The Jewish Light Rosh Hashanah Holiday Issue

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Volume 11, Number 7 Rosh Hashanah 2021

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

Around Town the

Mark Rubin named JCRS Executive Director

Mark Rubin has been named the new Executive Director of Jewish Children’s Regional Service (JCRS), becoming only the fourth leader of the Jewish social service agency since 1946.

A New Orleans native, Rubin was unanimously approved by a board vote on July 15. His appointment was effective August 1, 2021. He has served as Development Director at JCRS for the previous nine years.

Ned Goldberg, who became JCRS Executive Director in 1988, announced his retirement to the Governing Board earlier this year.

He will assume the role of Executive Director Emeritus. Goldberg had succeeded Sanford and Viola Weiss, who led the agency for over four decades, creating programs for camp scholarships and college aid.

They also created an out-of-home care program which was expanded and has become the present JCRS Special Needs Program for challenged Jewish youth.

“We look forward to working with Mark in his new position as executive director and have no doubts that he will transition into this role with great ease,” said Michael Goldman, JCRS President.

“Under Mark’s leadership, JCRS will not only continue to flourish but will expand its influence in order to help more Jewish children than ever before.”

Rubin joined JCRS in September 2012 as the agency’s first-ever development director. Rubin has made a tremendous impact on the agency in growing its reach in terms of fundraising and outreach to the Jewish community, both locally

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If your group has an event that you would like for us to include on the Community Calendar please e-mail the information to jewishnews@ bellsouth.net. All submissions are subject to acceptance by the Editor. ì and across the agency’s seven-state region. The JCRS annual Jewish Roots Gala has become the signature Jewish gathering event in Greater New Orleans and has garnered more than $1.4 million since starting the series in 2011. Most recently, Rubin was responsible for expanding the agency’s disaster relief efforts to include financial assistance for families with minor children who are impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rubin is a non-profit professional with more than 20 years of mission-driven development and program experience. He has worked for national and local organizations such as the American Cancer Society, the Arthritis Foundation and Tulane University. Mark has a Masters Degree in Arts Administration from the University of New Orleans and a liberal arts degree from New York University, where he graduated with distinction.

Rubin and his wife Andrea, who is also a New Orleans native, have two children, Rebecca, 18, and Jayden, 13. They are active members of Shir

Chadash Conservative Congregation.

“I am excited to begin this new chapter for the future of JCRS. It is an honor for me to build on the tremendous work that Ned has done with the agency,” Rubin said. “There are always Jewish kids in need – in good times and in challenging ones like the pandemic. Every day, JCRS makes a tremendous impact on the lives of Jewish youth through our programs and outreach. I look forward to working with our truly dedicated Governing Board, volunteers, and staff to meet that need where we can help the most.”

Since 1855, JCRS has provided needs-based scholarships, support and service to Jewish youth and families in the form of college aid, Jewish summer camp grants, and assistance to children with special needs. In 2020, JCRS reached more than 1,800 youth across seven MidSouth states.

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Researchers Unveil Massive Study On Jews Of Color, Boosting Fight For Racial Justice With Hard Data

By Asaf Shalev

Top left, clockwise, Gage Gorsky, Dalya Perez, Ari Kelman, Tobin Belzer, Vincent Calvetti and Tory Brundage. (Courtesy)

(JTA) — For the past few years, Jews of color in the United States have been counted and recounted.

They’ve been argued over and used as props in ideological battles.

Now their own voices have emerged as hard data with the release Thursday of the most comprehensive survey of Jews of color ever carried out.

The movement fighting racism within the Jewish community is heralding the study as a watershed

moment.

Responses from more than 1,100 people in the study reveal a deep engagement with Jewish identity that has often come with experiences of discrimination in communal settings.

In some cases, Jews of color said they are ignored. In others they are casually interrogated about their race and ethnicity. Respondents said white Jews will sometimes presume a need to educate them about Jewish rituals or assume they are present in synagogues or schools as nannies and security guards rather than community members.

Some 80% of respondents said they have experienced discrimination in Jewish settings.

Titled “Beyond the Count,” the study out of Stanford University corroborates with data and the anecdotes of racism in the Jewish community that have been widespread for years.

The study’s sponsor and research

Around WorLd the

team hope the findings will jolt Jewish institutions into funding initiatives for and by Jews of color and changing the composition of decision-making bodies to reflect Jewish diversity.

“This study validates the experiences of Jews of color, and it also takes away a bit of the illusion that Jewish community organizations are doing enough to respond to racism and racial injustice,” said Ilana Kaufman, executive director of the Jews of Color Initiative, which commissioned and funded the study. Kaufman also shared her reaction to the study in an essay.

Its 1,118 participants were found through an online survey that started with a series of screening questions to ensure that only those identifying as Jews of color were included. The study was not designed to be a statistical representation of all Jews of color but as an in-depth sampling of the views. Interviews with 61 of the participants provided additional texture and nuance.

In a finding that baffled researchers, two-thirds of respondents were women.

Nearly half of the participants identified with one or more racial categories, while two-thirds said

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they were biracial, mixed or multiracial. One in five were Black or African-American, about a tenth were Hispanic or Latino, and a tenth were Asian. Some 7% identified as North African or Middle Eastern, and a small percentage identified with other racial or ethnic groups.

Two-thirds of the respondents were raised Jewish and a similar percentage have at least one Jewish parent. About 40% said they converted to Judaism.

The researchers behind the study noted the diversity of both backgrounds and views among the participants.

“Jews of color are anything but monolithic, but there are common, prevalent trends about the places and moments when they are not fully embraced by the community or made to only bring a part of themselves to a program or congregation,” said Dalya Perez, a member of the research team who works as an equity strategist for Microsoft. According to her biographical description, Perez is the daughter of an immigrant father from the PhilSee RACIAL JUSTICE on Page

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Happy New Year to all my friends in the Jewish Community. Thank you for your continued support.

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Jewish Groups Lead Opposition To Bill Forcing Foundations To Pay Out Targeted Donations Within 15 Years

By Ron Kampeas Jewish federations have become major clearinghouses for donoradvised funds, which allow donors to funnel charitable giving through an existing foundation to a dedicated cause. There now is no time frame for foundations to disburse Sen. Angus King of Maine has co-sponsored a bill on donor-advised funds that is facing the donations. opposition from nonprofit groups. (Anna The Jewish Federations of North Moneymaker/Getty Images) America spearheaded a letter makWASHINGTON (JTA) — Doz- ing the appeal to the leaders of the ens of Jewish organizations are Senate Finance Committee in spearheading an appeal by nonprof- response to a bill introduced last its to stop a bill that would force the month by Sens. Angus King of disbursement of donor-advised Maine, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats, and Chuck funds within 15 years.

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Grassley of Iowa, a Republican.

Dozens of national and local Jewish groups signed on.

Donor-advised funds “are the simplest, most flexible, and most economical way for philanthropists to make these gifts,” said the letter sent Monday to Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the committee’s chairman, and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, its top Republican. “They encourage donors and their families to develop long-term giving plans and ensure that charities have the resources to realize their philanthropic visions far into the future.”

The funds provide advantages for the giver and the foundation: The donor gets the tax break up front, even though it may take years for the foundation to disburse the funds, and is spared the headache of setting up a private foundation. The foundation charges administrative fees.

An additional appeal for Jewish groups is how administering the funds deepens a relationship with a

donor. For Jewish federations and other Jewish groups, facilitating a donation to a favored non-Jewish cause is seen as a means of keeping the donor interested in Jewish causes.

A number of major Jewish and non-Jewish groups have signed onto the letter, among them the Anti-Defamation League, the Union for Reform Judaism, the American Jewish Committee and the American Red Cross.

King and Grassley, in a release last month, cited nonprofits that back their initiative.

“Charitable dollars ought to be doing the good they were intended for, not sitting stagnant to provide tax advantages for some and management fees for others,” Grassley said in the release. “The reform measures we are putting forward will ensure that the incentives for charitable giving actually result in money going to charities.” 

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Jewish National Fund-USA Launches ‘This Is What Zionism Looks Like’ Campaign

By Ryan Torok

The first phase of a new JNF-USA campaign allows people to post an online photo of themselves or beautiful places with the words, “This is What Zionism Looks Like." (Courtesy of JNF-USA)

Decades after the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism was a form of racism, Zionists continue to be maligned on college campuses, social media and city streets.

Confronting the ongoing hostility toward Zionism in a positive, multifaceted way, Jewish National Fund-USA (JNF-USA) launched “This is What Zionism Looks Like,” a campaign that features a website, social media strategy, online events, boot camps, and educational courses designed with the aim of celebrating Zionism and reclaiming what Zionism really means.

“The word ‘Zionism’ has been hijacked from us,” JNF-USA CEO Russell F. Robinson said in a phone interview. “We can no longer allow others to define it for us; we need to own our own narrative. At Jewish National Fund-USA, we decided to tackle this head on, not to attack the attackers—that is what other people do—rather to talk about the beauty, the substance, the building, the commonality that Zionism brings.

Zionism is a reclaiming of our ancestral soil and a building of our people together. It is a beautiful thing, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of it.”

The first phase of the JNF-USA campaign allows people to visit a website and post a photo of themselves or beautiful places and things with the words, “This is What Zionism Looks Like,” in the frame.

They can then share the picture on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp. As of press time, nearly 5,500 images had been posted at share. jnf.org.

The campaign also invites people from across the globe to join in the conversation about the many facets of Zionists during biweekly oneon-one conversations and moderated panels. Guests participating in THE

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these discussions will include Zionist historian and activist Gil Troy, human rights attorney Arsen Ostrovsky, and Zionist activist and author of the Almost Jewish blog, Virag Gulyas. Panels will explore topics including, “Can You be Progressive and be a Zionist?” and the Textures of the Jewish World.

On August 10, Shahar Azani, senior vice president at the Jewish Broadcasting Service and a former official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, is moderating the first panel, “Israel: A Light unto the World,” featuring leaders from four Israelibased organizations providing humanitarian aid around the globe.

“It excites me that a significant organization is willing to acknowledge that Zionism is an issue that needs to be addressed and is not just focusing on its own specific work,” Azani said in an interview from Israel. “I love this global perspective and am hoping a lot of people will join because Zionism is a value shared by all of us, is important to all of us, and we can’t allow our children to be called Zionist like it’s a slur. That is just unacceptable.

“It’s time people start seeing Israel for what it is: an amazingly small country, a sliver of land in the Middle East that is busy going out there and changing people’s lives in Africa, in South America, in Asia, for the better,” Azani added.

The series of events titled, “Conversations on Zionism: Reclaiming the Narrative,” will launch on July 27, with Robinson in conversation with American presidential historian and Zionist activist Gil Troy, author of the influential 2001 essay, “Why I Am a Zionist.”

J N F USA is launching the campaign in conjunction with a significant fundraising effort for its World Zionist Village, a 21-acre,

$350 million center for community, learning and love of Israel that will be built in Beersheva, Israel, and is expected to open in 2025. The Village will bring together high school students from Barcelona to Alabama; college kids from the United States on a gap year; adults looking for more Zionist education; and more.

The Village will also house a hotel and a conference center, which community groups and tours of all faiths from around the world will be able to utilize.

“It’s going to have an ecosystem, a Zionist ecosystem that is going to cause a new conversation, a conversation that is based on shared values and common destiny, not on right or left, religious or non-religious, or Diaspora or Israel,” Robinson said.

Vivian Grossman, JNF-USA’s National Vice President of Marketing, is helping organize the Conversations on Zionism discussions, and is one of the thousands of people who have taken their picture and

posted it to social media as part of JNF-USA’s new campaign.

Grossman, who lives in South Florida, became involved with JNF-USA 12 years ago, and hasn’t looked back since.

“I realized I needed to do everything to make Israel stay strong,” she said. “In order for the Diaspora to stay strong we need a strong Israel, and it was apparent to me that Israel staying strong was what JNF-USA is about.”

For more information, visit jnf. org/ZionismConversations.

This is a paid post. JTA’s editorial team had no role in its production.

This is a Paid Post from the Jewish National Fund-USA, which ensures a strong, secure, and prosperous future for the land and people of Israel, and Jewish people everywhere.

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A Jew, a Christian, a Muslim and a Baha’i: Welcome to Abrahamic House, an Interfaith Living Community

By Eric Schucht

Left to right, Abrahamic House residents Maya Mansour, Ala' Khan, Hadar Cohen and Jonathan Simcosky pose from their experimental interfaith living community in Los Angeles. A second Abrahamic House intends to open soon in Washington, D.C. (Courtesy of Abrahamic House via Washington Jewish Week)

(Washington Jewish Week via JTA) — Picture four young adults of different faiths sharing one house for one year. That’s not the premise of a new reality TV show. It’s just reality.

Abrahamic House is an interfaith fellowship program in which four people ages 21 to 35 share a home for one to two years. In exchange for subsidized rent, the residents organize programs and community events.

It’s a concept inspired by the Moishe House group-living program, but instead of involving only Jews, Abrahamic House is home to a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim and a Baha’i.

“We are trying to build bridges,” said Abrahamic House founder Mohammed Al Samawi, 34.

At the moment, there’s only one Abrahamic House — in Los Angeles. And the inaugural class of residents moved in just before COVID19 hit. But a second house will open Sept. 1 in Washington, D.C. Now all it needs is a (physical) house and people to live in it.

Applications for the D.C. Abrahamic House are open. Once the four fellows have been selected, they will be offered three possible sites for their house, Al Samawi said.

With Abrahamic House, Al Samawi wants to promote collaboration among adults from often hostile religions, and to challenge their stereotypes of each other. With any luck, such success will spread to the broader community.

Born in Yemen to a Muslim family, Al Samawi said he was raised to think Christians and Jews were his enemies. At 23, a teacher gave him a copy of the Bible. He began questioning what he had learned and started connecting with Jews and Christians on social media to learn more about them. He became an interfaith activist.

That’s when he started receiving death threats from extremists, he said.

When Yemen’s civil war broke out in 2015, Al Samawi was stuck in his small apartment in the city of Aden. He tried to lay low as he ran out of food, water and money.

With all flights out of the country canceled due to the fighting, Al Samawi reached out on social media for help escap6

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ing. Four Americans — three Jews and one Christian — came to his aid. They were practically strangers. Al Samawi only knew them from conferences, but they helped him leave the country on a fishing boat heading across the Red Sea to Djibouti.

His escape, which he has since recounted in his 2018 memoir “The Fox Hunt,” only strengthened his belief that what he was raised to think was wrong. People of different religions are not necessarily enemies, and interfaith work can lead to good.

“Without interfaith, I wouldn’t be speaking with you today,” Al Samawi said in a phone interview. “I would probably be dying in Yemen of suffering from the war.”

Al Samawi came to the United States and in 2015 received political asylum. He thought his fate was to become a barista. Instead he was hired to coordinate Middle East efforts for the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, a faith-based diplomatic nonprofit.

And he began telling his story at speaking engagements. One was hosted by Moishe House, which is where Al Samawi learned about the organization that plants houses and fills them with young Jews who draw a community around them.

“I loved the idea of just having a house for four or five Jews doing Shabbat dinners together,” Al Samawi said. “And because I’m always thinking about interfaith, I wanted one day do something similar to that, but instead of being only for Jews, it would be for everyone.”

For guidance, Al Samawi reached out to David Cygielman, Moishe House’s founder and CEO. Cygielman now serves on Abrahamic House’s board. Two other Jews, Jenna Weinberg and Daniel Pincus, also sit on the board.

Al Samawi launched the first Abrahamic House last year in Los Angeles, where he lives. He said

he chose Washington for the second house because he is familiar with the city, having lived there for his first two years in the U.S. And as the capital, Washington is a symbol of coexistence.

“You can find everyone from around the world in Washington. It’s an international city,” Al Samawi said. “You have all these young people trying to be part of NGOs, be part of political life, be part of charity. And I love that.

I feel like Washington, D.C., can be and it should be the center of Abrahamic House.”

The Jewish resident of the inaugural Abrahamic House in Los Angeles, which wrapped in January with a virtual graduation ceremony, was Hadar Cohen, a Jerusalem-born Mizrahi artist and spiritual healer. She shared the house with Jonathan Simcosky, a Christian book editor; Maya Mansour, a writer, photographer and model of the Baha’i faith; and Ala’ Khan, a Muslim filmmaker.

“I think it was valuable and educational,” Cohen told the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles about her time at Abrahamic House.

She further explained to Religion News Service that being at the house made her aware of how much she had kept her own “Jewishness hidden,” because “there’s a lot of fear, the hatred that comes with it.” (Cohen did not respond to a JTA request for an interview.)

Al Samawi’s goal is to have an Abrahamic House in all 50 states, plus in Morocco.

“In order to achieve this dream, we need to move step by step,” he said.

Each step will require fundraising.

“We are consistently fundraising to be able to open houses and do the programs,” Al Samawi said.

A version of this story originally ran in the Washington Jewish Week via Mid-Atlantic Media.

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Torah Commands Both Love And Vengeance. In Israel, We Face That Contradiction Every Day.

By Haviva Ner-David

A view of the Galilee, in northern Israel (Flickr Commons)

KIBBUTZ HANNATON, Israel (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Like Tikvah, one of the two main characters in my debut novel, “Hope Valley,” I moved to Israel out of Zionist ideology. Growing up, I went to Zionist schools and summer camps, where I imbibed the narrative that after 2,000 years of exile and oppression, even genocide, we, the few, defeated the many evil nations who were out to destroy us, and created a third Jewish sovereignty here on this land promised to us by God. But once living on this land, I slowly began to open my eyes, ears and heart, and realized I had only been told part of the story. Like Tikvah, who meets the Palestinian protagonist of my novel, Rabia (or Ruby), and hears her family’s story, I

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began to form close friendships with Palestinians and look beneath the surface of what I had been taught. I did my own research and listened to my friends’ family stories, and I began to get a broader picture.

When I read this week’s Torah portion, Ekev, I hear echoes of the Zionist narrative of my upbringing. Moses tells the Israelites as they are about to cross the Jordan River into Canaan: If you shall diligently keep all these commandments which I command you, to do them, to love YaHWeH your God, to walk in all God’s ways, and to hold fast to God, then will God drive out all these nations from before you, and you shall possess greater nations and mightier than yourselves.

Every place where the sole of your foot shall tread shall be yours; from the wilderness to the Levanon, from the river, the River of Perat, to the uttermost sea, shall be your border.

There shall no man be able to stand against you. (Deut. 10:22-24) Moreover, we are told: You shall consume all of the peoples which YaHWeH your God shall deliver to you. Your eyes shall not

have pity on them, and you shall not worship their gods. For that will be a snare for you. (Deut. 7:15) As I read this week’s Torah portion, I want to close the book in dismay. If this is what my most sacred religious text tells me, then this religion is not for me. But then another verse in this week’s Torah portion catches my eye: “And love the stranger because you were strangers in Egypt.” (Deut. 9:19). I grasp onto this lone voice of collective memory that is not about vengeance but rather love and compassion.

These are the two voices I heard inside my head as missiles were falling on us weeks ago, and much of the world did seem to have turned against Israel and the Jews. There is an enemy who wants to wipe us out.

There is antisemitism. There is an anti-Israel bias. Our collective trauma is not unfounded. How easy it would be to turn to this week’s Torah portion for justification to close the heart I worked hard to open.

But how can I love the stranger if my heart is hardened? If I cannot have compassion on the stranger,

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how can I love her?

In this same Torah portion, we are told to love not only the stranger, but to love God — with all of our hearts and all of our souls.

(Deut. 9:12) How can I love this vengeful God with my heart when my heart is a compassionate heart?

How can I love this jealous, powerhungry God with my soul when my soul is an expansive universalist soul? Does having no pity align with what we today call “Jewish values”? Perhaps for some it does, but for this human with this heart and this soul, it does not.

I am reminded of the powerful documentary film “Blue Box,” directed by Michal Weits, greatgranddaughter of Yosef Weitz, the mastermind of the Zionist plan to create a Jewish majority in a sovereign Jewish state. The Jews were a minority on this land before 1948, which is why they were happy to accept the Partition Plan. When the surrounding Arab countries attacked, See TORAH on Page

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For These US Jews Of Color, Encountering Israel’s Diversity Was An Eye-Opening And Affirming Experience

By Michele Chabin

Birthright’s open-tent approach to recruitment has meant that many of its participants have a hyphenated identity, either ethnically or religiously. (Sarah Korbluh)

JERUSALEM – Arel Moodie, the son of a white Jewish mother and a Black father, experienced a core identity struggle through most of his teenage years.

