial and/or licensing information from their states, as indicated. DC: The Certificate of Registration Number of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. is #40003848, which is valid for the period 9/1/2021-8/31/2023. Registration does not imply endorsement of the solicitation by the District of Columbia, or by any officer or employee of the District. FL: A COPY OF THE OFFICIAL REGISTRATION AND FINANCIAL INFORMATION FOR HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. (#SC-1298) AND HADASSAH MEDICAL RELIEF ASSOCIATION, INC. (#SC-4603) MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE DIVISION OF CONSUMER SERVICES BY CALLING TOLL-FREE 1-800-HELP-FLA, OR ONLINE AT www.FloridaConsumerHelp.com. KS: The official registration and annual financial report of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. is filed with the Kansas Secretary of State. Kansas Registration #237-478-3. MD: A copy of the current financial statement of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. is available by writing 40 Wall Street, 8th Floor, New York, New York 10005, Att: Finance Dept., or by calling (212) 355-7900. Documents and information submitted under the Maryland Charitable Solicitations Act are also available for the cost of postage and copies, from the Maryland Secretary of State, State House, Annapolis, MD 21401. MI: Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. MICS #13005/Hadassah Medical Relief Association, Inc. MICS # 11986/The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. MICS #22965. MS: The official registration and financial information of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. may be obtained from the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office by calling 1(888) 236-6167. NJ: INFORMATION FILED BY HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. AND HADASSAH MEDICAL RELIEF ASSOCIATION, INC. WITH THE NEW JERSEY ATTORNEY GENERAL CONCERNING THIS CHARITABLE SOLICITATION AND THE PERCENTAGE OF CONTRIBUTIONS RECEIVED BY THE CHARITY DURING THE LAST REPORTING PERIOD THAT WERE DEDICATED TO THE CHARITABLE PURPOSE MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY BY CALLING (973) 504-6215 AND IS AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET AT www.njconsumeraffairs.gov/ charity/chardir.htm. NY: You may obtain a copy of Hadassah’s Financial Report by writing to the Hadassah Finance Dept., 40 Wall Street, 8th Floor, New York, New York 10005. NC: FINANCIAL INFORMATION ABOUT HADASSAH, THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA, INC. AND A COPY OF ITS LICENSE ARE AVAILABLE FROM THE NORTH CAROLINA SECRETARY OF STATE, SOLICITATION LICENSING SECTION AT 919-807-2214 OR FOR NORTH CAROLINA RESIDENTS AT 1-888-830-4989. PA: The official registration and financial information of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc., Hadassah Medical Relief Association, Inc., and The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. may be obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of State by calling toll free, within Pennsylvania, 1(800) 732-0999. VA: A financial statement of the organization is available from the Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, P.O. Box 1163, Richmond, VA 23218, Phone #1 (800) 552-9963, upon request. WA: Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc., Hadassah Medical Relief Association, Inc. and The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. are registered with the Washington Secretary of State. Financial disclosure information is available from the Secretary of State. The toll-free phone number for Washington residents is 800-332-GIVE (800-332-4483), OR 360-725-0378. The website is www.sos.wa.gov/charities. WV: West Virginia residents may obtain a summary of the registration and financial documents of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. from the Secretary of State, State Capitol, Charleston, WV 25305. ALL OTHER STATES: A copy of Hadassah’s latest Financial Report is available by writing to the Hadassah Finance Dept., 40 Wall Street, 8th Floor, New York, New York 10005. REGISTRATION DOES NOT CONSTITUTE OR IMPLY ENDORSEMENT, APPROVAL, SANCTION OR RECOMMENDATION BY ANY STATE. Charitable deductions are allowed to the extent provided by law. Hadassah shall have full dominion, control and discretion over all gifts (and shall be under no legal obligation to transfer any portion of a gift to or for the use or benefit of any other entity or organization). All decisions regarding the use of funds for any purpose, or the transfer of funds to or for the benefit of any other entity or organization, shall be subject to the approval of the Board or other governing body of Hadassah. The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. is a supporting organization of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. and Hadassah Medical Relief Association, Inc. January 2021 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

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

Something Wild

By Hanna Halperin (Viking) The data is stark: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 25 percent of women and 10 percent of men in the United States will fall victim during their lifetimes to sexual and/or physical violence perpetrated by an intimate partner. Authorities say that the incidence of such abuse is as widespread in the Jewish community as in the general population. And with reports that domestic battery has risen in the country due to stressors caused by Covid-19, the picture of an idyllic home life is thrown further askew.

