March 3, 2005

Caricatured Tribute to Artists on ‘List’

Leave a Comment / Entertainment / Carolyn Slutsky

“Hitler’s List: An Illustrated Guide to ‘Degenerates'” by John Minnion. (Checkmate, 2004).

In the summer of 1937, the Nazi Party opened an exhibition in Munich titled “Great German Art.”

Much of the show’s art was culled from Hitler’s personal collection — he had amassed a number of works with the proceeds from his autobiography, “Mein Kampf.” The show consisted of pure lines and pure themes, with scenes of immaculate peasants tilling the fields, families sitting down to hearty dinners and soldiers fighting for an Aryan Germany.

More than 420,000 visitors gathered to see this show in the city that was the birthplace of the Nazi Party.

Later that week, the Nazis opened another exhibition across the street. This time the theme was “Degenerate Art.”

Works confiscated from German galleries were badly hung on the walls, labeled with crude hand-scrawled captions. It was a showcase, a freak show of the works of “degenerate” artists, Bolsheviks, homosexuals and Jews, whose work and lives the Nazis hoped to extinguish in the coming years.

More than 2 million people saw that show. It was a blockbuster success.

John Minnion, a British caricaturist, speculates that the large crowds may have come to jeer and mock the works by Jews and other undesirables in the exhibition. But he points out that Hitler did not prevail. So, he says, “we can look back and say that this was the art of the 20th century.”

Minnion has collected 86 stories of this generation of visual artists, as well as writers, scientists, philosophers and musicians, and caricatured them in a new book, “Hitler’s List: An Illustrated Guide to ‘Degenerates,'” which is on sale at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow.

According to Minnion, whose pictures have appeared in the New Statesman, BBC On Air, The Guardian and the Financial Times, the book was the brainchild of Chris Schwarz, an old friend, who runs the Galicia Museum.

Schwarz suggested that for his next project Minnion do a study of notable European figures of the 1930s whose contributions to intellectual and cultural development, abhorrent to the Nazis, landed them on “Hitler’s list.” Minnion, taking up the challenge, researched the period, selected the people he wished to include and brought them to life in drawings based on photos, self-portraits and other images. “The Holocaust is such a serious topic, and caricatures are so frivolous, but Chris convinced me to see that the story of the tragedy would be there all the time,” Minnion said. “We’re talking about a collection of individual stories. These people or their work survived, despite Hitler’s intentions.”

Each capsule biography, limited to one or two pages, delivers the story of a life lived with ambition and artistry.

From such musicians as Alma Rose, a niece of the composer Gustav Mahler who directed and played violin in the orchestra at Auschwitz and died in the camp, to such painters as Marc Chagall, whose personal art focused on images of rabbis, lovers and animals, to Edith Stein, the Jewish woman who became a Catholic nun and died in Auschwitz and later was canonized — a generation of thinkers and doers emerges.

They each challenged the status quo and so attracted the wrath of the Nazis.

“Hitler was a failed artist, but he had a definite aesthetic,” Minnion said, speaking from the Galicia Museum. An exhibition of his drawings opened there Feb. 17. “He felt that art should have no ambiguity, but great art always has ambiguity.”

Minnion has self-published “Uneasy Listening: A Caricature Guide to 20th Century Composers” (2003) and he illustrated “Glued to the Googlebox: 50 Years of British Television” (2003) with text by Lynn Truss. But he says neither book had the wide and immediate appeal of “Hitler’s List,” which Schwarz describes as a book of introductions to the people who shaped the last century.

“The megalomania and fundamentalist stupidity of the Nazi era not only set back German and European culture, but sowed the seeds of the Third Reich’s own destruction,” Schwarz said.

The book seeks to put a human — albeit cartoon — face on some of these cultural innovators. Minnion also wants to highlight that the people Hitler most hated, the ones he thought of as “cultural bolshevists,” he also thought of as being Jews.

In today’s climate in parts of Europe, with anti-Semitism re-emerging, it is becoming increasingly important to remember the great personalities of the last century.

If nothing else, Minnion’s book introduces them to a new generation, who will remember them, their artwork, their stories, their discoveries and their lives.

“If I perish don’t let my paintings die,” Felix Nussbaum, a Jewish painter who kept working even as he hid from the Nazis, once said. “Show them to people.”

Nussbaum died in Auschwitz in 1944.

For information about publishing or buying “Hitler’s List,” e-mail Chris Schwarz at chris@galiciajewishmuseum.org.

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The Nazi Who Saved the Rebbe

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment / Gaby Wenig

“Rescued From The Reich: How One of Hitler’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe,” by Bryan Mark Rigg, Yale University Press, 2004.

When a German army officer trawled the streets of Warsaw in 1940 looking for Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, people either pleaded ignorance or ran away in fear.

But maybe they should not have been so afraid of Ernst Bloch, the German officer whose many contradictions defined a life that was, ultimately, lived in service to both the hunter and the hunted. Despite his handsome, Germanic profile — if one overlooked the disfiguring scar on his bottom lip — and the many military awards he sported on his Wermacht army uniform, Bloch was a Jew. And despite his proud devotion to the Fatherland, when Bloch eventually found the rebbe, he lied to other SS guards, concealing the rebbe from them, and then escorted Schneersohn to Latvia (instead of a concentration camp), where the rebbe and his entourage awaited safe passage to the United States.

Historian Bryan Mark Rigg tells the unlikely story of how a Jewish Nazi risked his life and career to save the Lubavitcher rebbe in the fascinating book, “Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe.”

Rigg is a Cambridge University graduate and former marine who now teaches history at the American Military University and Southern Methodist University. He came to prominence a few years ago with the publication of “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military” (University Press of Kansas, 1997), a book which documented the fate of partial Jews, or “mischlinges.”

