fbpx

GET HOME DELIVERY! CLICK HERE »

ADVERTISE
pick up locations
HOME DELIVERY
donate

Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

November 12, 2009

Obama and Health Care: From the House to the Senate

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Raphael Sonenshein /

Almost exactly one year after the historic election that brought Barack Obama to the White House, the House of Representatives passed a health care bill that is itself historic. No president has ever moved the ball this far forward on health care. For a moment, the dramatic vote recalled the enthusiasm and esprit that characterized the Obama presidential campaign. We well remember the long lines of people young and old, rich and poor, of all races and ethnicities, preparing to cast the vote of their lives.

After a generation of cringing in the shadow of dominant Republicans, Democrats now find themselves with their own moment as America evolves into a multiethnic political community with a possible resurgence of support for government intervention. The Democrats have become a majority governing party built on a new popular base that is younger and more diverse than ever before, even as the Republicans are girding for irrelevance as a party of older angry white men, based mostly in the South and relentlessly hostile to all government intervention. Even Republican candidates are falling behind in the wake of the troika of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who drove the chosen Republican candidate out of a New York congressional race and saw the Democrats pick up a seat they had not won since the Civil War.

The Democrats’ problem, though, is not the Republicans. It is the Democrats. As a governing party, the Democrats are struggling to achieve ambitious legislative goals while maintaining enthusiasm in their mass base. The recent elections in New Jersey and Virginia revealed the consequences of not paying attention to the base, as Democrats saw a big voter decline among Democratic voters.

To keep people working hard and excited, a national party has to offer a choice between one side and the other. It has to be willing to make enemies, or at least opponents. It has to offer drama and characters.

Until the great moment in the House Chamber on Nov. 7, the Democratic side has been fairly subdued on the health care debate, while the Republicans have used the teabaggers to ratchet up their base. And characters? Democrats have them in abundance: Henry Waxman, Chuck Schumer, Jay Rockefeller and many others who have been holding the line on health care. Before and after his death, Edward Kennedy was the central dramatic figure in health care. But the public sees more of the protesters than of the Democratic leaders in Congress.

The White House decided in the summer to devote the lion’s share of its attention to an uninspiring senator from Montana, Max Baucus, who promised to craft a centrist, bipartisan bill. But instead of helping his party, Baucus happily stretched out his time in the spotlight for months, forcing long delays in the legislation. From the view of the average Democratic voter, health care consisted of President Obama, on the one hand, Baucus leading a pointless set of wandering talks on the other and, occasionally, Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine offering the mystique of bipartisanship. There was not much mention of the bill created by Kennedy’s committee, or the work of Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), or the many other Democrats who could have generated public interest. If that was the face of the health care team, who cared?

By elevating the importance of the centrist holdouts over the liberal loyalists who built the main set of bills, Obama made the classic teacher’s error of rewarding the bad kids with attention while taking the good kids for granted. So, naturally, the bad kids wanted more, and the good kids got annoyed. As soon as Olympia Snowe’s week of fame was over, Lieberman (I-Conn.) showed up to announce his deeply principled opposition to a health care bill — the principles of which he had previously supported.

So it was striking that when Obama went to the House to rally the troops in a closed-door session on Saturday, Nov. 7, he gave advice that perhaps he had begun to take himself. The Republicans will come after you whether you vote for the bill or not. There is no safety in opposing it. So you might as well do what is right. He spoke of the dramatic, historic moment. And when they passed the bill, he adopted it as his own. It is a classic presidential technique to use the more responsive House against the more hidebound Senate, and Obama, who has emphasized the Senate over the House for months, seems now to have gotten that.

As the bill moves to the Senate, the danger of another slowdown is high. In the Senate, obstacles to change are immense and written into the Constitution itself. James Madison and his fellow Federalists feared a fever of popular excitement for radical plans, and the Senate was meant to be a bulwark against the excess energy of the people. Senators like to think of themselves as solons of the Roman Empire. They will treat the House bill with disdain. They will announce that they will take all the time they need. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will wring his hands. Reid shocked the world by putting a public option in the draft Senate bill, but he will have to fight to keep it there. 

But, really, these are politicians, and they care most about two things: What you can do for them, and what you can do to them. No one wants to be on the wrong side of history. Reid may now see that his own re-election in Nevada, which is in serious peril, can only be salvaged by mobilizing the Democratic base. And even the self-centered Senate moderates may understand that it is time to get this done and to do it well.

And for those who don’t cooperate, the leadership can threaten “reconciliation” (passing the bill without facing a filibuster), and the caucus can reexamine committee chair positions. Even in the Senate club, actions should have consequences.

Obama will have to recast his earlier strategy of massaging the egos of those least likely to help. He needs to highlight and showcase those who have advanced the cause from the start, like Rockefeller, and he should go back to the spirit of Ted Kennedy and, while he is at it, Harry Truman. Kennedy and Truman pretty much outrank naysayers Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Lieberman, but if the Senate moderates stretch things out for very long, if this debate goes much longer, it will really hurt Obama and the Democrats in 2010.