First-time novelist Hanna Halperin, who has worked as a domestic violence counselor, draws on her career experiences to create a detailed and engrossing depiction of the complicated dynamics that fuel violence within one fractured family.

Tanya Bloom, 28, and her sister, Nessa, 30, are devastated when they discover that their mother, Lorraine, who lives in a working-class suburb

I 60 I hadassahmagazine.org

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BOOKS

of Boston, is being physically abused by her second husband, Jesse.

Tanya, a happily married assistant district attorney living in New York City, and Nessa, an office manager for

a psychiatrist in western Massachusetts, put their lives on hold to help their mother and try to protect her from further harm—to little effect.

Lorraine is paralyzed by fear, doubts

Bring Your Heart Home Israel travel is opening for the unforgettable experiences only Hadassah can provide.

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Crossword Puzzle on page 49

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H M O F I M A O S A C O

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and a diminishing level of self-worth, as Jesse, her husband of 10 years, has taken control of her life on every level: sexually, socially and professionally.

The novel excels in delineating the tangled web of abuse and family members’ varied responses to it.

Tanya, who was sexually assaulted by a stranger when she was 14—an episode that she was loath to discuss with anyone, even her sister—leads the charge against Jesse, imploring her mother to take out a restraining order. Tanya has come to identify, both religiously and intellectually, with her father, Jonathan, and his second wife, Simone, who are both Jewish. “Tanya has always associated Judaism with Jonathan—but she also associates Judaism with family, with togetherness, with childhood,” writes Halperin. “To her, the memory of Judaism is a tender one, like waking up on a snow day as a kid—outside bright and glittering; inside, dark and warm with sleep.”

Nessa, however, is more drawn to her non-Jewish mother and Jesse, and she has difficulty reconciling her affection for her stepfather 3:49 PM with the new information about his treatment of her mother. In addition, she is floundering in both career and relationships and, like her mother, struggles with issues of self-esteem.

The toxic cocktail that often allows domestic abuse to continue unabated—secrecy, shame, denial and magically thinking that “things will be different next time”—is masterfully limned in Halperin’s sure hands.

Something Wild is an important book for our times, indeed for any time.

That it is written with such virtuosity is only an added benefit to the reader.

—Robert Nagler Miller Robert Nagler Miller writes frequently about the arts, literature and Jewish themes from his home in Chicago.

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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.

one nighT wiTh LiLiTh Martin Golan

When their marriage – and their Victorian home – go up in flames, a couple must face the charred remains of both. But did the fire rob them of their past or free them from it? The novel draws on the biblical tale of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who is portrayed as a woman of fierce independence and unbridled sexuality. The protagonist sees his wife as his “Lilith” – until he unearths the tragic roots of her fervor. A love story like no other. “With prose that is insightful and slightly mystical, Golan questions the impossibility of happiness.”– Kirkus Reviews

Available in softcover or e-book on Amazon, barnesandnoble.com or through bookstores.

More about the novel and author at martingolan.com.

The sword oF david

Charles Lichtman

New York Times bestselling author Brad Davis calls The Sword of David, “A breathtaking thriller that has the best elements of The Da Vinci Code and a modern-day Raiders of the Lost Ark.” This action-packed book follows an exMossad agent’s quest for biblical treasure that could alter the world’s destiny, with a stunning conclusion that offers hope about the future of the Middle East.

Amazon, Barnes and Noble and all other booksellers.

mushy maTZah baLL

Arianna Brooks

Arianna Brooks delivers with her debut children’s book, My Mushy Matzah Ball. An inclusive celebration of love and traditional Jewish foods for the whole mishpacha!

Available through mymushymatzahball.com, or worldwide on Amazon.

hidden heroes

Pamela Braun Cohen

Spanning nearly three decades, Hidden Heroes gives an insider’s view of the modern-day exodus of Soviet Jews from the Soviet Union, a period of Jewish history that has rarely been told and is in danger of being forgotten. This deeply personal narrative explores the grassroots Soviet Jewish emigration movement through the eyes of one of its indefatigable leaders, focusing on the actions of heroic refuseniks in the Soviet Union as well as courageous individuals in the West – described by Natan Sharansky as the “army of students and housewives” who waged the battle to free Soviet Jews.