“It was one of the biggest pieces of turmoil in my adolescence,” said Moodie, who was raised in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Brooklyn and attended Jewish camps every summer.

“I asked myself, ‘Who am I? Where do I fit in?’ I felt like I had to make a choice between the Jewish side, the white side, the Black side.”

Moodie, now 37, began to find some answers during a Birthright Israel trip several years ago, where a chance encounter changed the

way he thought about himself.

Excited at seeing a Black Israeli soldier wearing a kippah, Moodie decided to approach him.

“I went up to him expecting that this incredible, long-lost brother would hug me,” he said. “It was like, ‘Omigosh there’s more of us!’

I sort of pantomimed, ‘You’re a Brown Jew, I’m a Brown Jew. That’s amazing!’ But he told me, ‘No, we’re just Jewish.’”

Moodie said the encounter led him to “own” his Jewishness, whereas previously he would elide the issue by telling himself and others that he was simply raised Jewish or that his mother was Jewish.

“I had always put a qualifier to my Jewish identity,” Moodie said.

“I realized I can just be Jewish while honoring my African-American identity. I don’t have to choose between my identities.”

Today he goes to synagogue regularly and his children attend Jewish day school.

Since its inception in 1999, Birthright has had a mission to

ensure Jewish continuity by strengthening the Jewish identity of Jewish young adults as well as their connections to Israel and each other through an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel.

Birthright’s open-tent approach to recruitment has meant that many of its participants have a hyphenated identity, either ethnically or religiously, or both. So being a Black Jew or Asian Jew or Latino Jew or Persian Jew has made their lives richer — but often more complicated.

“For some Jews of color, what seems to be society’s insistence on choosing one identity over another — for example, you’re Black in one space and Jewish in another — has led to internal identity struggles,” said Tema Smith, a diversity advocate and Jewish community builder.

“What is needed now is for the Jewish community to broadcast loudly that Jews can hold multiple identities and that there is no conflict between a Jewish identity and being from another group.”

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An encounter with an Israeli soldier changed the way Arel Moodie, the son of a white Jewish mother and a Black father, viewed his Jewish identity. (Courtesy of Moodie)

From its outset, Birthright enthusiastically welcomed Jewish young adults regardless of their racial or ethnic background, affiliation with Jewish institutions or religious observance.

Zohar Raviv, Birthright’s vice

president of educational strategy, described it this way: “We believe that whereas unity among Jews has always been a value, uniformity between Jews has never been a value.”

Amy Albertson, a Chinese-Jewish resident of Sacramento, California, who came on Birthright in her early 20s and ultimately lived in Israel for several years, said the experience exposed her to a Jewish diversity she never knew existed.

Ultimately that made her feel more comfortable in her own identity as both a Jewish and Chinese American.

“I grew up around Jews who looked a certain way: Eastern European,” Albertson said. “Until I went to Israel I didn’t know there were so many other types of Jews. In Israel, there were Jewish people from everywhere: I was able to interact with Mizrahim, Russians, Ethiopians and so many others.”

For Albertson, now 30, the opportunity to meet a diversity of Jews in Israel was a happy revelation.

“I didn’t grow up with a lot of Jewish tradition, and I would always get nervous in Jewish spaces because I didn’t know how to do this or that” religious ritual, she said.

Although Albertson became very Jewishly active in college, it wasn’t until she traveled to Israel for the first time with Birthright that she realized “to feel Jewish, all you have to do is exist. In Israel, Shabbat feels like Shabbat. It doesn’t matter if you go to shul or light See DIVERSITY on Page

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‘All The Cliches On The Table’: Germany’s ‘Friday Night Jews’ Talk Show Uses Humor To Familiarize Germans With Jewish Culture

By Joe Baur

Actor Daniel Donskoy hosts "Friday Night Jews." (Christian Pries)

BERLIN (JTA) — “Jude, Jude, Jude einfach nur ein Wort.”

The phrase — “Jew, Jew, Jew is just a word” — comes near the start of the opening rap theme song to the German talk show “Freitagnacht Jews” (“Friday Night Jews”), a state-sponsored program aimed at broadening the German public’s understanding of Jews and questions of Jewish identity.

The rap goes on to other punchy lines, such as “Antisemitismus ist in Deutschland Sport” (“Antisemitism is a sport in Germany”), before lapsing into a refrain of “Jude, Jude, Jude” like a kind of techno niggun.

At the start of every episode, viewers join the show’s host, Jewish actor Daniel Donskoy, in the kitchen. He’s busy whipping up a mix of traditional Jewish dishes for his guests, like latkes and borscht, or Moroccan chraime, as taught to him by Shani Leiderman — the owner of the Israeli restaurant Beba in Berlin.

Next, the episode’s guests are introduced. Joining Donskoy thus far at his roundtable have been figures such as Helene Braun, poised to be the youngest and first openly LGBTQIA rabbi in German history, and Sascha Chaimowicz, editor in chief of Zeit-Magazin (the prestigious magazine of the widely-read Zeit newspaper), who has a German-Jewish father and a mother from Trinidad and Tobago.

“We talk to [Sascha] about what it means to be Black and Jewish in a country where Lenny Kravitz doesn’t exist, where Drake doesn’t exist,” Donskoy says.

While parts of American society are far more familiar with the basics of Jewish culture, humor and history — thanks in no small part to the ever-growing slate of TV shows and films with Jewish characters — Jewish representation in German media is largely limited to Holocaust films, deeply tying public perceptions of Jews to the tragedy or to Israel. In that context, “Friday Night Jews” is a radical and ambitious program. It recently finished up its first season of eight episodes, and while a second season has not been announced yet, viewers can watch the first online (in German).

The show is just one of the German government’s many initiatives tied to a year-long sponsored celebration of 1,700 years of Jewish life in Germany — a program that some local Jews have criticized amidst a wave of antisemitism plaguing the country.

The series is equal parts irreverent and sincere. In the first episode,

Donskoy openly jokes with his guests, author Mirna Funk and actor Susan Sideropoulos, about the concept behind the show — they call it “Jew porn” — and humorously embraces Jewish stereotypes about money. During a discussion about the invitations famous German Jews are receiving to appear at some of the 1,700 year celebration events, Funk quipped that she’s happy to appear for the money.

“Let’s get all the cliches on the table!” Susan Sideropoulos says.

That kind of direct humor generally makes Germans uncomfortable, but it’s a staple of the Jewishness Donskoy says he wants to celebrate. That brand of comedy was never a problem for him while living in London, where he performed in the play “Bad Jews” in the West End, he pointed out. The 31-year-old, who was born in Moscow and lived in Israel in his teenSee CLICHES on Page

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In A German City With 30 Jews, A Restored Art Deco Synagogue Will House Interfaith Efforts

By Toby Axelrod

A view of the new Cultural Forum Synagogue Görlitz (Screenshot from MDR Fernsehen)

(JTA) — For years after World War II, the once magnificent Goerlitz Synagogue in Germany housed a family with goats and pigs. The roof of the Art Deco building was crumbling; the government came close to demolishing the whole structure.

But this week, that very synagogue — the only one in the state of Saxony to survive the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 — was rededicated as a house of worship and space for interfaith gatherings after some 30 years of renovation and restoration.

The Cultural Forum Synagogue Görlitz — which soon will house both Jewish religious services and interfaith cultural events — was revealed in a streamed ceremony on Monday in an event that had been postponed several times due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Norwegian Jewish vocalist Bente Kahan performed, and local and national politicians, rabbis and other dignitaries offered remarks.

Completed in stages over the

years, the restoration was “lovingly done,” though it did not bring the synagogue fully back, said Alex Jacobowitz, a cantor and chair of the town’s Jewish community. For example, the tablets in the sanctuary with the Ten Commandments have not been restored, nor have the Stars of David on the building’s exterior, or the words from Exodus that once graced the entrance: “And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them.”

But the tiny Jewish community — fewer than 30 members — and its supporters did raise some 70,000 euros (about $83,000) to cover the cost of replacing a giant Jewish star that once stood on the building’s cupola, visible for miles around in the city of some 55,000 near the Polish border.

Architects William Lossow and Hans Max Kuhne designed the synagogue, which had room for the entire community of about 600 Jews at the time of its original opening in March 1911. The city of Goerlitz boasted numerous Jewish institutions at the time, Jacobowitz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He recently published a book about the synagogue.

In the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, Nazis set the building ablaze, but the local fire

department put out the flames. A few years later, many of the community’s Jews were deported and killed in the Holocaust.

After the war, the building — located in the former East Germany — fell into disrepair. For a while it was used to store theater props, and it also housed a local family and their farm animals. The city bought the synagogue from the remnant Dresden Jewish community in 1963, and then formally purchased it again from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany in 1990 after the country’s unification.

A group of local citizens championed its restoration. Ultimately the costs of some 12.6 million euros (about $15 million) were borne by the federal and state governments, as well as by private foundations and individuals. The first thing to be fixed was the roof, in 1990.

As the final touch, the new star is expected to be placed on the dome later this year, Jacobowitz said.

“After many decades, the Jewish community in Görlitz finally has

again a place of prayer and pause,” the Orthodox Rabbinical Conference Germany said in a statement Monday. “We hope that the synagogue in Görlitz will be a place of exchange and encounter for all citizens on this side and on the other side of the Neisse River, in order to learn much more about each other and from each other and to break down prejudices.”

In a gesture summing up years of interfaith efforts, the son of a Protestant minister who worked in the city donated his own Steinway piano to the space, saying it would “now find a new home” in the town where he was raised.

Among those speaking at Monday’s event were Goerlitz Mayor Octavian Ursu; the prime minister of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer; and Rabbi Akiva Weingarten of Dresden.

“I always have found it important that the synagogue has continued to show its scars,” Jacobowitz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “to show that the story of the Jews of Goerlitz will not be destroyed by political exigency.”

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Observing Yom Kippur With A Disordered Eating Past

By Sarah Simone (JTA) -- Yom Kippur is arguably one of the most important days in the Jewish calendar. It is the Day of Atonement, a day for reflecting and repenting, where sins of the previous year are acknowledged and restitutions are made. Your repentance sets the tone for the future, and intentions are set for bettering yourself in the year ahead. That the atoning traditionally manifests itself as fasting all day isn’t problematic for some.

For others, like me, who are either in recovery from or still struggling with an eating disorder, the issue is far more complex.

The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that one in five women suffer from eating disorders or disordered eating, a statistic that entirely excludes the men who are often overlooked. Regarding anorexia alone, men make up a quarter of those suffering and, according to the National Eating Disorder Association, are more likely to die due to the cultural denial of male eating disorders.

Anxiety-related disorders have been amplified during the pandemic, and those with eating disorders may be reverting to harmful behaviors to gain a sense of control.

My eating disorder began when I was 12 and landed me in the hospital by age 16. At 18, I was firmly in the beginning stages of my recovery, though it’s important to note that recovery is not a linear process with a fixed endpoint but a process with ups and downs. Most everyone who has received treatment for an eating disorder is aware of the therapeutic conversations that surround big holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter: These holidays all center around food. That’s not unusual by any stretch; where people gather, they often break bread.

What rarely exists in treatment, however, is a conscious awareness around Jewish holidays that center eating differently.

It’s one thing to have your mom looking over your shoulder making sure you fill your plate. It’s another to be religiously obligated to fast for a holy day, when fasting is exactly what you need to avoid.

Before my habits became public to my family and health care proTHE

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fessionals, I would fast every year for Yom Kippur. As a child, I’d been difficult, always feeling there was much for which I had to atone.

Later, in the thick of my eating disorder, it was an opportunity to restrict for a day without excuses or sleight of hand. Traditionally, you don’t have to fast until you’ve been a bar or bat mitzvah and are seen as an “adult” in the eyes of God. This usually falls around puberty, which is an unfortunate coincidence regarding eating disorder risk periods.

Once my eating disorder became public to my close family, at age 16, the conversation about Yom Kippur became all the more relevant. My overprotective mother immediately and adamantly said “No fasting!” She was right in doing so, and while I knew I shouldn’t — and couldn’t — disagree, I still felt like it was a copout. It’s not like every other girl my age hadn’t struggled with thoughts of frustration and sadness when it came to their body, I told myself, and they weren’t skipping the fast.

A few years of unhealthy choices and suddenly I’m exempt for life?

It didn’t seem right.

Children, elders and the ill are free from fasting. Those of us with eating disorders in our histories aren’t mutually exclusive to any of those categories. For me, that meant I needed more than a “well, babies don’t fast either” brushoff when I asked why I shouldn’t. Ultimately, Yom Kippur is a holiday about selfreflection and solitude, and I didn’t want to miss out on that. The point, as I’d always assumed, was kind of that you’re made to suffer, and in that suffering lies redemption.

But since then, I’ve come to realize several key things through my years of recovery regarding Yom Kippur, and what it means not to fast: 1. It’s a day for self-reflection, meaning that what everyone else is doing with their bodies in relation to their faith is none of your concern, and your eating habits should likewise be none of theirs (provided said eating habits are not causing you bodily harm).

2. The way to atonement is not through pain, and punishing your

body has nothing to do with redemption. My belief is that God wants each of us healthy and kind to ourselves, and when you are engaged in disordered behaviors, you’re not being either.

3. In terms of atonement, Yom Kippur is a day not only for thinking about your actions, but how your actions have affected others. When engaged in your eating disorder, you are thinking of yourself. This is an uncomfortable thought, since so many with this disease are peoplepleasers and accommodators, but in practice, it has truth. So think instead of your family, of those who love you and want you healthy and alive, and practice love for them by nurturing your own body.

Yom Kippur, more than being a Day of Atonement, is a day for setting goals and sealing fates for the coming year. If you are suffering or have suffered from an eating disorder, rather than repenting through the act of not eating, repent by giving your body and soul the sustenance they had once been denied.

Ask your body’s forgiveness, and

more than anything, try to forgive yourself.

Punishment and atonement are not the same; what I had assumed about the role of fasting was incorrect. Yom Kippur is not at all about suffering — it is about apologizing.

I used to spend the day, and much of my life, apologizing to others.

Now that I am healthy, on the Day of Atonement, I apologize to myself.

If you or someone you know is suffering from an eating disorder, you can call (800) 931-2237 for help, or visit nationaleatingdisorders.org.

This article originally appeared on Alma, a sister site of JTA. (Sarah Simone (she/her) in 2020 was a student at the University of Colorado Boulder studying English literature, Jewish studies, and peace and conflict studies. She is involved with the restorative justice community in Boulder and is interested in applying restorative techniques wherever possible to build a more just world.)

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Sukkot’s Message Is Essential During Our Climate Crisis

By Esti Shapiro

Credit: (tovfla/iStock/Getty Images)

(JTA) -- Growing up in the temperamental weather of Denver, Colorado, it was not at all unusual to experience rain, high winds, heat waves or even snow on Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival that typically falls in September or October.

Some years even saw all of these dramatic weather conditions over the course of the weeklong holiday.

This always made the exercise of building a sukkah, a temporary and fragile structure to “dwell” in for the week, feel all the more absurd.

Yet Sukkot has always been my favorite holiday. At its core, the exer-

cise of building and being in a sukkah is one of both trust and humility.

While we try our best to construct a sukkah that is stable, we don’t go to extraordinary lengths to fortify it; impermanence and fragility are a feature, not a flaw. We design our sukkah to be easily disassembled and reassembled each year, often replacing materials such as the natural roof, or schach, with time. This annual ritual of (re)construction is also a celebratory moment, an opportunity to acknowledge the cyclical nature of Jewish time and life.

When I was in architecture school, we learned about the Ise Jingu Shrine in Japan, which has been ritually deconstructed and reconstructed on two alternating sites every 20 years for over a thousand years. This practice is designed explicitly to preserve the knowledge of traditional Japanese wood joinery techniques and craft as well as the physical condition of the structure itself. In designing something to be temporary, and crafting it out of renewable materials (in this case lumber grown in vast forests surrounding the site of the shrine), a far greater permanence is achieved. Ultimately the ritual lasts much longer than any building or structure constructed only once, regardless of how impenetrably it was designed, can.

The similarities and shared wisdom of this shrine and the sukkah are evident. These examples of ancient construction knowledge and ritual run counter to everything else we think we know about architecture. We tend to think of construction as an exercise in dominance over the environment, an attempt to protect ourselves from the natural forces of weather and erosion.

But the impulse to build bigger,

stronger, more monumental and longer-lasting structures is one of the most direct and harmful contributors to our current climate crisis. Today, concrete is the most widely used construction material globally, accounting for approximately 8% of carbon emissions worldwide. More broadly, nearly 40% of global carbon emissions are a result of building construction and operation. The combative attitude that most of our structures express toward the environment is quite literally destroying it in real time at this very moment.

Conversely, on Sukkot we acknowledge that no construction endeavor is ever so enduring. We recognize uncertainty and vulnerability as fundamental to the human experience. We do not allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that building something strong enough to resist the weather outside makes us impervious to the more pervasive element of time. A sukkah does not attempt to resist these conditions; it tenuously embraces them. It is in this very act of humility, in recognizing the need for continuous rebuilding, that the ritual remains enduring. There are few structures in the world older than the practice of building sukkahs on this week of each year.

When I teach about Sukkot to my religious school students, we talk about leaving our homes for the fragility of the sukkah as a metaphor for venturing outside of our comfort zones. The vulnerability of the holiday challenges each of us to leave what we know — what is easy — for an opportunity for growth. I would argue that this is an urgent and timely lesson, not just for Jewish people, and not just this week.

The reality of climate change is

that it will make almost all of us a whole lot less comfortable over the coming years and decades. With unprecedented forest fires, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters across the United States and world, our current condition is requiring us to drastically reconsider the ways we live and interact with our environment Acting with humility and acknowledging our vulnerability may mean accepting a broader range of temperatures as “comfortable” on our thermostats or resisting the convenience of personal car ownership.

More importantly, however, this will require us to act not just as individuals but as a collective through policy and structural change to resist the tendencies of human ego toward building bigger and stronger and more destructive societies.

On Sukkot, and all year, we should remember that endurance is achieved not through material monumentality, but through the much more nebulous constructions of the social: tradition, interpersonal connection, ritual, and celebration.

So this year, when I bundle up in extra layers and blankets to brave a brisk autumn evening for a holiday dinner, I will take an extra moment to appreciate the insight of our ancestors. As I take in the familiar sound of wood-framed canvas walls gently swaying, the smell of pine branch schach overhead, and the glimpse of a full moon through its needles, I will consider how our tradition has always recognized the means to a healthy, livable, harmonious, and enduring, if uncertain, future.

(Esti Shapiro is a designer and writer, trained as an architect, as well as a religious school teacher.)

This article originally appeared on Alma, a sister site of JTA.

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Amid Debates Over Vaccines And Masks, Jewish Day Schools Buckle Down For A Third Year Of Covid

By Ben Sales

Students at SAR Academy during the 2020-21 school year. (Courtesy of SAR)

NEW YORK (JTA) — When the school year ended two months ago, Rabbi Bini Krauss allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief.

His Modern Orthodox day school, SAR Academy, had been perhaps the first Jewish school in the country to close due to COVID when the virus hit its New York City neighborhood in early March 2020. The school rapidly pivoted to remote learning, and last year, with students masked, distanced and doing as much as possible outside, it stayed open in-person all year.

Right before the summer began, Krauss began to feel like the school just may have weathered the pandemic successfully. Older students and teachers were being vaccinated and positivity rates were cratering.

“We felt like, wow, we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “We knew that it wasn’t quite fully mission accomplished, but we certainly felt good and knew we were going into a positive summer and to a better place.”

Now he feels differently.

As schools across the country welcome back students, the spread of the Delta variant and rising case numbers have meant that instead of celebrating a return to normal, Jewish schools along with others have returned to debates about masks and vaccines that feel like they’ve only escalated a year and a half into the pandemic.

“We feel like it’s hard to believe that we’re convening our medical committees again and that we’re making decisions again about masking, very difficult decisions about vaccine mandates,” said Krauss, SAR’s principal. “It’s certainly, on one hand, a little deflating. On the other hand, I think we all feel like we’re a lot better equipped than we were a year ago.