Bloch was one such mischlinge. He had a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. He joined the German army in 1914 when he was 16 years old and by the end of World War I, his devotion to Germany was rewarded with both a Second- and First-Class Iron Cross and a Wound Badge. After the war, Bloch stayed with the army, and so capable and loyal to the cause was Bloch that in 1939 Hitler himself removed the undesirable circumstances of his birth by signing a document that bestowed “German Blood” on him.

In “Rescued From the Reich” the paradoxical nature of Bloch’s career, which culminates in his spectacular rescue of the rebbe, echoes the also contradictory larger story of the German-American cooperation needed to facilitate the rescue, and raises many questions about just how much could have been done to save more Jews in Europe.

The rescue was a result of an international lobbying effort, spurred by the fledgling Lubavitch community in the United States, which was not only anxious for the safety of the rebbe on a personal level, but concerned about the future of the Chabad movement, which it saw as dependent on the rebbe’s safe egress to the United States.

At the time, Chabad’s legal counselor in America was Sam Kramer, whose law partner was New York state Sen. Phillip Kleinfeld. Kleinfeld contacted U.S. Sen. Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) and asked him to lobby Secretary of State Cordell Hull to help get the rebbe out. Many other prominent politicians joined the lobbying effort, such as Reps. Adolph J. Sabath (D-Ill.) and Sol Bloom (D-N.Y.), as well as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. These men lobbied Robert Pell, the assistant chief of the State Department European Affairs Division, who had German contacts. Pell contacted Helmut Wolthat, a prominent Nazi Party member and who was an expert in international industry and economics, who in turn contacted Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence-gathering agency. Canaris chose Bloch for the mission.

So why did these men — both the Americans and the Germans — extend so much effort to get the rebbe out of Poland? Both groups acted not out of altruism but expediency. For the Americans, the rebbe was a significant enough Jewish leader that by rescuing him, as Rigg writes, “They could proudly illustrate their contribution to world Jewry, prove their humanitarian concern for the European Jews under Hitler and gain the support of a large group of voting Lubavitchers.” For the Germans involved, responding to the request from America (which had not yet entered the war) to rescue the rebbe was a chance “to restore a modicum of goodwill between the two nations.”

The Germans involved were also opposed to Hitler’s megalomania and racial policies.

“Governments in general are amoral,” said Rigg in a phone interview with The Journal from Texas. “They don’t act for humanitarian reasons. Most of the time governments only act because they are pushed. At the time, Roosevelt was the darling of the Jewish community and people couldn’t fathom that if he knew all about [what was happening to Jews in Europe] he wouldn’t do anything about it.”

Ultimately, the book, which also explores the more troubling aspects of Schneersohn’s leadership in the United States, such as his opposition to political efforts to save the Jews in Europe, is a clarion call for the efficacy of political action. The Schneersohn visa file at the State Department, Rigg said, was more than 200 pages thick. The files of thousands of other European Jews who applied for visas were only three pages long, as if their relatives wrote one letter, received one negative reply and then gave up the fight. The story of Schneersohn’s rescue demonstrates that anything is possible with a little effort — even Nazis working with Americans to save Jews.

“This is what we see with the rebbe,” Rigg said. “There are a lot of opportunities that come along our way — do we have the self-awareness to seize them?”

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Assad Faces Trouble on All Fronts

Bush Takes Wary Steps in Middle East

Leave a Comment / Worldwide / Ron Kampeas, JTA

Congress officially is lined up behind President Bush’s grand vision of Palestinian democracy — but it wants details along with that vision.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives’ powerful International Relations Committee met last week, right after two congressional resolutions overwhelmingly endorsing Bush’s call for a Palestinian state were passed.

The lofty language of those resolutions behind them, Republicans and Democrats on the committee made clear that they now want facts: Where should the $350 million that Bush is asking for — and which almost quintupled recent requests — go? How should it be monitored? And should strings be attached?

“We have few details at this point about the administration’s plans for assistance to the Palestinians,” Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) said Feb. 10, “but I’m inclined to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on assistance to the Palestinians in the forthcoming months. However, we expect that we will receive promptly any required authorization legislation, and the administration will respond fully and in a timely manner to any legitimate questions that may be raised about the package.”

So far, at least, the administration isn’t getting any clearer. In his formal requests to Congress to put $200 million of the requested $350 million in an $82 billion war-on-terror package, Bush did not expand on his goals beyond the broad outlines he put forward in his State of the Union speech Feb. 2.

“Following the recent historic election held by the Palestinians, this request includes $200 million to reinforce these positive political developments by supporting the development of economic opportunity and democratic institutions,” said a fact sheet attached to the White House request. “This money will be used to develop infrastructure and support critical sectors like education, home construction and basic services.”

One clue to where the money might go is State Department action in spending $40 million in pre-approved funds, separate from the $350 million Bush requested.

That money is going to water infrastructure, education, job creation and health care — all distributed through nongovernmental organizations and not directly to the Palestinian Authority. That’s certain to assuage concerns by some in Congress and in the pro-Israel community, who have noted that money directed to Palestinian aid in the past often ended up lining the pockets of corrupt Palestinian officials.

Until Bush comes up with more details about his request, however, the powerful members of Congress who approve the funds are looking elsewhere for answers.

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Foreign Operations Subcommittee — which has the final say on the request — rushed into the end of a Feb. 9 Capitol Hill lunch for Natan Sharansky, the Israeli Cabinet minister who has the president’s ear with his theory that stable peace can be made only with democratic regimes.

Lowey apologized for being late and asked Sharansky how he thought the request should be handled. Sharansky said the money should go to NGOs.

“That’s one of the most important things — to make sure it goes straight to people and not to bureaucracies,” Sharansky said.

