May 4, 2007

The tragic irony of a hero in Virginia

Leave a Comment / Teens / Samantha Simons

Irony. In a book or a movie, it’s the writer’s way of giving the observer a slap
in the face. People attempt to expect the unexpected, but when it actually happens no one is prepared.

When irony happens in real life it is usually so imaginative, not even the
greatest of writers could have come up with it. It is an event that comes as such a shock, it nearly knocks the wind out of you.

Irony can be cruel, sadistic, amazing or even beautiful. However, irony very rarely can be all of these things at once.

On April 16, 2007, 32 people were murdered and more than 20 others were left wounded in a shooting at a college in Virginia. Among the deceased was a 76-year-old professor named Liviu Librescu, who had survived both the Holocaust and the Romanian dictatorship that followed.

When the shooting broke out, professor Librescu barricaded the door in order to give his students a quick escape out a nearby window, away from the gunman. All of his students survived the attack, although he did not. Librescu died on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

When I first heard this man’s heroic story, I was instantly reminded of another. During Hebrew school in the seventh grade, I read a book called, “The Sunflower,” by Simon Wiesenthal. In his book, Wiesenthal talks to a former Nazi, who on his deathbed confessed countless atrocities against Jews during the war, seeking forgiveness.

One of the events the man told of was about a group of about 300 Jews who were forced into a building, which was then set on fire. When people attempted to jump out the windows, the Nazi soldiers were instructed to shoot.

The difference between these two events was that one of them had a hero. One of them had a single person who stepped up to save the lives of others. In one of these stories, the victims lived.

A hero died in one of these stories, and he died while a candle burned in the houses of millions of Jews all around the world, not yet knowing that it burned for him. A professor died protecting his students, never knowing that he would save their lives by sacrificing his own.

More than 12 million people died in the Holocaust, but Liviu Librescu lived. Why? Did he have some kind of skill that others did not? Did he possess the willpower when others gave up?

Or maybe there was something more planned for him. Maybe, instead of losing his life in a way that was out of his control, he lost his with heroic dignity.

What Liviu Librescu did made him a hero to more than just the students whose lives he saved. His death was cruel, sadistic and completely unfair, but it had a purpose. I never knew that tragic irony could be so beautiful.

Samantha Simons is a junior at El Camino Real High School and Los Angeles Hebrew High School.

Speak Up!
Tribe, a page by and for teens, appears the first issue of every month in The Jewish Journal. Ninth- to 12th-graders are invited to submit first-person columns, feature articles or news stories of up to 800 words. Deadline for the June issue is May 15; deadline for the July issue is June 15. Send submissions to julief@jewishjournal.com.

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My second childhood

Leave a Comment / Lifecycles / Yehuda Lev

It took eight decades, but at last I know what is meant by “second childhood.”

In my first childhood, my social life consisted of dating attractive young women. This second time around my calendar is just as full but my partners are all doctors.

The world looks different to me now that I have reached 80. It isn’t that I feel any older, it’s just that everyone else appears so much younger. And more distant. And a bit blurry around the edges. And much more difficult to hear. My ears have taken early retirement and last year, out of consideration for my fellow citizens, I gave up driving at night.

I am told that this last one is almost like a rite of passage; if you move to a retirement home to become one of its few available males, your popularity depends on your ability to drive at night. I will report to you further on this when and if the occasion arises.

The world sees me differently as well. What used to be bad taste (sloppy clothing, for example) is now acceptable. People are much more helpful; they see my four-legged cane and pause to open doors. If I should sit in my car for a few minutes trying to figure out the intricacies of cruise control, someone will rap on the window and ask if I am all right. At the supermarket I have been presented with my own key for the electric carts that are not equipped, thank heavens, with the latest gadgets dreamed up in Detroit. Besides, I no longer walk: I shuffle.

There is yet another problem. There are rows of keys on my computer’s keyboard whose meaning I fail to comprehend and icons on its screen whose purpose passeth all understanding. The makers of these gadgets assume that their customers are all graduates of MIT. In 688 pages of “Mac OSX for Dummies” there is not a single definition of the oft-used phrase “default position.” My wife and children, all highly computer literate, have given up trying to explain these matters to me; they use PCs and regard Macs as childish toys suitable only for the technologically challenged.

Despite this litany of whiney self-indulgence there are some advantages to being long in the tooth.

Even though the Iraqi quicksand is gradually swallowing us up, I am not likely to be drafted again for military service. Nor am I personally threatened by global warming, awakened in the morning by an alarm clock, paying for anyone’s college tuition or worrying about the state of my (nonexistent) portfolio.

Three sessions a week of cardiac rehab do much, I am told, for one’s physical well-being and has led to a discovery that will please the Bush administration.

They were expecting to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Well, I found them right here in my home city of Providence, R.I., at Miriam Hospital’s cardiac center.