We know a lot about what we potentially need to do if we need to do it.”

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Schools are reopening against their top priority is keeping kids Smith Jewish Day School in Marythe backdrop of state and national healthy and in school. Schools in land. “I think everyone understands debates over whether students need both left- and right-leaning states the situation that we’re in and to mask and whether teachers will be imposing mask mandates on they’re supportive as long as we should be forced to vaccinate, as students, doing activities outside can keep school open and the kids well as concerns about the Delta and either requiring or urging teach- will be safe.” variant’s increased transmissibility. ers and eligible children to vacciAlong with mandating masks, Public school districts in Texas and nate.

Charles E. Smith will be requiring Florida are imposing mask man“I’ve spoken to a lot of parents, that teachers and students older dates on their students, defying and no one [said] that, oh, it’s so than 12 get vaccinated barring a bans on mask requirements issued terrible that we have to mask,” said See DAY SCHOOLS 19 by the governors of those two states. Rabbi Mitchel Malkus, head of on Page In Texas, the ban on mask require- school at the pluralistic Charles E. ments has also faced legal setbacks.

Other states have yet to issue statewide mask mandates for schools, leading to these fights taking place on the school district level. In a district outside Pittsburgh this week, a parent who opposed masking flashed a Nazi hand signal after the board voted to require masks.

In Oregon and most of California, public school students will be required to mask. And on Wednesday, California required that its teachers either vaccinate or be tested for Please Join us for a Day of Service to Give Back COVID regularly. This to our Citizens who have lost so much during week, the two largest Hurricane Ida! teachers’ unions in the

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country both signaled openness to such requirements.

“Vaccines are the single most important way of dealing with COVID,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s not a new thing to have immunizations in schools. I think we need to be working with our employers, not opposing them, on vaccine mandates.”

Because Jewish day schools are private, they aren’t subject to public school district policies or declarations from governors aimed at public institutions. And schools nationwide have said that

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The Anti-Defamation League And Hillel Are Now Working Together To Document Antisemitism On Campus

By Ben Sales

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The school was the site of a heated debate over antisemitism and anti-Zionism this year. (Wikimedia Commons)

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(JTA) — Over the last year, Jewish college students took it upon themselves to combat antisemitism at their schools. Now, two major Jewish organizations are working together to play a stronger role in fighting antisemitism on campus.

Some of the student activists documented incidences of antisemitism at colleges nationwide, often submitted anonymously, while others have taken a confrontational tone on social media. With some portraying themselves as the ideological successors to early Zionist activists, the students often argue that anti-Zionism and antisemitism overlap.

In a new partnership, Hillel International and the Anti-Defamation League are aiming to take a more traditional approach to the same issues — one that they say will not always treat anti-Israel activity as antisemitism.

Hillel and the ADL will together create a college-level curriculum on

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antisemitism and jointly document antisemitic incidents on campuses in the United States. But not every student government resolution endorsing the movement to Boycott, Divest from and Sanction Israel, known as BDS, will wind up in the groups’ database.

“Anti-Israel activism in and of itself is not antisemitism,” an ADL spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Situations vary widely with BDS, we will carefully evaluate each one and make a determination based on our criteria for antisemitism.”

For example, the ADL spokesperson told JTA, a BDS resolution alone would not count as antisemitism, “but if a student was excluded from the debate because he or she was Jewish, then it might be counted.”

The Hillel-ADL partnership, which will begin in the coming academic year, follows a spike in reported antisemitic incidents on campus. In the school year that ended in 2021, the ADL tallied 244 antisemitic incidents on campuses nationwide, an increase from 181 the previous school year. Hillel has a presence on more than 550 campuses and says it serves more than 400,000 students.

Accusations of antisemitism on campus have received significant attention from large Jewish organizations for years. Some Jewish leaders have long said anti-Zionist activity on campus constitutes antisemitism, especially as a string of student governments endorsed BDS. Hillel International prohibits partnerships with, and the hosting of, campus groups that support BDS. Anti-Zionist groups have at times targeted Hillel; last week, Students for Justice in Palestine at Rutgers University criticized the school’s Hillel in a statement endorsed by other campus groups.

In addition, the ADL has documented white supremacist propaganda campaigns on campuses nationwide.

Multiple national groups have filed complaints with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights based on campus antisemitism allegations. In 2019, President

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Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating “robust” enforcement of civil rights protections for Jews on campus and including some anti-Israel activity in the definition of antisemitism. Pro-Palestinian activists said the order would have a chilling effect on free speech on campus.

The ADL and Hillel International plan to develop a curriculum about the history of antisemitism and how it manifests currently. They will also survey schools nationwide to provide a better picture of the state of antisemitism on campus, and will create a dedicated system to tally incidents of antisemitism at colleges and universities, including a portal for students to report incidents confidentially.

The ADL did not detail how it would verify whether confidentially submitted incidents actually occurred, beyond telling JTA they would be judged by the methodology the group uses in its annual audit of antisemitic incidents. The methodology states that “ADL carefully examines the credibility of all incidents, including obtaining independent verification when possible.”

In recent months, the student activists have formed their own organizations to further their online activism, called the New Zionist Congress and Jewish on Campus.

The New Zionist Congress hosts an online book club and discussions about Zionism, while Jewish on Campus records stories of college antisemitism on its Instagram account, which has posted more than 400 times and has 32,000 followers.

The ADL said its partnership with Hillel would “complement” student activism and that the group “will firmly support well-meaning student-led efforts to push back against antisemitism on campus.”

The effort with Hillel is also the third partnership with an external organization that ADL has announced in the past two weeks. It recently launched a partnership to combat antisemitism with the Union for Reform Judaism, and last week began an initiative with PayPal to research how extremists use online financial platforms. THE

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The Danger Of That #nosejob Trend On TikTok

By Joanna Mann

ALMA

This article originally appeared on Alma.

(Design by Emily Burack; screenshot via TikTok; hand via mikroman6/Getty Images)

Don’t get me wrong, I love my “Jewish nose.”

But when more and more #nosejob and #nosejobcheck videos started popping up on my TikTok For You Page, it brought back those old unwanted feelings of hating my appearance I worked so hard to overcome. I wasn’t even interacting with the videos, yet for some reason I couldn’t get them off my feed.

On TikTok, the #nosejob hashtag has nearly 2.5 billion views, and #nosejobcheck has over a billion as well.

The videos are all pretty much the same: the first half consists of people showing their side profile in several pictures (truly a nightmare for those of us with nose insecurities!), a horrifying photo of their post-op bloody and bruised face, and then — finally — the new and improved nose, which is usually tiny, upturned and bump-free.

Watching them makes me think about all of the young teenage girls on the app who are no doubt seeing the same videos I am. If I had seen these “transformations” at 15, it would have destroyed my already fragile self-esteem. I can’t help but

wonder how many young teenagers today — including Jewish girls — are taking in these videos in harmful ways.

First, let’s just take a minute to talk about the antisemitic history of the stereotypical “Jewish nose.”

There is actually no proof that Jews tend to have larger noses, or any physical characteristics that group us together, for that matter. There are Jews of every size, shape and color, and the diversity of the Jewish experience is something to be celebrated. But …

The large, hooked nose stereotype dates back to the 1930s, when it was used in Nazi propaganda to stir disgust and hatred of Jewish communities. I remember learning in Hebrew school about Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher and what he wrote in a children’s book during World War II. “One can most easily tell a Jew by his nose,” he wrote.” The Jewish nose is bent at its point. It looks like the number six. We call it the ‘Jewish six.’ Many Gentiles also have bent noses. But their noses bend upwards, not downwards. Such a nose is a hook nose or an eagle nose.

It is not at all like a Jewish nose.”

While there is no proof that Jews inherently have big noses, this feature does in fact run in many Jewish families, including mine. Whenever people see a photo of my family, the first thing they do is laugh and point out that my older sister and I most defi-

nitely inherited my dad’s “Jew nose.”

And while we wear this feature as a badge of honor today, for me it hasn’t always been that way. As a teenager I would straighten my frizzy, wavy hair before school, shave my forearms and, God knows, avoid showing my side profile at all costs. I told myself I would get a nose job before college. Maybe then I would finally be pretty enough to escape the teasing comments and wear a ponytail with pride.

But when graduation rolled around, I thought more about it and realized that being Jewish was my favorite part of being me. And that meant I was finally ready to embrace any physical attribute that came along with it.

This didn’t happen right away, of course, and I still catch myself overthinking it at times. But at 22 years old, I no longer entertain the possibility of a nose job, and I found that learning to love my nose came with learning to love the other parts of myself I thought I needed to “work” on.

Which brings me back to TikTok. How many girls must be out there watching these videos and questioning if they should join in on the “trend”? I was shocked and horrified to find out that “Teenage Rhinoplasty” exists for kids 15 and older if they want it. Had I known this at 15, combined with the influx of viral TikTok videos, I would have found a way to make it hap-

Happy New Year to our many Customers and Friends in the Jewish Community from the Paretti family of dealerships

pen. And I would have missed out on the self-love and acceptance that came with time as I got older.

I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with getting plastic surgery.

If changing a part of your body will make you more comfortable in your own skin, you should absolutely go for it. But I don’t think being bombarded with cute videos of a lifechanging procedure as a child is the right way to go about making that kind of decision.

TikTok can be an incredibly fun outlet for Gen Z kids to express themselves, but it can also foster extreme insecurity and self-doubt. I hope teenage Jewish girls will scroll past these videos without a second thought, loving their amazing culture and the beautiful features that come with it.

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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Bookshelf

New Children’s Books For The Jewish New Year: Kangaroos, Jonah And 2 Guys Named Max

THE

“Here everyone belongs” is a welcoming message.

By Penny Schwartz BOSTON (JTA) -- Challah-eating Australian kangaroos, an adventurous cartoon retelling of the biblical story of Jonah and the welcome second-in-a-series chapter book about a young girl with a magical sense of smell are among the highlights of this year’s crop of Jewish children’s books for the High Holidays.

Kids named Max will be tickled by two books with their name in the title. And the prolific master storyteller Jane Yolen offers up a fun-toread-aloud story that young kids no doubt will ask for again and again.

The array of colorfully illustrated books will enliven the High Holidays, which begin this year with Rosh Hashanah on the evening of Sept. 6. Jewish families can bid farewell to the summer and usher in the Jewish New Year by cracking open these engaging new holiday books.

loons and a large bakery box tied to the roof? In this delightful board book, a trio of siblings and their adorable dog greet the start of Rosh Hashanah, enjoying a festive meal and hearing the shofar at synagogue. Varda Livney’s simple text is sprinkled with Hebrew words that are translated into English, such as “dvash” for honey. Her cartoon-style illustrations match the joyful verse and present a family with varying tones of skin color, a refreshing portrayal of the diversity of the Jewish world.

“Happy 'Roo Year: It’s Rosh Hashanah” Jessica Hickman; illustrated by Elissambura Kar-Ben; ages 1-4 Young kids will be hopping to welcome Rosh Hashanah with a “Rosh Hashanah with Uncle Max” fun-loving family of kangaroos in Varda Livney this lively book in rhyming verse.

Kar-Ben; ages 1 to 4 At synagogue, they hear the blowWho wouldn’t love a Rosh ing of the shofar, a ram’s horn, Hashanah visit from Uncle Max, along with their Australian friends who arrives in a pink car with bal- the koalas, wombats and wallabies.

#

7# 7

“Something New for Rosh Hashanah” Jane Yolen; illustrated by Christine Battuz Kar-Ben; ages 4-8 The kids will find a kindred spirit in Becca, a spunky girl who insists that she does not like anything new. In Jane Yolen’s delightful rhyming story set at the start of Rosh Hashanah, Becca declares “Never” to tasting her bubbe’s brisket and turns down kugel and even sweet honey cake.

But will something new on the New Year’s table attract Becca’s curiosity? Yolen, the acclaimed author of more than 400 books for children and dubbed “America’s Hans Christian Anderson,” delivers a charmer with playful language and repeating phrases that are perfect for reading aloud. Christine Battuz’s vibrant illustrations match the fun.

“Not So Fast, Max: A Rosh Hashanah Visit with Grandma” Annette Schottenfeld; illustrated

by Jennifer Kirkham Kalaniot Books; ages 4-8 When Emily and Max’s grandmother, who they call Savta, visits from Israel for Rosh Hashanah, they look forward to their favorite tradition -- making caramel apples.

But Max is impatient when Savta’s plan to visit an orchard to pick “tapuchim,” Hebrew for apples, will delay the process. Max wants no part of the fun until his spunky, youthful Savta surprises him with basket-shooting pointers and juggling lessons.

Annette Schottenfeld deserves praise for featuring an active, lively

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grandmother. Jennifer Kirkham’s large, expressive illustrations glow with the colors of fall. Back pages include a note about Rosh Hashanah, a glossary of Hebrew words, and recipes for Savta’s apple cake and Max’s caramel apples.

“Jonah’s Tale of a Whale” Kids will be engrossed by this cartoonlike, age-appropriate retelling of the story of Jonah based on the eponymous biblical book that is read aloud in synagogues on Yom

Kippur.

Jonah the prophet is not happy when God instructs him to warn the people of Nineveh to change their wicked behavior, thinking Israel’s enemies should be punished for their misdeeds. To avoid doing what God asks, Jonah flees on a ship, is thrown overboard in a storm and swallowed by a whale. Jonah realizes he was wrong, however, and when he is freed from inside the whale, he warns the people of Nineveh, who take heed and begin to act kindly to each other.

Barry L. Schwartz; illustrated

by James Rey Sanchez Apples & Honey Press; ages 5-9 Barry L. Schwartz, a rabbi and acclaimed author, balances the captivating adventure with the moral tale of the power of forgiveness.

James Rey Sanchez’s colorful, cinematic illustrations bring the action See CHILDREN'S BOOKS on Page

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A Guide To Kosher Food (And Vegan Options) At Every Major League Baseball Stadium

By Rob Charry

(Image design by Grace Yagel; Getty Images)

(JTA) — Jews love baseball — there’s no denying it. But when the baseball season opened in April, most major league stadiums were operating at restricted capacities and offered a limited number of concessions stands.

Not anymore. As the U.S. COVID19 vaccination rate has soared, many of the ballpark restrictions have been lifted, and remain so even in the face of the Delta variant case surge.

For those returning to the stands across the country (and Canada) who keep kosher, we have prepared this guide to eating in every stadium, from Seattle to Miami. There’s no favoritism — it’s aligned in alphabetical order.

Note that it also includes vegan options, which are plant-based and therefore considered by some to be acceptable in their kosher diets.

(Another thing to keep in mind: It appears to be policy now at most ballparks, if not all, that credit cards are required to buy food — though there are special ATM machines at parks that can convert your cash into prepaid debit cards.)

Atlanta Braves, Truist Park There are no kosher items here, but vegan food available includes a Beyond Burger and a smoked tofu sandwich. Like some other teams that have held a Jewish Heritage Night, the Braves have featured a special “kosher night” in past seasons. Unfortunately that does not appear to be on the docket this year with COVID wreaking havoc on scheduling.

Arizona Diamondbacks, Chase Field No kosher items are available.

There are vegan hot dogs, vegan chicken wraps and vegan burgers.

Sports

Baltimore Orioles, Camden Yards Though Camden Yards is nearly 30 years old, it’s still a tourist attraction and a great place to watch a game. Like many of the remaining older parks, there isn’t a bad seat in the house. From day one in 1992, the stadium has had a kosher food stand, apparently the first certified kosher stand in any of the major league stadiums. Now called Kosher Grille, fans can find it beyond the left field seats.

Boston Red Sox, Fenway Park The oldest ballpark in the American League has the most unique kosher serving device: a vending machine with kosher hot dogs since 2008.

But it didn’t stop there — Fenway now also has two other similar “food diners,” as the Hot Nosh vendor’s owner Wayne Feder called them, serving up kosher pizza, mozzarella sticks, potato knishes, onion rings, veggie burgers and more.

Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field In the National League’s oldest ballpark, the Cubs have a kosher cart behind Section 227. They also sell veggie burgers in several locations and veggie dogs behind Section 117.

Chicago White Sox, Guaranteed Rate Field No kosher items are listed, but vegan and vegetarian items include sandwiches, veggie burgers and an Asian appetizer duo from Impossible Foods, the brand behind the Impossible Burger.

Cincinnati Reds, Great American Ballpark No kosher items are listed, but they do sell veggie dogs (and regular Nathan’s hot dogs, which sadly are no longer kosher).

Cleveland Indians (soon to be Guardians), Progressive Field The park’s kosher hot dog stand is a thing of the past and there are no kosher items listed in the stadium’s offerings. However, vegan options include tacos, burritos, dogs and a garden salad.

Colorado Rockies, Coors Field No kosher foods are listed, though the Sandlot Brewery inside the ballpark says its beer is kosher certified.

The vegan foods available include a veggie dog and salads. The park also offers vegetarian quesadillas.

Detroit Tigers, Comerica Park See KOSHER FOOD on Page

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No kosher items here, but fans can pay homage to former Tiger slugger and Jewish sports legend Hank Greenberg — his statue is one of six on the concourse in left center field.

Greenberg’s 58 homers and 146 RBIs in 1938 is tops for a season among Jewish ballplayers. Vegan choices such as Beyond Burgers can be found in the Big Cat food court.

Houston Astros, Minute Maid Park The park doesn’t have any specifically kosher foods, but the Astros offer several vegan food options, such as the Beyond Burger, at stands behind Sections 109, 125 and 208. It also has salads, fruit, hummus and other items at the 19th Hole concessions stand in center field.

Kansas City Royals, Kauffman Stadium The Royals boast a stadium cart

by Kohn’s Kosher, a Jewish deli from nearby St. Louis (the deli menu is similar to the Kohn’s Kosher cart at the St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium). Vegan options include burgers, Beyond Burgers and Beyond Brats.

Los Angeles Dodgers, Dodger Stadium The Jewish sausage factory Jeff’s Gourmet had provided the park with kosher food, but not this season.

“Due to health and safety restrictions, we are unable to offer Jeff’s Gourmet until further notice,” the vendor said. Note that health and safety restrictions could be removed or eased at some point this summer, so check before your visit on the team’s website: mlb.com/dodgers/ ballpark/information/guide. Dodger Stadium does have a variety of vegan options as well, including Beyond Burgers, Beyond Sausages, tempeh tacos and tempeh nachos with vegan cheese.

Miami Marlins, LoanDepot Park Kosher hot dogs and hamburgers can be found behind Section 3 — except on Shabbat, of course, as the team website makes clear.

Milwaukee Brewers, American Family Field The kingdom of the ballpark sausage does not offer a kosher option of the famed Milwaukee bratwurst or other proteins. Non-meat options include soft pretzels, popcorn and fries, but otherwise it’s slim pickings.

Minnesota Twins, Target Field While there are no kosher items offered, the stadium does offer a vegan burger and veggie burritos

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and tacos.

New York Mets, Citi Field The Mets offer several kosher products, including hot dogs, knishes and pretzels, which can be purchased near Sections 115 and 130 on the Field Level, as well as Section 408 on the Promenade Level. There are also vegan options at the many restaurants and concession stands scattered throughout the park.

New York Yankees, Yankee Stadium Strictly Kosher, which features items such as hot dogs and knishes, is in four locations — behind Sections 110, 214A , 229 and 321. The Yanks also offer plenty of vegan items, such as field roast hot dogs and burgers, black bean burgers, Beyond Sausages and vegan sushi.

There is more than enough kosher and vegan food to satisfy “long suffering” Yankee fans, who haven’t won a World Series since 2009.

Oakland Athletics, RingCentral Coliseum No kosher foods are listed. Nor are there any vegan items listed among the foods available for mobile orders.

But Aramark, which is in charge of the stadium’s food operations, does offer veggie dogs and veggie burgers at the other ballparks they cater. So there’s always next year.

Philadelphia Phillies, Citizens Bank Park Concessions manager Bruce Leith told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Unfortunately, we have not offered kosher items except on Jewish Heritage Night due to several reasons, including preparation concerns and other factors.” But he added that permanent kosher food offerings have been under discussion and will be something the Phillies hope to offer in the future.

Jewish Heritage Night has not been scheduled yet this summer — like most teams, the immediate concern was being up and operational by Opening Day. Citizens Bank Park also offers a variety of vegan options, including dogs and burgers. Before the pandemic, the Phils also had a stand that sold famed musician and Philadelphia native Questlove’s vegan Beyond Meat cheesesteak. It won’t be back this season — they’ve had to pause agreements with several vendors because of COVID-19 restrictions — but it could return in 2022.

