The Jewish Light Education 2018 Edition

Volume 8, Number 8 Education 2018

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Serving the Local New Orleans, Northshore, and Baton Rouge Jewish Communities

Who Is an Anti-Semite? Republicans and Democrats Grapple With the Question.

By Ron Kampeas (JTA) -- Two congressional races have been beset in recent days with charges of anti-Semitism, and each case -- in California and in Virginia -- uncovers challenges for Jews in the Republican and Democratic parties.

For Jewish Democrats, it's about Israel and the party's left wing. For Jewish Republicans, it's about extremists.

In both cases, Jews in the respective parties are grappling with old problems made sharper by recent developments. Democrats for years have had a left wing that tended to see Israel as a problem more than an alliance, but the party's drift from the country in recent years has brought a once marginal tendency to the fore.

Republicans, similarly, have repudiated fringe candidates who embrace far right and even Nazi identities, but President Donald Trump's on-again/off again embrace of the "alt-right" has lent greater urgency to facing down extremist GOP nominees.

John Fitzgerald, in California's 11th District, is at least the third Republican nominee in a congressional district expected to vote Democratic who has associations with the far right. (Two others are in Illinois. In all three cases, extremists seized the opportunity when the state and national GOP ignored unwinnable races and secured the Republican nomination by default.)

Fitzgerald peddles myths, for instance, that an army of Jews working in government are in fact Israeli citizens. (They are not. A list he links to on his campaign website generously includes a number of non-Jews presumed to be Jewish, among them National Security Adviser John Bolton.)

In Fitzgerald's case, GOP condemnation was so swift, landing in inboxes before much of the media knew his anti-Semitism was a thing.

In a statement sent Tuesday eve-

seek re-election.

The Democratic nominee, Leslie Cockburn, is a journalist who perhaps is best known as the mother of actor Olivia Wilde ("House"). But 27 years ago she earned notoriety of a different sort when she cowrote “Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship” with her husband, Andrew.

Virginia's Republican Party this month seized on the book to cast Cockburn as a "virulent anti-Semite."

By way of evidence, it quoted reviews at the time from Commentary, the conservative pro-Israel magazine, and The New York Times. Neither review calls the 1991 book anti-Semitic, although Commentary does insinuate that it is hostile to Jews per se. Joined with another review I uncovered, in the Los Angeles Times, the book's principal sins appear to be that it is often vaguely sourced, sensationalist and driven by a lazy anti-imperialist agenda. (The headline to the Commentary review is, irresistibly, "Inside Dopes.")

Virginia Jewish Democrats appear to agree that the book is problematic, but not anti-Semitic, as they indicated in interviews with The New York Times this week after Cockburn attended a salon organized by Charlottesville Jews, and also in a posting on Blue Virginia, a pro-Democratic blog.

"We urge voters in Virginia’s 5th who consider themselves allies to Jews in Virginia and throughout the John Fitzgerald is a Republican running for a House seat in California. country to go out and discover the (John Fitzgerald for Congress) truth for themselves: that these charges against Leslie Cockburn California Republican Party has included deadly violence.

Charlottesville is in Virginia's are false, made in bad faith, and been a good ally in our fight against anti-Semitism in the past, and we 5th Congressional District, once should be dismissed for not even proudly stand shoulder-to-shoulder solidly Republican, but now a pos- meeting the lowest bar of evidence with them on their decision to reject sible pickup for Democrats eager to to support them," said the Blue Virretake the U.S. House of Represen- ginia post by David T.S. Jonas and support for Fitzgerald."

It has been a busy season for the tatives with the sudden announceRJC and its condemnations of puta- ment this week by incumbent GOP See ANTI-SEMITE 26 tive neo-Nazi candidates. Two Rep. Tom Garrett that he will not on Page ning to the media, the Republican Party in California said it took steps to remove the endorsement automatically conferred on him when he became the nominee.

"The California Republican Party’s Board of Directors took swift and decisive action to eliminate any support for John Fitzgerald due to anti-Semitic comments he made recently -- those views have no home in the Republican Party," the state party chairman, Jim Brulte, said in a statement. "As always, California Republicans reject antiSemitism, and all forms of religious bigotry, in the harshest terms possible. We reject John Fitzgerald’s campaign and encourage all voters to do the same.”

In the same release, the Republican Jewish Coalition said that "the

weeks ago its target was Patrick Little, a U.S. Senate hopeful in California who says Jews control the United States.

Little, the RJC said, "is a white nationalist whose anti-Semitic, racist, bigoted views put him far outside of the GOP and civil discourse."

Little has told David Duke, the best-known American white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader, that he thinks Trump could one day be persuaded of the merits of his anti-Jewish arguments.

His optimism is fueled in part by an administration that has been populated by alt-right figures and a president who equivocated in his condemnation last year of the neoNazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a protest that

Community News

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Table of Contents Community News

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Education

4

Bookshelf

8

Arts & Culture

9

Entertainment

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Financial

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Community Highlights

14

The Nosher

15

Focus on Issues

17

National

18

Judaism

19

Kveller

20

Jewniverse (Jewish Culture & History)

21

Israel Under Radar

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Education 2018

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Education

Day Schools Applying Science and Technology Lens to Jewish Studies

By Ben Harris

Students at The Epstein School in Atlanta built their own scales as part of a Yom Kippur lesson about the weighing of one's deeds, part of an effort to link Jewish studies with science and engineering.

(Courtesy of The Epstein School)

In a classroom in Atlanta, balance scales symbolize the weighing of one’s actions on Yom Kippur.

At a Nashville school, a dreidel spinning on a CD player plays recordings of the late Jewish scholar and activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

In suburban Chicago, a map of Israel made from cups of water

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honors Israeli Independence Day. And in Irvine, California, a Hanukkah board game modeled on the popular game Risk shows how a small army of rebels could defeat a much larger and better equipped fighting force — just as the Maccabees had.

These projects at Jewish day schools across the country are examples of how the popular emphasis on STEAM subjects -- an acronym for science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics – are being used not just to teach math and science, but increasingly Judaic studies, too.

“STEAM is a way for our kids to engage purposefully and meaningfully with the world around them,” said Daniella Pressner, head of the Akiva School in Nashville.

“How do we see this world, and the shifting needs within this world, with possible solutions and even

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more questions,” she said. “How do we see somebody walking down the street who might need help and think ‘I can design something that can make their life better.’”

The STEAM educational methodology is meant to teach a range of vital life skills across the full breadth of school subjects. An outgrowth of STEM — which saw science, technology, engineering and math as key competencies to ensure American economic competitiveness in the 21st century — STEAM adds in the sort of innovative and entrepreneurial spirit increasingly prized by many employers, proponents say. It aims not simply to develop knowledge in specific content areas, but to promote habits like critical thinking, collaboration, innovation and problem solving.

The Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School in Northridge, California, used a STEAM approach to address a Jewish real-world problem of its own. Located in an arid area north of Los Angeles, the school lacked access to a running body of water to perform the tashlich ritual, where sins symbolically are cast away on or after Rosh Hashanah.

So three years ago, students

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devised a system that would recycle water through a kiddie pool using pumps and tubing. Now the pool is part of the school’s annual performance of tashlich.

“It’s become a part of our school, a part of our tradition and how we celebrate the High Holidays,” said Scott Westle, Heschel’s rabbi in residence.

Heschel is one of about 10 Jewish day schools that have participated in an initiative focused on STEAM and the Jewish holidays run by the Jewish Day School Collaborative, a project aimed at fostering innovation in Jewish day schools and funded in part by the Avi Chai Foundation. The project aims to promote sharing of ideas about how to better integrate STEAM principles into teaching about Jewish holidays.

“There’s big push in general about getting students to solve problems and be collaborators and critical thinkers,” said Alanna Kotler, a consultant who oversees the JDS Collaborative STEAM project.

“Teachers are trying to raise the level of student engagement across the board, in both general and JudaSee DAY SCHOOLS on Page

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DAY SCHOOLS Continued from Page 4 ic studies. How do we tap into what they’re interested in? How can we get these kids to really connect to the content in new and different ways? This is a vehicle for that.”

At Irvine Hebrew Day School, students are currently engaged in a yearlong project to develop games connected to the holiday of Hanukkah that the school hopes to eventually sell as a fundraiser. One student came up with a version of Risk. Another created a version of Hanukkah charades. Others created online holiday games using iPads.

In the process, students followed design protocols that wouldn’t be out of place in Silicon Valley: developing prototypes, testing them out with their friends, making adjustments and trying again. Over the summer, they were expected to fine-tune their games and return to school this fall with ideas of how to bring the games to market.

“It’s a way of thinking and working and understanding context,” said Tammy Keces, Irvine’s head of school. “There are actual opportunities to create a business. It’s an entrepreneurial spirit that’s happening in this program. It shows them

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the kinds of careers where they could actually earn an income. That is kind of the theme of our school.”

At Solomon Schechter in Northbrook, Illinois, students learning the laws of Sukkot used computerized drafting software to design different models of the temporary huts used on the holiday, each consistent with traditional Jewish laws about how a sukkah must be built.

Then the students used a 3-D printer to create actual scale models of their designs.

“In a lot of schools, subjects are very compartmentalized,” said Suzanne Mishkin, director of the Sager School, the Schechter’s K-8 division. “What we are trying to do is to show students that, first, we’re Jewish all day long. Second, learning can happen throughout the day.

And the learning you do in science or math class can be used in Judaic studies classes, too.”

At The Epstein School, an independent Jewish day school outside Atlanta, a so-called “maker space” is available to students every morning for working on design projects.

In one exercise, students learned about Persian menorahs, which could be disassembled quickly during periods when Jews were being persecuted. The students were chal-

lenged to build their own quickdisassembling menorahs. One student tried a design that used Velcro to hold the menorah together.

