The Jewish Light 2019 Election Issue

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Volume 9, Number 9 Election 2019

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

Community News

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Hebrew Reading: Alef, Bet, & Beyond Beginning This Fall! Tuesdays 7-8pm Oct 22, Oct 29, Nov 12, Nov 19, Dec 3, Dec 10, Dec 17 Learn To Read The Hebrew Alphabet and vowels. This course is designed for beginners and those who would like to brush up on basic decoding skills. For those interested in chanting Torah or adult

bar/bat mitzvah, this course will teach the reading skills necessary to take the cantillation class beginning in January.

Members: No Charge | Non Members: $50 Register Online At www.tourosynagogue.com/hebrewreading  Dr. Brad Philipson We welcome the entire community to join us for the Installation of Dr. Brad Philipson as the new Oscar J. Tolmas Head of School Chair.

The ceremony will take place at Shir Chadash followed by a deliciousbreakfast

by Linda Waknin, DVASH Catering at Jewish Community Day School, 3747 West Esplanade Avenue. 

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event. Cast aside the “black tie” and floor-length gowns and instead find a snazzy green cocktail dress or a green tie to go with your best suit.

Paparazzi will be snapping away as we walk the Green Carpet into this year’s glitzy gala here on the Goldring-Woldenberg Jewish Community Campus.

Things might get a bit garrulous as we gab about the glorious gains of the Green Preschool over great big glasses of Hollywood Highball, the signature cocktail of the evening. We’ll enjoy a performance from our “Best Song” winners, a capella group NJBeats, Tulane students who spend any time they’re not singing or cheering on the Green Wave. “Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role” will go to Dvash Catering, who is preparing its finest fare for the fete. Let’s not forget our hardworking Gala Committee, who are a lock for the oft-overlooked but coveted “Best Production Design” award.

Become a Green Carpet Patron to show your support for JCDS and the Greens!

Patron Levels • Lifetime Achievement ($36,000+) • The Oscar ($18,000) • Black Tie ($10,000) • Hollywood Star ($5,400) • Leading Role ($3,600) • Designer Dress ($1,800) • A-Lister ($720) • Tinseltown ($540) • Glitz and Glam ($360) • Envelope, Please (single patron $236)

In the time since Susan and Howard Green have become active supporters of Jewish Community Day School, we have been humbled time and again by the graciousness of their support, counsel, and advocacy.

In 2019, the Greens made a significant gift to establish a leading-edge, research-based preschool rooted in Jewish values here at JCDS, and, in appreciation, Susan and Howard Green Preschool has been named in their honor. We’re celebrating the spirit and legacy of this wonderful couple with this year’s Gala theme, a “Green Carpet Event.”

Susan and Howard Green Preschool @JCDS honors two individuals who truly, as our sages teach, wear the crowns of a good name. From its earliest days, Judaism has placed great importance on the value of names. Names provide us with the opportunity to bring honor to those whose names we bear and ensure that those for whom we are named live on. Jewish ComNon-Patron Tickets munity Day School is privileged to • Single Tickets $136 honor the names of two such exem• Professional Ticket (35 and plary individuals as Susan and under) $72 Howard Green.

• Alumni Ticket $54 In honor of such a glamorous For more information contact “It” couple as Susan and Howard, a Hollywood-goes-green theme will Tiffany Cotlar: tcotlar@jcdsnola.org take over our annual fundraising or (504) 887-4091 ext.11 

A CANDIDATE FOR THE PEOPLE! 2

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Community News

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If your group has an event that you would like for us to include on the Community Calendar please e-mail the information to jewishnews@bellsouth.net. All submissions are subject to acceptance by the Editor. ì

Floor Leader for Gov. John Bel Edwards Authored and supported legislation to increase teacher pay Funding for early childhood education Equal pay for women.

Environmental justice Ending discrimination in the workplace.

Table of Contents Community News

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Chai Lights

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Holiday Features

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Education

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Alma

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Bookshelf

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Arts & Culture

15

Entertainment

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Financial

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Health

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Southern & Jewish

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The Nosher

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Focus on Issues

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Judaism

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Kveller

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Israel Under Radar

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Community News October 10, 2019 Time: 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

New Orleans JCC - Uptown 5342 St. Charles Avenue New Orleans, LA 70115

Sukkot Celebration Celebrate Sukkot with friends at the J. A delicious, catered lunch will be served. Following the meal, Bremner Duthie will perform the music of Kurt Weil, the 1930's Jewish composer who worked in Berlin and on Broadway. This program is generously subsidized by a grant from Jewish Federation.

RSVP by Monday, October 7.

Contact: Rachel Ruth Phone: 504-897-0143 Email: rachel@nojcc.org October 17, 2019 Time: 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm New Orleans JCC Uptown Flossie Strug Kerner Memorial Luncheon Celebrating the centennial of the Bauhaus (1919–1933), An Ideal Unity will explore the artistic breadth and reach of the innovative school that integrated fine arts and design. In response to the rise of industrial production and the movement away from individually made objects, architect Walter Gropius founded the school in Weimar, Germany, aspiring to unify the arts through craft. The goals of the institution grew to include creating an aesthetic that served the modern industrial society, designing for mass production, and incorporating technology to improve quality of life.

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Join your friends for lunch at Cafe' NOMA in the museum at noon, then enjoy this new exhibit with the guidance of Anne Roberts, the curator of that exhibition. Museum entrance is free for Louisiana residents on Wednesday. Lunch is on you. RSVP by Monday, September 30 to Rachel Ruth at 897-0143 x161 or rachel@nojcc.org.

No charge members and nonmembers Contact: Rachel Ruth Phone: 504-897-0143 Email: rachel@nojcc.org Friday, October 18 6:00PM Shabbat Sukkot Touro Synagogue

Our New Torah

A Gift For Generations To Come Torah Dedication Celebration On September 16, 2018 Touro Synagogue witnessed as Soferet Linda Coppleson, our gifted scribe, wrote the first letters of what was to be our new Torah. Throughout this year, congregants have joined Linda on her visits to be part of the sacred scribing process. On Friday evening just before Simchat Torah, we will come together once again, this time to celebrate our new Torah’s completion, to read from it for the first time as a community, and to express gratitude to all who made this moment possible.

With words written by our loving hands, wood crafted from native Louisiana trees, parchment stitched together by a scribe who knows and loves our congregation, this Torah will be a treasure for generations to come.

Let us celebrate the end of the High Holidays with this joyful and holy Shabbat service and welcome our new Torah and all the love and commitment it represents into our congregational family.

October 23, 2019 Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Location: New Orleans JCC - Uptown 5342 St. Charles Avenue New Orleans, LA 70115 The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became And American Religion

Steven R. Weisman will be joined with his friend of many years, Walter Isaacson, to talk about his new book. This book tells the dramatic history of how Judaism redefined itself in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the personalities that fought each other and shaped its evolution and, crucially, the force of the American dynamic that transformed an ancient religion. It also serves as a guide to the foreseeable future. The chosen wars rage on, but now, at least, we have a manual to help us fight them more mindfully.

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November 4, 2019 Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm New Orleans JCC Uptown 5342 St. Charles Avenue New Orleans, LA 70115 Extra Innings Join us for a special event sponsored by the JCC, JFS, JCRS and The Greater New Orleans Jewish Clergy Council.

A coming-of-age story set against the enduring magic of the 1960's within a Syrian Jewish family in Brooklyn. Extra Innings is a film about a young baseball prodigy, David, who is fighting for the opportunity to pursue his dream. In a family afflicted with mental health issues, baseball offers David an escape. But when tragedy strikes, David struggles to find a balance between his dream of playing baseball, his religion and his family.

Albert Dabah, the writer and director of this film will join us for the showing and talk back.

Professionals from JFS & JCRS will also be available.

Ages: 16 and above Free and open to the community Contact: Judy Yaillen Phone: 504-897-0143 Email: judy@nojcc.org

Best Wishes to all my many friends in the Jewish Community.

Thanks you for your continued support.

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Community Happenings

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From The Brink, Hadassah Banks On Bipartisanship In Attracting New Members

Hadassah CEO Janice Weinman speaks at the group's national convention in New York, July 18, 2019. (Hadassah)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A decade after the Bernie Madoff debacle — one so serious that Hadassah officials refuse to even utter the Ponzi schemer’s name — the women’s Zionist organization is back.

The finances are robust — 2017 tax returns show $108 million in assets — and a staff of about 200 works at its New York headquarters and eight regional offices.

To build membership, Hadassah is targeting younger women, recognizing that the stay-at-home mothers who made “Hadassah lady” a cliche in the postwar years are now professionals balancing work and home lives along with a dedication to Israel.

And last year Hadassah reopened its office here, banking that one key

to growth is navigating a middle political ground in a polarized age.

The organization’s key success so far has been signing co-sponsors for the Never Again Education Act, which would “finance grants to public and private middle and high schools to help teachers develop and improve Holocaust education programs.”

Working with the Jewish Federations of North America, Hadassah’s Washington lobbyist, Karen Paikin Barall, has signed on 251 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 10 in the Senate since the measure was introduced in the latter body last month. (More are likely to sign on following the summer recess.)

The bill’s broad appeal is no coincidence.

“It gets the largest reaction response from membership,” Hadassah CEO Janice Weinman said in a recent interview, adding that it is her biggest applause line when she goes out to chapters.

Paikin Barall is a good fit for its bipartisan mission: She was a political appointee in the President George W. Bush State Department’s

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anti-Semitism monitoring office, and then for a number of years was director of mid-Atlantic advocacy for the Orthodox Union. The latter job required cultivating the Democratic-majority legislatures that typify East Coast states.

“Karen has been instrumental in our congressional outreach,” Weinman said.

On Friday, following two weeks of partisan warfare in Washington on what it means to be pro-Israel — culminating with President Donald Trump’s gibe that Jews who vote Democratic are “disloyal” to the Jewish state — Hadassah put out a call for bipartisanship.

“Pitting people and parties against one another will sacrifice the goal of respect for diversity and coexistence,” the group said.

“Hadassah is committed to the bedrock values of our two nations and urges our leaders to end the politicization of this essential relationship.”

Harder still may be keeping an increasingly polarized Jewish electorate on board. The group’s Israel agenda tacks slightly to the right,

endorsing bills targeting the boycott Israel movement — bills that left-wing Democrats reject as infringing on free speech rights.

Hadassah also advocates for changes in Palestinian textbooks considered anti-Israel.

On the left, the group advocates for reproductive rights, and its state chapters are organizing protests against increasingly restrictive abortion laws.

Hadassah’s language on reproductive rights will never please most Republicans, but also hews closely to how Orthodox groups describe their position on abortion, reflecting a membership in which all religious streams are represented.

“Reproductive health choices, based on full and accurate medical information and guidance, must be made in accordance with a woman’s own religious, moral and ethical values,” a handout says.

The group’s core mission remains to raise funds for the two Jerusalem hospitals bearing its name. Again, See BIPARTISANSHIP on Page

Hi I’m Mark Milligan #112, I’m running for East Baton Parish Sheriff,

#112

MARK MILLIGAN (D)

And Here’s Why :

SHERIFF

• 27 people died in East Baton Rouge prison since 2012. These victims ranged in ages of 17-73. This could be any of our family members or our friend’s relatives.

• No one will be booked into EBRP tor simple possession of Marijuana • Immediate suspension of the 287 (g) MOA with ICE.

• 5 million dollars was spent to settle wrongful death lawsuits and to pay liability insurance. And yes, my Republican opponent, the current occupant of the Sheriff’s office, did not hold anyone accountable.

• Limit all misdemeanor arrests to make room for violent offenders

• A 17 year old boy was placed in a jail cell with a known rapist, guess what happened?

• Mandate that all persons be treated humanely in or out of Jail

This lack of accountability must stop!

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• Properly staff the Jail/Prison system as well as all divisions of the Sheriff’s Office • Separate individuals who are awaiting bail from those who are serving time • Mandatory GED, Incorporate trade programs and College courses to assist incarcerated individuals n the rehabilitation process • Upon release all Formerly Incarcerated Persons will be supplied State IDs Call or Text (225) 247-7445

•

My Plan:

• My first day in Office, I will assemble a team that cares about all of the people, their medical and mental health, and we will keep them safe while we have them in our custody!

• I will ensure that you and their legal counsel will have access to them; so you can check on their well-being and their counsel might mount a proper legal defense to whatever the charge.

Vote Mark Milligan for Sheriff #112 on your ballot!

Expose the East Baton Rouge Prison

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Election Date: October 12, 2019 Early Voting 9/28 - 10/5 Election 2019

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Birthright Should Pay Its Non-Israeli Trip Leaders

By Eli Reiter

Taglit-Birthright participants ride camels during their stay at the Mamshit Bedoin tents in the Negev Desert of Israel. (Melanie Fidler /Flash90)

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JUSTICE OF THE PEACE 2ND JUSTICE COURT Honesty Integrity Justice

“BEST WISHES TO MY FRIENDS IN THE JEWISH COMMUNITY!”

-Amey Paid for by Amey French for Council District 5

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AN EXPERIENCED ATTORNEY On Saturday, October 12th Vote for Attorney Mark Spears Paid for by Committee to Elect Mark Spears

Early Voting Sept. 28 - Oct. 5

NEW YORK (JTA) — TaglitBirthright is one of the most successful philanthropic projects in modern Jewish history. The result of decades of collaboration between donors and Israel’s Department of Diaspora Affairs, the organization has spent hundreds of millions of dollars sending 700,000 people on a tour of the Holy Land since its creation in 1999.

A typical Birthright trip has a simple formula: Expose young Jews to seven to 10 days and nights filled with intense movement and exposure to superlative parts of Israel. Trip participants traverse the country from north to south and are exposed along the way to deeply emotional places like the Western Wall and Yad Vashem. Each trip usually has 40 participants and is staffed by a robust team: a bus driver, medic/guard, tour guide, and a male and female leader.

The Israeli staff — the bus driver, the medic/guard and the tour guide — are rightfully paid for their contributions to creating this oncein-a-lifetime Jewish experience.

The trip facilitators, on the other hand, are not.

Why? Reached for comment, Birthright’s vice president of marketing, Noa Baur, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency over email that “Thousands of volunteers, many of whom are college students, have dedicated their time to help make the gift of Birthright Israel possible as part of their desire to contribute to the Jewish diaspora. Some of these educators staff Birthright trips as part of their current job responsibilities through organizations such as Hillel.

As recognition for their efforts, Birthright Israel provides staff with stipends for expenses such as their flight to Israel, as well as professional development opportunities.”

This attitude is a symptom of a wider problem in the Jewish nonprofit world. Large organizations that raise millions of dollars from philanthropists often rely on unpaid staff to educate their participants. As more and more leaders worry about the declining amount of knowledge

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for young Jews, not compensating educators sends a message that the crucial information they provide is actually not that vital.

I have facilitated a Birthright trip twice, and both times I had an amazing experience. I learned a lot from the varied teaching styles of the tour guides, and I learned how to facilitate conversations about thorny topics in a way that allowed people to share their opinions and personal experiences. I finished tractates of Talmud at the gravesite of Yehuda Hanassi and held people who were unexpectedly touched after learning tales of the heroics at Mount Herzl as they cried.

But facilitating a Birthright trip involves a lot of hard work. Both trips involved approximately 300 hours of my time, from the airport check-in to hug-filled goodbyes. If you count the free flight as compensation, I earned approximately $2 an hour. This is, as they say in Yiddish, bupkes.

As trip leaders, we were on call at all hours and responsible for the safety of our participants. I fell asleep in shabby hotel lobbies in Jerusalem waiting for participants to return after curfew. My facilitation partner took sick participants to Bnei Brak clinics. Emergencies occurred on top of mountains, and while we did have a medic, we had to improvise and act as triage nurses. We had to constantly think on our feet.

But more important, we helped make the trip an educational experience by acting as people with knowledge of the country, Judaism and Jewish history. A trip leader has to improvise and answer questions about the people and sights, be able to frame momentous events at historic and spiritual sites in a meaningful way and serve as a peer mentor. This educational component is the key to turning a seven- or 10-day experience into a longer relationship with Judaism and Israel.

If Birthright continues to send the message that the American staff members are unimportant, it sends a message to the broader Jewish world.

