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Jewish Journal

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November 25, 1999

Symphonic Globe Trotter

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Music, Old Stories /

It says something about Gisele Ben-Dor’s dedication to her profession that when she made her conducting debut with the Israel Philharmonic in 1983, she was nine months pregnant.

Her concluding piece was Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” which, in view of her particular condition, was renamed by the orchestra as “The Rite of the Offspring.”

“All during the performance he didn’t move, but as soon as it was over, he did a mambo,” recalls Ben-Dor. The musically attuned fetus was born two weeks later as the first of her three children, and named Roy.

These days, Ben-Dor leads a bi-coastal existence as musical director and conductor of the Santa Barbara Symphony, musical director of the Boston Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, and wife and mother of the Ben-Dor clan in Englewood Cliffs in New Jersey.

The conductor, an effervescent blue-eyed blonde, was born 43 years ago in Uruguay, the daughter of Leon and Selva Buka, who had emigrated from Poland in the early 1930s.

The Buka family made a permanent move to Israel in 1973, a few months before the Yom Kippur War, and settled in a small apartment in Ramat Gan.

Gisele studied at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem and in 1980 enrolled at Yale’s School of Conducting.

Shortly after her Yale graduation in 1982, her budding talent was recognized by Leonard Bernstein, who adopted her as one of his last protégés and sharpened her skills with the Tanglewood Young Artists Orchestra.

In 1994, in the best Hollywood a-star-is-born tradition, she stepped in at the last minute for the ailing Kurt Masur to conduct the New York Philharmonic without a rehearsal, score or baton. Of course, she was a smash.

Twice a year, she returns to Israel, where her parents still live, to conduct the Israel Philharmonic.

Ben-Dor is only one of three women conductors leading prominent orchestras, and her gender inevitably comes in for comment by audiences and critics.

“If I worried about (the audience’s perception), I would become self-conscious,” she says. “I have conducted since I was 12 years old. Being a woman conductor may not be normal to the outside world, but it’s normal to me. I must say that since I came to the United States, I have been given every opportunity, and I hope I deserve it.”

Some 60 percent of orchestra members live in Los Angeles and during the season make the 200-mile round trip to Santa Barbara four times a week.

Harking back to her birthplace, Ben-Dor is rapidly gaining a reputation as the premier interpreter of the works of Latin American composers.

Leading her orchestra, she recently recorded, for the first time, the ballet score from, “La Cornela” by Mexico’s Silvestre Revueltas. Due out in the next few months is the world premiere recording of the “Amerindia” symphony by Heitor Villa Lobos.

“Maestra Ben-Dor,” noted the Los Angeles Times music critic, “is just the conductor we have been looking for to make a really persuasive case for Latin composers.”

Symphonic Globe Trotter Read More »

Changing the Climate of Hatred

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Worldwide /

Over the weekend Prime Minister Ehud Barak came to New York seeking stronger American Jewish support for the accelerating Mideast peace process, and by and large he will get it.

But two recent incidents point to the obstacles he faces in settling the lingering qualms of a significant proportion of the Jews who care about Israel’s future in a changing region — qualms that could eventually undercut the support he desires.

Suha Arafat’s claim that Israel is using toxic gas in the West Bank points to a continuing level of animus among Palestinian leaders that is not consistent with the peace process now underway. And charges in the Egyptian press about the recent EgyptAir tragedy suggest that treaties alone are not enough to end the paranoia and hatred that has driven Israel’s adversaries over the years.

During his visit to New York, Barak called for a moratorium on incendiary rhetoric.

“Peace making must be a two-way street,” he told leaders of the Israel Policy Forum on Saturday. “Each side must take into consideration the concerns and sensitivities of the other.”

American Jews understand that message, but apparently Palestinian leaders do not. Unless they begin to change the culture of rejection, the seeds of doubt among American Jews — and the ability of groups that reject any peace process to exploit that doubt — will grow.

The media frenzy triggered by the Suha Arafat incident focused on First Lady Hillary Clinton’s delay in responding to Ms. Arafat’s libelous charge.