Students at the school also created LED light menorahs, built a model of the Western Wall out of sugar cubes for Israeli Independence Day and designed balance scales to symbolize the weighing of personal actions on Yom Kippur.

“Not every balance scale was perfect. But they all succeeded in the idea of making something to balance their actions,” said Barri Gertz, the school’s STEAM coordinator.

“With STEAM, it’s not just one try and you’re finished,” she said.

“You might try something. It doesn’t work. You try again.”

(This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with the Avi Chai Foundation, which is committed to the perpetuation of the Jewish people, Judaism and the centrality of the State of Israel to the Jewish people. In North America, the foundation works to advance the Jewish day school and overnight summer camp fields. This article was produced by JTA’s native content team.) 

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Only Jewish Education Can Help Bridge the IsraelDiaspora Divide

By Pinchas Goldschmidt

Pinchas Goldschmidt has been the chief rabbi of Moscow since 1993. (Courtesy of Goldschmidt)

MOSCOW (JTA) -- Israel's passage of the nation-state law brought another round of barrages across the Atlantic underlining the growing alienation of the world's two largest Jewish communities. The issues are increasingly familiar: American pluralism versus Jewish exceptionalism, Orthodox versus Liberal, nationalism versus enlightenment.

Yes, we have a problem. Israel and American Jewry are growing apart from one other. It would be wrong to put the responsibility of this growing schism only on the Israeli government, or Israeli civil society, since Diaspora denominations have changed, too. The American Reform movement, for example, unilaterally introduced patrilineal descent, redefining Jewishness.

These tensions were aired in Ronald Lauder’s recent op-ed in The New York Times, in which the president of the World Jewish Congress argued that the nation-state law betrayed Israel's universalist values and that the country's religious establishment was alienating non-Orthodox Jews in the Diaspora. Reading between the lines, I sensed the anguish of a father and grandfather who sees his children distancing themselves from their people and ancestral homeland.

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s education and Diaspora minister, responded to Lauder’s op-ed with one of his own in the same newspaper, push6

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ing back in defense of Israel’s right to pass such laws. Bennett seems uninterested in bettering relations with the Diaspora — in direct contradiction to his title and portfolio.

He did not understand that the main question posed by Lauder was not "who is right and who is wrong," but what can we do to minimize the divide between Israel and American Jewry.

As American Jews are grappling with the direction their country is taking, and struggling to identify with a non-utopian Israel, the search for fresh waters from the well of our Jewish sources is called for.

Liberal Diaspora denominations count fewer followers in the U.S., and the Jews there are being assimilated into an increasingly secular country. The empty synagogues will have to be replaced with the classrooms of Jewish schools. The challenge of giving over 1 million Jewish children a minimal Jewish education can and should be tackled if the government of Israel will take a lead and major Jewish philanthropists will join.

In the beginning of the 1990s, when the Jewish Zionist establishment vehemently opposed the idea of establishing schools in the former Soviet Union, Lauder was among the first to understand that Jewish continuity, especially in the secularized post-Soviet countries, can only be guaranteed by formal Jewish education. The establishment of two dozen schools in Eastern and Central Europe in the beginning of the '90s by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation guaranteed a positive Jewish identity for tens of thousands of children of Jewish families.

(Full disclosure: My wife, Dara, is the head of the Lauder Etz Chaim School in Moscow, the largest Jewish day school in the former Soviet Union with currently almost 600 children.)

Having the honor to meet and speak to many of the thousands of graduates of our schools in Moscow, I can attest to the impact on the identity and personal commitment to the Jewish cause of the See DIVIDE on Page THE

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You Never Stop Learning From Jewish Preschool

By Jodie Fishman

(Kveller via JTA) – My parents still have the seder plate I made when I was in my final year of preschool. The teachers demonstrated how to draw an egg, shank bone and all the other essential accoutrements — and 5-year-old me drew two happy pigs, complete with belly buttons, basking in the sunshine.

My mom remembers her mortification when I skipped out the classroom door and proudly presented her with that masterpiece. Though we may not have used my seder plate for Passover that year, my mom kept the plate as a funny memory. (Also, in my defense: Pigs may not be kosher, but at least they don’t contain leavened bread.)

Now here I am wrapping up another year of Jewish preschool: My oldest is about to graduate and take the leap into the vast, scary world of public kindergarten. And while she and her younger brother continue to astound me with what they’ve learned at preschool — including, yes, what goes on the seder plate — the lessons for me have also piled up.

Old Testament stories are my kids’ “Game of Thrones.” Take the basic outline of the HBO series, extract the lust but retain the plot twists, alliances, tragedies and triumphs — and you basically have the Torah.

No doubt I learned these stories when I was in preschool, but they really came to life for my kids this year.

My daughter came home from school one sunny, spring day insisting that she wanted to stay inside and direct her own version of The Ten Commandments. There had been a re-enactment of Exodus that day — replete with plagues, pharaohs and parting seas — and my daughter wanted to dress her brothers as shepherds. I’ve loved reconnecting with these stories through my kids’ eyes -- whenever I feel pressure to tell a bedtime story, I THE

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now have a captivating collection from which to draw.

A pretend fire is almost as good as the real thing. I’ve always appreciated Judaism’s core value of community, and our preschool does a phenomenal job of making sure that everyone feels welcome and included. My son’s class made a pretend fireplace this winter — and, man, he was proud of that thing. Anytime we passed his classroom, he invited everyone in sight to come in and warm their hands by the red and orange construction paper flames.

The idea that there’s always room at the proverbial hearth really struck a nerve with my 3-year-old, who likes to engage with friends and strangers alike. Thanks to him, I now know a lot more people on our block.

The principal’s office isn’t scary.

I spent plenty of time worrying about Disney princesses this year.

First, I questioned whether my daughter’s obsession would ruin her self-image. Then I wondered if it was normal that my son also wanted to dress up in a glittery gown for Halloween. So I went to the director, who told me that my son doesn’t have a fully formed gender identity yet. She recommended some reading — I guess sometimes there is homework in preschool? — so I could decide for myself how I felt about all this I learned that I’m OK with anyone in my house being a princess, and that everyone in the school is a partner in the quest for my kids’ wellbeing.

Mensches are made in preschool.

My son’s class talked a lot about the word mensch. He spent the beginning of the year constantly asking what a mensch would do (“Mommy, would a mensch have to share his pretzels?”), but by the end of the year he was telling me definitively. And the thing is, both my kids’ teachers were showing them — and me — the meaning of that word all year long. When we couldn’t figure out why my daughter was crying at a particular activity, her teachers gave me a muchneeded hug —and followed up with weekly progress reports. I can’t imagine in the rest of her academic See PRESCHOOL on Page

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Bookshelf

In J.K. Rowling’s New Novel, a Villain Is an IsraelHating Anti-Semite

By Yvette Alt Miller critics who either downplay the phenomenon or say its proponents are confusing criticism of Israel with Jew hatred.

Now, in her newest book, she includes a character whose obsessive anti-Zionism morphs into antiSemitism.

“Lethal White,” the fourth series J.K. Rowling at the British Academy in Rowling’s Cormoran Strike mysFilm Awards (BAFTA) at Royal Albert Hall in London, Feb. 12, 2017. (John tery series, written under the pen Phillips/Getty Images) name Robert Galbraith, features a (JTA) — For months author J.K. pair of hard-left political activists Rowling has been warning about who believe “Zionists” are evil and the dangers of anti-Semitism in have a stranglehold on Western England, sparring on Twitter with governments.

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Extortionist Jimmy Knight’s extreme hatred of Israel has led him to hate Jews.

“I wouldn’t trust him if it was anything to do with Jews,” Knight’s ex-wife tells a detective. “He doesn’t like them. Israel’s the root of all evil, according to Jimmy. Zionism: I got sick of the bloody sound of the word. You’d think they’d suffered enough,” she says of Jews.

Rowling’s depiction of a far-left anti-Semite comes at a time of record high anti-Semitism in Britain, where she lives. Britain’s Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn have been accused of insensitivity to Jews and condoning antiJewish sentiments within the party’s ranks. Corbyn previously defended a grotesquely anti-Semitic London mural depicting Jewish bankers, and referred to his “friends” in terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah, though he’s said he now regrets these positions.

A September 2018 poll found that nearly 40 percent of British Jews would seriously consider emigrating if Corbyn became prime minister — as polls show he might.

The latest novel isn’t the first time the author of the Harry Potter series has commented on the dangers of anti-Semitism.

“Most UK Jews in my timeline are currently having to field this kind of crap, so perhaps some of us nonJews should start shouldering the burden,” she wrote in April, in response to a critic who said Judaism is a religion, not a race. “Antisemites thinks this is a clever argument, so tell us, do: were atheist Jews exempted from wearing the yellow star?”

Rowling, who is not Jewish, also shared with her 14.4 million Twitter followers examples of posts she’d received that denied anti-Semitism was a problem.

To a commenter who posted that Arabs cannot possibly be anti-

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Semitic because Arabs are Semites too, Rowling tweeted a photo of a dictionary definition of anti-Semitism: “hostility to or prejudice against Jews.” She also included a spirited defense of Jews: “Split hairs. Debate etymology. Gloss over the abuse of your fellow citizens by attacking the actions of another country’s government.

Would your response to any other form of racism or bigotry be to squirm, deflect or justify?”

When a Jewish mother tweeted Rowling to say her son had faced anti-Semitic bullies in school, Rowling tweeted back “so sorry” and wrote “Know that you aren’t alone and that a lot of us stand with you xx.”