Pittsburgh Pirates, PNC Park The Pirates do not offer kosher food, but like their counterparts at See KOSHER FOOD on Page THE

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the other end of the state (the Phillies), they have had Jewish Heritage Nights in the past, where they bring in kosher food, and may well have one at some point this summer (even though nothing is currently scheduled). Vegan items include a burger and a greens and grain salad.

San Diego Padres, Petco Park While they have no kosher items, no less than a dozen of their concession stands are listed as vegetarian friendly.

San Francisco Giants, Oracle Park Although there are no official kosher selections, they do sell Hebrew National hot dogs — which many Jews consider kosher, despite a longstanding dispute over its certification.

And there are plenty of vegan food options, including at the Garden (in an actual garden) behind center field and the John J. McGraw Derby Grill, which sells Impossible Burgers. A veggie cheesesteak can be found at Outta Here Cheesesteaks.

Seattle Mariners, T Mobile Park No kosher food listed here. There is a concession stand, The Natural, with vegan and organic foods including Beyond Burgers, vegan sausages and other plant-based food.

St Louis Cardinals, Busch Stadium The aforementioned Kohn’s Kosher has a presence here as well, behind Section 147. Among their items: pastrami and corned beef sandwiches, knockwurst and hot dogs. Kohn’s has operated inside the new Busch Stadium since it was built in 2013, which

happened to be the last time the Cardinals were in the World Series (they lost to the Red Sox, but the Cards do hold the National League record for most world titles at 11).

Tampa Bay Rays, Tropicana Field The Rays do not list any kosher food but they do have several vegan food items, including Beyond Burgers, and vegetarian rice bowls with vegan sauces.

Texas Rangers, Globe Life Field The good news is they sell Hebrew National hot dogs. The bad news is the kosher Centerfield Market stand from the Rangers’ last stadium didn’t make it into the new ballpark — the team technically moved into its new home last year, but this is the park’s first year with fans. It does have a vegan cart with plenty of options, though.

Toronto Blue Jays, Rogers Centre The Jays returned to their home base on July 30, after playing their games for more than a year in Buffalo due to the COVID-induced Canadian border closure. The Rogers Centre offers kosher hot dogs, sausages and french fries at the Olde Spadina in section 131.

Washington Nationals, Nationals Park Kosher Nats fans can rejoice: Max’s Kosher Grille features falafel, homemade sausages and hot dogs from the deli in Wheaton, Maryland. Vegan food choices are available as well at other concession stands.

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medical exemption. SAR Academy, which is Modern Orthodox, will also be mandating vaccines for teachers and students, and will make a final decision about masking soon.

Schools in Florida and Texas are taking a slightly different approach.

The Torah Day School of Dallas, an Orthodox institution, is encouraging but not requiring students or teachers to vaccinate, though its head of school, Rabbi Avi Pekier, said all but two teachers are vaccinated.

Unlike many other Jewish schools, Pekier said his is still deciding whether to require its students to wear masks when school begins in two weeks. Last year it required students in grades 4 and above to wear masks. This year, he said, other local Orthodox schools and synagogues have not required masks, and given how much students interact with the broader community, he believes masking only at his one school will have a limited effect.

“As of right now, shuls are not mandating masks, and as far as I know it’s not even being talked about,” Pekier said Wednesday, as the status of mask mandates in and around Dallas appeared fluid. “It seems like a bit of a joke that our day school masks when everyone else in town is not.”

At the Scheck Hillel Community School in North Miami Beach, Florida, students from kindergarten through high school will eat lunch in an outdoor dining area, just as they did last year, and the school will still stress hygiene and sanitization. Masks will continue to be mandated, as the governor’s stance does not apply to private schools.

But the school will not be mandating that teachers or students vacci-

nate at this time.

“It’s the best protection we have other than the vaccination, and I would think it’s even more so than the vaccinations because masking is that physical barrier,” said Craig Carpentieri, Scheck Hillel’s interim head of school. He said most parents support the mask requirement, adding, “I don’t think any school is ever going to make everybody happy, but our primary focus is to keep everyone safe.”

While the school encourages vaccination, Carpentieri said that given differences of opinion within the school community about vaccines, and recent changes in public health recommendations, the school administration is stopping short of a mandate.

“I think where the challenge has come for the entire U.S. is that we’re doing great with vaccination rates and everybody said you can remove your mask, and then the Delta variant came, so there’s this yo-yo effect,” he said. “We’ve had some questions from parents but not many. It is private medical information, a person’s vaccination status. So it’s not as simple a question as where are you going for dinner tonight?”

With contributed reporting by Shira Hanau.

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‘The Shrink Next Door,’ A Dark Jewish-Themed Podcast, Is Becoming A TV Show With Will Ferrell And Paul Rudd

By Ben Sales Upper West Side of Manhattan who takes control of the life of one of his Jewish patients, is being made into a limited TV series.

And it’s starring two comedy stars who last collaborated on “Anchorman 2: The Legend ConWill Ferrell as the manipulated Jewish tinues.” patient Marty Markowitz in the trailer The 8-episode adaptation will for "The Shrink Next Door." (Screenshot) star Paul Rudd as Dr. Isaac “Ike” (JTA) — “The Shrink Next Herschkopf, the psychiatrist, and Door,” a 2019 reported podcast Will Ferrell as Marty Markowitz, about a Jewish psychiatrist on the the patient whose life he takes over.

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It will stream on Apple+ beginning in November.

The podcast, reported by Bloomberg columnist Joe Nocera, is dark and tragic. It narrates how, over the course of nearly three decades of therapy, Herschkopf came to dominate Markowitz’s life and finances, commandeer his house, treat him like hired help and cut him off from his family and friends.

According to the podcast and a subsequent trial at the New York State Department of Health, other patients of Herschkopf also accused him of manipulating them financially and getting them to sever relationships with their families — including a woman who, on Herschkopf’s advice, stopped speaking to her mother and didn’t attend her funeral or shiva. After an investigation of those allegations, the Department of Health ordered Herschkopf to surrender his license in April.

The podcast is chock-full of Jewish references. Markowitz was referred to Herschkopf by Shlomo Riskin, the prominent Modern Orthodox rabbi who, at the time, led Markowitz’s synagogue. Herschkopf hosted parties at what was, in fact, Markowitz’s house and invited an array of prominent Orthodox leaders.

Markowitz worked in the famously Jewish garment industry. And Herschkopf also ran a charity created by Markowitz that had a Hebrew name (and to which he instructed Markowitz to leave his millions in wealth). The list goes on.

While Rudd (born Paul Rudnitzky) is Jewish, Ferrell is not. He’s certainly not the first non-Jewish actor to take center stage in a very Jewish show, though there is no shortage of actors (including several of Rudd’s frequent collaborators, like Seth Rogen or Jason Segel) who often mine their Jewish background and culture in their acting.

The trailer for the show, released Thursday, hints at the story’s upsetting turns. Ferrell and Rudd, of course, are not known for their work in psychological drama. They’re

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best known for starring in blockbuster comedies such as “Anchorman” and “I Love You, Man.” But both actors have done dramatic work. In 2018, Paul Rudd starred in “The Catcher was a Spy,” a film about Moe Berg, a Jewish baseball player who becomes (you guessed it) a spy in World War II, based on a true story. And Ferrell has had his share of more serious roles, including in “Stranger than Fiction,” a 2006 dramedy in which he plays an introverted, straitlaced IRS agent. His character in this trailer seems to share similar qualities.

We’ll see in November whether Ferrell and Rudd can capture the feel of the twisted story — and its Jewishness.

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In ‘Lansky,’ Harvey Keitel Puts The Legendary Gangster’s Jewishness Front And Center

By Stephen Silver

Harvey Keitel stars as Meyer Lansky in "Lansky." (Vertical Entertainment)

(JTA) — Perhaps no American Jewish actor has been so closely associated with crime films as Harvey Keitel.

During a career now in its sixth decade, the 82-year-old Keitel has appeared in “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “Wise Guys,” “Bugsy,” “The Two Jakes,” “Reservoir Dogs” and “The Irishman,” among numerous other films.

Now he’s adding to the list with “Lansky,” portraying perhaps the most famous Jewish gangster of all time, Meyer Lansky.

Lansky, born in Russia in 1902, arrived in New York in 1911.

Known as the “Mob’s Accountant,” he was notorious in his own right, operating criminal rackets from Miami to Las Vegas to Cuba and playing a role in the establishment of what’s been called the National Crime Syndicate.

The film, is directed by Eytan Rockaway, has Keitel portraying Lansky in the later part of his life, telling his life story to a book author (“Avatar” star Sam Worthington). John Magaro plays Lansky in his younger years, and the cast also includes Minka Kelly, AnnaSophia Robb and David James Elliott.

While some films about Jews

and organized crime, such as Martin Scorsese’s “Casino,” have avoided much exploration of their characters’ Jewish identity — aside from the odd antisemitic slur — “Lansky” is upfront about the importance of Jewishness to Lansky’s story.

We see Lansky, in the run-up to World War II, brawling with Nazi sympathizers from the German-American Bund. We also see him saying Kaddish in a synagogue and telling a rabbi joke. A montage of brutality by the Jewish criminal outfit Murder, Inc., is scored with “Hava Nagila.”

“I’m an American, and a Jew,” Keitel as Lansky says in the film.

“The Germans wanted to destroy both of those things. So I wanted to destroy the Germans, and I did.”

Later he’s seen promising aid and help to the nascent State of Israel — only to feel betrayed in the early 1970s when Golda Meir’s government denied him asylum.

“It was an important element in his life,” Rockaway said of the inclusion of such details. “And I thought to emphasize that — not tremendously, but I felt it was important.”

The “Lansky” film is somewhat personal for the director. He’s the son of Robert Rockaway, a history professor and scholar on the subject of Jews and organized crime. The author of a 1993 book titled “But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters,” the elder Rockaway conducted a series of interviews with Lansky when the gangster was in

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his late 70s. The scenes in the movie with a fictitious journalist named David Stone are based loosely on Robert Rockaway’s own experiences speaking with Lansky.

The script, Rockaway said in an interview, drew on his father’s research, although the younger Rockaway also did some of his own, noting that he was especially influenced by Robert Lacey’s 1991 biography “Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life.” The two Rockaways share a “story by” credit for the film.

Rockaway, the son of an American father and an Israeli mother, was born in Israel and came to the U.S. for college after finishing his army service, living in New York. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Rockaway has made commercials and music videos, and “Lansky” is his second film as director following the 2016 horror movie “The Abandoned.”

“I tried to be as objective as I could, to a certain extent,” Rockaway said of the thorny issue often raised in movies about crime bosses. “I definitely didn’t want to glorify him, but he did bad and he did good.”

An active criminal for more than

Keitel with director Eytan Rockaway on set. (Vertical Entertainment)

a half century, Lansky was a rarity among gangsters in some key ways: Aside from serving a couple of months on a gambling charge, he avoided major prison time, and also managed to live to old age, passing away at 80 in 1983. That gambling conviction was costly, however, as it later led Israel to deny him asylum.

Lansky’s “good” side, at least according to the film, consisted of fighting Nazis, and also providing crucial support to Israel at the outset of its existence.

Rockaway says in the press kit: “Meyer was a husband, father, friend, killer, genius, criminal, patriot and the founder of the largest crime organization in American history. To fully understand and depict this complicated man, this film portrays various aspects of his life while See LANSKY on Page

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2021 Emmys: All The Jewish Nominees, From Jurnee Smollett To Michael Douglas

By Emily Burack

From left: Brett Goldstein, Jurnee Smollett, Michael Douglas, Hannah Einbinder and Tracee Ellis-Ross. (Apple TV, Netflix, HBO)

(JTA) — At the last Emmy Awards, “Schitt’s Creek,” the comedy from Jewish father-son duo Eugene and Dan Levy, swept the night, winning every comedy category for its sixth and final season.

While there’s no big Jewish show to cheer on for another powerhouse performance this year, there’s still a bevy of Jewish nominees, which were announced Tuesday.

Black Jewish Actresses Lead The Way Jurnee Smollett received her

first Emmy nomination, as lead actress in a drama series, for her role in “Lovecraft Country” starring as Letitia “Leti” Lewis. While the show won’t be returning for a second season — and contained a plot point that some viewers found antisemitic — the HBO horror show had 18 nominations.

Jurnee Smollett in “Lovecraft Country” (HBO)

As a child actress, Smollett made her debut on “Full House.” Then she starred in “On Our Own,” a 1994 ABC sitcom, with her five siblings.

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trailer. We would eat hot links and bagels for breakfast every morning — very Black and Jewish of us,” she joked.

Tracee Ellis Ross was tapped for lead actress in a comedy series for her role in “black-ish.” It’s her fifth nomination; she’s never won. Ross recently announced a docuseries with Oprah, “The Hair Tales,” about Black hair and a “love letter to Black women.”

British Jewish actress Sophie Okonedo, who calls herself a “Jewish Nigerian Brit,” received a nod for best guest actress in a drama series for “Ratched,” a Netflix prequel to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” She plays Charlotte Wells, a patient with dissociative identity disorder at Nurse Ratched’s hospital.

And Maya Rudolph scored her seventh and eighth Emmy nominations for her guest appearances on “Saturday Night Live” — for the episode she hosted and portraying Vice President Kamala Harris over the course of the season. She was nominated as well for her voiceover performance as Connie the Hormone Monstress in the puberty-themed (and very Jewish) animated comedy “Big Mouth.” Last year she won in both categories.

“Big Mouth”, co-created by the Jewish comedian Nick Kroll and his friend Andrew Goldberg, also was nominated for best animated show.

Michael Douglas stars as Sandy Kominsky in season three of “The Kominsky Method.” (Erik Voake/Neflix)

Jewish Comedies “The Kominsky Method”, starring Jewish actor Michael Douglas, returned for its third and final season in May — but not with Alan Arkin, the show’s other Jewish star.

“The less work I get, the better my health,” the 87-year-old Arkin said. “The stress in the marketplace is enormous and my system has a fast reaction. I can’t deal with stress anymore.”

Even without Arkin, the show still garnered six nominations, including nods for Douglas as lead actor, Morgan Freeman and Jewish actor Paul Reiser as guest actor and supporting actor, respectively, and best comedy series.

And “Hacks”, the new comedy series from HBO Max starring Jean Smart and Jewish comedian Hannah Einbinder, received nominations in four major comedies: best comedy series, lead actress for Smart, supporting actress for Einbinder and supporting actor See EMMYS on Page

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L’Shana Tova Tikatevu May You Be Inscribed and Sealed for a Happy and Healthy New Year.

Joe Giarrusso District A New Orleans City Council joegiarrusso.com 22 Rosh Hashanah 2021

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for Carl Clemons-Hopkins. The show is from “Broad City” writers Paul Downs, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky.

Einbinder, the daughter of Jewish comedian Laraine Newman, told Nylon Magazine, “I want to do any comedy that feels authentic and good and meaningful. I have totally readjusted my view of what TV and film can be as a comedy medium. I will always be doing stand-up.

Until I reach an age where I’m just complaining at which point I will remove myself, as we all should.”

And while there’s nothing much Jewish about the breakout Apple TV hit “Ted Lasso” starring Jason Sudeikis, it features British Jewish actor Brett Goldstein as soccer team captain Roy Kent. Goldstein received a nomination for best supporting actor in a comedy series — helping “Ted Lasso” garner a total of 20 nominations, leading the comedy pack.

Jew-ish Dramas The smash hit Netflix regency romance “Bridgerton,” based on Jewish romance author Julia Quinn’s series, scored 12 nominations — including for best drama

Regé-Jean Page and Phoebe Dynevor in “Bridgerton” (Netflix)

and lead actor for Regé-Jean Page.

“I’m Jewish, and when I would read a book and one of the characters would be Jewish, I’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s me.’ And it was very powerful,” Quinn said of the diverse casting of the show. “And so now I feel like I’m able to start to extrapolate that and be like, ‘You know what, everybody needs that.'”

The second season of “The Boys,” the anti-superhero show on Amazon Prime, received six nominations, including for best drama.

“I realized what a perfect metaphor this was for the exact second we’re living in,” Jewish showrunner Eric Kripke told The New York Times.

“For this world, where authoritarianism and celebrity are combined and fascism is packaged through social media.”

As Lior Zaltzman wrote on Kveller, “‘The Boys’ isn’t a very Jewish show — but that doesn’t make its exploration of Nazism any less poignant.

the role. (“Hamilton,” which premiered on Broadway in 2016, debuted on Disney+ during summer 2020 and received 12 total nominations.)

“Top Chef” Jewish co-host Gail Simmons received her second Emmy nomination for best host of a Dan Levy hosts “Saturday Night Live.” reality show alongside co-hosts (Screenshot from Youtube) Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio.

The 73rd Primetime Emmy While it alludes to the history of the Holocaust, it is much more interested Awards will air Sept. 19 on CBS in how Nazi ideology takes form and and Paramount+. spreads in these modern days.”

Other Notable Jewish Nominees Dan Levy isn’t done with the Emmys just yet: The “Schitt’s Creek” star was nominated for guest actor in a comedy series for his turn hosting “Saturday Night YOUR Full Service Pharmacy Live” earlier this year.

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Best Wishes to my many Jewish Friends and constituents for a Happy New Year!

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Jewish Life

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Synagogues Made Covid-Safe High Holiday Plans. Then Came The Delta Variant.

Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles will offer multiple High Holiday service options, including outdoors for families with unvaccinated children. (Stephen Wise Temple)

(JTA) — The leadership team at Ikar, a synagogue in Los Angeles, had just begun planning to move their services indoors. They had gone through a year of virtual services followed by several months of outdoor services for members vaccinated against COVID-19.

Then the Delta variant hit.

Now the synagogue, like many across the country, is reevaluating how to organize its High Holiday services, balancing the high rate of vaccination within the community with the threat from the Delta variant. The community’s medical advisory task force is setting a meeting for early August to decide what it

can safely offer when Rosh Hashanah begins on the night of Sept. 6.

“You want to make decisions way in advance, but the ball keeps moving and changing,” said Melissa Balaban, Ikar’s CEO. “And so, in some ways, you know, giving it a couple more weeks and seeing what happens is going to be more helpful to us than making a decision right now.”

Decisions about how to plan for yet another holiday season in the shadow of COVID are keeping synagogue leaders up at night. Those decisions range from whether or not to hold services indoors or outdoors, on Zoom or in-person or both, with masks or without, with social distancing or without, and with options available only to the vaccinated or without regard for vaccination status.

For those attending services on the High Holidays, traditionally the most well-attended synagogue services of the year, that means yet another year of not quite “back to normal.”

“Last year, even though we were in the thick of it, I think a lot of folks sort of went with, what are we going

to learn from this, what are we going to take from it?” said Rabbi Sari Laufer of Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles. “Now we’re a year later and I think we’re not where we even thought we’d be this year.”

For many synagogues, the assumption until just a few weeks ago was that the vaccines had made it safe to come back together in person. Many who observed the High Holidays last year over Zoom longed to gather as they always did.

But the rapid spread of the Delta variant has thrown a wrench in those plans.

The risks Delta poses to vaccinated people appear to be low — most of the coronavirus vaccines have remained effective at preventing serious illness and death from the Delta variant, and the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths from Delta have been among the unvaccinated.

Still, even vaccinated people who have been comfortable socializing with other vaccinated people in small groups may not be comfortable attending Rosh Hashanah services with hundreds of people. And

for vaccinated parents of children who are not eligible for the vaccine, the calculations may be different.

Several synagogue leaders said they would be planning multiple options for services with the understanding that some of those plans would be scrapped at the last possible moment.

A rabbi blows a shofar during an outdoor Rosh Hashanah service in New York City, Sept. 20, 2020. (Noam Galai/Getty Images)

At Temple Shir Shalom in West Bloomfield, Michigan, the family service will be held at a local football field, with the rabbi and high school students who help lead the service stationed on the track.

“That way everybody can physically distance in the stands, and we See SYNAGOGUES on Page

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High Holidays Recipe: Braised Short Ribs With Honey And Thyme

• salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

By Ronnie Fein

Credit: (Ronnie Fein)

(JTA) -- Some people think of short ribs as rustic fare. But they are an ideal choice for the High Holidays – and not just because of the honey representing a sweet New Year.

