The Jewish Light Summer 2021 Issue

Volume 11, Number 5 Summer 2021

THE

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

A New Museum In New Orleans Puts The Family Histories Of Southern Jews On Display

An exhibit at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans focuses on the large number of Jewish Southerners who became traveling merchants. The museum opened to the public in late May. (Courtesy of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience)

NEW ORLEANS (JTA) — Janis Rabin’s family emigrated from Poland, eventually settling in Bogalusa, Louisiana. For years, she and her relatives had kept memories and stories of their family’s Jewish experience to themselves, or shared them casually with friends.

So, when Rabin entered this city’s Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience the day it opened to the public, she was moved by seeing her family’s history represented more formally.

“I look at the museum and it is such a beautiful representation of what it means to have your roots, your identity validated,” she said.

Like Rabin, many of the visitors on the museum’s opening day May 27 were Southern Jews themselves, eager to find evidence of their family lore or share artifacts with an unusual collection

designed to bring relics of Southern Jewish life out of the region’s closets and attics.

Unlike Jews in the North, who largely congregated in urban centers, Jews who settled in the South spread out across the region’s small towns and cities. The museum features large Jewish communities in New Orleans and Atlanta alongside lesser-known, but equally vibrant, places like Dumas, Arkansas, which had several Jewish mayors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also highlights the fact that Southern Jews often found careers as traveling salesmen, moving from one town to another.

In the center of the museum’s first room stands a peddler’s cart filled with the wares they might have sold. The piece connected with many of the visitors, who related it back to their own family’s

origins.

“My relatives were merchants and shop owners,” said Martin Covert, whose family came to New Orleans in the late 1800s. “The parts where they talked about commerce … really resonated with me.”

That’s exactly the point, said Anna Tucker, the museum’s curator. The South is a massive region and each community had a unique experience. So rather than set a singular narrative, Tucker used familiar objects to tell a specific story.

“If you didn’t know the story behind them, a lot of the artifacts here would just look like an everyday object,” Tucker said. “But once you start listening to the conversations around it, then you’re like, ‘wow, this is so much more.’”

The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience is the product of more than three decades of con-

certed work to preserve the heritage of Southern Jewry. When Macy Hart started collecting artifacts from small Jewish communities in the South in 1986, it was out of necessity. As Jews in the South gravitated toward cities, these rural communities were at risk of being forgotten. As a last-ditch effort, community leaders would ask Hart to take their ritual objects and Judaica. There are also more unorthodox items in the collection, including a prosthetic leg that once belonged to a Russian Jewish immigrant who settled in Lake Providence, Louisiana.

For years, the collection was displayed at a small museum at the Reform movement’s Jacobs Camp in Utica, Mississippi — a town of See MUSEUM on Page

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JCRS Hanukkah Gift Program in June Families Must Apply Online Now To Receive assigned to applicants as early as June. Families Best Gift Options indicate on the gift application their children’s general interests.

For Hanukkah 2020, and now Hanukkah 2021, the COVID crisis has impacted the Hanukkah Gift Program. Until the COVID crisis completely ends, and JCRS can resume its annual, volunteer-driven, fall community-wide, Greater New Orleans gift wrapping event, the gifts will be shipped to families unwrapped.

Since Hanukkah 2021 begins on November 28, and the gifts will arrive to family homes unwrapped, JCRS will begin shipping the unwrapped gifts in early November. These are all additional reasons to apply now, if you want your family to participate in this program.

For Hanukkah 2020, the Oscar J. Tolmas Hanukkah Gift Program provided gift sets to 250 Jewish youth and 25 adults in specialized care and/or state hospitals. Thousands of gifts Hannukah 2019 ---Rochelle Sackett were purchased, sorted, and shipped to children, youth and institutionalized adults. Many famiFor the 23rd year in a row, the Jewish Chil- lies also received department store gift cards, in dren’s Regional Service (JCRS) will be providing addition to gifts.

Hanukkah gifts to Jewish youth from families There is not a financial means test to qualify who are experiencing financial difficulties. Eligi- for gifts, and the online application is not ble Jewish families must live in the states of Ala- lengthy, but the brief application must be filled bama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklaho- out for each child in order to establish age and ma, Tennessee, and Texas. gift interests, as well as the best family contact Each child or youth receives 8 small gifts: one for information. each night of Hanukkah. Gifts are selected, and

Applicants can apply by finding the link to the application on the JCRS website, under the Oscar J. Tolmas Hanukkah Gift Program: www.jcrs.org . Otherwise, those who want to apply can connect directly to the link: https://jcrs.formstack.com/forms/ hanukkah_registration form.

To donate to this wonderful program, contact ned@jcrs.org . The agency website: www.jcrs.org also carries details about all JCRS programs. The JCRS office headquarters is 3500 North Causeway Blvd, #1120, Metairie, LA 70002 and phone number is 1-800-729-5277. The agency email is info@ jcrs.org .

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

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MUSEUM Continued from Page 1 fewer than 1,000 people, a 45-minute drive southwest of Jackson.

After the museum closed in 2012, the 4,000 items in the collection were put into storage. But people continued to donate artifacts even as the collection languished out of sight.

In 2017, a group of prominent Jewish lay leaders launched a $10 million fundraising campaign to move the collection to New Orleans, home to some 10,000 Jews, and give it a new, permanent home. The museum’s three galleries now occupy part of a nondescript downtown building. It’s a small space, approximately 9,000 square feet, though the museum has plans to expand as

its collection grows.

Most of the recent additions have come from donations by community members who rescued them from closets and attics in their families’ homes. With so many items to exhibit, the museum plans to rotate the displays every few months so it can show as much of its collection as possible.

The museum has a form on its website for people to submit their items, but many of the donations came through word of mouth. In a section focusing on the Holocaust and World War II, Tucker points to a large photo of a group of people sitting in a field. The photo, she said, was taken by Paul Arst, a Mississippi Jewish man who was fighting with the Allies in Germany. The people in the

photograph were Jews who, until the troops arrived, had been trapped in a cattle car bound for a concentration camp.

“This photo has never been seen before because it was tucked in a family scrapbook,” Tucker said.

Indeed, during the opening, Tucker was casually approached by several visitors who wanted to share their own family’s heirlooms or offer stories about photographs in the exhibit.

While many of the visitors at the opening had personal connections to the stories in the exhibition, the goal of the Museum of

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the Southern Jewish Experience is to be an educational resource for both Jews and non-Jews. Jay Tanenbaum, the chair of the museum’s board, said he expects about 30,000 guests annually, most of whom will not be Jewish. As part of the permanent exhibition, there is a section dedicated to Jewish terms and practices.

“We want to educate visitors about who we are as Southern Jews and how we are part of the American community,” Tanenbaum said.

“At the end of the day, education is always the best way to fight antisemitism.”

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USA

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Israel

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Global

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Education

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Alma

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Sports

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Arts & Culture

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Health

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Travel

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Jewish Life

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It’s More Important Than Ever To Show The Israeli People That American Jews Stand With Them

By Mark Wilf

Members of the first solidarity mission of the Jewish Federations of North America in Israel after its May 2021 conflict with Hamas in Gaza visit an Iron Dome anti-rocket installation.

(JFNA)

The world moves so fast that what seemed groundbreaking just a week ago already feels like a distant memory.

Last Friday, I arrived back home after leading the first solidarity mission of Jewish leaders from North America to arrive in Israel following Operation Guardian of the Walls and the year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In not much more than 36 hours, our top communal leaders visited Ashkelon and Lod, two of the most impacted communities in Israel during the week of fighting. We

also conveyed our message of solidarity and love to Israel’s top leadership, including the prime minister, the alternate prime minster and defense minister, the foreign minister and the heads of as many of the major parties in the Knesset as we could fit into our tight schedule.

Of course, in the week since our trip, Israel has elected a new president and may have a new “change” coalition coming to power in the Knesset, the wave of antisemitism in North America has grown and our community mobilization to address this challenge has accelerated.

Despite these rapid events – or perhaps because of them – I cannot let us forget what we did last week or why it is so important.

First, although we may not have walked a mile in their shoes, we did travel thousands of miles to embrace those who suffered loss and trauma, to reaffirm the unshakable bond between the Jews in North America and our brothers and sisters in Israel, and to show the depth of our love and concern.

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We must never forget how important it is to show up, and to openly and publicly express our support.

Zoom and social media may keep us informed and in touch, but it does not substitute for a warm embrace and for standing together shoulder to shoulder. We know that it was welcomed and appreciated.

Second, as much as we felt honored to be the first group of senior leaders of the American Jewish community to visit Israel since the COVID pandemic, we also felt deeply our responsibility to be the eyes and ears of those we represent back home. It was energizing to feel the toughness and vigor of the country and its people, and to convey that spirit back to our home communities.

As impactful as it was to meet with Israel’s political leaders, we were profoundly moved by our encounters with ordinary Israelis who had dug themselves out of the rubble but were still coping with the trauma that the conflict had engendered. Even as the streets and restaurants were bustling and life seemed to be returning to normal, we learned that under the surface, the suffering ran deep.

The house of the director of the partnership between the Jewish communities of Baltimore and Ashkelon was ruined by a direct hit from a missile; it will take at least a year to rebuild. A young mother in the Israel Trauma Center in Ashkelon could not buy balloons for her son’s birthday party because he has been traumatized by the incendiary devices that Hamas floats across the border.

Children cry when they hear music at weddings because loud sounds remind them of explosions from rocket and mortar attacks. In the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Lod, well-intentioned people on both sides are still trying to build a shared society despite the terrible strains that the recent conflict has caused, even among those who have known each other their entire lives.

The task of rebuilding is immense. The missiles that hit Ramat Gan destroyed more than five dozen apartments. The staff in the absorption centers in the South have their own post-traumatic stress to overcome. The first responders to the missile attacks, which reached

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deep into the heart of the country, are still struggling with what they had to do and see.

In addition to our ongoing support for the organizations that are first responders to these crises, we raised an additional $2 million from federations large and small in just the first few days of the conflict to help with these extraordinary demands, but we know there is still so much more to be done.

The news cycle may have moved on, but we won’t. We will not forget those who have suffered and need our help.

Israel is a strong country, and it will bounce back stronger than ever from the attacks and the riots. But no matter how resilient Israelis are, it is important for them to know that their family — Am Yisrael, the people of Israel — are standing together with them at this critical time. It was deeply meaningful to be able to express this solidarity and in turn to receive the love of our Israeli brothers and sisters. We came away from the mission more unified and more aware of how much we need each other.