And my brain, upon which I used to depend for solving The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, now is exercised by following the antics of Brad, Angelina, Britney, Paris, Nicole and their exes.

I used to imagine that life in the Golden Years would feature an endless series of visits from adoring grandchildren, all yearning to sit at the feet of the Fount of Wisdom so as to benefit from his experiences and profound utterances on issues of great moment. I have since discovered that grandchildren tend to live thousands of miles away and have interests of their own that rarely include the accomplishments of the Yankee teams of the 1930s or the pleasures of riding on the Sixth Avenue El all the way to the Battery. Instead, they chatter on about Game Boys, text messaging and other modern time-wasters, which will, in due course, turn them into members of the genus illiterati.

I know that it will all come to an end in a month or a year or perhaps another decade, but I don’t know how or when. Nor am I particularly anxious to find out. If there is one thing about which we elderly codgers are aware, it is that in becoming elderly we are riding a wave of good fortune.

After all, consider the alternative.

Yehuda Lev, The Journal’s first associate editor, lives in Providence, R.I., where his business card reads Editor Emeritus. He can be contacted at yehudal@cox.net.

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‘Undue influence’ is dangerous form of elder abuse

Leave a Comment / Lifecycles / Rachelle Zukerman

A woman in her 70s has a sizable estate acquired from a lifetime of hard work and smart investments. Lonely and overly trusting, she falls prey to a much younger man who persuades her to sign over her assets to him.

A frail widower hires an attractive housekeeper to help him with various household tasks. She eventually sweet talks him into giving her large gifts of money to pay for nursing school, clear her debts and pay for her mother’s operation.

The elders in these scenarios do not have dementia. Most courts would find them competent. How then are they bamboozled into losing what has taken a lifetime to accumulate? These examples of financial abuse (a form of elder abuse) occurred because of an insidious process called undue influence.

The perpetrators use various techniques and manipulations to gain power and compliance, exploiting the trust, dependency and fear of older adults. Over time, the perpetrators gain control over the decision making of their unwitting victims.

Anyone can be unduly influenced, including the stressed, ill, sleep deprived, lonely or frightened of any age, but the elderly are particularly at risk because of failing health, isolation and a tendency to trust. Margaret Singer, an expert on cults, brainwashing and persuasion, pinpointed several factors that perpetrators commonly use to groom potential victims.

These include:

Isolation from others. Telling the victim she was abandoned by her relatives and cutting off outside communication by telling visitors or callers that the senior does not want to see or talk to them.
Building a siege mentality. Making the victim believe that enemies (including health care providers and family members) are lurking everywhere. They convince their victims that these “enemies” are going to take away their houses, pensions and Social Security, and that they are going to put them in nursing homes.
Fostering dependency. They create the fiction that the influencer is the only trustworthy person and the only one who cares about the older person.
Creating a sense of powerlessness. Slowly but surely, the influencer persuades the senior that only they have the power to do anything to help the elder.
Making the senior fearful by exaggerating their illnesses and disabilities.

The perpetrator treats the elder more and more fragilely, exaggerating their ailments.

Who Are the Perpetrators?

Unfortunately, individuals who prey on vulnerable seniors are often the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. They may appear to be warm, sympathetic and selfless friends, caregivers and even family members, but they are not. Their numbers include:

Psychopaths or sociopaths, who get wind of the money, resolve to go after it and have no conscience about committing financial abuse.
Individuals with character defects whose greed is an overriding motivation.
People who perceive themselves as entitled to the money. They feel that they deserve to have the elder’s money or assets because their own lives have been fraught with hardship or because the older person wasn’t as appreciative of them as they should be.

What Can You Do?

Family, neighbors, friends and professionals who come in contact with older people can help in the following ways:

Check that the elder’s health and nutritional needs are being taken care of. A perpetrator may try to weaken an elder’s will by getting the senior to discontinue medications, neglect their health and eat poorly.
Keep the elder socially involved. The best insurance is for the older person to stay connected to relatives and people who they have known for a long time. Senior centers and social service programs are also excellent resources.
Provide the elder with information about undue influence and unscrupulous people who prey on senior citizens. Urge them to be careful.
Advise anyone who has contact with seniors to be on the lookout for signs that someone is attempting to control the elderly person for their own gain.

Should you suspect that an elder is a victim of undue influence, as soon as possible put every detail and all dates down in writing. States vary on abuse reporting requirements and procedures. However, each state has a service designated to receive and investigate allegations of elder abuse. The Eldercare Locator is a federal agency that will provide a referral to the proper agency for the area that the elder lives in.

Reporting suspicions of financial abuse via undue influence to the appropriate authority will begin an investigation and may prevent financial ruin or at least bring a halt to the elder’s suffering.