As the trailblazer in Jewish experiential education, and one of the Jewish world’s most influential organizations, Birthright Israel should lead by example and compensate its facilitators. It will lead to better outcomes and send a message to Jewish teachers across the world that their work is valued.  THE

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• PHYLLIS & JACK ALLTMONT on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary • JODY BRAUNIG on being named a 2019 Role Model by the New Orleans Young Leadership Council (YLC) • RICHARD CAHN on receiving the 2019 Roger Bissinger Memorial Award • SURI DUITCH on being named a 2019 Woman of the Year by CityBusiness • MARJORIE ESMAN on being honored at the 27th Annual Human Rights Campaign Louisiana Dinner • SOPHIE HARRIS VORHOFF on being named one of Gambit’s 40 Under 40 • AMANDA KRUGER HILL on

being named one of Gambit’s 40 Under 40 • AUDREY LIGIER on being featured in the Spring 2019 issue of Geaux Girl Magazine • KIMBERLY NOVOD on receiving the 2019 Millennial Award from the Spears Group and GNO, Inc. • DAVID SHEPARD on receiving the 2019 Herbert and Margot Garon Young Leadership Award • HAL SHEPARD on receiving the inaugural Oscar J. Tolmas L’dor V’dor Award • KEVIN WILKINS on being named a 2019 Role Model by the New Orleans Young Leadership Council (YLC) • GINNY WISE on being named a 2019 Woman of the Year by CityBusiness 

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Elect A Proud Democrat Candidate!

Life CYCLE

(CONDOLENCES)

If you have a condolence that you would like for us to include in Life Cycle please e-mail the information to jewishnews@bellsouth.net. All submissions are subject to acceptance of the Editor. ì

CONDOLENCES GATES OF PRAYER To Larry Davis on the death of his mother, Doris Levin Davis.

IN MEMORIUM GATES OF PRAYER Paula Levy Joseph

A lifelong resident of New Orleans and practicing attorney of 34 years, Allen is tired of the status quo in Louisiana’s Senate and wants to lead a strong delegation of New Orleanian representatives to accomplish change we can see in District 5.

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TOURO SYNAGOGUE Mark Greenberg, brother of David Greenberg, uncle of Michael, Ryan, and Molly Greenberg Cathy Ellen Laufer, daughter of Barbara & Beryl Laufer, sister of Jeffrey Laufer, aunt of Samuel & Rachel Laufer Mary “Joyce” McEvilly Rademacher, mother of Jeanne Rademacher Allan Harry Bissinger, husband of Nancy Bissinger, brother of Nancy Timm, son of Marjorie

Bissinger Rabbi Richard Nelson Levy Sam Menszer James Francis Kilroy, father of Maurya Kilroy, grandfather of Helene & Daniel Lovett Geraldine “Gerry” James Kirby, mother of Debbie Applebaum, grandmother of Sarah & Ben Applebaum James Jude McKinnie, friend of Nancy Ross-Ascuitto Michael Shawn Brown, stepbrother of Seth Levine Michael L. Berk, father of Bob Berk, grandfather of Ari & Seth Berk Anita Gutnick Greenwald, sister-in-law of Peggy Good, aunt of Zoe Skelton Kotel Sadrusi, friend of Brian Weimer and Randy Roig Isaac F. Kirshbom, father of Karen Herman, grandfather of Alexandra & Andrew Herman May their memory be for a blessing. 

Allen’s policy plans include: • Addressing road repair as well as flooding and drainage in New Orleans and throughout the state

• Bringing greater transparency and oversight to government spending so tax dollars are used to serve the people not the political elite

• Championing educational improvements so the children in our state can look forward to bright and successful futures

• Delivering on equal pay, a living wage, and equal protection for all persons who call Louisiana home.

Visit allenborne.com, and check out our Facebook page: Elect Allen Borne Senate District #5.

@electallenborne 8

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Is Your Synagogue Neglecting The Newly And Non-Religious?

A prayer book displays the Rosh Hashanah liturgy. (iStock/Getty Images Plus)

LOS ANGELES (JTA) —The first time I celebrated Yom Kippur, I was not yet a Jew. In fact, I wouldn’t become a Jew until five years later, when I dipped into the mikvah and completed my Orthodox conversion process.

I had never fasted, so I ate way too much during the pre-fast meal and ended up having a stomachache and migraine for half of the holiday.

I had no idea what was going on in the synagogue since everything was in Hebrew; I spent much of the day spacing out and thinking about things other than prayer and repentance. At the break-fast meal that followed, I felt like I hadn’t eaten for a thousand years, so of course I went overboard and again became ill.

Looking back, I wish I had someone sitting next to me who could have explained what was going on and better prepared me for fasting.

Today, nine years later, I can pace myself and follow along with services, but only because I actively sought out a synagogue and service that was more user friendly.

During the High Holidays, traditional synagogues — especially Orthodox ones — are not always

the best places for beginners. While there are many shuls that do have easier-to-follow services complete with explanatory speeches, in my experience, a majority of synagogues expect you to be able to follow along.

For converts, baalei teshuvah (the newly religious) or anyone spending the holidays in these spaces who did not grow up with a traditional Jewish background, High Holiday services can be confusing and not very spiritually fulfilling.

This is an absolute s h a m e .

Observance is meant to help us find d e e p e r meaning in our lives, not confuse or bore us.

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way. This High Holiday season, I would like to see my community step it up when it comes to inclusion.

There are several easy ways to achieve this. After the rabbi’s speech, he or another synagogue representative should announce what’s left on the schedule for the rest of the day, as well as other pertinent information, like who should

Holiday Features

stay in the room for Yizkor (a short memorial service), what time one should light Yom Tov candles that evening and what time the fast is over. Any Hebrew or Aramaic words used in the rabbi’s speech or during the announcements should be translated.

Prayer leaders should also announce the page numbers frequently, and shuls should invest in English and transliterated prayer books. I’ve often had to schlep my heavy ArtScroll siddur because many Orthodox synagogues only have Hebrew prayer books. While that’s fine in Israel, in America, we

need to have English siddurim as well.

If you’re in synagogue and someone you don’t know sits next to you, make sure they have a prayer book and show them what page you’re on. When I was converting, this was an absolute lifesaver. I always have fond memories of the kind women who would turn to me, say “Good yontif” and hand me a siddur turned to the correct page.

Hosts inviting less observant guests have plenty of things they See SYNAGOGUE on Page

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What Working As A Prosecutor Has Taught Me About Yom Kippur

Interior of a courtroom (iStock)

Editor’s note: The author is an active prosecutor in a major U.S. city. Due to the nature of their work, they must write anonymously.

(JTA) — The court officer calls out the calendar number and reads the docket into the record. The defendant, accompanied by his attorney, enter the well. The judge and the prosecutor are there already, waiting. The defense attorney states his name for the record, as does the prosecutor. Then the judge asks, “Where do we stand?”

The defense attorney answers.

He tells the judge that his client has completed the court-ordered program and hands up the documents as proof. The judge reviews them and concurs. He congratulates the defendant on his completion of the program. Then, something unexpected occurs. The judge stands and applauds. The court officers and the prosecutor join him, with joy. The defendant looks down sheepishly, then approaches the bench as the judge waves him over to hand him a certificate of completion. When he returns to his spot, the judge asks if he has anything he’d like

to say. He does. He smiles and tells the court that this is the first time he has ever graduated from anything. Then, in the mixed up emotions of pride and shame, he begins to cry.

The criminal justice system, and the modern shift toward rehabilitative justice (focused on reforming an offender) described in the story above has a lot to teach us about how we approach Yom Kippur.

I often end Yom Kippur feeling like I’ve just gotten away with something. The weight of our sins is too great a burden to bear. We know that we are guilty, but we pray that God’s mercy outweighs what justice demands, that despite our sins we should be found worthy of another year, and a good year at that. The facts are not on our side, and neither is the law. For how can we dispute what the Omnipotent One already knows? So we pray for mercy, that God wipes away our sins, and He in His infinite mercy cannot help but do so.

But what have we really accomplished? We are still the same people we were before, just with a clean slate for the new year. We are not, in any way, reformed. So we walk away from Yom Kippur with the certainty that we have been forgiven, but with the nagging feeling that we didn’t really deserve it. In a sense, it is far easier for God to forgive us than it is to forgive ourselves.

That is the power in rehabilitative justice. It reminds the offender that it

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is not solely by the grace of the court that he goes free. Rather it affords him the autonomy to earn his forgiveness. Through this lens, Yom Kippur evolves from the constricting binary of Justice against Mercy, Guilty against Not Guilty, and instead can be viewed as an empowering opportunity for each of us to reform ourselves and earn our forgiveness.

To make amends. In doing so, we become worthy of forgiveness. We can proudly walk away knowing that we have earned the right to utter the word “salachti” — forgive me.

In the context of Yom Kippur, true forgiveness combines God’s two attributes of Justice and Mercy into a rehabilitative program. As the liturgy tells us — through repentance, through prayer and through our charitable deeds — we can tear up an unfavorable sentence from the heavenly court.

That is the rehabilitative program that God proscribes for us — a carrot-andstick approach to forgiveness.

Perhaps this is why we end Yom Kippur by reciting “Hashem hu haElokim,” God is the Divine Judge, seven times. For it is only through the combination of God’s attribute of mercy (associated with the name YKVH) and God’s attribute of Justice (associated with Elokim) that we can achieve “teshuvah,” true repentance and forgiveness. The stick of justice, demanding that we follow God’s rehabilitative plan, coupled with the grace of God’s mercy to give us that chance to earn it, affords us the opportunity to clean the slate, expunge our record and find forgiveness from the heavenly court.

But one more

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opportunity remains. As the final cry of “Hashem hu ha-Elokim” fades away, and the tension of the day breaks, there is a moment of perfect silence. Listen for it. Feel it. A moment of reconciliation with God, when Yom Kippur has ended but the new day has not yet begun. A moment when the world is pure and cleansed.

And in that moment, you will find what you have been searching for all along.

A chance to forgive yourself.

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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Education

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When Soccer And Bar Mitzvah Dreams Collide This story originally appeared on (Kveller via JTA)

By Kimberly Burnham

(Adam Hunger/Getty Images)

You might think that being a Jewish soccer mom is no different than being, say, a Christian soccer mom or a Buddhist soccer mom. In some ways you’d be right.

But I’ve recently realized that there are some unique challenges for Jewish families when it comes to raising soccer-obsessed kids.

Take one recent Sunday, when my 10-year-old stepson, Yair, was so involved in a soccer game that he seemingly lost a shin guard while playing on the field — or, more likely, he was so eager to play that he didn’t even notice that he wasn’t wearing it in the first place.

The following week, when I found his missing shin guard in the

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lost and found at our synagogue, I realized that his dream to be a professional soccer player was on a collision course with our plans for him to become a bar mitzvah. It’s a sticky situation, and it’s going to become even more difficult as his 13th birthday approaches.

Here’s the situation: Nearly every week, we are forced to choose between soccer and Jewish activities. Yair’s soccer often coincides with Hebrew school, Sunday school or Shabbat services. And he is hoping to move up into his soccer league’s premier traveling team, which means even more practices and more time away from synagogue. Just how much time he plays in a game is largely dependent on whether he attends all his practices and is on time. As such, for several weeks this spring, I had to pull him out of Hebrew school early on Wednesdays in order to make it to his practice on time.

But that’s just the beginning — sometimes his games are on Satur-

day morning, coinciding with Shabbat services, and sometimes they’re on Sundays before Sunday school is finished. Sometimes we are lucky and his game is in the afternoon.

More often than not, however, it’s a juggling act; the games are typically in the morning and can be as far as a six-hour drive away. This means that most weekends, we assess what Yair can miss — be it a game or a Shabbat service or a Hebrew lesson — and if soccer wins that week, who will drive him to the game.

Fortunately, Yair is good at Hebrew. He’s on track with what he’ll need to know for his bar mitzvah, but still, we have to choose: What can he miss at synagogue?

What should he miss from soccer?

It will be even more challenging in the months leading up to his bar mitzvah, as his nearly 13-year-old brother, who is also obsessed with soccer, is learning. He has to attend all Friday and Saturday services in

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the three months before his big day.

We, the collective we, will have to force a choice between becoming a bar mitzvah and playing in all of his soccer games. It is not a real choice, not in our family — ultimately the bar mitzvah takes precedence. The synagogue’s expectations are too high, the social pressure to become a bar mitzvah too great.

Still, we worry: Will he start to hate being Jewish if it stands in the way of his potent dream of being a professional soccer player? Will he never come back to synagogue after being strongly encouraged — some might say required — to miss soccer in order to go to services the year of his bar mitzvah?

Why are we forcing this choice, or making it so that playing in every soccer game is not even an option for Yair? It is a good question — one I have thought about a lot in the See SOCCER on Page

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last year. I am a convert to Judaism; I grew up Mormon and there were Sunday basketball games and Sunday swim meets that I couldn’t participate in. My teammates were not happy and I was sad to miss the events but, at the same time, I felt proud of my connection to family and church. I knew my family and my religious community had my back — they loved me, they celebrated me and they wanted the very best for me. Missing Sunday events was part of the price of that loyalty, and part of being in that tribe.

I know that my childhood experiences are very different from Yair’s. At the same time, he is proud of being Jewish.

He descends from a line of rabbis who value the observance of Judaism, particularly because of how it builds character and develops community relationships. So with Yair, we try to focus on what he gets out of going to synagogue: friendships, a connection with his heritage, a connection with

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God and Torah, and hopefully some joy and grounding in a good life. He gets some of these things from soccer, too — how to be a leader, grace in the face of winning and losing, camaraderie, a sense of belonging.

Right now — and especially according to Yair — the list of soccer benefits seems longer. But we also have to think about the future, and what these choices mean: What will make him a better man in this nuanced and complicated world — going to every soccer game or every Jewish event?

For now, at least, some of the questions are still in the future. And the other week, Yair’s missing shin guard mysteriously turned up in the synagogue’s lost and found. I say “mysteriously” because, even though I knew it was lost, I never expected to find it there. It almost felt like it was transported there, symbolizing both the divide and the connection between synagogue and soccer.

The day the shin guard was lost was much like any other: I picked Yair up early from Sunday school.

As I’m driving, a flurry of questions escapes my lips: “Are you ready? Do you have your soccer cleats and shin guards on? Is there a water bottle back there?” As Yair changes into his uniform in the backseat, I am reminded that all these decisions are being made by and for a kid who is still too small to sit in the front seat of the car.

“Did you finish the kosher hot dog I brought for you as a snack? Did you take off your kippah?” It wouldn’t be the first time he had run out onto the field still wearing it.

Adrenaline is rushing. It is a hurried transition from

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the meditative quiet of synagogue to the bustling exuberance of a youth soccer game.

Yair is a good player on his team, and they especially need him today, as a few players are absent and they don’t have any substitutes. Yair makes a great assist and his team wins 7-2. When Yair finds out a couple of other boys are staying to play in the next game, so that the team will have some substitute players, he begs to stay and play.

“OK,” I concede. He quickly eats a granola bar and Rice Krispies treat from the car and is back on the field playing 30 minutes later.

His team wins again.

The boys are all happy. As he comes off the field, he says, “One of my shin guards came out of my socks.” It was puzzling — just how does that happen? We look everywhere, walking up and down the field, asking other players and parents if they have seen a lone shin guard.

We can’t find it anywhere, so later we buy him a new pair of shin guards.

But then, the following week, the missing shin guard turns up in the synagogue’s lost and found. It was discovered by security in the parking lot.

Apparently he played two games with only one shin guard. But I have to imagine that one shin guard was on duty, showing how much he cares about soccer, while the other one slipped away and sat quietly in synagogue. 

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I’m Tired Of SelfDeprecating Jewish Humor

By Caroline Hirsh

(Background: iStock; emoji: emojipedia)

This article originally appeared on Alma.

The other night, I found myself on a first date with a handsome baseball player in his mid-20s. He was 6-foot-2 with a dazzlingly gorgeous face, a sculpted jawline, a literal six-pack physique and oh, by the way, he’s Jewish. Sound the alarm – I mean wedding bells, y’all.

Could this sexy athlete also be the perfect Nice Jewish Boy my parents always wanted for me?

He took me to Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side, where we split a pastrami sandwich and salad. I kvelled. We chatted between bites.

“So, tell me about yourself,” I said with a smile. “What do you

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like?”

He winked. “Well, I’m a Jew, so I like money.”

Say what?

It was still a first date, so I awkwardly laughed off the comment.

However, the remark begs further analysis.

See, I’m a Jew, too – a strong, smart, attractive and proud Jewish woman, I like to think. I enjoy traveling, working out, exploring Manhattan, running in the rain, great conversations, wonderful witty banter, making you laugh and making you think.

I attempted to wave off his comment, but as we continued chatting, the issue arose again. While sharing our mutual love for fitness, I sadly explained how my beloved Equinox had forced me into exile in search of more fiscally responsible alternatives.

“I adore it, but my poor millennial wallet does not!” I said.

He joked back, “But you’re a Jew, Caroline, just haggle the price

down.”