But the more important story was that Ms. Arafat — the educated, intelligent wife of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat — was echoing views that are as common among the Palestinian leadership as they are on the mean streets of Gaza and Ramallah.

Even those leaders who seem sincere in their desire to make peace with Israel have not challenged the anti-Israel rhetoric of their comrades, or done anything to root out the anti-Jewish content that pervades their educational system and their media.

Ms. Arafat’s comments are hardly an aberration; they demonstrate how far behind the Palestinians are lagging in the effort to fundamentally change the culture of the Middle East.

The controversy over EgyptAir Flight 990 speaks to how that problem can play out over the long term.

Last week, the bumbling National Transportation Safety Board leaked information about the contents of the doomed flight’s cockpit voice reporter supporting the theory that the crash may have been caused by a suicidal co-pilot.

Later, NTSB officials backed away from their initial assessment after strong pressure from the Egyptians.

The jury is still out on the question of whether that pressure had any merit; the NTSB’s performance after other air disasters does not inspire confidence.

But what was incontestable was the outrageousness of the charges that surfaced in Egypt’s less-than-free press.

Some commentators blamed Israel for the anti-Egyptian “slur.” Others said the NTSB investigation was part of a government conspiracy designed to protect the American manufacturer of the aircraft.

Many even blamed Israel for the crash itself, prompting an indignant response from the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. The government of President Hosni Mubarak did nothing to counter the anti-Israel rumors.

Israel has officially been at peace with Egypt for two decades, but that peace has not resulted in a fundamental change in attitudes among rank-and-file Egyptians or their leaders.

There are disturbing indications that the same process could be at work in Jordan, where anti-Israel conspiracy theories have proliferated since the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace agreement.

None of this proves that Barak’s current peace drive is flawed.

Like the late Yitzhak Rabin, he believes an expanding web of treaties and economic relations can create a climate in which attitudes will then start to change, however slowly.

But that vision does little to quell the uneasiness many American Jews feel each time they read about anti-Semitism in Palestinian textbooks, or hear another libelous claim by a Palestinian official.

Barak wants continued American Jewish backing for his efforts. To keep it, he needs to address himself directly to this question: why is the current peace process in Israel’s interests DESPITE what seems like a wall of hostility that even successful treaties do not seem to breach?

He has not adequately explained to Israel’s supporters how it can all work when his Palestinian partners tolerate and even foster a climate of continuing hatred.

There may be good answers, but Barak has yet to convey them to American Jews who WANT to believe what he is doing will bring Israel lasting peace and security — but whose belief is challenged every day by the likes of Suha Arafat.

It’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that both Barak and President Bill Clinton have not made it clear enough to Arafat that his failure to exercise leadership in undoing the pervasive culture of hatred — admittedly, a process that could take generations to finish — will undercut the negotiations at precisely the time when Israel’s people are being asked to take the biggest risks for peace.

Changing the Climate of Hatred Read More »

Out and About

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Opinion, Personal Voice /

A newspaper office is, in some ways, a hot-house world. There are those insistent deadlines every week; copy to edit; layouts to peruse; the telephone and e-mail increasingly the link to a world that’s outside.

But then — thank goodness — there are those forays out of the office. They turn out nearly always to be a surprise; nearly always a learning experience.

I had three such experiences this past week.

The first, appropriately enough, was at the University of Southern California, where I appeared on a panel with other journalists from print and television. The topic? Hate crimes in America.

The surprise for me was that relatively few were concerned with anti-Semitism. It is not as though Jews and anti-Semitism have been hidden from view these last several months. There have been the August shooting and wounding of Jewish children at the North Valley Jewish Community Center; and earlier the fire bombing of three Sacramento synagogues, as well as the attack on a group of Orthodox rabbis in Illinois. I could keep listing.

But the panelists and the audience were primarily concerned with hate crimes directed against gays and Blacks. It was not that they were indifferent to the plight of Jews; or thought that anti-Semitism did not qualify as a hate crime. I concluded that rather they felt there was a difference : Blacks and gays were still, as a group(though not as individuals), outsiders. And we were not. We were part of the white establishment.

