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November 4, 2004

Mixed News for GOP Jews

Leave a Comment / Politics, Worldwide /

Republican hopes for a big Jewish surge in this year’s presidential contest were dashed on Tuesday when President George W. Bush, in his successful bid for a second term, claimed only about 24 percent of the Jewish vote nationally, according to exit polls published by major news outlets.

That was only 5 points above his weak 2000 showing, and came after an extensive and expensive campaign by Jewish Republican groups and a big pro-Bush turnout by the Orthodox community, which strongly approved of the President’s Mideast policies.

Bush’s numbers were even worse in the battleground state of Florida, which was the top target of the GOP Jewish outreach effort. According to exit polls, Bush garnered only 20 percent of the Jewish vote there.

Publicly, Jewish Republicans were claiming a modest victory.

“Twenty-four percent is a respectable showing in an environment in which values became so central to the success of the campaign,” said Marshall Breger, a longtime Jewish Republican leader and liaison to the Jewish community during the Reagan administration.

But in private, some expressed bitter disappointment.

“Anything less than 25 percent is a disaster, given how hard the [Bush-Cheney] campaign tried,” said one Jewish Republican as the votes were being counted. “It may be that we all overestimated the influence of the Israel issue, and overestimated the influence of the Orthodox.”

At press time, there was no specific data about the Orthodox vote, but most observers felt it was probably in the range of 70-80 percent Republican — which means that the non-Orthodox Jewish vote was even less favorable to the GOP than the overall exit poll numbers suggest.

Why did a president who got such high marks from Jewish leaders on Israel-related issues bomb so badly with Jews?

One answer is that in an important sense, he didn’t bomb at all.

“To the extent that the Republican Party has courted Jews, it’s not Jewish voters, it’s Jewish contributors,” said Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg. “When the numbers are added up, we will probably find that Jewish money was especially important to the Republicans this year.”

Still, Jewish Republicans expected significantly more than 24 percent — a number that confirmed the accuracy of recent polls by the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) and the American Jewish Committee.

Many Republicans believed the president would significantly broaden his Jewish base because of his extraordinary support for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — seen by Bush as a comrade in arms in the fight against terrorism.

Some top Jewish leaders sent clear signals that they hoped the Jewish rank-and-file would reward Bush’s strong pro-Israel policies with support on election day — even if they had qualms about his administration’s domestic agenda.

But recent polls pointed to a major flaw in that strategy: while American Jews care deeply about Israel, the issue does not rank at the top of the political agenda for a majority.

That is particularly true among the non-Orthodox.

“What these numbers mean is that Kerry was successful in getting the message out to Jewish voters that he is a strong supporter of the U.S.-Israel relationship,” said Rep. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who campaigned actively for the Massachusetts senator. “It’s been his position for a long time; it’s in his heart, and he believes it.”

Once mainstream Jews accepted Kerry’s pro-Israel credentials, they felt free to vote based more on the domestic issues that have traditionally driven Jewish politics — including things like abortion rights, church-state separation and civil rights, said Democratic consultant Steve Rabinowitz.

The GOP may have wanted to win Jewish hearts and minds, but they wanted to secure their political base even more. There were concerns in the campaign that evangelical voters might not turn out on Election Day, a potentially fatal blow to the Bush reelection effort.

The result was a strategy engineered by White House political guru Karl Rove that played heavily to the Christian right — a group most Jews continue to regard with deep concern.

“The Bush-Cheney campaign obviously got huge support from the religious right, and used ballot referenda in a number of states to bolster that support,” political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg said.

Anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives in 11 states — all of which passed on Tuesday — may have boosted Bush in the American heartland and among Orthodox Jews, but the GOP effort scared many mainstream Jews who saw it as an attempt to suppress the civil rights of a minority, Ginsberg suggested.

In the end, many Jews were more worried about Bush’s Christian right connections than they were appreciative of his pro-Israel positions.

“I’ve found more and more people in the Jewish community who are nervous about George Bush’s interpretation of a Christian state,” Cardin said. “It makes them feel uncomfortable, and it was a factor in the election results.”

And the Republicans may have made another miscalculation; they assumed that support for Sharon was the same as support for Israel. In fact, many passionately pro-Israel Jews are not particularly supportive of Sharon’s policies.

Those concerns have been masked in the past few years as the community rallied to support Israel during a time of crisis. Still, Bush’s personal embrace of Sharon may not have been the selling point for most Jewish voters that the Republicans expected.

And they misread the gap between Jewish and pro-Israel leaders, and the Jewish rank-and-file.

The leadership, focused much more on the single issue of Israel and eager to reinforce the administration’s friendship with Sharon through political support, gave the impression that the community was turning in droves to the Republicans. But as Tuesday’s vote demonstrated, Jewish voters weren’t necessarily following.

“What these numbers highlight is the leadership gap,” said a longtime pro-Israel lobbyist here. “The leaders may be trying to cozy up to the Republican administration, but Jewish voters are pretty much where they’ve always been: with the Democrats.”

Mixed News for GOP Jews Read More »

Few Surprises in Congressional Races

Leave a Comment / Elections, Politics, Worldwide /

The next Congress will look a lot like the last one, which was marked by unprecedented partisan strife and legislative gridlock.

The reason: the vast majority of incumbents were easily returned to office. Of hundreds of contests nationwide, only a small handful were genuinely competitive.

For pro-Israel activists, Election 2004 offered little drama; almost every important friend of Israel was easily elected, and lawmakers who have been critical of Israel, an increasingly marginalized minority, were keeping their heads low.

Only one Jewish lawmaker lost his seat, while another is leaving Congress voluntarily; the House will have two new Jewish women on the Democratic side of the aisle.

All five Jewish senators up for reelection on Tuesday won handily. The Republicans will add four seats to their slim Senate majority and at least four to their majority in the House, with three undecided as of presstime.

The biggest loss for the Jewish community was the defeat of Rep. Martin Frost (D-Texas), a 13-term veteran who fell victim to an aggressive, controversial redistricting plan engineered by Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas). The goal of the plan, which will be reviewed by the Supreme Court but too late to affect this year’s results, was to add five Republicans to the GOP majority; the plan apparently went four for five on Tuesday.

