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October 28, 2009

Col. Richard Kemp Testified at U.N. on Gaza [VIDEO]

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

What the world didn’t see: the Oral Statement delivered by Colonel Richard Kemp to the UN Human Rights Council 12th Special Session, 16 October 2009, during the debate on the Goldstone Report [VIDEO FOLLOWS]

Thank you, Mr. President.

I am the former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan. I served with NATO and the United Nations; commanded troops in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Macedonia; and participated in the Gulf War. I spent considerable time in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and worked on international terrorism for the UK Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee.

Mr. President, based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defence Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.

Hamas, like Hizballah, are expert at driving the media agenda. Both will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes. They are adept at staging and distorting incidents.

The IDF faces a challenge that we British do not have to face to the same extent. It is the automatic, Pavlovian presumption by many in the international media, and international human rights groups, that the IDF are in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights.

The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver aid virtually into your enemy’s hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks.

Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes.

More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas’ way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice their own civilians.

Mr. President, Israel had no choice apart from defending its people, to stop Hamas from attacking them with rockets.

And I say this again: the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Thank you, Mr. President.

VIDEO:

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R. Crumb Brings Signature Style to ‘Genesis’

Leave a Comment / Books, Judaism /

If you put a copy of R. Crumb’s “The Book of Genesis Illustrated” (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., $24.95) on your coffee table during the upcoming holiday season, I promise you that it will catch and hold the attention of your guests and provoke some lively conversation. Where else, after all, will they find a version of the Bible that includes male frontal nudity, bare breasts in abundance, and men and women in a variety of imaginative sexual postures?

Crumb’s version of Genesis carries a warning on the front cover: “Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors,” a caution that is not entirely tongue-in-cheek. After all, Crumb set himself the task of cartooning the biblical text of Genesis in its entirety — “a straight illustration job,” according to the artist’s hand-lettered introduction to his book — and, as any open-eyed Bible reader should already know, Genesis contains as much sex and violence as any book in the Western canon.

Still, it is an eye-opening experience to behold Crumb’s frank renderings of a drunken and naked Noah, Lot’s daughters engaged in sexual intercourse with their father, Judah paying for sex with his widowed daughter-in-law or the rape of Dinah and the bloody revenge taken by her brothers against her uncircumcised attacker. Even the tender scenes where the aged Sarah suckles the newborn Isaac, or the fully-grown Isaac finds “solace” in the arms of Rebecca on the death of his mother, are pictured with a kind of carnality that will come as a shock to anyone who is accustomed to weekly readings of Torah in child-safe doses.

Readers of a certain age will know R. Crumb, now 66 years old, as the artist whose comic strips provided some of the iconic images of the ’60s, including Mr. Natural and the X-rated Fritz the Cat. His sheer weirdness is much on display in Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary, “Crumb,” and he might seem to be an odd addition to the roster of famous artists who have portrayed biblical characters and scenes, ranging from El Greco to Marc Chagall, all in defiance of the second of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth.”

Indeed, the recent controversies over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed might have cautioned some authors and publishers against any comic strip version of the Bible. Some pious Jews and Christians, too, will be deeply offended by what they see inside Crumb’s book, and perhaps they deserve a warning label of their own. But, thankfully, Western tradition has tolerated and even encouraged the use of the Bible in the visual arts for at least the last fifteen centuries. Crumb’s depiction of God as the Ancient of Days, for example, may resemble Mr. Natural but it also owes something to Michelangelo’s classic image of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the watercolors of William Blake and — as Crumb himself readily concedes — the sword-and-sandal epics of Hollywood.

Above all, Crumb’s “Genesis” can be regarded as a new, novel, sometimes shocking but wholly authentic exercise in midrash, the ancient but still lively tradition of explaining and elaborating upon the Tanakh. To his credit, Crumb insists on reproducing all 50 chapters of Genesis, word-for-word and not excluding those tiresome “begats,” and he uses the fresh and nuanced translation of Bible scholar Robert Alter with only a few tweaks of his own. While the reader’s eye will inevitably be drawn to the most titillating images, Crumb himself patiently draws cartoon panels for every scene in the biblical text.