A few months later, on Aug. 26, after a fellow mystery writer, Simon Maginn, tweeted that British Jews’ outrage over Corbyn’s views were “synthetic,” Rowling defended the Jews. “What other minority would you speak to this way?” she posted, before quoting from Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Anti-Semite and Jew.” In 2015, Rowling declined to endorse open letters calling for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel and signed by over 1,000 British authors and opinion leaders.

Instead, she joined 150 other writers and artists in penning an alternative letter opposing singling out Israel for opprobrium.

“Israelis will be right to ask why cultural boycotts are not also being proposed against…North Korea,” her Oct. 23, 2015 letter declared.

Instead of boycotts, the letter said, “Cultural engagement builds bridges, nurtures freedom and positive movement for change.”

Rowling has been critical of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but is adamant that Israel, its people and its supporters should not be subjected to a double standard by their opponents. 

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Arts & Culture

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Neil Simon Got Us Right.

That's What Geniuses Do.

By Ari Roth

Neil Simon telling stories during a memorial tribute to Cy Coleman at the Majestic Theatre in New York City, Jan. 10, 2005.

(Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, D.C. (JTA) -On Sunday, the theater community's reactions to the death of playwright Neil Simon came even as social media were still processing the death the day before of Sen. John McCain. The homages to McCain bordered on the hagiographic until fights erupted (this being Facebook) between those who remembered the Arizona senator’s opposition to Martin Luther King Day and those who admired his bipartisanship and self-scrutiny.

Almost everyone remembering Neil Simon, on the other hand, did so with wistfulness, because everyone in the theater business had been touched by the breadth of Simon’s achievement.

Playwrights remembered how Simon crafted a line and set up an entrance; more than anything, they appreciated the crest of his career: how it shot forth like a cannon yet managed to sustain and grow ever more impressive, penetrating and personally revealing with the writing of the Eugene Trilogy -- "Brighton Beach Memoirs," "Biloxi Blues" and "Broadway Bound."

Actors remembered what it was to perform Simon.

“It was almost impossible," said Broadway veteran and now writer Peter Birkenhead, "to go fully up on a line in a Neil Simon play" -- that is, improvise a forgotten line of dialogue -- "because the next thing out of your character’s mouth always followed naturally from the last thing and pointed towards the next."

Producers remembered the dependability of the Simon brand and the vast volume of it. They remembered Simon either as their “bread and butter” or their “stock and trade.” Then there were those like me who, once upon a time, as a younger renegade, remember condescending to Simon, referring to THE

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him as a “sop to subscribers; a thing to define oneself against -- until growing out of such sanctimony to embrace his achievement Producers would sneer at Neil Simon for other reasons too. I remember a goyishe theater company in the middle of Michigan, not far from Ann Arbor, back in the '90s, where the artistic director said that they defined their brand of comedy as being “the opposite of Neil Simon.

Less New York in our references, less guilt-ridden, less neurotic, or driven by a particular kind of rhythm.” That struck me as vaguely anti-Semitic at the time – and strikes me as less vaguely and more explicitly so today, despite the admirable cultivation of “local voices.” Neil Simon, it appears, was so big that he became something to rebel against, for Jews and non-Jews alike.

My first reflection upon hearing of Simon’s passing was to think of the death of Philip Roth almost 100 days earlier: twin towers of literary and theatrical achievement now gone.

Prolific, uninhibited, and unapologetically gifted, Simon and Roth in their passing seem to have left a hole in the fabric of American Jewish culture. The very garment of that fabric is now moth-eaten: that power suit of the Straight White Jewish Male Secularist who, in the cases of Roth and Simon, spawned their own veritable one-man industries. That period of immense dominance is now done.

Theirs were the careers to look up to, back in the day, if you were dreaming of a life as a writer. Surely there were differences between them beyond discipline; Roth the provocateur and prolix subversive; Simon the pleasing jester, chafing at life’s annoyances, who played conflict and odd couplings for theatrical laughs. But their shared vibrancy, moxie and attitude — unapologetically Jewish yet secularized; worshiping the ironies of the American experience more than the signposts of Jewish history — were instructive tickets that they passed onto their progenitors and colleagues. They each had their particular American Voice down pat: urban and urbane; assimilated with healthy shmears of cultural quirks and loyalty, along with a See NEIL SIMON on Page

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Jewish Art 101 An introduction to Jewish visual arts from Bezalel to the 21st century.

By MJL

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

(Ori Sherman/Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life)

Jewish visual arts date back to the biblical Bezalel, commissioned

by God to create the Tabernacle in the wilderness. Since then, Jewish visual arts have flourished, bearing the imprint of Jewish wanderings around the globe. Jewish art divides into categories of: folk art, such as paper-cuts; ritual art–artistic renditions of ritual objects; and art by Jews, which encompasses a broad

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range of visual expression by Jewish artists, from painting to sculpture to avant-garde art.

What Is Jewish Art? Words and ideas have always been a focal point in Jewish life, but fine arts and handicrafts have played a prominent role as well.

The Jewish attitude toward art has been influenced by two contradictory factors: The value of hiddur mitzvah (beautification of the commandments) encourages the creation of beautiful ritual items and sacred spaces, while some interpret the Second Commandment (forbidding “graven images”) as a prohibition against artistic creations, lest they be used for idolatry.

With the age of Enlightenment in Europe, Jewish artists left the ghetto to become prominent artists worldwide. In their visual arts, Jewish artists displayed varied relationships with their Jewish identities, and some Jewish artists did not incorporate their Jewishness into their artistic work at all. With the rise of such artists came the question of what constitutes “Jewish

art,” a question still debated today.

Some artists, such as Marc Chagall, clearly drew upon their Jewish heritage for their work. For others, such as Camille Pissaro, Judaism was tangential or even irrelevant to their work. Regardless of how one might define “Jewish art,” Jewish artists — painters, sculptors, and others — have flourished in North America, Europe and Israel.

Jewish folk art has pervaded Jewish homes and synagogues for centuries. This has included the mizrach , an emblem placed on the eastern wall of the home to remind family members which way to direct their prayers; the shivitti, an adornment in the synagogue intended to focus attention; and the art of micrography, which uses sacred words and texts to create drawings.

Artistic ritual art has included kiddush cups, mezuzot, candlesticks, and more. These art forms were once an expression of folk-piety by Jews who worked without the benefit of artistic training. Today Jewish folk art has grown in sophistication as trained artists focus their skills and sensibilities on these traditional crafts.

Israeli Art

Outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, home to one of the world’s largest collections of Israeli art. (PikiWiki Israel)

emblematic of the unique encounter between East and West in Israel.

Artistic visual expression was enhanced in Israel in 1906 with the founding of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem. The school aimed to create an “original Jewish art” by blending European artistic techniques with Middle Eastern influences. Artists from this school — along with other artists who were part of the burgeoning visual arts movement — created paintings of biblical scenes depicting romanticized perceptions of the past linked to utopian visions of the future. Examples of such artists include Shmuel Hirszenberg, Anna Ticho, Nachum Gutman, Mordecai Ardon, and Reuven Rubin.

As the State of Israel has matured, so too have its visual arts. Yaakov Agam has attracted international attention for his unique use of shape and dimension. As Israel has continued to attract Jewish immigrants from around the globe, they have brought with them their artistic training and sensitivities shaped by their host culture. Throughout Israeli history, the visual arts have A painting by Marc Chagall (Wikimedia been used to interpret and make Commons) meaning of the difficulties of IsraeFrom the beginning of the 20th li and Jewish history.  century, visual arts in Israel were

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Entertainment

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'Blackkklansman' Recalls the Possibilities, Then and Now, of a Black-Jewish Alliance

By Marc Dollinger

Adam Driver, left, and John David Washington in a scene from Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman." (Focus Features)

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- In a dramatic scene, word reaches local officials that the leader of a militant black organization coming to town is intent on stirring up trouble. An uncover operation ensues when an African-American attends the event, taking copious notes and reporting his findings back to his Jewish colleague.

In this moment, it seems, the blackJewish relationship stood strong.

Racists and bigots, no matter what side of the racial or religion divide, will face blacks and Jews working together in pursuit of justice.

It sounds like an early scene from Spike Lee’s "BlacKkKlans-

man," when African-American detective Ron Stallworth (played

by John David Washington) surveils a speech by Black Power founder Stokely Carmichael.

Instead, it’s the true story of a 1959 speech by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad at a mosque in Newark, New Jersey.

Years before the events in the movie, in which a black detective and his Jewish partner go undercover to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, the American Jewish Committee joined with African-American civil rights leaders to investigate the threat posed by Muhammad and his call for black militancy.

Even as Jewish leaders concluded that Muhammad’s speech proved more anti-white than anti-Semitic, the episode painted a picture of black-Jewish cooperation that anticipated the partnership between Stallworth, Colorado Springs’ first black police officer, and the detective who in the film is called Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver).

On the surface, Lee presents a classic tale of black-Jewish cooperation. In this understanding of interracial relations, two historically oppressed groups joined forces to confront the racism and antiSemitism of the Ku Klux Klan.

Jews, committed to the mandates of prophetic Judaism, reached across the divide and leveraged their religious ideals to demonstrate the equality of all Americans, regardless of racial status.

In the civil rights movement that predated the events of the film, Jews comprised a majority of white volunteers and offered generous funding to

the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies. Most contemporary news reports and even historical accounts offered this idealistic and filiopietistic analysis. The black-Jewish story line of "BlacKkKlansman" offers a needed challenge to that simplistic historical understanding.

Even as Lee and script writers David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel and Kevin Willmott treat the Jewish detective sympathetically, they are careful not to fall into the trap, so prevalent in much of the historical literature, of moving white Jews See BLACKKKLANSSMAN 12 on Page

‘Sapiens,’ an Israeli Professor’s Best-Selling History of Humans, Will Be Turned Into a Ridley Scott Film

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari lecturing at the Global Artificial Intelligence Summit Forum in Hangzhou, China, July 9, 2017.

(VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

(JTA) — “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” the best-selling book by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, will be adapted into a movie.

Directors Ridley Scott, known for blockbusters such as “Alien” and “Blade Runner,” and Asif Kapadia, known for the Amy Winehouse documentary “Amy,” will helm the project, The Hollywood Reporter announced Wednesday.

The nonfiction book charts the course of the development of humans from the prehistoric era to THE

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modernity. It originally was published in Hebrew as a textbook for Harari’s students at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The Hollywood Reporter did not say whether the film would be a documentary, fiction or a mixture of both, reporting only that “the exact format for the adaptation is being kept open-ended right now.”

“It is a book that changes how you see the world and our adaptation should do the same, to serve as a wake-up call for who we are, where we have come from and where we are heading,” Kapadia said in a statement.

“We hope to mix science, fiction, history, drama and genius in order to bring to life the incredible journey of our species, that began as an insignificant animal and is now on the verge of becoming a god,” Harari said.

“Sapiens” has sold 8 million copies worldwide in 30 languages since its publication in 2011.  www.thejewishlight.org

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BLACKKKLANSSMAN Continued from Page 11 into the center of what was a movement created and led by AfricanAmericans. Instead, Stallworth enjoys agency. He is the one who finds an ad in the local paper advertising a meeting of the KKK. Despite the racism within his police department and in the community at large, he launches an investigation, determining its course throughout the film In a break from the classic interracial motif of more-powerful Jews helping less-powerful blacks, "BlacKkKlansman" places Jewish detective Zimmerman, as well as the other white police officers in his unit, in supporting roles. Stallworth, acknowledging white privilege as he impersonates Zimmerman’s voice in telephone calls with the KKK, lobbies his Jewish colleague to impersonate him in face-to-face meetings with Klansmen.

By redefining the black-Jewish relationship in this more Afrocentric way, Lee corrects a historical literature that all too often marginalized African-Americans in their own social justice movement. He takes an approach similar to "Selma" director Ava DuVernay, who was unfairly criticized by many Jewish viewers when she did not include an iconic image of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in her movie.

Lee and his team go a step further in rebalancing the black-Jewish relationship by showing the ways that Stallworth inspired his Jewish colleague to strengthen his own religious identity. When Zimmerman downplays his Star of David necklace, remarking that he did not identify strongly as a Jew, Stallworth pushes back. And when he asks, “Why you acting like you ain’t got skin in the game?,” Zimmerman realizes that his Jewishness matters. Later in the film, he faces virulent anti-Semitism from members of the KKK when he is told to take a “Jew lie detector test” and to lower his pants to see if he had been circumcised.

Zimmerman’s heritage mattered; it took his African-American colleague to wake him up from his

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Jewish slumber. My own research has shown how, taking their cues from the Black Power movement, young Jews were indeed inspired to seek a more serious engagement with their ethno-religious identity.

The deepest evidence of this film’s investment in exploring black-Jewish relations comes from the surprising fact that the real detective Zimmerman was not Jewish. Lee and the creative forces who wrote and produced the film, including "Get Out" director Jordan Peele, took license to frame this story in black-Jewish terms. With this decision, they offer a 21st-century re-creation of the postwar civil rights alliance.

"BlacKkKlansman" teaches us that in a nation so fraught with racism and anti-Semitism, blacks and Jews offered a model of cooperation built on equity and respect between communities.

In a riveting conclusion -- I won’t detail it here for those who have yet to see the film -- Lee connects the history of white supremacy and the KKK to the contemporary political climate. With heart-wrenching cinematic detail, viewers are left to wonder how much progress has been achieved since the emancipation of African-Americans in the mid-19th century.

Yet in his crafting of a renewed black-Jewish relationship that demonstrates the ways in which Jews learned, grew and benefited from their interactions with blacks, Lee offers a model of hope. With this reframe, we have a vision for blacks and Jews, as well as for other communities, to rally once again.

(Marc Dollinger holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University and is author, most recently, of "Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing The Alliance In The 1960s.")

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media. 

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Israeli Startups Want to Replace Your Sugar With High-Tech Alternatives

By Ben Hartman

Udi Barkan, the research and development chef for Unavoo, maker of a stevia-based sweetener mixed with fiber from acacia trees, uses the product to sweeten desserts. (Dan Peretz)

TEL AVIV -- Picture the scene: It’s Rosh Hashanah eve, the year 2023. A family sits around the table, apple slices at the ready.

But instead of dipping the fruit into a bowl of thick honey, they take turns dipping it into a bowl of diet syrup sweetened by Israelidesigned natural proteins.

That’s part of the vision of Amai Proteins, an Israeli biotech company working to develop sweet alternatives to sugar in commercial food products. The company is working on formulas that are based on proteins found in various fruits, and they have zero calories, are cheaper and sweeter than sugar.

They also don’t leave that aftertaste associated with artificial sweeteners.

And they’d be kosher.

“Unlike other high-intensity sweeteners, Amai’s products are proteins and get digested in the

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upper gastrointestinal tract without causing any insulin response,” CEO Ilan Samish said.

That, he said, could enable diabetics to consume the sweetener while avoiding the dangerous insulin response prompted by sugar consumption.

Amai is among a burst of Israeli startups developing innovative alternative sweeteners, part of a new crop of Israeli biotech and food science companies aiming to take on the $90 billion global sugar market. They want to wean consumers and food companies off their reliance on sugar -- its health effects range from obesity and cardiovascular disease to diabetes and liver illnesses -- and appeal to the growing demand for non-sugar, nature-based alternatives.

Israel has some 750 active startups and companies in the food and agriculture tech sectors, according to a May 2018 report by Start-Up Nation Central, an Israeli nonprofit that tracks and supports the country’s startup ecosystem. According to the organization’s public database, Start-Up Nation Finder, about 270 of the startups are food tech companies. At least a dozen of them are working on tackling sugar.

Sugar is so ubiquitous in processed food now that about 75 percent of food and beverage products contain added sugar,

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including in items like yogurt, protein powder and tomato sauce.

Consumption of soft drinks with high sugar levels has increased fivefold in the United States since 1950. Meanwhile, sugary drinks are linked to an estimated 184,000 deaths per year worldwide, according to a 2015 study.

While sugar alternatives have been on the market for decades, most have an aftertaste, contain artificial chemicals or don’t produce the same “mouth feel” as sugar.

Many of the new Israeli companies are focused on products that overcome those problems.

An Israeli startup called ShakeUp is working on a healthy ice cream that is low-calorie, low-fat, has no added sugar and is dairy-free. Another company, Better Juice, is crafting low-sugar fruit juice by converting the sugars into dietary fibers.

The Caesarea-based outfit Lampados International has developed a low-calorie meringue sweetener called Liteez made of prebiotic fibers and vegetable proteins that consumers can plop in a hot drink and watch melt.

Last year, Amai’s Samish and Masha Niv, the vice dean for research at Hebrew University’s Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment, founded a forum to boost collaboration between Israeli academics and food industry leaders in the field of healthy sugar reduction.

Called the Sweet Science Forum, it’s meant to share research and brainstorm solutions in subjects like sweet perception, molecular mechanisms of sweetness and

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sensory analysis. Among the members are scientists from the Technion, Hebrew University and the Israeli agricultural research center the Volcani Institute; food industry giants like Tnuva, Strauss and CocaCola; and startups like Amai.

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Community Highlights

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Northshore Jewish Congregation

A Call to Action against Hate

On September 16th, The Jewish Community along with supportive and caring Elected Officials and Neighbors made a Unified Community Stand as a much broader community stood together as one against hate.

The Congregation’s president, Jeremy Shalett was quoted as saying, “This is our way of turning the graffiti act

into something positive, this isn’t going to affect the community, it’s only going to make us stronger.”

Though this hateful vandalism will be hard to forget, the community support shown from phone calls, letters and attendance was truly inspirational.

The NJC is truly a congregation of volunteers, who put in countless hours because of the love for Judaism and the desire for a strong Jewish community, committed to the values and conduct of the individual, the family and the society in which we live.

On September 16, 2018, the community outreach gathering proved that these values are just as important to St. Tammany as well.

We thank everyone who responded! 

Photo Credit by Anya Nebeker of Geaux Smile Photography

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Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Coffee Cake

By Sheri Silver

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Coffee Cake (Sheri Silver)

(The Nosher via JTA) – To be a gluten-free baker (and eater) years ago was to be a disappointed baker (and eater). Delicious, high-quality gluten-free products were virtually impossible to find, and trying to make gluten-free goods from scratch was equally frustrating since there was little information out there to instruct the home baker.

But today is quite a different story. Blogs, websites, and cookbooks solely devoted to gluten-free baking abound, with no end of tips, recipes, and suggestions for alternative flours, creating flour blends, and duplicate GF (it even has an abbreviation now!) versions of every cookie, bread, and cake imaginable.

No one in my family has celiac disease, or even a gluten sensitivity. But I have found, over the years, that we ALL tend to feel better if we reduce the amount of white and wheat flours in our diet. And while I “could” make my own flour blends for baking, I am a huge fan of what I call the “cup-for-cup” packaged blends that are widely available. These commercially produced blends are meant to be used as an exact substitute for flour in any recipe, and for the most part, you’d never know the difference.

I say “for the most part” because I’ve found the greatest success when using these flours in sturdier baked goods – cookies, quick breads, and denser cakes. Like coffee cake!

Unlike an angel food or layer cake, coffee cake made with a gluten-free blend is virtually undetectable. A generous addition of sour cream provides incredible moistness and you can never go wrong adding in chocolate chips. Instant espresso puts the “coffee” in this cake, and the chocolate streusel topping and cinnamon-sugar is simply a traditional must.