Despite a spirited battle in a new and strongly Republican district, Frost lost to four-term Rep. Pete Sessions, a conservative, by a 57-41 percent margin. Frost conceded early Tuesday night after the two rivals clashed in the nation’s most expensive House race.

“We are losing a veteran Democrat in the leadership at a time when there is a lot of unease about a drift away from Israel by the party,” said Morris Amitay, a longtime pro-Israel lobbyist. “Martin Frost has been a very important supporter of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship for many years.”

In the Senate, there will be a lot of familiar Jewish faces when the new Congress convenes in January.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), one of two Republican Jews in the upper chamber, faced a vigorous primary challenge earlier in the year, but on Tuesday bested Rep. Joe Hoeffel, a Democrat, by a 53-42 margin. Hoeffel gave up his seat to run against the moderate Republican — and will be replaced by State Sen. Allyson Schwartz, a Jewish Democrat who beat her Republican rival, Melissa Brown. Specter’s reelection and the GOP’s successful defense of its Senate majority put the Jewish lawmaker in line to chair the critical Judiciary Committee, where he could play a critical role in confirmation proceedings for any new Supreme Court appointees.

A few weeks ago, political analysts predicted that Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) could have trouble in a state that seemed to be shifting to the GOP column and which was also the focus of a concerted effort by the Bush-Cheney campaign. But when the votes were counted, Feingold won a third term by beating political newcomer Tim Michels by a 55-44 margin.

Things were a lot easier for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), running for a second term. Schumer was so far ahead of state assemblyman Howard Mills that he spent most of his time campaigning for other Democrats. When the votes were tallied, Schumer won with an overwhelming 71 percent of the vote.

In California, Sen. Barbara Boxer, one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate, was once at the top of the Republican Party’s senatorial hit list. But faced only token opposition from former secretary of state Bill Jones, Boxer won a third term by a 58-38 margin.

And in Oregon, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, easily fended off a challenge from political newcomer Al King. King, who ran a bargain-basement campaign against the well-financed Wyden, claimed that the incumbent had a “socialist” platform.

In Ohio, Sen. George Voinovich, a Republican, trounced former Democratic Rep. Eric Fingerhut, a onetime United Jewish Appeal leader. In South Carolina, Republican Jim DeMint defeated Democrat Inez Tenenbaum, the non-Jewish wife of a prominent Jewish activist, by 11 points in a race for an open seat.

In other races, congressional Democrats got a huge jolt when Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) was defeated in his bid for a fourth term by John Thune, a former House member who has also been a supporter of the Jewish state.

Daschle has been a powerful and effective friend of pro-Israel groups over the years; when the Thune challenge emerged, pro-Israel campaign givers rushed to the minority leader’s assistance.

“We gave money to him,” said Dr. Mandell Ganchrow, founder of a major pro-Israel political action committee. “I have mixed feelings about him because I’m a Republican. But I’ve known him since he was a congressman, and he’s been a very strong supporter of Israel.”

Daschle will probably be replaced as minority leader by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who “has been very good on our issues,” Ganchrow said.

Barack Obama, a charismatic Democratic state senator in Illinois, swamped conservative talk-show host Alan Keyes, a Republican. Both candidates are black, but Keyes, who lived in Maryland before he ran for the Illinois seat, was unable to shed his image as a member of the GOP’s far-right fringe — an image that was reinforced last week when he compared Catholics who voted for the pro-choice Obama to Germans who supported the Nazis.

In Oklahoma, former Rep. Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican, beat Rep. Brad Carson, a Democrat, for an open seat. In 1997, Coburn angered Jewish activists when he claimed that NBC was “polluting the minds of our children” by showing the Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List.”

In the House, there were few races that stirred more than cursory interest.

Early in the year, there were reports that Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), the only Holocaust survivor in the Senate, could face his toughest race yet as he vied for a 13th term. But after dispatching several energetic challengers in the Democratic primaries, the pro-Israel veteran went on to defeat Republican Mike Garza by a massive 68-21 margin.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the only Jewish Republican in the House, won a third term the easy way: the Democrats didn’t even bother putting up a challenger in the heavily GOP district in the Richmond area. Cantor, a rising star in the Republican cosmos and chief majority deputy whip, was a major campaigner for President George W. Bush in Jewish communities around the country.

Also in Virginia, Democrat David Ashe, a Jewish Marine veteran, was defeated by state delegate Thelma Drake, a Republican, in a race for an open seat.

There will be a new Jewish member from Florida: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat, won the race to replace Rep. Peter Deutsch, a Democrat who tried and failed to win the Democratic senatorial nomination. Schultz beat Republican Margaret Hostetter, a real estate broker, by a 70-30 margin.

Two races involved Democrats who had locked horns with Jewish and pro-Israel groups in the past. But this time around, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) tried to steer clear of the Israel issue. Moran triggered controversy two years ago when he suggested at a community forum that Jews bore some responsibility for the impending the Iraq war. The seven-term incumbent also had several major brushes with ethics controversies in recent years.

Despite fierce opposition by local Jewish activists, Moran first turned back a spirited primary challenge by a young Jewish activist and on Tuesday went on to beat defense consultant Lisa Marie Cheney — no relation to the vice president — by a 60-37 margin.

McKinney was defeated in 2002 when pro-Israel groups, angered by her persistent criticism of Israel, helped finance her opponent, Rep. Denise Majette, also a Democrat. But this year Majette abandoned the House to run for the seat of retiring Sen. Zell Miller, a Democrat who conspicuously supported President George W. Bush’s reelection effort. Majette lost that race by a huge margin, and on Tuesday, McKinney easily beat Republican Catherine Davis to regain the seat she lost in 2002.

The narrow margins and the bitter polarization mean that the 109th Congress is likely to be a repeat of the 108th, which finished only a small fraction of its legislative to-do list because of partisan deadlocks.

L. Sandy Maisel, director of Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs at Colby College, said that the slim GOP lead means “you can’t get anything radical through Congress.”

In the Senate, it takes 60 votes to shut off debate, and the GOP isn’t even close, he said, allowing Democrats to retain the filibuster weapon. “So it’s going to be another two years of trying to get anything through Congress at all,” he said.