So there are both shocking and sublime moments in Crumb’s book, and sometimes they appear in the same scene. When he illustrates the creation narrative in Genesis 2:7, for example, Crumb allows us to see God standing amid the muck and mire of the newly made earth, then kneeling in the mud to draw out a human form and finally blowing “the breath of life” into his nostrils. As Crumb draws it, God is opening his mouth as if to place a divine kiss on the lips of the first man, and it struck me as perhaps the single most daring image in the whole remarkable book.

After all, no one should be surprised to see the couplings of mortal men and women, and we see plenty of it in the pages of Genesis. Indeed, Crumb’s trademark style emphasizes our carnality: all of his women are blessed with protuberant breasts and prominent nipples, and all of his men are swarthy and thickset. But the intimate encounter between God and humankind fairly sizzles with provocative theological speculation.

Original drawings from Crumb’s book are on display at the Hammer Museum in Westwood from Oct. 24, 2009-Feb. 7, 2010, in an exhibition titled “The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.”
“The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis,” Oct. 24, 2009 – Feb. 7, 2010 at the Hammer Museum, 10889 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. (310) 443-7000. ” title=”jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve”>jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve.

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A Different Kind of Fighter for 5th District

Leave a Comment / Bill Boyarsky, Opinion /

L.A. City Councilman Paul Koretz hustled into his fourth-floor office suite followed by two aides, just after he finished a long council session. I followed him into a back office to interview this City Hall newcomer, the latest person to represent the difficult 5th District.

He is a friendly man with a soft voice and a relaxed — for a politician — manner, a contrast to his predecessor, the edgy Jack Weiss, famous for taking no lip from constituents who objected to his actions. Koretz seems as though he’ll listen patiently like a sympathetic sales person.

It remains to be seen whether this satisfies the 5th District, home of the most aggressive developers, the most militant and sophisticated homeowners groups and some of the worst traffic in Los Angeles.

The district, in the heart of the Jewish community, extends from the Westside into the west San Fernando Valley. It includes development hot spots such as Ventura Boulevard and Century City, now suffering from Great Recession stagnation but expected to come back when the rest of the country does.

In a close race last May, Koretz defeated David Vahedi, a lawyer who emerged from the neighborhood councils. Koretz had climbed up the Westside establishment political ladder, serving on the staffs of former 5th District City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky and 11th District City Councilman Marvin Braude. Koretz was a West Hollywood city councilman for six years and served the same amount of time in the state Assembly.

The 5th District includes Encino, Sherman Oaks, Valley Village, Palms, Westwood, Century City, Beverlywood, the Fairfax District, Cheviot Hills and Carthay Circle, as well as hillside communities between the 405 Freeway and Laurel Canyon.

I asked Koretz about issues he’s now confronting that are important to the Jewish community.

“I am someone who tries to do coalition-building,” he said. “This is an issue relevant to the Jewish community. Historically, we may have had closer relationships with the African American community and the Latino community, and I think we need to find issues where we have strong common ground and work together. That is something I have done, particularly in the labor movement.”

Koretz’s father, who worked as a waiter on the Sunset Strip in its restaurant heyday and at the Los Angeles Hilton for 10 years, was a waiters’ union activist. “I’ve been walking picket lines since I’ve been 2,” Koretz said.

Most recently, he was executive director of the liberal Jewish Labor Committee, which works with unions representing teachers and other public employees, supermarket workers, janitors and other elements of the labor movement in Los Angeles. Koretz was arrested in 2006 along with other demonstrators protesting the anti-labor tactics of LAX-area hotels.

That puts him in the mainstream of City Hall power, wielded by a coalition of developers and other businesses and organized labor, particularly the unions representing government and construction workers. Together, the coalition, backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and a majority of the council, has followed a pro-development agenda that is contrary to the policies advocated by 5th District anti-development homeowner groups.