For more information, call (800) 677-1116 or visit drrzuk@aol.com.

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Notes from the campaign trail: Israel and the Dems; Mitt Romney; GOP faves

Leave a Comment / Politics, United States / James D. Besser

Presidential campaigns keep getting longer and uglier, but the candidates, at least, are volunteers. Hapless voters are a kind of captive audience — bombarded by attack ads and money, pummeled by the ever-shifting conventional wisdom and dizzily spun by candidates whose views change with the winds.

Election Day 2008 is still more than a year away, but the 24/7 news cycle and the tidal wave of money already lavished on a long list of serious contenders have combined to redouble the assault on our senses and pocketbooks.

Here are some notes from the campaign trail:

The Israel Factor and the Democrats

It’s understandable that Republican candidates approach Jewish voters with a single issue — Israel. After all, the conservative domestic positions demanded by the conservative GOP base are generally nonstarters with a still-liberal community.

But why do Democrats react by playing the same game?

At last week’s National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) forum, candidate after candidate focused overwhelmingly on Israel, even though most of the folks in the room were already perfectly comfortable with the party’s pro-Israel standing.

Isn’t that just playing into the Republicans’ hands by seeming to be on the defensive, when Jewish voters obviously don’t agree with GOP attack ads tarring the Dems as soft on Israel and suggesting that’s all Jewish voters should care about?

Why didn’t the Democratic contenders come to NJDC and say “you know where I stand on Israel, let’s talk about health care, the economy and Darfur?”

James Baker III

Also at last week’s NJDC’s conference, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson stepped in it when, in response to a reporter’s question, he said he might consider former Secretary of State James Baker as a special Mideast envoy.

Smart move, Bill; word immediately flashed across the Internet, and Richardson will now spend a lot of time and energy telling pro-Israel groups he didn’t really mean it.

It’s a familiar trap for politicians. Baker may not have had a love affair with Jews, but at least he had the diplomatic grit to bring Israel and her hostile neighbors together in negotiations previously considered impossible.

That’s what politicians in both parties remember, not his infamous “bleep the Jews” comment and his clash with the Yitzhak Shamir government over loan guarantees, actions that have been turned into mortal sins by Jewish groups that opposed Baker’s Madrid peace talks and have opposed every initiative since then.

Mitt Romney, Big Game Hunter

You think the pro-Israel lobby is all-powerful? Then you haven’t been paying attention to the gun lobby, which makes everybody else look like slackers.

That was evident last month when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, desperate to win over the NRA crowd, boasted of his lifelong love of hunting, only to be embarrassed when it was revealed he had only hunted twice. He tried to make up for it by issuing statements about his favorite guns, but the whole episode was an embarrassment for a candidate already being slammed as the ultimate flip flopper.

Once again, it seems that gun ownership and hunting are absolute prerequisites to winning the GOP nomination, and it doesn’t hurt Democrats to have a few trophies on the wall, either. Maybe Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) should start packing heat and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) should nail a few varmints.

The gun gap may be the biggest single impediment to a serious Jewish presidential candidate. Can you see Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) going before the NRA and talking about the .22 he got as a bar mitzvah present? Or Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) bragging about a great ten-point buck he bagged?

Favorite Republicans

Six months ago, the conventional wisdom held that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), a “maverick” who once stood up to the powerful religious right, was the Republican best positioned to capture a larger-than-average slice of the Jewish vote in 2008.

How fortunes change: today McCain is seen as too tied to President Bush’s Iraq war policies, which are opposed by a big majority of Jewish voters, and too enthusiastic in his outreach to the religious right.

Now it’s former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani who could boost the GOP’s sagging fortunes among Jewish voters, the pundits say. Rudy is a familiar face, he’s indelibly stamped with the imprint of the Big Apple and he has in the past taken moderate positions on hot button social issues.

But wait: In order to win the Republican nomination, the former mayor is veering right so fast he risks a dislocated neck. In June he’s scheduled to speak at Pat Robertson’s Regent University; he’s flipping on abortion and flopping on gay “civil unions”; he is calling Democratic health care plans “socialized medicine.”

Now there’s a lot of whispering about former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) as the next Jewish GOP favorite.

Stay tuned.

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Briefs: Koufax and SLO power-hitter named draft IBL picks; Iran top terror sponsor

Leave a Comment / Video, Worldwide / Jewish Journal

Sandy Koufax on the mound. Click the BIG ARROWKoufax chosen in Israel Baseball League’s (IBL) first-ever draft

Power-hitting California outfielder Aaron Levin was the first player selected in the Israel Baseball League’s inaugural draft.The Modi’in Miracles made Levin, 22, from Cuesta Community College in San Luis Obispo, the first pick in the draft, held Thursday night in New York City.