My parents and grandparents survived the Holocaust. It is impossible for me to come to Israel and not think about how the existence of a Jewish state at that time might have changed history.

We will never cease to advocate for Israel and for her right to defend herself against violent attack. And we will provide even more opportunities for both Jews and non-Jews to visit Israel and see firsthand, as we did, what it means to live in the Jewish state.

Above all, we need to inspire those back home with the knowledge of how truly indomitable the spirit of Israel is and always will be.

Mark Wilf is the board chair of the Jewish Federations of North America.

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.

This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with the Jewish Federations of North America, which represents 146 local Jewish Federations and 300 network communities. This story was produced by JTA's native content team. THE

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Some American Jews Are Taking Off Their Kippahs And Stars Of David Amid A Wave Of Antisemitic Incidents

(Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

(JTA) — When Ricki moved into her new ground floor apartment in New York City less than a year ago, she felt perfectly comfortable placing a mezuzah on the front door for all who passed through the lobby to see.

Today she feels less sanguine about that choice.

Ricki hasn’t removed the mezuzah, but she has asked the building’s management to put bars on her windows. And she’s still considering taking down the Jewish symbol.

“When I put it up I was really proud of it,” Ricki said, declining to use her last name due to privacy concerns. “I’m not embarrassed of being Jewish, I knew when I put it up that people would see it. But I really didn’t think twice about it.”

She’s not alone in having second thoughts now.

This week, Jews across the United States have been attacked THE

because of the fighting in Israel and Gaza. In Los Angeles, pro-Palestinian attackers threw punches and bottles at diners at a sushi restaurant. In New York’s heavily Jewish Diamond District, protesters of Israel threw fireworks from a car amid a violent street altercation.

As footage of those attacks and others spreads online, American Jews say they are feeling a renewed anxiety around identifying themselves publicly as Jews. Some are taking off their kippahs or Star of David necklaces. Others, like Ricki, are considering the removal of their mezuzahs. Some are mulling whether it’s safe to walk into synagogue.

That anxiety has long been familiar to Jews in Europe and elsewhere in the world. At times it has reared its head in the United States, like in 2018 following the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. A survey last year by the American Jewish Committee found that nearly a quarter of Jewish respondents avoided wearing or displaying something that would mark them as Jewish at some point in the previous two years.

This week, American Jews feared

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they could be targeted due to an association, real or imagined, with Israel and its actions regarding the Palestinians. For some American Jews, that fear is manifesting in decisions to tamp down their public displays of Jewishness as a way to protect themselves.

“On the one hand I want to be a proud Jew and express to the world that that’s something I’m passionate about,” said Drew Feldman, a theater director and writer who has taken to wearing a baseball cap more often in recent days rather than his kippah due to the tension he feels around the conflict in Israel. “On the other hand, the Torah says we have to put life above all else.”

Feldman, who spent the past several months living in Tennessee, first started wearing a kippah regularly in 2015 as he became more interested in his Judaism and more observant.

He recently called his rabbi to discuss whether it would be appropriate to stop wearing it for a while.

“When I’ve traveled to Europe, I’ve done that because I’ve been told it’s a safer thing to do in places like France,” Feldman said. “This is really the first time outside of traveling to Europe or elsewhere that I’ve put on a different hat or baseball cap and not done it simply for fashion, done it out of a sense of

anxiety or maybe fear.”

Rabbi Adir Yolkut of Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York, said he had never seriously worried for his safety walking to synagogue on Shabbat morning wearing a kippah.

“I just sort of had a fleeting thought that was not so fleeting, is this something I should be nervous about?” he said. “Should I take more precautions than I usually need to?

Because it feels like you don’t know where it’s coming from.”

On Friday, the Diamond District was calm and host to a typical range of Jewish characters: Men in kippahs stood on every corner, a group of haredi Orthodox boys fist bumped a store owner dressed in jeans and a T shirt, a group of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries approached bystanders asking “Are you Jewish?”

But there was a smattering of police throughout the neighborhood’s few blocks, and some Jewish store employees were wary.

Emanuel Shimunov had witnessed the previous day’s violence through his store window. According to Shimunov, it started when a Jewish boy said “Peace in Israel” to the pro-Palestinian protesters drivSee KIPPAHS on Page

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A view of a street in New York’s Diamond District, May 21, 2021. (Gabe Friedman)

ing through the street. They began cursing at him, then fought with a man who came out to protect the boy.

“There are a lot of people who will be affected,” said Shimunov, a descendant of Bukharan Jews.

“There are a lot of people like that.”

Ian Steiner, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which has a large Jewish population, doesn’t attend synagogue frequently. But after seeing the news about attacks on Jews in New York City and Los Angeles, he decided to offer to escort other Jews to and from synagogue if they felt unsafe walking alone.

“I’m a bigger guy and I’m not scared,” he said. “I know I’m strong

and I’m young and agile, and if an older person or someone is afraid to go to shul or to practice their religion, I have the duty to do something to make sure they feel safe.”

The Secure Community Network, which coordinates security for Jewish institutions nationwide, has received dozens of reports of antisemitic incidents over the past week, said its CEO, Michael Masters. He said a big difference between what happened this week and during the last Gaza War in 2014 is that social media is playing a larger role in fueling discord regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States.

“We’ve seen an incredible surge in online incidents and events, online acts of targeting or hate speech, as well as the ability of the [Jewish] community to share information about incidents and events,” he said.

“If we look at the process by which people are motivated to violence, whether they are someone who follows supremacist ideology or they support Hamas, there’s absolutely no doubt that the proliferation of messaging on social media plays a role.”

The spate of attacks on Jews has

given Jewish security officials deja vu to 2019, when antisemitism spiked in and around New York City and Jews suffered two lethal attacks.

Evan Bernstein, who runs the Community Security Service, a volunteer synagogue security organization, said when it comes to attacking Jews, the incidents in New York this week make it seem like the city has picked up from where it left off before last year’s pandemic restrictions took people off the streets. The attacks also come as many synagogues are transitioning back into holding services inside their buildings following a year of worshipping outdoors or virtually.

“So many people in the Jewish community thought that we just didn’t have to deal with this kind of antisemitism,” said Bernstein, whose organization is based in New York. “I kind of knew COVID was going to be the pause button on that. I’m sad that I’m right.”

Regarding antisemitism, while Bernstein said “the climate around us is very different” than it was a couple weeks ago, he isn’t giving his volunteer security patrols any special instructions for the coming

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Shabbat. Nor does he think New York has reached a point where people necessarily need to take off their kippahs in public, as many Jews do in Europe.

“I don’t think we should stop being openly Jewish,” he said. “If we get to that point in the United States where we can’t wear our yarmulkes comfortably and openly, we’re at a whole different level, and I hope that’s a conversation we don’t have to have.”

To Ricki, the fear that she may have to take down her mezuzah feels ironically painful. Grappling with the decision this week, she thought of her grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors. Growing up, she had felt safe as a Jew in America.

Antisemitism had never felt like such an immediate threat as it did to her now in downtown Manhattan.

“I was always told that antisemitism is really real, but as someone in the millennial generation, maybe I was blind to it,” she said. “But now I’m like wow, I see it.”

Gabe Friedman contributed reporting.

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The Pew Study Cheat Sheet: 10 Key Conclusions From The New Survey Of American Jews

By Ben Sales

(Illustration by Grace Yagel)

(JTA) — Meet America’s Jews: They’re older, more educated, richer and less religious, on average, than the rest of the country.

They’re overwhelmingly white, though Jews under 30 are more diverse. Most of them care about Israel, though one in 10 support the movement to boycott it. Most of their young adults are marrying non-Jews, though the growing Orthodox community is not.

Those are some of the many findings of a study on Jewish Americans published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. It’s the second edition of a landmark 2013 study that changed the American Jewish conversation.

The 2013 survey measured not only the size and makeup of American Jewry, but quantified what those Jews believed (or didn’t), how they practiced their religion (or didn’t), whom they married, how they raised their children and how they felt about Israel.

The “Pew study,” as it came to be known in Jewish organizational circles, reflected the current state of American Judaism and influenced what Jewish nonprofits did and how they spent their money. Jewish leaders and pundits marshaled its data to buttress their arguments and advance their vision of what the Jewish community should look like.

The new edition asks many of the same questions, and adds a few new ones based on the events and conversation of the past few years.

For example, the survey delves much deeper into antisemitism, as well as racial and ethnic diversity among American Jews.

If this year is anything like 2013, the response will be reams written (including by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) about what this Pew study means. Meanwhile, its authors have cautioned not to make direct comparisons between the data in the two surveys because of differences in methodology.

But here are the basics: The American Jewish community is growing and increasingly diverse.

It is largely educated, affluent and leans Democratic. Most of its young people are marrying non-Jews, though many of those families are still raising their kids Jewish.

Orthodox Jewry is growing and the Conservative movement is shrinking. The more traditionally observant Jews are, the more likely they are to consume Jewish culture.

More than 4,700 Jews took part in the survey, which has a margin of error of 3%, with larger margins of error for subsets. Questions pertaining to Orthodox respondents, for example, had a margin of error of 8.8%. Here are some of the highlights.

1. There are 7.5 million American Jews.

The number includes approximately 5.8 million adults and 1.8 million children. About 4.2 million of the adults identify their religion as Jewish, while the rest of the adults are what Pew calls “Jews of no religion.”

The 7.5 million figure is up from the 6.7 million counted in 2013, which included some 5.3 million adults and 1.3 million children. And the 2021 figure is a bit larger than the Jewish population of Israel, which is around 6.9 million.

Jews make up about 2.5% of the American population. They are slightly older than Americans overall, with a median age of 49 compared to the overall median American age of 46.

2. Most young Jews are either Orthodox or unaffiliated.

The future of American Jewry appears to be one of polarization.

The numbers of Orthodox and unaffiliated Jews are growing. The Conservative and Reform movements, which once claimed the bulk of the American Jewish community, are shrinking.

Overall, the raw percentages belonging to each denomination haven’t changed much since 2013.

But religious affiliation by age shows a changing community.

Among Jews aged 65 and older, 69% are either Conservative or Reform, while just 3% are Orthodox. But among adults under 30, 37% are Conservative and Reform and 17% are Orthodox. Just 8% of those young adults are Conservative, as opposed to 25% of Jews over 65.