Because it’s time to get off health care and onto the economy.

The moderate Blue Dogs are wrong about the politics of health care. Opposing the president on health care will only lose them Democratic votes, without winning enough independents to balance out the losses. But they are right about one thing, and that is that Obama can now best help the party by focusing on the economy. There’s no time to lose; the economy has to be issue No. 1, and that’s why Baucus’ waiting game, which he drew out with Reid’s permission, was so damaging. Time’s up. The Democrats need to harvest the stimulus and health care victories. With the unemployment rate above 10 percent, the jobs issue is likely to dominate the coming year. Even if Obama can make progress on other issues, the economy will dwarf them all.

The president can spend the next year jawboning employers to hire new workers and banks to lend money. He can use regulatory and other frameworks, cut stimulus project ribbons, visit unemployment lines and all in all make advocating for the downturn’s casualties the president’s main job. He should remind people of the mess he inherited and that those who are attacking his economic policies put us in this spot in the first place. 

Oddly, though they do not always realize it, the interests of the House and Senate Blue Dogs are, in fact, the same as Obama’s: a quick completion of health care and a turn onto the economy.

History is watching. That is the talk that Obama will have to give the Senate Democratic caucus. It is also a talk he has to give once again to himself.

Are the Democrats a majority governing party? Are they ready or not? Or just a bunch of freelancers? It’s time to decide.

Raphael J. Sonenshein is chair of the Division of Politics, Administration and Justice at Cal State Fullerton.

Obama and Health Care: From the House to the Senate Read More »

Prose Rescues Anne Frank From Sainthood

Leave a Comment / Anne Frank, Books, Entertainment, Judaism /

Anne Frank is a unique figure in the iconography of Judaism. Of the 6 million victims of the Holocaust, her face is the only one we all know intimately and even subliminally. It has been said, and it’s perfectly true, that she has become the Jewish equivalent of a saint — cherished and revered. How else to explain the thrill and terror that I felt when a long-lost film clip showing Anne Frank recently surfaced on the Internet?

But it’s also true that Frank has been studied and debated, used and abused, exploited and expropriated, during the 50-plus years since “The Diary of a Young Girl” was first published. Novelist Cynthia Ozick, for example, complained that Frank’s writings have been “infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized [and], in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim cited the Frank family as exemplars of a fatal failing among European Jews, because they sought refuge in a hiding place with no possibility of escape or defense. And Philip Roth dared to imagine a fictional character, based on Anne Frank, who survives Bergen-Belsen and ends up the mistress of a famous writer in America, all as depicted in his novel, “The Ghost Writer.”

Now Francine Prose, author of more than two-dozen works of fiction and nonfiction (including the novels “Goldengrove,” “A Changed Man” and “Blue Angel,” and the nonfiction meditation “Reading Like a Writer”), offers her own contribution to the vast literature of Anne Frank in “Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife” (HarperCollins, $24.99). To Prose’s credit, she has something new and important to say.

Prose studies the various versions of the diary as Anne herself composed and revised it. She analyzes the textual variations in the published editions and the editorial tampering by Anne’s father, who sought to conceal references to conflicts between Anne and her mother and to the young girl’s budding sexuality. Prose traces the strange route the book traveled to Broadway and Hollywood, one that “involved lawsuits, betrayals and alliances, accusations of plagiarism and breach of contract, and obsessive paranoia concerning Zionist or Stalinist plots.” She even pauses to deconstruct the precious footage of Anne Frank leaning out of the window of her family’s Amsterdam apartment that only last month became such a phenomenon on YouTube.

“As familiar as we are with images of Anne Frank, as inured as we may think we are to the sight of her beautiful face,” she writes, “the film pierces whatever armor we imagine we have developed.”

What interests Prose is Anne Frank as an author rather than a victim, but Prose’s incidental retelling of the girl’s life experiences is deeply moving because Prose adds back in the details that are necessarily missing from the diary itself. Prose, for example, depicts the remarkable scene in which the Gestapo officer who broke into the secret annex and arrested the Jews in hiding there dumped out the contents of a briefcase so he could use it to carry off cash and jewels. The papers he scattered on the floor were the drafts of Anne’s diary.

“But how could he have imagined that what he had discarded — loose sheets of paper, exercise books — was not only a work of literary genius, not only a fortune in disguise, not only a record of the times in which he and its author lived,” Prose writes, “but a piece of evidence that would lead to the exposure of his role in the Nazis’ war against the Jews, even as so many like him slipped back into their old lives and kept up their furniture payments?”

Prose’s book is a superb work of history, biography and criticism, but it is something more, too. She has produced a midrash on “The Diary of a Young Girl,” a fresh reading of an old and familiar text, full of insight and illumination. Prose rejects the common perception of Frank as “the perky teenage messenger of peace and love” and argues that “Anne’s book is a testament to certain individuals’ ability to develop, at an early age, a sophisticated moral consciousness, and to maintain compassion and humor under the most intense stress.”