It did not make anti-Semitism any less pernicious; any less of a hate crime; any less dangerous. But the struggle seemed not the same. I suggested we were all “linked” by the Internet, where anonymity and instant access to a world mailing list gave voice and accessibility to all those who wanted to demonize any and all of us. We were now joined as subjects for those who wished to vent against Blacks or Jews or gays or anyone else in the new populist media. An attack against one was a wound against all.

My next outing a few days later was a luncheon at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica with Rabbi Marc Schneier. It was what I would call a “Blacks and Jews” meeting, maybe 10 present, consisting naturally enough of Black and Jewish community representatives. Among Jewish leaders present were Jonah Goldrich and Rabbi Steve Jacobs.

Rabbi Schneier is a dynamic, articulate Modern Orthodox rabbi whose congregation is in the Hamptons, about three hours outside of New York City on Long Island. Yes, it’s those Hamptons; the place where wealthy artists and writers and Hollywood stars own extravagant — or maybe just expensive — homes, and appear always to be partying, or stuck in traffic during the summer months. Our own Steven Spielberg has been one of the rabbi’s benefactors.

The occasion for the meeting? “Shared Dreams,” a new book written by Marc Schneier to be published officially in January. It was three years in the making and it documents, in considerable detail, the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to make the cause of the Jews his own. There were his speeches and exhortations in support of freeing Soviet Jews; his resounding defenses of Israel; and his bitter and immediate denunciations of anti-Semitic acts and statements in the United States, particularly when they emanated from voices in the Black community.

The point of the book, the author emphasized, was to demonstrate that the relationhip between Blacks and Jews in the ’60s was a two-way street. It was not just Jews helping Blacks to gain social justice and the right to vote; it was Jews and Blacks supporting one another. That message, he explained, was largely unknown. It needed to be heard if we were to repair some of the friction that has come to define some of the feelings among people in both communities.

Finally, a visit to the Workmen’s Circle on South Robertson Boulevard. The occasion? Another panel, this time consisting of members of the Jewish press, come together to discuss the role and the functioning of Jewish media within Los Angeles.

You would think by this time I would have the answers down pat. It would just be a matter of rote description. Wrong. To my surprise — and perhaps for the audience as well — I found myself learning once again what we were all about.

We try to be fair and accurate, and to speak to the broad range of Jewish readers (and interests), I said. That certainly was familiar. And we try to be authoritative; perhaps respected and read because we were authoritative, I added. Nothing new there.

And because I care deeply about writing — and believe as well that our readers respond on a conscious or unconscious level to language and felicitous writing — we try to include columnists who have something to say, and who say it at times with elegance and grace and style. That was a bit extra, but not actually a new recognition for me.

But then I found myself continuing in uncharted territory: What we strive for is to develop loyalty among our readers. I like to think that we are the home team newspaper; not unlike the Lakers or the Dodgers. We count on our readers for support; for their loyalty. And on our part, we try to hear, recognize and respond to them. Ultimately we try not to betray their trust. Ruefully, I must admit, we don’t always succeed. –Gene Lichtenstein

Out and About Read More »

Jewish Philanthropy, From A to C

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Philanthropy /

There was a sort of informal poll conducted among the delegates who gathered in Atlanta last week for the annual assembly of America’s Jewish welfare federations.

The agency that convened them, the newly-designated United Jewish Communities, had scheduled a series of discussions for the assembly’s second day on the four “pillars” that sum up its mission: Jewish renaissance, social services, Israel and overseas needs, and fundraising. Delegates were free to pick their “pillar.”

The results tell you everything you need to know about where Jewish philanthropy is headed in the next few years. The session on fundraising drew between 400 and 500 people, mainly professionals engaged in a businesslike discussion of new trends. The session on Israel and overseas needs drew about the same number, including some of American Jewry’s top activists, for an earnest — and inconclusive — exploration of how to bind American Jewry and Israel together in the years to come.

The session on social services, the worst attended, drew just over 300 people, for a dispirited discussion of how to keep American Jewry from dropping out of social activism altogether. “People in the room were generally pretty depressed from what I could tell,” said a New Jersey delegate. The best attended session was the one on Jewish renaissance and identity.