Be sure to make this at least a THE

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NOSHER

(food)

day in advance to allow the flavors rack. Serves 8-10.

(Sheri Silver is writer of the blog and texture to settle and develop.

(You can even make it a month in Donuts, Dresses and Dirt (http:// sherisilver.com/) – where she advance and freeze it!) shares all of her passions, including Ingredients: baking and cooking, gardening and • 12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) shopping, and her adventures in unsalted butter, divided, at and around New York City with her room temperature husband and three kids. She is also • 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar, a regular contributor to Babble divided Food, Buttoned Up and VRAI • 1/4 cup brown sugar Magazine.)

• 2 3/4 cups cup-for-cup glutenThe Nosher food blog offers a free flour blend dazzling array of new and classic • Kosher salt Jewish recipes and food news, from • 1 tablespoon unsweetened coEurope to Yemen, from challah to coa powder shakshuka and beyond. Check it • 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon • 1/4 cup chocolate chips, diout at www.TheNosher.com.  vided • 2 eggs • 1 teaspoon vanilla • 1 cup (8 ounces) sour cream • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder • 1 teaspoon baking soda • 1 tablespoon instant espresso Directions: 1. Pre-heat oven to 350 F.; line a 9-by-9-inch pan with parchment paper (or grease and flour) 2. Melt 4 tablespoons butter in a saucepan; remove from heat and add 1/4 cup granulated sugar, the brown sugar, 3/4 cup gluten-free flour blend, the cocoa powder and a pinch of salt. Stir with a fork, breaking up any large clumps, and spread out onto a baking sheet. Set aside.

3. Combine 1/4 cup granulated sugar and the cinnamon in a small bowl; set aside.

4. Beat the remaining 8 tablespoons butter with the remaining 1 cup sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs, vanilla and sour cream and beat again. Add the remaining 2 cups gluten-free flour blend, baking powder, baking soda, instant espresso, and a pinch of salt and beat again.

5. Spread half the batter into your prepared pan – use a small angled spatula to spread evenly.

Top with the cinnamon-sugar and sprinkle with half the chocolate chips. Top with the remaining batter; use a small angled spatula to spread evenly. Top with the streusel and sprinkle with the remaining chocolate chips.

6. Bake cake for 45 minutes or until a cake tester tests clean. Cool completely in the pan on a wire www.thejewishlight.org

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The Nosher

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One Pot Paprika Chicken with Orzo and Olives Recipe

By Samantha Ferraro • Chopped parsley, for garnish

Directions:

One Pot Paprika Chicken with Orzo and Olives ( Samantha Ferraro)

This one pot paprika chicken is a take on my mom’s memorable paprika chicken recipe. I have very fond memories of cleaning the whole bird and then rubbing it down with loads of paprika for weeknight dinners. The spice gives a deep rich color and imparts a delicious smoky flavor.

This is my updated and modernized variation of mom’s simple recipe made into an easy one-pan meal. Oh, and find yourself some Castelvetrano olives — they are buttery with a bit of brine and are so addictive.

Tip: If you can’t find the specified olives, substitute with the easier-to-find green manzanilla olives.

This recipe is excerpted with permission from Samantha Ferraro’s new cookbook, “The Weeknight Mediterranean Kitchen.”

Ingredients:

• 2 pounds chicken thighs, bone• • • • • • • • •

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in and skin-on 2 teaspoons smoked paprika 1/2 teaspoon salt Olive oil, as needed 1 shallot, chopped finely 2 garlic cloves, chopped finely 8 ounces dried orzo 2 cups chicken stock 1 lemon, sliced 1 cup whole pitted Castelvetrano olives

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1. Preheat the oven to 350 F 2. In a bowl, toss the chicken with the paprika and salt, making sure the spices evenly coat the chicken.

3. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat and add enough olive oil to coat the bottom. Don’t add too much oil because the chicken will give off its own fat, as well.

4. Once the oil is hot, place the chicken thighs skin-side down into the hot pan and cook until a deep golden brown, about 3 to 4 minutes, and then flip the chicken over to the other side and cook for an additional 3 minutes.

5. Once both sides of the chicken are a deep golden brown, remove to a plate and set aside.

6. In the same hot skillet, add the shallot and saute until lightly golden, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add the garlic and saute for another minute.

7. Add the orzo and stir so it is coated in the oil and aromatics (this will give it great flavor). Use a spatula to even out the orzo. Add the chicken back into the pan, skinside up and pour in the stock.

8. Scatter the lemon slices and olives over the chicken and orzo and place in the oven, covered, for 25 minutes. Remove the cover and continue cooking for an additional 12 to 15 minutes.

9. Once cooked, remove from the oven and garnish with parsley.

Serves 2-4.

(Samantha Ferraro is the food blogger and photographer for The Little Ferraro Kitchen. Follow Samantha at http://littleferrarokitchen.com.)

The Nosher food blog offers a dazzling array of new and classic Jewish recipes and food news, from Europe to Yemen, from challah to shakshuka and beyond. Check it out at www.TheNosher.com. 

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Focus Issues

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on This Seattle Singer Wrote an Entire Folk Rock Album on the History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

By Gabe Friedman

Ben Fisher's album "Does the Land Remember Me?" explores the history of Israel from Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints. (Kendall Rock)

(JTA) — In 2014, early on in a three-year stint spent living in Israel, songwriter Ben Fisher took a vacation to Japan. Sitting in a hotel room in Tokyo, he spontaneously wrote a song about the founding of Tel Aviv — in about 15 minutes.

The story goes that the first Tel Aviv homesteaders chose their plots of land at random by picking seashells from the Mediterranean shoreline with numbers written in them. Fisher named the song “The Shell Lottery.”

Earlier that year, the Seattle-based songwriter had quietly released an album of country-tinged folk rock called “Charleston.” But Fisher, a self-described “huge musical nerd,” had long wanted to write a more ambitious concept album in the vein of Sufjan Stevens’ cult classic “Illinois” and “Michigan” records. “The Shell Lottery” was the moment he had been waiting for.

“I realized that it could serve as the start of something bigger, something more cohesive,” he said.

Over the course of the next year, while living in an apartment across from the Old City in Jerusalem, he went on to write most of the songs that wound up on his folky, heartfelt 17-track opus “Does the Land Remember Me?” On the album, which comes out Sept. 7, Fisher inhabits a range of characters, from early Israelis nervous about their new country to Palestinians forced to leave their homes to a settler imagining his eventual expulsion from the West Bank. There are history lessons on Masada, terrorist attacks and Israeli figures such as singer Meir Ariel and astronaut Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli to make it into space (he was killed in the fatal Columbia mission in 2003).

Some songs also capture the 26-year-old Fisher’s contemporary perspective on the city and country he grew to love, from his apartment on what he calls “the seam” between THE

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Jewish western Jerusalem and Arab eastern Jerusalem. Each song has an explanatory liner note giving the listener context and, in some cases, a mini history lesson.

“You hear gunshots from terrorist attacks, you see dead terrorists in the public park adjacent to the walls of the Old City,” reads the liner note for “Horses and Helpers,” one of the tracks sung from Fisher’s contemporary perspective. “You are late to work because a car has plowed into your light rail station, aiming to run down people going about their daily business. You’re not allowed to leave the Damascus Gate of the Old City after getting coffee with friends because there has been a stabbing attack and they’re still searching for the perpetrator.”

The goal of the project, Fisher says, is to challenge those with deeply held ideologies on Israel from all sides of the spectrum. He wants listeners to realize that there is always “another perspective” and “another story” to hear about Israel, no matter

what preconceptions one might have.

“My intent from the beginning was to write songs that a certain group of Israeli or Jewish-American society would agree with, and then have the next song be something totally out of left field, from a perspective that they had never considered from somebody they considered to be the enemy,” he said. “And all within the course of three minutes.”

Fisher’s fascination with Israel started after college when he realized he had a “black hole” in his knowledge about the Jewish state. His parents, whom he describes as “baconeating” Reform Jews, actually talked more about Egypt, where they lived for a time in the 1980s, than they talked about Israel. He majored in Middle Eastern studies and Arabic at the University of Washington.

But after graduating, Fisher set out to educate himself on Israel and its history. He read books on the country by Martin Gilbert, Daniel Gordis and Yossi Klein Halevi, and Israeli newspapers like Haaretz. He

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listened to Israeli music. He says he became a little “obsessed,” telling his parents he wanted to move to Israel with the idea of writing songs inspired by the country. 

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National

John Mccain’s Parting Shot Is a Warning About the ‘Alt-Right’

By Ron Kampeas

U.S. Senator John McCain speaking at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Arizona, October 21, 2016. (Gage Skidmore)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — John McCain’s farewell message was seven short paragraphs packed with the qualities that made the Arizona Republican stand out among his colleagues in the Senate: a paean to his family and to the state and country he loved, gratitude for the opportunity to serve in its military and in Congress, and acknowledgment of his flaws.

Make that five paragraphs: McCain reserved two paragraphs in his posthumous farewell for a warn-

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ing about the dangers of hypernationalism, alluding to the rise of the “alt-right,” the white supremacists whom he reviled. And he invoked a slogan that predates the Nazis, but that was made popular by them: blood and soil.

“I lived and died a proud American,” said McCain, underscoring his warning with an eerie first person past tense use of the verb “die” perhaps only he could get away with. “We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil.”

He cast his warning in the context of the robust American interventionism he has always favored.

“We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process,” McCain said. “We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal

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rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe.”

It was not the first time McCain had referenced the term “blood and soil,” which the Nazis used to justify their theories of racial purity.