With the final pick of the draft the Miracles chose Sandy Koufax, the former Los Angeles Dodger left-hander and Hall of Famer, who famously refused to pitch in a World Series game that fell on Yom Kippur.It’s unclear whether Koufax would actually suit up for the Miracles.

“His selection is a tribute to the esteem with which he is held by everyone associated with this league,” the team’s manager, former big leaguer Art Shamsky, told The Associated Press. “It’s been 41 years between starts for him. If he’s rested and ready to take the mound again, we want him on our team.”

The IBL will play a 42-game schedule starting June 24. Players from around the world were drafted, but roughly half the league will be made up of Jews, league founders said.

Iran ‘Most Active’ Terror Sponsor

Iran is the “most active” state sponsor of terrorism, and its proxy, Hezbollah, is the “most technically capable terrorist group,” a U.S. report says. Syria also was named as a state sponsor of terrorism in the U.S. State Department’s country reports on terrorism released Monday, although the report implied that Damascus was more responsive to pressure than Iran.

“[Iran’s] Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] and Ministry of Intelligence and Security [MOIS] were directly involved in the planning and support of terrorist acts and continued to exhort a variety of groups, especially Palestinian groups with leadership cadres in Syria and Lebanese Hezbollah, to use terrorism in pursuit of their goals.”

Syria, it said, had ties to the same groups, but added, “Syria’s public support for the Palestinian groups varied, depending on its national interests and international pressure.”
The report praised Sudan as a “strong partner in the War on Terror” and said it “aggressively pursued terrorist operations directly involving threats to U.S. interests and personnel in Sudan.”

It noted that the Sudanese government welcomed officials of Hamas, the terrorist group that heads the Palestinian Authority government, but added that it “limited their activities to fundraising.”

Assessing terrorist groups, the report described Lebanon’s Hezbollah as “the most technically capable terrorist group in the world,” based in part on its performance against Israel in last summer’s war. It noted past Hezbollah attacks on Americans and compared them to Hamas, which “has not directly targeted U.S. interests, although the group makes little or no effort to avoid targets frequented by foreigners,” the report said. In its summary, the report said that “the Israeli/Palestinian conflict remains a source of terrorist motivation.”

Rabbinical Assembly Opens Convention

Arnold Eisen twice brought a room of Conservative rabbis to their feet in his inaugural address to the movement’s rabbinical association Monday. Speaking at the annual Rabbinical Assembly convention in Boston, the chancellor-elect of the Jewish Theological Seminary called for a wide discussion of the idea of mitzvah, a contentious subject for a movement dedicated to a careful balance of tradition and modernity.

“I think we’ve largely dropped the ball when it comes to message,” said Eisen, who urged the movement to build tight communities and fill them with enriching content.

The R.A. convention comes at a time of unease in the Conservative movement, whose legal authorities recently voted to permit gay and lesbian clergy, in a move that some feared would cause an irrevocable split. Along with resolutions on the Iraq war and Darfur, there’s an effort to have the convention discuss a resolution calling on all the movement’s rabbinical schools to accept gay and lesbian students.

Vatican Polls on Anti-Semitism

The Vatican is conducting a survey among Roman Catholic bishops on anti-Semitism and interfaith dialogue. The questions, published last week in advance of an international bishops conference in Rome in October 2008, ask the clergy if they think biblical texts are being used to foment anti-Semitism and whether they are working to foster dialogue with Jews.

The questionnaire expresses concern that too few Catholics know enough about the Old Testament.

Hebrew U. Co-Sponsors Learning at Einstein Home

An Israeli university and a German forum are teaming to use Albert Einstein’s former summer home as an educational site. Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which inherited the home in Caputh, near Berlin, signed an agreement April 25 with the Potsdam-based Einstein Forum launching joint educational programs at the site. A fellowship at its guest house is to begin May 1.

Einstein was on Hebrew University’s first board of governors. He used Caputh as a retreat from 1929 to 1933, then immigrated to the United States when the Nazis took power. The Einstein Forum raised funds to renovate the site from the Cornelsen Culture Foundation and the federal commissioner for culture and media. In 2005 it was reopened, 50 years after Einstein’s death.

Reform Divests From Sudan

The Reform movement became the latest Jewish group to divest from Sudan over the genocide in Darfur.

“Divestment is a tactic to use in specific and appropriate situations,” Reform’s Religious Action Center said in a statement Thursday. “It is now time we apply this additional economic tool, along with our other strategies, to seek an end to this tragic violence in Darfur.”

Government-allied terrorist groups have massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians in the region of western Sudan. President Bush has introduced sanctions and pledged to expand them, and said he would consider imposing a no-fly zone unless Sudan allows in more peacekeepers and observes a truce. Other Jewish groups divesting from companies that deal with Sudan include the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the National Council of Jewish Women.