Koretz said he is on the homeowners’ side. “The council is somewhat sympathetic to the development side of things,” he said.

That’s a wise stand. Almost half of his constituents are homeowners.

“Most residents feel we have allowed development that has outstripped the infrastructure,” he said. “We have to step back and take a look at it.”

Koretz is fighting “tooth and nail” the proposal to tear down the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Century City and replace it with two high-rise buildings.

In the 5th District, controversies over development and traffic are intertwined and bring out the most furious reactions.

For example, take the episode when Mayor Villaraigosa, supported by then-Councilman Weiss, proposed making Olympic and Pico boulevards one-way streets to ease the rush-hour gridlock on the streets.

Merchants, particularly those on Pico Boulevard, protested. A strong objection came from those serving Orthodox Jews shopping on Thursdays to stock up for the Sabbath. The stores that serve them have little parking.

Koretz opposes the plan. With his opposition, and that of council members in neighboring districts, the one-way proposal is pretty well dead.

As we talked, I was struck by Koretz’s bland manner, so different than his recent predecessors. A conversation with Weiss could turn into an argument. The same was true of Yaroslavsky, who added another ingredient: an overwhelming command of detail.

So it was surprising that Koretz had taken on the popular Police Chief William Bratton, joining other council members in favoring freezing the hiring of new police officers for the rest of the year. “Totally naïve,” Bratton said. “What background does he have to make these types of decisions?”

Plenty, Koretz said, citing his service in West Hollywood and as chair of the Assembly’s committee dealing with safety. That didn’t appear to be much experience to me. But Koretz seemed satisfied with it.

What’s most striking about the Koretz-Bratton feud is that Koretz even got into the beef. In talking to him, he doesn’t seem the type. Moderate and even bland on the surface, Koretz may turn out to be a fighter.

Bill Boyarsky is a columnist for The Jewish Journal, Truthdig and LA Observed and the author of the just-published book “Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times” (Angel City Press).

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Who Owns the ‘N’ Word?

Leave a Comment / Cover Story /

This week, we have finally reached Holocaust overload.

It began Sept. 23, 2009, when the General Assembly of the United Nations featured a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust. In a speech widely cheered in Jewish circles, both in Israel and the Diaspora, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rose to the bait the next day; standing with German documentation of the gas chambers, he went toe to toe, rhetorical flourish to rhetorical flourish, with the self-elected leader of the Iranian people. “It didn’t happen,” the president said.

“Oh, yes it did,” the prime minister retorted.

In the political sphere we have recently heard equally trivial statements.

• The Rev. Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention called health care reform proposals “what the Nazis did” and invented the “Dr. Josef Mengele Award” to present to health care policy-maker Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a respected oncologist who has written brilliantly on medical ethics. Recall that Mengele conducted medical experiments that routinely and deliberately killed his patients, and he presided over selections at Birkenau.

• Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) referred to the current health care system as a “holocaust in America.”

• The Republican National Committee posted a video online showing Adolf Hitler discussing health care proposals.

But wait, there’s more!

As the debate heated up last summer, pictures of the president with a Hitler-like mustache appeared. Surely, even his most severe critics can agree that even if Obama has not earned the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded him, he surely has not earned comparisons to Hitler. In both cases one may say, “What has he done to deserve that?”

Then there were the so-called death panels — in reality, a Republican congressman’s well thought-out proposal that Medicare pay for two consultations at age 65 and again at 70 with one’s own physician about the all-important end-of-life decisions. This marvelous proposal was then called “Nazi medicine” when in reality it was its antithesis. The first of the 10 principles of medical ethics introduced by the judges at the Nuremberg Nazi doctors’ trial was that a patient is entitled to informed consent. That is, to be told of any treatment and to consent to its implementation. The so-called death panels were about informed consent. Nevertheless, the Nazi analogy stuck, and because of such trivialization and falsification, the proposal was withdrawn.