It had over 800 delegates spilling out of the chairs and lining the walls . The mood in the room was one of eager expectation. But the reviews afterward were generally downbeat. The consensus seemed to be that delegates hadn’t heard much they didn’t know already. In part, that was because the answers are already familiar. “We already know exactly what we have to do,” Boston federation president Barry Shrage told the delegates. “All we have to do is do it.” What’s needed, Shrage said, is more and better teachers, more communication among synagogues, more openness among Jews.

“The bottom line is, you can’t do anything without money,” said one delegate, Caryl Berzovsky of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as she exited the session. The delegates had come to Atlanta with few expectations. They knew the organization that convened them had been reorganized and renamed. Just what that would mean for their local work, out in the community, wasn’t clear to anyone. But they were about to find out. After five years of mind-numbing quibbling, the fabled United Jewish Appeal had been transformed into the little-known United Jewish Communities. This assembly was the new agency ‘s inaugural rollout.

The opening session had featured Vice President Al Gore, in a 45-minute speech that could only be called astoundingly adequate. He was smooth, sometimes funny, at times almost uplifting. He talked about things his listeners cared about. By any standard it was a credible performance. For Gore, given his robot-like reputation, it was a masterpiece. “I was looking for a reason to like him, and he gave one,” said one satisfied listener. By the time delegates headed home two days later, that was pretty much the verdict on the operation as a whole. For five years the national institutions of Jewish philanthropy had been paralyzed, unable to discuss anything but their own structure. In Atlanta, finally, they got back to t he business of Jewish philanthropy. “There’s a sense of optimism that some o f the institutional baggage has been cleared up,” said delegate Francine Immerman of Cleveland. The shift hadn’t come a moment too soon. Delegates spoke repeatedly, many in urgent tones, of the need to shake up the Jewish community’s institutions and move them into a new era. The existing institutions of Jewish philanthropy had been created a century ago, to face emergencies that have long since ended. Local Jewish federations were set up to provide social services for millions of penniless Jewish refugees pouring into America’s urban ghettoes. The United Jewish Appeal arose a half-century later to rescue Jews from the devastation of Nazi Europe and build a new state of Israel.

Today’s emergency isn’t in the ghettoes or battlefields, but in the heart s of young Jews. The issue is no longer how Jews can survive in a hostile world. The issue is why stay Jewish in a world that’s ever more welcoming . The question facing the Jewish federations is whether the awesome resources they command — annual donations of $1.5 billion, a vast network of institutions from coast to coast — can be harnessed to that new mission.

Up to now the system has been slow to shift direction, in large part because the old structure kept vested interests in command. The old Unite d Jewish Appeal, run by donors who’d spent a lifetime fighting for Israel, was a stubborn advocate for keeping things unchanged. Local initiatives — new forms of Jewish outreach, voices of Jewish spirituality, women’s groups — had little voice. According to some critics, that was a key reason the new emergency hasn’t yet gotten the full-bore response American Jewry is capable of. “Right now, the leadership and vision are being provided further down the food chain,” says Shrage. Heads of the new United Jewish Communities say they’re moving as fast as they can. “None of our pillars is up and running,” says UJC president Stephen Solender. “We don’t have permanent committees working yet. This is just the beginning. Up to now people really couldn’t see what we were trying to do. People here are seeing it come together.” But there’s another question facing the federations, and it’s not so simple to answer. You can’t discuss a renaissance of Jewish identity without discussing what Judaism is about. That will leave Jews feeling empty and frustrated, as assembly delegates learned.

Pursuing a genuine agenda of Jewish renaissance means not just focusing inward and teaching more Torah. It also means adapting — and expanding — the old programs. It means reaching out to Israel, not forgetting about it now that it can take care of itself. It means adapting, not ending, Jewish social services and social activism, so that Judaism doesn’t become the only religion in America with nothing to say. The initial moves by the UJC are encouraging. What’s needed is much more leadership and vision, to keep Jews engaged with each other and the world.

Otherwise, as one UJA ex-board member griped, “it’s all just rearranging furniture.” “In the end, this is the place where people come together to set the agenda for the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt of Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac, Md. “The question now is how this whole configuration is going to trickle down, whether changing an A to a C is going to have an impact on people’s lives.”