Briefs courtesy Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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What now after Winograd?

Leave a Comment / Israel, Politics / Dina Kraft

With “failure” officially stamped on Ehud Olmert’s management of last summer’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the question is: What happens now?

The Israeli public, deeply critical and hungry for blame, may yet stop short of ousting the unpopular prime minister because of a lack of alternatives. Also because the official commission of inquiry into the war found fault not only with Olmert but with the government and military leadership as a whole, past and present.

“I think he is going to be stubborn and refuse to resign,” Abraham Diskin, a political science professor at the Hebrew University, said of Olmert.

“It will also depend on the cohesion of Kadima and the government, and the scope and nature of the public reaction, including in the media and rallies. But most of these elements are, for the time being, under his control,” Diskin said. “What we have is a very big drama but not a real earthquake yet.”

In fact, Olmert said Monday, following the release of the Winograd Commission’s interim report, that though “serious mistakes were made, mainly by me,” during the war, he would not resign.

Shortly after telling his Kadima Party faction that he had no intention of stepping down, Olmert reiterated his stance at a news conference.

“This is a serious and difficult report,” the prime minister said. “There were mistakes by the decision-makers, we need to start to fix the shortcomings; there’s much to be done. The presentation of the report opens a new chapter of fixing mistakes and learning lessons.”

Other prime ministers have stepped down in the wake of public anger and disappointment following wars, even when no official inquiring body demanded they take that action.

Golda Meir resigned after the Yom Kippur War, and Menachem Begin eventually stepped down after launching the first Lebanon War.

Asked how President Bush regarded the Winograd Commission report, White House spokesman Tony Snow said, “Well, obviously he works very closely with Prime Minister Olmert and thinks that he’s essential in working toward a two-state solution. The president remains committed to it.

We’re not going to comment on, obviously, internal investigations within the Israeli government.”

The report’s five authors — a mix of judges, former generals and an expert on public policy — said they would refrain at this point from making recommendations about specific people and posts.

Nevertheless, after months of speculation and a recent barrage of media leaks, the harsh condemnations in the commission’s interim findings took even seasoned politicians and pundits by surprise.

“The prime minister made up his mind hastily, despite the fact that no detailed military plan was submitted to him and without asking for one,” the report said. “Also, his decision was made without close study of the complex features of the Lebanon front and of the military, political and diplomatic options available to Israel. All of these add up to a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence.”

The war began after Hezbollah seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid July 12. Israel counterattacked, but Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz at first relied mainly on air force and artillery shelling, which exacted a steep price on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure but failed to budge Hezbollah from its heavily fortified bunkers near the border. The terrorist group continued launching short-range rockets into northern Israel until the very end of the war.

By the time troops and tanks were finally unleashed in force just days before an Aug. 12 cease-fire was brokered by the United Nations, the damage to Israel’s prestige had been done. Critics charged that soldiers’ lives were wasted on a futile ground mission in the war’s waning hours, long after it could have made a real difference.

Still, as scathing as the commission was about Olmert’s failings, it was perhaps even more damning of Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz.

The commission charged Peretz, a novice in military matters, with not properly consulting experts, and said Dan Halutz was negligent in not presenting a range of alternative strategic plans. Halutz stepped down in anticipation of the report.

David Frenkel, a law professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, said even though the public wants to see a change in the top leadership echelon, there was a danger in moving too quickly to new elections. With the government in power for only 13 months, existential issues that need to be addressed are more important than campaigning, Frenkel said.

“We are facing a very hard time with Hezbollah in the North and Iran,” he said. “To leave everything behind and go to elections would be considered a luxury.”

Frenkel went on to say, “There will be a next war, and instead of preparing for it we are constantly dealing with who is to be blamed for the past.”

He said it was natural for the public to place blame, but suggested that Israeli society did not acknowledge Israel’s achievements in the war — namely that Hezbollah had been pushed back from the border and struck a severe blow.

Hezbollah lost virtually its entire arsenal of long-range missiles to Israeli air strikes in the war’s opening days, and some analysts said the terrorist group lost nearly half its fighting force. Hezbollah publicly downplays its losses.

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said after the war that he never would have launched the conflict had he anticipated Israel’s massive response, a sign that the war may have succeeded in restoring Israel’s deterrent capacity after years in which Hezbollah felt it could attack the Jewish state with impunity.

“One should not forget it was not Israel who launched the war, but Israel had to defend itself,” Frenkel said.

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Why is this award different from all others?

Leave a Comment / Gina Nahai, Opinion / Gina Nahai

I’m sitting with my husband in the packed and darkened auditorium at Royce Hall in UCLA. It’s the night of the LA Times Book Prizes, but we might as well be at some Hollywood awards show: The stage is decorated like the set of a movie — Sean Penn is sitting two seats to my right; Bruce Dern and Mike Farrell are rumored to be somewhere in the audience; and a tall, slim woman with long, dark hair and very pronounced curves has just appeared from stage left, surrounded by a halo of light, to bring to the presenter a sealed envelope bearing the name — not of “the winner,” but of “the person to whom the award goes.”