Serve them with a thick and glossy gravy: They look impressive and substantial, keeping with our hopeful and festive feelings.

And there’s a bonus: Short ribs taste even better a day or so after TORAH Continued from Page

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lic and cook briefly. Return the meat to the pan.

Pour in the red wine, stock, chili sauce, honey and Balsamic vinegar. Bring to a boil, lower the heat and let simmer for 3-4 minutes. Sprinkle with thyme, salt and pepper.

Cover the pan, turn the heat to low and cook for about 3 hours or until the meat is tender (or place in the oven at 275 degrees). For best results, when the meat is tender, separate the meat and sauce and place in the refrigerator.

When chilled, remove the fat that rises to the top of the sauce.

Place the meat in an oven-proof serving dish, cover with the sauce and reheat (about 30 minutes in a preheated oven at 325 F.). Makes 6 servings.

Best Wishes to My Many Supporters for a Happy New Year Thomas J. Capella Jefferson Parish Assessor

7

this was a license to change those demographics. When the Arabs left in fear, their villages were razed and they were not allowed to return.

According to the many diaries that Yosef Weitz left behind, he carried out this plan with a heavy heart, as he did feel compassion for the Arab refugees he was creating, but he felt at the time that it was “us or them.” He assumed the surrounding Arab countries would absorb the Palestinians, whereas Jewish refugees had nowhere else to go.

But the Palestinian refugees were not absorbed, and he had a change of heart — especially in 1967, when occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip reversed much of what he had accomplished. With annexation, Palestinians would again be a majority on this land. With occupation, Jews would be mistreating the stranger. At that point in history, the Jews were no longer the powerless refugees they were in 1948. But matters were out of his hands.

This week’s Torah portion tears me apart — if we are truly meant to read it as a recipe for how to live today. But what if we aren’t? What if we are meant to read it as a recipe of what not to do today? What if instead of trying to repeat history, we are meant to correct it? The Jews were THE

cooking, so you can make them ahead, skim the fat and just reheat.

The addition of honey in this recipe adds just a hint of sweetness to the dish, a good balance to the spicy chili sauce and tangy Balsamic vinegar I serve these on cooked egg noodles, but mashed potatoes would be welcome, too.

INGREDIENTS: • 4-5 pounds boneless short ribs • all-purpose flour • 6 tablespoons vegetable oil, approximately • 2 large onions, sliced • 2 cloves garlic, chopped • 1 1/2 cups red wine • 1 1/2 cups stock or water • 1 cup bottled chili sauce • 1/4 cup honey • 3 tablespoons Balsamic vinegar • 2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves

DIRECTIONS: Dredge the meat in some flour and shake off the excess. Heat 3 tablespoons of the vegetable oil in a large saute pan or oven-proof casserole over medium heat.

Add the meat a few pieces at a time and cook them for 3-4 minutes per side or until lightly browned.

Add 1-2 more tablespoons of vegetable oil to the pan as needed to prevent sticking.

When the meat has browned, remove the pieces to a dish and set aside.

Pour the remaining 1-2 tablespoons vegetable oil into the pan.

Add the onions and cook, stirring occasionally for 2-3 minutes or until slightly softened. Add the gar-

(food)

sovereign on this land twice already, and it did not end well.

As Ruby tells Tikvah about her mandala art in my novel: “These paintings combine the linear and the circular. As does life. We move forward as we spiral back to our core. Each reconnection to our essense strengthens us for the next spiral. Hopefully even correcting past mistakes, healing old wounds.”

Should we insist on the borders God promised us in (Deut. 10:23), or should we take the spiral path forward, look beyond Deuteronomy, inward to our “hearts of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:29), and find a new way to live here in this land that does not pit “us” against “them”? I am part of a growing movement in Israel to create a shared society, a true partnership of equals. It is hard work, but it is the only way to spiral out of this vicious cycle dating back to the biblical Ishmael and Isaac.

In my novel, when Tikvah and Ruby meet, they are suspicious and fearful of each other. But slowly, as they recognize each other’s humanity and acknowledge each other’s pain, they build a deep and true friendship which ends up being the corrective of the novel’s backstory in 1948. Let’s hope fiction can one day become reality.

Happy New Year to all of my friends in the Jewish Community.

www.thejewishlight.org

Thank You for your continued support.

Judge Sidney H. Cates, IV

Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans

Rosh Hashanah 2021

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High Holidays Recipe: This Sweet Treat Is Like Baklava

By Ronnie Fein born, and is sometimes made with include orange peel, but I think it thin pancakes. My grandma made it gives the cake a refreshing quality. with strudel dough.

INGREDIENTS: I recall watching her make her For the cake: own dough for this dish, as well as • 1/2 pound phyllo dough her fabulous potato strudel, laying • 1/2 pound melted butter the paper-thin dough across the • cookie or cake crumbs or entire kitchen table. I did that once ground nuts -- then switched to store-bought.

• 1 1/2 cups finely chopped alCredit: (Ronnie Fein) There was a time when I could monds (JTA) -- During the High Holi- find authentic strudel dough, but • 2 tablespoons sugar days, I always make my family’s these days I use phyllo, which is not • 2-3 teaspoons freshly grated recipe for a dessert called turte, which exactly the same (it’s thinner and orange peel is similar to Greek baklava. Rather more papery), but still absolutely • 1 teaspoon cinnamon than walnuts, however, it’s made fine. And it’s a whole lot easier.

• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated with almonds and drenched with a This is such a wonderful treat, nutmeg thick sugar syrup instead of honey. whatever your background. It’s • For the syrup: Turte is a specialty from the east- sweet, crumbly and tender, and the • 3/4 cup sugar ern part of Romania called Molda- fragrance of cinnamon is enchant• 3/4 cup water via, where my grandparents were ing. The original recipe did not • 1 teaspoon orange flower water or 2 tablespoons orangeJEFFERSON PARISH DISTRICT ATTORNEY flavored brandy or 1/2 teaspoon PAUL CONNICK, JR. orange extract DIRECTIONS: Happy New Year Make the cake: Preheat the oven to 350 F. Layer half the phyllo to all my friends in dough in a 9-inch square baking pan the Jewish (or use a 9-by-13-inch pan), brushCommunity. ing with half the melted butter and scattering crumbs between layers.

In a bowl, combine the chopped almonds, 2 tablespoons sugar, orange peel, cinnamon and nutmeg. Place the nut mixture over the layers of dough.

Cover the nut mixture with the remaining phyllo leaves, separating them as above with melted butter and crumbs.

Brush the top layer with the last of the melted butter. Score the dough with the tip of a sharp knife into squares or rectangles.

Bake for 30 minutes. Raise heat to 400 F. and bake for another 15-20 minutes, or until the top is golden brown. Remove from the oven and set aside.

Make the syrup: Combine the 3/4 cup sugar and the water in a saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring only until sugar dissolves. Cook at a boil for a few minutes until the liquid has thickened, but do not let it become caramel colored.

Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the orange flavoring.

Pour the syrup over the warm cake.

Let the cake cool and cut it into pieces where you have scored the top Makes 8-12 servings.

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High Holidays Recipe: Chilled (Or Not) Fresh Tomato Soup

By Ronnie Fein

Credit: (Ronnie Fein)

(JTA) – You hear it every year: The High Holidays are either early or late, never on time.

This year is an early one – real early. Rosh Hashanah starts at sundown Sept. 6, the night of Labor Day for Americans. Fortunately, it’s also the peak of tomato season, so

why not include some in your holiday meal?

This soup, made from fresh tomatoes, has lots going for it: You can make it ahead by four or five days; you can enrich it with dairy or nondairy milk or cream if you wish; and it’s delicious either hot or cold.

While it is lovely as a first course for dinner on the first or second night of Rosh Hashanah, I’ll be serving this at room temperature in juice glasses to my break-the-fast guests as we gather after services and need a little nosh before our post-fast dairy meal.

You can warm it up, too, for Sukkot for those chillier nights in the sukkah.

CHILDREN'S BOOKS Continued from Page 16 to life with drama and touches of up to the starlit skies and fill her with the fragrant aromas. Magically humor. the flavors transform pots of boil“Starlight Soup: A Sukkot Story” ing water into Starlight Soup -- it Elana Rubinstein; illustrated by tastes like everyone’s favorite food.

Jennifer Naalchigar Meanwhile, Saralee’s best friend, Apples & Honey Press; ages 7-10 Harold, whose family owns a rival Jewish restaurant, is plotting his own Sukkot celebration. Trouble stirs the pot when Saralee’s soup overpowers everyone’s tastebuds and ruins their appetites.

What will Saralee do to make it all better? The book’s school setting is Jewish with racially diverse kids. Jennifer Naalchigar’s blackand-white, cartoon-style illustrations enliven the pages.

Just in time for Sukkot, Saralee Siegel is back in a chapter-book series about the endearing, spunky school-age girl whose magical sense of smell saves the day in the original, “Once Upon an Apple Cake: A Rosh Hashanah Story.”

Saralee’s grandfather, Zayde, the patriarch of the family’s popular Siegel House restaurant, asks her to create a zippy new recipe to excite customers for the seven-day fall festival, when Jews eat in small, open-roofed huts and welcome guests. Standing in her family’s large sukkah, Saralee’s senses waft THE

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Happy New Year from The Jewish Light

INGREDIENTS: • 2 tablespoons olive oil • 3 thick scallions, chopped • 2 large cloves garlic, chopped • 2 pounds ripe tomatoes, chopped • 4 cups vegetable stock • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil • salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste • 6 tablespoons uncooked white rice • 1 cup dairy or nondairy milk or cream, optional • Garnish (fresh herbs or croutons)

DIRECTIONS: Heat the olive oil in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the scallions and cook, stirring occasionally, for 2 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for about another minute. Add the tomatoes, stock, basil and salt and pepper.

Bring the soup to a simmer, cover the pan and cook for 10 minutes.

Add the rice, cover the pan and cook for another 20 minutes.

Blend the soup in a blender or with an immersion blender. Serve hot or let cool. Stir in the milk if desired. Chill completely.

Serve garnished with fresh basil, parsley or Italian bread croutons.

Makes 8 servings.

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

Thank you for your continued support.

Charlie Kerner Justice of the Peace

Jefferson Parish 3rd Justice Court

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Focus Issues on

Rabbis Are Supposed To Offer Hope On The High Holidays. What If I Can’t?

By Rachel Barenblat

Demonstrators protest against mask wearing and other restrictions meant to halt the spread of COVID-19, Vancouver, Canada, Oct. 17, 2020.

(GoToVan/Flickr Commons)

(JTA) — I was a writer before I became a rabbi and High Holiday sermons usually come easily to me.

Some years I have so many ideas and teachings and hopes to share that I accidentally write more sermons than I need to give.

Not this year. This year I haven’t felt able to begin writing at all.

The enormity of what’s broken in the world feels paralyzing. In recent weeks we’ve seen unprecedented heat and wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, a flaming oil spill turning part of the Gulf of Mexico into an inferno, and extreme flooding across Europe. “Who by fire, who by water,” the words of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, land differently this year.

Dayenu, that could be enough to still my pen — but there’s more.

Last year, leading High Holiday services via Zoom from home, I spoke about our obligation to take care of each other by staying apart. I

turned to the rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto for his teachings about hope during adversity. I imagined Rosh Hashanah 5782: Surely, we would be vaccinated and safely back together!

The past 18 months of pandemic were hard even for those of us who have it easy (a job, a place to live, no illness). For many the isolation of sheltering in place was crushing, or numbing. For many without stable income or a roof overhead, the pandemic has been unimaginably worse. So, too, for frontline workers and those whose jobs are “essential” and often unseen.

When vaccines became available, my heart soared on wings of hope.

But I hadn’t reckoned with the power of social media influencers lying about the putative risks of the vaccine, or claiming the virus is a hoax or “not that bad.” The simple truth that vaccines save lives became perversely inverted — and weaponized.

Now vast numbers of my fellow Americans are refusing vaccination, claiming “personal freedom” at the expense of the collective good.

I keep thinking of the parable of the guy in the boat drilling a hole under his own seat. He doesn’t seem to notice that his personal freedom is going to drown everyone else. As a parable, it’s tart and a little bit funny.

In real life, it’s horrifying. Dayenu:

THE

that too could be enough to spark despair. But there’s more.

The governor of Texas recently made it illegal for municipalities to require masks. To many, masks have become a symbol of government control. To me, a mask is literally the least we can do to protect the immunocompromised (and all children under the age of 12.)

Refusing to wear a mask during this pandemic is like leaving your lights on during the London Blitz.

Combine the anti-maskers, and the anti-vaxxers, and the new Delta variant (more contagious than chicken pox, and vaccinated people can spread it), and cases are rising again.

We’re facing another long winter of isolation and mounting death counts — and it didn’t have to be this way.

Between what we’re doing to our planet (which disproportionately harms those who are most vulnerable), and the impact of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers on public health (ditto), and the persistence of the Big Lie that the presidential election was “stolen,” and the lack of accountability around the Jan. 6 insurrection, it’s hard not to despair. How can I write sermons from this place? I’m pretty sure no one comes to High Holiday services to hear their rabbi admit that she’s given up hope.

I poured out my heart about this

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to my hevruta partner, who reminded me that in Torah even God sometimes despaired of humanity.

When God despaired of us, it was our ancestors’ job to push back and remind God of reasons to hope for humanity’s future. This is part of why we live (and learn!) in community: to help each other find hope when our hearts despair.

Indeed, the Torah readings most of us will encounter on Rosh Hashanah cue up that inner journey. On the first day we read about the casting-out of Hagar and Ishmael.

On the second day, the stakes may feel even higher with the binding of Isaac. Yet these same Torah stories also remind us of the hope to be found in tough times. An angel opens Hagar’s eyes to a flowing spring, and she and her son are saved. An angel opens Abraham’s eyes to the ram caught in the thicket, and Isaac’s life is spared.

Our task is to see the traumas of this moment clearly — and also to cultivate the ability to look beyond our own despair. The Days of Awe open the door to new beginnings, even when (or especially when) we can’t see our own way back to hope for change. We just have to be like those biblical angels for each other: helping each other see the hope we can’t find alone.

Happy New Year to my many friends and supporters in the Jewish Community!

I am asking for your vote as we work together to protect our musicians, our residents, and our culture from outsiders who want to remake the face of our proud city and our citizens.

Best Wishes...

...to all My Jewish Friends Steve Stefancik

St. Tammany Parish Council

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on ISSUeS

Ben & Jerry’s Stopped Using Social Media After Violence Erupted In Israel. Why?

By Asaf Shalev

(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

(JTA) – Pro-Palestinian activists were swarming the social media comments sections of Ben & Jerry’s to demand the company boycott Israel.

In response, Ben & Jerry’s appears to have indeed entered a boycott — of social media itself.

The international ice cream brand with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales typically posts to its Twitter, Instagram or Facebook pages daily, including about the many progressive social causes that the company supports.

But Ben & Jerry’s fell silent on May 18 amid the deadly exchange of fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that also played out intensely on social media.

The company did not respond to a request for an explanation by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Those who waged a social media campaign against Ben & Jerry’s because of its affiliated factory in Israel and the availability of its products in Israeli settlements are taking credit for the silence.

“20 days without online advertising means @ benandjerrys knows they can’t go back to business as usual without addressing their investments in Israeli colonization and land theft. Now is not the time to back down,” a user named @ princessmlokhia, an anti-Zionist account with nearly 15,000 followers, tweeted earlier this week. The movement even has a hashtag, #HasBenand JerrysTweetedYet. The silence is atypical for a company famously founded by two Jewish hippies in Vermont.

Ben & Jerry’s, which launched in 1978, is known for its marketing strategy of appealing to social justice values. Last year, following the murder of George Floyd, the company added a special section of its website devoted to combating white supremacy.

“Silence is NOT an option,” the site says.

But Ben & Jerry’s has conspicuously refrained from weighing in on Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

So while it has readily marked the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v.

Board of Education ruling barring school segregation in the 1950s and condemned the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack as a riot for white supremacy, the company did not mention Israel or Palestine even as the flare-up in May grabbed headlines around the world.

But on social media, users can respond even when nothing has been said. And each time a new Ben & Jerry’s post appeared, a digital THE

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crowd formed to condemn the company. conflict. But the day after Israel and Hamas For example, when Ben & Jerry’s asked,” agreed to a cease-fire, it resumed posting to its Any mint lovers out there?” user @husammu- thousands of followers. nism spoke up — but not about favorite flavors.

“The quality of a weekend is measured in a Offering an opinion on the company’s poli- quality brunch,” it said in Hebrew, “for example tics, this user wrote: “Will never buy Ben and one that incorporates an ice cream sandwich.” Jerry’s until I hear you all stop doing business Happy New Year to all My Friends in illegal settlements in the Jewish Community! stealing Palestinian land and contributing to the ethnic cleansing of PalLouis Fitzmorris Assessor estine.”

St. Tammany Parish In other words, Ben & Jerry’s was being repeatedly ratioed, which is internet slang for when replies to a post, typically negative, vastly outnumber likes and Best Wishes to my friends retweets. in the Jewish Community!

The criticism of the brand coalesced on May Office: 504-799-1702 • Cell: 504-610-0679 19 with a call by a social 4018 Magazine St., New Orleans, LA 70115 justice group called Nathalie Dubois LAW_full Size_2019_print.pdf 1 11/11/19 11:38 AM Decolonize Burlington Licensed in Louisiana.

Each office independently owned and operated. in Vermont for Americans to boycott the company, according to the Burlington Free Press. Local activists have been lobbying against Ben & Jerry’s Israel ties since at least 2012.

“If Ben & Jerry’s wants to profit off of anti-racist messaging, they need to be consistent,” Decolonize Burlington said in its post. “The BLM movement has publicly supported the Palestinian cause. It’s time for Ben & Jerry’s to divest from their holdings in Israel.”

Ben & Jerry’s has not responded to the activists.

The last time Ben & Jerry’s was caught up in Israeli-Palestinian politics on social media was in 2018, when the pro-Israel camp was attacking the brand for supporting left-wing activists such as Linda Sarsour, who has been accused of animus toward Jews.

The Israeli Ben & Jerry’s, the brand’s only independent licensee, is widely popular. It has produced special flavors for holidays, such as haroset for Passover and “mixed-up” for this spring’s national election, and last year held a Purim costume party whose prize was a six-month Louisiana Alarm Watch (504) 780-8775 www.laalarmwatch.com supply of ice cream.

SECURITY • FIRE • MEDICAL ALERT • CAMERAS • ACCESS CONTROL The Israeli Ben & Jerry’s also did not post during the recent C

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Kveller

Jewish Tradition Celebrates The Rhythm Of Nature.

What Happens When It’s Thrown Off Balance?

By Hannah S. Pressman This article originally appeared on Kveller.

(tdubphoto/Getty Images)

Every houseplant I’ve ever been responsible for could attest, from beyond the grave, that I don’t exactly have a green thumb. So, it was interesting to move out to Seattle over a decade ago and be thrown into the Pacific Northwest gardening scene. People out here take their horticulture, like their outerwear, very seriously. Raised veggie beds dot the sidewalks, and many houses sport carefully tended flowers, lavender and rosemary mixed with mountain-chic rock clusters. The

former gardening correspondent for the local news is popular enough to go by one name, like Shakira.

Though I felt at odds with this gardening culture when I first arrived here, over the past few years I have gradually taken more of an interest in the art of tending a garden. I’ve also realized that taking time to weed and water can provide a lovely break from the nuttiness of life with three kids. In the spring we upped our sustainability game by planting lettuce, chard, broccoli and berries in raised beds in our backyard. (I freely admit that this required some professional help – I’m even worse at building than I am at growing things!)

As our area slowly emerged from the monotony and strain of pan-

Amy Misko for District A

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demic-induced lockdowns, our home garden began to thrive. The kids each contribute to the workload: My 12-year-old mists the raised beds, my 9-year-old digs up weeds, and my toddler totes her pink watering can over to the fuchsia and lavender.

My favorite “pet” outside, though, was growing here long before we moved in: a beautiful midsize Japanese maple. Its base is covered with soft green moss, its branches are the perfect height for kids to hang from, and its leaves change from bright green to vibrant red-orange as the seasons go by. I take pictures of this maple all year round, in every variety of sunlight.