Rep. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a senior member of the Jewish delegation in the House who easily won re-election this week, said — somewhat dispiritedly — that “there won’t be any big change [in Congress]. It will be a real challenge for leaders to lead, and stop paralyzing the nation on critical issues.”

House leaders have to rise above the partisanship that has produced legislative gridlock on Capitol Hill, he said.

“This is not about being a partisan leader; it’s about being a national leader, about representing this nation,” he said. “It’s time that leaders understand that their responsibility is to build coalitions, to build broad support for policies, because Americans want that.”

But Jewish leaders mostly expect more of the same: partisan squabbling and legislative gridlock.

A lobbyist for a major Jewish group in Washington said that Senate Democrats would continue to act as a partial brake to some church-state proposals and some judicial nominees — but that “the Republican leadership will take this vote as a mandate and push much harder on their core issues. Unless people start reaching out across party lines, we’re in for a very difficult two years.”

Few Surprises in Congressional Races Read More »

Will Bush Change Course on Israel?

Leave a Comment / Israel, Politics, Worldwide /

The Israeli establishment is delighted by the re-election of President Bush.

His Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, may have been seen as a good friend of Israel, but Israeli officials speak of an ideological meeting of minds between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud-led government and Bush’s neoconservative-dominated milieu.

Both put a premium on the war against terror and the creation of democratic institutions as a means to world and regional peace. Moreover, Bush’s record on Israel as president is seen as impeccable, and there was some anxiety that, if elected, Kerry might have been inclined to follow a more coordinated internationalist policy leading to pressure on Israel to make concessions on the Palestinian track.

But there are concerns about pressure on Israel from a second Bush administration, too. Some suggest that Bush may seek improved ties with Europe, and that that could spell new demands on Israel. Israeli officials hold that Bush’s overall worldview, dividing the world into good and evil protagonists, allies and enemies, with Israel on the side of the steadfast allies, is a huge bonus.

Kerry, the Democrat, would probably have been more inclined to turn to the international community, and international institutions like the United Nations and the International Court at the Hague, to resolve global problems. And that, the officials maintain, might have been detrimental to Israeli interests.

They also make much of Bush’s letter to Sharon last April, in which they see a significant upgrading of the strategic understanding between Israel and the United States on the Palestinian issue.

The letter underscores agreement that the Palestinians would not have the right to return to Israel proper in a final peace settlement, that Israel would be able to keep large settlement blocs in the West Bank, and that the United States would not support any international peace plan other than the “road map,” which both Israel and the Palestinians have approved.

In addition, they say, Bush, who refused to have anything to do with Yasser Arafat because of his perceived implication in Palestinian terror, would be less likely to deal with his successors unless they carry out road map reforms. Kerry, if elected, they say, might not have stuck to the road map or to its demands for Palestinian reform. Still, there is a mainstream assessment in the Israeli Foreign Ministry that American policy on the Israeli-Palestinian issue even under Bush will be become more proactive and more closely coordinated with Europe.

A ministry position paper warns of a possible American deal with Europe over Iraq and Iran, in which Israeli concessions to the Palestinians are the payoff for European support for Washington in Iraq and the Gulf.

There are two schools of thought on a new Bush administration in the Foreign Ministry: One expects more of the same, with Bush feeling that he now has an overwhelming mandate from the American people to continue the war on terror, as well as his policies in Iraq and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no matter what the Europeans think.

The opposing view holds that Bush’s first order of business will be to start cleaning up the mess in Iraq, and that he will need European and Arab support.

“He won’t go to them cap in hand,” an official told JTA. “But he will be ready to coordinate moves with them on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in return.”

What this will mean on the ground, the official said, is American insistence that immediately after its planned withdrawal from Gaza and part of the West Bank next summer, Israel be ready to enter into negotiations with the Palestinians, based on the road map, with the Europeans playing a key role.

“Bush,” said the official, who asked not to be identified, “will want to see his two-state vision, Israel and Palestine, side by side, implemented before he completes his second term.”

But, the official said, much will depend on the Palestinians. Bush will only push for progress if the violence stops. Otherwise, he will give Israel the same unlimited backing in its fight against terror as he has for the past three years.

On the other hand, if a new Palestinian leadership, with a sick Arafat out of the picture, does make a serious effort to curb terror, Bush, in his second term, will want to see more from Israel, the official said. He won’t pressure Israel in a crude way but he will ask “that it help the U.S. by making moves that go down well in Europe and the Arab world.”

Labor leader Shimon Peres makes a similar argument, but sees in it positive potential. He says the next major challenge America will face will be Iran, and its drive for nuclear weapons.

After two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States will not be in a position to launch a third. Therefore, he reasons, it will need international — especially European — cooperation to contain Iran through the imposition of sanctions.

This, he says, will probably lead to a Middle East package — a new U.S.-backed European initiative on Israel and the Palestinians, in return for European support on Iraq and Iran.

In some government circles, there is a fear that this could lead to pressure Israel will be bound to resist. But Peres sees it as a welcome development. He says three major changes are coming to fruition at the same historical moment and could lead to a long overdue breakthrough on the Israeli-Palestinian track: the Israeli government’s readiness to withdraw from Gaza and part of the West Bank, a Palestinian readiness to be more pragmatic, and Europe and the United States, after the American election, ready to play a more active role.

Peres is hoping that Bush, in his second term, may be ready to risk more than he did first time around to stabilize the Middle East as a whole. And he is convinced that this need not lead to a showdown with Israel.

The Foreign Ministry officials, who foresee a more proactive American policy, agree — on the condition that the Israeli government continues to coordinate all its moves as closely as possible with the new administration.

Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.

Will Bush Change Course on Israel? Read More »

L.A. Jewish GOP Parties, Dems Despair

Leave a Comment / Elections, Politics, Worldwide /

Stress and disappointment gave way to jubilation at the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) of Los Angeles’ election night party as President George W. Bush piled up the electoral votes and turned the map of the United States Republican red.

The mood was far more somber at the Manhattan Beach Marriot, where Democrats gathered for a victory party that never took place. By early morning, the crowd had dwindled to a handful of true believers who looked stunned by Sen. John F. Kerry’s disappointing performance.