Earlier, master of ceremonies Jim Lehrer asked the audience to think of him as an author first, and everything else second, because he has written and published for far longer than he has had a television career.

Now, M.G. Lord opens the envelope. The Science and Technology award, she says, goes to Eric R. Kandel, author of “In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind.” Music blares, the spotlight abandons the curvaceous presenter in favor of the section in the audience where finalists from each category are seated, and Kandel makes his way up the steps and to the podium.

He looks somewhere in his late seventies. He’s wearing a very sharp gray suit and a red bow tie, and he appears every bit as distinguished and scholarly as you might expect from a Columbia University professor. He says he’s genuinely pleased to be receiving this award — which is nice of him, I think, given that this isn’t the first time he has found himself on a stage delivering an acceptance speech: Before making his way to Los Angeles and Royce Hall, Kandel has garnered the National Medal of Honor, the Wolf Prize, the Gairdner International Award, and, in the year 2000, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

When he says that this award means as much to him as the Nobel, a chuckle rises from the audience and quickly spills into applause. But Kandel isn’t joking. “I’ve been asking myself,” he says, “what the difference is between being here and being in Stockholm.” Again, there’s laughter from the audience.

For one thing, he says, he knew ahead of time to prepare an acceptance speech for Stockholm; for another, here he is among authors who write not just about science, but about everything else in the world as well. In other words, this, to him, is a more intimidating crowd than a room full of fellow Nobel winners.

Not that any of the writers in the audience believes him, but I think we’re grateful for the complement nevertheless.

I go home that night and look up Kandel’s history online. I learn that he was born in Vienna in 1929, escaped the Nazis in 1939. I read about his many degrees and countless achievements, about his research and writings in scientific fields the names of which I can barely pronounce. Forget Sean Penn and Bruce Dern, I tell my kids. Eric Kandel was by far the biggest hit of the evening.

The next day, in the green room, I’m sitting with two friends when Kandel walks up and asks if he can join us at our table. It’s lunch hour, the place is packed, and he needs to share a table with someone, but I still think this is an act of God — like when Michael Jordan appeared out of thin air on a basketball court in an inner-city neighborhood in the middle of a sweltering summer afternoon, and passed the ball to the wide-eyed children in those television ads for some sporting good or other. I tell Kandel as much, and he laughs, puts his plate down and starts asking about me and the others at the table — what we write and where we come from, if we like our agents and publishers.

I ask him what book he’s working on, and I gather from his response that it has something to do with Freud and European Expressionism, but he’s more interested in finding out how many children I have than in explaining the subject matter of his book. I ask how long he’s staying in Los Angeles — only till Sunday, and then he’s off to New York, Paris, then Vienna, where he is to receive another award.

He offers that he has a son in New York, and a daughter — Minoosh — in San Francisco. He says he likes his children’s spouses, thank God; they’re good people and responsible parents. He has four grandchildren, and he doesn’t see them as often as he would like, what with his teaching schedule and all the traveling he has to do, but they all make a point of getting together for the holidays.

People come up to him every few minutes and ask him to sign their books, and he interrupts what he’s saying, engages in cordial conversation with the fans, then picks up with me where he left off. Two agents, an editor, a pair of newspaper reporters stop by to pay their respects, and end up staying. Before I know it, we’re all exchanging high holiday stories and talking about our children, how quickly they seem to have grown up, how we wish they wouldn’t take off for the other side of the country every time the wind blows, how we hope that they will observe Jewish traditions whether or not we’re there to enforce it.

“When he was alive,” Kandel says, “my father had us all at his home for every Jewish holiday. After he died, it fell upon me to do the same.”

What is the difference between being here and in Stockholm? I wonder. At the end of the day, between one Jew and another, perhaps not very much.

Gina B. Nahai is an author and a professor of creative writing at USC. Her new novel, “Caspian Rain,” will be published this fall. Gina Nahai’s column appears monthly in The Journal.

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Success of Jewish day schools breeds crisis

Leave a Comment / Opinion / Rabbi Laurence Scheindlin

It was, I believe, a disarmingly candid statement during my interview in 1977 that helped get me my job as headmaster of Sinai Akiba Academy in Los Angeles.

“If I were on the board of a day school seeking to hire a headmaster,” I said, “I am not the person I would hire — yet.” At the time a pulpit rabbi interested in education, I made three promises to the search committee: I would go back to school myself, I would make good use of consultants and I would make mistakes.

