Fighting Terror Through Kindness/Gary Rosenblatt in New York
Tiki Barber, the former New York Giants star running back, said he was “honored and humbled” to receive the Koby Mandell Foundation Humanitarian Award at the group’s annual dinner Tuesday evening at the Puck Building.
He told several hundred attendees that having been raised by a single mother, he and his twin brother relied on the kindness of coaches, teachers and ministers.
He said Sherri and Seth Mandell do “what those people did for me – you give people a shoulder to stand on.”
The Mandells created the foundation to memorialize their 13-year-old son who, along with a friend, was stoned to death in a cave near their homes in Tekoa, Israel, on Lag B’Omer 2001.
The foundation operates camp programs in Israel for children who lost a parent or sibling to Arab terror, and retreats for women who have lost husbands or children. The Mandells believe that they have reached about two-thirds of the 1,300 Israeli families who have lost a loved one to terror over the last seven years.
Koby was a sports fan, his parents said, and previous award recipients were former Oriole Cal Ripken and New York Mets Manager Willie Randolph.
Barber, who retired last year and is now a commentator on NBC’s Today Show, said he was moved by the Mandells’ response to his question as to how they could deal with their loss. “You said, `because we have other kids,’” Barber noted.
He told the audience he visited Israel in the summer of 2005, at the invitation of Israeli leader Shimon Peres, and found it to be “one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever been to.”
Earlier, Sherri Mandell thanked the audience for helping her, her family and the youngsters who attend Camp Koby to heal. “Our goal [at the camp] is not just resilience, but post-traumatic growth,” she said, and to use emotional pain as a catalyst for growth. “We’ve become leaders in the field of traumatic bereavement.”
An adult counselor and 14-year-old camper told the guests of how caring a place Camp Koby is, where youngsters can smile and enjoy themselves, knowing that everyone there understands their sadness.
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Nothing Has Changed/Gary Rosenblatt in New York
Thinking about the Annapolis conference and prospects for peace creates an internal battle for me between Mideast hope and Mideast history, between the silver lining and the clouds of skepticism.
I’d like to think a new page was turned on Tuesday, just as I felt when watching Rabin, Arafat and Bill Clinton on the White House lawn more than 14 years ago. Then, and yesterday, the speeches were moving, the expressions of ending violence and resolving differences were powerful. The logic of two peoples sharing a land rather than killing each other over it was compelling.
But I have learned that the Mideast is not about logic.
Annapolis showed that when the U.S. wants to act, it can bring together the leading cast of characters in the Mideast drama. But for all its influence, it can’t make them resolve their differences, especially in light of past experiences – Oslo, Madrid, Wye River, etc. -- and the same willful blindness on the part of American officials.
Why am I pessimistic? For starters, there is no indication that Mahmoud Abbas has the clout – even if he has the intention – of reining in Palestinian militants, or that Ehud Olmert could navigate the political obstacles in selling a plan to return to pre-1967-like borders. Not to mention that Hamas, which reasserted its intention to destroy Israel and increase violence soon, has not been dealt with in the Annapolis talks.
Equally disturbing to me is that the U.S., after being burned by so many previous peace attempts, continues to advance negotiations by ignoring the realities and conditions that undermined earlier efforts. Differences are glossed over through ambiguous rhetoric rather than confronted outright because the impetus is on moving forward. But towards what?
As Natan Sharansky pointed out this week in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, even Israeli officials are always saying not to insist on dramatic changes from Abbas. First strengthen him, they argue – through aid and support – and then make demands. But why should the Palestinian leader ever go against popular opinion – which he helps foster by allowing anti-Semitism to prevail -- especially if he lacks the boldness of a Sadat or Rabin?
Will the Palestinian Authority continue to resist recognizing Israel as a Jewish state? Will it continue to allow, if not promote, hatred of Jews through textbooks, media, children’s television shows and religious leaders?
I pray that I am wrong, but I think that unless and until the Arab world comes to grips with the reality of a Jewish state in the Mideast, the prospects for increased violence in the region in the coming year are greater than those for pea ceful negotiations.
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Behind the Almontaser Stories / Larry Cohler-Esses, Editor at Large
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article for The Nation Magazine denouncing inaccurate smear campaigns against Muslims, Arabs and critics of Israel as a kind of “new McCarthyism”---for which I was strongly criticized in some corners of the Jewish community.