Things got off to a slow start at RJC’s event at Level One supper club on Wilshire Boulevard. A sense of foreboding filled the crowd of 250 Republicans as early exit polls showed Kerry in the lead.

A dispirited Allen Jacobs, 27, said he felt nervous, anxious and worried. Frustrated by the early results, he attacked newly registered young Democrats as “uneducated voters who do whatever Puffy says,” an allusion to rapper Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’ efforts to get out the vote.

But like a cyclone that suddenly shifts directions, momentum quickly swung the Jewish Republicans’ way. Fox announced that Bush held a 5 percentage point lead over Kerry in Florida with 95 percent of the vote in. Men and women let out shrieks of joy, quickly forgetting about Pennsylvania. All eyes focused on Ohio, the do-or-die state for both Bush and Kerry.

Well-groomed 20-somethings clad in black, reeking of tobacco and wine, sat side by side with rich bankers and middle-aged fallen liberals who said they had never voted Republican until now.

RJC Southern California Director Larry Greenfield smiled as he surveyed the diverse crowd of Bush supporters. He said the high turnout for the festivities reflected the political realignment now taking place among traditionally Democratic Jews. Simply put: he said the Democrats had lurched too far to the left and the Republicans had become the party of liberty and stalwart support for Israel.

“Our movement is growing, and the Jewish conversation is broadening,” said Greenfield, who participated in 40 debates around the Southland before the election.

Early Los Angeles Times exit polls confirmed this trend: In California, 80 percent of Jews voted for Kerry and 20 percent voted for Bush, compared to 2000, when 81 percent voted for Gore and 15 percent voted for Bush.

In Manhattan Beach, a dark mood permeated the ballroom. Beth Matenko, a Jewish Canadian immigrant who hopes to become a U.S. citizen and vote, said she thought Jews had helped the conservative president win re-election.

“A lot of Jewish voters are voting for Bush. It’s obvious,” she said.

Back at Level One, pandemonium broke out at 9:45 p.m. when Fox projected Bush the winner in Ohio.

Jay Hoffman, a 52-year-old retiree from Los Angeles, broke into a wide smile. Around him, friends and family hugged one another.

“I think it helps Jews everywhere to have access to the Republican Party,” he said. “Democrats can no longer take the Jewish vote for granted.”

A number of RJC revelers said they had often voted Democratic in the past, but no more. They said they changed their allegiance because Bush exhibited the strong leadership needed to successfully prosecute the war on terror. Equally important, they said he understood the folly of dealing with Yasser Arafat, a terrorist not welcome in the Bush White House.

Shirley Darvish, a 24-year-old independent, said she disagreed with the president on most social issues. For the Beverly Hills mortgage banker, foreign policy trumps domestic policy in the post-Sept. 11 world. In her view, Kerry worried too much about keeping on good terms with America’s allies and not enough about identifying U.S. interests and pursuing them.

“I don’t want somebody whose going to bow down to the U.N.,” said Darvish, alluding to Kerry’s promise to work closely with the international body. “I want somebody who will make the big decisions, regardless of what other countries think.”

Lifelong Democrat Susan Rabin said she’s a new GOP convert. An entertainment lawyer who marched against the war in Vietnam in the ’60s, Rabin said her transformation from a Mill Valley liberal to ardent Bush supporter began after Sept. 11.

Stunned by the viciousness of radical Islam, she said her friends’ reaction to the terror attacks shocked her nearly as much. Rabin’s progressive pals said U.S. policies and an unflagging support for anti-Palestinian Israel had provoked the tragedy. From then on, Rabin said she considered herself a liberal no more.

“They were blaming the victim,” she said. “I couldn’t stand that they weren’t being supportive of our country and Israel. I was completely turned off.”

David Finnigan and Tom Tugend contributed to this report.

L.A. Jewish GOP Parties, Dems Despair Read More »

Closing the Gap on Believers

Leave a Comment / Community, Judaism /

Is religion more prominent or less today in American life? Is it fading away or roaring ahead? Articles about the conservative Christian influence in the Bush administration point — often fearfully — in one direction. Statistics about the disappearance of young adults in the 18-30 age group point — with another kind of anxiety — in the opposite direction. Ironically, those who are the greatest removed from religious affiliation tend to believe that religion is more powerful than ever, while those in the thick of congregational life tend to believe just the opposite. Meanwhile, is any force more powerful in American life than inertia?

From Oct. 10-11, a colorfully diverse group of Jews, Christians and Muslims gathered at USC to address what some in the clergy have called the “black hole” in religious affiliation. Synagogues, churches and mosques are all more or less equally affected. Membership tends to be strongest among those younger than 18 or older than 30. Ominously, this black hole seems to be growing at its upper end. Can this common problem have something of a common answer? Can there be learning across canyons that usually divide these groups? Is there a set of identifiable “best practices” that work for all Americans? The conference was given the name Faith, Fear & Indifference: Constructing Religious Identity in the Next Generation.

The diversity of sponsorship of the conference is unusual enough in itself to deserve mention: The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Omar Ibn Al Khattab Foundation, and three entities under the roof of USC.

Among Americans of the middle class, the experience of “going away to college” has long been thought a key to the interruption of religious affiliation. That departure from hearth and home has been sanctioned for many years as a salutary separation away from childhood itself, a coming of age, a major step forward in individuation that would properly include a stock-taking with regard to religion. But because American education has been growing longer and more costly, this interruption between childhood and achieved adulthood has been growing longer as well. American marriage has been taking place later and, as a result, parenthood has come later. In an earlier era, when college education, marriage and first parenthood were all accomplished by age 25, the early adulthood hiatus frequently enough ended with a religious wedding ceremony that was simultaneously a kind of spiritual homecoming. Now the seven years have grown to 12 or 14 or more — And the longer the hiatus lasts, the more likely it is to become permanent.

In a presentation spiced with sometimes-hilarious direct quotes from survey respondents, Berkeley sociologist Christian Smith characterized what might be called the majority or default religiosity of young Americans — present among the unaffiliated as well as among the affiliated — as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” According to MTD, there is a God, he cares much about right and wrong; while he wants you to do right, he mainly wants you to be happy, which means that he wants you to be involved or not in any organized form of religion to the extent — and only to the extent — that it fosters your happiness. In effect, no other value is operative for adherents to MTD.