That’s why I was especially dismayed last week when, after three consecutive days of temperatures over 100 degrees in the Pacific Northwest, I saw visibly scorched, crumpled leaves all over the maple.

Two days later, once the cool marine air moved in and returned Seattle to the overcast mid-60s and 70s days we’re used to, I saw something even worse: hundreds of healthylooking green leaves carpeting the ground. Clearly the stress of the Heat Dome, as experts called this extreme weather event, caused a swath of the maple’s leaves to fall

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off prematurely.

This isn’t supposed to happen, I thought. Something is wrong with our planet.

Just as with the West Coast wildfires that kept us shut inside last summer, the Heat Dome can be directly linked to climate change.

Just as with the wildfires and smoke plumes, I had to explain to my kids why this was happening, and I felt ashamed. Just as before, I am now incredibly angry and scared that this new reality — tarnished air quality, sweltering days, warming oceans, unlivable conditions for flora and fauna and humans — is now the reality of the planet that our children, and our children’s children, will inherit.

Judaism offers us so many chances to celebrate the rhythms of the natural world: trees on Tu b’Shevat; spring greens on Passover; fall harvests and outdoor living on Sukkot.

But what does our tradition offer when the rhythms of the natural world are knocked askew? We have blessings for seeing large and small wonders of nature, lightning and rivers, animals and trees — even a special blessing for seeing a rainSee RHYTHM on Page

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21st Century Solutions for OUR 21st Century Problems!

• END ALL EMERGENCY DICTATES ON DAY 1.

• UPHOLD OUR RIGHT OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. • Never again will ANYONE close OUR places of worship, OUR businesses, or OUR schools.

• ALL taxes collected in District A must be spent in District A! • SAFETY: WE need to invest and hire new officers for OUR NOPD. We need a modern police force, attracting recruits from all over the US with great competitive salaries, relocation bonuses, educational benefits, and state of the art training. We need to invest in EMT and the NOFD, too.

• CORRUPTION: Audit the City Planning Dept. Fire the guilty and reward the honest and trustworthy.

• SPEED CAMERAS: Remove ALL speed cameras and abolish ALL outstanding tickets.

• Lower ALL city taxes: especially Hotel Taxes, Car Rental Taxes, Sales and remove city payroll taxes. Stop punishing the workers and employers.

• End State and City-sanctioned utility monopolies. Encourage competition and offer citizens the choice for providers of trash, water, electric, gas, cable, internet, & phone.

• Roll back OUR property taxes to 2017. District A has suffered huge, unconstitutional, and arbitrary property tax hikes, every year of the current administration. We have been denied due process.

• All city-owed judgments must be paid including Firefighters and Unconstitutional Speeding Tickets • WE get justice and OUR money back, finally.

Visit www.misko4citycouncil.org for more information!

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Elvis Presley Was Jewish? A Grave Marker Locked Away For 4 Decades Confirms It.

By Dan Fellner

Elvis Presley On "The Milton Berle Show," June 4, 1956. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (JTA) – The large crate sat unopened in a 20,000-square-foot warehouse here for more than four decades, concealing a little-known fact about one of America’s cultural icons.

Inside was the headstone of Elvis Presley’s mother, Gladys, which had been stored in the Graceland archives along with 1.5 million other items since 1977. And on the upper left side of the long-unseen marker — designed by Elvis himself — is a Star of David.

Yes, the King of Rock and Roll had Jewish roots.

The headstone, which was taken from storage only in 2018, is now on display at the sprawling complex in Memphis where Elvis lived from 1957 until his untimely death 20 years later at the age of 42. It sits in Graceland’s Meditation Garden, just outside the mansion and a few feet from Elvis’ own grave.

Stories of Elvis’ Jewish heritage have long been in circulation, but when it comes to a legend like Presley — whose death is not even considered settled fact in some quarters — it’s not always easy to separate fact from fiction. With the headstone now on public display and an accompanying sign proclaiming “Gladys’ Jewish heritage,” any lingering doubts can finally be erased.

Gladys Presley’s grave marker, now on display at Graceland. It was designed by her famous son to honor the family’s Jewish heritage. (Dan Fellner)

“There was a lot of mystery surrounding it,” said Angie Marchese, Graceland’s vice president of archives and exhibits, and the one who came up with the idea of unveiling Gladys’ headstone on the THE

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60th anniversary of her death, partly to dispel doubts about Elvis’ Jewish lineage. “The star is on it, so it answered a lot of questions that were out there.”

Marchese says Elvis’ maternal great-great-grandmother was a Jewish woman named Nancy Burdine. Little is known about Burdine, but it’s believed her family immigrated to America from what is now Lithuania around the time of the American Revolution. According to Ancestry.com, Burdine was born in Mississippi in 1826 and died in 1887.

Burdine’s great-granddaughter was Gladys Love Smith, who married Vernon Presley in 1933. Two years later, Gladys gave birth to Elvis in Tupelo, Mississippi. The family moved to Memphis when Elvis was 13.

The Presleys once lived in an apartment directly below the family of Rabbi Alfred Fruchter, the first principal of the Memphis Hebrew Academy. The rabbi’s son, Harold, who now lives in Maryland, said that Elvis actually served as the Fruchters’ “Shabbos goy,” a nonJew who performs household tasks for observant Jews that are normally forbidden on the Jewish Sabbath. Fruchter said his parents “never had even an inkling” that Elvis had Jewish roots.

“If they had, they would never have considered asking him to be a Shabbos goy,” Fruchter said.

Elvis was especially close to his mother, who died of heart failure in 1958 at the age of 46. Initially Elvis had her buried in a public cemetery in Memphis. Her headstone was marked with a cross.

But Marchese says that six years later, Elvis replaced the headstone with one designed to his specifications. The new marker featured a Star of David on one side and a cross on the other along with the words “Sunshine Of Our Home” engraved between.

What prompted Elvis to include the Star of David on his mother’s headstone? Marchese isn’t exactly sure, or even when Elvis learned of his mother’s Jewish heritage. But she says “the Jewish faith gave him comfort when he was seeking answers” to help him deal with her passing.

Following an attempt to steal Elvis’ body from a Memphis cemetery, Vernon Presley had the remains of his son and wife moved to Graceland for security reasons.

Gladys’ grave marker with the Star of David went into storage. And there it remained until Marchese suggested it be put on public dis-

play.

Elvis Presley wore this diamond-studded chai gold necklace during the final years of his life. (Dan Fellner)

“We thought it would be a great way of honoring her Jewish heritage as well as honoring her,” said Marchese, who has worked at See ELVIS PRESLEY on Page

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I want to say thank you to my friends and supporters in the Jewish Community. It has been an honor to serve as your judge for 25 years, and I sincerely appreciate your prayers, and your support.

Judge Ethel Simms Julien Civil District Court Division N

Happy New Year to all my friends and supporters in the Jewish Community!

Congressman Clay Higgins www.captainhiggins.com

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This portrait of Gladys Presley hangs on the wall inside the Graceland mansion in Memphis. (Dan Fellner) www.thejewishlight.org

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PO Box 870332 • New Orleans, LA • 70187-0332 egreen@nationwiderealestatecorp.com www.nationwiderealestatecorp.com twitter.com/nationwidecorp Rosh Hashanah 2021

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How Fleischmann’s Yeast Built The Jewish Catskills

By Joel Haber This article originally appeared on The Nosher.

(Grace Yagel)

Many home cooks this past year, in an Instagram-inspired spirit, upped their challah-baking game with new braiding patterns, interesting flavors and vibrant colors.

Yet it was a more standard ingredient that unwittingly connected many to their roots.

If you used Fleischmann’s yeast for your challah, you leavened your dough with the essence of American Jewry.

The Fleischmann family’s story echoes the experience of many other immigrant Jews. They built on their experience from Europe, using it to fully integrate into American society. Without routines to hinder them, innovative business practices brought them success.

Finally, they used their power to benefit their community.

Hungarian brothers Charles and Max Fleischmann were part of the mid-19th-century wave of Central European Jews arriving in America.

They settled in Cincinnati where they became yeast manufacturers in 1868. Charles had learned the process in Prague and Vienna, eventually overseeing production on a noble’s estate. The origin tale of Charles bringing a single vial of pure yeast to America is likely fabrication, but he probably did see America’s poor-quality baked goods as a business opportunity.

Soon, the Fleischmanns were mass producing pressed cakes of yeast. Many claim theirs was the first commercially produced version of this product. But while Charles did hold some production patents in America, the main steps were invented decades earlier in Vienna. His genius lay not in invent-

A Fleischmann’s Yeast advertisement from 1915 (Chris Hellier/Corbis/Getty Images)

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ing a new product, but in its clever distribution and marketing techniques.

The compressed yeast could only survive a few days, so reaching customers quickly became essential.

Cincinnati was a hub of transportation routes, and Fleischmann’s also built a network of production and distribution centers in order to reach most of the country. Delivery improved in the 1880s with the invention of refrigerated railcars.

With supply taken care of, however, demand for the unfamiliar product lagged. Fleischmann’s had to familiarize America with compressed yeast. Unfettered by preconceptions on “proper” business practices, Fleischmann’s Yeast found out of the box solutions.

Their first major marketing coup was at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where they featured a Vienna Model Bakery to demonstrate their product. The fair attracted 10 million visitors, many of whom stopped to sample the delicious bread. Soon compressed yeast became the preeminent solution for home bakers.

Another early marketing effort featured a promotional cookbook giveaway. Fleischmann’s followed others in using this fairly new medium, continuing well into the 20th century. The company also offered wrapper premiums — customers could trade in yeast package labels for free kitchen utensils.

But Fleischmann’s most significant contribution to consumer marketing was in what we now call branding. From the start, Charles Fleischmann guarded the company’s name and image, zealously warning his customers against cheap imitators. Fleischmann’s branding was so successful that by the late 1920s they controlled over 93% of their market.

Fleischmann’s also paralleled other Jewish immigrants via their expanding product line. In the 2012 book “Jews and Booze,” Marni Davis highlights the disproportional representation of immigrant Jews within American alcohol businesses in the late 19th century. Within just a few years of starting the company, Fleischmann’s added distilled spirits to their offerings, using the grain alcohol that was a major byproduct of yeast production. Adding juniper

berries and other botanicals, they produced America’s first distilled gin, with other hard liquors soon to follow.

While this all ties the family into the American Jewish experience, their greatest related legacy is also their least recognized. The late 1800s saw prominent antisemitic discrimination aimed at wealthy American Jews. More than once, the Fleischmanns were denied entry at fancy hotels and resorts.

Charles Fleischmann used his amassed fortune to beat the antisemites at their own game. Purchasing 60 acres in Griffin’s Corner, New York, he created a resort village specifically for Jews. Eventually incorporated as Fleischmanns, New York, the town grew to include mansions, summer homes and hotels (many with kosher food to accommodate Ortho-

Fleischmanns, Catskill Mountains, Delaware County, July 1925. (The New York Historical Society/Getty Images)

dox customers).

Fleischmanns was no budgetlevel bungalow colony, either. The luxurious features included heated swimming pools, a golf course, a deer park, a stocked trout pond and an artificial lake from which they could harvest ice in the winter. This

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famous resort town launched a classic 20th-century Jewish phenomenon: vacationing in the Catskill Mountains, the so-called Borscht Belt that is indelibly linked with American Jewish popular culture.

Without Charles Fleischmann’s pre-immigration experiences in Europe, he might not have started his company, and with deeper roots in the country, he might never have broken new ground to reach success. His family story prominently reflects that of broader American Jewry.

Although Fleischmann’s is no longer a family owned company, there may be no more appropriate ingredient to put in your challah than Fleischmann’s yeast. And for an extra dose of Jewish pride, have a Fleischmann’s gin and tonic after kneading the dough.

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The Jewish History Of Gold’s Horseradish This article originally appeared on The Nosher.

By Stephanie Ganz

By Evelyn Frick

If you happened to be walking down the 800 block of Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn in the 1930s, you might have caught a whiff of horseradish in the air. From their Brooklyn apartment, two Jewish immigrants — Hyman and Tillie Gold, from Ukraine and Romania, respectively — were peeling the pungent roots at their kitchen table, filling bottles of prepared horseradish by hand and labeling them with homemade labels and paste made from flour and water.

The couple came into the horseradish business almost by accident.

Hyman’s cousin worked on the sidewalk in Borough Park, Brooklyn, peddling the freshly-peeled root in front of a busy store; but when he got into a dispute that turned physical with the store owner, he landed in jail and called on Hyman to bail him out. Hyman’s compensation was his cousin’s horseradish grinder.

to represent maror, bitter herbs, which symbolize the suffering of the Jewish slaves in Egypt. The Golds were gambling on one thing: that the predominantly Jewish families in the area would prefer for someone else to do the crying over their horseradish for the Seder. That bet paid off, with four generations of Golds eventually working for the family business.

As word of Gold’s Horseradish grew, Hyman employed his three sons — Morris, Manny, and Herbert — to deliver bottles on their bicycles and via the train. One brother would wait at each stop while the third would stay on the train, shuttling bottles back and forth, to avoid paying multiple fares. Horseradish engulfed the Gold household. The family grew the galloping roots, weed-like and unruly, in their backyard, and they would fill the bathtub with the dirtencrusted horseradish roots to wash them. The air in the small apartment was constantly tinged with the eye-watering fumes, which wafted from the open window to the streets below.

Having recently lost their business selling and repairing radios, the Golds were all in on horseradish, which Hyman sold, four jars at a time, to shops and delis in the neighborhood.

Horseradish is a staple of the Passover Seder because it has come

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(Getty Images)

The family were used to doing all the work themselves — and by hand. At 6 years old, Marcus Gold remembers marking the boxes of beet horseradish with a fat red marker, his first task for the family business. As a teen in the 1960s, around the holidays especially, he and his cousins would be called in whenever someone didn’t show up to work. The long days started at 7 a.m. and went on nonstop with the brisk pace of an assembly line in motion. “We always made sure we had enough to be used for the next couple of days, but we didn’t stock up. So when the production list was made, we had to get to that amount

made,” he recalls.

By the mid-1970s, the third Gold’s generation — Steven, Neil, Howard, and Marc — took over under the leadership of their fathers, who were mourning the loss, in 1975, of their mother, Tillie. Over the next two decades, the brothers and cousins worked together to make every major decision for the brand, continuing to grow the product line and, in 1994, relocating to Hempstead, New York, in the western part of Long Island. Eventually, Steven’s daughter Melissa and Marc’s son Shaun joined the team, marking the fourth generation to contribute to the family business.

It was Marcus Gold’s father, Morris, who instilled in him the importance of advertising. Morris was responsible for introducing Gold’s jingle, “If it’s gotta taste great, it’s gotta have Gold’s,” punctuated by the ringing of a bell. From the business’s earliest days, Morris knew that name recognition mattered, so he brought signs and winSee HORSERADISH on Page

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Happy New Year to my friends and supporters in the Jewish Community!

Thank you for your continued support!

(Newsday LLC/Getty Images)

(Getty Images)

grandmother Tillie, who had filled jars by hand using a small funnel, in classic bubbe fashion, remarked, “Why did you buy a filling machine?

I’m a filling machine!”

As they outgrew their home operation, the Golds moved the business to 4127 18th Avenue in Brooklyn, where, over the next two decades, they introduced automation that allowed them to speed up production and introduce new products, like borscht in 1948. According to third generation owner Marcus Gold, when they brought in a filling machine to fill the jars, his

Dr.

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

Thank You For Your Support.

Sheriff Tony MancuSo

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University Of South Carolina To Open Anne Frank Center

By Cnaan Liphshiz

Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office 5400 East Broad St. • Lake Charles, LA 70615 (337) 491-3600

Part of the permanent exhibition of the Anne Frank Center at the University of South Carolina in Columbia (The University of South Carolina)

(JTA) — The University of South Carolina has announced the opening of a permanent exhibition on Anne Frank, complete with a reproduction of the desk where she wrote her diaries and in partnership with the museum in Amsterdam.

The Anne Frank Center is scheduled to launch in September on the Columbia campus with an exhibition and a learning program featuring photos, videos and artifacts, according to an item Tuesday on the CBS affiliate there. One room will reflect the famed diarist’s experiences living in hiding from the Nazis for two years in a secret annex in Amsterdam.

The Nazis caught Anne along with her parents and sister Margot in 1945 and deported them to concentration camps. Only her father, Otto, survived. He edited diaries and other writings by Anne and HORSERADISH Continued from Page

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published them as “The Diary of a Young Girl,” and it became an international bestseller.

The house where the family hid is a museum that before the COVID19 pandemic had received more than a million visitors annually. It is an official partner of the University of South Carolina, providing the university with educational material developed at the museum and some funding.

Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House museum has partnerships with three other entities operating Anne Frank centers in London, Buenos Aires and Berlin.

Columbia’s Anne Frank Center, where admissions will be free, also will reference racism in America and the South, including in the story of Emmett Till, a Black teenager who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955.

Separately, a statue of Anne Frank was unveiled in Edmonton, Canada.

The Dutch Canadian Club, a group focused on Dutch immigrants to that country and their descendants, commissioned the statue that was unveiled Sunday in Light Horse Park in commemoration of Canada’s role in liberating the Netherlands from Nazi Germany, the Edmonton Journal reported.

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dow decals for store owners to display, letting shoppers know that their store carried Gold’s products.

“Advertising gave the appearance that you were bigger than you really were,” says Gold. In the early 1950s, Gold’s hosted Miss Horseradish contests to raise brand awareness. Gold’s also bought ad space in Haggadahs produced by local grocery chains to further emphasize their connection to the Seder table.

This insistence on name recognition stuck with Gold, an avid baseball fan and the founder of the Mets Fan Club. After the business made its final move to Hempstead, New York and began manufacturing specialty mustard, Gold saw an opportunity to get their mustard into Shea stadium. It was the chance of a lifetime for Gold, and after con34 Rosh Hashanah 2021

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vincing the rest of his family (which required securing Mike Piazza to do a Gold’s bobble head doll promo), the brand began their conquest of baseball stadiums. To this day, Gold’s is the go-to condiment brand for stadiums around the country.

In 2015, the Golds sold the brand to LaSalle Capital, a Chicago-based investment firm. In early 2021, that company announced the closure of the Hempstead factory, but a representative from the company says production will continue undisturbed. Though Gold’s is no longer made in Brooklyn, memories of the brand linger, in Brooklyn and beyond, any time someone opens a jar of horseradish for a Bloody Mary or their Passover Seder. THE

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I Used To Judge Ex-Orthodox Jews.

Then I Started Listening To Them.

Opinion

By Rivka Nehorai

Matisyahu performs in Berlin, Aug. 31, 2015. (Stephan Röhl/Flickr Commons)

(JTA) — Ten years ago, I sat shocked watching a new music video from one of my creative Jewish heroes, Matisyahu. Newly married and studying in yeshiva, my husband and I were trying to figure out how to uplift the art world in alignment with our Orthodox Torah ideals.

Yet here was my icon, Matisyahu — who rose to fame singing about his faith and wearing the black hat and modest suit of a Hasidic Jew — dancing around in a Santa suit for his “Miracles” video with a shot of an immodestly dressed woman and a guy dressed up as Antiochus using the word “babes.” Outraged, I wrote a blog post imploring the singer to remember that he was a

“poster child” for a serious, beautiful and deep people.

A few months later I ran into Matisyahu himself in a random little shul on Shabbat. I introduced myself after services and took the quick opportunity to bless Matisyahu in coded language that he should “continue helping the Jewish world.” He bowed his head in thanks and I walked away feeling good about what I had said.

I understand now that I was really blessing him to continue to suppress his own truth and voice, and for him to toe the expected “traditional” Orthodox Jewish line out of my fear of what non-Jews might think. At the time, I believe he owed it to all of us.

A few years after we left Israel, my husband and I began hosting gatherings in Brooklyn for creative, out-of-the-box Jewish thinkers. Our guests included a significant number of what are derogatorily referred to as “off-the-derech” Jews: those who had been raised in the ultraOrthodox community but had left

Happy New Year to all my friends in the Jewish Community.

it. Many of them no longer followed many or most of the traditional Orthodox interpretations of Jewish law. But, my God, their Jewish spirit and the depth of their insights blew me away.