The spectacle of one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington chasing a foreigner for advice underscored the degree to which members of Congress felt the need to fill in the gaps in Bush’s vision.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) put it most succinctly, toward the end of three hours of expert testimony from three top Jewish thinkers and one Palestinian: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Danielle Pletka, a former top Republican Senate staffer and American Enterprise Institute vice president; former top Middle East envoy Dennis Ross; and Ziad Asali, who heads the American Task Force on Palestine and who was an official U.S. observer in last month’s P.A. elections.

“What do you think our role should be, if you think we have a role at all in determining how the money is spent],” Jackson Lee asked.

Despite the broad range of views at the table, all four panelists agreed on Congress’ role: oversight, oversight, oversight.

“Congress has always been the feet-to-the-fire agency in the peace process,” Pletka said. “Congress has always been, in a very bipartisan way, the branch of government that has been most willing to do very, very serious oversight to ensure that aid is being used properly, that it is being directed correctly.”

A few minutes later, Asali, Pletka’s ideological opposite, echoed the thought and urged assurances of Palestinian accountability.

One powerful Democrat wanted accountability elsewhere as well — among Gulf Arab states that have not made good on hundreds of millions of dollars in aid pledges to the Palestinians.

“Many Americans join us in wanting to help the Palestinian people, but we can’t want to help them more than the Arabs themselves do,” said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), the ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee. “That is why I intend to pursue an initiative that will condition our aid on the demonstrated performance of oil-rich Arab states in providing assistance to the Palestinians.”

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Circuit

Leave a Comment / California, Circuit / Kelly Hartog

Friends in Deed

On Feb. 17, David Nathanson hosted a silent auction at his L.A. home for more than 100 young executives – and special guest 5th District L.A City Councilman Jack Weiss – to benefit nonprofit Yemin Orde Youth Village in Israel.

Located just south of Haifa, the 500 children who call Yemin Orde home come from 22 different countries. These immigrant, disadvantaged and refugee children, who have experienced trauma of one form or another, are defined as at-risk youth, and the Village provides them with a home, high-quality care and an education.

“Yemin Orde never closes and we never turn a child away who has nowhere else to go,” said Dr. Chaim Peri, director of Yemin Orde Youth Village, during his two-day visit. “Support from the Los Angeles community will help us to continue our care, and support our alumni.”

“It’s very clear that Angelenos are interested in learning more about the incredible work of the Yemin Orde Youth Village,” Weiss said. “Yemin Orde is turning at-risk youth into productive members of Israeli society. It’s an organization worthy of support, and a model for Los Angeles to study.”

High Hopes

As trumpeters heralded the moment, City of Hope supporters entered the sleek new Betty and Irwin Helford Clinical Research Center in Duarte on Feb. 13. The futuristic hospital replaces a building constructed back in 1937.

“As we open the doors of this magnificent facility, we recognize that we are metaphorically and literally opening the doors to the next century of this institution’s existence and its service to humanity,” said Dr. Theodore G. Krontiris, executive vice president of medical and scientific affairs.

Completed just weeks earlier, the 347,000-square-foot center is slated for patient occupancy this spring and incorporates innovative features to meet the needs of patients with compromised immune systems.

Honorees Irwin and Betty Helford were recognized for providing a $36 million gift that fueled development of the $200 million center.

“We’re very proud to be part of City of Hope, and grateful to have the ability to do this,” said Irwin Helford, chairman emeritus of Viking Office Products. He said he viewed the gift not only as a contribution, but also as an investment in the people of City of Hope, and recounted many acts of kindness and generosity he witnessed by hospital staff over the years. – Nancy Sokoler Steiner, Contributing Writer

A Humbled Humanitarian

In accepting the Ambassador of Humanity Award from Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, former President Bill Clinton described the refusal of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in 1939 to admit 900 Jewish refugees aboard the German ship, St. Louis, as “one of the darkest chapters in United States history.”

Clinton, who addressed a star-studded audience of some 750 on Feb. 17, also apologized and asked forgiveness for his failure to intervene in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which 1 million victims were slaughtered during a three-month period.

Established by Spielberg following the global success of his film, “Schindler’s List,” the foundation is currently processing the last of nearly 52,000 videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses.

In his brief and thoughtful address, Clinton explored his longstanding concern with the roots of human hatred, thanking his grandparents for “growing up to despise racism” in a small, segregated Southern town.

One of the country’s most accomplished politicians himself, Clinton ascribed the cause of ethnic hatreds mainly to power-hungry politicians indoctrinating their followers with “the fear of the other.”

“How can we survive in a global society in which we have to have enemies?” he asked.

Clinton paid special tribute to assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as “A man I loved as much as anyone I know.”

The annual event, was held on the Universal Studios backlot under a huge tent, occasionally shaken by gusts of rain and wind.

Actor Tom Cruise served as master of ceremonies and such Hollywood stars as John Travolta, Sharon Stone and Scarlett Johansson were in attendance.

Stand-up comic Robin Williams, in one of his patented multiaccented monologues, welcomed the fashionably dressed guests to “Temple Beth Prada” and assured them that the dinner had been prepared under dietary laws separating milchig (dairy), fleishig (meat) and sushidik ingredients. – Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor

Diamonds Are Forever

Jim and Laura Maslon and Shirley and Edgar Phillips received Lifetime of Service Awards at the Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) 75th anniversary diamond-studded gala on Jan. 29 in front of 400 guests at the Loews Santa Monica Hotel.