Prose confronts the notion that Frank’s diary is untouchable because its author died under such tragic circumstances, the notion that, as Harold Bloom asserted, “Since this diary is emblematic of hundreds of thousands of murdered children, criticism is irrelevant.” She insists that it is not only permissible but also necessary to apply the tools of literary criticism to the celebrated text. In doing so, Prose rescues the girl from the high perch of a plaster saint and restores her to us as a gifted but mortal human being. And thus does Prose take a kind of revenge against the murderers of Anne Frank.

Jonathan Kirsch is the book editor of The Jewish Journal and the author of, most recently, “The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God.” His book blog, 12:12, appears at Prose Rescues Anne Frank From Sainthood Read More »

Five Reasons Vampires Aren’t Jews

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, Entertainment /

Their day begins at night, they show a certain aversion to the sign of the cross and they dress in black. Of course, I am talking about Jews.

But add some invidious stereotypes — bloodsucking and a predatory nature, and you get vampires. So, are vampires Jewish?

There are Jewish vampires. In his classic, “Jewish Magic and Superstition” (Forgotten Books, 2008), Joshua Trachtenberg writes that medieval Jewish literature has tales of “Estrie” — a bloodsucking demon who can assume different forms. But Trachtenberg points out that the Estrie and similar fiends are of non-Jewish origin, imported into certain strands of Jewish folklore to express deep-seated fears of dangers lurking in the world.

Despite such glancing references, there is something essentially un-Jewish about vampires. Although no definitive conclusions can be reached, I have identified five reasons why vampires are not, indeed cannot be, Jewish.

1. Proselytizing: There are many and varied legends about how vampires are created, but the most common is that they’re made by each other — by fellow vampires. Countless movies recount the hero’s fear not that he will die, but that he will be reborn as one of these creatures of the night. For reasons not entirely clear (loneliness? herd instinct?) vampires seem intent on enlisting others. In other words, vampires proselytize, though I wouldn’t call them missionaries; they opt for a more direct approach: fangs over persuasion.

Jews, on the other hand, have for most of their history been content to accept those who convert, but not seek them. Historically, being Jewish was a considerable burden. Jews felt that someone had to push hard in order to ensure he or she would really accept the travails of Jewish life. When men, in particular, converted to Judaism, it often did involve a small amount of blood, but not from the neck.

2. Blood: Vampires live on blood. They relish it. But in the vampire lexicon, not all blood is equal. In the bestselling “Twilight” series of books and movies, there are vampires who call themselves “vegetarians” — not because they sink their incisors into soy and seitan, but because they abstain from human blood. Animal blood is still essential. 

Despite the mad and murderous blood libel, Jews abhor eating blood. The Bible is explicit in its prohibition against eating blood, and generations of salted meat are our culinary legacy. Jews overcook and oversalt. It is what we do. My mother, God bless her, thought meat underdone if it could not double as a club for batting practice. Moistness was the enemy. 

3. Nightlife: Vampires are on uneasy terms with the day. They can only live at night and in darkness. Shadows and secrecy are the vampires’ friend. Nocturnal creatures are denizens of another world, never fully glimpsed or understood. 

Jews love light. “Let there be light” is God’s initial declaration in the creation of the world. We light candles on Shabbat, for Havdalah, on Chanukah; we follow Hillel who taught us, on Chanukah, to increase the light each night, rather than Shammai, who counseled to begin with eight candles and diminish to one. One of the blessings preceding the Shema is Yotzer Hameorot, God who makes the shining orbs. God even creates a light for the Earth before creating the sun. Jews rise for the Shacharit prayer, greeting the shining new day. A Jewish vampire would never be awake to make the minyan.

4. Immortality: Vampires don’t die. Or at least, not before the end of the movie. Then someone drives a stake into the heart, and they expire amid swelling music. But the fundamental premise is clear; the vampire is designed to be immortal and only the most drastic Van Helsing-ish intervention can contravene the design.

Judaism believes in death. Yes, it believes in immortal life, but death comes first. The entirety of Jewish ritual is crafted to emphasize that all creatures — all of them — ultimately, unequivocally die. We shovel earth on the grave to remind ourselves of the finality of death. The very first human story in the Bible, that of Adam and Eve, talks about their expulsion from the garden — so that they cannot eat from the tree of life and be immortal. Jews cannot be vampires because Jews have to die. It is part of the scheme. Even if at the end of time we are all resurrected (Daniel 12), well, there are no resurrections without deaths.

And while we are at it, vampires misuse coffins. Jews are traditionally buried in plain pine boxes because the boxes, along with those in them, return to the earth from which they came. A coffin is not a pied-à-terre or a Posturepedic. 

5. Imaginary Creatures: Finally, vampires, I hasten to remind you, are not real. They have a long and startling history springing from the depths of the human imagination, drawing from our fears and from real-world creatures (bats, mostly), but they live in books and movies and powerful projections of our minds. But what they share with the abominable snowman, the Loch Ness monster and political bipartisanship is an essential unreality.