I carried out all three promises. My board supported the first, funded the second and simply didn’t know what to do about the third. In the course of time, I developed an educational philosophy and vision, learned the ins and outs of daily life in school and the board and I figured out how to support each other by continually focusing on educational excellence.

Why did they take a chance on someone unproven? Unable to identify from the pile of resumes before them an individual with both the paper credentials and the moxie, the board decided to take a chance on someone who, in their judgment, could grow into the job.

Thirty years later, Jewish day schools find themselves facing the same dilemma — and often not succeeding. Directors of organizations like Ravsak (the Jewish Community Day School Network) and Solomon Schechter (the national association of Conservative day schools) report being besieged by calls from schools unable to fill principalships that too often resemble revolving doors.

Observers estimate the average tenure of Jewish day school heads at between two and five years. Having labeled the problem a crisis, a consortium of organizations, including the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education and the Avichai Foundation, recently invited 50 participants to convene at a think tank consultation in New York.

In the last 20 years alone, 300 Jewish day schools have opened in the United States, bringing the total to about 800. In 1980, Los Angeles supported only 17 day schools. Today there are nearly 40.

American Jewish educational history will recall the ’90s as the Jewish high school decade, when Jewish communities as small as Portland created Jewish day high schools. Between 1990 and 2004, some 25 non-Orthodox Jewish day high schools opened.

This is good news for the Jewish future, but we cannot staff these schools. Who would have thought that the solution to a problem would itself become a problem, let alone a crisis?

Two streams of analysis quickly emerged among the think tank participants. According to the first, we need to identify alternative pathways into the profession, creatively recruiting candidates from public and private schools and from other Jewish social services. Equally important, innovative programs could teach schools how to grow their own future leadership from within their teacher ranks.

The other stream of thought identified the problem as the failure of school boards to work in effective collaboration with their heads of school. The board oversteps its bounds, turmoil ensues, the principal is on his or her way out and the board embarks on still another search.

Training and mentoring programs for school boards and heads, according to this point of view, would lead to more stable governing relationships.

Far from contradicting one another, the recruitment analysis and governance analysis actually address different dimensions of the crisis. Those who work in national and regional independent school organizations regale listeners with governance and head turnover horror stories. But the scarcity of personnel for Jewish day schools is at least an equal partner in crisis, and it runs far deeper than the headship.

Probably the single-most frustrating activity of Jewish day school heads is searching for qualified Judaic studies teachers. Although many of us are blessed with gifted teachers, every teacher opening is a cause for hand-wringing.

When seeking general studies teachers, I compete against public and superb independent schools with lovely campuses and substantial salary and benefits packages. I am able to compete successfully. Most important, there are teachers to compete for.

When I need to hire a Judaic studies teacher, I don’t know where to turn. Graduates of Jewish teacher training institutions often lack the Hebrew skills needed for day schools such as mine. Teachers from Israel often lack a religious orientation and, in many cases, basic Judaica knowledge. Rabbinical students foresee greater satisfactions in the pulpit.

The dramatic shortage of well-qualified Judaic studies teachers calls into question the future effectiveness of the day school movement. If this isn’t a crisis demanding a solution, I don’t know what is.

We need to create a viable Jewish education profession offering multiple career tracks, attractive salaries and opportunities for advancement. Only a comprehensive set of initiatives can do this. Examples: identify promising high school students and begin promoting day school work as a future profession for them (one of the many fascinating ideas presented by the think tank organizers). Grab the attention of college and graduate students by creating prestigious, well-funded fellowships for future day school teachers and administrators. Create highly visible, prestigious leadership tracks that enable day school teachers to branch out to curriculum writing, training, administration and mentoring.

People choose careers not only for income but because they perceive opportunities to be challenged, to grow and to enter career paths of status and dignity. We will draw intelligent, able young people to Jewish education not only by offering more viable salaries but by stimulating their imaginations.

We will need funders to support innovative training and mentoring programs, incentive fellowships and promotional activities. We will need Jewish institutions of higher learning and model day schools to create more collaborative teacher and administrator internships and residencies.

Development of a viable life-long profession through a comprehensive set of such initiatives can yield the Jewish teacher and administrator corps necessary to secure the future of Jewish education in America. Fortunately, a critical mass of Jewish educational leadership and potential funding today exists to accomplish this goal, but there is no time for hesitation.

Rabbi Larry Scheindlin is headmaster of Sinai Akiba Academy in Los Angeles.

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Zapped!

Joe ‘Master Blaster’ Weider still going strong

Leave a Comment / Lifecycles, Video / Robert David Jaffee

Bodybuilding guru Joe Weider, who discovered and trained Arnold Schwarzenegger, among other champions, walks with a slight limp into the second-floor conference room in one of the buildings bearing his name in Woodland Hills. Outside, Tuscan columns of this Greco-Roman building support a frieze of Olympians engaged in wrestling, archery, running and weightlifting.