The Maslons began their volunteer life together at the Venice Art Walk and Jim Maslon is a former president of JVS. Laura Maslon serves on the JVS Marketing Committee as well as the board of the Contemporary Art Council at LACMA, and the executive committee of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

Edgar Phillips has been a board member of JVS since the 1970s and is co-founder of the JVS Jewish Community Scholarship fund. Shirley Phillips is devoted to The Helping Hand that runs the nonprofit gift shop at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

The gala event, hosted by Monty Hall, was attended by local elected officials and longtime agency supporters City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo; mayoral candidate and former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg; City Councilman Jack Weiss; L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and his wife Barbara; Jewish Federation President Harriet Hochman; and Michelle Kleinert, deputy director of community affairs for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“We believe that putting people to work and assisting them to have meaningful careers is the key to achieving our core mission,” said JVS CEO Vivian Seigel.

Beyond Rebbitzen

Women rabbis from Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and Arizona gathered on Feb. 24 at the University of Judaism’s (UJ) Gindi Auditorium in Bel Air to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Conservative movement’s first ordained female rabbi.

As part of the celebration, “Women in the Rabbinate” was the topic of this year’s Torah Fund Study Day, held by the Torah Fund Campaign for the Pacific Southwest Branch of Women’s League for Conservative Judaism.

The day, which focused on what the coming decades hold for women as they make their voices heard, included a panel discussion with Rabbi Leslie Alexander, community chaplain for the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley; Rabbi Sherre Zwelling Hirsch of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles; and Rabbi Sally Olins of Temple B’nai Hayim in Sherman Oaks. Gail Labovitz, Talmudic scholar and assistant professor of rabbinic studies at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the UJ, was the keynote speaker.

The day began with greetings from UJ President Robert Wexler and

Ziegler School Dean Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson.

Real Treasures

Elsewhere on the UJ front: On Feb. 22, the University Women of the UJ presented a check for $30,000 to UJ President, Robert Wexler. The proceeds, raised from sales at the Treasures of Judaica Gift Shop at the UJ, are part of the group’s annual grants allocations program, which supports student scholarships.

After the event, four UJ students discussed their scholarly goals: second-year Gershom Sizoumu, spiritual leader of the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda; first-year Gary Buchler, who has led more than 150 college-age students on their first visit to Israel; first-year Penina Podwol, who graduated cum laude from UCLA and is the daughter of a Chicago-area Conservative rabbi; and fourth-year Michael Werbow, who has worked with Jewish youth programs around the country.

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Bombing Creates Quandary for All

Leave a Comment / Worldwide / Leslie Susser

The late February suicide bombing in Tel Aviv shattered a three-month lull in terror and brought key Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking issues into sharp relief.

The terror attack, which came just three weeks after Israeli and Palestinian leaders declared an end to more than four years of hostilities, forced both sides to define their new relationship more clearly.

It enabled Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to clarify his policy toward the Palestinians, finger Syria and the Hezbollah as potential spoilers, and re-emphasize his view that there can be no real peacemaking until the Palestinians dismantle their armed terrorists.

It also highlighted Israel’s vulnerability to suicide terror attacks and rekindled the debate on the security fence.

Lastly, it underlined the core Palestinian dilemma: How to stop rogue terrorist cells from subverting the peace process without actually taking them on. Israeli military intelligence traced the orders for the attack to the Damascus headquarters of the radical Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which has dozens of agents on the West Bank, also was said to be implicated. According to military intelligence, the Jihad in Syria used Hezbollah channels in Lebanon to convey instructions to Hezbollah agents in the West Bank, who, in turn, operated a small Jihad cell in the West Bank town of Tulkarm.

In a pre-bombing video, the bomber identified himself as a Tulkarm-based Jihad operative. A few days later, Israeli forces found and dismantled a huge car bomb between Tulkarm and Jenin. Again Islamic Jihad in Damascus was said to be behind the planning, with the Tulkarm cell responsible for the actual operation on the ground.

The new terror, clearly designed to scuttle the nascent Israeli-Palestinian peace process, left Israeli policy planners in a quandary.

If they retaliated with military might they could play into the terrorists’ hands and destroy the fragile process. And if they waited for the Palestinians to act, things could get badly out of hand. Instead, they appealed to the international community to limit the spoilers’ room for maneuver and put pressure on the Palestinians.

On Monday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry summoned ambassadors of countries on the U.N. Security Council and in the European Union for a briefing. Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, head of research in military intelligence, explained the Syrian, Hezbollah and Jihad involvement.

The Foreign Ministry’s director-general, Ron Prosor, said the Hezbollah and Jihad were trying to undermine the cease-fire agreement Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had reached with the terrorists. And Syria was to blame for allowing the Jihad offices to operate on its territory, he said.

Late Monday, Feb. 28, the U.N. Security Council condemned the Feb. 25 attack “in the strongest possible terms.” Noting in its statement to the media that the Palestinian leadership also had condemned the attack, the council urged the Palestinian leadership to “take immediate, credible steps to find those responsible for this terrorist attack and bring them to justice and encourage further and sustained action to prevent other acts of terrorism.”

Clearly feeling the heat, Syria, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad all vigorously denied the charges.

Syrian President Bashar Assad, already under massive international pressure to pull his troops out of Lebanon, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, “It is a pointlessly offensive accusation. Syria had nothing to do with it.”

Hezbollah officials dismissed the Israeli charges as “beneath contempt.” And Islamic Jihad’s Gaza chief, Mohammed al-Hindi, claimed the bombing was the work of a rogue cell acting on its own.

“The Islamic Jihad’s policy has not changed. We are still committed to the period of calm we agreed with Abu Mazen,” he declared, using the popular name for Abbas.

Israel also sought to apply pressure directly on Abbas’s new Palestinian leadership.

Sharon himself took the lead, warning that the new diplomatic process would get absolutely nowhere unless the Palestinian Authority confronted the terrorists and disarmed them.

“While Israel is interested in advancing toward a settlement with the Palestinians, there will be no diplomatic progress, no progress until the Palestinians take strong action to eliminate the terrorist organizations and their infrastructure,” he told a meeting of Likud Party members.