Jews not only are real, they know real monsters. There are things in Jewish history, as Abba Eban wrote, too terrible to be imagined, but nothing so terrible that it didn’t happen. We have known the kind of monsters that turn day into night and have a thirst for blood that puts Nosferatu to shame. They are not deterred by a cross; some have marched beneath it. These days, the world’s demons have a different but equally terrifying aspect. Once you have encountered true monsters, the imaginary ones seem not quite so vivid or frightening.

Vampires are not Jews. Maybe we can allow one powerful, popular trend to be about someone else for a change?

David Wolpe is senior rabbi of Sinai Temple.

Five Reasons Vampires Aren’t Jews Read More »

Jewish Screenwriter Pens ‘Kosher’ Vampires for ‘Twilight’

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, Entertainment, Film /

Melissa Rosenberg, the screenwriter of “The Twilight Saga,” is 6 feet tall with straight blonde hair, a pale complexion and a long, slim nose. Not exactly the most ethnic mien imaginable.

“I don’t look particularly Jewish,” she says sheepishly, half wondering why she’s on a lunch date with The Jewish Journal. “But I have a very Jewish name.”

Her name — Rosenberg — has been strangely, if not surprisingly, advantageous to her career. Back in the 1990s, when she was first looking for an agent, one interested agency made an incorrect assumption about her that proved fortunate. “They said, ‘We just made a deal for your mother’ and I was thinking, ‘You guys are good. [My mother] has been dead 10 years.’ Then I realized they thought I was Joan Rivers’ daughter, who at the time was Melissa Rosenberg.”

In the 18 years since, Rosenberg has made a name for herself as a television and film writer. But her career really took off in 2007 when she was anointed movie scribe of the “Twilight” franchise, based on the best-selling series of young adult novels by Stephenie Meyer. The story, about a high school girl who falls in love with a vampire, became a tween/teen phenomenon. Rosenberg penned the first script, “Twilight,” which grossed $380 million worldwide, and has since gone on to write the sequels “New Moon,” which hits theaters Nov. 20, and “Eclipse,” which wrapped production in Vancouver in late October and is set for release in June. Rosenberg is also the writer/executive producer of the Showtime series “Dexter,” about a sociopathic serial killer who justifies his life of crime by knocking off the bad guys.

Bloodlust, vampirism and ambiguous morality could be seen as decidedly un-Jewish. After all, vampire mythology, as Rabbi David Wolpe notes (see accompanying article), is philosophically at odds with Jewish values. And if you ask Rosenberg, “The Twilight Saga” in particular is a departure from religion-based vampire lore and instead is an exercise in secular storytelling.

“Vampires aren’t very Jewish,” Rosenberg says. “The most basic thing about them is that they are born out of Christian mythology.” Nevertheless, she is quick to point out that Meyer, a devout Mormon, has created her own vampire mythology, devoid of religious connotation, absent the Christian symbolism of crosses and holy water.

And yet, the protagonist vampires of “Twilight” are different in another way from other vampires.

“They’re kosher vampires,” Rosenberg says, laughing.

Melissa Rosenberg

To call them “kosher” may be a stretch, but the leading figure, Edward Cullen, and his family are all “vegetarians” — which in this context means they don’t drink human blood, though they do eat animals — and therefore they are not killers, but hunters. Their anomalous way of life, in which diet is not simply a carnal drive but a moral choice, makes them outsiders, not only from the world of mortals but also from the larger vampire culture, who see the Cullens as a threat to the vampire establishment. The story’s human protagonist, Bella, idolizes the Cullens, and, you could say, sees them as a light unto the vampire nation.

Rosenberg insists this isn’t a religious film (“The minute you start espousing any religious framework, you start turning audiences off”), yet she does identify with one aspect of vampirism: “There is that sense of wanting to be a part of something but being unable to be, that sense of being the other, the outsider,” she says.

Rosenberg grew up in a secular community in Marin County, just outside San Francisco. “We led the whole human potential movement,” she says. Her father, Jack Lee Rosenberg, is a prominent psychotherapist; her mother, Patricia, who was raised Irish Catholic, died when the future screenwriter was a teenager. The loss was profound, though Rosenberg quips that it made her “highly neurotic” and fixed her with a “tremendous fear of abandonment.” Rosenberg left home for the East Coast when she was 17 and worked at a theater and dance company before she attended Bennington College in Vermont. It was there that Rosenberg says she felt “Jewish” for the first time.

“There was a much stronger community there,” Rosenberg remembers. “They really embraced me. In my world, that had never happened, so I felt the warmth and safety of it. I think I, more than anyone else in my family, really have more of a Jewish identity because of that. And also — this will sound silly — but the head of the theater and dance company was married to a Jewish man, and I idolized him. I said, ‘I want a man like him’ — and I ended up with one.”

Rosenberg says she retired her dream to become a dance choreographer when she realized “I was too tall and started too late.” She moved to Los Angeles in 1986 and began writing, but decided to enhance her resume by going to graduate school. “Writers don’t have a lot of clout in this town,” she says about why she chose to learn producing. “Writers are typically a very introverted group; we spend our days alone in a room typing. It’s not in our nature to put ourselves out in front of a movie and demand recognition.” In 1990, she graduated from USC’s prestigious Peter Stark Producing Program, hoping that a producing credit might help her control the direction of her work. A year later, she got an agent.