I blinked. What? Did this man really just say that to me?

Of course, there is a history behind this “Jews love money” trope. Jews became identified with money during the Middle Ages, when Christians believed (or the Bible told them) that lending money at interest was a sin. Christians reasoned that since the Jews did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, they were doomed to perdition. Therefore, if Jews sinned, there was no extra consequence on the margin.

How perfectly convenient.

The “money-loving” trope really just reflects the purposes, motivations, fears and unreasonable prejudices of non-Jews throughout history. It has nothing to do with Jewish character. The fact is, nonJews “love money” just as much as we do. Humans like money; it allows us to live self-actualizing, autonomous lives. Making offhanded comments about Jews loving money just perpetuates medieval

thinking.

Now I’m also aware that Jewish humor is one of our culture’s greatest, most enduring and totally fun contributions to modern civilization. From old standbys like Mel Brooks to modern knockouts like Maya Rudolph and Rachel Bloom, our humor has always been pregnant with deep insight into human nature – filled with pathos and informed by pain. It’s a precious tool we use to get through difficult circumstances and a cultural treasure that binds our community. Like morphine, it is an anodyne: It makes pain more tolerable. To be antihumor is to deny yourself of a cultural treasure, and to deny yourself fun, relevance and what it means to be Jewish.

But there is a difference between Jewish humor and insensitive, cheap-shot Jewish jokes uttered at the expense of Jewish history, culSee JEWISH HUMOR on Page

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Bookshelf

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Nathan Englander On The Book He Has Been Waiting His Whole Life To Write

By Gabe Friedman

Nathan Englander returns with a novel titled “Kaddish.com.” (Cover: Alfred Knopf; photo: Joshua Meier)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Sitting in a kosher bakery in the town of West Hempstead, on Long Island, Nathan Englander admits it: He sees the world through, in his words, “hummus-colored glasses.”

“Without being silly, every character, every setting, every food, every thought — the weather in my books is Jewish,” he says, speaking at a whirlwind pace and clutching a cup of coffee.

His Jewish roots are traced back to the small town with a sizable Modern Orthodox community about 45 minutes by car from his current home in brownstone-lined Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

West Hempstead is even more Jewish than he remembers it — a half hour earlier, he pointed out a couple of Hatzalah first-responder trucks parked across the peaceful suburban street from his old modest-sized synagogue. The old Carvel ice cream store where he used to hang out now has signage on its window marking it as kosher.

Decades ago, he explains, kosher certification wasn’t as big a deal —

people looked through ingredients on packages to determine for themselves if something was kosher enough to eat.

Englander, 49, grew up wearing tzitzit and studying hours of Talmud a day, but now looks like just about any other secular Brooklyn dad (he has a 4-year-old daughter).

He’s about 5-foot-8, with slight bags under his eyes that hint at a mix of child care and his obsessive editing process: He jokes that he has only recently lowered his average time in between publishing books to about four years from over twice that. His fuzzy gray sweater tastefully matches the same-colored hair that’s starting to spread from his sideburns to the top of his head.

He’s brought along his black dog, Calli, a rescue who periodically telegraphed her separation anxiety throughout the ride from Brooklyn from the back of his sedan.

“Sometimes I get introduced as a young writer, which I love, ’cause I’m not 50 yet,” he said.

Englander was gearing up for the publication of his fifth book, a darkly humorous novel titled “Kaddish.com” that hit shelves Tuesday.

It features a formerly Orthodox man named Larry who goes to stay at his sister’s house in Memphis to sit shiva for his father. Secular Larry clashes with his still-Orthodox sister and the rest of the community there, and he won’t promise

to say the Kaddish prayer three times a day for a year for his father — a requirement of Orthodox law.

So Larry, his sister and her rabbi come up with a plan: Larry can simply find a proxy to say the prayer for him. He does just that through the website Kaddish.com, which does not exist in real life, despite Englander’s attempts to buy the domain from its unwilling current owner (he does have Kaddish. com.com, however). But Larry starts to feel remorse about his decision over time and the story takes a sharp, unexpected turn.

“What I like about Judaism — Jewish law is very strict, but there are a lot of ways to make stuff OK,” Englander said. “There’s a lot of ‘we’ll figure it out,’ which I find very nice and comfortable.”

Englander certainly wasn’t comfortable growing up, studying through long days of Jewish and secular subjects, holding in his questions about God and being bullied by anti-Semitic kids from the other side of town. Literature was always a solace — he calls finding his sister’s copy of “1984” and his parents’ copy of “Portnoy’s Complaint” life-changing moments — but fiction writer was never a realistic career choice in his world.

“I felt like I was living this life, it’s not a fit for me, but … this is my lot in life, I’m going to live in a world where I don’t fit in, and I’ll just be an unhappy person,” he said.

Independent

That changed when Englander studied abroad in Jerusalem during his junior year of college and came in contact with secular Israelis.

“Obviously I knew secular Jews in college, but they were so different from what I was I couldn’t make the leap,” he said. “But it was in Israel [where people had the] same reference points … Seeing an atheist who’s speaking Hebrew and knows what Purim is and knows the same songs … I was like ‘Ah, this is what it means to be a cultural Jew, and that’s what I am.'”

That didn’t mean he only wrote about secular Jews. For instance, the titular story in his acclaimed debut book of short stories, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” involves a Hasidic Jew whose rabbi allows him to see a prostitute.

Another from that collection, “Reb Kringle,” involves a bearded Orthodox man who plays Santa Claus at Christmas.

But even more so than “Unbearable Urges,” Englander calls “Kaddish.com” the book he’s been waiting his “whole life” to write, and one that brought him back to where he started. Besides the secularOrthodox tension, the book’s other major theme involves the interaction between God — a concept he has contemplated since his early teenage Shabbat nights, staying up See ENGLANDER on Page

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Is ‘Seinfeld’ Still ‘Fresh’ In 2019, Like Netflix Says It Is?

Arts & Culture

By Daniel Treiman

The stars of "Seinfeld" at the 1993 Emmy Awards. The show was the most popular sitcom of the 1990s. (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc/Getty Images)

(JTA) — A lot happened in 1989.

The Berlin Wall fell, the Iron Curtain crumbled and a young political theorist named Francis Fukuyama announced that with Western liberal democracy’s triumph, we had reached “the end of history.”

Also that year, the pilot for what was then called “The Seinfeld Chronicles” aired on NBC. While NBC was tentative initially about the show’s prospects, “Seinfeld” would become not just an unlikely hit for the network but the most popular sitcom of the 1990s. To put it in perspective, 76 million viewers tuned in for the sitcom’s 1998 series finale — that’s

nearly four times the number who watched the last episode of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” earlier this year.

What more propitious time for a “show about nothing” than the end of history?

Now, 30 years after the debut of “Seinfeld,” Netflix is betting big on the timeless appeal of the TV show that yada, yada, yada’d its way into America’s hearts, buying its exclusive streaming rights starting in 2021.

“Seinfeld is the television comedy that all television comedy is measured against,” Netflix’s chief content officer said in a statement.

“It is as fresh and funny as ever.”

The enduring charms of “Seinfeld” in the streaming era, however, should not obscure the fact that the show is also very much a product of its time.

One aspect of the “Seinfeld” story that seems like a relic from a distant past is NBC’s initial concern that the show was “too New York, too Jewish” to be a hit, as the network’s entertainment president,

Brandon Tartikoff (a New York Jew himself), memorably worried.

“Who will want to see Jews wandering around New York acting neurotic?” he asked.

Amid such shpilkes, the Jews behind “Seinfeld” masked the Jewishness of the show’s characters.

True, the show’s four main characters seemed like over-the-top caricatures of Jewish New Yorkers (some were even based on real-life Jews, with George Costanza as a stand-in for series co-creator Larry David, and Cosmo Kramer inspired

by David’s former neighbor Kenny Kramer). But aside from Jerry Seinfeld’s eponymous character, none of the main characters were identified by the show as Jews.

No matter how Jewish Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) seemed, “Seinfeld” viewers learned that she was, in fact, a magnet for Jewish men due to her “shiksappeal.” Meanwhile, the fact that George, played very Jewishly by Jewish actor Jason Alexander, had an Italian last name was cause for considerable confusion, including for the Jewish actors (Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris) who played his parents.

“It was never really clear if the Costanzas were Jewish or Italian or what they were,” Stiller later recounted. “Jason, Estelle and I were given the name Costanza, which sounds Italian, but there were episodes where I cooked Jewish food and ate knishes and kasha var-

nishkes in bed. When people asked me about this, I would simply say it was because we were a Jewish family in the Witness Protection Program.”

Amid the plenitude of Jewishthemed comedy on “Seinfeld” (public displays of affection during “Schindler’s List,” a desperate quest for a chocolate babka, the high anxiety of a bris, a dentist who converts to Judaism for the Jewish jokes, cavalier comparisons of soup purveyors and burger chefs to Nazis), the fact that the show’s characters could not be openly Jewish seemed like a joke itself.

Perhaps thanks in part to the success of “Seinfeld,” Jewish TV characters no longer need a witness protection program.

Now you can have an entire series about the mishegas of two young Jewesses wandering around New York, moaning about fasting on Yom Kippur and yearning to host a Passover seder (“Broad City”); a show whose protagonist engages her childhood archnemesis from Scarsdale in a “JAP rap battle,” replete with obscure-to-gentiles rhymes about Birthright Israel and the Jewish fraternity AEPi (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”); another show that spends a whole season on a family trip to Israel (“Transparent”); or a show where a character might crack wise about how wearSee SEINFELD on Page

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Best Wishes to all of my friends in the Jewish Community!

Thank you for your continued support!

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open The Real Story Behind ‘The breakfast 7a-7p Spy,’ Sacha Baron Cohen’s lunch everyday New Netflix Series bagels country after having lived in Argentina. The goal was to gather intellimuffins gence from high-ranking Syrian politicians and military officials. local coffee Cohen wasn’t allowed tell anyone of the plans and told his wife chai that he was working abroad for cafe Sacha Baron Cohen as Eli Cohen in Israel’s Defense Ministry.

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"The Spy." (Screenshot from Netflix)

(JTA) — For “Borat,” his 2006 film, Sacha Baron Cohen went undercover as a made-up Kazakh journalist who travels America and gets unwitting targets to share his boorish and sometimes bigoted opinions. In “Who Is America,” the Jewish actor creates a variety of characters who manage to get prominent Americans to say shockingly offensive things.

In “The Spy,” he once again goes undercover, but in a very different way. The Jewish actor and filmmaker portrays the real-life Eli Cohen, a daring Israeli agent who embedded himself in the upper echelons of Syrian society in the 1960s and provided crucial intelligence to the Jewish state.

Released Friday, the espionage thriller is already getting plenty of buzz. Here’s a look at the wild and true story that it is based on.

According to My Jewish Learning, Eli Cohen was born in 1924 in a Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt. Like many Jews in Arab countries, his family left Egypt after the establishment of the state of Israel, as they faced increased anti-Semitism. But Cohen stayed behind to finish his degree in electronics. He also participated in Zionist activities in Egypt, for which he was at one point arrested, and took part in Israeli spy missions there.

In 1956, was expelled from his native country along with many other Jews. He then immigrated to Israel, where he joined military intelligence the following year. He attempted to join the Mossad but was initially rejected. He married Nadia Majald, an immigrant from Iraq, and settled in the coast city of Bat Yam. In 1960, he was recruited to join the Mossad for a special mission in which he was to pretend to be a Syrian businessman returning to the

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Ahead of the mission, Cohen had learn to speak Arabic in a Syrian accent rather than his native Egyptian. He took on the name Kamel Amin Thaabet and went to live in Argentina for a period of time to build a name for himself in the Syrian expat community. There he gained the trust of Amin al-Hafez, who would later become Syria’s

Israeli spy Eli Cohen, left, and two other unidentified co-defendants, during their trial in Damascus, ten days before his execution, May 9, 1965. (AFP/Getty Images)

president.

In February 1962, Cohen moved to Damascus. He was quickly able to infiltrate the highest levels of Syrian society. He would entertain high-ranking politicians and military officials at extravagant parties where there would be many women and lots of booze. The drunk guests would often end up blabbering about their work to Cohen, who was sober but would pretend to be intoxicated. He made friends with many of the guests and ended up receiving classified military briefings and coming along visit Syrian military sites.

Cohen would then send intelligence back to Israel using a hidden radio transmitter.

He returned home to his family only a few times during his mission. On his last visit, in 1964, he told intelligence officers he wanted to come in from the cold because he was concerned a new Syrian intelligence commander did not like him. But the intelligence officers See SPY on Page THE

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Finally, A Disney Princess Who Celebrates Hanukkah!

By Arielle Kaplan About a year after Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman posited that her character in Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, Vanellope von Schweetz, is, in fact, a Jewish princess, we’re back with some truly stellar news: The universe is getting another Jewish Disney princess.

And this time, the princess’ Jewish identity is in the script.

In possibly the most exciting news you’ll hear all week, JamieLynn Sigler (yes, Meadow from The Sopranos) announced Tuesday that she’ll guest star in a Hanukkahthemed episode of Elena of Avalor as a — wait for it — princess from a “Latino Jewish kingdom.”

Now that’s representation, baby!

For those unfamiliar with the animated Disney Channel series, titular character Princess Elena Castillo Flores is a 16-year-old who saves her kingdom of Avalor by defeating a dark sorceress. With the help of family and friends, Elena learns how to govern her people as she navigates adolescence. (And you thought your plate was full!)

I am so excited to voice Disney’s first Jewish princess We don’t know yet what the story line will be for Sigler’s Jewish-Latina princess, but we do know that we’re seriously stoked. And apparently, the Jewish actress is as thrilled as we are. As she tweeted yesterday: “I am so excited to voice Disney’s first Jewish princess.”

As amazing as this is, “first” is slightly up for debate. Although

Silverman insisted that her character was Jewish — “nobody said no,” she said — and the directors agreed with her, Princess Vanellope’s religious and/or cultural identity wasn’t something addressed in Wreck-It Ralph. (Totally shocking, we know!) By contrast, it sounds like Sigler’s character’s identity is a key plot point in this forthcoming Elena episode.

We’re totally rooting for this Hanukkah episode that’s actually about Hanukkah. “Can it be a Hanukkah episode and not a ‘Look, it’s Christmas, but that one girl is celebrating Hanukkah’ episode?” fan Jessica Russak-Hoffman asked Sigler on Twitter.

“Yup!” Sigler replied.

“Thanks Disney and mazal tov on being a Jewish Disney princess, Jamie-Lynn!” Russak-Hoffman said.

“My daughter will be SO EXCITED and want the Purim costume!”

Sigler is the perfect person to voice the character of an explicitly Jewish Disney princess. The Jewish mom — who shares sons Beau, 6, and Jack, 1 with her husband, baseball player Cutter Dykstra — strongly identifies with her Jewish roots.

The 38-year-old went to Hebrew school, had a bat mitzvah, and called Israel “one of the most beautiful inspiring places [she’s] ever been to” after completing a Birthright trip.

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Josh Gondelman Is The Nicest Guy In Comedy

By Emily Burack

Josh Gondelman's new book is "Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results." (Mindy Tucker)

(JTA) — Comedian Josh Gondelman wants you to know up front: He’s a nice Jewish guy.

“I’m Jewish. I was bar mitzvahed, and I enjoy the ritualized eating of carbohydrates. But more than that, I was raised nice,” he writes in the opening meditation on “nice guys” in his new book, “Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results,” which comes out Tuesday.

In that way, Gondelman, 34 — who won three Emmys for his work on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” and currently works as a writer and producer for the Showtime series “Desus & Mero” — is a bit of an outlier in the modern world of comedy, which often values mocking and R-rated themes.

Why open with talking about being a nice guy?

“It sets the tone for the overall arc that’s going to happen,” Gondelman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“There is a strong element of Judaism, which is obviously important to me, but the book really focuses on niceness versus goodness.”

It’s a deeply enjoyable arc: The essays cover everything from Jewish summer camp to working as a preschool teacher to romantic failures, and they are laugh-out-loud funny. Which makes sense — in addition to working on those shows, he has also had a successful standup career and back in 2012 started the popular Modern Seinfeld Twit-

ter account, which won hundreds of thousands of fans by imagining what contemporary episodes of “Seinfeld” would involve.

Gondelman spoke with JTA about the concept of “niceness,” his favorite Jewish holidays, discovering the Wu-Tang Clan at Jewish sleepaway camp and his evolving thoughts on Twitter.

JTA: How do you distinguish between niceness and goodness?