J.J. Goldberg writes a weekly column for the Jewish Journal.

Jewish Philanthropy, From A to C Read More »

Saturday, November 25

Leave a Comment / Judaism, Old Stories /

Rabbi Steven Greenberg usually kept quiet through the gay jokes. After all, he had been in the closet in the Orthodox community for 20 years, so he was used to smiling through the ridicule, through tirades about same-sex marriage.

But not that day last year around the Shavuot table. His friend and teacher, also an Orthodox rabbi, held up a ketubah with an illustration of two men at the top and launched into a comedy routine about what the “reformers” were doing to sacred tradition.

Greenberg stood and ordered his teacher to sit down. “Those two people who are just cartoon figures to you actually in real life are human beings,” he said, “and they probably looked long and hard and suffered a great deal to find love in their lives. And now the finding of that love is so precious, you can’t imagine how precious it is. You don’t understand how difficult it is to fight against a cultural weight of self-hatred. And likely you can’t grasp this because no one has ever said to you, ‘rabbi, I’m gay.’ So let me be the first. Rabbi, I am gay.”

Sitting in his brother’s Long Beach backyard one gray morning last week, Greenberg imitates the faces at that Shavuot table, dropping his strong, clean-shaven jaw, furrowing his heavy gray brows, opening his bright brown eyes wide.

Then, as if uttering a punch line, he delivers the rabbi’s response: “Stevie, have you gotten help?”

Now that Greenberg, 42, has made a very public point of being the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, this kind of story is a little less painful than it used to be. And it illustrates what he thinks needs to happen in the Orthodox community: He is convinced that if traditional Jews open their ears, and their hearts, to homosexuals, if they listen to the pain, loneliness, confusion and self-hatred that often comes along with being gay in the Orthodox community, they will be forced to rethink the rejection they have thus far offered up to the homosexuals among them.

Greenberg, a teaching fellow at the New York-based CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, is an intellectual, articulate and thorough in presenting his thinking.

He’s been around long enough to know that he will not be considered Orthodox by most people who are. And he is not naive enough to believe that, in one decisive moment, he can convince the world that male homosexual sex is within the confines of halachic Judaism.

But he does believe he can open the door just wide enough so that homosexuality can become a legitimate topic for discussion. He believes his coming out will give others the strength to do the same. And once the personal testimony of their sons and nieces, brothers and best friends is heard, Greenberg says, the authorities who interpret halacha may be moved to creatively rethink the prohibitions that appear to be black and white.

Though to many this might appear to be a losing battle, Greenberg has a powerful weapon in his arsenal: his personal story, a compelling tale of fighting his own identity until he could no longer deny that being gay was an essential part of his soul, that it was the only way to bring love into his life.

‘A Richness of ‘Spirit’

Greenberg, who was in town as a scholar-in-residence at Beth Chaim Chadashim, a Westside synagogue for lesbians, gays and bisexuals, has no doubts about whether homosexuality is inborn or a chosen lifestyle.

“There’s hardly a person in the West who would want to be gay if they were asked, because it’s so not normative, so othering,” he says. “The only reason you fight to accept yourself and challenge the norm is because you don’t have many choices.”

Though Greenberg can’t pinpoint when he knew he was gay, he remembers his childhood and teenage years being spotted with confusing emotions and sensations. He detailed some of his journey in an article in Tikkun magazine in 1993, written under the pseudonym of Rabbi Yaakov Levado (Hebrew for “alone”).

When he was about 15, Greenberg, whose family is Conservative, began studying with an Orthodox rabbi and found himself enthralled by the rich texts and traditions.

He attended Yeshiva University as an undergraduate and then as a rabbinical student. When he was 20, he studied at the prestigious Yeshiva Har Etzion outside of Jerusalem, where he was attracted to a fellow student. Concluding he was bisexual, Greenberg decided to approach Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashuv, a respected rav in Jerusalem.

“Rabbi,” he told the elderly man, “I am attracted to both men and women.”