And 41% of Jews under 30 are unaffiliated, compared to 22% over 65.

3. Some 15% of young Jewish adults are not white.

The survey adds to a discussion that the Jewish community has been having in recent years: What proportion of American Jews are Jews of color, and have Jews of color been undercounted as a result of institutional bias? That conversation grew more intense during and after the protests over racial injustice that began last year.

The survey did not ask about the term “Jews of color” specifically because of debates over its definiSee PEW STUDY on Page

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PEW STUDY Continued from Page 7 tion and researchers were concerned that respondents may not be familiar with it. But the survey aimed to measure the racial and ethnic diversity of American Jewry.

It found that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community identifies primarily as white — 92% — but that young adults are significantly more diverse. Some 85% of adults under 30 identify primarily as white, while 7% identify as Hispanic, 2% as Black, 6% as multiracial and less than 1% as Asian or Pacific Islander. By contrast, 97% of Jews over 65 identify primarily as white.

And while most American Jews were born in the U.S. and identify as Ashkenazi (with roots primarily in Eastern Europe), those numbers drop among young adults as well.

Among those under 30, 28% are either not Ashkenazi, identify with at least one racial minority or are the children of immigrants from countries with a largely nonwhite population.

Overall, two-thirds of Jews identify as Ashkenazi, while only 3% identify as Sephardic, or following the traditional religious Jewish cus-

toms of Spain, according to Pew. Another 1% identify as Mizrahi, a term primarily used in Israel that refers to Jews with roots in the Middle East and North Africa.

4. Some 10% of Jews support the boycott of Israel — but half of young adults haven’t heard much about it.

As in 2013, the survey asked American Jews how they feel about Israel, and the results provide fodder for Israel’s advocates as well as its critics. On one hand, more than 80% of Jews say that caring about

Israel is an important or essential part of being Jewish. Nearly half of American Jews have been to Israel, and a quarter have been there more than once.

But the survey also found that the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, or BDS, has made inroads into the American Jewish community. One in 10 American Jews — and a slightly higher proportion of young adults — said they either “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the BDS movement.

Some 43% of Jews oppose BDS, and another 43% haven’t heard much about it.

(The survey did not define BDS — due to debates over its scope and aims — but instead asked people how much they had heard about it.

Only those who had heard “some” or “a lot” were then asked if they supported or opposed the movement.)

In that vein, the survey found that college campuses appear to be far from the hotbeds of BDS support that some have warned. While Jewish organizations have fretted about BDS activism on campus for over a decade, the survey found that nearly half of Jewish adults under 30 had heard little or nothing about the boycott movement.

5. Most young Jews are still intermarrying.

For organizations that are invested in “Jewish continuity” (or, in plain English, urging Jews to marry Jews and have Jewish babies), the 2013 Pew study was a red flag. It found that the majority of Jews who married after 2000 wed non-Jews.

When it came to non-Orthodox Jews, the numbers were even higher.

The same is true of the 2021 study, though researchers say the numbers haven’t shown meaningful growth. In other words, plenty of young Jews are still intermarrying, but the number isn’t much bigger than it was in 2013. Due to changes in methodology and small sample sizes, the researchers emphasize that it’s unwise to compare results between the two surveys.

The 2021 study found that in the past decade, 61% of Jews married non-Jewish partners. And nearly

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three-quarters of non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010 wed non-Jews. Intermarriage is quite rare among Orthodox Jews.

In total, 42% of married Jews have a spouse who is not Jewish.

6. But among young adult children of intermarriage, nearly half are still Jewish.

Whether intermarried couples are raising their kids Jewish has been a perennial concern of Jewish communal planners and institutions worried about the vitality of the Jewish future. The survey found that virtually all in-married couples are raising their children Jewish. In addition, most intermarried couples (57%) are raising their kids Jewish, with about half of that number saying they are raising their children to be Jewish by religion.

Another 12% of intermarried couples said their children were being raised “partly Jewish by religion,” meaning that overall, the survey found that more than twothirds of children of intermarriages are being raised with some Jewish identity.

Among adult children of intermarriage, the study found that younger adults are more likely to be Jewish than older adults. Only 21% of adults over 50 with one Jewish parent identify as Jewish, as opposed to 47% of those under 50.

The finding led the researchers to conclude that “the share of the offspring of intermarriages who choose to be Jewish in adulthood seems to be rising.”

Across the survey’s respondents, preventing intermarriage is not a high priority. For every age group, the respondents said it was more important that their grandchildren share their political convictions than that they marry a Jewish partner.

7. Most Jews have experienced antisemitism in the past year.

Like a range of other recent surveys, this one asked Jews about antisemitism — something that was largely absent from the 2013 study.

This one said that in the wake of antisemitic events from the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally in 2017 to See PEW STUDY on Page

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PEW STUDY Continued from Page 8 the deadly attacks on Jews in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, California, in 2019, antisemitism appears to be a larger part of American Jewish life now than it was at that time.

Like other studies, the 2021 Pew survey found that most Jews believe antisemitism in America has increased in recent years and said they feel less safe now than they once did. Five percent of American Jews said they have stayed away from a Jewish event or observance because of safety concerns.

Over the past 12 months, the survey found, 51% of Jews have experienced antisemitism — either by seeing anti-Jewish graffiti, being harassed online, being physically attacked or through another form of discrimination.

8. Jews are wealthier and more educated than Americans overall.

In line with other recent studies, this one found that American Jews are significantly more educated than Americans overall, and wealthier. The majority of Jews have a college or postgraduate degree, as opposed to fewer than 30% of Americans overall.

Jews also have higher salaries.

The majority of Jewish adults have a household income of more than $100,000, including 23% above $200,000. Only 19% of Americans overall have a household income above $100,000. Jews also report being satisfied with their lives and communities at higher rates than Americans as a whole.

Orthodox Jews appear to have a tougher time financially. Among Orthodox Jews, 45% reported having trouble paying bills over the past year, compared to just 26% of Jews overall.

9. More than three-quarters of American Jews say remembering the Holocaust is essential to being Jewish.

While the survey highlighted differences across American Jewry, the survey found that the vast majority of Jews, 76%, believe remembering the Holocaust is essential to being Jewish. A similar number said the same of leading an ethical and moral life.

At the other end of the spectrum, just 15% of Jews said observing Jewish law is essential to being Jewish, and 33% said being part of a Jewish community was essential.

Among Orthodox respondents, though, the numbers were different: 83% called observing Jewish law THE

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essential, and 69% said the same about being part of a Jewish community. Slightly over half of Orthodox Jews said remembering the Holocaust was essential to being Jewish.

Holocaust remembrance was also a lower priority among young adults — although it was still high.

Sixty-one percent of respondents under 30 said it was essential to being Jewish.

10. COVID hit Jews earlier than most Americans.

The survey was mainly conducted prior to the pandemic, so its findings were not intended to reflect

changes in practice or attitudes that were introduced during it. But the report included details from followup interviews that quantify something that is conventional wisdom for many Jews: Relative to Americans as a whole, Jews were hit early in the pandemic.

Jewish areas of Westchester County, in suburban New York City, were an early COVID-19 hotspot, and haredi Orthodox communities in Brooklyn suffered painful losses from the disease last spring. Pew’s numbers bear this out: In August, 10% of “Jews by religion” had tested positive for

either COVID or antibodies, compared to 3% of Americans overall.

And 57% of Jews knew someone who was hospitalized or died from COVID, as opposed to 39% of Americans overall.

But by February 2021, as the coronavirus circulated widely in the United States, gaps between nonJews and Jews had narrowed. “Jews by religion” were still about twice as likely to have tested positive as Americans overall — 23% to 11%.

But among both groups, a little more than two-thirds knew someone who was hospitalized or died from COVID.

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If You’re Asking American Jews If They’re Religious, You Don’t Understand American Jews

By Rachel B. Gross

A woman with a tallit. Jewish traditional religious practice is fading among new generations of American Jews, according to the findings from the Pew Research Center's 2021 study on American Judaism. (Photo: Yochi Rappeport via Wikimedia Commons/ Creative Commons)

(JTA) — In Sheldon Oberman’s children’s book “The Always Prayer Shawl,” a grandfather passes on his tallit to his grandson along with the sage advice, “Some things change and some things don’t.” At public readings, Oberman wore his grandfather’s tallit, which had inspired the story. When a non-Jewish author told him that she wished she could tell stories the way he did, he placed the tallit on her shoulders and told her, “You can! You can do it.”

This story illustrates how reli-

gion functions in complex ways in the lives of North American Jews.

Was Oberman’s tallit a religious object? Was he using it in religious ways?

The new study of American Jews by the Pew Research Center, too, reflects the complicated and often contradictory ways that Jews employ the concept of “religion” as well as the way “some things change and some things don’t” in both American Jews’ practices and sociological studies of them. Like the 2013 Pew study of American Jews, “Jewish Americans in 2020” divides Jews into “Jews by religion” and “Jews of no religion.”

Jews by religion say their current religion is Jewish. According to Pew, 27% Jewish adults do not identify their religion as Jewish but consider themselves Jewish ethnically, culturally or by family background. Among Jews 18-29, that number rises to 40%, twice that of Jews ages 50-64.

Some may wring their hands over what they see as dwindling

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participation in Judaism as a religion, as commentators did after the last survey. But what I see in this survey is evidence of the innovative and ever-changing ways Jewish religion is practiced, not grounds for panic.

Although the authors inform us “religion is not central to the lives of most U.S. Jews,” the concept of religion, as most Americans use it today, is a modern, Protestant creation, and Jewish practices fit uncomfortably in the category.

Despite the best efforts of Jewish thinkers to separate religious and cultural aspects of Jewish practice, the boundaries have never been clear. Traditional understandings of “religion” have rested uneasily with Jewish realities, which have a greater focus on communities and practices. Only 20% of survey respondents said that their “religious faith” provides a great deal of meaning and fulfillment, perhaps because American Jews rarely use the language of faith.

Read more about what the 2020 Pew study reveals about American Jews.

But the study does reveal the many ways that American Jews of all kinds create Jewish meaning in their lives. These include practices traditionally understood as religious, such as attending a seder (62%), and those understood as cultural, such as cooking or eating traditional Jewish foods (72%).