Gondelman: Niceness is pleasantness and politeness and the kind of surface-level things you do to get by, which are important. And then goodness is kindness and righteousness, and sometimes it’s the same as niceness, and sometimes it’s in conflict.

I really resonated with your chapter about trying to apologize less.

Oh, yeah.

It is something that I find so challenging. You write about how your favorite part of Judaism is that time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and how you used to write a mass apology email. What was in those emails? And why did you stop sending them?

It was a recurring thing that I did.

I would try to be very sincere [and] email a lot of people in my life. It was a vast mass email. I would give a little primer on Yom Kippur, and then say, so in that spirit, if I have done anything that was hurtful to you that I didn’t realize, I want to say that I’m sorry and I would love to restore whatever was breached.

It’s different than [writing], “I’m sorry if you were offended” because there’s a value to being like, “Hey, if I did something that I didn’t realize, like please let me know. This is the time where I would like to clean the slate.” It’s nice to have a moment

[where] it’s easy to explain why am I hitting the reset button today. It’s a nice excuse, as opposed to just doing it on like a random Sunday afternoon. I don’t know, people might go ‘why is this? What is this?’

Yeah, it gives it context.

It does. It gives it a context, which is a really beautiful thing about Judaism. There’s moments that are like structures for being a good person. [It’s] the kind of thing that I appreciate most about any kind of religion: These opportunities to go and do better and be reminded of the best ways to behave and treat people.

One of my favorite parts of “Nice Try” was when you wrote about your time at sleepaway camp. You talk about discovering rap music. I love how you connect studying for bar mitzvahs and learning rap music with “learning and parsing dense, opaque lyrics,” but “only one felt like it prepared you for adulthood.” How formative were those years for you?

Some of my best friends are the guys that I went to camp with those years. We’re still in super close touch. I have a couple of close

friends from high school and college, but numerically a disproportionate amount of the people that I still consider really close to my heart were the guys [from camp].

That brings me to my next question: You write a lot about the impact of the Beastie Boys on you.

Why do you think the Beastie Boys were so important to you and to young Jews more generally?

I think the Beastie Boys are like the cool Jewish kids that you know.

They were visibly and clearly — by their proclamation and by their heritage — Jewish, but were also doing cool stuff. Their music was both really enmeshed in the broader hiphop culture, but also didn’t feel like they were putting on airs or pretending to be people they weren’t. They were goofing around and having a good time. It was like, oh there’s a place to be a sarcastic Jewish kid.

[Their Jewishness felt] more modern than the Mel Brooks and, at the time, the Woody Allen version of popular culture male Judaism.

They’re very important to me.

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What Does ‘Jew Down’ Mean, And Why Do People Find It Offensive?

By Marcy Oster (JTA) – “Jew down” seems to be being cheap or prone to hoard money. Often they were forced into financial occupations and thus were best known as money lenders, leaving them vulnerable to anti-Semitic misrepresentations. Think of portrayals such as Shylock, the villainous lender in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”

A 16th-century painting of a money The term itself means to haggle lender by Dutch artist Quentin Massys or bargain for a lower price than (Francis G. Mayer/Corbis/VCG via originally agreed upon. The Oxford Getty Images) English Dictionary notes the earlimaking a comeback — or maybe it est usage of the term came in 1825 never left the lexicon. and that it was used in 1870 on the In April, a City Council member floor of the U.S. Congress to uttered the term at a meeting in Jef- describe a bill setting salaries in the fersonville, Indiana. military. The legislation supposedly This month, council members in prompted someone to say that Contwo New Jersey cities — Paterson gress is “ready to Jew down the pay and Trenton — used it in govern- of its generals.” ment forums.

The comparable term “gyp” also In Paterson, Michael Jackson was born out of a negative stereoapologized for using the term to type, in this case about Roma — criticize developers looking to buy often derogatorily referred to as land for less money. Jackson said it “gypsies” and stereotyped as cheap. was used as a “term of endearment” To gyp someone out of something when he was growing up. is essentially to steal it away.

In Trenton, Kathy McBride, the Same deal with the term “Welsh” council president, used the term to — a verb substituted for swindle or describe the settlement of a per- cheat — derived from a stereotype sonal injury lawsuit (by a Jewish about Welsh people. lawyer) at a low rate, saying “they But is it always anti-Semitic? were able to wait her out and Jew Trenton’s Muschal is correct — her down.” A City Council col- the expression probably has been league, Robin Vaughn, defended used a million times. Are all the McBride, saying the term is “a users anti-Semites if they don’t verb.” know its history?

Councilman George Muschal Historian Deborah Lipstadt’s latalso defended her. est book, “Anti-Semitism: Here and “You know, it’s like a car dealer. Now,” includes a chapter on what They wanted $5,000, you Jew ‘em she calls the “clueless anti-Semite,” down to $4,000,” Muschal said. which is, she told the Jewish Tele“It’s nothing vicious. The expres- graphic Agency, “the person who sion has been said millions of engages in anti-Semitism but times.” doesn’t even know it.”

In the wake of it all, a Jewish “Anti-Semitism has gone so deep attorney working for Trenton sev- into the roots of society that people ered ties with the city, citing what don’t recognize that they are engaghe called McBride’s “disgraceful ing in it when they engage in it,” and shameful anti-Semitic said Lipstadt, the Dorot pro­fes­sor remarks.” of Mod­ern Jew­ish His­to­ry and (Amid calls for their resigna- Holo­caust Stud­ies at Emory Uni­ tions, the three Trenton council ver­ si­ ty. This, she hastens to add, members apologized for their use does not excuse such behavior. and defense of the term.)

She calls clueless anti-Semites What does the term actually just as dangerous as extremist antimean, and why is there such a gap Semites, who know exactly what in the understanding of it? they are saying when they say it.

It comes from an anti-Semitic Expressions of anti-Semitism from trope. both “feeds into the society’s perThe term to “Jew down” was ception of Jews.” born out of stereotypes formed dur“It is not meant to be made light ing medieval times about Jews of,” Lipstadt said.

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Is it becoming more popular these days?

While it feels like the term is gaining in popularity, Brandeis University professor Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun professor of American Jewish History, suggested that it is merely getting more coverage in modern media. Google, he said, makes it easier to discover examples of the term’s usage.

In addition, he said, throughout the 1990s and until just a couple years ago, there was an assumption that anti-Semitism had significantly declined. But now it appears to be back, and some young Jewish adults are being confronted with its expressions for the first time.

If the Jewish community wants to eradicate the use of the objectionable term, or what Sarna calls “linguistic insensitivity,” they have to call out the people who use it, he said.

Echoing Lipstadt, he adds, “language helps to shape the community we live in.”

The New Jersey city officials who used the phrase in the last month were people of color, and Sarna said that the Jewish community “has not been very successful in shaping the sensitivity of people of color.”

For a long time, the Jewish community forgave such usages by the African-American community because they themselves were victims of prejudice. Now, he said, we have to tell them that the use of “Jew down” as a verb is as insulting to us as the use of the N-word is to them, or its Yiddish equivalent. 

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Here Are 6 Favorite Jewish Foods You Should Stop Eating

By Alix Wall

A bagel with lox and cream cheese is supremely unhealthy. The bagel alone has the nutritional equivalent of five slices of white bread. (Fudio/Getty Images)

With barbecue season finally here, Americans everywhere will be firing up their grills and feasting on their favorite foods.

But many of our culinary indulgences come with a cost. We’re not just talking about foods that are overly salty, fatty and sugary. There are foods that actually raise your risk for developing cancer — including some much-loved American Jewish classics.

“You want to have a diet of mostly healthy whole foods, and you want to proceed with caution

and have a smaller portion of these Jewish delicacies that do not promote health,” says nutritionist and author Lisa R. Young.

It may be hard to avoid such foods entirely, Young says, but exercising portion control is essential.

Here are some classic favorites you might want to think twice about due to their potential to increase the risk of cancer.

Charred Barbecue It doesn’t matter what kind of meat you’re barbecuing, or whether you’re doing it over wood, charcoal or gas. Overly blackened or burn marks on most foods cause heterocylic amines, or HCAs, which have been proven to cause cancer in studies on animals. HCAs form when amino acids and creatine, a chemical found in animal muscles, react at high cooking temperatures.

Fire from wood, charcoal or gas also emits polycyclic aromatic

hydrocarbons, known as PAHs. According to the National Cancer Institute, both HCAs and PAHs can be mutagenic, which means they cause changes in DNA that may increase one’s cancer risk. Marinating foods bound for the grill can alleviate this somewhat, but the best remedy is to keep careful watch to make sure your food cooks evenly but doesn’t burn.

Processed Meats Pastrami, salami, hot dogs — there’s so much unhealthy stuff here it’s hard to know where to start. These foods all contain nitrates or nitrites, preservatives used to cure meats that prevent them from spoiling and give them that rosy color. But nitrates and nitrites are known carcinogens, occurring both naturally in some foods and as an additive in others.

Nitrites can damage cells and react with other molecules found in food to create an enhanced cancer risk.

For this reason, these Jewish delicacies top the list of foods to avoid when thinking about optimizing one’s diet.

Organ Meats Jews have a long tradition of consuming organ meats, from the Ashkenazi Jewish favorites chopped liver and kishke (cow intestine stuffed with gizzards, shmaltz and vegetables) to the Sephardic dish known as Jerusalem mixed grill, which consists of spicy sautéed chicken hearts, spleens and liver, often served with warm hummus or in a pita. Organ meats are a mixed bag: On one hand, they are packed with nutrients like vitamin A and folic acid, both of which are good for the heart. On the other hand, they are extremely high in saturated fat and cholesterol. While a highfat, high-cholesterol diet is bad for See JEWISH FOODS on Page

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JEWISH FOODS Continued from Page 20 the heart, studies show such diets are also associated with colorectal, breast, ovarian and prostate cancer.

Liver and other organ meats, sauteed or chopped, are extremely high in saturated fat and cholesterol, which are associated with a variety of cancers. (Vitpho/Getty Images) Fried Foods Sadly, it’s best if latkes and other fried foods are kept to a minimum.

When food is cooked at very high heat, an amino acid called asparagine can react with sugars to produce acrylamide. This happens especially with latkes, since potatoes are high in sugar content. The chemical acrylamide is used in all kinds of industries to make dyes and plastics. When consumed by the human body, acrylamide is converted into a compound called glycidamide, which can cause DNA mutations that may lead to cancer.

Farmed Salmon This one is a real heartbreaker, because what Jewish occasion doesn’t call for a nice salmon, fresh, smoked or poached? Unfortunately, experts say, farmed salmon has on occasion been contaminated with chemicals that could be carcinogenic. Don’t let fish labeled “Atlantic salmon” fool you — there are large salmon farming operations in the Atlantic Ocean, where most salmon is farmed in this country.

When buying fresh fish, always try to go with wild.

Bagels, Lox And Cream Cheese Lox, that Jewish favorite, is not as healthy as we would hope. If it’s farmed, it could have those dangerous chemicals that sometimes are associated with farm-raised fish.

Even if it’s wild, smoking the lox often leads to the presence of nitrates, and the smoking process itself can add additional carcinogens. With bagels, lox and cream cheese, the whole package is unhealthy, according to Young.

“A bagel is the equivalent of about five pieces of white bread,”

Young says, and cream cheese is essentially a combination of cream and milk that gives it a high fat content.

Young spoke about nutrition at a recent Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) event where she stressed that moderation is the key to healthy eating.

Young advocates for a diet low in calories that includes a variety of foods focusing on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, and vegetable oils. Hold the pastrami and knishes.

“While most causes of cancer are unknown, reducing environmental factors like unhealthy diets is important,” according to Dr. Mark Israel, the former director of Dartmouth College’s National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center and now the national executive director of the Israel Cancer Research Fund, the largest nonprofit organization dedicated solely to funding cancer research in Israel.

“Environmental exposures that impact on cancer risk, such as known carcinogens that are present in trace amounts in certain foodstuffs, can provide opportunities for individuals to decrease their risk of cancer by modifying their exposure to known hazards,” Israel comments.

ICRF funds scientific research that helps us understand cancer risks.

“Further understanding of how such exposures contribute to the development of cancer can provide opportunities to interrupt those processes,” Israel says. “That’s another key area in which we are focused.”

This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with the Israel Cancer Research Fund, whose ongoing support of these and other Israeli scientists’ work goes a long way toward ensuring that their efforts will have important and lasting impact in the global fight against cancer. This article was produced

by JTA’s native content team.

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Israel Gives New Hope To Patients With Multiple Myeloma

By Larry Luxner

Members of AMEN, the Israeli Association of Myeloma Patients, attend a patient conference at Tel Aviv University, May 2019. (Courtesy of AMEN)

TEL AVIV — Shlomit Norman was only 42 when doctors diagnosed her with multiple myeloma — a bone marrow cancer with no known cure that rarely strikes people under the age of 65.

At the time, the youngest of her three boys was 10, and few patients with the disease survived for more than a couple of years.

“I told my best friend that she’d have to be in charge of my son’s bar mitzvah because I didn’t think I’d be around by then,” recalled Norman, who lives in Haifa.

But thanks to some innovative treatments with roots in Israeli

research, Norman managed to outlive her initial prognosis and today leads a relatively stable life 12 years later.

“For the first 10 years after I was diagnosed, I was in a partial remission after my first bone marrow transplant and I had a fantastic quality of life,” she said. “But in 2016, I relapsed and had another transplant. Since then, I’m on maintenance medicine. Other than fatigue, and numbing in the hands and feet, I’m OK.” According to the American Cancer Society, some 13,000 Americans die annually from multiple myeloma — commonly referred to as myeloma and first documented in 1844. But the typical life expectancy for patients following diagnosis has surged from two years to nearly 10. Some people now live for more than two decades with the illness.

A significant part of the global progress in treating multiple myeloma — in which the body produces too many plasma cells, “crowding

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world,” Cohen said.

Dr. Mark Israel, national executive director of the New York-based Israel Cancer Research Fund, which helped fund Ciechanover’s research and raises millions of dollars every year for cancer research in Israel, said the early work on proteasome inhibitors was groundbreaking even if the scientists at the time didn’t fully realize all its implications.

“When Ciechanover and Hershko got the Nobel Prize for something important, they had no idea they had discovered an efficacious drug target that inhibits multiple myeloma,” Israel said. “But if they had never done their work, everybody with the disease would still be dying quickly.”

Now there are second- and thirdgeneration drugs based on the same research, such as carfilzomib, a selective proteasome inhibitor given to patients via an intravenous line, and ixazomib, the first oral

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out” other types of blood cells like platelets and red cells, all of which are necessary for optimal health — stems from research conducted in Israel.

In 2004, Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, scientists at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with American biologist Irwin Rose, for their discovery years earlier of the ubiquitin proteasome system, a pathway responsible for the degradation of proteins within the cell.

This discovery was crucial to the creation of a whole class of treatments called proteasome inhibitors — drugs that slow the degradation of protein and thereby inhibit the cancer’s progress, explained Dr. Yael Cohen, head of myeloma services at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, also known as the Sourasky Medical Center.

“Velcade, a drug which came out of that, was revolutionary, and it’s still used as first-line treatment for myeloma in most places around the

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MYELOMA Continued from Page 22 therapy for multiple myeloma.

A more recent Israeli contribution to treating multiple myeloma was the invention of the CAR-T cell based on early work by Zelig Eshhar of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.

T cells are a type of white blood cell that helps the human immune system fight harmful microbes.

CAR-T cells are specially modified T cells designed to fight cancer.

“Eshhar’s idea was to take a T cell, modify it genetically by implanting a hybrid receptor that can target the cancer cell and have a second component that activates the T cell to kill the cancer cell,” Cohen said. “This was later developed for the treatment of leukemia and lymphoma, and we are now hoping to open CAR-T clinical trials in Israel to treat multiple myeloma in the next few months.”

Dr. Moshe Gat chairs the Israeli Multiple Myeloma Study Group, a gathering of 20 to 30 physicians who meet every few months to discuss current topics in myeloma.

The group runs some joint clinical trials and advocates for better patient care and enhanced access to

medication.

“When I was a fellow 15 years ago, the median survival for a patient with multiple myeloma was 2 1/2 years,” Gat said. “Since then it’s nearly quadrupled, and I don’t know what to say to a new patient since so many treatments are coming online.”

About 550 people in Israel are diagnosed with multiple myeloma each year, with some 3,500 patients living with the disease at any given time, according to Norman, who chairs AMEN-The Israeli Association of Myeloma Patients. The nonprofit, founded in 2005, advocates for multiple myeloma patients throughout Israel, including offering support through monthly meetings, empowerment workshops and an active Facebook group with more than 600 members.

“These days, people are living with myeloma much longer than they used to,” Norman said. “Even if they’re diagnosed at the age of 40, they will make it into their 60s.”