The surprise, given this as an opening state-of-the-population vision, was then a set of presentations by groups that have been most successful in reaching the age group in question. In every case, the successful seemed to ask a great deal, did not promise happiness or customer-is-always-right service and stressed to newcomers that their communities — be it study group, worship community, summer camp, whatever — were going forward for authentic reasons of their own that would remain valid whether or not new, young recruits were attracted.

This was the message that I, for one, took away most especially from presentations by two charismatic leaders: Brother John of Taizé, an American member of a French Protestant monastery that attracts thousands of young Europeans to a remote village in Burgundy every summer; and Rabbi J. Rolando Matalon, an Argentine who shares leadership of the extraordinarily successful Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Actions always speak louder than words. The cleverest pitch will always seem no more than a pitch when contrasted with a quietly embraced way of life.

We speak proudly in the West of our pluralism, but what happens when you substitute the phrase “the religion market” for “religious pluralism”?

But is it not obvious that religions do compete with each other in this country? Different congregations within the same religion compete with each other, as well, and all religious activities compete with other claimants for the free time of the American. This being the case, there always looms the possibility that market success — and market techniques for building market success — can drive out all other kinds of success and all other techniques for reaching it.

But those who live by the market also die by the market, or so the conference seemed to conclude. The young are, if nothing else, very market savvy. They can spot a pitch. They are the hardest of hard sells. Yet they crave authenticity and, perhaps the largest surprise, they hunger for mystery.

Jack Miles, author of “God: A Biography” and other works, delivered an address at the Faith, Fear & Indifference conference titled “The Leisure of Worship and the Worship of Leisure.”

Closing the Gap on Believers Read More »

Federation Vows to Help Jewish Poor

Leave a Comment / Community /

Jews have long had a reputation as being among the most successful minority groups in the country. For the most part, they are. But as a new report from The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles makes clear, not all Southland Jews live large. While some big machers tool around in BMWs and inhabit Beverly Hills and Brentwood mansions, thousands of less-fortunate community members struggle just to survive.

About one in five local Jews, or 104,000 out of 520,000, earn less than $25,000 annually. An estimated 7 percent live below the poverty line, compared to 5 percent nationally, according to a study titled “Alleviating Jewish Poverty in Los Angeles.” In greater Fairfax, an area with a high concentration of seniors and immigrants, an estimated one in three Jewish households lives in poverty.

“There’s an enormous number of Jews who live at or below the poverty line, and I think it will shock many members of our community to see how many people just scrape by,” Federation President John Fishel said.

In light of the stark findings, The Federation plans to make fighting Jewish poverty an even bigger priority, Fishel said. The agency has already allocated funds to Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) to hire new employees to focus on the need of the working poor. Around the country, Jewish agencies have undertaken several ambitious programs. In Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Jewish Family Service helps poor clients pay outstanding utility bills. In New York, the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, has built four buildings for the elderly poor with federal funds.

Jews in Southern California have a harder time eking out a living than their counterparts in other U.S. cities. Los Angeles ranks only behind San Francisco and New York as the nation’s most expensive city. Skyrocketing rents, health care and other costs mean poor Jews can afford little beyond the basic necessities, the report said. And the situation appears to be getting worse. The cost of a one-bedroom apartment in most Jewish neighborhoods is $900 to $1,200 per month, putting it beyond the reach of the poor and many working poor.

Based on the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) poverty study, the disabled account for 48 percent of the Jewish poor, refugees and immigrants make up 22 percent, non-college educated are 12 percent, seniors older than 65 comprise 9 percent, single-parent homes are 8 percent, and 1 percent is classified as other.

Ironically, some local Jews working for Jewish nonprofit organizations fall into the ranks of the Jewish poor. At a time when executives at the L.A. Federation and other agencies earn upward of $200,000, plus benefits, nearly 20 percent of the 450 full- and part-time unionized workers at Jewish Family Service (JFS), the Federation and five other Jewish agencies earned less than $20,000 as of the beginning of 2004. Many Jewish day school teaching assistants also make less than $20,000.

In preparing its poverty report, the L.A. Federation collected no new data locally. Instead, the agency based its findings on a Jewish population study commissioned in 1997 and a 2000-2001 survey by the NJPS. That the L.A. Federation conducted no recent random samples undermines the credibility of its study, said Pini Herman, a demographer and author of the 1997 L.A. Jewish Population Survey.

“It looks like they grabbed their numbers out of thin air,” said Herman, who was not consulted for the new survey. “The data fails to account for mortality, migration and movement up and down the economic ladder. I think it is intellectually dishonest.”

Fishel said he stood behind The Federation’s study, adding that he thought information from the 1997 data was still relevant.

The increased patronage of SOVA by local Jews reflects how much tougher things have become for them, said Paul Castro, executive director of JFS, the food bank’s operator. About 1,000 Jews visit SOVA twice monthly for free groceries, a 15 percent increase from last year and a 100 percent hike since 2002, he said.

“From the street level, the economy doesn’t look like it’s getting any better,” Castro said. “It’s getting worse.”

At JVS, demand for job training and job placement services by poor Jewish refugees and immigrants has jumped by about 10 percent annually over the past four years, said Vivian Seigel, JVS chief executive and president.

A scholarship program for Jewish men and women in L.A. County living at or below the poverty line has also experienced a surge in interest. This year, about 500 young men and women applied for the higher education stipends, up from 350 last year, she said. Skyrocketing tuition costs, combined with surging rents and insurance costs, have placed a heavy financial burden on poor aspiring college students.

“They’re being pushed down,” Seigel said.

The poor are not the only Jews experiencing financial hardships. The report said an ostensibly middle-class family of two working adults and three school-age children must earn $79,750 to cover living and Jewish community expenses, which include religious school, two weeks of day camp and one month of residential camp. Parents wanting to send their children to Jewish day school would have to come up with another $20,400 per year.

“There are significant numbers of Jews in Los Angeles who can’t make ends meet because of the high costs of living [here] and often find that the costs of Jewish affiliation is beyond their reach,” the report said.