ISBN: 9789657023365 HC | 424 pp. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and GefenPublishing.com.

no regreTs Living – 7 keys To a LiFe oF wonder and ConTenTmenT

Harley Rotbart, M.D.

In this sequel-of-sorts to his bestselling Miracles We Have Seen, Dr. Rotbart – physician-scientist, infectious diseases specialist, son of an Auschwitz survivor, and quadruple-bypass heart patient – shares his prescription for healing past regrets, preventing future regrets, and moving forward as individuals and as a society from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Universal truth for people of all faiths and people of no faith,” Rabbi Joshua Hammerman. “Wise, worldly guidance… couldn’t be more timely,” Rabbi Daniel Cohen. “Every personal moment is his gift to us,” Intermountain Jewish News.

“Leaves you feeling you have a new friend in the author,” San Diego Jewish World.

Paperback, available at Amazon, BN.com, and in fine bookstores everywhere.

The boy wiTh Four names

Doris Rubenstein

The Boy with Four Names is an historical novel of the Holocaust and the Diaspora. You will go beyond the death and tragedy of Anne Frank to read a story of struggle, identity, and triumph in a place where few people know that Jews live: the Andean country of Ecuador. This multi-award-winning author tells a story that both teens and adults will enjoy. https://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore

giTTy and kveTCh

Caroline Kusin Pritchard, Illustrated

by Ariel Landy A hilariously sweet story chock-full of Yiddish humor. Gitty and her feathered-friend Kvetch couldn’t be more different: Gitty always sees the bright side of life, while her curmudgeonly friend Kvetch is always kvetching about the trouble they get into. But when Gitty’s perfect plan goes awry, oy vey, can Kvetch come out of his funk to lift Gitty’s spirits back up?

Visit simonandschuster.com to order your copy.

deTours

Rosemary N. Gensler, Phyllis W. Hoffman, Marion S. Phillips, Nancy S. Sims and Ellyn Horn Zarek Discover magical realism in DETOURS, a novel penned by five women writers nicknamed THE INKSLINGERS. They portray six ‘wannabe’ writers traveling to an upstate New York writing conference; instead of fulfilling dreams of authorship, they encounter some twists and turns. Throughout the story, each author develops her imaginary character. Sisterhood nourishes collaboration, testimony to friendship and power of the written word. After seven years of writing, authors transcended painful personal experiences amidst the pandemic. In 2020-21, after participating in nearly 100 virtual meetings, publication was achieved! Plan to chat with us, sipping some razzle, dazzle raspberry tea.

Paperback or e-book available on Amazon.

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The bibLe aCCording To eve: The women oF The Torah

do noT disCLose: a memoir oF FamiLy seCreTs LosT and Found

Hadassah Alderson

“How does the Hebrew Bible fit into the lives of Jewish Women today?” has become a central question to Modern Jewish life. Combining the seemingly antithetical interests of the Biblical text and feminist thinking, well-known, little-known, and the author’s own Midrashic stories about the laws are told to make the Bible relevant to modern readers. Early reviews emphasize this book’s literary content and comprehensiveness.

Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

gaLiLee goLd Susie Aziz Pam

Kings, pirates, conspiracies of wives; scenes of Tiberias, Acco, Malta all woven together when beautiful Tamar of Aleppo and the King of Galilee cross paths.

Daher el Omar, 18th century Bedouin king, rebuilds the Galilee and invites Jews to return to the land of their forefathers. Tamar must choose.

Will she reciprocate the King’s feelings, or will she flee, to preserve her Jewish identity?

Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Book Depository in paperback and as an e-book.

The ausChwiTZ PhoTograPher: The ForgoTTen sTory oF The wwii Prisoner who doCumenTed Thousands oF LosT souLs

Luca Crippa & Maurizio Onnis

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, William Brasse became a political prisoner for refusing to swear allegiance to the Nazis. He was deported to Auschwitz and became prisoner #3444. A trained photographer, he was put to work recording the inner workings of the concentration camp.

Between 1940-1945, Brasse took over 50,000 photos of the nightmare around him, before defiantly setting down his camera for good.

Available on Amazon.