This past week, The Rabbinical Assembly, the Conservative Movement’s rabbinical body, issued a statement condemning these all-too-facile and inaccurate comparisons. They urged caution. Invoking the Talmud, they pleaded: “Sages, be cautious in the words you utter.” 

They pleaded for civility: “When one has a public platform one cannot allow the heat of rhetoric to outrun its reason. “

My distinguished colleagues made a pronouncement, as is clearly their right and their obligation. But they offered no analysis as to why this heated rhetoric, why these bizarre — and clearly false — analogies. We must ask the question: why?

The answer, I’m afraid, is this: We are the victims of our success.

Over the past decades the Holocaust has taken its place as the “negative absolute” of the Western world.

In a world of relativism, when we do not know what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, we have near universal agreement — except for the lunatic fringe — that Nazism was the embodiment of evil. It was bad — absolutely and indisputably bad.

As criticism of President Obama mounted, his enemies — not his opponents — went on the attack: They called the president a socialist and a Marxist. But in the post-Cold War world, such terms no longer sting the way they once did. Out of frustration, out of sheer pique, Obama’s critics resorted to the nuclear bombs of moral epithets: Nazis, Hitler, the Holocaust. Those terms seem to be understood. “Nazi” still carries moral weight in contemporary culture, and is reinforced by the many films that have brought the story of the Holocaust to the foreground or used it as a back story that seem to dominate cinema and television. The Holocaust occupies center stage in museums and memorials, in conferences and in scholarship, but also in the public sphere.

Beyond our success at spreading awareness of the Holocaust, I have a deeply uncomfortable feeling that Jews, committed and serious Jews concerned with the survival of the Jewish people, are often themselves increasingly responsible for trivializing the Holocaust by using it as a rhetorical political tool with little regard to its appropriateness or the consequences of its misuse.

We make all too trivial comparisons between the Holocaust and contemporary anti-Semitism.

We employ rhetoric of the Holocaust all too easily, all too cheaply.

We thought that the Holocaust could be transmitted into the mainstream of American culture — indeed of world culture — without the vacuousness and viciousness of that culture overwhelming it, without trivialization, minimalization and falsification. And we were wrong. The minute that Elie Wiesel was translated and transformed from Yiddish into French and then into English, the second our first made-for-TV Holocaust movie aired, we ceded control of the imagery and rhetoric to the world’s imagination. We didn’t make the Holocaust less serious, but we offered it up to a culture that is less serious about it. My esteemed Conservative rabbis can chastise its misuse, but their words are too late.

Whenever I invoke the Holocaust, I think of two injunctions offered by two very serious scholars of the Holocaust.

John Roth admonished us: “Handle with care!”

Rabbi Irving Greenberg established a principle of authentic expression after the Holocaust: No statement, theological or otherwise, can be made that cannot be made in the presence of burning children.

In our world, very little is handled with care in the public sphere.

In our world, there is precious little humility that would suggest awe before an event of such magnitude.

Let us declare a moratorium on Holocaust analogies.

Those who invoke the analogies of the Holocaust demonstrate how little they understand of that time and place — and more importantly, of our time and our place.

Michael Berenbaum is professor of Jewish Studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at American Jewish University.

Who Owns the ‘N’ Word? Read More »

Fans Embrace Maccabi Electra at Staples

Leave a Comment / Community, Sports /

It’s a long way to fly for a home game, but that was the effect when Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv’s players walked into Staples Center, more than 7,500 miles from Israel, to play the Clippers in an exhibition game on Tuesday, Oct. 20. Rather than wearing the blue uniforms normally associated with a Maccabi away game, the players wore home gold, which gave the superficial appearance of a Lakers-Clippers match-up.

Every Maccabi basket earned loud cheers in the arena, which was filled to 72 percent capacity, or 13,700 seats (2,000 more seats than Maccabi’s Nokia Arena in Tel Aviv). Fans waved Israeli flags and held up signs written in Hebrew. And there seemed to be more kippot in one place than at any time outside of the High Holy Days.