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Passing on a Legacy of Love

Leave a Comment / Entertainment /

“All That Matters” by Jan Goldstein (Hyperion, $17.95).

Walk into Zabar’s and it’s easy to spot 76-year old Gittel “Gabby” Zuckerman. She’s feisty and funny, and her shrinking height and failing health don’t diminish her power. Nor do the memories of the family she lost in the Holocaust ever leave her.

Gabby is the heroine of Jan Goldstein’s uplifting first novel, “All That Matters,” a book that’s been compared to Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays With Morrie,” for sharing the wisdom — this time in fiction — of an elderly person facing death. It’s Gabby who ultimately saves her granddaughter Jennifer, and the novel follows their journey together, toward each other, affirming memory, life and love.

Jennifer loses her way after her Hollywood producer father (“Harvey Weinstein in a size 40”) leaves the family and marries a younger woman (“Ms. Beverly Hills Aerobics”), and after her mother Lili’s death. Lili was fatally struck by a car while crossing a Los Angeles street, on a day when she lent Jennifer her own car. After Jennifer feels abandoned by one more person, a boyfriend who promises her a better life and then asks her to move out, the young woman tries to commit suicide on Venice Beach — but she is found by a truck driver.

Defying her doctor’s orders, Gabby flies across the country when she hears the news and insists on bringing her only child’s only child home with her to the Upper West Side, rather than allowing her ex-son-in-law to confine her to an institution. To see her granddaughter so troubled “was a grandmother’s pain, one that reached the deepest part of her, a place where the memory of lost family resided.”

Gabby wrestles with God, never forgiving God for failing to save her family in Poland, yet on occasion she offers up prayers of gratitude nonetheless. But when it comes to Jennifer, she found that God “didn’t seem a reliable bet,” so she turns to her late daughter, Lili, searching for her voice.

It’s exactly this time of year when Gabby and Jennifer return to New York City, when the air is crisp and the leaves are turning burnt orange and golden. The fall scene on the book jacket could be Central Park, where some of the novel’s key scenes are played out. When Jennifer first enters her grandmother’s apartment in the West 70s, she “took a deep breath and exhaled, looking over the glass coffee table overflowing with tchotchkes. It was if she’d entered a time warp, fallen into some kind of back hole where everything modern and contemporary had ceased to exist.”

The author — whose book recently made the Los Angeles Times best-seller list — is an L.A.-based poet, playwright and screenwriter who has written two nonfiction books, “Life Can Be This Good” and “Sacred Wounds.” One fact about him doesn’t appear on the book jacket: He’s a rabbi, trained in the Reform movement. For 20 years, he was the rabbi-in-residence at Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School in Northridge, and he now heads a congregation called Shofar, “a show business shul,” he said. He said that his rabbinic experience “has given me insight into human psychology and what moves people.”

As a man probing the inner lives of women, he credits the powerful example of his mother, who was a poet, and his father, who was an actor, and helped establish a conservative synagogue in Burlington, Vt., where he grew up, “surrounded by poetry and theater.”

Goldstein explains that he also learned a lot about women as a single father, with primary responsibility for raising his three children — two daughters and a son, who are now grown up — after a divorce. Now 53 and remarried, he also has a stepson and a young daughter.

His attraction to the rabbinate grew out of his involvement in the ecumenical movement in Vermont.

“We wanted to bring people together, to create more understanding between religions,” he said. “I wanted to explain who Jews are.”

Throughout his rabbinic career “the writer in me has been wanting to come out,” he said.

He describes his Jewish outlook as “progressive in orientation, with a healthy respect for tradition and a healthy hunger for creating new forms of ritual. Telling stories is a very Jewish activity, also a human activity, making meaning out of human experience.”

“We have a profound power through creativity to help alter the world. In a small way I’m doing that through the stories I tell.” He added, “Artists like to nudge the world along.”

“All That Matters” was inspired in part by the suicide of a vivacious young woman Goldstein had taught; he hadn’t seen it coming and that haunted him.

“I wondered if I could create a character who could intercede, who could mentor her back to discover the joy of living,” he said. “I couldn’t think of a more dramatic person to reach someone and show someone how precious love is than someone who has seen the worst that life can dole out.”

The character of Gabby was informed by several Holocaust survivors he has known, who have a joyous quality about them — in spite of all they have been through. In particular, his father had a cousin whose own experience of surviving and being hidden by a righteous Polish woman is reflected in Gabby’s story. Goldstein was also influenced by a meeting with Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna, when he was researching an earlier nonfiction book. Some of Wiesenthal’s determination — how early experiences in his life led to his involvement in bringing the world to justice, and a sense of owing something to future generations — surfaces in Gabby.

For Goldstein, the message of the book is about second chances in life, about learning to savor life’s gifts.

“Sometimes we look in the wrong places for a special kind of love that can rejuvenate our lives,” he said.

Goldstein’s writes with ease and fluidity, and he explains that he finished the book quickly, in 10 weeks.

“It just poured out of me,” he said.

While he was writing, he could imagine a film version and several producers have shown interest. The author dreams of Natalie Portman playing Jennifer.

About the book title, he sounds rabbinic, “When we discover what matters, life becomes different and better.”

Goldstein will be the featured guest at Sinai Temple’s Friday Night Live on Nov. 12, 7:30 p.m. 10400 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood.

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More Than Surviving

Leave a Comment / Community, Old Stories /

Nandor Markovic was lying in the gutter, awaiting death. He had already seen his best friend shot in the head, but Markovic could not take another step on the German-led march in 1945.

“I won’t waste a bullet on you,” a soldier said. “You’re already dead.”

He doesn’t know how much time passed before he felt a shovel near his body, then looked up to see the face of an American soldier.

“Lt. Kirsch. He nursed me back to life,” Markovic says, sitting one recent morning at a cafe on Beverly Boulevard. “That was the first time I had pancakes.”

Markovic, today the owner of International Silks and Woolens, believes it is his mission to help young people understand the import of the Holocaust. It is why he attended the March of the Living, and why he independently sets up speaking engagements at local schools year-round to share his story.