Paramount soon hired her to write a dance movie that was never produced, though the experience gave her the needed cachet to land her first television gig. For the next 15 years, Rosenberg worked continuously as a writer/producer on a variety of shows, including, “Party of Five,” “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” “Ally McBeal” and “The O.C.,” which she also co-executive produced. In 2006, Rosenberg’s first feature screenplay — another dance film, called “Step Up” — made it to the big screen.

On the set of “The O.C.” Rosenberg met her husband, television director Lev Spiro, who Rosenberg claims is descended from 16 generations of rabbis. The couple studied with Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels of Beth Shir Sholom before he married them.

Throughout her career, Rosenberg has demonstrated an activist streak, taking up causes to benefit writers and women. She sat on the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America, West for five years and served as a strike captain during the industry-crippling writer’s strike of 2007.

On the gender divide in Hollywood, Rosenberg is adamantly outspoken.

“I don’t like being powerless,” she says. “I do not accept powerlessness.”

When she began working in television, show runners employed few women — typically one per show — to capture the requisite “female voice.” The lack of opportunities created severe competition among women writers. And for feature films, women were hired for “chick flicks” and not much else. On the rare occasion when a woman was hired, she first had to combat stereotypes to prove her talent.

“Apparently women are not funny,” Rosenberg says facetiously of the prevailing belief in the industry. “And we don’t know how to write action, and we don’t know how to write men. Whereas men can write everybody.”

But women’s status in Hollywood is finally changing, she says: more and more women are writing in a variety of genres, and now there is group advocacy. Rosenberg is a member of the League of Hollywood Women Writers, a collection of female show runners — “a good portion of which are the breadwinners in their families,” Rosenberg notes. 

“Every battle is ongoing,” she adds. “Women are in a better situation than they were 50 years ago, and yet, we’re still making 78 cents on the dollar.”

Rosenberg’s credo is “a writer is a writer,” and she believes gender should have little impact on content. So could a man have written “Twilight?”

“A man would have written a different ‘Twilight,’” she says. “It may have been as good, or perhaps better, but I mean — in the same way that you know I could have possibly written ‘Transformers.’”

If Rosenberg once considered herself a “solidly middle-class working writer,” “The Twilight Saga” has catapulted her into the Hollywood big leagues. Instead of waiting for projects or writing spec scripts, she is now part of a club of writers who get offered prized material.

“I’m the longest overnight success in the history of writing,” she says.

But Rosenberg’s favorite perk comes on the red carpet: “My stylist is able to get some dresses loaned by some wonderful designers,” she says. “When I first hired her for the last premiere, she said, ‘So-and-so designer will loan us a dress.’ And I said, ‘They do understand I’m just the writer, right?’”

Jewish Screenwriter Pens ‘Kosher’ Vampires for ‘Twilight’ Read More »

Clinton, Bush L.A. Appearance on Hold

Leave a Comment / Community /

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have canceled their joint public lecture in Los Angeles, but the sponsoring American Jewish University (AJU) believes that the cancellation rests on a misunderstanding and is working to reverse the presidential decisions.

The joint lecture was scheduled for Feb. 22 at the Gibson Amphitheatre at Universal City, and tickets went on sale Nov. 5.

According to Clinton spokesman Matt McKenna, the two former presidents were offended by the way promoters handled publicity for another joint appearance, on Feb. 25 at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.

However, the arrangements and advance publicity for the Los Angeles event were handled independently of the New York organizers, AJU President Robert Wexler told The Journal.

McKenna said Clinton was upset because the New York promoters advertised their forum as “the hottest ticket in political history,” implying a clash between the 42nd and 43rd chief executives, rather than a moderated panel discussion.

“It’s unfortunate that an overeager promoter ruined the opportunity to hear a serious discussion on the issues between two former presidents, who have a great deal of respect for each other,” McKenna told the Times.

By contrast, the full-page ads for the Los Angeles event, placed in The Journal by AJU’s Whizin Center for Continuing Education, were low-key, reprinting the presidential inaugural oath and using such headlines as “One Unprecedented Night” and “The Wait Is Over.”

Wexler said that he and Gady Levy, AJU vice president for continuing education, were notified of the cancellation on Nov. 6.

“We arranged for the appearance of the two presidents independently through their respective speakers bureaus and made it clear we would conduct the moderated discussion on the highest level,” Wexler said.

“President Clinton has talked to us on two previous occasions, which were very successful,” he added. “We are hopeful that the decision will be reversed.”

Tickets for the Los Angeles forum were advertised as ranging from $75 to $125. Fees for the two speakers were not disclosed, but each received a reported $150,000 when they spoke recently in Toronto, according to the Times.

Clinton, Bush L.A. Appearance on Hold Read More »

New Hebrew School for Kids With Special Needs

Leave a Comment / Community /

The Friendship Circle of Los Angeles, a program that pairs teen volunteers with kids with special needs, now includes an after-school supplementary Jewish education program. The Friendship Circle Hebrew School opened Nov. 9 with separate boys and girls classes for kids with moderate to severe conditions such as autism, Asperger’s, Down syndrome and pervasive developmental delays.