“I thought that tonight I’d be coach Don Levy,” Clippers coach Mike Dunleavy told The Journal. “I thought that might help.”

But during a road trip overshadowed by the Tel Aviv suicide of a former team manager and team coach Pini Gershon’s refusal to leave the floor after a second technical foul in New York on Sunday, Maccabi players suffered the additional indignity of finding their Staples Center locker room burglarized during a game lost to Los Angeles 108-96.

The Clippers, which has a woeful NBA history, managed to best a club that has 48 Israeli National Championship titles and five European Cup wins. The Maccabi Electra had no answer for 7-foot Chris Kaman or the athletic rookie Black Griffin, who combined for 31 points and 15 rebounds.

Then there was Kaman, who stood almost 3 inches above Maccabi’s tallest player, Yaniv Green, and it showed as he had his way in the paint. Kaman scored 18 points, including six in a row to start the second half that turned a 53-42 halftime lead into a laugher.

Griffin stands 6-foot-10 but is so athletic that he played taller than that Tuesday. He scored 12 points and grabbed 10 rebounds as seven Clippers scored in double digits.

Maccabi’s Chuck Eidson scored 18 points and Doron Perkins had a triple-double with 16 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists, the final assist coming in USC graduate David Bluthenthal’s 3-pointer at the buzzer. Bluthenthal scored 12 points.

Yet despite being dominated for the second time in two days (the Knicks beat Maccabi 106-91 on Oct. 18), the Tel Aviv players felt satisfied with their effort. And perhaps they were more motivated in the wake of the apparent suicide of their former manager, Moni Fanan on Sunday. The crowd observed a moment of silence before the game.

Fanan’s official title for 16 years was manager, but he was much more than that. According to Yedioth Ahronot’s Ynet News, Fanan helped select the players, greeted them upon arrival to Israel, met all of their needs and, legend has it, used to change their light bulbs at 3 a.m.

Bluthenthal said Fanan was one of his “good friends. He was the link between the players and [management]. I was the first guy in the gym and he was always there a few minutes before me.”

Fanan allegedly hanged himself in his Tel Aviv apartment over financial problems. He owed millions in shekels to former team members, having promised investors high returns that he was unable to deliver.

And then Tuesday night, the Maccabi players returned to their locker room at halftime to find it had been burglarized. Maccabi coach Gershon said money and watches were stolen from the locker room. On Friday, Lt. Albert Gavin of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Station said the suspect stole more than $22,000 in cash and property from the team.

Gershon was upset with the security breach, but he was pleased with his team’s on-court showing.

“I’m feeling good, because they’re a better team [than the Knicks],” Gershon said. “They’re working on things and we’re working on things, and you can’t ask for better than that.”

This Gershon was different from the one who refused to leave the Madison Square Garden court after receiving two technical fouls against the Knicks. Gershon was upset at the replacement referees, and it took the pleading from Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, founder of the Israeli orphanage Migdal Ohr, which received proceeds from the game, to finally get Gershon to leave after eight minutes.

The Gershon who coached at Staples Center was on his best behavior, infrequently shouting at the refs and limiting most of his objections to “where’s the call?” gestures. 

Grossman, meanwhile, sat courtside at Staples and received as much attention as any celebrity. At halftime, he spoke for four minutes, starting with saying “Hinei Ma Tov” before saying a few words about Migdal Ohr’s mission, reciting the “Shema” and then leading the fans in singing “Am Yisrael Chai.”

Maccabi players, meanwhile, felt the Clippers were better than the Knicks, and that they played better.

“We executed our offense better, played better defense. We were fresher,” said Bluthenthal, who had his own group of family boosters in Section 110.

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Kathy Ireland Named Sheba Ambassador

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Community /

Supermodel turned supermogul Kathy Ireland has been named the international ambassador of Holyland Heroes, a new Friends of Sheba Medical Center campaign to raise awareness and support of wounded soldiers and victims of terror being treated at Sheba’s National Center for Rehabilitation.