Markovic — known to everyone as Marko — was oldest of six siblings in a Czech town of “200 tallesim” in the Carpathian Mountains. When his father was taken away in 1941, 15-year-old Marko helped run the shoe and clothing business until that too was taken away. In 1944 all the Jews in town were rounded up in the synagogue and shipped to Birkenau. There his mother, two sisters and a brother were immediately killed.

Marko survived through six concentration camps before he was liberated. He joined the Israeli underground in Europe, playing a role in adventures involving British diplomats he still cannot speak of with impunity today. He joined the Israeli army and fought in the War of Independence, and in 1949 came to Los Angeles.

Marko’s ready smile and winning charm — along with his bravery and generosity — made him a star among last year’s Los Angeles March of the Living delegation. He bought the girls flowers for Shabbat, and the teens still call and drop by the store to say hi.

Participant Miri Cypers remembers walking on the train tracks to Birkenau, when Marko asked them to sing with him “Ani Maamin,” the anthem of the survivors that means “I believe.”

“Marko told us that when he was in the camps and had seen what was going on, he had a hard time believing in God, and couldn’t sing ‘Ani Maamin,'” Cypers says. “But he said that after witnessing the vitality and the strength we had shown on the trip, he wanted to sing the song now with us. After seeing the vitality of the Jewish youth and the example we had shown, he could sing the song, ‘I believe.’ ” — JGF

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March Connects Students to Shoah

Leave a Comment / Community, Kids & Teens /

With 15 years of Jewish day school education under his belt, Marc Marrero had a plan for college.

“I was going to graduate from Milken, come to college and basically have my Jewish life back home, and I was going to completely forget about Judaism when I came to college,” said Marrero, a freshman at Tufts University in Boston.

That plan was “flipped upside down” after he attended March of the Living last April, spending a week in Poland and a week in Israel with thousands of teens from all over the world and forming a bond with a Holocaust survivor who became like a grandfather to him.

“The first thing I did when I came to Tufts was go to Hillel,” Marrero said. He also advocates for Israel, and made an effort to find Shabbat services that are meaningful to him.

It is reactions such as Marrero’s that has given March of the Living such widespread support both among those interested in perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust and those interested in building positive Jewish identity — two camps that often find themselves at odds.

With the anniversary of Kristallnacht this week, the ongoing debate around whether to put scarce community resources into Holocaust memorials or into Jewish education re-emerges. In this touchy context, March of the Living seems to have carved out a niche where memorializing tragedy and fostering positive Jewish identity come together in such a way as to deflect criticism and to attract broad support from educators and community leaders.

In cities around the United States, including Los Angeles, the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE) often acts as a local planner for the trip, and community money subsidizes its roughly $3,500 price tag. The BJE in Los Angeles this year is sending an adult group, and is also making the trip a yearly rather than biannual event, as it has been for the past decade.

“This is not a horror and sadness trip. It’s not just about concentration camps and death camps, not about Nazis,” said Phil Liff-Grieff, BJE’s associate director, who has attended with groups twice. “It’s really about having the opportunity to think about who we are in a very powerful conversation with our past.”

This year, the international March of the Living is boosting promotion efforts in an attempt to get 18,000 Jewish and non-Jewish teenagers and adults — nearly three times the yearly average — for the May 2005 trip, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camps.

At Milken Community High School, which sent 12 students last year, recruitment efforts are underway to get as many as possible of the 138 seniors to go this year, an idea Marrero thinks is a good one.

“I got a really good Jewish education, but I never really understood the immediacy of why I needed that education and the role it needed to play in my life. There was this disconnect, and the march really made Judaism a part of my life,” Marrero said. “It has given me a calling, or a task.”

About 100,000 teens worldwide have gone on March of the Living since the first trip in 1988. Every year, local delegations from around the world spend a week in Poland, touring erstwhile shtetls and concentrations camps. The week culminates on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, with 6,000 teens, chaperones and survivors in matching blue jackets marching with Israeli flags from Auschwitz to Burkina.

After Poland the groups head to Israel, where they celebrate Israeli Memorial Day and Independence Day.

The combination of understanding the richness of what was once there, how it was lost, and then how Israel rose from the ashes to become what is today, in a milieu with peers from around the world, proves to be an intense experience for teens.

To aid the teens in processing the information, a social worker attends the trip, and work is done in small groups before, during and after the trip itself.

“Even though the experience was intense and very emotionally and mentally challenging to deal with, I think ultimately the intensity of the experience is what lit up the passion inside of us to go out and carry the message of what we learned,” said Miri Cypers, a Milken graduate who now attends Barnard College. “One of the most important messages of the trip was how to take history and take the tragedy of the past and still continue to find meaning and depth in everyday life.”

That message was brought home by the presence of Nandor “Marko” Markovic, a survivor who attended with last year’s Los Angeles group (see sidebar).

“Marko’s response and his way of dealing with things — and the way I’ve come to view the world — is that you have to respond to injustice with humanity,” Marrero said.

Markovic built intense bonds with the group, telling them his story of surviving through six concentration camps when he was younger than most of them.

“I never got to meet my grandfather, but Marko filled that void in my life,” said Marrero. “I’ve never learned such important lessons from anyone as I did from him. It was unbelievable to be able to meet someone you didn’t know before and two weeks later feel like you’ve learned the most important lessons of life on how to deal with yourself and how to confront humanity and how to deal with evil in the world.”

Both Marrero and Cypers tell of their experience in the small town of Tykocin in Poland, where they stood in desolation looking at the barely visible relics of a wooden Magen David on what was once the rabbi’s house in a thriving community. The group suddenly heard loud noises coming from the 500-year-old synagogue that had been salvaged as a museum. They entered, and found hundreds of March of the Living participants from around the world singing and dancing.

“I could see Marko just started to weep, because this was a tangible moment where we could see how we were bringing back life that [which] was decimated,” Cypers said.

It was Marko’s first time back to Auschwitz since he lost his parents and several siblings there, and he said it was the kids who carried him through the trip, and gave him the strength to continue on the 3-kilometer march.

“With my generation going, the whole story will go to academia,” Markovic said. “If we bond with these kids, they will remember it emotionally rather than academically.”

That was the thinking behind the creation of March of the Living. Israeli Knesset Member Avraham Hirchson saw that Israeli teens did not know anything about the Holocaust, and he wanted to be sure that Israelis and Jews worldwide could bear witness to the destruction. Along the way, the larger idea of building Jewish identity arose.