Leora Krygier

A mysterious file and a stranger’s World War II postcard propels a second-generation Holocaust survivor on a haunting journey of betrayal and redemption, giving her the courage to confront her own family’s buried secret. “A captivating story, smartly recounted,” Kirkus Starred Review.

Available on Amazon.

never enough: The CarL kaTZ sTory Elise Garibaldi

Hunted by the Nazis long after the fall of the Third Reich. In this-stranger-thanfiction true-crime story, Carl Katz contends for survival against relentless enemies.

“Meticulously researched and superbly written… an enormously important contribution… [and a] potent antidote to the increasingly prevalent distortion of history…”- World Jewish Congress.

In this much anticipated sequel to bestselling, Roses in a Forbidden Garden: A Holocaust Love Story, Never Enough follows the defiant, German-born, Carl Katz.His unwillingness to succumb sparks outrage and vengeance from his would-be executioners. As his perpetrators hunt him, he discovers that old habits certainly die hard in the Fatherland.

More information on www.elisegaribaldi.com.

Available on Amazon.

The goLem’s giFT

Benny Zelkowicz

“On the day after Yom Kippur, as he did every year, the old Rabbi shaped a Golem from a mound of clay” So begins this fable of a Golem who tries to repair the broken world he sees around him. Illustrated with gorgeous sand paintings by the author, this picture book reminds us that every choice we make has immeasurable impact.

Available in hardcover and paperback from Amazon.

The Paris PhoTo

Jane S. Gabin

This historical novel, praised by Kirkus Reviews and many readers, is based upon the exploits of the author’s father, aiding a Jewish family, in WWII Paris. But much of the story - including the very existence of the French mother and her child - were hidden. What was the mystery? The fear-haunted days of the Occupation, the joy of Liberation, and the unanswered questions in the Jewish community reverberate throughout this story. Follow Sgt. Ben Gordon as he strives to bring joy, and follow the discoveries of his daughter decades later.

http://www.theparisphoto.com. Available in softcover or e-book at Amazon or from your favorite bookseller.

The FabergÉ seCreT

Charles Belfoure

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Architect: The Life of Prince Markhov of the Imperial Court of Nicholas and Alexandra is changed when he witnesses the aftermath of the 1903 Easter Sunday pogrom. He is shocked by the brutality the Jews must endure in Russia. Does he stand by or fight injustice?

In bookstores and available as an e-book.

The sTory oF viLma

Barbara Brown

This is a story of a woman who, with her husband and baby, made a decision in 1923 to travel from her country, Hungary/Romania. She left her extended family behind to start anew in America. The book is based on authentic research by the author and her team of relatives.

Vilma Weisz’s decision was a critical choice in her life and the lives of her future children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren because it was discovered by the author that the Jewish family was sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis and no one from the city of Oradea survived.

Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Xlibris in soft cover, hard cover and e-book format.

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The PresidenT’s Pen Jeffrey A. Margolis

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson published his first book, Notes on the State of Virginia. In doing so, Jefferson appeared to have started a trend as more than half of all U.S. presidents have published at least one book. The President’s Pen examines the diverse writings of sixteen Presidents of the United States, providing readers with background stories and anecdotes in an easy-to-understand format.

Available from www.presidentspen.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.

LiLyviLLe

The Jewish brigade

Tovah Feldshuh Written in three acts, this heartwarming and funny memoir from beloved actress Tovah Feldshuh tells the story of a mother and daughter whose narrative reflects 110 years of American cultural changes and the world’s shifting expectations of women.

Marvano

“The Jewish Brigade covers the group that fought as part of the British Army in World War II...an exciting, moving, and thoughtful historical graphic novel.”

—Foreword Reviews.

Available at usni.org/books or wherever books are sold.

Available on Amazon.

a Jewish besTiary: FabuLous CreaTures From hebraiC Legend and Lore Mark Podwal

Originally published in 1984 and called “broad in learning and deep in subtle humor” by the New York Times, this delightful and enlightening updated edition of A Jewish Bestiary features new full-color renderings of thirty-five creatures from Hebraic legend and lore. The illustrations are accompanied by entertaining and instructive tales drawn from biblical, Talmudic, Midrashic, and kabbalistic sources.

9780271091730 | 88 pp. | 35 color illus. | cloth: $14.95.

For more information and to place an order, please visit https://www.psupress.org/books/ titles/978-0-271-09173-0.html.