The announcement was made during the 2009 Women of Achievement Luncheon of the Friends of Sheba Medical Center held at the Beverly Hills Hotel Oct. 15.

“Admittedly, I’m led to support Sheba through my faith, but we need not be Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic or atheist to understand Israel’s survival is critical to our survival,” Ireland said. “Too often Israel is portrayed as aggressive when she acts only to protect her people and the cause of freedom in the world.”

Since gracing the pages, including three covers, of Sports Illustrated for 13 years in a row in the 1980s and 1990s, Ireland has established herself in the business world as CEO and chief designer of Kathy Ireland Worldwide, a design and marketing firm that earns over $1.4 billion sales annually. She attributes her success as well as her unwavering support for Israel to her deep Christian faith.

Friends of Sheba selected Ireland for “her amazing appeal, her credibility, her vision, her complete passion for Israel as a pro-Israel Christian and her willingness to take the public heat when talking about the virtues of Israel publicly,” executive director Jack Saltzberg told The Journal.

Author and mother of three, Ireland’s latest book, “Real Solutions for Busy Moms” (Howard Books) rested on the place settings of the 350 women in attendance at the luncheon, which also bestowed the Woman of Achievement Award to Dr. Lidia Gabis, director of Sheba’s Weinberg Child Development Center and an internationally recognized leader in the area of autism and developmental disabilities. Marjorie Pressman, a founding member of the Friends of Sheba in Los Angeles, was honored with a Lifetime of Achievement Award.

In her speech, Ireland recalled historic instances of Christian anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews and expressed her commitment to ensuring Christian communities stand by Israel in troubled times. “Our only hope is our faith and the knowledge that today we can do more,” she said.

Ireland will visit Israel in January in the capacity of her new role. It will be her second trip to the country.

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Cedars-Sinai Under Fire for Radiation Overdoses

Leave a Comment / Community /

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a widely respected Jewish institution, is facing lawsuits, investigations and embarrassment after heavy overdoses of radiation administered to 206 patients went undetected for 18 months.

The mostly elderly patients received eight times the normal dose of radiation during CT brain perfusion scans, used to diagnose strokes.

Hospital spokesmen have acknowledged that in February 2008 staff members reset a CT scanner, overriding the manufacturer’s instructions, to raise the radiation doses and enable improved analysis of the blood flow to brain tissues.

It was not until August of this year, when an overdosed patient called in to report that he was losing tufts of hair following the scan, that the hospital became aware of the mistake. After contacting the rest of the 206 patients, Cedars-Sinai learned that 40 percent of the group also suffered hair losses.

Overdosed patients face increased risk of brain tumors, which develop very slowly. National experts interviewed by the Los Angeles Times generally agreed that because the median age of the affected patients is 70, they are likely to die first of other causes.

Attorneys for the affected patients have filed class action and individual suits against Cedars-Sinai.

Thomas M. Priselac, president and CEO of the medical center, which is frequently in the news for its Hollywood celebrity clientele, apologized to the affected patients and said remedial steps had been taken to prevent a future incident.

The incident is another black eye for the highly rated hospital. In an earlier foul-up in November 2007, the newborn twins of actor Dennis Quaid were given 1,000 times the intended dose of blood thinner.

The California Department of Public Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are joining in an investigation of the incident.

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Assemblymen Announce Iran Divestment Legislation

Leave a Comment / Community /

California Assemblymen Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles) and Bob Blumenfield (D-San Fernando Valley) have announced plans to introduce legislation in January that would prohibit California public entities from doing business with corporations that have contracts with Iran’s energy sector.

Leaders and supporters from various Jewish organizations, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the American Jewish Committee and Stephen S. Wise Temple, joined the assemblymen during an Oct. 20 press conference at Beverly Hills City Hall to show support for the latest Iran divestment effort, which hopes to curb the country’s nuclear ambitions.

“Given the size of California’s economy, we have an essential role to play in this international effort to deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions,” Feuer said.