Even at 86 years old, Weider gives you the sense he might have once been one of those Olympians. As he approaches the head of the table inside this wood-paneled room, Weider appears dapper and powerful, his muscular torso still filling out the gray pinstriped suit he wears with a starched white shirt and red power tie.

A young assistant helps Weider into his chair, a concession to his age. But the man who says he was “born with a barbell in my hands” in his book, “Brothers of Iron: Building the Weider Empire” (Sports Publishing, 2006), retains a strong handshake even after undergoing a heart valve operation and back surgery in recent decades.

Weider’s twin interests in history and art are reflected in the Frederic Remington bronze sculptures of cowboys and Indians on horseback that adorn the conference room, as well as sculptures of Abraham Lincoln and Weider himself outside the room. A teacher once told him that he should be an artist, and indeed he says that that could have been his career had he not chosen bodybuilding.

His artistic sensibilities can be seen in his illustrations of the male body framed in the downstairs lobby, which appeared in the inaugural issue of Your Physique, the first publication in his magazine empire and the precursor to Muscle & Fitness. In 2003, he sold Weider Publications titles, including Muscle & Fitness, Shape, Flex and Men’s Fitness, to American Media, Inc., for roughly $375 million, Weider says. Not bad for a Depression-era kid with a seventh-grade education who invested his life savings of $7 into putting out the first issue of Your Physique in the late 1930s.

On this spring day, he sports an adhesive bandage around the tip of his nose to cover a precancerous growth he had removed. Were he a younger man, one might assume that he had gotten into a fight, as he once did as a teen in Montreal, knocking out an anti-Semitic French Canadian bully with one punch. However, Weider, who immigrated to the United States after World War II, has not gotten into any fights since that scuffle in Montreal.

Weider grew up in an era when many Jews fought for a living, but he did not fight in the prize ring; he fought to keep a business afloat.

“Judaism made me,” he says. “It taught me to be a good boy, respect women, study and apply myself to work.”

Weider and his brother and business partner, Ben, never denied their Judaism, even when Ben was making contacts in Arab countries like Egypt, Iraq and the Palestinian territories as part of their effort to promote bodybuilding worldwide.

Over the years, they had to battle fierce competitors within their field, including Bob Hoffman, founder of the York Barbell Company and a U.S. Olympic weightlifting coach, who published magazines for weightlifters and served as head of the Amateur Athletic Union.

Joe Weider, who casually drops in references to Freud’s pleasure principle, also had to battle psychologists, who claimed that weight training “would do you no good.”

Looking resplendent with a full head of silver hair and matching silver moustache, Weider speaks for many young weightlifters when he says that “It made me feel I can change myself,” then he adds, “and change other people.”

Although bodybuilding improved the self-esteem of Weider and his disciples, he says that he had to counter another notion propounded by psychologists at the time — that those who built up their physiques were “latent homosexuals” who liked to stare at their bodies. It seems an odd point to mention and certainly less serious than charges back then that lifting weights would leave one overly muscle-bound, that muscle could turn to fat and, worst of all, that weight-training could result in so-called “athlete’s heart.”

Like former pupil Schwarzenegger, Weider did have surgery for a leaky heart valve, but he says that both were born with the condition.

“Arnold’s mother had it and died from it,” he says.

Weider also says that his back problems were due to a freak accident and had nothing to do with weight training. However, he admits that handling weights improperly can damage the body. He is also well aware of the drug abuses of too many body builders and athletes in other fields, a scourge that has led to severe health concerns, including heart attacks, strokes and cancer.

In “Brothers of Iron,” which is equal parts memoir, business primer and popular culture history, Weider stresses that he and Ben were always opposed to steroids. He writes that, “like much of the world’s evil … steroids … came from the Nazis and the Communists,” a point that resonates when reflecting on the multitude of East German Olympians, both male and female, who cheated their way to gold medals with bloated musculature through the late 1980s. Although the International Olympic Committee banned certain performance-enhancing drugs in 1967, steroids were not added to the list until 1975.

Ironically, many of those Eastern Europeans got their weight-training methodology from Weider, whose publications have been circulating the globe for nearly 70 years.

In 1950, Weider made his famous 10 predictions, some of which ended up being remarkably prescient. None more so than Prediction No. 1, “I predict that civilization will speed up in every phase, and that the stresses and strains on mankind will continue to increase,” and Prediction No. 2, “I predict that the resulting increase in mental and physical illness will force the world to recognize the importance of systematic exercise and physical activities.”

Most satisfying of all, he says, has been Prediction No. 10, “I predict that body building will one day become one of the greatest forces in existence, and that it may be hailed as the activity that actually saved civilization from itself.”

Joe ‘Master Blaster’ Weider still going strong Read More »

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