The road Taken: an arChaeoLogisT’s Journey To The Land oF The bibLe Seymour (Sy) Gitin

Sy Gitin’s engaging and entertaining memoir recounts a remarkably lived life. From his childhood in 1940s Buffalo, New York, to a storied career as an archaeologist working and living in Israel, Sy shares his experience about being Jewish in America and Israel from the 1940s through today and provides an eye-opening look at the often-controversial development of biblical archaeology.

9781646021345 | 256 pp. | 46 b&w illus. | cloth: $37.50.

For more information and to place an order, please visit https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/ titles/978-1-64602-134-5.html.

branChing ouT From sePharad Sarina Roffé

Explore the Global Journey of Sephardic Jews. Branching Out From Sepharad outlines the 1492 Expulsion from Spain, Jews who moved to Syria and later to the Americas.

Chapters include Sephardic naming practices, genealogy in the Torah, and a 100-year history of Brooklyn’s Syrian community. Selected dynasties are traced from Spain to the Americas.

420 pages; $36. Available on Amazon.

baCkyard kiTChen: The main Course

Sarina Roffé

With over 90 recipes and amazing photography, this kosher cookbook is a collection of traditional Middle Eastern entree recipes handed down from mother to daughter for generations.

Like her first cookbook, Backyard Kitchen: Mediterranean Salads, the genesis for Backyard Kitchen came from Esther Salem, Sarina’s Syrian grandmother, who came to America as an immigrant in 1921, and could not read or write.

Esther supported her seven children with a catering business housed in the garage located in her backyard. Also enjoy Sarina’s blogs, the Sarina’s Sephardic Cuisine iPhone app and tips at sarinassephardiccuisine.com.

Available on Amazon.

To advertise here, please call Randi O’Connor at (212) 451-6221, or email roconnor@hadassah.org.

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ABOUT HEBREW BAR-BAT MITZVAH, FAMILY AND ADULT TOURS

Judaism and Citrus Fruits

Small Groups - Personal Attention Fine Hotels - Unique Itineraries

Beautifying Sukkot with an etrog | By Joseph Lowin

W

SHUTTERSTOCK

hat is the connection between beauty and citrus fruits,

editors and Talmudists? They come together in a Hebrew root that sometimes provides dubious pairings, ‫ר‬-‫ד‬-‫( ה‬heh, dalet, resh), which can mean to return, or to adorn.

Students of the Talmud who complete a tractate use the root by proclaiming ‫( ֲה ְד ָרן עֲ לָ ך‬hadran alakh), “We shall return to you.” By doing so, according to the late eminent Talmudist Saul Lieberman, they praise the text’s alluring beauty while noting that they have not yet exhausted the tractate’s teachings. Two exclamations of praise are heard in concert halls, ‫( נֶ ְה ָדר‬nehedar), “Superb!,” and—converting an ancient Aramaic verb into a Modern Hebrew noun—‫( ֲה ְד ָרן‬hadran), “Encore!” When a ‫ַמ ְה ִדּיר‬ (mahdir), editor, reviews a text, it is often to prepare it ָ ‫( ַמ ֲה‬mahadufor a new ‫דוּרה‬ rah), edition—perhaps a new volume of Hebrew roots?

Another Aramaic term, ‫ְמ ַה ְדּ ִרין‬ (mehadrin), originally meant “Jews who would return to their mitzvot in order to enhance them.” Today, the expression ‫( ְמ ַה ְדּ ִרין ִמן ַה ְמ ַה ְדּ ִרין‬mehadrin min ha-mehadrin), translated loosely as the best of the best, assures that you’re getting the “most kosher” products available.

In the Book of Isaiah, Cyrus the Great is imagined as speaking in the name ִ ‫( ֲה‬hadurim), “puffed-up hills,” of His of God, threatening to level the ‫דוּרים‬ enemies. One of the rules of Jewish ethics found in Scripture teaches that in a court of law ‫( ל ֺא ֶת ְה ַדּר‬lo tehedar), you shall not show favoritism to either an illustrious man or a penniless person.