In my book, “Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice,” I argue that making sense of Jews’ practices requires us to employ a broader definition of religion. Following religious studies scholar Robert Orsi, I think religion is best understood as meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives and emotions that create and support these relationships. Understanding religion as relationships makes our interactions with families, our attachments to our ancestors, our connections to communities and the narratives we use to explain our place in the world central to religious activity. It lets us see Jewish religion flourishing in a wide variety of practices and in unexpected sites — in ways that its practitioners might not themselves identify as “religious” because of the way religion is so

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often narrowly construed.

I applaud the authors of this study for asking far more questions about Jews’ everyday practices than the 2013 study did, as well as for noting that cultural activities complement so-called religious ones.

This study finds that, in large numbers, Jews eat foods they recognize as Jewish, visit Jewish historic sites when traveling, read books and articles about Jewish topics, listen to Jewish music, and watch TV and film with Jewish themes. What all of these activities have in common is that they allow Jews to place themselves within narratives that provide existential meaning. I wish that the study had asked about visits to Jewish museums, which are increasingly important spaces of Jewish community, or genealogical research, a wildly popular pastime that helps Jews place themselves within family and communal histories that cross time and space.

I suggest we pay more attention to what Jews do than to what they name as “essential” to their identity, as the study continues to ask, echoing the 2013 study. Only 20% of American Jews consider eating traditional Jewish foods to be essential to what being Jewish means to them. But the wording of the question does not reflect Jews’ realities.

Eating foods recognized as “Jewish” may be a meaningful part of a Jew’s life, but it may be too quotidian, too easily overlooked, to be recognized as essential or important according to traditional metrics of religion. Commonplace activities such as eating foods that remind us of our families, our communities, and our histories are often quietly fundamental to religious identities rather than explicitly identified as essential to them.

Likewise, the study finds that large numbers of Jews own Jewish ritual objects. The fact that 24% of “Jews of no religion” own a Hebrew-language prayer book should give us pause. As religious studies scholar Vanessa L. Ochs finds, American Jews unobtrusively enact important parts of their identities through the material objects they have in their homes, including items they rarely if ever use. OberSee ASKING on Page THE

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I Grew Up In A Divided Jerusalem. I’d Like To Live In A Shared One.

By Gilead Sher

Jerusalem, seen from the east, with the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif) in the foreground. (Flickr)

(JTA) — After Hamas launched seven missiles at Jerusalem from Gaza this week, forcing the unprecedented evacuation of the Knesset and the city’s District Court, a new escalation was inevitable. Once again, Israel’s capital is at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one intertwining religious tension between Muslims and Jews with political arm wrestling over both the city and the Palestinian territories.

And once again, the future of the city of Jerusalem, in particular the future of eastern Jerusalem and the Old City, lays at the very heart of the charged narratives of both sides to the conflict.

Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jewish people had no land and no sovereignty.

From a scattered Diaspora, oppressed and persecuted Jews remembered Yerushalayim, cherished it and prayed facing the Old City from wherever they lived.

Since Israel’s establishment, 3,000-year-old Jerusalem as its eternal capital has been a self-evident fact.

I grew up in a divided Jerusalem.

I was 14 in 1967 when Israel, attacked by five Arab states supported by eight others, swiftly conquered the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria — and the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from Jordan, bringing biblical areas and the Old City’s Temple Mount under Israel’s control.

Israel opened the Old City’s holy sites to all faiths for the first time since the British Mandate ended 19 years earlier, establishing rules for access and worship by Jews and

Muslims. Under these rules, known as the Status Quo, Muslims may visit and pray on the Temple Mount, while Jews may visit during limited hours. Jews, however, are prohibited from praying at what our tradition considers the Holy of Hollies.

A decade later, in 1977, I was among the thousands of Jerusalemites lining the streets to enthusiastically greet President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who courageously accepted an invitation from Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to speak at the Knesset, paving the way for the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement. Just four years earlier, I was fighting against the Egyptian enemy in the Yom Kippur War. At the July 2000 Camp David summit in which I participated — one of several attempts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian permanent agreement — President Bill Clinton urged PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to negotiate Jerusalem directly with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Arafat replied: “I will not sign without Al-Quds (Jerusalem).” He blew up the summit because he was

unwilling to compromise on Jerusalem, insisting on sovereignty over the entire Old City, except the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall.

The Israeli peace negotiators at Camp David were actually attempting to ensure the continued survival of a Jewish Jerusalem, a city with a Jewish majority, as has been the case since 1844. One that would be, in Clinton’s words, larger and more vibrant than any in history, alongside Palestinian Al-Quds.

Arafat’s “contribution” to peace at Camp David was his assertion that there was never a Temple in Jerusalem, but in Nablus. Sadly, today, even Palestinian moderates continue to espouse this dogma: “For Islam, there was never a Jewish Temple at Al Quds but a distant mosque,” the late chief negotiator Saeb Erekat once said.

Such “Temple denial” makes future negotiations with the Palestinians even more difficult.

Resolving the future of JerusaSee DIVIDED on Page

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DIVIDED Continued from Page 11 lem meant resolving the custodianship and sovereignty of a complex of holy places: the area within the walls of the Old City and the “Holy Basin,” which encompasses most of the sites sacred to the three monotheistic religions, including the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif), the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Gethsemane, Mount Zion, the City of David, the Mount of Olives and the village of Silwan. Beyond these are other urban areas, to the north, south and east, whose future remained in doubt and in dispute, and which were consequently also on the table at Camp David.

Following the Camp David Summit, when the Palestinians launched the Al Aqsa intifada in late September 2000, Jerusalem again became a pivotal target for their suicide bombings and despicable terror acts. During those bloody years, 2000-2005, we raised four children,

aged 8-16, in Jerusalem. It became an ordeal, with their classmates, teachers and friends being killed and wounded by Palestinian terrorists.

Given this history, this week’s rapid deterioration into violence was predictable. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a long record of miscalculated decisions over Jerusalem, poking fingers in the Palestinians’ eyes, inflaming the city and withdrawing only once the damage is done. The decisions he has taken recently, as an outgoing premier of an interim government, are no exception. He and his supporters accuse former prime ministers, including Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert — and any future government exclusive of Likud — for Hamas’ belligerence. These allegations are groundless.

Netanyahu should revisit Olmert’s 2008 proposal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. It included the two capitals, Al Quds and Yerushalayim; a spe-

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cial regime to be established in the Old City/Holy Basin; and shared oversight of its holy sites by a special multinational committee consisting of representatives from five nations — Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, the United States and Israel. All of the above would be carried out only in the framework of a comprehensive peace agreement.

Israel also should revive the provision in the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, giving Jordan its “special role” in “Muslim holy shrines” and acting with it to “promote interfaith relations.”

Saving the Zionist enterprise while respecting the Palestinian right to self-determination requires a solution in Jerusalem. It demands courage, leadership and national responsibility. President Biden’s administration should be hands-on for both the process and the ultimate vision of a two-state-for-twopeople reality, which is indispensable. It is attainable throughout a series of transitional phases, interim agreements and independent steps, all compliant with a continuous negotiation process. It is clearer now that there are no bypasses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution, contrary to what President Trump and Netanyahu would have liked us to believe with the festivities over the Abraham Accords as stand-alone peace agreements.

Despite many challenges inherent in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, with Jerusalem at the head of the list, only a two-state reality will work for the benefit of a Jewish and democratic Israel, consistent with the Zionist vision.

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ASKING Continued from Page 11 man’s unconventional use of his tallit reminds us that Jews can find new and sometimes surprising meanings in ritual objects, even outside of traditional contexts.

Some things change, and some things don’t. American Jews continue to find meaning in emotional connections to their families, communities, and histories, though the ways they do so continue to change. Expanding our definition of “religion” can help us better recognize the ways in which they are doing so.

RACHEL B. GROSS

Rachel B. Gross is assistant professor and John and Marcia Goldman Chair in American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the author of "Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice."

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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Amid A Surge In Hate Crimes, Prominent European Jews Worry The War Against Antisemitism Has Been Lost

By Cnaan Liphshiz

Demonstrators cross their arms at a rally against antisemitism in Cologne, Germany, May 20, 2021. (Ying Tang/ NurPhoto via Getty Images)

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — In Germany, a man wearing a kippah was beaten on the street. In Austria, a student was harassed on the train for reading a book mentioning Jews in the title.

In London, a nurse said she was threatened at her hospital for wearing a Star of David necklace. And in Belgium, an Orthodox Jewish woman was told “Get away, dirty Jewess” by a man with whom she tried to share a park bench.

The full dimensions of Europe’s current surge in antisemitic activity are not yet clear, but by some measures, including those by the British Jewish community, the extent is unprecedented. Meanwhile, the range and density of incidents are unusual.

Local Jewish leaders are responding with sometimes uncharacteristic pessimism.

Antisemitic incidents were already rising in Europe before the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that ended with more than 230 Palestinian and 12 Israeli fatalities. With the start of the hostilities, Europeans began bracing for antisemitic activity that tends to accompany Middle East tensions. It’s known on the continent as “the import of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.”

In the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, proPalestinian rioters broke shop windows and set fires on July 20, 2014. (Cnaan Liphshiz)

That dynamic was prominently on display during an escalation in 2014. But this time, some promiTHE

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nent Jewish community leaders and longtime fighters against antisemitism are issuing unusually dour warnings that the battle may be lost.

In light of dozens of incidents in Belgium alone in recent weeks, Joel Rubinfeld, the president of the Belgian League Against Antisemitism, wrote that he doubts whether he will be able to continue living in the country with his wife and two children.

“I believed I could. Now I doubt I can,” Rubinfeld, a former leader of the CCOJB, the umbrella group of French-speaking Belgian Jews, wrote in an op-ed published Saturday in the Le Vif weekly.

Brigitte Wielheesen, a wellknown journalist and counterterrorism expert from the Netherlands, wrote Thursday in an op-ed for the news site Jonet that after years of battling antisemitism, she has concluded that the activity has become useless.

“The fight against this sickness has become hopeless,” wrote Wielheesen, a former secretary of the Interprovincial Rabbinate of the Netherlands. “If Jews are Europe’s canary in the coal mine,” she said, then “that bird is no longer alive.”

Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, who for years has recommended local Jews immigrate to Israel, partly due to antisemitism, said during a lecture in the city of Nijmegen that he and his wife would leave if not for their duties.

“It made us think of a captain duty-bound to a sinking ship,” one listener described it in a letter he sent to Jacobs following the lecture, Jacobs wrote on his blog.