“I am convinced that March of the Living has such an impact on these youngsters, that without modesty I will predict that they will represent the future leadership of the Jewish people all over the world,” said Freddy Diamond, a survivor of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen who founded Los Angeles’s citywide Yom Hashoah program and attended the march five times over 10 years.

While in Auschwitz, Diamond showed the teens the block where his brother, a leader of the little-known resistance in Auschwitz, was tortured and then where he was hanged in front of 15,000 inmates.

Markovic showed them where he stood when he shooed his little sister to go stand with their mother and other siblings; they were among thousands killed that day.

But more than reliving the tragedy, the survivors provide inspiration. It is a difficult trip for the aging survivors, but one they see as key not only to remembering their lost families, but as central to the Jewish future.

“What is the impact of the trip to Poland and Israel?” Diamond asked. “I can say it in one sentence: For the first time in their lives, these youngsters know what a privilege it is to be Jewish.”

Applications are now available for March of the Living 2005. For more information, visit www.motl.org or www.bjela.org, or call (323) 761-8605.

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UCLA Forming Israel Studies Program

Leave a Comment / Community, Israel /

Everybody talks about Israel, but, surprisingly, there is no teaching, research and community program at an American university that focuses solely on the Jewish state in all its multiple facets.

The gap is beginning to be filled at UCLA, and if all works as planned, the Israel Studies Program will be “the most comprehensive and systematic” in the United States, according to its organizers.

Already in place are two undergraduate courses, visits by prominent Israeli and American scholars, and a community lecture program. In the works is a major international conference on Israeli democracy.

By 2007, Israel studies expects to be fully on the intellectual, community and media map, with an interdisciplinary faculty, prestigious academic chair and library, and poised to offer an undergraduate degree.

While there are well-established Jewish and Middle/Near East study centers at UCLA and a number of East Coast universities, “Israel itself doesn’t get focused attention and tends to get lost as an appendage to other programs,” said UCLA political scientist Steven Spiegel, one of the movers of Israel studies.

Aside from academic considerations, there is a strong feeling among many professors — and certainly within the Jewish community — that Near East departments on many campuses (though not UCLA) are dominated by pro-Arabists.

Yuval Rotem, who recently left his post as Israeli consul general after five years in the Western United States, reflects the opinion of more reticent scholars.

“Professorial posts in too many Middle East centers on too many American campuses are funded and occupied by pro-Arabists, and when they invite Israeli speakers, these are often more hateful of Israel than are the Arabs,” said Rotem in a phone call from Jerusalem.

“This situation, plus pro-Palestinian student movements on many campuses, can’t be changed by the occasional seminar on Israel’s plight or discussions among Jewish organizations,” he said. “It’s a long-range problem. Knowledge is a cumulative process and only a permanent study program on Israel can provide it.”

The initiative, drive and seed money for the Israel Studies program has come from a determined woman — Sharon Baradaran, a member of the influential Iranian American Nazarian clan of Los Angeles, who has a doctorate and is a university teacher in political science.

“It started more than two years ago, after the Israeli-Palestinian clashes in Jenin, when the media reported a lot of false and slanderous information about the behavior of the Israeli army,” Baradaran said in a phone interview.

Upset by the reported distortions, she invited a group of friends, including Rotem, American academicians and Israeli officers who had participated in the Jenin action for an informal discussion at her home.

Every two or three months, she reconvened and expanded the salon, including visiting Israeli politicians and scholars, and the discussions became more urgent as anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incidents were reported on numerous American campuses.

“I had the idea that while there were study centers on China, Russia, Latin America, Africa and many other areas at the UCLA International Institute, there was none for Israel, whose history, culture and political impact certainly warranted its own study program,” Baradaran said.

“First, we wanted an interdisciplinary program that would draw faculty and students in history, economics, sociology, law, political science, literature and cultural studies,” she added. “Secondly, we wanted a place open enough to also attract Arab and other scholars.”

She and some of her influential salon friends presented the concept to UCLA Vice Provost Geoffrey Garrett, dean of the International Institute, and to UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale. Both men reacted enthusiastically but noted that in these difficult times, no university funds were available for the program.

Baradaran was not fazed. She and Steve Gamer, external affairs director for the UCLA Institute, mapped out a fundraising drive for a $5 million endowment, to underwrite a permanent academic chair, visiting scholars program, campus and community education, policy forums and conferences and to develop a curriculum on Israel for school teachers at all levels.

The Israel Studies program, and future center, will be named in honor of the hoped-for $5 million donor.

So far, $800,000 has been raised and seed money to invite distinguished scholars has been provided by the family foundation of Younes and Soraya Nazarian, Baradaran’s parents. This month, professor Shlomo Avineri of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem inaugurated the visiting scholar program.

While the fundraising is progressing, two undergraduate courses in the Israel program are already in their second year. One is “History of Israel: 1948 to Present,” popularly dubbed Israel 101.

The second is an innovative course on Israel-Diaspora Relations, in which students at UCLA and Tel Aviv University hold “joint” videoconferencing classes to explore each other’s culture, politics and attitudes. Dr. Fredelle Spiegel initiated and teaches the class, which was initially funded by The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

Directors of the Jewish Studies centers at USC and UCLA see the developing Israel program not as a competitor, but as an ally.

“I’ve always emphasized that the more high quality research and teaching on Israel and Jewish life we can get, the better it is for everybody,” said Dr. Barry Glassner, director of the USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life.

Dr. David N. Myers, director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, who participated in the planning of the Israel program, said, “Israel is one of the most misunderstood countries in the world, and a better comprehension is vital to the intellectual and general communities. What better place to have the Israel program than in Los Angeles?”

Myers’ center at UCLA has organized an extensive campus and public program for the 2004-2005 academic year, including lectures, seminars and workshops on local Jewish history, Jewish-Muslim relations, Yiddish and Sephardic culture and the Holocaust. For information, call (310) 825-5387 or visit www.cjs.ucla.edu.

For information on programs or financial support for the Israel Studies program, contact Steve Gamer at (310) 206-8578 or sgamer@international.ucla.edu.

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