Last October, receiving the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal, he used the term to warn against the white supremacism that had led to violence and murder in Charlottesville, Virginia just two months earlier.

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history,” McCain said then. “We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil.”

Neo-Nazis marching through Charlottesville had chanted “blood and soil” on their way to Emancipation Park, where they protested plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The phrase has its roots in the “scientific racism” that roiled Europe and particularly Germany in the 19th century. A spokesman for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum pointed JTA to a glossary of Nazi terms the museum posted on its website after the Charlottesville violence.

“Blood referred to the goal of a ‘racially pure’ Aryan people,” the museum definition says. “Soil invoked a mystical vision of the special relationship between the Germanic people and their land. It was also a tool to justify land seizures in eastern Europe and the forced expulsion of local populations in favor of ethnic Germans.”

McCain was furious with President Donald Trump for equivocat-

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ing following Charlottesville, when the president insisted both sides were to blame for the violence and — despite evidence that the days’ events were organized by white nationalists and attended mostly by their followers — declared that there were “very fine people” on both sides. And McCain’s final statement segues from a warning about the term to an indictment of Trump’s policies, particularly the president’s anti-immigrant postures.

“We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down,” McCain said, an allusion to the wall Trump hopes to build along the border the United States shares with Mexico, and which runs through Arizona. “When we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.”

Trump despised McCain and had to be pressured into honoring the senator’s memory.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the AntiDefamation League CEO, said McCain’s message was a call to all Americans, and their leaders. “’Blood and Soil’ is a direct reference to the right-wing nationalist slogan chanted during the racist and anti-Semitic protests in Charlottesville last year – one that, along with ‘Jews will not replace us,’ has in some respects come to symbolize the modern face of racism and hatred in America,” Greenblatt said in an email to JTA. “In referencing this slogan, I believe Senator McCain is exhorting all of us to rise above the hatreds that have divided us in recent year,” Greenblatt said. “He is reminding us – as Americans and as human beings – that we are bound together by the highest ideals of liberty and equality, and that those ideals cannot be undermined by claims to racial or religious superiority. It is an important message; one should be heard as a clarion call at the highest levels of our government.” 

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The Surprising Thing Marshmallows Can Teach Us About Being Jewish

By Jordana Horn

(JTA) You’ve probably heard of the marshmallow test, especially if you ever took a college course in psychology or read an article in The New Yorker. It’s a famous experiment: put a marshmallow in front of a preschooler and tell them that they can either eat it now or, if they can wait 15 minutes and not eat it, they will get two marshmallows.

Demonstrating the willpower to not eat the sugary treat, the test found, was a predictor of the kid’s future ability to succeed in life generally.

Let’s start from the fact that I don’t know any small children who are capable of delaying gratification — and I doubt you do, either.

Moreover, we now live in a world

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where nobody delays gratification.

The president wants to say something? He doesn’t wait to call a press conference — he tweets. You want to buy something? Whip out your phone and order it on Amazon.

You want to hear music? Tell Alexa.

The very concept of delaying gratification seems somewhat retro at this point.

A trio of social scientists recently restaged this experiment — and found that our assumptions about delayed gratification aren’t only inaccurate, but they’re something closer to insidious. While the original experiment worked with 90 children in a preschool at Stanford University, the revamp conducted

by NYU’s Tyler Watts and UC Irvine’s Greg Duncan and Hoanan Quan used a sample of over 900 children representative of the general population — taking into account race, ethnicity, and their parents’ education levels and income.

The marshmallow test’s new results, published last month, find

limited support for the idea that delayed gratification leads to great outcomes. Instead, as The Atlantic reported, a kid’s ability to wait for a second marshmallow is very closely correlated to the child’s social and economic background, which is — wait for it — a significant factor in determining a kid’s long-term success in life.

“This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run — in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior — than those who dug right in,” says The Atlantic. “Similarly, among kids whose mothers did not have college degrees, those who waited did no better than those who gave in to temptation, once other factors like household income and the child’s home environment at age 3 (evaluated according to a standard research measure that notes, for instance, the number of books that researchers observed in

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the home and how responsive mothers were to their children in the researchers’ presence) were taken into account. For those kids, selfcontrol alone couldn’t overcome economic and social disadvantages.”

The takeaway is that it’s not the innate ability to delay gratification but, rather, it’s the circumstances on the ground in the child’s life that dictate so many factors — including whether or not the child is capable of delaying gratification in the first place. Can the willpower of a kid who has no fear of where his or her next meal is coming from be tested against that of a child who’s very determined but has only known food insecurity? As the article states, “For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting. And even if their parents promise to buy See MARSHMALLOWS on Page

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Kveller A Guide to Talking to Your Child About God

By Beata Abraham (Kveller via JTA) – The long anticipated (and sometimes dreaded) moment has arrived —your child has come to you with questions about your belief in and/or relationship with God. If you are anxious about answering — perhaps even paralyzed with the fear of saying the wrong thing and sending your child spiraling down a lifelong abyss of confusing, anchorless spirituality — fear not.

Yes, it’s a BIG TOPIC. But here are some ways to get through this trepidatious occasion.

Step 1: Congratulate yourself: You are officially the parent of a child who has recognized and begun to grapple with the universal questions of life.

More important, your prodigy is actually interested in your beliefs. Mazel tov! Act like this is perfectly normal and the two of you regularly mull over the meaning of life together.

Step 2: Take a deep breath, and express

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your opinions and beliefs freely.

Regardless of whether your religious beliefs are firm — grounded in the logic of science or steeped in the amorphous nature of spirituality — let it all hang out. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, and expressing them to your child is not to be confused with indoctrination. It is simply modeling the concept that you are a person who has given these questions the hefty thought that they deserve. This is a good thing, and important for your child to know.

Disregard any and all eye rolling (alas, this moment is not about you).

Step 3: Keep in mind that you do not have to give the “right” answer.

(And if you know what the “right” answer is, let me know, OK?) Remind yourself that if all your words had lifelong impact on your child, his/her room would remain spotless at all times, and he/she would be showering you with the gratitude you clearly deserve.

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Instead, this conversation about God will be much like all of your others: You will express your deepest, most heartfelt thoughts and platitudes, and your child will add this information to the ginormous bucket in which he/she is collecting drops of knowledge and opinions before arriving at his/her own conclusions -- the same conclusions that he or she will arrive at with or without your input. However, what does matter is that you model the importance of taking the time to contemplate these significant matters.

Step 4: Understand that your child is struggling with the same things with which you struggle. Your kid is wondering: Why is there injustice in this world? Why do bad things happen to good people? How can I make a difference? What is my purpose on this earth? If these questions sound familiar, it may be due to your own continued search for the answers. You have this in common.

Step 5: This brings us to the shared journey for answers. Just let your children know that you are both on this path — along with pretty much all of humanity. There is comfort and inspiration in companionship, even when provided by the least cool

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parent in the world (and yes, sorry to say, I’m talking to you). Once you have pointed out that you share the journey, just listen a lot. When the opportunity arises, ask many open-ended questions designed to elicit a full, meaningful answer, then listen some more. Your child is trying on his/her opinions for size by expressing them aloud. They are far from being fully formed.

Step 6: Begin the kvelling — you have earned it. Though you may be deeply uncool (see: Step 5) take pride knowing you are raising a thoughtful, inquisitive future adult who also cares what you think. You must be doing something very right, so sit back and wait for the compliments about raising an amazing kid to roll in. You have nailed parenting once again!

(Beata Abraham, a writer and Jewish educator, is the director of education at a Reform temple in Columbus, Ohio. She is the mother of four children.)

Kveller is a thriving community of women and parents who convene online to share, celebrate and commiserate their experiences of raising kids through a Jewish lens. Visit Kveller.com 

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Hydrox, the Original Kosher Sandwich Cookie, Is Accusing Oreo of Sabotage

By Ben Sales

Hydrox celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2008. (Jim Henderson/Wikimedia Commons)

(JTA) -- You know what Oreos are.

They're two delicious chocolate cookies sandwiched around a creme filling. Oreos also come in Double Stuff, vanilla, birthday cake and pumpkin spice (really).

There is debate on how they should be eaten, but everyone knows they're best when dunked in milk.

What you might not know is that Oreos are just a copycat of Hydrox, a sandwich cookie first sold in 1908, four years before Oreos appeared on shelves. Even though

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(or maybe because?) they were second, Oreos came to dominate the market, becoming a fixture in America's grocery stores.

But for most of the past century plus, Hydrox has held on. And at least in part it's because of the Jews.

Until a glorious day in 1998, Hydrox was the premiere kosher sandwich cookie on the market, while Oreos remained "treif," lacking a kosher heksher, or seal of approval. Growing up, I genuinely thought Hydrox cookies were knockoff Oreos produced specifically for religious Jews. Oreos were the forbidden fruit, and I still vividly remember when, shortly after they became kosher certified, my mom snagged a sleeve of Oreos from a Jewish event. We gobbled them up.

Hydrox stopped production in 2003, giving Oreo 12 years of a monopoly, give or take a 100th anniversary promotion by Hydrox's then maker, Kellogg's. A Pax Oreana, if you will. But in 2015, Hydrox, now part of Leaf Brands,

sprang back like a phoenix and has been trying to duke it out with Oreo, David and Goliath style.

And now it's taking that battle to the government.

Hydrox posted on Facebook that it has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing employees of Oreo's parent company, Mondelez, of blocking Hydrox from view when it stocks Oreos on supermarket shelves. The Facebook post says Mondelez uses a system called "direct store distribution" in which employees of the brand, rather than supermarket attendants, stock the food. This allows the Oreo stockers to push Hydrox aside when they place Oreo boxes on the shelves.