The Israeli-Palestinian flareup came shortly after Jews in France expressed deep concerns over their future in the country in the wake of a final court ruling in the Sarah Halimi case. The nation’s highest court upheld rulings that the Muslim man who killed the Jewish physician and educator while shouting about Allah and calling Halimi a demon was too high on marijuana to be criminally responsible for his actions.

“I understand your doubts and

your questions about the future, and I share them,” a leader from France’s leading Orthodox organization said at a rally in Paris last month.

Not all communal leaders are so deeply pessimistic.

In Britain, Jews are shaken by a flurry of antisemitic incidents this month and “scarred” by the recent proliferation of antisemitism within the Labour Party, said Jonathan Arkush, the previous head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

“But I don’t believe you should jump from that to thinking our community is not viable as it was,” he said, citing Labour defeats after 2019, media vigilance about antisemitism and police efforts to curb it.

Meanwhile, news of antisemitic incidents continued to flow in throughout this week.

In the Germany incident Thursday in Magdeburg, a city situated about 70 miles west of Berlin, a group of young men allegedly harassed a 22-year-old who was wearing a kippah and proceeded to beat him, inflicting minor injuries, the news site MDR reported. A passerby intervened and the men left the scene. The passerby said they were Arabs.

Also in Germany, in the northern city of Hamburg, three people in a car hurled antisemitic hate speech at a Jewish cyclist while stopped at a traffic light, the news site TAH reported. In Bremen, a northern city located 200 miles west of Berlin, a man wearing a face mask with a Star of David pattern was insulted on the street.

In Austria, a non-Jewish woman was called a “child killer” and harassed by three men in the subway who picked on her two weeks ago because she was reading a book titled “The Jews in the Modern World,” she told the ORF broadcaster Friday. One man pulled her hair, she said.

The woman said police advised her to forget the incident and that it was not antisemitic because she’s not Jewish. The Interior Ministry told ORF it was looking into the incident.

In the United Kingdom, two men confronted a neonatal nurse in an elevator at her London hospital after they noticed her Star of David. They asked the nurse, Hadasa Abrams, whether she believes in “a free Palestine.”

She replied “I’m Jewish,” prompting one to say “I want to kill all your people,” Abrams wrote on Facebook.

In the Belgian city of Antwerp, a blogger described witnessing a man shouting “Get away, dirty Jewess” at an Orthodox Jewish woman who approached a park bench where the man was sitting.

On May 21, a man was assaulted on a train in Austria after asking two men, whom witnesses said had a Middle Eastern appearance, to stop making antisemitic remarks and denying the Holocaust, a local paper reported.

In London on the same day, a Jewish man was assaulted in his car because it had an Israeli flag. That See HATE CRIMES on Page

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Global HATE CRIMES Continued from Page 13

Men from the CST and Shomrim security units detain a man whom witnesses said assaulted a Jewish man in a car in London, May 21, 2021. (Eye on Antisemitism)

followed a streak of incidents, including the serious assault of a rabbi outside his synagogue in Chigwell, near London, on May 16.

That same day, a convoy with eight cars displaying Palestinian flags drove through London, with passengers yelling antisemitic obscenities on loudspeakers. One of the passengers shouted “f— the Jews, rape their daughters” while driving through a heavily Jewish part of London.

“Antisemitism in the United Kingdom sadly always spikes when there is conflict in the Middle East, but this feels worse than ever,” Luciana Berger, a former prominent Jewish Labour lawmaker who now works in public relations, tweeted that day.

British Jewry’s security unit documented more than 250 antisemitic incidents in the 17 days that followed May 9 — a 500% increase over the previous 17 days. In May, that unit, CST, has logged 325 incidents — more than any month since 1984, when CST began documenting incidents. In

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July 2014, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, CST recorded 317 cases.

Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement on May 21, but new incidents continue to unfold. On Thursday, one of British Jewry’s biggest charities, Norwood, which helps children with learning disabilities, had its website hacked.

A banner reading “Free Palestine End Apartheid” replaced the homepage.

On Tuesday, Elise Fajgeles, a Jewish former City Council member from Paris — the scene of some of the worst violence during the 2014 spike — penned an open letter to Muslims in Europe pleading for their community to crack down on extremists who are perpetuating hate crimes against Jews.

(According to France’s National Bureau for Vigilance Against Antisemitism, Muslims or people from a Muslim background are responsible for all the recent violent incidents where the perpetrators’ identity was established or surmised. The profile of hate speech perpetrators was more diverse, with right-wing extremists accounting for half, the bureau found.)

“I’m not here to speak to you about what’s going on over there,” Fajgeles wrote in her open letter, published in French in The Times of Israel. “I’m going to talk about what’s happening here. I’m here to tell you about me. I want to tell you I’m afraid.”

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Dutch University Removes ‘From The River To The Sea’ Pro-Palestinian Banner Following Protests By Jews

By Cnaan Liphshiz

A banner about Israel hangs on the facade of the De Ateliers arts institution in Amsterdam, May 28, 2021. (Barry Mehler)

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A public Dutch university removed a series of banners about Israel made by resident artists, including one reading “from the river to the sea,” after protests by local Jews.

The State Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam was “not aware of some of the meanings of the phrase and have decided, with the resident artists who displayed banners on the subject, to remove them,” Emily Pethick, the Academy’s director, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Tuesday. “We deeply regret it.”

The slogan is an abbreviation of the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which refers to the area between Jordan

River and the Mediterranean Sea — a region comprising the West Bank and Gaza and Israel. Advocates of the slogan say it calls for freedom for all inhabitants. Critics say it references the widespread sentiment among Palestinians that all the land is occupied and should be liberated by dismantling the Jewish state.

“This chant isn’t about supporting a Palestinian state but all about expelling the Jews from Israel. This will never happen,” wrote Ronny Naftaniel, chairman of the Central Jewish Board of the Netherlands, or CJO, on Facebook.

“One Final Solution was enough,” he added, referencing the Nazi euphemism for the Holocaust.

A separate arts institution in Amsterdam, De Ateliers, which is housed in the Academy’s former address, also displayed banners about Israel last week, including one reading “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” De Ateliers did not immediately reply to JTA’s request for comment.

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Out From The Cold, Into The Light: The Journey To Guarantee Inclusion In The Jewish Community

Participants at a Matan training session in Rochester, New York.

(Courtesy of Matan)

Josh was 8 years old when his parents sent him to Jewish summer camp for the first time. Even though he had issues like ADHD that made school challenging, they figured the informal, open environment of summer camp — together with a little extra care from staff — would enable him to find his place.

They were wrong. After just six days, he was sent home.

Meredith Englander Polsky, who had attended that same overnight camp throughout her childhood, was working there as a counselor that summer.

“I thought, is this really something that happens in the Jewish community,” she wondered, “or did I just happen to stumble upon this one kid who wasn’t being included?”

That question led her to ask more questions, and eventually to the realization that these types of experiences were more common than people liked to admit. Meredith discovered that there was a crisis within the Jewish community that needed to be addressed. And she decided to do something about it.

That’s how Matan was born, by confronting the hard questions that challenge us as a community to look in the mirror and asking if we are really as inclusive and accommodating as we think we are, as we claim to be. It is a method that drives its successful approach to this day. Almost immediately, through Matan, Meredith began to work to bridge the gap between

where we are as a community and where we want to be.

With support from funders and foundations, along with a grant from the Covenant Foundation and a fellowship for Jewish social entrepreneurs with the Joshua Venture Group, Matan slowly began making a difference by creating inclusive programming for children with special needs and others that were not being included in Jewish life.

“When my daughter got to Matan, there were so many girls, and they were her peers, and they treated her as friends. And that was an important experience for my daughter,” recalls Marjorie Madfis.

“I think that these other girls felt the same way. They all said, ‘We never have friends.’”

Matan created a welcoming space. For the first time, many children with special needs felt included in Jewish community life. They could walk into a Hebrew school

class or a JCC program, and they felt it was for them. They felt at home, not on the fringe. They felt welcomed, and they felt included in a real way that was engaging and authentic. They were given the opportunity to have normal Jewish childhood experiences and develop friendships, and their families could also be included in a way that wasn’t possible before.

At this point, Matan was having a very profound impact, changing the lives of relatively few people in a very big way. Recognizing that the real opportunity lay in taking the expertise being developed and scaling it so it could be shared and replicated, after 10 years Matan pivoted to focus on providing training for Jewish educators and professionals.

As a result, Matan became a specialized resource for Jewish comSee INCLUSION on Page

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JEWISH LIGHT

Superman Taught Me How To Be A Cuban Jew

By Jake Carson Steinberg This article originally appeared on Alma.

(Design by Emily Burack. Vectors via Getty Images; Superman via Wikimedia Commons)

I was Jewish to everyone but the Jews.

That’s what it felt like to grow up the son of a Cuban mother and Jewish father. I looked exactly like my dad, with his curly hair and deepset eyes, and I had his last name, Steinberg, stitched on the back of my baseball jerseys. But my Jewish friends and their parents ceaselessly reminded me that I was not really like him. Judaism comes from your mother, they said, so I couldn’t be Jewish. Isaac’s dad would have me over for dinner and have a laugh over my being “the fake Jew.” His wife would jokingly correct him, saying I was really more of a “half-

Jew.” A lot of Jewish people seemed to agree: There weren’t any Cuban Jews.

Clark Kent thought he was just like any other kid in Smallville, Kansas, until someone told him otherwise. In 2009’s “Superman: Secret Origin,” a young Clark examines the spaceship he came to Earth in for the first time. The rocket projects a hologram of Clark’s birth parents and they tell him about his origins and the planet Krypton. They reveal that Clark was originally named Kal-El and remind him, “Although you look like one of them — you are not one of them.” There weren’t other kids in Smallville like Clark.

In 2021, I know there are other Cuban Jews like me, but I didn’t know that when I was a kid. Speaking Spanish at home with my mom and having the rice and beans she prepared for every other meal was all it took to alienate me from my peers. I laughed when my friends joked about not being able to understand my mom because of her

accent, even though I couldn’t hear it myself.

When Clark Kent was a kid, he accidentally broke his friend’s arm while playing football and started a fire at school with an unexpected blast of heat vision. Clark’s adoptive parents tried their best, but they could never quite grasp their son’s alien experience. Similarly, my parents knew what it was like to be Jewish and Cuban respectively, but neither could show me how to be both.

Clark Kent showed me how to be both.