“Most families who have kids with special needs can’t send the kids to Jewish day schools, and as a result there is a major void in their Jewish education,” said Rabbi Michy Rav-Noy, who founded and runs the L.A. Friendship Circle. “It’s very hard for parents to see their kids coming home singing ‘Jingle Bells,’ and not knowing Jewish songs or having Jewish art projects to bring home.”

Classes meet once week, taught by Rav-Noy and by a director who also runs the school and develops curriculum. Teen volunteers will be paired one-on-one with the students, shadowing them and offering direct assistance. The Friendship Circle is an Orthodox organization, but welcomes volunteers and students from all Jewish backgrounds.

Conservative synagogues Valley Beth Shalom in Encino and Temple Beth Am on the Westside also run after-school programs for students who have special needs.

Rav-Noy hopes to expand the school to kids with less severe disabilities and eventually to have a full-scale Hebrew school program for kids of all ages. He is working with Vista Del Mar, which runs programs for children with special needs, to develop further curricula and potentially to collaborate on creating more programs.

In addition to the Hebrew school, Friendship Circle of Los Angeles facilitates weekly visits between teen volunteers and kids with special needs, runs kung fu and karate programs, has Sunday and special holiday programs, and winter and summer camps.

Rav-Noy said he hopes to one day be able to open a Jewish day school that can serve children who have special needs.

New Hebrew School for Kids With Special Needs Read More »

Con Man Suspected in Multiple Thefts

Leave a Comment / Community /

Los Angeles police are still trying to find a smooth-talking crook who stole $26,000 in cash, jewelry and watches from the Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv basketball team.

According to police and local media reports, the suspect slipped into the locker room of Staples Center, where the Maccabi were playing the L.A. Clippers on Oct. 20, and stole the money and valuables from the lockers of the 11 Israeli players.

The same man was seen earlier in the day at the Staples Center and was ejected for not having proper credentials, witnesses told police.

“Apparently the man returned, dressed in a suit, holding a clipboard and with some kind of credential sticking out of his pocket. A ball boy saw the man in the Israeli team’s locker room after the players went on the court, but the ball boy assumed the man worked at Staples,” Police Lt. Paul Vernon said.

Maccabi players discovered the theft during halftime and then went on to lose to the Clippers 108-96.

Based on surveillance videos, the same con artist earlier stole a laptop computer from the office of a Los Angeles police detective.

He had also struck earlier, on Sept. 22, when, dressed in a jersey with the colors of the visiting Chivas soccer team from Mexico, he hugged the players as they left their hotel on a team bus for a game.

Then the man walked back into the hotel, convinced the desk clerk to give him the keys to the players’ rooms and made off with $10,000.

One month earlier, on Aug. 29, it was the turn of a visiting salsa band staying at a downtown hotel. The mystery man told the hotel’s receptionist that he was a member of the band and needed the pass cards to the musicians’ rooms.

The receptionist turned over the cards, the man gave the clerk a music CD as a tip and then took $9,000 from the band’s rooms.

Police Lt. Vernon summarized the lesson for future tourists. “These out-of-town visitors are often unfamiliar with their surroundings and are often carrying lots of cash,” Vernon said.

Con Man Suspected in Multiple Thefts Read More »

Phish, Shabbat Mingle in Coachella

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Music /

For three days over Halloween weekend, between 30,000 to 40,000 fans of the eclectic, free-form rock band Phish gathered on the Empire Polo Fields in Indio, site of the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, for Phish Festival 8. RVs and thousands of small camping tents staked out territory throughout eight campgrounds. And in one of those tents, on Friday night, Rabbi Yonah Bookstein led 35 people in a Kabbalat Shabbat service. This was the Shabbat Tent.

Starting at around 5 p.m., timed so people wouldn’t miss the first Phish set, a group of Jews and non-Jews crossed the campground dancing and singing “Lecha Dodi,” then, beneath a huge Israeli flag, they recited Kiddush, said the Motzi and ate a vegetarian Shabbat meal.

“We were basically making a big scene, and everybody pretty much enjoys it,” said Bookstein, who serves as director of JconnectLA, the tent’s sponsor at the festival. “You can be Jewish in so many ways and in so many environments. You don’t have to check your Magen David at the festival gate.”

The Shabbat Tent concept was created in 1999 by Shmuel Skaist, a musician and rabbi known to Phish fans as Rav Shmuel or the “Phish Rabbi,” and Adam Weinberg, a concert promoter. The two originally met in Israel and became friends. Skaist told Weinberg about his idea to host Shabbat at all Phish concerts and other music festivals, and before long they were doing exactly that, traveling around the United States. But the pair were operating on a small scale and with no funding.