This week I am under attack from another sector of the community, charged with practicing what I so recently denounced. The charge comes from my Page One story on Debbie Almontaser---one of those I cited in my Nation article as a victim of the New McCarthyism.
My story -- headlined “Ex-Arab School Head Rapped for Rally Partners” --highlights the identity or backgrounds of several speakers at a rally in support of Almontaser, who resigned under fire last August as leader of a new dual language Arabic-English public school in Brooklyn. The story implies that these supporters’ backgrounds stand in contrast to Almontaser’s own moderate public positions. It includes the attack of a critic who asks: “Now that [Jewish Week readers] know who the supporters of this school are, are they happy? Are they comfortable?”
The three speakers at Almontaser’s support rally who came under attack were part of a total of nine or 10 who appeared there, including a labor leader, a prominent Manhattan rabbi, an academic and the chairman of the City Council’s Education Committee (all also cited high up in the article). One of those angry about my highlighting the other speakers and their backgrounds asked: “Are you sure this is not tainted by neo-McCarthyism?”
I think the best way to answer this is to relate how the news judgments in this story came about. In this case, this includes how those news judgments interacted with personal feelings I had come to develop about the issues and people involved in this story.
Almontaser resigned last August under fire as founding head of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) in Brooklyn. The new public middle school, which opened in September, offers a dual language, dual culture English-Arabic college prep curriculum. One of some 60 dual language public school programs in the city, it aims to draw in students from Arab and non-Arab backgrounds. But from its inception a group of critics has attacked the school and Almontaser herself for, they say, harboring a covert extremist and Islamist agenda.
None of this had any effect until Almontaser granted an interview to The New York Post last August. Almontaser was asked then about her association with T-shirts for local Arab American teen-age girls bearing the message “Intifada NYC.” The T-shirts were produced by Arab Women in the Arts and Media (AWAAM), a group that shared office space with a separate, unrelated group on whose board Almontaser sat. Almontaser was quoted explaining that the root meaning of the word intifada---“shaking off”---had different meanings in different contexts; voicing her understanding that the word “is developing a negative connotation” due to the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and stating her belief that neither the T-shirts nor the girls wearing them meant to extol violence.
Right-wing media outlets slammed Almontaser for not having simply condemned the T-shirts. So did Stop the Madrassa, the group that charged the school and Almontaser with seeking to instill extremism in students. In her suit last week, Almontaser alleged that the Department of Education had illegally forced her to resign as interim principal in the face of this pressure and was now refusing to consider her application for the post of permanent principal.
At the time of her resignation, I wrote a story detailing how this was but the latest episode in a months-long smear campaign by forces opposed to the school who sought to portray Almontaser as an extremist. I detailed specific distortions and falsehoods they had put out about her in the months preceding the ill-fated Post interview. The story reviewed Almontaser’s long history of commitment to nonviolence and interfaith work with Jews and Christians.
The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater New York and Rabbi Michael Paley, who works for UJA-Federation, were among those who attested to this.
This story and another that followed led Almontaser and her attorney, Alan Levine, to offer me an exclusive interview with her shortly before they filed suit. During this interview, Almontaser reiterated her view that the Post reporter had sought to impose an inappropriate litmus test by asking her about AWAAM’s T-shirts: “I said [to The Post] this organization and its T-shirt have nothing to do with me or the school,” she said.
I also discovered then that I shared a rare common point of personal background with Levine. We had both, it turned out, done civil rights work in Mississippi many years ago and even shared some common acquaintances from that era, an intense and vivid period in both our lives. On top of this, it turned out that Levine’s spouse was Donna Nevel, the person who first recruited me to come to New York and work in Jewish journalism after I finished graduate school in Illinois in 1982. Nevel, with whom I had had no contact for many years, is one of the organizers of the community group defending Almontaser and KGIA.
On a personal level, I liked these people and what they were trying to achieve. I also disliked what I had, through my reporting, found to be the falsehoods, distortions and guilt-by-association charges that school critics had launched against Almontaser.
Because of this, my heart sank when I attended the support rally for Almontaser.
The lead speaker, with Almontaser at her side, was Mona Eldahry, who was introduced as executive director of AWAAM, the group that produced the T-shirts and---equally relevant---the group Almontaser had repeatedly stressed she had nothing to do with. Eldahry praised Almontaser in her speech for having refused to condemn the T-shirts or her organization.
