The United Nations is “concerned” that two national heritage sites approved by the Israeli government are in “occupied Palestinian territory,” a statement said.
The sites are not only holy to Jews but to Muslims as well, U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry said in a statement issued Monday.
At Sunday’s Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and The Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron would be added to a list of 150 national heritage sites that Israel will rehabilitate and promote as part of a $100 million renovation and restoration plan.
“These sites are in occupied Palestinian territory and are of historical and religious significance not only to Judaism but also to Islam, and to Christianity as well,” Serry’s statement said about the Hebron and Bethlehem sites.
Serry warned that “implementation of the government’s decision could harm trust between the two sides and hurt the efforts to renew talks,” Haaretz reported.
Palestinians on Monday rioted at the Cave of the Patriarchs; police quelled the rioting using tear gas and stun guns. Palestinians also called a general strike in Bethlehem and Hebron.
The Orthodox Union commended Netanyahu for his decision.
“While some continue to wage a campaign to deny and obscure the historic connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel—and have even permitted Jewish sites to be defaced—that connection is deep and ancient,” said a statement from OU President Stephen Savitsky and Executive Vice President Rabbi Steve Weil. “Nowhere is that Jewish connection more obvious than these two biblical sites. Nothing the Prime Minister proposes in this plan precludes peace negotiations or what may result from such negotiations.”
Just when you thought you were safe from Jewish content in a Marty Scorsese thriller starring Leonard DiCaprio, “Shutter Island” takes you to Dachau.
Now, unless you read the Dennis Lehane novel upon which the film is based, it may have come as a shock that the weekend’s $40.2 million hit was fueled by Holocaust imagery and narrative. Turns out, DiCaprio’s character is haunted by memories of liberating a concentration camp. And throughout the film, Scorsese drives forward his plot with vivid flashbacks of death camp carnage, where thousands of bodies lay frozen in piles.
As an American soldier during WWII, DiCaprio’s character is forced into some horrific scenes. These eventually lead to the accidental slaughter of a hundred SS officers. The unintended massacre plagues DiCaprio with guilt; but not too much: he still stands idly by while a Nazi commander botches a suicide attempt and bleeds to death, fully conscious.
The trauma of the death camp experience sends DiCaprio on a psychological spiral. Back home, he starts drinking. Then he marries a woman (Michelle Williams) who turns out to be clinically insane; they have three children together, who drown. DiCaprio sees his dead children in nightmares that take place at Dachau. His wife and children lay with the other dead bodies and call out to him.
“Why didn’t you save me?” his daughter asks.
“I couldn’t get there in time,” he answers, an easy metaphor for Americans arriving at the camps way too late to save the Jews.
As DiCaprio’s character descends into madness, the imagery continues. When he shows up at Shutter Island, he is a Federal Marshal, but soon he is wearing the garb of the inmates. At one point, DiCaprio opens the door to a vast room that looks a lot like a gas chamber. And he stands alone beneath the shower heads.
Scorsese’s parallels are obvious: The scenery and the prisoner dress seem to put DiCaprio in the position of the Jewish victim. The difference is that the Jews suffered from external forces and DiCaprio suffers from his own inner demons.
Matisyahu’s friends and family call him “Matis.” The first time I approached Matisyahu for an interview at Jewlicious, he said okay. But he was on his way to the bathroom. Can we do it in five minutes? he asked.
The lanky, Chasidic reggae star resembles a track runner. In fact, remember “Forest Gump,” when Tom Hanks is running all over the country and his hair and beard haven’t been cut for God knows how long? That’s how Matisyahu looks.
“Sure,” I said, feeling hopeful. I haven’t been in journalism that long – the Grammy-nominated reggae star would be my most famous interviewee – and I assumed that when he said he’d be back in five minutes, he would be. I waited and waited. Actually, I didn’t wait that long. There was Mexican food and I was hungry. But I did hang around longer than five minutes, and he never came back
Did he go to the bathroom? I will never know.
That night, I saw him during Kosha Dillz’s performance. He was wearing his hood over his head—he has to keep his head covered, but it seemed as though he was doing more than reminding himself that God was above, it was like he was trying to hide. He’s so tall, though, that his head was popping out of the crowd. He couldn’t hide.
“Hey,” I said, walking up to him. “Remember me? Do you think we can do an interview? It will only take a few minutes.”
Neither his head nor body budged. Just his eyes moved. He glanced all the way down at me, looking suspicious.