The turning point for the project came in 2007, when Chasidic reggae star Matisyahu invited Skaist and Weinberg to pitch a Shabbat Tent at a festival he was headlining. The pair worked with the camping directors and festival promoters, and the Shabbat Tent, which took up a large space in one of the campgrounds, fed hundreds of people over the course of the weekend. The event was a significant success for Skaist and Weinberg.

“We had such a tremendous response,” Weinberg said. “The more we can get into the festival framework, the more kids we can cater to.”

At the recent Phish Festival, the Shabbat Tent didn’t get official placement, but it had its place. Phish has Jewish blood — the band’s bassist, Mike Gordon, is Jewish, and “Avinu Malkenu” occasionally pops up on Phish set-lists.

On Saturday morning, as the desert sun warmed the palm trees and a group of festival-goers sat on a warped trampoline drinking beers, the Shabbat Tent team walked around the campsite trying to pull together enough people for a minyan. Among the men they found was one fan dressed in flip-flops, shorts and big sunglasses and sporting a big rubber boa constrictor around his neck. Asked if he wanted an aliyah, he initially declined, saying he had forgotten all the Hebrew he once knew. But he relented as organizers urged him to try; he took the Siddur and read perfectly.

The week’s portion was Lech-Lecha, the story of Abraham and Sarah’s journey to a land unknown.

Lunch was served after prayers, with more than 75 people attending. For the rest of Shabbat the tent became a relaxing hangout, a place where fans could take a break from the chaos.

“The Shabbat Tent brings people together in ways that are more creative than other events,” said Aliyah Hemley, a San Fernando Valley resident who spent much of her time in the Shabbat Tent. “A lot of organized Jewish events don’t have much to do with the outdoors, so it’s nice when they are a bit more earthy.”

Valley Village’s Continental Kosher Bakery and Schwartz’s Bakery in West Los Angeles donated food to the tent, and at one point during the weekend, a woman dropped off 12 challahs, wished everybody “Good Shabbos” and disappeared, never to show up again.

Good deeds occurred all weekend long. On Friday, before Shabbat, fire marshals declared the area where the Shabbat Tent had set up to be a fire lane. They made the Shabbat Tent move, but not without help: camping officials got dozens of volunteers to help organizers set up the tent in a new area, and neighboring campers donated spare tenting.

“Even within the larger scene of the festival, you have community,” Bookstein said.

Phish, Shabbat Mingle in Coachella Read More »

L.A. Branch Safe in Reform University’s Long-Range Plan

Leave a Comment / Community /

Over the next five years, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), the four-campus academic flagship of the Reform movement, will tighten its institutional belt by slimming down its faculty and administration, selling off real estate and instituting “electronic” classes.

On the more cheerful side, HUC-JIR will keep open every one of its campuses in Los Angeles, New York, Cincinnati and Jerusalem, balance its budget, and maintain its academic excellence, pledges Rabbi David Ellenson, the institution’s president.

An outline of the five-year plan, labeled “A New Way Forward,” emerged from a Nov. 2 board of governors meeting on the Cincinnati mother campus.

In a statement, Ellenson, 62, emphasized, “This plan provides a vision of our role as the preeminent progressive seminary of the 21st century, addressing contemporary Jewish demographic, societal and educational trends and responding to the challenges and needs of a changing Jewish world.”

In a phone interview, Ellenson, who has held the presidency for eight years following 22 years teaching on the Los Angeles campus, filled in some concrete details.

Currently, HUC-JIR’s total enrollment fluctuates between 375 to 450 full-time students, roughly equally divided among the four campuses, with the New York campus educating the largest number of future rabbis.

Faculty on the three stateside campuses totals 47 tenured and tenure-track professors. Within five to six years, it is expected that the faculty ranks will be down to between 40 to 45 professors.

Ellenson hopes to consolidate the New York campus facilities with those of the congregational Union for Reform Judaism to form a shared Center for Reform Judaism in New York. Some real estate in other cities may also be put on the block.

The institution will expand and innovate e-classrooms, in which lectures by “star” scholars, such as Reuven Firestone, an authority on Islam based in Los Angeles, will be electronically transmitted to students on other campuses.

However, Ellenson pledges that “live” professors will still teach some 80 percent of all classes.

Cooperative academic programs with secular universities, such as current ones between the Los Angeles campus and USC, will be tried elsewhere. Ellenson hopes to expand the current program between the Cincinnati campus and Xavier University to also include the University of Cincinnati.

There will be consolidations on the administrative side, with perhaps one person taking over the functions now handled separately on each of the three stateside campuses. In addition, Ellenson foresees some administrative collaboration with the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary,

Last year’s $40 million budget for the 2008-09 fiscal year has already been cut to $33.5 million, including $2.5 million in deficit financing, for 2009-10. Regular annual reductions should eliminate current deficits by 2012 and yield a steady annual budget of between $31 million and $33 million by 2014.

HUC-JIR as an institution did not have money invested with convicted Ponzi scheme swindler Bernard Madoff, but many of its large donors were not as fortunate. Cutbacks by philanthropists and Reform congregations have sharply reduced the academic institution’s endowment.