The most difficult thing about living with myeloma, Norman said, is the inevitability that her health will take a turn for the worse.

“For now there’s no cure, so even when you’re in remission you know it’s going to come back,” Norman

said. “You don’t know when or how, but every physician you ask will say ‘You’re going to relapse.’

We always carry this fear.”

While the median age for a multiple myeloma diagnosis is 70, some patients get it much younger.

Norman says it is outdated thinking to view it as a disease of the elderly.

Myeloma is one of the many cancers that the Israel Cancer Research Fund is targeting through research.

“We’re trying to use the best minds in the world to ask the fundamental questions about cancer cells: How do they grow, how do they metastasize, how do they invade

normal tissue and ultimately do things which make people sick and die?” said Israel of the ICRF. “We contribute to the fund of knowledge on which cancer interventions are based. This is where the investment really counts.”

This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with the Israel Cancer Research Fund, whose ongoing support of these and other Israeli scientists’ work goes a long way toward ensuring that their efforts will have important and lasting impact in the global fight against cancer. This article was produced

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Thanks to Dr. Charles Runnels, the inventor of the O-shot for women, we have protocols involving Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP), which is obtained from the patient by various processes. The most common of which is a double cen-

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trifugation process. This isolate of the patient's own blood product is activated and injected back into the patient. Activated platelets are known to have at least 424 regenerative and growth factors. It attracts stem cells to the area with their own regenerative and healing capabilities, and it brings about angiogenesis, or new circulation.

In the case of its use in the O-shot it can treat and resolve women's urinary incontinence and bladder leakage, it can strengthen the vaginal wall, and it can return sensation to the clitoris. The ‘O' stands for orgasm, for good reason!

For women, PRP is also used in Dr. Runnel's Vampire Facelift, Vampire Facial, Vampire Breast Lift, and Vampire Wing Lift procedures.

But, above all the use of PRP is safe. And, since it is not a drug, it is not part of the FDA's jurisdiction..ì Election 2019

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Health

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The Unexpected Jewish Ritual That Helps Me Relax

(Frank Rosenstein/Photodisc)

This story originally appeared on (Kveller via JTA) On a recent evening the house was quiet, except for our neighbor’s construction workers sweeping gravel off the driveway. I had just dropped off my younger son at tennis lessons and my older son at cross-country practice. My husband was still at work. Dinner — leftover pesto pasta with chicken — sat ready in the fridge.

In this rare family-free hour at home, I wondered what to do. Take a bath, go for a run, read one of the

young adult novels stacked on my desk, bake the peach crisp I had been craving?

As I considered the options, I decided that first I’d take a minute to listen to a recording that our cantor had texted me earlier in the day.

The next Friday I would be chanting the Torah at our synagogue, and I wanted to begin imprinting the melody into my brain.

I sat in an easy chair by the window, iPhone on one side, Gunther Plaut’s “Torah: A Modern Commentary” on the other. When I finished, I looked up and was taken by surprise — an hour had passed.

Stumbling through a first-draft reading, I had been in flow, untethered from time, which usually happens only when I’m reading, writing, running or teaching. In the dregs of a hot summer Tuesday, I hadn’t known such a space could exist. And until several years ago, I

couldn’t have predicted my joy in inhabiting it.

For my bat mitzvah in the late ’80s at my Reform temple, I hadn’t even learned the tropes. Instead I memorized my portion from the rabbi’s cassette recording. Although I liked the precision of following the Hebrew with a silver pointer, I didn’t feel I understood how the text worked.

Yet at a temple retreat several years ago, I joined a small session on cantillation because I enjoyed Jewish songs. In half an hour, I realized that Torah chanting checked all my favorite intellectual boxes: history, storytelling, music, plus a challenge. Puzzling together the Hebrew words, English translations and trope marks felt like reading poetry in 3-D. A couple of months later, I chanted my first lines in front of the congregation at a sparsely attended

summer service. Standing at the podium, a yad in hand for the first time in decades, the minutes flashed by. Since then, I’ve chanted occasionally, at regular services and also on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — a time that feels even more heightened because the tropes change for the High Holidays, not to mention the increased size of the crowd.

Each time I am visibly nervous, as I’m not a singer. I skew flat every so often, and I have no idea how to phrase passages with my breath. Yet I also sense that I’m not the main event — nobody is judging me on my tone or my pitch, nobody cares what I’m wearing, except for a prayer shawl around my shoulders to honor the Torah.

Rather, I’m simply a conduit for See JEWISH RITUAL on Page

25

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Embracing the physical, Thousands of people turn to hospice when facing a lifeemotional,and spiritual needs limiting illness. According to the National Hospice and of our patients and their families.

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Hospice is not only directed toward the person experiencing a life-limiting illness or injury, but is also designed to offer support and resources to family members to help them better cope with the end of a  loved one's life.

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centers or long-term care homes.

Hospice care often begins when the individual receiving care and his or her family members feel the end of life may be near. According to Relias, a healthcare advisory organization, most patients enter hospice during the last six months of life.

Care providers are interdisciplinary. Doctors, nurses, social service providers, bereavement therapists, dieticians, spiritual counselors, and physical or occupational therapists may be included in hospice treatment.

Hospice should be discussed when doctors realize that they're running out of treatment options to prolong life. If such discussions are delayed, seriously ill patients may not fully benefit from the advantages awarded them through hospice.

Hospice is usually paid through private insurance, Medicare or Medicaid, so there is no need to worry about cost. Various hospice services operate in different areas, and doctors and care centers can refer patients to hospice programs.

A hospice program may conduct its own medical examination and review health records to recommend a plan of action. It is important for a family member or health care proxy to be present for this initial meeting to express the patient's wishes if he or she is unable to do so. Hospice care may begin shortly after this initial consultation.

Hospice helps people with life-limiting conditions spend their final days as comfortable as possible. If you have been advised by a doctor that you or a loved-one is ready for hospice, please call St. Joseph Hospice at 504734-0140 or 225-769-4810.  THE

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Health

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JEWISH RITUAL Continued from Page 24 these millennia-old words.

In addition, as an English and history teacher, someone devoted to words, I notice that the text means more when connected to the musical notation. Many basic tropes, recognizable from the Ve’ahavta prayer, recur as a musical baseline.

But when more unusual melodies appear, watch out — that means something important is going on.

When our cantor recently assigned me a passage for another sleepy summer Shabbat, I was thrilled to see it was one of the biggest biblical stories there is: the section of Numbers 20 when Moses strikes a rock to get water and then learns that his arrogance, or perhaps lack of faith, or reluctance to sanctify God, has cost him entry into the Promised Land.

In this fateful sentence — “But the Eternal One said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them’” — the words leading up to God’s statement use complicated tropes and have an elegiac, drawn-out quality, as if to let us know that what comes next is sadly inevitable. Yet the tropes in the quotation itself are normal, as if to emphasize the loss of promise that Moses has suffered in this moment.

These days, when I attend a Torah service — something I don’t do regularly — I find myself following along not with a silver pointer but with my fingertip, trying to remember the few Hebrew roots I know, delighted when I can connect a trope to a translation. I now appreciate about why this arcane system exists — to heighten the emotion behind these worldchanging words — even as I wish the scroll included vowels and trope markings.

During the weeks leading up to chanting, I often save practice for the end of the evening, just 15 or 20 minutes before bed. The process is unexpectedly meditative, just as wearing a tallit on the bimah feels unexpectedly comforting. I even bought a new prayer shawl — offwhite silk shot through with a silver, gold and bronze tree of life — to replace the musty rainbow one I wore at my bat mitzvah.

If you had told me five or 10 years ago that I would be chanting Torah several times a year, I would have laughed. It would have seemed too heavy, too old-fashioned, somehow just too much.

Yet when the cantor calls, it’s exactly the ancient and complicated beauty of the text that keeps me saying yes. Through words and music, I’ve found my own path as an adult into a tradition I thought I’d left behind at 13, creating a peace I didn’t know could come from Judaism. 

Louisiana State Representative District 89

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Southern & Jewish

Seven Sukkot Themes To Spice Up Your Sukkah

By Dave Miller

Sukkot is almost here! It’s our week to cram friends and family into the sukkah , whether for short services and meals or full-on campouts. But the more the merrier, and the more fun, the better! With that in mind, here are 7 Sukkot ideas for modern themes and decorating ideas that might just get you and those you care about to spend a few more minutes outside. Hang some pictures, prepare thematic food, maybe dress up, add some fun decorations, and play some fun games.

1. Harry Potter: Hmm, four walls and four houses– there’s a match made in heaven. Use this as a chance to make some homemade

Butterbeer, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, Cockroach Clusters, or Chocolate Frogs. Might make for a good time to play a game of Quidditch, practice your spells, and wear your house’s best swag (avoid letting the kids use the invisibility cloak – just a suggestion).

2. Game of Thrones: Have a favorite kingdom? Ready to take up arms? Always wanted to break bread with a White Walker? Now’s your chance. Let’s see if you can keep the peace longer than Jon Snow was able to. Nothing like heating your Sukkah with some dragon’s fire and filling your belly with some of the Lannister’s favorite wine. This one’s for the grownups, of course.

3. Star Wars/Star Trek: No, I’m not taking sides here. This could be the perfect time for you to go on an adventure with Captain Kirk and his crew (avoid the red shirts). But, if you prefer more of a space opera, Star Wars is going to be the best

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option. Fair warning, watch your hands – inevitably someone always loses theirs. Play safe with your light sabers!

4. Heroes, Marvel/DC: Team Cap. or Team Iron Man, Team Batman or Team Superman…surely not a decision to be taken lightly.

Touch base with your inner hero, or better yet, watch the kids around you be the heroes. The sukkah can be a great place for superheroes!

5. The Multicultural Sukkah: I love inviting friends of all backgrounds into the sukkah, and using the opportunity to share my culture and traditions with them. This year, I think we may try using this as an opportunity to share all of our respective cultures and let the sukkah to serve as the setting for this exchange. Creating understanding and appreciation of diversity can be done any time, and Sukkot is one of the most welcoming of Jewish holidays to explore and share our various identities and traditions!

6. Sports: Who said the man (or woman) cave has to be inside the house? This is the perfect time to don your favorite jersey, beer helmet, swag, and flag as you enjoy watching/playing your favorite

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sport with your friends. Just remember, the sukkah is not made out of stone, so be careful with the passes, catches, and end-zone dances. And you might need a really long extension cord if you want to watch the big game out there.

7. Pixar/Disney: Need to relive your glory days with Buzz and Woody? Anxious to surprise the kids with Dory and Nemo? Who said you can’t have a little animated fun in the sukkah? This is a great time to celebrate with all characters, some human and some not-sohuman. You know you’ve always wanted to dress up, have a make-up party, and do your friend’s hair in a sukkah, here’s your chance. Help your kids’ imagination come to life in a beautiful and magical space.

Warning, do not attach 100,000 helium balloons to your sukkah, we all know what’ll happen then…

Sukkot is a beautiful holiday filled with many rich traditions.

This might just give you the chance to add a little flare, some things to do while enjoying the night sky, and help bring people together in new and fun ways. 

Best Wishes To My Friends In The Jewish Community

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

District 78 26 Election 2019

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NOSHER

(food)

Instant Pot Georgian Pomegranate Chicken: The Easiest Chicken For The Holidays Or Any Time

By Sonya Sanford (JTA via The Nosher) -- I was initially an Instant Pot doubter. I love both my Dutch oven and my stock pot, and I love letting the kitchen slowly fill with warmth as things simmer and cook for hours while I putz around the house. Then I got married and an Instant Pot (real talk: Instapot) literally showed up on my doorstep. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I put it in the closet and forgot about it for at least six months.

And then I heard about making rice in the Instant Pot. My first pot of sushi rice instantly made me a convert. My first vegetable stock changed my feelings about how stock can best be made. My first batch of chickpeas led me to making hummus on a more regular basis.

Rice, stock and beans are all great in the Instant Pot, but I still carried

some skepticism about cooking other things. Chicken? What’s wrong with cooking it in the oven?

Turns out, chicken in the pressure cooker is delicious. The chicken ends up deeply infused with any added aromatic or spice, it becomes fall-off-the-bone tender and requires much less attention than cooking it on the stove.

As documented by the queen of Jewish cooking, Joan Nathan, and by Georgian food guru Carla Capalbo, the Georgian Jewish community traditionally makes chicken cooked in pomegranate juice for Rosh Hashanah. It’s a perfect recipe for the High Holidays: sweet, tart, flavorful and eye-catching. This recipe is an adaptation from multiple recipes for this dish, but in any variation the chicken is braised in a generously spiced,

fruity pomegranate juice-based broth and then topped with fresh red jewellike pomegranate kernels.

The pomegranate juice adds expected sweetness, but there’s also an assertive and awakening tang that comes through, especially with the addition of tamarind and pomegranate molasses. The copious amounts of onion and garlic add deep levels of sweet savoriness to the dish. The coriander, hot pepper (not too hot) and thyme play off each other with their respective aromas, heat and mintiness. It is Rosh Hashanah, so a hint of honey makes its way into the pot to remind you of sweetness without being at the forefront of the show.

After 15 minutes at high pressure, the chicken barely clings to its bones and the sauce becomes rich with and fortified by the golden schmaltz left over from browning the chicken. Take out the chicken and let that liquid simmer (still in the Instant Pot), and the mahoganycolored sauce will thicken and become silky and as decadent as a festive meal demands.

Once the chicken and sauce are plated, you shower them with the bright green fresh herbs and the glistening ruby red pomegranate seeds. Dark meat works best for this, but you can certainly make it

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with white meat as well. And like all great holiday dishes, you can make this several days in advance and it only gets better when reheated. It also freezes well, just leave off the fresh garnish until right before serving. And yes, if you really don’t want to cave to culinary social pressure, you can make this recipe the old-fashioned way.

Note: This recipe can easily be doubled. You can find tamarind paste and pomegranate molasses at Middle Eastern stores, Whole Foods, or online.

INGREDIENTS: • 12 whole chicken legs, or 6 bone-in thighs plus 6 legs (about 4 pounds) • Sunflower or avocado oil, as needed • 3 medium red onions, halved and sliced thin • 4-5 cloves garlic, finely minced • 2 teaspoons ground coriander • 1 1/2 teaspoons aleppo pepper, or 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or to taste • 1 teaspoon sweet paprika • 2 tablespoons tomato paste • 1 cup pomegranate juice • 2 tablespoons pomegranate See CHICKEN on Page

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Shanah Tovah “I am running for governor because hardworking Louisianians deserve better! As governor, I will

unleash Louisiana’s full potential and create a state

that thrives for generations to come. Our families “Thank you for your

will see a stronger more opportunities, support aseconomy, we continue and ato better quality of life.

Help is on the protect and defend Israel. ” way!”

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The Nosher

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CHICKEN Continued from Page 28 molasses • 2 tablespoons tamarind paste • 1 tablespoon honey • 3 sprigs fresh thyme • 1 bay leaf • Arils/seeds of 1 whole pomegranate • 1/2 bunch fresh cilantro or parsley, for garnish • Salt and pepper, as needed DIRECTIONS: 1. Start by generously seasoning your chicken with salt and pepper on both sides.

2. Turn your Instant Pot or pressure cooker to the sauté setting, which should produce high heat for browning. If needed increase the heat to More or according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Once the pot is hot, add a drizzle of oil.

Brown each piece of chicken until golden brown, about 3-4 minutes on each side. Cook the chicken in batches so as not to crowd the pot and cause the chicken to steam instead of brown. On the stovetop, brown the chicken in a large pot or Dutch oven on medium high heat.

Once all the chicken is browned, transfer it from the pot and reserve.

3. Next, add the onions to the same pot so that they can cook in the remaining chicken fat. If your chicken did not release very much oil, and another tablespoon or 2 of oil to the pot. Season the onions with salt and sauté for 5-6 minutes or until softened and starting to slightly brown. Add the garlic, coriander and paprika to the pot and sauté for an additional 1-2 minutes, or until fragrant. Add the tomato

paste and stir everything until the onion mixture is well coated in the tomato paste Nestle the reserved browned chicken back into the pot.

Press Cancel to turn off the sauté function on the pot. Follow the same steps on a stovetop.

4. Add the pomegranate juice, pomegranate molasses, tamarind paste, honey, thyme and bay leaf to the pot. Place the lid on the Instant Pot, close the pot and seal it. Press the Poultry or Manual setting and set the time to 15 minutes. Let the steam naturally release for 10-15 minutes; shift the valve to venting if more air needs to be released. On the stovetop, cover the pot and simmer for 30 minutes on medium-low or until the chicken is tender and cooked through.