“Yeah,” he said. Then he averted his eyes back to the show.
I looked back too. A skinny Persian teenager had jumped onstage and was dancing happily to the beat, tossing his arms in the air.
Dillz, who was wearing a Star of David chain and is relatively new to the Jewish alternative music scene, was mid-verse, holding the mic in one hand. He threw his free arm around the teen, and they rocked out together.
“Um, do you want to wait until after the song,” I said to Matisyahu.
He nodded, less than enthused.
When the song ended, the kid hurled himself back into the crowd.
“When I was young I wanted to be onstage too,” said Dillz, to the audience. “So why not?”
I turned back to Matisyahu and asked him if he wanted to do the interview now.
“I think I’m going up,” he said.
Oh. Why hadn’t he mentioned this before? “Can we do it after?” I said.
“Yeah.”
Matisyahu walked onstage, freestyled back-and-forth with Dillz, and I didn’t see him the rest of the night.
The next morning, I walked into the JCC determined to get my interview. I asked one of the P.R. people if I could talk to Matisyahu.
“He’s in Palm Springs,” she said.
“Palm Springs? What’s he doing in Palm Springs?”
“An interview.”
An interview!? “Is he coming back?”
“Yeah, he’s scheduled to perform on the acoustic stage later this afternoon.”
The elusive Matisyahu, he did return and play the show that day. At 3:30 p.m., he walked on the candlelit stage, smiling. His long, ashen hair burst out of a baseball cap. He sat on a high stool, two acoustic guitarists flanked him and they played songs like “One Day” and “Jerusalem.” His off-the-cuff beat boxing extended most of the songs, and the guitarists did everything they could to jam well with his improvised beats.
Mid set, he asked the festival staff, who were sitting on the side of the stage, if this was supposed to be a Q-and-A, too. They basically told him “whatever.” So, Matisyahu decided to take some questions. He warned the audience, however, that if anybody asks who his influences are, they would have to leave.
When somebody wanted to know if he had smoked pot before the set, he told the person to exit the room.
“I’m just joking,” Matisyahu said.
After the 45-minute set, Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, the director of the festival, went onstage. The crowd was departing, ready, after the 3-day event, to make their way home. Bookstein thanked everybody for coming, for making Jewlicious possible.
Bookstein is known for being generous with his time, so when he stepped away from the mic, I asked him if he could help me get an interview with Matisyahu.
He led me behind the stage and through a door. It took us outside, to a parking lot, where Matisyahu was hanging with family, friends, other performers and Yuri Foreman, the welterweight champion of the world. Foreman, fresh off his November title victory, had come to the festival to lead boxing workshops.
“This guy is from the Jewish Journal,” said Bookstein, talking to Matisyahu. “Can he do an interview?”
“Yes,” said Matisyahu, turning to me, his tone unprecedentedly convincing. “Now we can do the interview.”
I followed Matisyahu to a quieter area across the parking lot. He found a couple of stranded chairs and sat down.
I stood, and, holding a recorder, aiming it at the Matisyahu’s mouth, fired away. I asked him if he liked playing Jewlicious.
Five, maybe ten minutes later, I was out of questions. I thanked Matisyahu for his time, we shook hands and I walked off.
Matisyahu stayed while another reporter shoved a camera into his face and started an interview. He asked him if he liked playing Jewlicious.
Who would have thought in this cookie cutter world, a heimishe hamantashen controversy?
Let me tell you the whole megillah.
Out in Anaheim, Calif., where Mickey and Minnie live, in the community where I grew up, there is a changing group of women and men who are a bunch of Purim pixies. Baking in the Temple Beth Emet kitchen for the past 45 years, they have turned out tens of thousands of hamantashen.
Working in two shifts, with a division of labor and specialized tools, and using a not-so-secret recipe, each year they baked hundreds of dozens of prune, mohn (poppy seed) or apricot.
That is until two years ago, when the chocolate chip controversy began.
But while the controversy bakes a bit (350 degrees for 20 minutes, or until brown), you need to hear the rest of this Purim story. It goes beyond fillings and shapes to asking how has the baking filled and shaped the bakers’ relationships? And are they somehow providing their synagogue with more than sweets?
For a fully baked answer, I took the 30-mile drive from Los Angeles to Anaheim to see if I could discover what has kept things cooking over two generations—through Vietnam, Watergate, several Middle East wars and eight rabbis.