One bright spot is the just-completed $12 million renovation on the Cincinnati campus of the Klau Library, which houses the largest collection of Judaic literature in the United States and the American Jewish Archives, Ellenson said.

Despite some of the harsh economic realities, Ellenson remains resolutely upbeat about the long-range future of his institution as the academic arm of the largest Jewish denomination in North America.

The “New Way Forward” plan, he says, “provides a vision for the College-Institute as the intellectual, spiritual and professional leadership development center for Reform Judaism and the Jewish people.”

On a final personal note, Ellenson, who now lives in New York, retains a nostalgic twinge for Los Angeles, where he lived for 22 years while teaching at the local HUC-JIR campus. On the other hand, he is eagerly anticipating the arrival of his first grandchild.

L.A. Branch Safe in Reform University’s Long-Range Plan Read More »

Abbas’ Threat to Resign Sparks Fears

Leave a Comment / United States, Worldwide /

Just as he hoped it would, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ threat to resign has concentrated the minds.

Both Israel’s prime minister and the U.S. president are considering new ways to kick-start the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process in a bid to keep the two-state vision alive. Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama both fear that Abbas’ departure could lead to instability, chaos and even violence in the Palestinian-populated territories.

With the process deadlocked ever since Israel went into a new election cycle more than a year ago, an element of desperate brinkmanship is in the air. Abbas threatening to resign is aimed at pressuring the United States and Israel to come back with a serious offer.

Abbas, 74, announced last week that he would not seek re-election in a ballot scheduled for January. One of the main reasons he gave was a profound sense of betrayal by the U.S. administration after Obama dialed back the pressure on Israel for a full settlement freeze.

“We had high hopes in President Obama — they had a very clear attitude on settlements — but it turned out that the American administration favored Israel,” Abbas declared.

Abbas had understood from Obama that he would force Israel to stop all settlement construction and then launch peace talks. The Palestinian leader believed the policy would push Netanyahu into a corner and possibly even topple his Likud-led government for one more likely to cut a deal with the Palestinians.

Taking his cue from Obama, Abbas made a full freeze of settlement construction a precondition for talks.

But when the Americans backed down several months later, after Netanyahu offered a slowdown but not a freeze, Abbas was left high and dry. He held to a condition he could not abandon without losing face among his people, but he could not approach the negotiating table so long as he stuck to it.

The last straw was U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s statement early last week aligning herself with the Israeli view of the settlement issue. Clinton backed Israel’s claim that the Palestinians had never before made a settlement freeze a condition for talks, and she praised Netanyahu’s agreement to restrictions on settlement building in the West Bank as “unprecedented.”

Clinton’s forthright language stunned the Palestinians. For Abbas it meant his gamble on a settlement freeze had failed. A few days later he announced his intention to step down.

While insisting that his decision was not a tactical ploy, he raised the specter of the two-state solution for which he had worked so hard slipping away.

Abbas also finds himself in a no-win situation with regard to Hamas. If he backs down on settlements, the fundamentalists will accuse him of being an Israeli-American lackey. If he resigns, they will say his resignation is proof of their thesis that negotiations with the Zionist enemy can only lead to grief.

Abbas had hoped through Egyptian mediation to reach a national reconciliation deal with Hamas. That would have been the basis for truly representative national elections in the West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza. But now Hamas says it will not contest elections in the West Bank and will prevent balloting in Gaza.

For Abbas, who had hoped to regain legitimacy as leader of all the Palestinian people through the ballot box, this is another source of deep frustration. 

A third source of frustration is Netanyahu’s refusal to recognize the progress Abbas made with the previous Israeli government under Ehud Olmert. Abbas says he was very close to an agreement with Olmert: On borders, he says, they were already reviewing detailed maps, and on the thorny question of the right of return to Israel for Palestinian refugees, Abbas says the differences were only over numbers.

Abbas would like to continue negotiations from the point Olmert left off. But by insisting on “no preconditions,” Netanyahu seems to be indicating that he wants to start from scratch.

To break the impasse, P.A. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is considering declaring independence unilaterally if the United States agrees to back a self-declared Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. But other voices in the Palestinian camp are talking about a return to armed struggle and a new intifada.

What makes the situation even more volatile is the lack of an obvious successor to Abbas if he goes through with his threat to stand down. The frontrunner is the jailed former leader of the young Fatah military cadres, Marwan Barghouti, who would likely take a more militant line toward Israel — if he were even able to compete.

Abbas’ move has forced early decision time on the main players: Obama must decide whether to work with Netanyahu to appease Abbas — by, for example, getting the Israelis to release Fatah prisoners and make a serious peace offer — to disengage altogether until both parties are ready to talk business, or to shake things up by putting a detailed American peace plan on the table.

Netanyahu must decide whether to seize the moment to launch a major peace initiative or face the consequences of a resignation by Abbas that could spark chaos on the Palestinian side. If he really wants to convince Abbas to stay, he will have to make a far-reaching offer on settlements or on substance.

Although there has been no hard evidence yet, confidants say he is ready to go much further than most people expect.

The next few weeks could be crucial.

Abbas’ Threat to Resign Sparks Fears Read More »