Loyal Hydrox customers have sent in pictures of the cookies being boxed out by Oreos, moved behind other products or otherwise obscured from customers. Hydrox claims a major supermarket chain brought up the problem at a meeting.

"We believe in competition and

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choice but we firmly believe the folks @Mondelez (the owners of Oreo) have been undertaking a national program to damage our brand and stop us from competing," Hydrox's posts says. "Many of you over the last few years have been great at taking pictures when you see #hydroxcookies being moved or blocked from store shelves and we really appreciate your help."

Mondelez sounds unconcerned about the complaint, telling Gizmodo that it is "confident that this accusation has no merit. The OREO brand is an iconic one, with a proud and rich history of delivering great tasting products and exciting innovations to our consumers for more than a century. This focus, and our commitment to operating with integrity, has made OREO America’s favorite cookie.”

So who will win, the original kosher sandwich cookie or the giant it's fighting? Only time -- and maybe a government agency -- will tell. 

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Israel Under Radar

If Israel Has Such Bad PR, Why Does It Remain So Popular?

By Andrew Silow-Carroll (JTA) -- The first mention in JTA of the Hebrew word "hasbarah" was in 1988, at the height of the first intifada. The article focused on Israelis and American Jews and their deep concern that the media were distorting the unrest and showing the Israeli military in a

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bad light.

The answer, interviewees agreed, was better "hasbarah" -- a Hebrew word, explained the author (OK, it was me), "whose meaning falls somewhere between information and propaganda."

“Israel has never actually looked

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at hasbarah as an integral part of policymaking,” said Dan Pattir, a former press secretary to prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin.

Fast forward 30 years. Writing last week in the Los Angeles Times, Noga Tarnapolsky makes a convincing case that Israel's public diplomacy efforts are flawed, unprofessional, scattershot and out of touch. Critics tell her that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relies too much on social-media videos to defend Israel. They say its military spokespeople are ill prepared to answer questions about controversial events, like May's deadly riots on the border with Gaza. "“There is … no single authority that coordinates and supervises these various activities,” complains Michael Oren, who is (wait for it) Israel's deputy minister in charge of public diplomacy.

The critics, however, don't make a convincing case why any of this matters.

Complaints about Israel's hasbarah efforts are as regular and ritualistic as the Jewish holidays. Without answers from a strong PR campaign, the theory goes, the litany of anti-Israel charges gains traction.

But among whom? Israel remains hugely popular among the American public. According to Gallup, 64 percent of the U.S. population sympathizes with the Israelis over the Palestinians, and only 19 percent say they sympathize more with the Palestinians. Congress remains firmly pro-Israel. Yes, a Pew survey in January showed a wide partisan divide over Israel, with 79 percent of Republicans and only 27 percent of Democratic sympathizing more with Israel than with the Palestinians. But the poll questions forced respondents to choose between

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands that Israel’s “hasbarah” can only get the country so far.

(Illustration by Charles Dunst/JTA; photo: Michal Cizek/AFP/Getty)

Israelis and Palestinians (why not both?), and the results may have reflected only the deeply partisan nature of American politics -- not anything you can hasbarah away.

Despite wide publicity and Jewish consternation, the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment movement hasn't taken root outside the far left. As of June, 25 states have enacted anti-BDS laws. In fact, the whole point of BDS is that Israel has a positive image that needs to be undermined. You wouldn't know about BDS if celebrities didn't regularly include Israel on their world tours.

The charge of "pinkwashing" -that Israel touts its relatively progressive record on LGBT rights to distract the world from the occupation -- targets what the BDS folk think is a positive and effective means of hasbarah -- otherwise, why would they bother? And paradoxically, every charge of pinkwashing only reminds the casual reader of Israel's strong LGBT record.

Two kinds of critics, often overlapping, criticize Israel's hasbarah.

The first is convinced that the media have in it for Israel. Such critics also hold the mistaken notion that the media's role is to tell a story as they would have it told. Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conSee ISRAEL on Page

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students of the Lauder school.

These children’s lives are forever changed.

What Lauder has achieved in Central and Eastern Europe should be applied now in the United States, where the continuity of the largest community outside of Israel is in danger.

Communities such as the United Kingdom, Australia and France have achieved great strides in recent years toward this goal. The great majority of their children receive a formal Jewish education; there is no reason why this should not be attainable in the U.S. Every Diaspora Jew is the carrier of dual identities -- the national one and the Jewish one -- trying to juggle and reconcile and build a symbiosis. Trying to strike the balance between enlightenment and tradition has not been easy.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, in his latest book “Enlightenment Now,” argued that the Enlightenment improved humanity by replacing "dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking.”

Yoram Hazony of The Herzl Institute, in a response to Pinker, said that if the response of the Jews to the Enlightenment had been absolute, then the Zionist movement -which drew its passion and strength from the vast sources of Jewish tradition and history -- would never have been born and we wouldn’t have had a Jewish state today.

We as a people are out of balance. The world is out of balance.

The climate is out of balance, and geopolitics are increasingly shrill and simplistic, polarizing friends and family members. Let us try to regain some balance and perspective for the sake of our future, of our children — before it is too late.

(Pinchas Goldschmidt has been the chief rabbi of Moscow since 1993, serving at the Moscow Choral Synagogue and since 2011 as president of the Conference of European Rabbis.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media. 

cranky independence, interwoven into an identity that could clearly be demarcated as “New York Times Arts Section Jewish.”

I'm glad I met Neil Simon when I did, in the early '90s, while on a trip to L.A. for a reading of a play of mine. I was at a lunch meeting, pitching a project to a friend in the business from Chicago at an upscale Hamburger Hamlet in Westwood.

We spied Neil Simon sitting alone reading "The Jordan Rules" by Sam Smith, right after the Bulls had won their second NBA championship.

Simon was then on the crest of what seemed to be a career high point, soon to earn a Pulitzer Prize for “Lost in Yonkers.” Perhaps Simon could identity with the book's unseemly treatment of Michael Jordan, just as Simon had to endure sneering critics who found his substance somehow lacking. Despite the achievement of the Eugene Trilogy, "Lost in Yonkers" had gotten trashed in Washington that winter. The New York Times critic who had so admired the trilogy also sniffed at Simon's latest.

But "Lost in Yonkers" would wind up running for two years on Broadway and found a new way to impact audiences -- or at least me.

And that’s what I wanted to talk to Neil about in Hamburger Hamlet.

At the time, I too was working on a play about my own German-Jewish family. In "Yonkers," we meet Bella Kurnitz, a sweet, middle-aged, behaviorally-challenged woman still living at home.

Her successful brothers have moved onto busy lives outside the home, leaving Bella to live with their fierce, commanding and less-than demonstrative mother, who scares her visiting grandsons have to death.

With the exception of that icy Grandmother Kurnitz, the setup reminded me of the situation in my own father’s family, and his own troubled sister, my Aunt Irene. Like Bella, she had been born with scarlet fever, was a little bit slow and very much the black sheep.

Overshadowed as she approached middle age, she was a girl in a woman’s body with dreams that would likely not come true. My Aunt Irene didn’t make it past 40 and, over the ensuing years, I tried to write what it meant to lose her.

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A play came out but it took a long time – both in getting it produced, and then in trying to get it right; I probably never did. I was just at the beginning of writing that play when Neil Simon introduced Bella Kurnitz to the world, and I thought to myself, “He’s captured my Irene better than I ever will. And he’s saved her through comedy." I admired Neil Simon for a lot of reasons but none more than for the effortless dexterity that went into "Yonkers." Genius makes hard work look easy.

I got to produce "Lost in Yonkers" some 16 years later, as I grew more comfortable as an artistic director at a Jewish theater, and it became a huge hit for us, of course. It attracted great artists and great audiences alike. It also attracted that surly critic from the Washington Post, now a fulltime writer outside of journalism, who joined our team as production dramaturge, having given Neil Simon and his play another look. Neil Simon would be vindicated before his critics, and before those acolytes who thought they could craft a deeper brand of expression. Neil won on account of his genius.

What set Simon apart, especially from Roth, was the empathy on display to women: Bella and Grandma Kurnitz in "Lost in Yonkers," and to Kate, the broken mother in Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway

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Bound, who would come to endure her husband’s defection, echoing the same betrayal in Simon’s own family. We see their grit, and then heartbreak, and then tenderness, framed in laughter. Simon found his material from within, but he wrote outside of himself just as brilliantly. He was the Michael Jordan of Broadway -- with all quirks, critics, and limitations that come with. But his achievement was singular, and the way he re-shaped the game – and the art form and business of theater – is total. We’ll not see his like again.

(Ari Roth is a playwright, producer and founding artistic director of Mosaic Theater Company of DC, dedicated to creating independent, intercultural, uncensored, socially relevant art. As artistic director over 18 seasons at Theater J, Roth built the fledgling DC theater into the largest Jewish theater in North America. Roth's plays include "Born Guilty," a sequel, "The Wolf In Peter," "Andy and The Shadows," "Life in Refusal," "Oh, the Innocents," "Love and Yearning in the Not for Profits" and "Goodnight Irene.")

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media. 

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SUGAR Continued from Page 13 “It’s hard to say what will be in 20 years, but I don’t think it’s the optimal outcome to replace sugar altogether,” Niv said. “We also have to somehow convince ourselves to consume less.”

Many startups in the sweet science field were launched as a result of their founders’ personal needs.

A1C Foods, which develops products that are low carb and low on the glycemic index -- how much the carbohydrates in a certain food affects blood glucose levels -- was launched

by Ran Hirsch, a lawyer and entrepreneur whose daughter has diabetes, and the endocrinologist who treated her, Dr. Mariela Glandt. In July, A1C was chosen by PepsiCo to be one of 10 companies to take part in its Nutrition Greenhouse incubator.