I can still hear the haunting, booming melody of one man who occasionally came. Born and raised in a strict Hasidic sect, he cherished his memories of singing together with his father and brothers on Shabbat. He had chosen to leave that community because he needed to search for a truth and a life beyond it, but he loved Judaism so fiercely and deeply that I can cry just thinking about what it was like to hear him sing.

If I could say one thing to my outraged self-watching Matisyahu shift directions 10 years ago, and what I would say to Orthodox Jews today who say they are hurt by “My Unorthodox Life” and any of the other critical examinations of the Orthodox world, it is this: Listen.

These Jewish people who have

“left” and are now creating art that is critical of your community are your greatest teachers.

They have seen the belly of the beast and they have valuable information for you. They know how to make your world healthier, safer and more just. And they love the Jewish people and Judaism perhaps more than you will ever understand.

Instead of worrying about the optics of a celebrity Hasid going his own way, I should have been worrying about those who are hurting, who are being abused by the systems that structure the Hasidic world. Those who want a different life but can’t escape. Or those who escape with scars.

Just listen to their stories, I would tell my past self, and see how you can be a part of the change.

I know that many thrive in Orthodoxy. But the point isn’t that the system works for some or even most people. The point is that when someone is sharing their story of See EX-ORTHODOX on Page

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Happy New Year to all my friends in the Jewish Community!

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I Feel Empowered As An Asian-American Jew — But It Sure Took A While To Get There

By Jenni Rudolph This article originally appeared on Alma.

(Jared Chiang-Zeizel)

I first noticed I was different at my Jewish preschool. I came home with a little bag of crayons and a big question: “Why am I ‘tan’ if all the other kids are ‘apricot’?”

I don’t remember how my mom explained my ethnicity, which today I describe as mixed Chinese and Russian Ashkenazi Jewish, but I remember being unsatisfied with her response. Nonetheless, I felt at home at my preschool, so being a different “color” wasn’t an issue — that is, until I aged out and enrolled in public elementary school.

(Jenni Rudolph)

I grew up in Huntington Beach, best known as California’s hotspot for surfing and neo-Nazis. The weather here is perpetually 73 degrees, our last mayor pro-tem sold QAnon merch and for some inexplicable reason there just aren’t a ton of Jews here. Switching to public school, I finally met a few other Asian kids, except now I was one of the only Jewish kids, and the culture shock was real. I brought matzah for show and tell and was

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shocked that no one had even heard of Passover. “Wait, so not everyone is Jewish? Also, who is this Santa guy you speak of?”

My classmates invited me to church, trying to convert me. After singing exclusively Christmas songs in every local “holiday” concert, I recovered by writing my own Hanukkah songs (plus some nonreligious Christmas songs, as every Jewish songwriter needs in their catalog). I took on these battles proudly, as I loved to remind people that I was Jewish.

Meanwhile, “Asian” was a label that I never chose for myself, yet my face gave it away. My earliest associations with the word “Asian” were microaggressions, so I grew to despise the word and everything it represented. Surprise surprise, growing up Asian American in an imageobsessed, Hollywood-adjacent culture with zero role models of color was the perfect storm for a sneaky bitch called internalized racism.

My immigrant ancestors assimilated for their own survival, rejecting everything that made them “different” to prove their loyalty as Americans. Carrying on that tradition, my mom never learned Cantonese, and I never learned how to use chopsticks. “Don’t wear yellow, you’re too dark,” my mom would tell me, projecting onto me what she’d been told as a kid. So, I tried scrubbing away my tan in the bathtub, as my white classmates were spraying on theirs.

While my friends were soaking up the golden hour aesthetic and rocking cat-eye winged eyeliner, I was slapping blue filters on my photos to look less “yellow” and googling tutorials on “how to fix my hooded eyes.” All my insecurities were amplified by comments from my classmates, like the sixthgrader who advised me to bleach my hair and get plastic surgery.

Internalized racism completely distorted my self-image. I saw myself as a hideous Asian caricature, a jumbled collage of stereotypes and failed expectations. My Asian face didn’t feel like mine.

I resented my own mother for making me Asian. I sought the approval of my white peers, believing that every white person was

inherently superior to me and that I was half-superior to my monoracial Asian friends. White supremacy really had me convinced that my Asianness was a problem for which I needed to apologize.

So instead, I leaned into my Jewishness. Except, without a solid Jewish community, finding my Jewishness was like navigating an abandoned highway at night with no GPS, where my only road signs were stereotypes, vague Holocaust references and occasional words of wisdom from my Jewish grandma.

Whenever anyone called me

(Jared Chiang-Zeizel)

“Asian,” I’d counter that I was Jewish. As a secular, Asian-presenting, patrilineal Jew, it felt like a lie. I slept in thick plastic curlers every night, waking up to lumpy, lopsided curls that only held for a few hours in my Asian hair. While my friends were reading “Harry Potter” and “Magic Tree House,” I was maxing out my library card on Holocaust books, which made for some dazzling playground icebreakers such as, “Who is your favorite Holocaust survivor?” and, “Where in your house would you hide from the Nazis?”

I can’t rationalize why immersing myself in historical Jewish trauma felt easier than embracing my modern Asian-American Jewish reality. I reasoned I was simply learning my people’s history. Ironically I was weaponizing my Jewishness as a steppingstone to whiteness. I thought if I redesigned myself to be as Jewish as possible, people could forget I was Asian.

So, every night I’d put in the curlers and search my reflection for any physical proof that I was Jewish.

Puberty finally granted me my wish: Practically overnight, my stick-straight Asian hair had a major Ashkenazi awakening.

If genetics worked like a Builda-Hair workshop, I’d combine the texture of smooth, silky stereotypical Chinese hair with the volume of

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big stereotypical Jewish curls and defy all laws of hair physics. Instead I ended up with a frizzy, inconsistently wavy, unmanageable mess.

“Have you heard of conditioner?” my Asian friends would ask.

Or my favorite, “Just brush it!”

Suddenly my Jewishness was another problem to detangle.

It was a vicious cycle: dissecting every inch of my body, comparing myself to two sets of unattainable beauty standards and constantly finding a new insecurity. “Do I have a Jewish nose?” I’d ponder, obsessing over my side profile. (I do, in fact, have a Jewish nose because I’m Jewish and I have a nose.) “Ugh, my eyelashes are so short and Asian!” The shameful tug of war between my two identities seemed never-ending.

One day, all these messy, nuanced feelings spilled out onto a page in my songwriting journal. Digging through these complexities with humor and a profound level of honesty, I wrote “Water & Oil,” a song more genuinely Jewish than any of the Hanukkah songs I’d written as a kid. Twenty-five mixed collaborators helped me bring the song to life, along with a music video shot by fellow Asian Jew Jared Chiang-Zeizel.

The music video was a cathartic opportunity to wear everything I had denied myself — monochrome head-to-toe yellow, winged eyeliner and my hair in its full frizzy glory.

We satirized all my insecurities — the blue filters, my vendetta against my hairbrush and my failure to use chopsticks. It was angsty, it was campy and it made me feel whole.

Today I feel beautiful and empowered in my Asian-American Jewish identity. My Jewish identity means so much more to me than simply my “whiteness,” and I will never let white supremacy define my identity again. Growing into my mixed identity is a lifelong rollercoaster of learning and unlearning, but I’m into it. And hey, that’s pretty damn Jewish.

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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Jewish Spaces Should Keep The Resources Offered During The Pandemic — It’s A Disability Issue

By Shelly Jay Shore This article originally appeared on Kveller.

(RLT_Images/Getty Images)

With 46% of Americans fully vaccinated, trials for children under 12 in progress and a population eager to put the last year and a half in the rearview mirror, it’s no surprise that the cultural timeline for “returning to normal” — if “normal“even exists anymore — has accelerated. Restaurant gatherings with friends are back on the table, in-person weddings are filling calendars and the number of people wearing masks seems to be dwindling by the day. Summer camps are reopening, to the relief of parents and kids everywhere. Many offices are going back to an expec-

tation of at least some if not full in-person work, to relative degrees of success.

Yet the emotional conversation around reopening remains complicated. The delight in buying those first post-pandemic tickets to a Broadway show; the tears of families getting to meet infants born during the pandemic for the first time; the joyful reunions of longdistance partners separated by international borders — all of these are precious sparks of wonder after months of horrible loss. But there’s discomfort, too. Even for those with no history of anxiety prior to COVID, many are facing new trepidations over the easing of pandemic restrictions and the shift away from the precautions to which we’ve become accustomed.

What’s more, for many with preexisting health conditions — myself included — the conversation about reopening can be painful. What’s

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now a socially normalized healthy caution around public transportation, crowded rooms and long commutes is exacerbated by the fear that as the world prioritizes physical, in-person reopenings, people with disabilities will be left behind.

Again.

The lockdowns and restrictions of the COVID pandemic gave many able-bodied people their first taste of some of what disabled people deal with every day.

“Throughout the pandemic, [disabled people] watched non-disabled people forced to cope with restrictions, adjustments and practices that many disabled people have always had to live with,” disability writer Andrew D. Pulrang wrote for Forbes. “[L]ots of us have always had to work twice as hard to shop for groceries, get to doctor’s appointments, or socialize with friends.”

Many disabled people approached

this unprecedented societal shift with empathy — extending support and resources to the able-bodied world. Kaalyn M., a disability justice activist, recently shared a lengthy list of what disabled people were able to offer the world during COVID, including coping strategies for managing anxiety, grief, depression, and how to have hard conversations about death and dying while in isolation.

But now a lot of us are worried that as society reopens, that empathy isn’t going both ways.

Like many others with chronic health conditions, my pandemic experience was complicated. At the onset of COVID, I had a new baby and an incredible anxiety about returning to a full-time, in-person job, and when I was told that I didn’t need to return to the office at the end See JEWISH SPACES on Page

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‘My Children Are Still Religious’: More From Our Interview With Julia Haart Of ‘My Unorthodox Life’

Julia Haart and her 14-year-old son Aron, who is still religious, in a scene from "My Unorthodox Life."

(Courtesy of Netflix

(JTA) — Julia Haart doesn’t want her son Aron to stop being Orthodox. On “My Unorthodox Life,” the new Netflix reality show about her family, Haart is shown encouraging the 14-year-old to give up the commitment he made at summer camp not to talk to girls at his new school. He says engaging with girls — or sports, for that matter — would distract him from learning Torah. She tells him that life is bigger than the Torah.

It’s among the more emotionally charged scenes on the show, which premiered this week on Netflix. It’s also evidence that Haart’s critics are citing to show that she wants to force the people in her life to aban-

don Orthodoxy the way she did before becoming a fashion industry CEO, all in her 40s.

We included Haart’s defense against that criticism in our first story about “My Unorthodox Life,” what the show depicts and the feedback it’s getting. But in her interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, she said much more, including that she does not pressure those close to her to change their ways.

“Do I give them a hard time about being religious? No, the only person I ever gave a hard time to was Aron,” Haart said. “All I said is, talk to girls, get an education, go to college. It’s just about opening the outside world to yourself, and realizing that there are wonderful people in every nationality, in every ethnicity, in every religion.”

Here are some more highlights from Haart’s JTA interview about her religious Jewish upbringing, why she decided to tell her story now and the impact she hopes to have on the community she left.

This interview has been con-

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densed and edited for clarity.

JTA: How did you decide to tell your story so publicly? And why now?

Haart: When I first left the community, I didn’t tell a soul. I started telling my close friends after I became creative director of La Perla [three years later]. Until that moment, no one knew me. I hadn’t ever done anything, and I wanted to first get known for what I was capable of — to show the world what I had inside of me.

And then, to go from there to sharing it with the planet, that was a very difficult decision for me because it is very personal and private. And we live in a world with social media and, you know, people get attacked. It’s not an easy decision to make, but I chose to do it.

I have met so many thousands of women from different walks of life, different situations, different cultures and nationalities. And what I have seen is that it’s a story that hopefully — that’s my prayer — may help other women. There are so many women in different situations, different countries, religions … it doesn’t matter what the impediment is to them achieving their goals, but there are so many women suffering. And so I felt that it [my story] is such an unusual story that perhaps it may inspire someone, it may give someone the courage to change their life.

Can you elaborate about how you left the community? Most people who leave do not end up where you are.

Thank you for pointing that out, because that is the truth — most people who leave do not have that same experience. And it’s not because they’re not brilliant or hardworking, or they don’t want to, you know, change their life and become part of the outside world, it’s because they’re not equipped to handle it. And that’s the frightening part.

When it comes out, I hope you read [my memoir] “Brazen.”

Believe it or not, when I handed it in when I finished writing, it was 1,700 pages because it’s such a complex story and there is no short way of telling it. Luckily, I have great editors, we got it down to something under 500 pages, but the

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reality is that it is a crazy story.

Like, the first woman to walk into my showroom was the head buyer of shoes for Harrods and I met her at a fashion party.

Who in particular do you want to watch “My Unorthodox Life”?

I hope everyone watches the show. For the people in my community, I think if they actually watch the entire show and not just the first episode, where I explain why I left. … The next eight episodes show that we [in the family] all get along, that there’s beautiful things in religion and that I have nothing against Judaism.

My children are still religious.

Do I give them a hard time about being religious? No, the only person I ever gave a hard time to was Aron. All I said is, talk to girls, get an education, go to college — it’s just about opening the outside world to yourself, and realizing that there are wonderful people in every nationality, in every ethnicity, in every religion.

One of the critiques we’re hearing is that you only have negative things to say about your life before leaving Orthodoxy. How would you respond to that?

I learned many beautiful things in my community. I mean, during Purim, you don’t go and ask for gifts, you give gifts. There’s so much giving and generosity and gratitude and appreciation. I talk about it in this show, I talk about it in every interview. I love being a Jew, I love the people in my community. I hate fundamentalism, and there are aspects in our world that are fundamentalist, and they need to go, and they can go.

In an ideal world, what changes would you want your show to induce?

I don’t want to change halacha [Jewish law]. … I would love to see women have an opportunity to have a real education, go to college, and not have to get married off at 19 on a shidduch [arranged marriage]. I want women to be able to sing in public if they want or dance in public if they want. I want them to create. I want them to be doctors or lawyers or whatever they want to be. I want them to know that they matter, in and of themselves, not just as wives and mothers.  THE

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German media is because Jewishness remains attached to the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust. In age years, now splits his time the first episode, he mentions a between London and Germany, study that shows the first four terms where he appears in both English that Germans think of when they and German TV shows. He is one hear the word “Jew” are “Holoof thousands of Soviet refugees caust,” “antisemitism,” “Hitler,” who make up a large part of Gerand “Israel/Palestine.” many’s contemporary Jewish comThis, Donskoy argues, is how a munity — and who have a comlot of German antisemitism starts; pletely different culture than native anyone who identifies as Jewish is German Jews who survived the immediately attached to “negativeHolocaust. driven” topics.

“In Germany, could you imagine “Antisemitism doesn’t need to be a play at the Deutsches Theater in a person who says ‘I hate Jews.’

Berlin called ‘Die Schlechten Antisemitism starts the moment Juden’ [‘The Bad Jews’]?” he told you think differently about a perthe Jewish Telegraphic Agency. son,” he said. “It’s not the person “That wouldn’t work and that is sad hates you, but a person attaches because it means we are denied only negative-driven themes the parts of our humor.” moment they know you’re Jewish.”

The show closes with an “Ask A Donskoy spoke to JTA in between Jew” segment, offering non-Jewish filming two projects, one of which viewers the opportunity to ask quesis called “Faking H.” and is about tions. Questions range from discusthe 1983 media scandal when a sions on the police presence in front West German news magazine purof Jewish institutions to whether or chased the alleged diaries of Adolf not Judaism is a religion, a nationHitler for $3.7 million. The diaries ality or both. (It is actually a histowere later revealed to be fakes. ry, answers Max Czollek, a Berlin- Donskoy makes a toast with guests After a brief introduction to what based author and poet who appeared Helene Shani Braun, center, and Laura the Jewish Telegraphic Agency is, Cazes. (Christian Pries) in an episode.)

Donskoy laughs and says: “That’s One viewer writes in asking Donskoy agrees that the strange- how Jews control the media.”

Donskoy about how he feels about ness of Jewish representation in Against the historic backdrop of German history, Jewish programs Air Travel? COVID-19 PCR Test there geared towards non-Jews — either exclusively or in tandem with ***RESULTS in 2-4 Hours*** Jews — are still noteworthy events.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany’s recent “Meet A Jew” program, in which German Jews told their stories to non-Jews, usually in classroom settings, garnered mixed reactions. Some celebrated the mission to increase non-Jewish Germany’s exposure to Jewish people; others felt the initiative, itself Does your employer require regular testing? an evolution of an earlier “Rent A Jew” program, paraded Jews in Planning group travel or a special event? front of Germans for their benefit.

It recalled an earlier, more conParish mandate requiring 72-hour negative test? troversial exhibition called “The Truth,” put on by the Jewish Individual and group testing available to Whole Museum of Berlin in 2013. The the general public, including rapid test, exhibition included a sign that read “Are there still Jews in Germany?” antigen test, and antibody test with no and included a Jewish person two hours every day outside of Saturday symptoms or doctor’s orders required. to answer questions.

The response from Jewish audiProvided by: ences and German press covering US BIO-CHEM MEDICAL SERVICES “Freitagnacht Jews” has been most4449 North I-10 Service Road West ly positive.

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circumcision, namely his own.

After laughing, Donskoy says that he was circumcised on the living room table at his grandmother’s house, the same table where he eats dinner with her to this day. Czollek then asks if this is the grandmother that makes the good borscht they ate at the start of the episode, joking that it probably does not have any blood from Christian children in it.

“That’s foreskin blood,” Donskoy replies, “it makes the soup really spicy.”

The humor may land with Jewish audiences, but there are explicit nods to non-Jewish ones as well — pop ups on screen explain that Hanukkah is the Jewish festival of lights, and that “l’chaim” means “to life” when the guests clink their glasses.

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studies student.

On this point, Semra Kizilkaya, a 28-year-old linguist and activist engaged in Jewish-Muslim dialogue, agrees.

“I enjoy the new perspective in discourse it sets about being Jewish in Germany today, and the plurality of voices it shows on even the very basic questions,” she said. “At the same time, it is one of the few formats in public television where a minority group sets their own agenda, acclaims their own voice, and for once, the others listen.”

But Rogowski also felt the show confirmed certain cliches about Jews — like the idea of “two Jews, three opinions” — without offering clear and productive conversations about them.

“Everyone was constantly interrupting and it was difficult for viewers to follow,” she says.

She also wasn’t thrilled with where Donskoy took the conversation about “Jew porn” as cultural voyeurism — he noted that the term is an actual pornographic category.

Still, 72% of the 54 people who responded to a poll she posted on Instagram said they liked the show overall.

Kubra Dalkilic, a 25-year-old Islamic theologian and research associate at Forum Dialog in Berlin, says she likes the show and appreciates the insight into Jewish life and cuisine. She added that she feels like she can relate to the guests when they discuss their shared distaste for being reduced to their Jewishness.

“As a Muslim woman, that’s something I can definitely understand,” she says.

Rogowski hopes that “Freitagnacht Jews” continues to develop, showing non-Jewish Germans that Jews have fun, and “that although we have collective trauma, we don’t allow ourselves to be defined by it.”

She wants to see the show promote pluralistic values that are core to her Jewishness.

On that point, Donskoy clearly has her in mind.

“Once you have a voice, you need to use it,” says Donskoy. “I as a person stand for a pluralistic way of living. Multiculturalism is something I really propagate and I live.”

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bow. What language is available for the opposite of rapture, when we witness something on our earth that should not be? Is there a reverse bracha to mark the sadness of seeing tree leaves fall when it’s not yet autumn?

We are witnessing drastic changes to our earth in real time, and no area will be spared: The Associated Press reported recently that while the West is getting hotter during the day, the East Coast is becoming hotter at night, a worrying trend because that means fewer cool nights for relief. As a society, we must be concerned about the public-health ramifications for those who cannot afford or access cool indoor air during ever-warmer days.

As parents, it is getting harder to tell our kids that some terrifying weather event is a rare circumstance likely not to repeat itself for many years, when actually these extreme events have started to repeat themselves with increasing frequency. Last week’s Heat Dome was billed as a “once-in-a-millennium” convergence of factors, but as the Portland-based journalist Tove Danovich wrote in The Washington Post, “Unprecedented is becoming the norm.”