“Israel,” he warned darkly, “will not compromise over the security of its citizens.”

Sharon has no wish to be caught in a situation where Palestinian rogue organizations carry out terror and Israel can’t respond because of its concern for the peace process. And the subtext of his message was that if terror continues, Israel will take military action, even if that means sacrificing the chance for peace.

Meanwhile, Israel is exploring other options.

By far the strongest lever it has is the release of Palestinian prisoners. Writing in the mass circulation daily Ma’ariv, columnist Ben Dror Yemini argued that Israel shouldn’t stop the political process or its disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank, “because that is just what the terrorists want.”

Instead, it should make the rate of prisoner release dependent on the degree of terror.

“Release the prisoners gradually — 20 at the end of every quiet month,” he wrote. “Every violation of the cease-fire will lead to a suspension of the releases for a period of time that Israel alone will decide. ”

The bombing also highlighted the fact that the government has completed the construction of only one-third of the security fence designed to keep the bombers out.

Even if there is progress in peacemaking with the Palestinians, politicians and pundits argued that Israel should rely on its own devices to keep the bombers out — devices like the fence. So far, only some 132 miles of the planned 372-mile route are in place.

On the Palestinian side, Abbas, in the short time he has been in power, has made some positive security moves. He has appointed a new interior minister, who is charged with enforcing the cease-fire, and warned a group of new military commanders that they would be sacked if violence isn’t stopped.

As for moves on the ground, Palestinian forces have closed down 12 arms-smuggling tunnels in Gaza and arrested six Jihad terrorists.

But the bottom line is that so far there is no sign of any willingness to actually dismantle the terrorist infrastructure. That could be fatal for the peace process.

If the terror continues and Abbas does nothing about the terrorists, the process will die. It could die, too, even if there is quiet, and Sharon continues to demand dismantling of the terrorist groups as a condition for progress in peacemaking.

Which leads to what is perhaps the most important question of all: What will the American position be a few months down the road, if there is quiet — or relative quiet — but the terrorists remain intact?

Leslie Susser is diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.

Terror in Tel Aviv

by Dan Baron, Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Last Friday night’s attack on the Stage killed five people and wounded more than 50, turning the usually raucous Tel Aviv beachfront promenade into a nightmare of blood and debris.

The bomber was a 21-year-old Palestinian from the city of Tulkarm, acting in the name of Islamic Jihad. The terrorist group’s own leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip denied any involvement in the bombing, which violated their truce talks with Mahmoud Abbas. Then came a claim from Islamic Jihad’s Beirut branch, a proxy of its Damascus headquarters.

Among the dead were three members of a close-knit Israel Defense Forces reserve combat unit and the fiancée of another member of the unit. All died immediately. Yael Orbach, a 28-year-old acting student, was to have been married in three weeks — she had planned to hand out wedding invitations that evening. Her fiancé, Ofir Gonen, was seriously wounded.

“I call on these people and the army, in tears and with full consciousness, to avenge Yael Orbach,” her father, Yisrael, told Army Radio on Sunday. “If they do not avenge this righteous person, I will.”

The fifth victim, Odelia Hobera, 26, died Monday. She was going to a birthday party she’d organized at Stage.

Three of Gonen’s comrades — Yitzhak Buzaglo, Arik Nagar and Ronen Reuvenon — were killed. Buzaglo’s wife, Linda, remains in critical condition.

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Q & A With Sharon Waxman

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment / Amy Klein

If you loved movies like “Pulp Fiction,” “Fight Club,” “Traffic,” “Being John Malkovitch,” “Boogie Nights” and “Three Kings,” then you should probably read Sharon Waxman’s new book, “Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System” (HarperEntertainment 2005). Waxman has covered Hollywood for The New York Times for a year and for The Washington Post for eight, and in her eminently readable and well-researched book, she encapsulates the 1990s through the breakout films of six young directors: Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, David. O. Russell and Spike Jonze: “With their films, the rebels of the 1990s shattered the status quo, set new boundaries in the art of moviemaking, and managed to bend the risk-averse studio structure to their will. They created a new cinematic language, recast audience expectations, and surprised us — and one another.”

Waxman, 41, talks to The Journal about filmmaking, about being an observer to “this foreign country” of Hollywood and about the biggest taboo subject of all: Being Jewish in Hollywood.

Jewish Journal: Why did you want to write this book?

Sharon Waxman: I did the book because I was covering Hollywood for the latter part of the ’90s and most of the movies I was writing about were not interesting movies — retreads and blockbusters with computer effects. But as the ’90s wore on I’d see some very innovative films and I’d meet the directors who made them — and it occurred to me that there was a new kind of movement; enough of them were making movies that were very different from the kind of movies that the studios were making at the time.

I wanted to look if there was a new generation leaving their mark on the cinema — that was the thesis, and I went out to prove it…. I was trying to draw a contemporary portrait of the 1990s … how they were making their mark in a Hollywood that was increasingly run by corporations and very bottom-line driven.

JJ: Is this a book with a happy ending or a sad ending? You have all these new directors who created a voice of the 1990s, but what has happened to them in the new millennium? (In her conclusion, Waxman writes, “But in truth, the system had already begun to beat them down and dilute their voices.”)

SW: I don’t think that this is a book that you can write the final chapter yet. These guys are right at the height of their filmmaking powers. I wrote about the decade where they wrote their one breakthrough movie; movies that will mark the culture…. That doesn’t mean that’s the end of the story for them. It’s silly to try and say what the ending is.

JJ: It’s too early to tell?

SW: People reviewing the book say [the independent spirit of moviemaking] is over — that was the ’90s, it was done…. There’s a lot of debate about it. I tend to think that filmmaking is a young person’s game, and it’s really hard to stay true to the pure artistic drive that you have as a young person — but there are people who beat the odds, like Clint Eastwood. So how can you possibly judge until you see what movies they’re going to make?