I knew that Eldahry’s role as lead speaker on Almontaser’s behalf with Almontaser next to her ran up against Almontaser’s repeated emphasis previously that she had nothing to do with AWAAM. Whatever the situation before, she did now, and this change was news.
The news impact was similar when City Council Member Charles Barron stepped up to the microphone. Almontaser’s history---one she herself stresses---reflects a consistent commitment to nonviolence in confronting racial and social issues.
In contrast, Barron, after the police shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man in Queens, advocated protest marches and prayer—first: “Then, if they don’t respond to none of that, then don’t ask our people to be peaceful while they are being murdered,” he declared to hundreds at a protest rally last November. “We are not the only ones that can bleed.”
Barron is most famous lately for pushing for naming a street in Brooklyn after Sonny Carson, the late self-described “anti-white” activist involved in the CrownHeights riots and the protests against Korean owned stores in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Of less, but not no significance: I knew a young woman who spoke at the rally from the Council on American Islamic Relations would be of interest to Jewish Week readers. Some non-government investigators, such as Steven Emerson, have accused CAIR of having ties to terrorist groups. Former FBI counter-terrorism investigators have been quoted challenging this. At the same time, the U.S. Justice Department named CAIR as an unindicted conspirator in its recent---failed---prosecution against the Holy Land Foundation for allegedly supporting Hamas.
There was no way the issue of these speakers’ backgrounds could be kept out of a news story. At the very least, Stop the Madrassa would have something to say about how these speakers clashed with Almontaser’s public stand. And since in this case, they were speaking up for Almontaser with her at their side at a rally she endorsed with her presence, I would be obliged to quote the group.
Nevertheless, in my initial draft, I wrote about all this deep down in the body of the story. My lead angle was about Almontaser’s suit and some of the contents of the complaint. But when I turned my story in, Rob Goldblum, the paper’s managing editor, pointed to the section on the speakers and said no---this belongs at the top. Basically, he effectively ruled this, not the suit---whose imminent filing and basic outline had been previously announced and reported----is the story, at least for our readers.
I didn't like this instruction. At the same time, with the clock ticking relentlessly toward deadline, I could not think of one quick knockout response to show he was wrong----by which I mean wrong in his news judgment. Almontaser had made her lack of any connection to the T-shirt people a central point in her position that the Post was wrong to even be asking her about the shirts. Now the leader of the T-shirt people was her lead speaker. This was the "new" in the word "news," independent of whether one thought the T-shirt's message or AWAAM itself was right or wrong in its stance.
Throw in Charles Barron and the woman from CAIR, and the angle Rob favored was reinforced.
Rob Goldblum and I have a long relationship as editor and writer, one in which there is both trust and freedom to challenge and dispute. Yet I could not rebut him. In the rushed and frazzled way in which thought occurs as deadline looms, I concluded that I might well not like Rob’s instruction simply because I DID like Almontaser and did not much care for Stop the Madrassa’s distortions of her record.
I thought: this is what editors are for---to provide the distance from a story that a writer can lose.
Rob's job is to know his publication's readers and what is, or should be, important to them. It's true this can easily turn into simply pandering to their fears. But in this case, the news judgment criteria for Rob's position were pretty solid.
Therefore, my resistance to pandering here would consist of making sure I did not portray the presence of AWAAM or CAIR at this rally one dimensionally, as self-evident evils (as say, The New York Post might). In the space I had (a very big constraint), the best way to do this was by giving good play to the strong responses of Levine, Almontaser's attorney: that the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater New York had actually offered AWAAM a mini-grant of $500 in 2005---a kind of heksher that, he argued, tied JCRC more closely than Almontaser to AWAAM; and that CAIR-NY's chief counsel is a mayoral appointee.
I was not sure what to do about Charles Barron. But Almontaser’s supporters challenge why any of this is relevant to the news. "Does the fact that Charles Baron and speakers from AWAAM and CAIR spoke at her conference cast any doubt in your mind on the facts of her case?” asked one. “If not, why mention them? Because your readers would be interested? How about if one of the speakers was gay?”
If Almontaser was presenting herself as an anti-gay rights advocate who had never had anything to do with gay people, such a speaker at her rally would, indeed, be newsworthy.