Among the superheroes, Superman was always my favorite. The movies, the comics, the animated series — I ate it all up. Here was this guy that didn’t need to bear witness to trauma-inducing violence to know the difference between right and wrong. He stood up to bullies and had a mind for social justice that stretched back to his Depression-era origins, which activated my politics at an early age. It didn’t hurt that he had all the

best powers, too.

But my favorite thing about the Man of Steel was how, even without wearing a mask, the idea that Clark Kent and Superman were the same person was preposterous.

People just couldn’t believe that these two identities existed within the same person! Superman had great success keeping his two identities separate; why couldn’t I do the same? I took quiet comfort in knowing that a lot of other kids preferred Batman or Spider-Man to Supes. They didn’t understand him like I did. Superman always had a little Jewishness, too. The “El” suffix in Kal-El is short for the Hebrew word for God. The character’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both came from Jewish backgrounds and even grew up in Ohio, just like me. Superman didn’t have a Jewish mother either, but he had two Jewish fathers, so that had to count for something.

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SUPERMAN Continued from Page 16 One of my favorite comics was the critically acclaimed “All Star Superman” series in which Superman is given an unexpected death sentence and, with his remaining time alive, decides to reveal his identity to Lois Lane. He fills her in on his alien side, takes her to his fortress of solitude, and even creates a serum that gives Lois his powers for 24 hours. This was the only time I had ever seen Superman so completely share himself and his worldview with another. This, I thought, was what great love looked like. Going forward, I’d allow others to label me either Jewish or Latino, but I’d reserve Jake Steinberg — my full, Superman-loving, Jewish and Cuban self — for the people I really loved.

In the fall of 2011, DC Comics would relaunch its entire line of monthly superhero comic books in an event dubbed the “New 52,” due to the fact that 52 different comics were rebooting with a new No. 1 issue. Two of those monthly comic installments were “Action Comics” and “Superman,” both of which starred the Man of Steel, albeit at two different points in his life. From the New 52 on, any version of Superman you were reading was new, changed and updated for the modern era. This version of Superman was now young, inexperienced and — rather than putting emphasis on his Smallville roots — Clark’s alien status was at the forefront of most stories. Most devastating to me at the time, his entire relationship with Lois Lane was erased.

This era for Superman coincided with a reinvention of my own.

Shortly after the launch of the New 52, I left Bexley, Ohio, for a suburb of Philadelphia to attend the private, Catholic Villanova University.

It became extremely apparent within my first week there that I would have to accept a new normal and a new challenge. At Villanova, I was half-Jew no longer; I was the Jew. Without any prompting on my part, and often after simply introducing myself, my peers would admit that I was their first Jewish friend. For the entire first semester, a professor called roll with the first and last names of every student, but she only ever said “Jake” for me.

When I asked her about it, she replied, “I didn’t want to embarrass you.” The next year, at a play rehearsal, a friend said it was “hotter than an oven in here.” An Augustinian priest walking behind us laughed and called out, “Don’t say ovens in front of him!” At the career fair for seniors, a professor — my adviser — asked me what my major was. She cut me off before I could answer and said, “Business, it’s business, right? Economics?” In that same conversation she told me I reminded her of Jerry Seinfeld.

It was rarely the actual remarks that got to me, but the fact that everyone had decided who I was without my input. My existence had been rebooted. I went from being the “fake Jew” to the one and only chosen person. The Jewish identity kept from me in Bexley was wielded like a weapon at Villanova.

I occasionally tried to wield that weapon myself. For a time, I announced myself as Jewish, wearing the identity on campus like a bright red Superman S on my chest.

If I brought it up first — reclaimed the identity in that way — it couldn’t be used against me, I thought. My efforts proved futile. On one occasion, I was performing stand-up comedy at a local on-campus event and made jokes and observations playing on my Jewish perspective,

like being offered pork at dinner with my Catholic girlfriend’s parents. The event went well, I thought.

If I was responsible for what people were thinking about me, then I was happy.

The next comedian in the lineup took to the stage and immediately made remarks about my appearance and “Jewish voice.” He compared me to the lawyer from the movie “Carlito’s Way,” a reference I had to look up but later discovered to be a character played by Sean Penn and based on the real-life attorney Alan Dershowitz. The character was the epitome of a harmful Jewish stereotype (this was before Dershowitz would go on to represent people like Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump in court). None of this was good for my brand, but the whole event proved I couldn’t control the ways in which my heritage would be used against me.

At my lowest point, I met a girl who reminded me that the world was basically a good place. She knew I was Cuban and Jewish, but we focused on movies, sports and whatever the dining hall was serving for dinner. It was good and uncomplicated. We dated for three years, but during our senior year I became aware of a fight with her parents. She showed me a text from her father that read, “You’re about to graduate, life is getting serious, it’s time to dump the Jew.” She agreed and admitted to me that I was “never a real option.”

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In some ways, I blame myself.

I saw Superman as an excuse to hide my identities rather than to exist as the complete synthesized version of them. Clark Kent to some, Superman to others, the two parts only coexisting within himself — it seemed like it worked out for him. When he came clean to Lois Lane about who he really was, he did so on his own terms and in his own way. He trusted someone he loved with his authentic self and she accepted him. I didn’t trust anyone with that.

Maybe if I did, I would have been with my Lois Lane.

Superman did eventually bring his identities together. In 2019’s Superman No. 18, “The Truth,” he holds a press conference in which he reveals to the world his secret identity. “… I’m so proud of my heritage,” Superman says, “both from Krypton and Earth. … And when I show up as Superman, I want to show up representing both parts of me at the same time.”

Superman explains that he gets to “see and hear people discover and rediscover themselves all the time,” and it was by witnessing everyday people grow that he was inspired to grow himself. By sharing our stories — our intersectional, multiracial stories — we can inspire everyone from the 82-year-old Man of Steel to the 27-year-old Jewish Cuban to exist truthfully.

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Arts & Culture

Sports

THE

JEWISH LIGHT

Marv Albert, Jewish Sports The Jewish History Of Broadcasting Legend, To Bazooka Bubble Gum

By Joanna O'leary Retire This Year This article originally appeared on The Nosher.

By Rob Charry

Marv Albert calls a game between the New York Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Dec. 13, 2012. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

(JTA) — Legendary Jewish sportscaster Marv Albert will retire after the NBA playoffs this summer, he announced Monday.

Born Marvin Aufrichtig to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, he became one of basketball’s most prominent broadcasters. But he was also a national voice for the NFL and NHL, calling Super Bowls and Stanley Cup Finals in addition to NBA Finals over a career that saw him broadcast in seven decades.

Albert, who turns 80 next month, will continue to call basketball games on TNT until the NBA Finals.

As the story goes, a 21-year-old Albert got his big break when another Jewish Syracuse grad, the fabled Marty Glickman — also

Albert’s mentor — had a conflict and could not broadcast a New York Knicks game on WCBS-AM radio in 1963. It launched a career in which Albert did play-by-play for several New York-area teams along with the Knicks, including the NBA’s Nets, NHL’s Rangers and NFL’s Giants on TV and radio.

Albert’s legacy includes calling the Olympic gold medal game for the original Dream Team in 1992, NCAA tournament games, boxing and tennis. He was the sports anchor on WNBC-TV in New York from 1975 to 1987, which led to his more than 50 appearances with David Letterman, first on NBC (“Late Night with David Letterman”) and then on CBS (“The Late Show”), showing highlights and lowlights in sports.

He was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1993.

In 1997, his longtime employer NBC fired him in the wake of sexual assault charges by multiple women. The network brought him back two years later after he was given a 12-month suspended prison sentence.

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Chew on this: One of America’s most iconic gum brands was originally a Jewish-owned tobacco business.

In 1891, Morris Chigorinsky emigrated from Russia to the United States, where in the early 1900s he assumed control of the American Leaf Tobacco Company. But by 1938 — by then Chigorinsky had changed his surname to Shorin — the business was flailing. His four sons decided to save the family from certain penury by starting a new penny candy business, Topps Chewing Gum Inc., with the name borrowed from an eponymous Chattanooga candy company they purchased.

Following the end of World War II, the Shorin brothers — Abram, Ira, Joseph and Philip — aggressively set about supplanting their then-dominant competitor, Dubble Bubble, manufactured by Fleer, through the launch of Bazooka Bubble Gum. The gum cleverly capitalized on the nation’s postwar patriotic pride in the wake of their recent victory, not only via its name (derived from the rocket-propelled weapon invented and deployed by American troops) but also through its red, white and blue packaging.

The product sold well, but in 1953, Topps made an alteration to the design that proved to be a game changer: the inclusion of small comic strips starring Bazooka Joe, a swashbuckling kid who donned a black eyepatch and got into scrapes and adventures with his crew of streetwise companions. The wrappers — ultimately there were over 1,500 manufactured — also featured fortunes and immediately became collector’s items among consumers and candy enthusiasts, who still vigorously buy and sell vintage strips on online auction websites. While the original flavor continues to be the bestseller, Topps has also introduced variations, such

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as Grape Rage, Cherry Berry and Watermelon Whirl.

In 2012, Bazooka discontinued the inclusion of comics in favor of “brainteaser” wrappers and subsequently found itself in a sticky situation. Loyalists were displeased and chewed out corporate honchos for the most unwelcome change. In 2019, Topps responded to the call to adhere to the original look by issuing a Throwback Pack intended to be “inspired by the brand’s iconic original packaging” with “nostalgic 1980s graphics and Original flavor Bazooka Bubble Gum wrapped in classic comics.”

Testaments to Bazooka’s enduring popularity have bubbled up over the years in sitcoms such as “How I Met Your Mother,” “Seinfeld” and “King of Queens.” The candy made a particularly sweet cameo in an episode of “30 Rock,” in which NBC exec Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) erroneously and hilariously claimed Bazooka’s founder inherited a quarry of pink rocks, then baked them to transform them into gum.

While Bazooka continues to be cherished in many countries, the gum has amassed a particularly unique cult following in Israel. In the 1960s, Islico Ltd. began making Bazooka in Tel Aviv, which was taken over by Lieber Co. in the 1970s, then assumed in the 1980s by the food conglomerate Strauss-Elite, which continues to manufacture the candy today, in addition to snack mashups like Bazooka-flavored marshmallows and even milk.

“So culturally iconic are the strips in Israel,” The Jerusalem Post reported in 2017, “that they even inspired one local artist to assume “Bazooka Joe” as his pseudonym because “he naturally connected with the colors and simplicity of the comics.'”