“Companies that support Iran’s ambitions have a choice,” he said. “They either continue in that support or they will risk the loss of the support of California’s taxpayers.”

Feuer and Blumenfield said they hope that other states will draft similar legislation.

“I challenge every other state in this country to follow our lead,” Blumenfield said.

The press conference follows passage of the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act in the House, which, like Feuer and Blumenfield’s legislation, would allow state and local governments to divest from companies doing business in Iran’s energy sector. Similar legislation has also been introduced in the Senate.

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Women Rabbis Shed Light on Unique Roles

Leave a Comment / Community /

To watch a video of the Women Rabbis panel, click here.

Nearly 40 years since the Reform movement ordained the first female rabbi in America, women rabbis have become an integral force in American Jewish movements outside Orthodoxy, and their experience, thought to be distinct from that of men, has become a topic of curiosity.

The challenges women rabbis have faced, from their matriculation at male-dominated seminaries to the forbidding cultural stigmas held by their families and communities, were addressed during “Women Rabbis: Trailblazers and Innovators,” a cross-denominational panel sponsored by The Jewish Journal and Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary on Oct. 21, which drew about 600 people to the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Moderated by Journal managing editor Susan Freudenheim, the event featured two generations of L.A. rabbis, including Sharon Brous (IKAR), Denise L. Eger (Congregation Kol Ami), Laura Geller (Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills), Zoë Klein (Temple Isaiah), Naomi Levy (Nashuva), Michelle Missaghieh (Temple Israel of Hollywood) and Debra Orenstein (Makom Ohr Shalom).

The rabbis’ roles as mothers was the evening’s most loaded topic, and one or two expressed discomfort at having to address the issue.

In her opening remarks, Geller, the third woman to be ordained in the Reform movement, read from a 1980 study compiled by the Women’s Rabbinic Network, an organization of Reform women rabbis, which spelled out community fears about hiring women rabbis at the time.

“If women can read from the Torah, preach, and teach, the rabbis’ duties become accessible to everyone,” Geller read. “This possibly leads to the breakdown of the hierarchy of the rabbi-congregant relationship.” It also said, “Women in the rabbinate will not be able to balance a career and personal life because their first priority will be to family,” or, Geller continued, “their work will lead to dissension within their families.”

Perhaps the most unfair stereotype a woman rabbi contends with is the idea that she must be a bad mother to excel in her work. Despite this and other obstacles, Geller said, “Judaism has changed because women’s voices are now fully part of the Jewish conversation.”

Some of the rabbis bristled at the idea of framing the conversation around gender.

“I’ve been a rabbi for 20 years, and I don’t even know what to think anymore about being a woman rabbi — I’m a rabbi!” said Levy, who was in the first class of women to be ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Levy, who grew up in a Chasidic neighborhood in New York’s Borough Park, studied at the Orthodox Yeshiva of Flatbush. “I had to hide who I was and what I wanted because it was so unacceptable to be a rabbi in the community I was living in,” she said.

Levy suggested that women rabbis had more freedom to take risks and experiment with new approaches to Judaism since they did not have clear role models.

The year Brous reached rabbinical school, the Jewish Theological Seminary was ordaining its 120th woman rabbi, and she felt that being female in seminary was a “non-issue.” However, she admitted there was fierce competition among women to get ahead.

“There was a sense that while women could be accepted in the rabbinate, there was only really room for some of us — or maybe one of us,” Brous said.

Once she became a rabbi, Brous said it took years before the congregation’s focus shifted from her appearance to her teachings. “The next frontier is to be seen as rabbis and teachers, not women rabbis,” she said.

Orenstein, however, said congregants sometimes feel more comfortable sharing their struggles with a woman — someone they perceive as having overcome a tremendous set of obstacles. During the first five years of her rabbinate, she said she was approached “at least 100 times” about sexual abuse, while her father could recall only two such occasions during his rabbinate.