In short, there is a big difference between noting the way in which some speakers standing with Almontaser at her own rally stepped on her message; and say, charging---as one of her opponents did---that a member of KGIA’s advisory committee was a speaker at a Muslim youth camp, where another person also spoke who was accused in unidentified “court papers” of helping yet a third person make backup copies of a fundraising site for terrorism. The latter is, to my mind, guilt by association. The former is reporting.
Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker famously wrote about journalists being seducers and betrayers, as a matter of necessity. She spoke about this as a conscious art good journalists cultivated. I never accepted this. But I certainly experienced a deep divergence in this story between my sense of connection and sympathy on a personal level with one side and my professional obligation.
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Deepening The GA Experience/Gary Rosenblatt just back from Nashville
Memo to future planners of the scores of programs offered at the GA (General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities), the most significant annual conference of and for Jewish leaders:
The GA does a very good job of offering panels on a variety of vital issues, from innovations in education to restoring a sense of Jewish Peoplehood. But in dealing with 3,000 people and a range of interests in 48 hours, invariably a number of sessions seem superficial.
There is a certain show-and-tell aspect to many presentations, with three or four expert panelists presenting on a given topic, often by expounding on “what our community does to deal with this issue.” That is followed by a brief and often hurried Q and A segment, with audience members not infrequently noting how their community responds to the issue. And then it’s over.
These sessions generally provide a solid overview on topics ranging from pro-Israel advocacy to fundraising techniques. But for those looking for a deeper discussion of the issues, why not include longer sessions with a limited number of attendees – delegates would sign up in advance – that could more fully explore a complicated subject in a setting that allows for more give and take between experts and the audience?
Maybe delegates could register for a series of discussions on a given track so that over two days they would come away with a real sense of expertise on the issue they chose to explore.
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Carter And The Jews/Gary Rosenblatt in New York
In recent weeks, former President Jimmy Carter has held several private meetings with Jewish leaders, and sought to meet with others, only to be rebuffed.
What’s up?
Why is Carter, whose book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" blames Israel for the lack of peace progress in the Mideast, suddenly trying to cozy up to the likes of Abe Foxman, Malcolm Hoenlein and Elie Wiesel?
Sources close to Carter say he is bent on getting a prime time speaking slot at next summer’s Democratic National Convention and feels that “he has to kosherize himself” with the American Jewish community in order to do so. To date, he has made no apologies for his book, filled with errors of omission
and commission.
We’ll know if he was successful when we tune in to the convention in Denver next August.
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My Most Memorable GA /Gary Rosenblatt in Nashville
This my 25th GA (General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities), and I find myself thinking back on some of the highlights of this annual event, the most influential in the organized Jewish community.
I remember a thrilling encounter between Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and then-Brandeis University professor Leonard Fein that touched on religious and secular influences, at my first GA, in Chicago in 1974; the "off the record" pronouncement made by Arye Dulzin of the Jewish Agency to thousands of delegates in Montreal in 1979 that Ethiopian Jews were about to be rescued; and marching in solidarity with thousands of delegates through the streets of Jerusalem in 2003.
But the most dramatic GA scene I've witnessed took place in Dallas in 1977, late on Shabbat afternoon, when a frail Golda Meir entered a room full of several thousand delegates and was greeted by a spontaneous and spirited singing of "Am Yisrael Chai."
In contrast to the carefully staged and planned presentations of the GA now, when plenaries are scripted to the minute, the beloved former Israeli prime minister delivered an impromptu speech, recalling her career in the service of the Jewish people and, particularly, her connections to the American Jewish community.
We knew she was ill and many in the crowd sensed that she was delivering her farewell address to Diaspora Jewry.
Golda spoke in her raspy voice, a little softer than usual, about how David Ben-Gurion chose her to come to America to raise desperately needed funds for the war effort in 1948, in large part because, having been born in Milwaukee, she spoke English better than other leading members of the new government. Her effort was a huge success, catapulting her career that took her to Israel's highest political office.
Only three years before the GA, Golda had resigned in the wake of a commission report faulting her government for the thousands of Israeli casualties suffered in the Yom Kippur War. Today she is reviled by many in Israel for her role leading up to the war, but for those few moments, the bond between several thousand American Jews and this small elderly woman reminiscing about her career was powerful and palpable, and there was real love in the room.
Then she thanked us for our support, waved good-bye to thunderous applause, and was soon back in Israel, where she died two months later of cancer.