Today, when life gives you a lemon, American folk wisdom suggests you make lemonade. In the matter of ‫( ָה ָד ִרים‬hadarim), citrus fruits, Jewish tradition takes another tack. To celebrate Sukkot, one acquires a ‫( ְפּ ִרי ֵעץ ָה ָדר‬peri etz hadar,) “attractive tree fruit,” called an etrog, and thus performs ‫ִהדּוּר‬ ‫( ִמצְ וָ ה‬hiddur mitzvah), adornment of a biblical commandment.

In Israeli popular culture, the term ‫( ֶא ֶרץ נֶ ֶה ֶד ֶרת‬eretz nehederet), “This Wonderful Land,” is both the title of a beloved Zionist song and the name of a satirical television show. The root has given birth in Israel to the family name Hadar as well as to a gender-neutral first name, ‫( ֲה ַדר‬Hadar), with which we solemnly honor the memory of Israel Defense Forces soldier Hadar Goldin, murdered by Hamas terrorists in 2014, and joyfully welcome into the world the newest addition to the family, Hadar Lowin, my granddaughter.

Not all unexpected pairings are dubious, after all.

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

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

I 67 I hadassahmagazine.org

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QUESTION

ANSWER

Tilly Shemer Helping students find their voice on campus

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen

A

COURTESY OF TILLY SHEMER

s college students return to campus, many after a year of remote learning, there is growing concern about the level of antisemitic and anti-Israel activity at universities across the country—so much so that the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel International recently

What are some recent challenges for Jewish students?

In May 2021 [as Israel was involved in a conflict with Hamas in Gaza] the student government put forward a statement condemning Israel. It used the language of pro-Palestinian groups even as rockets were falling on Israel, the kind of statement we would have seen previously come from activists now put out by a mainstream group. If the student government had acknowledged suffering in Israel and not taken such a one-sided extreme perspective, there would have been greater understanding. When Jewish students communicated how they felt, they received a very cold response, that the statement “was intended for the most marginalized group.” That made our students feel unseen, that when they say something feels antisemitic, they’re not being heard.

The sad conflation on campus that is challenging for me is the overlay of Israeli-Palestinian dynamics on students. When a Jewish student said at a student government meeting that the Jewish community should have been considered and even consulted on the statement, another speaker responded that the student government should not consult with the “oppressor.” That is when the line from anti-Israel to antisemitic is crossed, when a student is seen

announced a partnership to help schools address and document it. According to Tilly Shemer, executive director of the Hillel at the University of Michigan—which boasts one of the country’s largest Jewish student populations with some 5,000 Jews out of 30,000 undergraduate students—her school is not alone in seeing significant recent anti-Israel activity that crosses into antisemitism, making Jewish students feel “unseen” and “othered.” Shemer’s Hillel, with an annual budget of $2.5 million and a staff of 16, is the largest run by a woman.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

as an oppressor just because they’re Jewish. It’s deeply problematic.

How has the climate for Jewish students changed overall?

It has changed on campus like it has changed in this country. People are more siloed by their views and keep to communities of like-minded individuals. We try to overcome that by creating dialogue environments for our Jewish students to speak across their differences and listen to one another.

It can also be challenging for Jewish students when they’re part of a student group based on values or an identity, for example, one focused on social justice issues. We see anti-Israel politics creep into those spaces with their leaders making statements that fall outside of the group’s purpose. It makes it very difficult for students who have found a like-minded community but need to navigate whether to bring up their views on Israel or stay silent. They feel very torn.

How is your Hillel addressing anti-Israel and antisemitic activity?

Hillel’s role is to help students find their voice in these moments. This can be through one of our educational series on Jewish identity, antisemitism or relationship with Israel. It can be when we work one-on-one with students

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

to address a bias incident, including directing them to the university’s Student Life office. It can be during our Campus Leaders trip to Israel during which we help mostly non-Jewish student group leaders see the complexity of Israel’s reality. It can be when an anti-Israel incident happens and we work with students to write articles for the campus newspaper or present their views to student government.

Growing numbers of young Jews identify as non- or anti-Zionist.

Do you see that on campus?

There’s always been a small number who identify as anti-Zionist.

More connect in a positive way. The number of students going on Birthright Israel and doing internships in Israel remains high.

But more students are saying they don’t need to be involved with Israel to be engaged with their Jewish identities.

I have student leaders of our Hillel who have no interest in Israel. They get upset when people assume that because they have Hebrew on their T-shirt from Camp Ramah that they have a particular perspective on Israel.

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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