Orenstein became the first female rabbi in an Orthodox family line that goes back seven generations. Even as she was excluded from her father’s Torah study sessions, she knew her calling by age 8. “I looked around and saw that it was the family business,” said Orenstein, whose rabbinate has included a focus on women’s issues, incorporating new rituals for childbirth, miscarriage and abortion.

For Eger, who attended Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in the 1980s, her gender was the lesser of two evils, she explained, because at the time, openly gay and lesbian rabbis were often pressured during interviews to be “open” about their private lives. Eger said she asked herself, “What does it mean to be a rabbi and have to lie?”

Eger, president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, found a mixed blessing with her first pulpit at Beth Chayim Chadashim, a community of gay and lesbian Jews. There, she didn’t have to hide the fact that she was lesbian, but rabbinic colleagues warned her that taking a gay pulpit would end her career.

Missaghieh said she had the blessing of seeing a woman on the pulpit at her childhood synagogue. But she faced opposition from her own mother, who prodded her to consider law school upon learning of her daughter’s plan to become a rabbi. “I just thought it was normal that there were women rabbis,” Missaghieh said.

Zoë Klein addressed the challenge of being married to another rabbi. Her husband, Rabbi Jonathan Klein, is executive director of CLUE Los Angeles, an interfaith organization that addresses social justice issues. Klein said she once harbored fantasies of a big Jewish family who studied and sang together, but the reality is “a very messy home.”

“It’s not a unique struggle,” Klein said of balancing work and family life. “The difference is that we have the privilege of accolade, the advantage of education, of studying Torah; we have the privilege of leading a community.”

During the Q-and-A session, the women were asked about the continued rejection of their profession by Orthodox Judaism.

Eger pointed out that Los Angeles is a more inclusive community than most.

“Even though we may not daven together, there is still in our community a sense of mutuality and a sense of kavod [honor], that if your denomination recognizes you as a rabbi, you have a seat at the table,” she said.

A fifth-year female rabbinical student asked if the women ever felt isolated or lonely.

“I think the presence of women in the rabbinate has brought God down to earth in a beautiful way,” Levy said. “I never feel lonely; I feel very full. There is very little difference between who I am as a rabbi and who I am.”

“I love what Naomi said, but it’s not my experience,” Missaghieh added. “My Yom Kippur sermon was all about loneliness.” Missaghieh said it’s difficult for her congregants to see her as anything other than a rabbi, so when she wants to “let her hair down,” she said she calls Brous or Klein.

Klein said that in her congregation, “there is lots of love, but very little friendship.”

But Geller said she doesn’t feel the same kind of loneliness in her role as a rabbi.

“I was taught you can never be friends with people in your congregation,” Geller said. But, she added, “I think you can.”

To watch a video of the Women Rabbis panel, click here.

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Google’s Brin Gives $1 million to HIAS

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin, 36, has given a $1 million gift to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), one of the groups that helped Brin’s family when it fled the Soviet Union 30 years ago.

Brin, who is Jewish — as is Google co-founder Larry Page — apparently is ramping up his philanthropy. According to The New York Times, he has given several gifts to Jewish organizations that helped his family.

“I would have never had the kinds of opportunities I’ve had here in the Soviet Union, or even in Russia today,” Brin told The Times in an interview. “I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that’s what this organization does.”

The HIAS gift was announced Oct. 25, on the 30th anniversary of his family’s arrival in the United States.

The oldest refugee agency in the United States, HIAS has helped generations of families escape violence and repression in their homelands and resettle in the United States, Israel and elsewhere. Since its founding in 1881, HIAS has assisted more than 4.5 million refugees and migrants, including the vast majority of American Jewish families.

“As a refugee himself, Sergey Brin knows better than most the value of living freely in a country that allows people to dream and — through vision, creativity and hard work — fulfill those dreams,” HIAS Chairman Michael Rukin said in a news release. “He and his family were able to build a new life in the United States and, as a result, he was able to create a new industry by changing the way we process and use information. His contributions literally have changed the world.”

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