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Bloggers Are Us/Gary Rosenblatt in New York
The question posed at the Columbia Journalism School’s First Amendment Series breakfast this week was “Bloggers: Are They The Future of Journalism?” The answer from the three panelists was a definitive “yes,” even from a self-proclaimed newspaper “dinosaur” like Arthur Browne, the veteran editorial page editor of The Daily News, who added: “But so what? And welcome to the party.”
“It all comes down to audience, interest and economics,” Browne told a packed room of about 200 people at the Columbia University Club in midtown. Any enterprise that can accomplish all three – be they bloggers or newspapers – will succeed.
He noted that “what sets blogs apart” are speed and unlimited space. But facts count, he insisted. Browne said he already sees a “melding” of blogging and journalism, with both striving to become “useful and interesting” to readers.
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and advocate of blogging, said that “bloggers are not about to replace journalism” but they “expand the press,” which is a good thing. He cited several examples of niche blogs that, in their specialized interest, ferreted out important information leading to major media coverage. One was firedoglake.com, a liberal blog that raised funds from readers to send six experts to cover the federal “leak” trial of “Scooter” Libby, the vice presidential aide, and transcribe and post the proceedings.
The third panelist, Jen Chung, is editor of the successful website Gothamist.com, now in more than a dozen cities, including New York, where it claims to be the most popular of local blogs. She described how the site began four years ago and combines news summaries, food blogs, social events and a live news map of incidents and accidents around the city.
With a background in marketing and consulting, Chung doesn’t claim to be a journalist, but she said the Gothamist sites are viewed by young men and women who want to know what is happening in the city but “don’t have time to read newspapers.”
She said she is continuing to seek press credentials from the New York Police Department.
Overall, the panel’s message was clear. Blogging has more than its share of crackpots, and most of its content is of narrow interest and opinion-oriented. But the fact that it has its serious participants shedding light on so many more topics than the mainstream press could ever explore means that the field will continue to grow in size and importance, and should be welcomed – with caution.
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Solidarity And Socializing/
Gary Rosenblatt in New York
“Today we pray with our feet,” Lior Sinai of the American Zionist Movement, told hundreds of Jewish students rallying on Tuesday in front of the United Nations for the release of Israel’s kidnapped soldiers.
The protest was one of about 50 planned by the Jewish Agency for Israel and other groups for the same day in communities and college campuses in the U.S. and another 30 in countries around the world, from Australia to Ukraine. It was billed as a “world solidarity day” for the prisoners.
The great majority of those gathered at the UN were yeshiva high school students who chanted “Bring Them Home” and “Let Them Go,” and were addressed by a number of student leaders as well as community and political officials, the new Israeli Consul General, and the mother of one of the kidnapped soldiers.
“Help free our son, your brother,” urged Miki Goldwasser by phone from Jerusalem. Her son, Ehud, now 32, was abducted by Hezbollah in the north in July 206, along with Eldad Regev.
Gilad Schalit was taken by Hamas several weeks earlier.
“This may happen in your backyard” someday,” she warned.
Despite the painful circumstances, the air was festive at the UN event – these were high school students, after all -- and many of the youngsters socialized during the steady string of brief speeches. “It’s camp reunion central,” observed Cynthia Dweck, a senior at the Magen David Yeshiva High School in Brooklyn. She and schoolmate Leona Ashkenazi, a ninth grader, urged bystanders to sign a petition on behalf of the three Israeli soldiers missing for almost a year and a half, and handed out flyers asking people to call the Red Cross and urge the organization to visit the prisoners, which has not happened.
Rachel Klapper, a Baruch College student who organized a campaign to collect signatures on behalf of the missing soldiers, told the crowd how she delivered 3,000 letters “from you” to the families in Israel this summer. “Always use your own power to make a difference,” she said, “and understand the power of your activism.”
Observing the scene, a community organizer asked rhetorically, “How often can we hold a major rally?” He noted that a larger gathering was held at the same spot last month. But how can the community not cry out against the injustice of kidnappings that fly in the face of international law?
It’s an unanswered question, and an impossible situation.
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You Fuse You Lose / Gary Rosenblatt in New York
Jewish educators would do well to encourage teens to pursue their interest in the arts without trying to make them produce Jewish art – at least not at that age.