Yuval Maimon, CEO of Unavoo, maker of the natural sweetener Heylo, once owned a sprawling gelato business. After being diagnosed with diabetes 10 years ago, he shifted gears to focus on a new venture aimed at helping people eat tasty, sweet food without consuming more sugar. Unavoo sells a stevia-based sweetener that is mixed with fiber from acacia trees to offset the bitterness of stevia.

“The point is for it to be sweet and to feel like sugar when you eat it,” said Lilach Bar-Tal, Unavoo’s vice president of marketing and strategy.

As with so many Israeli startups, the target market is overseas; Israel serves primarily as a center for research and development. In most cases, the Israeli companies are targeting not consumers but major global corporations to whom the Israeli know-how and technological breakthroughs can be sold or marketed.

For example, Amai is still in the R&D stage and doesn’t expect to be on the market for two more years, according to Samish. But the company already is collaborating on uses for its sweeteners with several large food and beverage firms, including SodaStream, the Israeli beverage giant that in August was acquired by PepsiCo for $3.2 billion.

SodaStream is one of Israel’s

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great sweet-science success stories.

Its sodas have about one-third the quantity of sugar in traditional sodas like Coca-Cola, and the company’s stock price has more than doubled over the past five years. Since April, SodaStream has been working with Amai on integrating sweet designer proteins into SodaStream products, including low-sugar and no-sugar soda in flavors like lemon, orange and coconut, according to Samish.

Eran Baniel, CEO of DouxMatok, a startup from the central Israeli city of Petach Tikvah that manipulates sugar molecules to enhance the perception of sweetness, described the sugar business as “a very conservative, very traditional industry” suffering from reduced profits in markets across the world and looking to benefit from partnerships with innovative companies.

Ironically, global sugar demand overall is expected to accelerate over the next decade as processed food giants -- like Germany’s Sudzucker, which is the largest sugar producer in Europe, and Brazil’s Cosan, a sugar and energy conglomerate -- make inroads in emerging markets where sugar consumption is still relatively low.

For companies targeting sugarconscious consumers, however, the race to find alternative sources of sweetness is on. The key, of course, is to reduce sugar without sacrificing taste.

“You can develop a very healthy product,” said Tammy Meiron, the head of Amai’s food technology department, “but if the consumer experience isn’t great and the food isn’t tasty, they won’t buy it a second time.”

(This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with Start-Up Nation Central, an Israelbased nonprofit that provides a gateway to the Israeli innovation ecosystem and strengthens Israel’s tech economy by convening government, industry, academia and NGOs to help shape policies that support Israel as a thriving innovation nation. This article was produced by JTA’s native content team.) 

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MARSHMALLOWS Continued from Page 19 more of a certain food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity.”

In an era in which the top 1% of our society is becoming an American aristocracy, this new study is a real eye opener: Not only is delayed gratification a dated concept, it also highlights how the notion that everyone begins life at the same starting line — even in America’s comparative land of opportunity — is inherently problematic.

What’s more, as parents, when we teach our children the idea that success only stems from having more grit/determination/spunk/ force than others, I think it actually also does something, subconsciously, to our kids’ ability to empathize and understand others’ lives and experiences. If we perpetuate the idea that disadvantages — like not being born to parents who went to college — have little to no impact on a kid’s future success in life, we are less likely to either appreciate our own privileges, and we are less likely to make sure that other people have access to those same opportunities. Don’t we want our kids to be aware of their privilege?

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Don’t we want them to recognize those differences and get angry about them? Don’t we want our children to be aware of the uneven playing field so that hopefully, one day, they can grow up being motivated to change it?

So, thanks some marshmallows, we have the chance to revisit our assumptions about privilege and success. We have an opportunity to think about what motivates us and what motivates others — and to try and to see things from someone else’s perspective.

And that, by the way, is an inherently Jewish value. In the Talmud, a person asks, “The ruler of my village came to me and said, ‘Kill that person, and if you don’t, I’ll kill you.’

Can I follow his order so I will be able to save myself?” And the response to him from the rabbi is this: “Allow yourself to be killed, but you may not kill another. Who says that your blood is redder than his? Perhaps his blood is redder than yours.”

In other words, who is to say that one life is more valuable than another? Every person’s life is fundamentally precious and unique.

And part of our responsibility, as Jews, is to try and ensure each person has the most opportunities to allow their inherent light to shine.

That’s what tikkun olam, repairing the word, means. Let’s all try harder to make sure that everyone can get to a place where they can earn two marshmallows. 

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ANTI-SEMITE Continued from Page 1 Lowell Feld.

Jonas and Feld acknowledged that the book was lacking in some respects.

"The writing can be too sensationalist at times, making it seem like the authors are pushing too hard, rather than letting readers come to their own decisions," they wrote.

At the Charlottesville salon, The Times reported, the consensus was that Cockburn was not anti-Semitic, but that she represented a trend among Democrats unsettling for pro-Israel Jews.

“None of us think she’s antiSemitic,” Sherry Kraft, an organizer of the meeting, told the newspaper. “That’s not even an issue. It’s more where are you about Israel.

There’s a lot of negativity toward Israel from the political left right now and people who call themselves progressive."

Plunging into political marriages is a delicate affair, but there are indications that the spouse who has Israel issues is not Leslie but her husband. Internet searches come up with plenty on Andrew Cockburn, who just last year was peddling the far left and baseless accusation that Israel is aligned with the Islamic State, and who in a 2007 Oxford Union debate spoke about a proIsrael "stranglehold" on debate in the United States.

For Leslie Cockburn, all I got was this 1991 appearance on C-Span with her husband pitching their book. Leslie Cockburn, who weathered Scud attacks on Israel as a journalist during the first Gulf War, seems quite enamored with the country. She fretted at the time that Israelis were vulnerable not just to Scuds but to misfired U.S.operated Patriot anti-missile mis-

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siles.

"Israelis are very interesting people, also," she said. "The fact is, Israelis love to talk and tend to be, at least in this business -- in the arms business and in intelligence -- fairly gregarious, and also they have a lot of feuds with each other, very strong personalities. It's a very interesting group of people to work with."

Will Cockburn's co-authorship of the book hurt her? She's already pushing back hard, taking to Twitter to call Republicans "desperate" and to quote an Israeli historian, Irad Malkin, as saying the antiSemitism charge is "outrageous."

In a season where partisan divisions on Israel are deepening, Republicans will naturally run on the pro-Israel relationship. Campaigning in Tennessee this week, Trump spoke at length about his decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. The move earned him a standing ovation last week at a closed-door, minimum $50,000 a head fundraising dinner in New York, according to a report in Politico.

And Democrats stumping for Jewish votes will circle back to the threats posed by Trump's flirtations with the alt-right, and the overlap between the alt-right and plain old Nazis.

"At a time when American Nazism is on the rise and literally has cost Virginians their lives, we don’t have the luxury to simply let these bad-faith charges go unanswered," Jonas and Feld wrote.

"There is a real and present danger facing American Jews, and it’s not coming from authors of a book that no one has actually shown contains anti-Semitic passages." 

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career she’ll ever encounter that level of caring again.

Pigs can belong on seder plates. I don’t mean I’m going to serve ham at a festive holiday meal. Instead, I’m going to embrace the creativity — and the messiness and silliness — that’s just part of life with little ones.

My son recently came home with a drawing of a “train,” though, in truth, all I could make out was a smattering of random, shakily written numbers — but I proudly hung it up. There will be plenty of time for my kids to play by the rules; for now we’re embracing the things that excite them. And to remind myself of that, I just may display my pig seder plate at our holiday table next year.

(Jodie Fishman is a child health professional.)

Kveller is a thriving community of women and parents who convene online to share, celebrate and commiserate their experiences of raising kids through a Jewish lens. Visit Kveller.com. 

flict is hardly perfect, and examples abound of stories becoming stories only when Palestinians are the victims, or headlines that ignore cause (a terror attack) for effect (the Israelis' response). In general, however, Palestinians have a point when they complain that the media often shape the narrative according to an Israeli point of view, depicting Palestinian life with an Israeli gaze If you want to see what coverage of the conflict would look like otherwise, read a pro-Palestinian website like Electronic Intifada or a far-left Israeli site like +972. It's nothing like the Israel coverage you see in the mainstream media.

The other kind of critic blames unpopular policy on bad hasbarah.

Good hasbarah, they insist, could presumably have forestalled the brouhaha over the Israeli nationstate law (a brouhaha, I'd wager, that most Americans never even heard about). That story got legs not because of a bad marketing rollout, but because the law was a policy decision that fed directly into a perception that Israel's right-wing government was growing less dem-

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ocratic and more nationalistic.

Passage of the law capped a week in which the Knesset allowed the education minister to bar groups critical of government policies from speaking in public schools, made it harder for Palestinians to win land disputes and blocked single men and gay couples from having children through surrogacy. More broadly, Netanyahu's close ties with President Donald Trump may be understandable and justifiable, as his outreach to European nationalists, but there is a political and PR price to be paid for such embraces.

Netanyahu has good instincts for English-speaking audiences, and sometimes he realizes that a positive pitch can only get you so far. In the past few weeks, left-wing activists have complained that Israeli airport security have detained them and asked specifically about their activism and their political beliefs.

On Monday, after the liberal Zionist writer Peter Beinart said he was stopped and interrogated, Netanyahu issued a statement saying it was an "administrative mistake," adding that "Israel is the only country in the Middle East where people voice their opinions freely and robustly."

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The latter statement is a staple of pro-Israel hasbarah. It's a terrific policy, as long as it has the added benefit of being true. But when actions prove unpopular, PR won't save you. The root meaning of hasbarah is "explanation," not "alchemy."

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media. 

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