To Greenberg’s amazement, the rabbi responded, “You have twice the power of love. Use it carefully.”

While Eliashuv’s students recently responded to this story saying the rabbi never said such a thing, Greenberg says those students issued that response without asking the rabbi. And, he says, the words are deeply etched into his memory.

“A weight was lifted off me, to think that whatever this was, it was a richness of spirit,” Greenberg says. “He wasn’t permitting me to have sex with men, he was telling me that my desire was not ugly in and of itself.”

Greenberg, who was ordained in 1983, did not admit he was gay until he was 28, and still he continued to date women for another seven years.

“I was still trying to make it work. I was so motivated for a family and children and a life — for being part of the flow of humanity, which is so appealing,” Greenberg says. “It’s a center of real hurt in my life that it didn’t work out that way. But that hurt doesn’t justify a life of deep, deep self-deception and deception of others.”

‘If You’re Gay, Get Out’

While living in Israel the past two years, Greenberg decided to come out publicly in the national daily newspaper, Ma’ariv. He timed the article to coincide with the early March opening of the Jerusalem Open House, the first community center for gays and lesbians in Jerusalem, which he helped found.

The center includes a clandestine support group for haredi youth, and a group calling itself the Orthodykes. In New York, the Gay and Lesbian Yeshiva Day School Alumni Association meets monthly.

Greenberg says many Orthodox youth who think they are gay are encouraged to marry anyway, at least to start a family, even if it ends in divorce. “The cruelty in that is unthinkable to me,” Greenberg says incredulously.

Others are encouraged to hide their gayness or remain celibate, condemning them to a life of lovelessness, he laments. In some cases, gay youths are simply told to leave the family, for their presence in the community is just too jarring.

“The subliminal message is if you’re gay, get out, for our benefit and for yours,” Greenberg says.

But often families unwilling to abandon their children are willing to accept a compromised level of halachic observance, just as they sometimes are in other areas of halacha.

Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City, says he, like most other rabbis, has counseled gay congregants and their families. He says he has listened with compassion, but makes clear that the halacha forbids homosexual sex. “They have to come to terms with the fact that not everything we want and desire is permitted,” Muskin says.

Using an argument often heard in Orthodox circles, Muskin says he treats homosexuals as he would treat anyone who is violating a mitzvah. Muskin would certainly not expect an observant Jew to proudly proclaim that she cheats on her tax returns or regularly eats cheeseburgers.

But Greenberg says the cheeseburger analogy just doesn’t work. “People can live deep, emotional, committed, loving, wonderful lives and not eat cheeseburgers,”he says, apparently having heard the argument one too many times. “But to tell a person that to be a member of this group you have to live a life without self-expression and love and commitment and intimacy and daily touching and caring and holding… that would be an unbearable burden for most people.”

Torah’s Puzzling Attitude

Greenberg is a few months away from completing a book that, along with telling his personal story, explores what he believes is the Torah’s puzzling attitude towardhomosexuality. Greenberg asserts that there is more to the discussion than the surface meaning of the verse in Leviticus 18: “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; it is an abomination.”

While Greenberg is reluctant to lay out the specifics of his arguments without the benefit of several hours of background building up to his conclusions, he says that he is “attempting to demonstrate this verse is more interesting and ambiguous than a simple, superficial reading would suggest. This is what rabbis do when they confront a verse: find anomalies in order to enrich its meaning.”

But, he says, rabbis will only be motivated to reinterpret the verse if the issues become personal, rather than abstract and foreign. “In this area I believe halacha is wrong, because its refusal to talk to people makes it fail to be authoritative. True halacha has to be open to listening to people,” he says. And he is willing to be the first to talk.

“The story of a gay rabbi is the story of a person who had incredible, powerful motivation, personal and religious, to fight his sexual identity to the end. And the story of a 20-year struggle against my heart and my final decision that it is futile, helps portray how difficult it is for gay and lesbian people and makes clear why this is truly a humanitarian, and I would even say a Jewish, imperative.”

For more information on Jerusalem Open House, go to www.poboxes.com/gayj or call Hagai El-Ad at (617) 247-8420.

Saturday, November 25 Read More »