Chomping at the bit to get a glimpse of some of these crazy toons but still hesitant to travel because of COVID-19? Those interested in Israeli Bazooka historiography can visit a virtual museum dedicated to displaying the cartoons over the decades. THE

JEWISH LIGHT

THE

Health

JEWISH LIGHT

There’s A New Test For Cancer Risks From A Longtime Jewish Genetic Screening Program

By Renee Ghert-Zand

It was only after Abby Match was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer that she learned she was a carrier of a mutation in her BRCA1 gene associated with a significantly elevated risk for developing breast cancer at a young age. (Courtesy of Match)

After discovering a suspicious lump in her breast one day while in the shower, Abby Match was diagnosed in August with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She subsequently underwent a bilateral mastectomy, a hysterectomy, chemotherapy and radiation.

It was only after she discovered she was sick that Match, 35, learned she was a carrier of a mutation in her BRCA1 gene — associated with a significantly elevated risk for developing breast cancer at a young age, and also for ovarian and other cancers. One in 40 Ashkenazi Jews have a BRCA mutation, which is 10 times higher than in the general population.

Match, a speech pathologist living outside Philadelphia, wishes she had known beforehand about her genetic predisposition. She could have – by having a genetic screening. Had she known she was a BRCA carrier, she could have more closely monitored herself for early signs and taken certain preventive steps.

“Knowledge is power — it is important to know the risks ahead of time,” Match said. “It doesn’t mean that it will happen, but knowing allows you to take actions to increase the chances to live a long, healthy life.”

Having a genetic screening for cancer risk is actually quite simple — and recently became easier with a national program called JScreen that focuses on the prevention of Jewish genetic diseases. A nonprofit project of the Emory University School of Medicine’s Department of Human Genetics, JScreen provides genetic screening tests for at-home use that can be completed just by sending in a saliva sample using a mail-in kit.

JScreen long has provided subsiTHE

JEWISH LIGHT

dized reproductive testing for genetic diseases, screening for conditions like Tay-Sachs disease that could impact a couple’s future children.

Now the organization also offers cancer genetic testing, including a comprehensive panel of more than 60 cancer susceptibility genes associated with hereditary risks for breast, ovarian, prostate, colorectal, skin and many other cancers.

Genetic counselors discuss the results with users by phone or secure videoconference.

“Making cancer genetic testing accessible is key,” said Dr. Jane Lowe Meisel, associate professor of hematology and medical oncology at the Emory University School of Medicine and medical director for JScreen’s cancer program. “This type of testing is important because it alerts people to their risks before they get cancer. They can then take action to help prevent cancer altogether or to detect it at an early, treatable stage.”

If your mother or father has a BRCA mutation, you have a 50% chance of carrying it. After Match’s diagnosis, her family members underwent genetic screening and discovered that Match’s mother, Carla Rockmaker, 61, carries the same BRCA1 mutation as her daughter and had passed it on to her.

“It was very distressing, to say the least,” Rockmaker said.

Rockmaker, who lives in Sarasota, Florida, decided to undergo a preventive bilateral mastectomy and also encouraged her fiance to be screened. It turned out that he carries a BRCA2 mutation. The couple plans to avoid excess sun exposure and monitor their health closely, as BRCA-related cancers include pancreatic, prostate and melanoma, in addition to breast and ovarian cancer. Jews also are at higher risk of carrying a mutation in the APC gene, increasing their risk for colorectal cancer.

After completing a pilot project in Atlanta from July 2019 to June 2020 in which 500 people of Jewish background were tested for mutations in the BRCA genes, JScreen formally launched its 60+ gene cancer screening test nationally in January.

“For the Atlanta pilot, none of

the people tested had related cancers in close family members, but we still found that there was a higher rate of BRCA mutations than in the non-Jewish population,” JScreen Executive Director Karen Arnovitz Grinzaid said. “We added the cancer panel to our testing options because we want to impact the health of the Jewish community over the entire life span.”

The subsidized cancer screening, which costs consumers with insurance $199 (or $349 for those without insurance or who choose not to use it), requires a doctor’s order and is available to anyone age 21 and above.

JScreen, which originally launched in 2013 with seed funding from The Marcus Foundation, initially focused on reproductive screening for h aged 18-45 to determine the risk for having a child with a genetic disease. This testing helps parents and wouldbe parents ensure that they are taking the precautions necessary to have healthy children. (For example, couples in which both parents are carriers of the same genetic disease can minimize their chances of passing it on by conceiving via in-vitro fertilization

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with pre-implantation genetic testing of embryos).

JScreen’s ReproGEN test screens for 226 genetic diseases, many of which are commonly found in the Jewish population (Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrachi), and others that are found in the general population. Most of these diseases are inherited in a recessive pattern, meaning that a child may have the condition only if both parents carry a mutation in that disease gene.

Each child of two carrier parents has a 25% chance of inheriting both mutations and having the condition.

JScreen also screens for several X-linked conditions that can be passed from a carrier mother to a child who may have symptoms.

Some of these genetic diseases are relatively common, such as Gaucher’s, cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs. However, Carly Sonenshine, a 32-year-old social worker in Atlanta, learned from her JScreen test that she carries a mutation for CPT2 deficiency, an extremely rare condition that prevents the body from using certain fats for energy. There are three See SCREENING on Page

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20

19

heAlth SCREENING Continued from Page 19

T 2012 Prenatal testing enabled the parents Layla Sonenshine to take steps to T 2012 ofensure her good health despite her T 2012 being positive for CPT2 deficiency,

an extremely rare genetic disease that prevents the body from using certain fats for energy. (Courtesy of the Sonenshine family)

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educAtion whole new demographic, the organization said. In the future, JScreen plans to add screening for other genetic risks.

Anyone planning a baby should do reproductive genetic screening, Grinzaid stressed, and cancer genetic testing is relevant to the entire Jewish community, not just those with a family history of cancer.

Match and Sonenshine are both active advocates of genetic screening and help educate others. Match, for example, now holds virtual parlor meetings to introduce the idea of genetic screening to friends and raises funds for JScreen through a jewelry-making project.

“With JScreen, you don’t have to wait for cancer to find you,” Match said.

This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with JScreen, whose goal is making genetic screening as simple, accessible and affordable as possible, and has helped couples across the country have healthy babies. JScreen now offers a new test for hereditary cancer risk. To access testing 24/7, request a kit at JScreen.org. This story was produced by JTA's native content team.

INCLUSION Continued from Page 15 munities and schools everywhere.

The impact of its work was multiplied a hundredfold and more.

Bringing the experience and lessons learned by Matan into a curriculum and sharing it with thousands of Jewish professionals across North America with little or no background in special education meant that the children in those schools and communities could now enjoy a greater level of inclusion in Jewish life.

“Matan is a gift,” relates Rina Cohen Schwartz, director of education at Congregation Habonim.

“Matan provided me with a whole tool chest, and I in turn could bring that to my teachers, to my team.”

“We felt that we were inclusive, and we felt really good about it,” recalls Rabbi Neil Zuckerman, a rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue.

“And in the course of a conversation with some parents we felt there was a big gap between who we thought we were and who we needed to be.”

Currently, Matan is training over 3,000 educators and community leaders per year. As a result, hun-

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dreds of thousands of students experience better and more holistic inclusion in Jewish life.

“As a result of Matan’s training, people across the country and beyond understand the value of inclusion,” reflects Meredith, who is still involved with Matan as national director of institutes and training. “And more than simply being welcome, they actually know what to do.”

Another aspect of Matan’s impactful work is community consultations.

“Typically, Matan is hired by a local Jewish federation to conduct an ‘inclusion audit’. We spend approximately three full days on the ground in a particular community (or many hours over Zoom) in order to research the points of pride, the gaps in service, and make recommendations for concrete steps the community can take in order to be more inclusive across the lifespan,” Dori Frumin Kirshner, Matan’s executive director, explains. “There’s been a sea change in recognizing that the Jewish community is whole when all of our members are included.”

Essentially, every person touched

by Matan, whether directly or indirectly, becomes an ambassador for the value of inclusion in the Jewish community. Matan is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. As the realities and needs of Jewish communities evolve, Matan continues to develop and adapt its innovative program to further the value of inclusion to ensure that every individual can be part of our collective Jewish future.

Do you believe in making sure everyone can be included in Jewish life? Matan can use your support.

Matan is celebrating its 20-year anniversary with a fundraising campaign and virtual event. You can be part of it by making a donation or registering for the event at matan20years.org.

Visit Matankids.org to learn more about how Matan enables Jewish professionals, communities and families to create and sustain inclusive settings in educational, communal and spiritual aspects of Jewish life. THE

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THE

trAVel

JEWISH LIGHT

6 Jewish Delis Run By Women That You Need To Know About

By Rachel Ringler This article originally appeared on The Nosher.

and white cookies, made without “gribenes.”

Solomon’s lemon zest.

Call Your Mother

(Daughter's Deli)

Not long ago, there were ominous reports about the fate of Jewish delis. Lovers of pastrami and chopped liver wrung their hands.

While it’s undeniable that there are far fewer Jewish delis today than there were a generation ago — David Sax, author of “Save the Deli,” calls them “a dying breed” — a revival is underway, in many cases led by women.

That wasn’t always the case in a male-dominated industry. But in the past five years, several delis owned and run by women have joined the Jewish food landscape, putting their own stamp on the Jewish deli. We’ve rounded up the best of them.

Daughter’s Deli

(Nicolette Lovell) (Tim Casey)

Daniela Moreira is the chef at Call Your Mother, a “Jew-ish” deli in Washington, D.C., founded in 2019, which she runs with her partner, Andrew Dana. Their menu is influenced by nostalgia, as well as the flavors Moreira and Dana love.

As a nod to her South American background, for instance, Moreira put a Latin Pastrami sandwich on the menu: pastrami, spicy herb mayo, veggie slaw and jalapenos on rye. For dessert, babka and black and white cookies stuffed with dulce de leche sit alongside peanut butter-pretzel doughnuts.

Moreira is involved in more than just the food. She and her partner offer their staff English lessons, gym memberships and classes with trainers who teach them how to care for their bodies.

Edith’s

(Daughter’s Deli)

Those who love deli and have been to Los Angeles know Langer’s Deli. In 2018, Trisha Langer, granddaughter of Langer’s founders, opened Daughter’s Deli in West Hollywood. The menu is classic deli fare — hot pastrami, potato latkes, lox with a schmear — but with a modern aesthetic. The blintzes and knishes are delicately sized, and while matzah ball soup is on the menu, chopped liver and mushroom barley soup are not.