5. Press Cancel, open the lid and transfer the chicken to a platter and lightly cover with foil to keep the chicken warm. Remove the bay leaf and thyme stems. Turn on the Saute function again. Allow the sauce to simmer and reduce by half, or until it has reached your desired thickness. On the stovetop, turn the heat to medium-high and simmer.

6. Once the sauce has reduced and thickened, pour the sauce over the chicken. At this point you can keep dish warm in a low oven, or you can cool it and freeze if making in advance.

7. Just before serving, garnish the chicken with the fresh pomegranate and roughly chopped cilantro or parsley. Serves 6-8.

(Sonya Sanford is a chef, food stylist, and writer based out of Los Angeles.) 

“Thank you for allowing me to serve as your Assessor” Louis Fitzmorris Assessor St. Tammany Parish

ST. TAMMANY PARISH ASSESSOR’S OFFICE MISSION STATEMENT: “To serve the citizens of St. Tammany Parish with fairness, efficiency and responsiveness”

Louis Fitzmorris Assessor St. Tammany Parish

On October 12, PLEASE ELECT

RICHARD DUCOTE

Louisiana Supreme Court Jusce, District 1 (St. Tammany, Washington, St. Helena, Tangipahoa, and parts of Jefferson & Orleans Parishes) ∙One of the nation’s leading child abuse/domestic violence litigators and law reformers ∙Wrote over 25 laws for child abuse and domestic violence victims ∙National Organization of Forensic Social Work’s Sol Gothard Lifetime Achievement Award ∙Southeast Louisiana United Way Legislative Champion ∙Judge Richard Ware Memorial Award from Louisiana Children’s Trust Fund Board

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Election 2019

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Focus Issues on

Religion And Science Don’t Contradict — They Just Answer Different Questions

Gary Saul Morson

Morton Schapiro

CHICAGO (JTA) — It has been 60 years since C.P. Snow delivered his scathing Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Snow lamented the fact that scientists and humanists had little knowledge or appreciation of one another’s disciplines.

Many years later, one of us attended a gathering of STEM professors and self-described faculty of faith, some from the humanities and some from other disciplines.

30 Election 2019

The discussion was no more fruitful than the ones Snow described attending decades earlier.

Near the end of the meeting, one of the participants, a devout Christian, put his finger on the core issue.

“The problem is that those of us who have an abiding religious faith also believe in science,” this participant said. “We recognize that you present an objective truth, and that your approach is worthy of careful deliberation. But we get little in return. When you look at us, you can barely conceal your contempt.

What you see is little more than confusion, superstition and folly.”

In our lives, and in our teaching, we reject that divide. As the Jewish New Year approaches and we welcome in the Hebrew year 5780, we don’t feel at all confused about when the world was created: It was formed around 5 billion years ago, and it is also 5,780 years old. Why, we ask, must we choose?

But how can one believe two

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contradictory things? If the world is really 5,780 years old, then evolution must be false. And if the universe is governed by laws that make humanity a mere accident of physics and chemistry, what can biblical stories of Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs possibly teach us?

F. Scott Fitzgerald put it beautifully: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” And John Keats praised what he called “negative capability,” the capacity to entertain mysteries and contradictions without any “irritable reaching” for some system to impose on the world’s complexity. We take these messages to heart in an undergraduate class we co-teach, where we try to impress on our students that the greatest questions tend to have the most elusive and incongruous answers.

So thought Leo Tolstoy, who was impatient with all systems. His most interesting and autobiographical characters seek the truth but, like Tolstoy himself, cannot accept ready-made answers.

Tolstoy’s greatest admirer, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, explained that neither science nor philosophy is a sort of super-theory to be applied outside its appropriate realm.

Take any theory outside its proper context, outside its proper “language game,” and it yields nonsense.

Then “language goes on holiday,” Wittgenstein memorably observes. With scientific disciplines, “problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.”

This tension is palpable in both Tolstoy’s life and work. At the conclusion of his masterpiece “Anna Karenina,” the hero, Konstantin Levin, falls into despair. The death of his brother has brought him face to face with his own mortality, which he feels not as some abstract fact but as a profound horror, making nonsense of everything he does.

Tolstoy is famous for his descriptions of such a mood, and he himself, like Levin, could hardly resist the impulse to suicide.

“The power which drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and more widespread than any mere wish,” he wrote. “It was a force similar to the former striving to live, only in the opposite direction.”

Both Tolstoy and Levin hid rope so they would not be tempted to hang themselves, and stopped hunting lest they yield to so easy a method of ending life.

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A student of the natural sciences, Levin searches there for an answer.

But he finds that words like “the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, and evolution… were very useful for intellectual purposes,” but were incapable of addressing questions of meaning, of life’s purpose and of right and wrong.

No matter what laws it discovers, science can only say of each person’s life: “In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is me.”

For Levin, talking to scientists about such issues was like conversing with a deaf person who kept answering questions he had not been asked. Levin “was in the position of a man seeking food in a toy shop or at a gunsmith’s.” He realizes that in casting off his old religious convictions, he was like a man “who has changed his warm fur cloak for a thin muslin garment, and going for the first time into the [Russian] frost, is immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature that he is as good as naked and must inevitably perish.”

The sense of life’s meaning dawns on Levin in a way that only Tolstoy could describe. It comes from a realm of thought completely different from science. Levin does not reject science, but he no longer asks it to address questions of meaning, which by its very nature it excludes.

When Levin realizes that he must think about astronomy with one set of tools, and about meaning with another, he finds himself lying on his back gazing up at the high, cloudless sky. He muses: “Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a rounded vault?” And yet, where everyday life is concerned, “in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a firm blue vault, far more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it.”

And with this insight, Levin realizes that he has found faith.

So if asked how old the world is, the proper reply is: Are we doing geology or something else? By the same token, a biological explanation of how homo sapiens arrived at its ethics is one thing, and the question of what is right or wrong is quite another.

The world is billions of years old, and it is also 5,780 years old — not an average of the two, and not one or the other, but both, depending on what question we are asking.  THE

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on Issues

15 Inconceivable Jewish Facts About ‘The Princess Bride’

By Arielle Kaplan (JTA) Look up! Do you see pigs flying above? No? Are you sure?

Because, in a first, the internet appears to agree on one important thing: The cult classic movie The Princess Bride should not — repeat, not — be rebooted.

Why this idea ever came to mind is beyond my pay grade, but I do know the source: Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive Tony Vinciquerra mentioned it in passing in an interview with Variety.

“We have so many people coming to us saying, ‘We want to remake this show or that show,” Vinciquerra said. “Very famous people, whose names I won’t use, but they want to redo The Princess Bride.”

Needless to say, the internet was not having it.

As for the identities of these “very famous people?” Well, we also don’t know — but it’s certainly not Seth Rogen. When he was taken to task on Twitter about it, Rogen’s response was swift: “I would never dare,” he tweeted.

Other celebs were quick to pan

the potential project, too, including Jewish mom and actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who’s married to Christopher Guest — AKA the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride.

Oh really? Well, I married the six fingered man, obviously why we have stayed together for 35 years and there is only ONE The Princess Bride and it’s William Goldman and @robreiner’s. “Life is pain highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something!”

Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra says that “very famous people whose names I won’t use” want to redo Norman Lear’s ‘The Princess Bride’ And don’t let’s forget about Cary Elwes’ (yes, Westley!) brilliant response to the rumor — which may be the most clever use of an iconic line we’ve ever seen: Anyway, since The Princess Bride is back in the news — and about to turn 32! — now is a truly excellent time to review all the Jewish facts about this iconic film, that, to reiterate, absolutely does not need to be meddled with.

1. The plot of The Princess Bride isn’t explicitly Jewish, but the people behind the novel and movie adaption certainly are. First up is William Goldman, the late Jewish author of the 1973 fantasy novel by the same name. He grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, and was raised by observant Jewish parents.

2. The story behind the name of Goldman’s book is adorable. Before venturing on a business trip, the Jewish dad promised his two daughters he’d write them a story. When he asked what the plot should be about, one said, “a princess,” and the other “a bride” — and thus, “The Princess Bride” was born.

(Awww!)

3. Director Rob Reiner, of When Harry Met Sally, is Jewish!

4. Mark Knopfler, the composer for The Princess Bride, is also a proud Jew! In fact, his parents fled Hungary in 1939 because of rampant anti-Semitism.

5. You know who else is Jewish?

The late actor Peter Falk, famously known for playing the titular role in Columbo, narrates the movie. He

plays the grandfather in the romantic comedy, who reads the book, The Princess Bride, to his sick grandson.

6. Said “sick grandson” was played by child actor Fred Savage, who is also a Jew! Probably most famous for his starring role in the 80s/90s sitcom The Wonder Years, Savage is, of course, no loner an adolescent — he’s a 43-year-old dad of two.

7. The short, Sicilian boss who kidnaps Princess Buttercup before her wedding to the evil Prince Humperdinck is played by Jewish actor Wallace Shawn.

8. The character Inigo Montoya, who spends the entirety of the movie seeking revenge on the sixfingered man who murdered his father — thus birthing the iconic phrase, “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father.

Prepare to die!” — is played by Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin, now of Homeland fame.

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Judaism

How Should Jews Treat Each Other? Jewish Thinkers Have Come Up With A Plan.

By Marcy Oster JERUSALEM (JTA) — Despite our differences, Jews around the world have remained bound together by a shared history, by the Torah and by our core values, Israeli PresCall Our Trained Experts & Experience the Difference

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ident Reuven Rivlin told Jewish thinkers from around the world.

The 30 scholars and activists met this week in Jerusalem to hammer out a Declaration of Our Common Destiny, meant to start a worldwide discussion about the shared values and principles by which world Jewry will treat, support and engage one another.

The project is a joint initiative of the Genesis Philanthropy Group and the State of Israel under the auspices of Israel’s president.

“The future of the Jewish people depends on three things: preserving our core values, traditions and identity; mutual respect for our differences; and mutual responsibility to each other,” Rivlin said in receiving the declaration. “We must embrace our unity and our diversity. We must see our diversity not as a

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source of weakness, but a source of strength.

The declaration says: “The purpose of this shared vision is to strengthen and deepen unity among our People brought together by celebrating our shared destiny, to endorse and enhance our common values and moral code, and ground Jewish practice in every aspect of life on a broad and commonly accepted set of principles stemming from Jewish tradition and its vision for the world.”

The document calls to strengthen the Jewish people by improving security and well-being through mutual responsibility and connection, and strengthening Jewish identity. It commits to promoting ethics and morality, to being a “light unto the nations,” and to help develop and improve the world.

The document will travel to Jewish communities around the world to promote discussion and an expansion of its ideas.

“We are inviting Jews living in Israel and elsewhere to join in the crafting and completion of a document as ambitious as the Declaration of Our Common Destiny because we believe doing so has the

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JEWISH LIGHT

Jewish thought leaders and activists from around the world present the Declaration of Our Common Destiny to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, Sept.

10, 2019. (Avishag Shaar-Yashuv)

potential to excite and engage Jews of all backgrounds and worldviews,” Ilia Salita, president and CEO of Genesis Philanthropy Group, said in a statement. “We know the initial draft of the Declaration will be vastly improved by the input it receives from the world Jewish community.

This is Jewish crowdsourcing on a whole new level.”

Among the thought leaders affiliated with the project are Lord Jacob Rothschild, Bat Galim Shaar, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Judith Tanenbaum, Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Amos Yadlin, Rabbi Pinchas Goldshmidt, Rabbi Silvina Chemen, Rabbi Yaacov Meidan, Éliette Abécassis, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, Jonathan Sarna and Rabbi Sharon Brous. 

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I’m A Perfectionist — But I’m Learning To Let Go

By Gayle Apfel

(Edgar Chaparro/Unsplash)

I first realized I had a problem about two years ago, when my third son was born. His older brothers are twins, and people often commented that twins are a handful. They certainly are. But if twins are a handful, with three I just don’t have enough hands. That’s when I understood that I needed help.

I used to do ballet, something that really demands perfectionism.

Each move has to be just right. And I was the kind of person who always had my ducks in a row, for whatever needed to happen. Whether it was a project or a test I needed to study for, I always made sure that everything was done right. Even when I had my first children, I had

charts and timetables to keep track of when they needed to eat and sleep. Everything was quite organized.

The problem with perfectionism is that it comes from the illusion of control. When I think I’m in control, there’s no reason why things shouldn’t be perfect — and if they’re not, it must be that I’m not trying hard enough. If something is not the way I want it to be, I can just make it better using my control of my world.

This illusion was deepened with my first children. I figured, these people came from me. They basically are me. If there’s anyone I can control, it must be my own kids.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for that illusion to shatter.

I first noticed that my charts and timetables weren’t going to work anymore as soon as I brought home my third child. Inevitably he would need to sleep when the others were screaming, or would want to eat while the others wanted to play with him. There were just too many

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variables with that one extra person.

As my children grow and become their own people, this loss of control is becoming more and more apparent. They each want to do their own things, to assert themselves in their own way. The oldest have started dressing themselves in the morning and, to put it mildly, sometimes I simply don’t agree with their choices.

The great biblical commentator Rashi talks about Eve’s punishment for eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: the pain of rearing children. He doesn’t say it refers to the physical pain of childbirth. Rather it’s the emotional pain of raising an independent person. Whatever preconceived expectations you might have for your children, they will always surprise you. They might even disappoint you. And the perfectionist in you can throw its own temper tantrum at the proof that you really aren’t in control.

So I realized I had to lose the perfectionist.

It’s hard work, letting go of the illusion of control. It’s a delicate dance between setting limits and allowing space. I have to learn how to build appropriate boundaries for my children to thrive within, without crushing their individuality by controlling them.

Here’s an example: It’s late Friday afternoon and we have a crowd coming for dinner. The table is set, the children have bathed and are ready for shul, and I am wearing my Shabbat clothes. Everything is ready, and there is perfect calm as I light my Shabbat candles to usher in this holy space in time.

Yeah, right. It’s usually something like this: The remains of the children’s supper are spread all over

the kitchen floor, the 2-year-old has helpfully rearranged all the cutlery on the table and I’m chasing after scattering children, still in my dressing gown, trying to get them to put on their shoes.

But here’s the thing: Shabbat is still coming. Even if I can’t have perfect calm around me, I can be calm on the inside as I light my candles. Because it’s OK if the table isn’t perfect. And it’s OK if there’s a mess in the kitchen. But it’s not OK if I don’t light Shabbat candles because I’m too busy trying to get everything else perfect.

Of course, the challenge is not to go to the other extreme. Mess on the floor is fine for a while, but cleaning up is also important. That’s not perfectionism, that’s just basic life skills. But if my focus is on the mess — if I insist on there being none — then the mess becomes about me. It feels like a deliberate insult to my sense of perfection.

So when I focus instead on my children, and we sing the “clean-up song” together and have a race to see who can get the most Lego pieces into the box, then it’s about learning. And growing. And becoming.

Like this, it’s not just my children who learn important life skills.

I, too, learn something invaluable — to guide instead of control, to accept imperfections while encouraging growth. And I remember that, just as I cannot control my children, I really can’t control any aspect of my surroundings. All I can control is myself — my responses — and my belief that God has everything under control. And then I take a step in my journey to beat perfectionism.

This article originally appeared on Kveller. 

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Kveller

THE

JEWISH LIGHT

16 Fascinating Facts About Dr. Ruth’s Incredible Career

By Arielle Kaplan Standing just four feet and seven inches, Dr. Ruth Westheimer says she feels like she’s six feet tall. The Holocaust survivor, known as “America’s sex therapist,” has helped countless people reclaim their sex lives, gain ownership of their bodies, and feel like they’re “normal.”

Then again, according to Westheimer, 91, who is known to everyone as Dr. Ruth, “Everything is normal.”

When she entered the public sphere in the 1980s with her radio show, Sexually Speaking, talking about sex and normalizing taboos was basically unheard of. She was met with immense criticism from people who thought she was blasphemous, or gave out advice too frivolously. But as a Jewish immigrant who prioritized education, nothing could stop Westheimer from preaching sex-positive gospel.

Her charisma belies her short stature — when Westheimer talks, people lean in to hear her say things like,

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“short people make the best lovers” (something we here at Kveller wholeheartedly agree with!) or “size doesn’t matter.” With her thick German accent, she became a vocal and formidable figure during the AIDS epidemic, and she fought homophobic misinformation by educating people about the disease.

She also fought for a woman’s right to abortion, and became the point person to ask things no one dared ask anyone else.

Just how did a Holocaust survivor wind up being one of the most famous sex therapists in the world?