JJ: What do these filmmakers have in common?

SW: I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that [they] are all extremely driven, that they’re extremely individualistic, that they are wedded to their ideas, to what they want to create as filmmakers, and that they don’t want to budge from that. They’re egotistical — but I don’t think they’re more egotistical than anyone I come across in Hollywood, not more egotistical than the average Hollywood director (egotistical not in a bad sense).

Directors (and screenwriters) are the most interesting people you meet in Hollywood because they’re very different. To be a great director requires so many different talents….

JJ: How else are they similar?

SW: All of them are guys, they’re all white, from an upper-middle-class environment, all had broken homes and tortured relationships with their mothers and fathers. The common point is that they were driven from a very young age to make movies.

JJ: Are any of them Jewish?

SW: No. Except David O. Russell is half Jewish. (His father was Bernard Markovski, the name of the main character in “I (Heart) Huckabees.”)

JJ: If you read histories of Hollywood or look at the old studio system and the people who were making movies, it really did seem as if the Jews were running the system. But none of your book’s main characters are Jewish.

SW: The directors aren’t Jewish, but the executives are still more often than not. There’s a very large Jewish presence in Hollywood. Maybe it’s a bit less than it was at the studios — I guess it’s no longer 100 percent. But there are a large number of Jewish people in powerful positions.

JJ: Yet, no one wants to talk about being Jewish in Hollywood…

SW: The Jewish question in Hollywood is the most taboo subject in Hollywood.

JJ: Why?

SW: There’s a reluctance to highlight the fact that there are a large number of Jews in Hollywood, because there’s a concern that people will take that to mean there’s some kind of Jewish influence or cabal, and people don’t want to feed into false negative stereotypes.

JJ: Does being Jewish have any value in Hollywood?

SW: I think that it’s just part of the culture of Hollywood. In “A Mighty Wind,” Christopher Guest plays this Swedish music producer who speaks in Yiddish the whole time, [saying] “he’s so meshuggene” — and it’s so hilarious, it’s a gentle satire that there is a Jewish character to Hollywood. Here’s a Swedish character who can throw in Yiddish [because that’s the] tone of the culture that he’s living in. That’s a reality.

JJ: Does it help to be Jewish in Hollywood?

SW: Just like if you are from Detroit, and you want to get a job in the auto industry, and you have relatives at the Ford Motor Co., so you have that connection; from that standpoint [if you’re Jewish in Hollywood] you might have that advantage going for you, if you grow up in a connected Jewish community then there might be someone in the system you could reach out to…

JJ: Is that a sensitive point for you?

SW: I think that it’s a sensitive question that deserves a sensitive answer, because I wouldn’t deny that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood. I am not “The Jews of Hollywood,” I am just one person, I am a reporter.

I think there’s a desire to not be lumped together and not be a target, but at the same time I would never deny that there’s a lot of Jews in Hollywood and there is a certain Jewish characteristic to the industry.

JJ: How is it to be part of the Hollywood community and the Jewish community?

SW: I’m observing Hollywood as a reporter. The day that I become “part” of Hollywood is the day I should stop covering Hollywood. I’m an observer, I’m not a joiner. I’m not part of synagogues and denominations or any of that stuff. I think that the challenges to me personally in the job that I have and in the Jewish community that I live are personal challenges. Similar to the way every parent here does,

my husband and I are trying to

raise our [three] children with good values in a very materialistic and often superficial place that is wealthy Los Angeles.

JJ: How is it to be The New York Times correspondent presenting Hollywood to the rest of the world?

SW: I have the same approach as at The Washington Post. I treat it like it’s a foreign country. I think that there are differences between East Coast and West Coast culture, and I try to translate it. I’ve been here a while, but I still do.

JJ: What can young filmmakers learn from this book?

SW: I hope it will in some ways be an inspiration or useful to them — yes they can make the movies that they want to make, yes it is difficult, but it’s not impossible.

JJ: Did you ever want to make movies?

SW: Never.

JJ: And now, after covering Hollywood, less so?

SW: What is less than never?

Sharon Waxman will be at the Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Encino on March 8 and the Santa Monica store on April 11.

Q & A With Sharon Waxman Read More »

Meditate on Shabbat in the Old City

Leave a Comment / Travel / Lisa Alcalay Klug

Minutes from the Western Wall, brilliant bougainvillea grace the courtyard of an Old City apartment encased in Jerusalem’s signature stone. This is where participants in Sarah Yehudit Schneider’s women-only meditation retreats symbolically leave the rest of the week behind to embrace the healing, nurturing powers of Shabbat.

One powerful way to harness these transformative qualities of Shabbat is through stillness.

“Stillness resonates with stillness,” Schneider said. “Hashem ‘rested’ on Shabbat and ceased from creating form and vibration. When we ‘rest’ in silent retreat and meditation, we create a vessel for receiving the precious flow of Divine peace that is uniquely available on this holy day.”

Schneider is the founding director of A Still Small Voice, a correspondence school that provides weekly teachings in classic Jewish wisdom to subscribers around the world. The program has earned the endorsement of many respected leaders, including Rabbi Levi Y. Horowitz, the Bostoner rebbe; Rabbi Noah Weinberg, dean of Yeshivat Aish HaTorah; Rabbi David Refson, rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Neve Yerushalayim; and Rabbi Meir Schuster of Heritage House.

Schneider, who says she “has pursued the study and practice of religion, meditation and comparative mysticism since the early 1970s,” moved to Jerusalem in 1981. She has studied at Neve Yerushalayim and with Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, a noted teacher of chasidut and kabbalah.