That was the advice of Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, founder of BIMA-The Berkshire Institute for Music and Art, a summer program for Jewish high school students, at a panel on “Fusing Arts and Culture Into Jewish Learning” at the second annual Sidney Krum Jewish Culture Conference.
Better known as Shmooze `07, the two-day gathering of about 175 serious professionals dealing with various aspects of Jewish art, was held at UJA-Federation headquarters in New York, and was the brainchild of music entrepreneur Michael Dorf. (Actually, Dorf says the inspiration for the conference came from his participation several years ago at The Conversation, a conference retreat sponsored by The Jewish Week.)
When it comes to fusing arts and culture into Jewish learning, as the topic suggested, Lehmann is against it, proclaiming at the outset: “I want to speak against integration” – in contrast to the previous speaker, and to conventional wisdom on the subject.
Lehmann, whose work as founding headmaster of Gann Academy-New Jewish High School of Greater Boston earned him a Covenant Foundation Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, described the serious time provided to the arts at the school and camp he heads, including playwright David Mamet teaching creative writing. “Not Jewish creative writing,” he noted, “just creative writing.”
Lehmann said teens don’t want adults “giving them pre-packaged integration; they reject it.”
His advice: let the young men and women develop a true love for art and instill in them the idea that the Jewish community cares about them as people and as artists without “using” them to produce Jewish art.
Let the students do their work in an intensely Jewish setting and then sit back and observe. “Interesting things will happen,” he said, if not in the short term then at some point in their careers.
It was a refreshing take on a much-discussed topic among Jewish educators.
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Rebirth in New Orleans / Steve Lipman in New York
He’s 24 years old, he entered Saturday morning services with the name of Nash, and left with the name Noah. In New Orleans Noah nee Nash is another symbol of a Jewish community rebuilding itself.
On Parshat Noah, when the biblical Torah portion about the ark and 40 days of rain are read in synagogues, Nash showed up for the first time at Congregation Beth Israel, the city’s major Modern Orthodox synagogue.
I was there on assignment last week, chronicling New Orleans Jewry’s attempts to recoup from the losses it sustained in Hurricane Katrina two years ago. The community lost a third of its residents, including many of its prominent members and leaders.
In the last year, hundreds of Jews have settled again in New Orleans, among them rabbis like Uri Topolosky of Beth Israel, and teachers like Nash.
Rabbi Topolosky’s and Nash’s decisions to move to a decimated city are symbols of New Orleans’ potential future. The Jewish community needs leaders. And it needs regular members.
The rabbi has already met scores of Jewish New Orleanians in shul, in his house, in the city’s pair of kosher restaurants. He invites everyone – virtually none of them Orthodox – to his interactive Shabbat services. There is singing, Carlebach style. There are impromptu Torah discussions. There are responsive readings in English. There is an unorthodox tone for an Orthodox synagogue.
So Nash showed up Saturday morning with his girlfriend, also a young idealistic teacher.
Rabbi Topolosky offered him an aliyah. Nash declined. It turned out he had no Jewish education, no bar mitzvah, not even a Hebrew name.
Finally Nash agreed to be called to the Torah. By what name? The rabbi asked for suggestions. “Noah” was the best name offered. The rabbi read the Hebrew name that conferred on Nash the Hebrew name Noah ben Abraham. Haltingly, he read a transliteration of the Hebrew blessings. Everyone broke out in a round of “Simon tov u’mazel tov,” a traditional bar mitzvah song.
“This,” Rabbi Topolosky announced, “was the first bar mitzvah this congregation has had in a long time.”
On Parshat Noah, the Jewish community of New Orleans gained another member.
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Senior Moments / Gary Rosenblatt in New York
Amid all the kvetching (including my own) about the fear of losing disengaged young Jews, so many of whom show little concern for Israel and affiliating with American Jewish organizations, let us offer a word of praise for their parents and, more likely, grandparents who make up the majority of attendees at so many mainstream Jewish events.
These thoughts come to mind after attending an all-day conference on Sunday at the East Midwood Jewish Center in Brooklyn. More than 350 people turned out for the program, titled “Can We Talk About Israel? Enhancing The Dialogue,” sponsored by The Institute for Living Judaism in Brooklyn and the Hadassah Brooklyn Region.
The majority of attendees were senior citizens, and while they were slow to navigate the stairs, they were quick with their questions and comments.
At the session I addressed, on Jewish journalism, they were knowledgeable and engaged on the issues, and their concern about future generations was palpable.