Well, a new documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth, now streaming on Hulu, unpacks the myriad fascinating tidbits of her unlikely journey from sniper — really! — to sex therapist.

Naturally, we rounded up some of the most remarkable facts about Westheimer’s life and work. Read on for 16 of them.

1. Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Germany in 1928. When she emigrated to Israel (Palestine at the time) after World War II, there was so much hatred towards Germany that Westheimer changed her Germansounding name. She used her middle name, Ruth, with the hope that if her parents or other family members survived the Holocaust, they could still locate her. In a particularly moving scene of Ask Dr. Ruth, Westheimer learns that her father died in Auschwitz.

2. Since emigrating to the United States in 1956, she has lived in the same apartment building in Washington Heights, New York. When asked if she wanted to move, following her fame, she said: “This is a neighborhood of immigrants, and I said, ‘No, I’m very comfortable here.’”

3. She first had sexual intercourse when she was 17, “on a starry night, in a haystack, without contraception.”

She later told The New York Times that she was “not happy about that, but I know much better now and so does everyone who listens to my radio program.”

What’s spicier is that the man Westheimer

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had sex with was her ex-boyfriend’s younger brother.

4. When she moved to Israel, Westheimer joined the Haganah (now known as the IDF) and trained as a sniper. She nearly had her legs amputated after being caught in an explosion during the 1948-1949 Palestine War. Always on brand, while recovering in the hospital, Westheimer pretended that she couldn’t use her arms — only her legs were injured — so that the hot doctor would feed her.

5. She was married three times, but the last one was the “real” one, she said. Her first husband was the man she lost her virginity to in Israel; they divorced because she wanted to study in France. While there, she got pregnant with her daughter, Miriam, and married a second time. The third time was the charm — she married Fred Westheimer (whom she met skiing in the Catskills!) in 1961 and the pair remained together until his death in 1997.

6. She was a single mom. It’s fitting, really, because Westheimer was always ahead of the curve! In the 1950s, single motherhood was very taboo. It didn’t last for long, though. Once she married a third time, the Westheimers had a son, Joel.

7. While giving a talk at Oklahoma State University, an attendee tried to make a citizen’s arrest for obscenity.

8. The only possession she has from her parents’ home in Frankfurt is a washcloth with her name embroidered on it. She always keeps it by her, and never forgets where it is. “It kind of links me to my past,” she said.

9. When she was 10, her parents sent her to an orphanage in Switzerland on the Kindertransport. “My parents gave me life twice,” Westheimer. “Once when I was born, and once when they sent me to Switzerland.” There, she helped to take care of the other orphans.

10. In addition to two children, Westheimer has four grandchildren.

As a rule, she doesn’t talk about sex with any of them.

11. Despite the wishes of her granddaughter, Leora, Dr. Ruth See DR. RUTH on Page THE

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Community Happenings

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BIPARTISANSHIP Continued from Page 5 its pitches are tailored to the younger Jewish women Hadassah hopes to attract.

Hospitals remain a nexus of Jewish-Palestinian coexistence in an environment where that is increasingly rare, and that’s an aspect the organizations stresses in its U.S. outreach. Hadassah says it is on the right track after a financial crisis at the once-private hospitals led to a restructuring plan supervised by Israel’s Finance Ministry.

Hadassah is partnering as well with the former Jewish Women’s Renaissance Project on a heavily subsidized yearlong program called Momentum — informally “Birthright for Moms.” The program, which is designed to connect Jewish families to Jewish tradition and Israel, includes eight days in Israel.

Also emphasized are Hadassah’s breast cancer research (for an Ashkenazi Jewish population at slightly higher risk) and infertility treatment (for a demographic heavy with professional women who are likelier to wait until their mid- to late 30s to start families).

The new Hadassah member is younger and wants a professional networking element attached to her extracurricular activities. Hadassah now boasts “affinity groups” for physicians, nurses and lawyers who meet and are as likely to exchange information about their fields, including innovations and job opportunities, as they are to raise money for Israel.

Weinman said that membership, including female members and male associates, has fallen to 300,000 from a peak of 358,618 in 1986-87.

“It has gone down not because we have not maintained a level of membership but because of attrition,” Weinman said. “We are not making up in the same numbers those who have died.”

Programs now are shorter, Weinman said, to accommodate busier women and include a transactional

element.

“There’s less of an extended commitment the way Hadassah members in the past have made,” she said. Today’s Hadassah meetings are pitched as benefiting members as much as they are opportunities for giving, although Weinman is quick to point out “they are not frivolous.”

“They choose their subject not from a generic or ideological perspective but personal, what affects their families and futures, how do they network,” she said.

Hadassah’s unwitting role in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the worst in U.S. history, remains a sore point.

An official half-jokingly warned a reporter not to mention his name ahead of the Weinman interview.

Hadassah scaled back operations after the Madoff scandal blew open in late 2008, and eventually shut its Washington office, among other measures. In 2011, Hadassah returned $45 million to other investors, just under half its earnings under the fraudulent scheme, which paid early investors from money garnered from more recent investors instead of from actual earnings on the investments.

Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for his crimes.

Jewish lawmakers from both parties told JTA that they were pleased to see Hadassah back in business.

“It’s advocacy is unmatched and it’s an honor to work with its members on important legislation, such as the Never Again Education Act, to combat anti-Semitism through Holocaust education, and the Peace and Tolerance in Palestinian Education Act, bipartisan legislation I introduced with Rep. Brad Sherman,” said Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y. Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., the lead sponsor of the Never Again act in the Senate, told JTA: “I’m working with faith-based organizations like Hadassah on important policies like the Never Again Education Act because we must educate our students on the important lessons of the Holocaust.” 

SYNAGOGUE Continued from Page 9 can do, too. Announce each step of the meal, like washing hands and making kiddush, and briefly explain its purpose. Make sure to have a few English and Hebrew-transliterated benchers to use for the Grace After Meals so that your guests can follow along.

Explaining rituals at the table and making them inclusive is not only educational, but also makes it easier for everyone to follow along.

For example, knowing why my now in-laws had a dead fish head on their table every year for Rosh Hashanah made it much easier for me to understand the custom. In the process of explaining, you’ll be teaching yourself and even your observant guests new and beautiful things about the holiday, which makes it that much more special.

Simple things like going around the table and having everyone introduce themselves and say something about the holiday also will make guests feel welcome. Every year, my husband and I invite less observant friends to our sukkah and ask them to say a few words about the holiday or talk about how they feel sitting in our hut. I love hearing

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their perspectives; it’s one of my favorite parts of the entire High Holiday season.

Becoming religiously observant is not an easy process, and attending a traditionalist synagogue or going to a religious home can feel overwhelming to nonobservant guests. Though many leaders and members of the community would like their fellow Jews to become more observant, they don’t always take the actions to make these newcomers feel included and motivated to stay on the path.

This year, I hope that our community can do more to welcome outsiders who are trying their best to fit in and to experience a truly uplifting holiday season.

KYLIE ORA LOBELL is a copywriter, editor, marketer and publicist who has written for New York magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Time Out NY/LA, The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Aish, Chabad and Tablet magazine.

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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Israel Under Radar

Netanyahu Didn’t Win Israel’s Election. So Why Is He Getting The Chance To Form A Government?

By Josefin Dolsten

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin presents Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, with the mandate to form a new government, at the President's Residence in Jerusalem, Sept. 25, 2019.

(Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

(JTA) — As votes were counted following last week’s election in Israel, many saw the results as a loss for longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

After all, Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party won fewer seats than the Blue and White party of his main competitor Benny Gantz.

So it came as a surprise for many on Wednesday when Israeli President Reuven Rivlin decided to give

Netanyahu, rather than Gantz, the first shot at forming a ruling government.

The Sept. 17 election wasn’t just a battle between Netanyahu and Gantz, or Likud and Blue and White. The two men represent the country’s two largest parties, but Israel’s electoral process isn’t that simple. In the current system, whichever party wins the most votes still has to create a coalition of parties that together makes up a majority of seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

In other words, to lead the country, the parties need to work with smaller parties and convince them to join their coalitions to reach the magic majority number of seats: 61.

At the moment, neither Netanyahu or Gantz has an easy path to a

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coalition of 61 seats — but Rivlin decided that Netanyahu has a slightly better chance.

Even with that opportunity, Netanyahu might not emerge victorious when all is said and done.

Still confused? Here’s a quick breakdown of how it works, and what could happen next.

How does Israel’s electoral system work?

There are 120 seats in the Knesset. The number of parties fluctuates as they disintegrate and give way to new ones — and most don’t get enough votes to pass the threshold needed to make it to the Knesset. For a breakdown of the country’s major parties, check out this guide.

Israeli citizens do not vote for specific politicians but rather for parties, whose members then vote for their leaders. No party has ever been able to get a majority of seats in the Knesset on its own, so parties have had to form coalitions with each other throughout Israel’s history.

Netanyahu’s last coalition included a number of religious and nationalist right-wing parties. Gantz partnered with a number of centrist and left-wing parties, and this time

around he has also earned the support of the Arab Joint List — a group of Arab parties that have never before been included in a governing bloc (the List’s leader Ayman Odeh said it would not officially join his government but support him from outside the ruling coalition).

How did we get here?

In his most recent coalition, in addition to the nationalist and religious parties, Netanyahu also teamed up with the secular-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Avigdor Liberman.

But that fell apart at the end of last year, when Liberman got angry over a cease-fire agreement brokered with Gaza and Netanyahu’s refusal to pass a bill to extend the military draft to involve more haredi Orthodox men. Afraid that his coalition would crumble, Netanyahu called for new elections, which took place in April.

Though it seemed he was poised to form a right-ring coalition following those elections, he didn’t garner quite enough votes and support to do so. Gantz and his team of See NETANYAHU on Page

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Israel Under Radar

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Netanyahu Nominated To Form Israel’s Government

By Sam Sokol

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, is presented with the mandate to form a new government by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, at the President's Residence in Jerusalem Sept.

25, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will get his second try this year to form Israel’s government after talks aimed at creating a unity government broke down.

President Reuven Rivlin tasked Netanyahu with forming a government on Wednesday evening even though his Likud party did not finish first in last week’s Knesset elections.

The centrist Blue and White, led by former military chief Benny Gantz, won 33 seats to 32 for Likud in the Sept. 17 balloting for the parliament.

However, 55 lawmakers recommended to Rivlin that Netanyahu try to form a government, one more than Gantz. Still, the incumbent is short of the 61 seats needed to form a viable coalition. He was unable to assemble a government following national elections in April.

Netanyahu has one month to cobble together a government.

While he has the support of the nationalist and religious parties to the right of Likud, he still needs the backing of the secular-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party led by ally turned rival Avigdor Liberman in order to return to the Prime Minister’s Office.

September’s repeat vote was triggered by Liberman, who would

only join a Netanyahu coalition if the country’s military draft was expanded to include more haredi Orthodox men — they can use a religious exemption to avoid being conscripted in the army. The haredi parties balked, however, and the Knesset was disbanded, leading to the second election.

Liberman unsuccessfully attempted to use his leverage to force a national unity government.

According to The Times of Israel, negotiations between Netanyahu and Gantz brokered by Rivlin could not resolve the issues of who would serve first as prime minister under a rotation or if Netanyahu’s far-right allies would be invited to be part of the government.

If Netanyahu fails to form a government within a month, Rivlin can tap Gantz or another Likud politician, The Jerusalem Post reported.

Despite failing to come to an agreement regarding a coalition with Blue and White, Netanyahu said on Wednesday evening that Israel needed a “broad national unity government” in order to deal with the challenges facing the country and to “achieve national reconciliation” following what he described as a “tough election campaign on all sides.”

Netanyahu said he would “make every effort” to establish such a government “as soon as possible.”

In response, Gantz stated that “Blue and White is committed to the idea of unity, but from our perspective, the appropriate order would see negotiations between the two largest parties — and them alone — in order to reach agreements on the substantive issues and the character of the next government,” The Times of Israel reported. 

GONDELMAN Continued from Page 18 They felt like such an entry point into this world that I felt like I didn’t have access to; there was a point of commonality being white guys, but being Jewish guys specifically. When I heard Eminem, I wasn’t like, oh that guy is me!

When I heard the Beastie Boys, I was like, oh, there’s a way to appreciate and have access to this world in a way that’s not appropriate or disrespectful and that feels related to my own life experience.

What’s your favorite Beastie Boys album?

Oh, man, I think it’s become “Paul’s Boutique.” It’s just so out there and so silly. I think [they] made it in L.A., but there are parts of it that [are] nitty-gritty New York stuff, so it feels like this weird hybrid of West Coast sonics and East Coast reference points.

Switching gears a little: You’re very visible on Twitter, and the social media platform has been a large part of your career. What’s your relationship to Twitter these days?

I’ve had so much good fortune with it, professionally and personally. It’s like if you fell into a sewer and found $100, and you fell in a second time and found a diamond ring, and you’re like, wow, this sewer has been really good to me. Even though it is full of human waste.

Can you talk about the origins of your Modern Seinfeld account?

I started one afternoon — I think while I was seeing a tutoring client, while they were doing a practice test — I started tweeting a couple things of like, here are some Seinfeld plot lines that might happen if the show was on now. I was doing it kind of idly and my friend Jack saw it, and [said] “This should be its own thing.” He immediately jumped on the Twitter handle [@SeinfeldToday]. People really latched onto it, which was very incredible. A lot of credit to Jack Moore’s vision. It was

a lark that turned into something that people really got into. Part of it is that we did a nice job executing it, but the other part is that people just have so much affection for “Seinfeld” — and “Curb.” [It’s] a specific, beloved thing for a generation of people, if not more than one generation. It was very nice to stand on the shoulders of giants in that respect.

One thing you still do on Twitter is give pep talks to strangers. You write about this in “Nice Try,” but could you talk about why you decided to start?

I started doing it [when] I felt kind of down about certain things. I [thought], I could ask for something online and say, “Hey, does anyone have any ways to feel better?” Or, you know, “Is there anyone that wants to book me for a show?” But [I thought], I bet I’ll get the same charge out of trying to do something for someone else. So, I said, “if anyone needs to hear a kind word, I’ll be here for five minutes.” This is maybe six, seven years ago. So I did that, and it went well, and it was fun. And I got the thing out of it that I wanted.

What do you hope readers take away from “Nice Try”?

I hope that, first and foremost, they have a fun time reading it.

That it feels warm and funny. I want people to enjoy it thoroughly, and to come away being like, wow, what a good time, I feel better than when I started because it was invigorating and entertaining.

The second thing is, if there’s a good another level to it, I want people to take away that things are often hard and bad, [but] they can get better. There are things to latch onto amongst how difficult things are. One thing that is really inspiring to me is people doing really hard activist work, and people really standing up for what they believe in. So I hope that there’s like a little bit of encouragement.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

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Israel Under Radar

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Who Is Avi Berkowitz, The Kushner Adviser Stepping In To Work On Israeli-Palestinian Peace?

Avi Berkowitz, right, with Jared Kushner at the TIME 100 Summit in New York City, April 23, 2019. (Craig Barritt/Getty Images for TIME)Current Issue\Vol 9 #9\Editorial\photos

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The sentence came at the end of a list of White House talking points regarding the surprising departure of Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trump’s former top Middle East peace negotiator: “Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook will take on an increased role on the team.”

For Middle East tea-leaf readers, Hook was the more immediately interesting story. He’s the lead State Department official on Iran, and his joining the peace-brokering team suggests that the Trump administration sees containing Iran and forging peace between Israel and the Palestinians and other Arab states as of a piece.

But Berkowitz’s elevation tells

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an even more Trumpian story: one of elevating those who are close to the family, as opposed to Washington insiders, and of a Middle East peace team that has made Israel’s interests paramount in its strategies.

There isn’t a ton of public knowledge about Berkowitz, a 30-yearold assistant to Jared Kushner who graduated from law school in 2016, and the critical quick-take headlines were harsh. “Trump’s New Mideast Point Man Is Jared Kushner’s Former Coffee Boy Avi Berkowitz,” Vanity Fair wrote. And from New York magazine: “Trump Somehow Replaces Unqualified Mideast Envoy With Even Less Qualified One.” What’s the story on Berkowitz (who declined an interview for this story)? Here are some facts.

He’s a good friend of Kushner.

According to the most comprehensive profile to date of Berkowitz, in Business Insider in 2017, he met Kushner when Berkowitz was an undergraduate at Queens College, and they joined a pickup basketball game at a Passover retreat in Phoenix, Arizona.

They became fast friends.

Berkowitz followed Kushner to the newspaper he then owned, the New York Observer, and then to the Trump campaign and subsequently the White House.