She teaches privately to individuals or small groups and is the author of “Eating as Tikkun,” “Purim Bursts ” and “Kabbalistic Writings on the Nature of Masculine and Feminine.”

Observing traditional halachic guidelines for Shabbat, Schneider said, usually fosters an atmosphere in which to access the “healing, guiding and enlightening potential inherent on Shabbat.”

Taking this experience to a heightened level is the goal of her meditation retreats, which are also halachic.

“There is a whole other wealth of ‘light’ and bountiful resource that … remains untapped. Shabbat is a healer. Shabbat is a counselor. Shabbat is a teacher. Shabbat is a loyal and beloved companion,” Schneider said. “It is a taste of the world to come — a taste of perfect clarity, health, knowledge and ecstatic satisfaction.”

The typical retreat takes place monthly before Rosh Chodesh. It begins two hours before Shabbat candlelighting and continues two hours after to allow for journal writing. Sitting and walking meditations complement traditional Shabbat davening. Save for meditation instruction and meals, when conversation focuses on the weekly Torah portion, the group maintains an otherwise silent environment.

Schneider leads participants through specific meditation exercises focusing on the Shem Havaya — the Ineffable Name — based on traditional Jewish sources. She also encourages participants to label thoughts that arise in meditation and, in a subsequent exercise, to respond to these thoughts with short affirmations or prayers, including the following examples:

All-encompassing prayer for those who come into one’s thoughts during meditation, whether for good or bad: Please Hashem, bring light and love, trust and healing into this place [or into that person].

A potentially helpful prayer for thinking or planning: Hashem, please engrave this thought into my memory so that when I sit down to plan it will be there.

Remembering (positive): Thank you for all the sweet experiences of my life but help me stay in the present.

Remembering (negative): Hashem, help me find a way of healing this memory, perhaps by just letting it go. In the meantime, help me to stay in the present.

These small retreats accommodate four or five guests. Advance registration is required. Fees include vegetarian/dairy meals and modest accommodations. It also requires shared responsibility for clean-up and other tasks. For more information, contact A Still Small Voice, Correspondence Teachings in Classic Jewish Wisdom, at POB 14503, Jerusalem, 91141; phone (02) 628-2988; fax (02) 628-8302, smlvoice@netvision.net.il or visit Meditate on Shabbat in the Old City Read More »

Forgo Rainy Day Woe With Spa Trip

Leave a Comment / Travel / Lisa Alcalay Klug

When the torrential winter rains take a reprieve, don some wings and head south. This three-day itinerary for rest, relaxation and kosher cuisine creates sunny inspiration even on the cloudiest days.

Day 1: Ease in slowly with a day stop at Glen Ivy Hot Springs Spa, an affordable spa alternative. A single admission fee includes access to all pools, sauna, steam room, Roman baths, towels, lockers and Club Mud, an outdoor mud “well” of red clay guests self-apply. We luxuriated it in all, even visiting the Grotto, a body moisturizing treatment in an underground cavern. First, an attendant smears a warm, thick body mask containing aloe vera and sea kelp over a guest’s skin, then it is time to relax in the heated grotto. As it started to rain and the weather turned chilly, we headed indoors and sampled the menu of spa treatments, which includes wraps, body polishing and reflexology along with the usual massages, facials, manicures and pedicures.

We ate a light snack at Glen Ivy’s cafe, which sells kosher packaged items, knowing we were headed to dinner at Sheila’s Cafe and Bakery, a kosher restaurant in San Diego. The extensive offerings include salads, sandwiches, meats, poultry, fish, pasta and Mexican dishes. We were happy to find a delicious chicken soup ($3.95) on the menu. We also loved the giant tostada ($10.95), an edible tortilla shell filled with black beans, rice, salsa, tomatoes, onions, guacamole and strips of chicken breast. For dessert, we indulged in a delicious custard-filled eclair ($3.95) with rich chocolate topping.

Day 2: Destination La Costa. The recipient of a $140 million facelift, its new mission-style architecture perfectly suits the stunning California landscape. It also serves as a great foundation for its three main attractions: golf, tennis and spa.

La Costa has long been a golfer’s mecca, with two courses boasting the likes of Nicklaus, Woods and Palmer. It is also haven for tennis players and fitness buffs. Our priority was rejuvenation, so we headed straight to the new spa. Guests pick and choose from various water elements, including Roman waterfalls that offer an intense shoulder massage. It’s all part of the Agua de la Vida, a water circuit included with most treatments, combining whirlpools, shvitz, cedar sauna and a loofa scrub with a personal attendant.

After a luxuriant stone massage and facial, I rested outdoors in the patio, surrounded by beautiful purple and pink petunias, sipping tea and snacking on a perfect green apple. We capped off the day with a rigorous Pilates mat class –just one of the many La Costa fitness options. The extensive offerings include yoga, body sculpting, Pilates, indoor cycling, circuit training, meditation, stretching, kickboxing, balance ball and more. Our last stop: dinner, where the chefs were eager to accommodate kosher diners with a fish (double-wrapped in foil) dinner and fresh berries for dessert.

Day 3: After a visit to the on-site cafe, which offers a wide variety of packaged kosher drinks, snacks and Starbucks coffee, we met our guide for a spectacular lagoon-kayaking excursion in a protected reserve. The 75-degree weather was perfect. The sky was clear and our patient guide taught my friend, who had never kayaked before, how to comfortably maneuver the craft. We witnessed a variety of birds from the nearby migratory sanctuary and delighted in the tiny fish splashing up out of the water.

That afternoon, we returned to the Chopra Center, where Deepak Chopra spoke of lessons in tune with Judaism.

“The ultimate goal of spirituality is to be in love with creation at all time,” he told us. At a place like La Costa, that wasn’t much of a challenge.