When I asked how many read The Jewish Week, nearly every hand went up.
Where are their grandchildren? They shrug and acknowledge that young people today have other interests, especially on a lovely Sunday morning.
Jewish groups are right to focus on attracting younger people, but Sunday’s impressive event was a reminder that the backbone of the active and organized community are those who remember and remain touched by the Holocaust and the creation and struggles of the State of Israel. Our challenge is to find new and positive reasons for younger Jews to continue to engage.
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More Than a Newspaper / Gary Rosenblatt, Editor and Publisher
Three projects founded by The Jewish Week are launching anew this week.
First is this web site, which now includes more content from videos to exclusive blogs to unique features than we are able to publish in print each week. We hope you will keep coming back to the site as it continues to grow in quality and quantity, and we welcome your suggestions.
A second project is Write On For Israel, our advocacy through journalism program for high school students, starting its sixth year this Sunday. Created at the height of the intifada, with funding from the Avi Chai Foundation, Write On is committed to teaching high school students a mix of modern Zionist history and skills in journalism and communication so that when they get to college, they will have the knowledge and moral confidence to become the leaders of pro-Israel advocacy activities on campus.
Each year about 30 high school juniors are chosen for the two-year program from about 100 applicants. The group is made up of students from public, private and Jewish high schools in the metropolitan area. They will spend one Sunday a month during the school year in instruction and discussion, hearing from educators, journalists, Mideast experts and media analysts.
The first year culminates with a 10-day free trip to Israel where the students meet Israeli political leaders, journalists and military and diplomatic experts while touring the country.
In their senior year, the group will take on a special project of its own. One of the things we have learned in keeping in touch with graduates of the program is that they become leaders of pro-Israel programs even as freshmen in college.
Also this Sunday, The Jewish Week will sponsor the third annual conference known as The Conversation, a two-day meeting of 65 American Jews who are leaders or emerging leaders in a variety of fields, including the arts, business, journalism, philanthropy and science. Held this year at a retreat near Atlanta, The Conversation is focused around the theme of “being Jewish in America in the 21st century,” giving participants 48 hours to meet, network, discuss, debate, dream together and inspire each other.
Our primary partner in this exciting venture is CLI (Center for Leadership Initiatives), with core funding from philanthropist Lynn Schusterman. Several other foundations are sponsors as well.
What is unique about this conference is that there are no plenaries or panels, no keynote speakers and no planned outcomes. Rather, the participants are invited to propose the topics on the spot that they want to talk about, and then they do.
The program is off the record so that participants can speak openly without concern about being quoted directly. But I hope to report on the themes and points of view that emerge, so stay tuned.
And here you thought The Jewish Week was "just" a newspaper.
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In a Stew Over "In the Mix"
If you think dealing with the issues surrounding intermarriage is easy, just ask any rabbi -- or Jewish newspaper editor.
Julie Wiener's "In the Mix" column about the challenges facing intermarried couples continues to draw heaps of reader mail --some of it positive, some absolutely outraged.
For a sample of the latter, here's something from Jay Saltzman, a reader in Woodmere, who raises an interesting dilemma. Saltzman argues that publishing Wiener's monthly column "undermines what (Jewish Week editors) seem to believe is important to the survival of the Jewish people."
Saltzman goes on to state that "rather than publishing a monthly column about intermarriage, how about a monthly column about the struggles of parents to send their children to private Jewish day schools, the failure of the Jewish 'establishment' to help make tuition affordable and the failure of rabbis to speak out against this utter disaster?"
Publishing "In the Mix," Saltzman writes, is "antithetical to American Jewish survival."
Jewish Week editor Gary Rosenblatt acknowledges that the inclusion of Wiener's column may outrage some readers -- a lot of readers, actually -- but argues it provides an important service to many others who are wrestling with similar issues in their own lives.
"We believe that publishing Julie's column about one intermarried woman's attempts to raise her children as Jews, and the issues she struggles with, is not an endorsement of intermarriage but an effort to explore a situation faced by an increasingly large percentage of families in American Jewish life," Rosenblatt said.
The Jewish Week faces a difficult choice, he said.
"We could ignore or confront these and other delicate issues; we choose to bring them to light and welcome the resulting debate, as long as it is not hurtful on a personal level."
So debate away, and let us know what you think.
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