Much of his job description, at least publicly, appears to include being joined at the hip to Kushner and his wife, Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Much of his Twitter feed is retweets of articles praising the two, at times accompanied by a Berkowitz addition of an emoji expressing joy.

He loves his job.

Jewish Insider reported in 2017 that Berkowitz, who had just graduated from Harvard Law, turned down a job offer at the “white shoe” law firm Gibson Dunn the previous year to join the Trump campaign crunching data.

Berkowitz appears to have no regrets: Another feature of his Twitter timeline are photos of him on the White House grounds, as well as traveling with the Kushners on the job.

It’s a mutual love fest. Trump, who has posed with Berkowitz on multiple occasions for social media posts, promoted Berkowitz a year ago from special assistant to the

president and assistant to the senior advisor (Kushner) to deputy assistant to the president and advisor to the senior advisor (yes, advisor to the advisor is correct).

In the arcana of federal government lingo, the leap from “assistant” to “advisor” is significant” — a transition from answering phones to shaping policy.

He’s cut from the same religious and ideological cloth as Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman.

For its first year or so, the Kushner peace team included an ArabAmerican woman, Dina Powell, which at least offered it the patina of diversity. Since her departure in January 2018, however, its uniformity is striking: Berkowitz, Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, were all raised in Orthodox Jewish homes, are all from the New York area, and all have deep pre-government ties to Israel and its religious institutions.

Berkowitz studied at Yeshiva Kol Torah in Jerusalem for two years.

See AVI on Page

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NETANYAHU Continued from Page 36 seasoned politicians — including Yair Lapid and former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon — made a formidable debut on the national stage. That gridlock triggered a second election.

Why does the president get to choose, and why did he choose Netanyahu?

Though the Israeli president is mainly a ceremonial figurehead, the office does have one important role in forming the post-election government: deciding who has the best chance at forming a ruling coalition and giving that leader the chance to do so.

Initially, it seemed that Netanyahu and Gantz might work together to form what is called a unity government, in which they each hold prominent positions and possibly even trade off the prime minister role. But that possibility fell apart after days of negotiations, and Rivlin — who has clashed publicly

with Netanyahu in the past — decided to grant the sitting prime minister 28 days to try to form a ruling coalition.

Rivlin ultimately sees an easier path to 61 seats for Netanyahu and his allies, because there are simply more elected right-wing lawmakers than there are centrist and left-wing ones. Rivlin also take the recommendations of the elected Knesset members into account. In the end, it still came down to numbers: parties with a total of 55 seats recommended Netanyahu to form the next government, while 54 recommended Gantz.

Even so, the eight seats that Liberman won loom large and would tip either side over 61 — but Liberman has insisted on the idea of a unity government, and won’t pledge his help to either Netanyahu or Gantz on their own. So plenty of negotiating remains to be done.

What happens next?

To say the picture is unclear might be an understatement.

“My inability to form a govern-

ment is slightly less than that of Gantz,” Netanyahu said Wednesday.

Some analysts say that Netanyahu is unlikely to get his allies together, again, and that could seriously damage his reputation — or even lead to a third election. Others say that whether he forms a ruling coalition or not, being the first one to try to do so boosts his public image as a leader.

Gantz might actually be happy about the way things have worked out so far. Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Arab Joint List Party, said that Gantz’s party strategically asked him to have only 10 out of his 13 Knesset members recommend Gantz as leader of the country, essentially handing the first shot at the coalition-building to Netanyahu. Perhaps Gantz feels that if Netanyahu fails first, the country will rally around the Blue and White leader to avoid that dreaded third election.

Either way, there is a lot to watch for in the coming weeks. 

Jonathan

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www.TeamLoveall.com SEINFELD Continued from Page 15 ing a yarmulke into a Palestinian chicken restaurant is akin to the raid on Entebbe (Larry David’s own “Curb Your Enthusiasm”).

And that’s not even mentioning the Emmy-conquering “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

“Seinfeld,” though, was a different animal than any of these. It was the top show on network television before cable and streaming fragmented the American TV-watching audience into countless niches.

Above all, “Seinfeld” is a product of a more innocent time. At the end of history, with America at peace, Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer could run around preoccupied with minutiae like puffy shirts and close talkers, their audience relatively undistracted by more serious national and world dramas.

Now that history has resumed — with rising illiberalism, terrorism, wars — a classic “Seinfeld” laugh line like “Ukraine is weak!” seems more ominous. Indeed, the world now intrudes even upon “Seinfeld” itself, as with reports that the pied piper of right-wing populism Steve Bannon managed to profit from the show’s royalties.

“Seinfeld” was silly and careTHE

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free. By contrast, our new golden era of television has tortured antiheroes for its most celebrated protagonists. True, the “Seinfeld” characters were themselves selfish miscreants, but they were so endearing that audience members tended to forget that they were kind of awful people. Even on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” it is harder to overlook the David character’s bad qualities; it’s edgier comedy for edgier times.

Netflix is certainly right that “Seinfeld” is still funny. Like the original ratings-topping sitcom “I Love Lucy,” “Seinfeld” is comedy for the ages. If you stream it, people will watch and laugh.

But is it still “fresh”?

That’s not as clear. Don’t be surprised if the jaundiced eyes of 2021 view “Seinfeld” through a screen of nostalgia.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

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Arts & Culture

THE

SPY Continued from Page 16 convinced him to go back one last time.

The following year, Syria was able to find out about Cohen by tracing his intelligence transmissions to Israel.

He was convicted in a trial without a defense and sentenced to death. Israel desperately tried to commute his sentence, and despite requests from world leaders and Pope Paul VI for clemency, Cohen was hanged publicly in May of that year.

His remains have yet to be returned, despite pleas from his family. Reports earlier this year said a Russian delegation had removed his remains from Syria in

Join Us For Archives Month at the Notarial Archives Research Center

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak receives a picture of a new postage stamp commemorating Eli Cohen, from his widow Nadia Cohen, Jan, 25, 2000.

(Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

an attempt to bring them to Israel.

Last year, Israel was able to retrieve Cohen’s wristwatch from Syria and return it to his family.

Information provided by Cohen is thought to have been crucial to Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. For example, on a trip to the Golan Heights, Cohen suggested to an army officer that he should plant

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trees to provide shade for troops stationed there. Those trees helped Israel identify where Syrian troops were located. Levi Eshkol, the late Israeli prime minister, credited Cohen’s intelligence with saving countless Israeli lives and “having a great deal to do” with Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. Cohen wasn’t the only Israeli who went on such a mission, though he’s perhaps the most well-known one.

Israel “took a lot of ideas from the Soviet-style of playing the spy game,” in sending out citizens on long-term spy missions where they had to adopt false identities, said Dan Raviv, a correspondent for i24News and the author of “Spies Against Armageddon,” a history of Israeli intelligence.

“The Israelis were softer about this than the Soviets were because the Israelis generally allowed their long duration agents to come home on family visits,” Raviv told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Though these types of missions were a part of Soviet intelligence work — as dramatized in the FX series “The Americans” — it different from strategies used by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Raviv.

“American spies go to foreign

countries using false identities for very short missions, but it’s just not in America’s nature to expect employees to give up their normal life to that extent,” he said. “In Israel from the very beginning that’s what Israeli intelligence looked for.”

One thing that helped Israel with such missions was that its citizens came from many countries and spoke those languages fluently.

“In the case of Eli Cohen, the mission was even more ambitious,” Raviv said. “To set him up as really rich man who flamboyantly and visibly would climb up the ladder of influence in Syria, it was a very bold mission but the Israeli intelligence chiefs thought Eli Cohen was up to it.”

Though it is impossible to say how many missions like Cohen’s took place, Raviv said that they were at their height in the 1960s. As immigration and border technology became more sophisticated with each coming decade, it got harder and harder for spies to adopt new identities without being detected.

“Israel in the 1960s was just a master at taking advantage of these loose systems in so many countries,” he said. 

PRINCESS BRIDE Continued from Page 31

Bride, was worried that Miracle Max and Valerie were “too Jewish.”

Pish posh!

14. Miracle Max and Valerie as bickering Jewish grandparents were such a comedic hit that Crystal floated the idea of a spin-off. Hey, there’s a quality idea for you, Sony Pictures!

15. The Princess Bride saved someone’s life. Seriously! In an interview with Variety, Reiner recalled that, after a lunch one day with his producing partner, Andrew Scheinman, and another producerfriend, an extreme skier, who was totally eavesdropping on their conversation, approached the table and told them about the time she and a bunch of skiers were trapped by an avalanche. To keep everyone occupied and happy while they nearly froze to death, she said she reenacted the entirety of The Princess Bride, as she knew every single line.

Is there anything more Jewish than preserving a life? Methinks not. 

9. The character Miracle Max, who helps to revive the movie’s protagonist with magic, is played

by Billy Crystal, a Jewish dad.

10. Miracle Max’s wife, Valerie, is played by Carole Kane, yet another famous Jew. 11. Reiner wanted Miracle Max to be written in the same voice as the 2,000 Year Old Man, a kvetchy character written by Mel Brooks and Reiner’s father, comedian Carl Reiner, who embodies Jewish stereotypes. This was fine with Crystal, who said “I had relatives like him.”

12. When brainstorming makeup for Crystal’s character, Miracle Max, the Jewish actor brought two photos for the artist to draw inspiration from: his grandmother and Casey Stengel, a former Yankees manager.

13. In the novel, Goldman writes that Morgenstern, the fictional author of the book The Princess Bride within the book The Princess

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AVI Continued from Page 38 His classmate there, Rabbi Johnny Ouzzan, told Business Insider that Berkowitz would have come away understanding that the West Bank is part of “lands that religious Jews believe were part of the whole of Israel that was given to the Jewish people, starting with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob going back to the times of the Bible.”

Martin Indyk, who held jobs similar to Greenblatt’s under Democratic administrations, on Twitter called Berkowitz a “nice guy but does not have the weight or experience of Trump’s former real estate lawyer.”

That’s not fair, said Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

“Avi has been an integral member of this team since the beginning,” Brooks said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “He’s been to all of the trips overseas and in all the meetings, in a high-level capacity developing the administration’s plan. It’s not as if, as some people assume, they plucked his resume off the shelf.”

Berkowitz’s rare appearances in media coverage of the peace deal suggests that he does indeed have a deep involvement. In April, Reuters reported that he was one of a handful of people who have access to the as-yet unveiled plan. In November, The New York Times reported ENGLANDER Continued from Page 14 late in the dark in his bedroom — and the internet, something he has a lot to say about these days.

“The omniscience of God … if you’re plugged in right now, we’ve already achieved that: They know everything you’ve done, everything you’re currently doing,” he said, referring to online personal data mining. “Everyone needs to buy in, but we have beta God.” After walking by the town pond he used to skate on (where he laments that climate change has left it unfrozen in February) and his old day school (where a security guard and the principal immediately swarm us, in case we were somehow connected to the creepy possible anti-Semites who’ve been spying on the school recently), we get in the car to drive back. In a pocket of the dashboard sit a few Lactaid pill packs, which he says he drops all over Brooklyn like breadcrumbs.

“I’m tolerant of all things, except lactose,” he says.

Back in Brooklyn, we visit his writer’s studio — which turns out to THE

Israel Under Radar

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that Berkowitz, Greenblatt and Kushner convened a private dinner of major Jewish philanthropists identified with both parties to pitch them the peace plan.

Berkowitz also was given got the seal of approval of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“Mr. Berkowitz has a strong reputation on working on these important issues and we look forward to engaging with him in advancing the prospects for peace and reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman said in an email.

The problem with Berkowitz, said Debra Shushan, the legislative director for Americans for Peace Now, was not his callowness but the very experiences he brought to the job.

“His religious commitment to the Greater Land of Israel is the central story,” she said on Twitter.

He’s sensitive to some biases, not so much to others.

Berkowitz wrote a column, bylined Avrahm Berkowitz, in Kushner’s Observer chronicling the culture wars at Harvard. His advocacy led to a student apologizing for having called former Israeli parliament member Tzipi Livni “smelly” at a Harvard event.

However, Berkowitz also voiced skepticism of activists at the law school whose advocacy led to the retirement of its shield, which was a tribute to one of the school’s founders, a slave owner.  be a small room lined with books in an artfully decorated Park Slope apartment owned by fellow writer John Wray. Wray lets some other famous writer friends, such as Marlon James and Akhil Sharma, write in other rooms on the same floor as Englander. The bottom main floor is spacious and the couch feels incredibly comfortable after a day of walking.

“How I relate Jewishly today is kind of fraught and confusing just because [of the question], ‘do you believe in God?’ I don’t know, I don’t even have to invest in that … but now that I’m a dad, it’s really interesting to decide what I’m passing on,” Englander says. “There’s a lot I have to figure out now.”

He’s not sure of the exact topic for his next book either, but he does know that he’s going to put a lesson gleaned from his late friend Philip Roth into practice and write constantly. “[Philip] talked about finishing a book and going to the Natural History Museum [in New York] and standing under the big whale and thinking, ‘That’s what I’m going to do all day?’” Englander said. “And he went home and started the next novel.” 

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Kveller

THE

DR. RUTH Continued from Page 34 doesn’t call herself a feminist. What she will agree to is that she’s a “non-radical feminist.”

12. She also doesn’t call herself a Holocaust survivor, because she never endured the pain of living in a concentration camp. “I call myself an orphan of the Holocaust,” she said.

13. There’s a mundane Hebrew word that means a lot to her: lada’at.

It means “to know,” but it also means “to have sex.” In the documentary, she said: “It’s wonderful because the word sex means to know each other, and it means to take the time to listen and talk to each other. By not having parents at the age of 10, I was very much aware of the importance of being touched, and being loved. So that’s one of the reasons I became so interested in the issues of the family, and relationships, and then, eventually, of sexuality.”

14. Education as a Jewish value was of the utmost importance to Westheimer. In the documentary, she said being forced to make big decisions early in life taught her that women need to take initiative.

financial independence — which meant that Westheimer needed to get a job. After the war, when Dr. Ruth emigrated to Israel, she was allotted reparations in order to afford school. So she flew to France, got her degrees focusing on marriage and family planning, schlepped to the United States, and worked at Planned Parenthood. It was there she realized she needed to learn more about human sexuality so she could answer people’s questions.

15. Sexually Speaking, her first radio show, debuted in 1981 and catalyzed the sex therapist’s tremendous career. The show was more successful than expected — she initially hosted it as a volunteer from Cornell Medical Center, but it was shortly renamed the Dr. Ruth Show. Mostly all of her following shows — Ask Dr. Ruth, The All New Dr. Ruth Show, to name a few — included her name in the title.

16. She has written more than 40 books, and counting! She published three books in 2018, and her latest children’s book, Crocodile, You’re Beautiful! Embracing Our Strengths and Ourselves, comes out this August. ©2019 Kveller All Rights Reserved. 

JEWISH HUMOR Continued from Page 13 ture and people. Even when it’s a Jewish person doing it, telling these lazy, self-deprecating jokes simply perpetuates ugly medieval falsehoods. As educated Jewish adults, we need to stop making them. We need to think about how we present ourselves to the world – and consider what we owe ourselves.

This wasn’t my first time encountering anti-Semitism in the dating world. It wasn’t even the second or third. My first serious boyfriend was a handsome guy who grew up in a Hispanic Catholic household in Los Angeles and had never met a Jew before attending college. Ironically, he ended up pledging a fraternity, which on our campus happened to be largely Jewish. At the tender age of 18, he got his introduction to Jewish culture from his frat brothers.

“Throw the Jew down the well,” they would sing as they hurled pennies at their friends from across the hall. Boys being boys, right? Of course, my ex learned the lyrics and would join them in the chorus. I don’t blame him; I blame his fraternity brothers on whom the whole point of “Borat” was lost. Sacha

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expose anti-Semitism and the indifference to it. But these Jewish boys just thought the song was catchy.

As Jews, we are ambassadors of our own culture. How we showcase ourselves to others matters. We need to think about our self-image and what self-deprecating Jewish jokes do to our self-worth. By perpetuating cheap, casual Jewish stereotypes in our own day-to-day conversation, we subconsciously denigrate ourselves – and start believing the put-downs.

Can self-deprecating Jewish humor be funny? Sure. As long as there’s a little nuance. But if it stands alone and serves only to belittle us, then it’s not funny; it’s sad.

Ultimately, we need to think about the types of jokes we tell. AntiSemitism is toxic, even when it stays between Jews. As young, educated and progressive Jews, we need to look critically at the rhetoric we use to describe and represent ourselves, both to one another and to outsiders.

Be proud of who you are and find the humor in your culture — but don’t contribute to the plague of self-deprecating Jewish jokes. 

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Baron Cohen’s humor was meant to

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