In homage to her roots, Langer named sandwiches for family members, like The Papa sandwich, stuffed with hot pastrami and swiss cheese, for her grandfather, Langer’s founder. Her baby is the dessert business: chocolate chip cookies, New York-style cheesecake and her own version of black THE

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When you’re next in New York, take the subway to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and stop in at newly opened Edith’s. Owner Elyssa Heller gathers elements of world Jewish cuisine and applies them in fresh and unexpected ways.

Her most popular item is a bagel filled with bacon, egg and cheese — with a latke for extra crunch.

Her bagels, by the way, are twisted, a reference to the original twisted Polish bread from Krakow, the bagel’s ancestor.

The cooks at Edith’s use a “no waste” concept. Instead of making matzah balls with matzah meal, for instance, they make dumplings with day-old bread mixed and schmaltz.

“We take historical elements and incorporate them into our food,” Heller says.

They use every part of the fish, too, which they smoke in-house.

Expect to find their softly scrambled eggs topped with salmon skin

Sacramento, Calif., has a vibrant food scene, but it was missing a Jewish deli. Jami Goldstene and Andrea Lepore remedied that situation when they opened Solomon’s in July 2019, named for Russ Solomon, founder of Tower Records and local Jewish boy who loved deli. While inspired by New York Jewish delis, this establishment also features street food that you can find in the countries where Tower Records has stores.

The Patti, their most popular sandwich named for Solomon’s

wife, combines scrambled eggs and white cheddar with aioli in a warm Japanese milk bun or bagel of choice. It sits alongside The Bangkok — fried chicken, red Thai curry sauce, kewpie aioli, turmeric pickles, cabbage and cilantro on a warm Japanese milk bun.

The cocktails here are designed with the same approach; a bloody Mary flavored with turmeric and finished with dill pickles sits alongside etrog liquor and Japanese whisky. It’s a place, the founders say, “where everyone could find something.”

Mamaleh’s

When Rachel Miller Munzer and her partners opened their Boston Jewish deli in 2016, they named it Mamaleh’s, a Yiddish word of endearment. Munzer’s husband, Alon, was moved by David Sax’s book “Save The Deli,” about the See DELIS 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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Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans

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Fried Cabbage And Noodles Is The Most Underrated Jewish Food

By Joe Baur

What is haluski? The answer, like with many dishes, depends on who you’re asking.

Different varieties pop up across Eastern Europe, including Slovakia, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine, where it’s the national dish. The variations likely stem from the fact that haluski simply means “dumplings.” Just as there are many ways to make a kugel, there are many ways to make a dumpling dish.

In general, the dumplings are made from a dough of flour and potatoes. Depending on the consistency of your dough, you might roll it out and cut it up before dropping it into boiling water, not unlike a gnocchi. With a wet dough, you’d simply drop small pieces of the batLAW_full Size_2019_print.pdf

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ter one by one into boiling water.

There’s even a haluski-specific strainer for the task.

The dumplings are commonly accompanied by cabbage, eggs, and/or cheese. The Slovakian version, for instance, called bryndzové halušky, uses fried cabbage and a sheep’s milk cheese (that’s the bryndzové), but no eggs.

When the dish made its ways to the States, likely in the early 20th century, the potato dumplings were ditched in favor of egg noodles.

The reason isn’t entirely clear.

What’s clearer, though, is that the dish — also known more plainly as cabbage and noodles — at some point found its way into the Hungarian Jewish community.

Haluski follows the same logic of any classic dish that’s stood the test of time: It’s quick and easy, filling, has few ingredients, and can be served as a side dish or as the main course.

I found it while exchanging emails with a cousin, Sandy Mott, in search of heritage recipes to better understand what my ancestors were eating.

“My grandmother was a phenomenal cook,” Sandy wrote.

“She used to make a dish called haluski, which was basically sautéed cabbage and onions with wide egg noodles mixed in.”

This recipe comes from Sandy by way of her grandmother, Helen Greenfield, whom likely got it from her husband, Mr. Louis Darnell Sterns. Louis came to the United States from a 19th century shtetl

of the Austro-Hungarian empire outside of modern-day Bardejov, Slovakia where Sandy and I trace our shared ancestry. Now that shared heritage lives on in this smoky dish of haluski.

Ingredients • 1 medium onion, chopped • 1 medium head of cabbage, chopped • ¾ stick butter + 2 Tbsp • 1 Tbsp brown sugar (optional) • 1½ tsp smoked paprika • 1½ tsp sweet paprika • salt and pepper, to taste • 1 package wide egg noodles • parsley, to serve (optional) Directions Place a pan on the stove over medium heat with ¾ stick of butter (about 6 Tbsp). Use olive oil if you want to keep the dish pareve. Simultaneously fill a pot with lightly salted water and bring it to a boil.

This will be for your egg noodles.

While the pan is heating up, remove the core from your cabbage, cut it in half along the spine, and chop into long strands. Dice your onion.

Once the pan is hot (splash a little water and listen for a sizzle), sauté your cabbage and onions. Season with kosher salt and ground pepper.

Stir your onions and cabbage frequently for about 8-10 minutes until caramelized.

Sprinkle with the smoked and sweet paprika. (Sandy’s daughter adds an optional tablespoon of brown sugar at this stage that isn’t part of the original recipe.)

By now, your pasta water should be boiling. Put in about five cups of wide egg noodles and follow the package’s cooking instructions. Usually it’ll take about 8-10 minutes.

Once the noodles are ready, pour about a cup of the pasta water into your onion and cabbage mix. Then, drain the noodles and add them into your pan with the onions and cabbage. Allow the pasta water to reduce and the noodles to absorb the flavors.

Stir. Add more butter (1-2 Tbsp) as needed to avoid burning on the pan.

Once everything’s come together, turn the heat off and serve warm.

Feel free to garnish with fresh or dried parsley.

www.thejewishlight.org

(Nina Gallant)

decline of the Jewish deli. The husband-wife team felt “an obligation to save a dying art.”

Their food, Munzer says, is “from the heart, made with thought, of the highest quality.” You can get a pastrami-chopped liver sandwich or a rich bowl of chicken soup filled with chunks of chicken, carrots, celery and one or two large matzah balls. And if you are dreaming of a hot tongue sandwich, look no further. Their restaurant even has a gift shop where you can pick up lactaid pills.

“It’s the Jewish disease,” Munzer said. “We need it available!”

Russ & Daughters

(Russ and Daughter’s)

These Jewish delis are all relatively new and one could say they stand on the shoulders of another Jewish eatery — an appetizing shop, not a deli — based in New York. Russ & Daughters was the first American business to have “& Daughters” in its name. In fact, says Niki Russ Federman, a fourth-generation owner, when Joel Russ named his business in 1935, “people assumed the owners were a Mr. Russ and a Mr. Daughters.”

Women have been working and running the business from its earliest days.

“Today, almost all of our managers are women,” Federman said.

“And at times we have more women working behind the counter than men.”

How does Federman see the future of Jewish food?

“It’s bright!” she said.

She exhorts new businesses to “respect tradition and find their own voice to put their own spin on what they are doing.” THE

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Conversion Students Are Asking Me If It’s Safe To Become Jewish. This Is What I Tell Them.

Jewish star necklaces are a signifier of Jewish identity and, some fear, a potential risk during times of antisemitism. (Getty)

(JTA) — “Rabbi Adar, is it dangerous to wear my Jewish star?”

In 12 years of teaching “Introduction to the Jewish Experience” through HaMaqom|The Place in the San Francisco Bay Area, no student ever asked me that question in those words.

This year three students have asked it of me. The first student who asked it was a young woman, a conversion candidate, and she made an appointment to talk to me outside of class.

I answered with a question: “Why are you asking this right now?” She talked about reading about attacks on Jews in New York City, and in West Hollywood. She talked about the fact that the synagogue she attends was vandalized a few months ago. She talked about how Jewish friends are concerned about safety.

“Am I being silly?” she asked.

“Do I need to worry about this on the streets of Oakland and Berkeley?”

Yes, I said, this is real. We are living through a time of increasing antisemitism. As far as the jewelry is concerned, I said, it is like any other item of personal safety: Trust your instincts. If you don’t feel safe, leave it off or put it out of

sight.

Then I asked another question: “This happens to the Jewish People from time to time. Are you sure you want to pursue conversion?” I assured her that I would not think badly of her if she chose the safer path. Confronting fears like those is how we sort out who we want to be, what we want for our children, what we want for our descendants.

There is no single right answer, only the answer deep in each individual heart.

The young woman said, “No, rabbi, I want to be a Jew!” I recognized the passion in her voice, a passion that I still feel after 25 years as a naturalized Jew — my word for a Jew by choice. We love the Jewish people and we are not going anywhere.

Conversion to Judaism is more complex than a change of creed.

Judaism is not only a religion; it has elements of culture, ethnicity and peoplehood as well. To become Jewish is to become heir to a history and a way of being in the world. It is different from conversion to Christianity in that it means becoming a target for antisemitism.

In the earliest description of a rabbinical court, or beit din, for conversion, the Sages warned proselytes of the dangers inherent in becoming a Jew: The Sages taught in a baraita: With regard to a potential convert who comes to a court in order to convert, at the present time, when the Jews are in exile, the judges of the court say to him: What did you see that motivated you to come to convert? Don’t you know that the Jewish people at the present time

are anguished, suppressed, despised and harassed, and hardships are frequently visited upon them? (BT Yevamot 47a) Every convert to Judaism makes a journey across the religious, cultural and emotional frontiers of Judaism. One of the milestones on that journey is the moment when antisemitism ceases to be theoretical, when it is felt in the kishkes, in the gut.

I have never regretted becoming a Jew. I give thanks every morning that God has made me a Jew, and that the Jewish people were willing to have me. I feel sure, listening to my student, that she will say the same thing after 25 years, no matter what history brings, so I give her advice: “Go sit with the Jews, when you feel shaky. You will see, when there are frightening things on the news, synagogue services fill up, gatherings fill up, we all show up somewhere to be with the Jews. As a people, we draw strength from one another. When bad things happen, there’s nowhere I would rather be

than with my Jewish family.

“Whether in my synagogue, or someone else’s synagogue, or at the Jewish Film FestiRABBI RUTH val, I feel better ADAR when I am surrounded by our people.”

Rabbi Ruth Adar is Executive Director of HaMaqom|The Place in Berkeley, California.

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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