In fact, the last time Seattle experienced heat on this level was not 1,000 years ago — it was the summer of 2009, shortly after my first child was born. Like most residences there, our rental house did not have air conditioning at the time; locals took pride in having the least air conditioning of any American metropolitan area.

But now I view that heat wave as a grim harbinger of things to come. I remember the moment the houses on our street collectively darkened as the overtaxed electrical grid blew. Local hotels were completely booked with people fleeing the heat, so we had nowhere to go. My parents happened to be visiting from Virginia, and my dad insisted that we’d all be safer sleeping outside since the house felt so stifling. My husband hoisted the bassinet into the backyard and my infant son slept peacefully under the stars in a short-sleeved onesie, while the rest of us tossed and turned on blankets beside him.

That baby boy is now studying for his bar mitzvah, and the “freak” heat wave that occurred during his first summer on the

planet can no longer be considered an outlier. As we recover from the Heat Dome, he is practicing the blessings for the Torah service. As we gird ourselves for wildfire season, he is starting to learn his haftorah. At a moment when so much of nature feels offkilter, the cycle of Jewish life reliably continues. For this mom witnessing climate change affecting our earth in real time, tradition is sometimes a cold comfort.

As parents we learn to compartmentalize our own fears in times of immediate urgency. When my daughter ran into the corner of her brother’s metal bed frame a few months ago, I stanched the bleeding, calmed her down and consulted with a doctor about whether to come in for stitches. I could see that the wound on her forehead was bad, but I was able to put my fears aside and act out of necessity. Mediating the drastic changes happening to our environment feels like a different level of crisis management, though. When it comes to the wounds being inflicted upon the earth, I am not sure how to compartmentalize my fears, nor do I know whether I should tell my kids that “it’s going to be OK” when they can plainly see the vibrant green ferns in our yard scorched to a dark maroon.

The Jewish response to a crisis is to care for others and take responsibility for those who are most vulnerable. I am trying to turn my emotions about the climate crisis into action, seeking out organizations that are educating and making an impact, and informing myself about policies that might create change. But I still have my garden to tend, and so I will head outside in the cool air tomorrow morning, and my daughter will bring her watering can. I’ll sweep up the maple leaves that fell too soon, check on the mulberries still taking root and give the yellow Hakone grass some extra water. I will bless any new raspberries that appear on the vine, praising God, “Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam, shekacha lo be’olamo” — “Blessed are You, source of all life, who fills the world with beauty.”

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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of my parental leave because everyone had gone remote, my first feeling was that of absolute relief. Without a long daily commute, I found that even with the added complication of an infant, I actually had more energy. Plus I no longer caught every cold anyone ever brought into the office, so in many ways I was healthier over the course of the pandemic than I was for many of the prior years. People defaulted to socializing online, which meant I didn’t have to navigate “saving the spoons” for even longer days, more exposure to crowds and the lack of certainty about the accessibility of whatever we were attending.

But like so many others in my position, there was frustration, too.

Why were so many of these pandemic adjustments — flexible schedules to manage family and health needs; remote work and learning; streaming access to Jewish services and events; virtual offerings from museums and cultural centers — suddenly possible now that able-bodied people needed them, when people with disabilities have been told for years that they simply couldn’t be done? Why did it take a global pandemic and a devastating loss of life for the world to realize what kinds of accessibility are possible?

And even more frustrating: What’s going to happen now that able-bodied people don’t need these accommodations anymore? The answer seems to be that in many cases, they’re disappearing. And if they stay, there will be hurdles to overcome in order to keep them as the default returns to what’s possible for the able-bodied world.

The Jewish world is no stranger to these challenges and conversations. Some places in the Jewish community were set up well to adjust to the pandemic — many

synagogues have been livestreaming services for years. Sarah, a member of a large synagogue in Syracuse, New York, said her synagogue is planning to keep a hybrid model for services, discussions and classes, as well as shiva minyans, even though the physical space has largely reopened.

“We’ve been hearing from a lot of older members that this is good for them,” she said. “We’re trying to be deliberate about staying hybrid, so that those who want and are able to be can be in person, and those who can’t or don’t want to can still participate.”

For others, the drive to return to in-person life is forcing disabled people to wrestle with their place in their communities. My own learning institution has defaulted back to in-person learning, with remote learners — some with disabilities, some remote simply due to distance — now pushing back at the sudden reduction in the opportunities available, despite the expectation that remote learners continue to pay the same course fees as in-person learners.

“There was that tiny glimmer of hope that when things went back to normal, the institution would see the beautiful array of disability pathways they could offer as a way to expand our community,” a disabled Jewish seminary student from another school told me, asking to remain anonymous. Her school is fully reopening in the fall with an expectation of inperson course work and internships, and students needing disability accommodations to remain remote must go through an approval process.

“Instead, I’m watching my peers rush back with excitement to their in-person classes while I’m left with a sense of grief, and the responsibility to figure out how my professors can ‘fit me in’ to their otherwise in-person classes,” she said.

Much has been written on the idea of inclusion as a Jewish value.

In an article for The Times of Israel blog, Rabbi Dov Linzer recounts the exclusion of “ritually impure” community members (for example, those who had been caring for the dead) from making a sacrifice on the eve of Passover and the voicing of their frustration to Moses.

“Why, they were saying, are we being pushed out of the community? … By telling us that we cannot bring this sacrifice, you are telling us — whether you intended or not, whether you are doing it actively or not — that we are not ‘part of the rest of the Israelites,'” he wrote.

Linzer cites this as an allegory for the inclusion of people with disabilities in the Jewish community: When we fail to actively create pathways to inclusion, we’re creating inaccessible spaces, rituals and communities.

This is the conversation that disabled people are having all over the world — with workplaces, with schools, with houses of worship, with friends and family. Whether exclusion is intentional — or simply a byproduct of the assumption that certain systems are simply “better” — the impact is the same: Disabled people like myself feel

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that they are not a full part of the community, and that “membership” is a privilege conveyed on those who are able to physically show up to access it. As someone whose disability brought me a connection to Judaism that I never had before, it’s painful to not just feel like my community no longer has space for me.

“I don’t want to be part of a Jewish community that’s based around convenience,” the seminary student told me. “If your doors are only open to the people who can make it to your building and your event spaces, then you’re not an inclusive community.”

Disabled people like me want the same things as our able-bodied friends and family and co-workers as the world reopens. We want to safely reconnect with the people we love. We want to engage in meaningful work. We want to be part of the communities that we value.

All we ask is that you don’t leave us behind.

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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ippines and a refugee mother who is a Sephardic Jew from Egypt.

One Native American interviewee quoted in the report had moved to a new area and sought out community at a local synagogue. What the woman encountered were intrusive questions about her identity.

“At times I’ve had to compartmentalize sides of myself because it’s just so mentally exhausting facing the ‘What are you?’ questions,” she said.

A Black man who is active in the Jewish community told researchers about a similar experience of being scrutinized over his perceived differences.

“I went to Shabbat services recently and a woman came up to me and said without introducing herself, ‘Shabbat Shalom. So are you here for a religion class? Did you convert?’” he recalled.

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can spread out and use the sound systems to be able to project,” Rabbi Daniel Schwartz said. “For those families that aren’t comfortable being in person just yet, we’ll also have a livestream of the service, too.”

Ikar will offer seats to members only, who will be guaranteed entry to only one in-person service on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.

There will also be a livestreaming option for each service.

For those who feel more comfortable gathering indoors in small groups, Ikar will encourage “watch parties” at private homes, where smaller groups of vaccinated members can gather to watch the livestream of services together.

Balaban said the gatherings would “encourage people to be in community with one another, but maybe not in a big crowd, as people might not be comfortable with that yet.”

At Stephen Wise Temple, masks will be required for vaccinated members in the main sanctuary.

There will be a livestreaming option as well. And families with unvaccinated children can attend an outdoor service, also with masks.

The Reform synagogue will also offer multiple Zoom discussion groups for those who wish to mimic the experience of being in services for most of the day or for whom Zoom may be the only way they feel comfortable interacting with others.

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to specific actions has to do with Jews of color seeking community with one another. Nearly 40% of participants said they had no close friends who are also Jews of color and half said talking to other Jews of color about their experiences was very important. Jews of color can have a sense of belonging among white Jews, the survey said, but only about half said they have felt they belong.

Perez said these findings demand “tangible” investments in community initiatives for Jews of color.

Defining exactly what the term “Jew of color” means is a challenge that the researchers and the wider Jewish racial justice movement have grappled with for years.

Calling it an “imperfect, but useful umbrella term,” the study said those who identified as Jews of color for a variety of reasons. Some were referring to belonging to a racial group as is common in the United States. Others use the term to capture their national, geographic or ethnic heritage, as in the case of certain Iranian,

Ethiopian or Sephardic Jews.

The ambiguity of the term arose previously in debates over the total number of Jews of color in the U.S. Estimates of the community range from 6% to 15% depending on the study and definition. A 2019 report from the Jews of Color Initiative argued that the community has been chronically undercounted because of poor study designs.

The recent Jewish population report from the Pew Research Center did not attempt to answer the question, but it did conclude that 92% of Jews identify as white.

As the title “Beyond the Count” suggests, the new study’s authors want to turn the focus away from past debates and move toward a deeper understanding of Jewish diversity.

Asked how they express their Jewishness, the participants offered five main responses. Three out of four said that working for justice and equality was very important to their Jewish identity. About twothirds selected passing on their

Judaism, honoring ancestors, remembering the Holocaust and celebrating holidays as very important expressions of Jewishness.

The quotes from interviewees enlivened the numbers and pointed to the wide-ranging ways in which Jews of color conceive of their identity. One woman, who identified as white, Black and Native, spoke about the significance of being outdoors and observing birds or the rustling of leaves.

“Nature grounds me that there’s a creator responsible for all of this,” she said.

An Indian American talked about the challenge of keeping kosher in the South, while an Asian American said they had recently brought people together for a Bollywoodthemed Shabbat ritual.

“With every person I talked to, their story was so unique and interesting,” said Gage Gorsky, one of the researchers. “Each time I said, “Wow, yeah, another way to be Jewish that I hadn’t even thought of.” 

access experience,” Laufer said.

At The Jewish Center in Manhattan, Shabbat services are held in the sanctuary with two options: maskoptional sections for vaccinated people as well as mask-required and socially distanced sections for the unvaccinated. (As an Orthodox synagogue, the congregation doesn’t do Zoom or other livestreaming options on Shabbat and holy days.) It also hosts a service on the roof for those who feel more comfortable in an outdoor setting. Rabbi Yosie Levine said the plan is to keep these options throughout the holidays.

“We actually just had a meeting about it this week with our advisory committee. And the conclusion of the meeting was that we’re not changing any of the guidelines,” Levine said, though he noted the committee would recommend that high-risk people should wear a mask to services.

For many worshippers at this year’s High Holiday services, there will be some disappointment that services aren’t entirely “back to normal” yet. For others, the return to inperson services may be more than they are comfortable with.

“I think there are some people who are going to be like, I can’t believe you’re making me be masked at an outdoor service, or I can’t believe you’re making me be masked at an indoor service when I showed you that I was vaccinated,” Laufer said. On the other hand, she said, “We definitely have people saying I just want to confirm that we’ll be able to stream services.”

Laufer said the goal this year was to be safe, to gather in-person as much as possible and to upset as few people as possible.

“Last year was easier, [though] emotionally much harder. The

feeling of a sense of loss last year was really palpable for all of us,” Laufer said. “I think now it’s harder logistically, the flow charts we had to make — it made my brain hurt.”

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what didn’t work for them, it creates an opportunity to discuss the change that can be made, from giving yeshiva students an adequate secular education to changing the way homosexuality is viewed.

If those critical of the Orthodox world are dismissed as traumatized, mentally disturbed or bitter, we miss out on the greatest gift our society could receive. To become whole. To become better. To end abuse. These voices are the checks and balances for a society.

Once upon a time, before I married, I was a kiruv, or outreach, professional. I worked with an offshoot of a Modern Orthodox youth group that worked largely with secular Jewish youth.

I was close with one high school student in particular, a dancer who had recently started keeping Shabbat and Orthodox modesty laws.

The advisers told her that she could be a dancer or she could be a religious Jew, but she couldn’t be both.

As a religious artist, I disagreed.

I printed out different opportunities for Jewish Orthodox dancers offered in Israel and America and brought them to a meeting with the

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student and my colleagues. I insisted that there was no reason she had to choose. I left the meeting feeling good about helping steer the discussion, yet never paused to consider how problematic the situation was in the first place.

Years later I look back and wonder: Why was it OK to take a vulnerable girl into a room with people she looked up to and pressure her to make a choice about her life that did not need to be made?

This was not in some ultraOrthodox sect. This was a group of Modern Orthodox advisers, all kind and well-intentioned.

For the past 20 years I classified myself as “Orthodox,” although I always identified more as “postdenominational.” The denominations limit us. Especially within Orthodoxy, it becomes more about proving you fit in than about being part of an ongoing conversation.

Our creative community in Brooklyn was filled as well with those who jumped between cleaving to tradition and listening to the reality on the ground of what was and wasn’t working and shifting because of it.

This past year, I moved far away from everyone who shared their stories with me in the last decade. I

now live in Long Beach, California, outside of an observant Jewish community. It’s quiet here, as my husband and I try to untangle for ourselves how Jewish practice and belief can serve us in contributing most to the world.

One thing has become clear to us: We need to listen to the critics, no matter where we are. Don’t worry about what the non-Jews will think. Don’t worry about a “backlash” from white supremacists or antisemites or other Jews.

Just listen. The future belongs to those who struggle and question and search and shift — and can inspire us to create a better Jewish world, if only their stories are taken seriously.

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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Graceland for 32 years and is one of the world’s preeminent experts on the Presley family. “We think it’s what Elvis would have wanted.”

There is evidence that Elvis’ Jewish lineage meant more to him than just a symbol on a headstone.

He gave generously over the years to a variety of Jewish organizations, including the Memphis Jewish Community Center, a donation honored with a plaque that hangs in Graceland today. Elvis’ personal library included several books on Judaism and Jewish history. An entire book on the topic, “The Jewish World of Elvis Presley”, was published last year.

During the final years of his life, Elvis was frequently photographed wearing necklaces with the Star of David and the Hebrew word “chai,” which means life. The chai necklace is kept in a cabinet at Graceland next to the keys to the singer’s famed 1955 pink Cadillac. Never one to be accused of subtlety, Elvis had the necklace designed with 17 diamonds. He purchased the jewelry in 1976, one year before he died.

“He would often make a joke, ‘I don’t want to get left out of heaven on a technicality,’” Marchese said.

“So he would wear a Star of David, a chai and he would also wear a cross. He wanted to keep all his bases covered.”

Gladys’ heritage notwithstanding, Presley was raised in the Assembly of God Church, but he explored other religions as he got older and began to struggle with physical and mental issues.

“He was always searching for answers as to why he was chosen to be who he was,” Marchese said. “I think he found some of those answers through different religions.”

There have been suggestions that Elvis’ handlers didn’t want his Jewish heritage known to the public, fearing it might prompt some of his Southern fans to abandon him. But Marchese says there is no evidence of that.

“It was not something he was shying away from,” she said. “He would be photographed in these [necklaces] and he would make donations to Jewish community centers throughout his entire life.” THE

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moving back and forth from his past to his present as an old man, revisiting key moments of his life.”

“This film is not about loving or hating this man,” he adds, “it is about understanding him.”

Keitel is among several screen portrayals of Lansky by Jewish actors, including Richard Dreyfuss in a David Mamet-written HBO movie, also called “Lansky,” in 1999, and Dustin Hoffman in 2005’s “The Lost City.” Patrick Fischler played the gangster in the TV series “Mob City.”

In “Bugsy,” Warren Beatty’s 1991 biopic of another Jewish gangster, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, the nonJewish actor Ben Kingsley played Lansky — Keitel played a different Jewish gangster, Mickey Cohen.

But probably the most famous movie portrayal of Lansky was a fictionalized version: Hyman Roth (played by Lee Strasberg), the partner-turned-antagonist of the Corleone family in 1974’s “The Godfather Part II,” was heavily based on Lansky.

Roth, like Lansky, was an older Jewish gangster who worked with the mafia to build casinos in Cuba, and like Lansky he later sought asy-

46 Rosh Hashanah 2021

lum in Israel.

In the new film, Lansky likens his business operations with the mob to that of U.S. Steel, which “Godfather” fans may recognize as a line said by Roth. But according to Rockaway, it was a comparison that the real-life Lansky was known to make himself, the National Crime Syndicate to that corporation.

Ironically, the Jewish Strasberg, who was better known as an acting teacher than as an actor, was a teacher and mentor to Keitel — and Keitel to this day is closely associated with New York’s Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Rockaway said he went out of his way not to watch other movies about Lansky, but he listed the films of Martin Scorsese, as well the Coen Brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing,” as great influences.

As for Robert Rockaway, who lives in Israel and teaches at Tel Aviv University, he has yet to see the movie. The director says his father is waiting for the theatrical release of the film that sprung from his long-ago research and was brought to the screen by his son.

“Lansky” opened June 25 in U.S. theaters as well as on VOD, and it will be available to stream three months later on Amazon Prime Video.

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Shabbat candles.”

Albertson recalled a Birthright activity with the Israel soldiers who accompanied the group.

Amy Albertson, a Chinese-American Jew from Sacramento, Calif., said she had an epiphany on her Birthright trip: “I realized that I don’t need to do anything to be Jewish. I am Jewish.”

(Courtesy of Albertson)

“We were asked to share a Jewish memory, but I was like, ‘I don’t have many Jewish memories,’” she said. “The soldier I was paired with said, ‘I guess all my memories are Jewish, but I’m secular.’ That’s when I realized that I don’t need to do anything to be Jewish. I am Jewish.”

Benjamin Sklar, 29, visited Israel several years ago on Birthright Excel, a 10-week professional experience designed to foster economic and social partnerships between Jews from the Diaspora and Israel. An experience on the trip inspired him to decide to move to Israel and join the Israeli army (he later moved back to the United States and become a lawyer).

The group met with the ArabIsraeli CEO of Jerusalem’s YMCA and learned about how the Y builds bridges between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem.

“It was valuable to be exposed to an Arab living in Jerusalem and not just Ashkenazi Jews,” said Sklar, who is Mexican American and was raised in an interfaith home in Houston by his Catholic mother and Jewish father. “I felt the organizers made an effort to expose us to Reform, ultra-Orthodox, Sephardim, Ashkenazim. We experienced all the different angles of Israel.”

Even as he decided to join the army, Sklar said he wanted to devote his career to helping the Palestinian-Israeli relationship.

“I just had a feeling on Birthright that I wanted to be an Israeli soldier; I felt they were superheroes,” Sklar said. “I wanted to serve the country and be part of the team. I thought to myself, ‘Are they more Jewish than me?’ I served in the paratroopers.”

For Emily Nassir, whose mother

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is an American-born Ashkenazi Jew and her father a Persian Israeli, growing up in a diverse home helped her appreciate the various customs and rituals practiced by different communities.

“It taught me to respect other people’s ways of living,” said Nassir, 25, of New York.

Nassir’s trip to Israel with Birthright in March 2019 exposed her to an even wider swath of Israeli culture.

“My favorite part of the trip was sleeping overnight in a Bedouin tent, engaging with Arab culture,” she recalled. “It was the most eye-opening experience, immersing for a time in another culture, watching someone in their own space. I realized that so many peoples and cultures exist in this one small country.”

At a time when antisemitism is rampant, Nassir said that engaging with Israelis with different viewpoints, as she did during her Birthright experience, “is the only way to understand” Israel as a living, breathing place.

Albertson said experiencing Israel and Israelis firsthand has enabled her to fight antisemitism and antiZionism with facts.

“When people are yelling lies about Israel, I can feel more confident that I know they aren’t true,” she said.

“Israel as a Jewish country and homeland is not just a story or an idea. I’ve seen it, tasted it, touched it. I’ve witnessed and felt the Jewish connection to the land, and that is a powerful feeling.

“When I face antisemitism,” Albertson said, “I know that I am part of this legacy and this nation.

And I know that in the worst possible case scenario, I always have a home as a Jewish person.”

This story was sponsored by and produced in partnership with Birthright Israel, which aims to give every young Jewish adult around the world the opportunity to visit Israel on an educational trip. This article was produced by JTA's native content team.

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