“Every thought,” he said, “is information and energy. Thoughts are also space-time events because they have a beginning, middle and end. Our senses trick us into believing the world is continuous. The world is an imagination.”

His words were consistent with the Jewish idea that we live in olam hasheker, a world of lies, where appearance is emphasized but is merely a shell of the truth of our existence.

“If I could see you as a quantum physicist or God,” Chopra continued, “then I would see you as photons turning on and off. The whole world is a huge, blinking electro-magnetic storm. In reality, it’s just quantum energy soup.”

His words reminded me of teachings I had previously explored with Henry Falkenberg, a gifted scholar in San Francisco and stalwart of Congregation Knesset Israel. Falkenberg is well-versed in the Zohar, which predicted countless scientific findings later revealed by modern science, including the identification of the photo and other forms of light and energy.

As he continued, Chopra suggested the brain is an on/off code of photons and the soul is the experience of the experience. The body serves as the object. The mind is the process and the soul is the space between your thoughts. If you can distinguish or feel a still presence between your thoughts, “That,” he said, “is your soul…. I am not in the body. The body is in me. I am not in the mind. The mind is in me. I am not in the world. The world is in me.”

His words again reminded me of what our sages taught in Pirke Avot: “One who saves an individual saves an entire world.”

That world, past and future generations, are encapsulated in the soul. It’s your job to protect it. And you can do that with conscious acts of spirituality, whatever form they take.

Glen Ivy Hot Springs Spa is located at 25000 Glen Ivy Road, Glen Ivy. (888) 258-2683, www.glenivy.com.

La Costa is located at 2100 Costa Del Mar Road, Carlsbad. (760) 438-9111, (800) 854-5000, www.lacosta.com.

Sheila’s, under the supervision of the Va’ad HaRabonim of San Diego, is located at 4577 Clairemont Drive, San Diego. (858) 270-0251, Forgo Rainy Day Woe With Spa Trip Read More »

Charedi Choose Unorthodox Job

Leave a Comment / Travel / Gail Lichtman

Jerusalem is a magnet for religious tourism from all over the world, and ultra-Orthodox Jews are a growing segment of the religious tourists visiting the city. In order to meet their special needs, an ultra-Orthodox training program is offering a course to teach men to guide tourists through the spiritual center of the three great monotheistic religions.

The Lekach-run program provides an intensive 140 hours of classroom study plus eight field trips, covering 3,000 years of Jerusalem history — from the First Temple period up to the modern 21st-century city. The course also includes archaeology, geography, ecology and demography, as well as training in how to guide and communicate effectively.

“To be a guide for ultra-Orthodox tourists requires more than just looking and dressing like an ultra-Orthodox person,” said Yerucham Kanteman, the program’s coordinator. “The guide must also have the correct terminology and understand the mentality of his audience. Not every tourist is interested in stories of the hazal [the sages]. The ultra-Orthodox are.”

Kanteman said the guides don’t have to limit themselves to the ultra-Orthodox community.

“There are many general tourists who are interested in a Jerusalem experience and who would be happy to learn from up close about the city’s ethnic mosaic,” he said.

Yosef Haizraeli, a white-bearded student, father of nine and grandfather of six, echoes this sentiment.

“I want to be able to tell people about the history of the religious community in Jerusalem and its contributions to society,” he said. “I would like to bring this information not just to ultra-Orthodox groups, but also to general tourists.”

The program also answers another growing need in the ultra-Orthodox community — employment training.

For years, Charedi men in Israel have been encouraged by their community to engage in full-time religious studies. As a consequence, some 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men do not participate in the labor market. According to the Bank of Israel research department, the overall level of participation in the workforce in Israel is 55 percent, 10 percent lower than in any other Western country. About one-third of this gap is due to ultra-Orthodox men who do not work.

Recent budgetary cuts in government welfare spending have hit the ultra-Orthodox community especially hard, resulting in a growing awareness of the need to participate in the labor market. Unfortunately, many ultra-Orthodox men lack marketable skills.

Financed by the Jerusalem Foundation, the program is run by Lekach: The Ultra-Orthodox Training Center in Jerusalem, in conjunction with Yad Ben-Zvi and the City of David Project.

The program’s first class had 24 students, ranging in age from 20-something to 70-something. They came from all sectors of the ultra-Orthodox community and learned about the tour guide course from ads in religious newspapers.

Lekach was the natural choice for running this program. Over the past five years, it has established itself as a professional training center for the ultra-Orthodox community in areas related to community and society. It does so while providing an appropriate framework that conforms to the sensibilities of this population. The center conducts courses for sports instructors, dance teachers, librarians, community center professionals and photographers.

“We believe that those who serve the ultra-Orthodox need to know the community and its culture and this can be best done by the community itself and not by outsiders,” said Naomi Borodiansky, Lekach’s director.

“In putting together the program, I contacted the most professional bodies in the field with respect to building the curriculum and providing instructors,” she added.

Feedback about the program has been so positive that Lekach is planning more courses in the future and hopes to add a similar group for ultra-Orthodox women.

The agency itself has a very good employment track record, with a high percentage of its course graduates finding work. Borodiansky is equally optimistic about the tour guides.

“There are many school and yeshiva groups touring Jerusalem, in addition to community groups and families,” she said. “School groups are really hesitant to take tour guides who are not ultra-Orthodox.”

Uri Eldar, one of the program’s younger participants, is a musician with his own band who was studying in a kollel, a yeshiva for married men.

“All my life, I have loved to go places and learn about history,” he said. “This course has given me a wonderful opportunity — to make my hobby into my profession. As a religious person, I see things through a spiritual lens. As a tour guide, I will be bringing a love of Israel and the values of the Jewish people to those I guide. What could be better?”

For help organizing a tour of Israel, visit Charedi Choose Unorthodox Job Read More »

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