First, I must tell you in complete journalistic disclosure, since I grew up in the Temple Beth Emet community, I know most of the bakers. The temple has largely aged in place. Among the afternoon baking crew are my junior high school social studies teacher, several friends of my family, a woman who is the sister of a former college roommate and, for good measure, my mother-in-law, Shirley.
Was baking one of the activities that held them to this spot half a mile from the Magic Kingdom?
As I entered their kitchen, I could smell the answer.
In the well-known 1988 essay “The Tent-Peg Business: Some Truths About Congregations,” Rabbi Lawrence Kushner wrote that “Since no one can be sure of what someone else must do to serve the Holy One, anyone who thinks he has a new idea or an old idea must be given a chance.”
In 1965, when Ruth Notkin began baking hamantashen with a group of congregants as a means to financially support the temple Sisterhood (now called Women’s League), she and her co-bakers had little idea how the act would bring together generations—mother and daughters, granddaughters and grandmothers.
“This is what we do,” Notkin said while feeding balls of dough into a machine roller and then turning the crank.
Not a religious act, yet each year the result of the cranking is thousands of dollars of tzedakah. The sale of the hamantashen helps keep the synagogue healthy, and the donation of the finished hamantashen to local retirement homes keeps people happy.
I watched as the women went about their work mixing, rolling, cutting out circles of dough using a Yuban coffee can, folding, filling and finally baking.
“We each have a specialty,” Notkin noted.
As the dough rolled, they talked about friends, relatives and how they had first came to the task.
“I got a phone call. They said we want to honor you,” related Ruth Wilkoff over the whirr of a commercial-sized mixer.
“Religious institutions directly support a wide range of social activities well beyond conventional worship,” political scientist Robert Putnam wrote in “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community,” his groundbreaking 2000 book about civic disconnection.
As I watched this team filling tray after tray with hamantashen (they sell 2,000 to 3,000 pastries per year), I began to wonder if their volunteer baking helped connect the crew to the synagogue and to each other.
I found out firsthand.
“Would you like to try it?” one of them asked.
After washing up, I folded, cut and cranked. Only then could I see how each task was interdependent and how you really didn’t want to mess up someone else’s work. Each piece was inspected—this was handmade love going out to their fellow congregants.
Later I spoke with Polly Schechter, a former neighbor, who leads the morning shift. Asked about her crew, she told me that “it ties us to the temple, even for those who don’t necessarily come to services. At the end of the day we have something to show for it. It’s a high.”
The controversy? As you might expect at a synagogue, it’s about tradition.
Two years before, the morning group broke the baking “minhag,” or custom, of more than 40 years by introducing three new flavors—raspberry and apricot with chocolate chips and plain chocolate.
“They caught on like wildfire,” Schechter said, adding that “Kids like the chocolate chips better.”
The afternoon group won’t make them.
“We’re too traditional for that,” Notkin said. “The morning group, they’re more modern.”
“Do you sense a little competition?” another baker asked.
No, but perhaps a small crumb of pride.
At the end of my shift, I sampled a traditional apricot.
In so many ways it tasted just right.
(Edmon J. Rodman is a JTA columnist who writes on Jewish life from Los Angeles.)
ESPN anchors seem to get suspended and fired so often that it probably wouldn’t warrant a post here even if there was a religion angle. But the religion hook on Tony Kornheiser’s suspension is too unique to pass up.
Kornheiser, the Jewish half of “Pardon the Interruption,” has been given a brief suspension for comments he made regarding Sportscenter anchor Hannah Storm’s wardrobe:
“Hannah Storm in a horrifying, horrifying outfit today. She’s got on red go-go boots and a catholic school plaid skirt … way too short for somebody in her 40s or maybe early 50s by now.” [She’s 47.] “She’s got on her typically very, very tight shirt. She looks like she has sausage casing wrapping around her upper body … I know she’s very good, and I’m not supposed to be critical of ESPN people, so I won’t … but Hannah Storm … come on now! Stop! What are you doing? … She’s what I would call a Holden Caulfield fantasy at this point.”
In a follow-up post today, The Big Lead sided with Kornheiser, again referencing religious attire:
We’ll be brief: Silly suspension. Storm’s Sportscenter wardrobe for nearly two years has been embarrassing. Male anchors are dressed in suits; Storm frequently wears outfits that you might see on a cougar at a bar. Is she going dancing or talking about the Kentucky Wildcats? Erin Andrews has cleaned up her sartorial act on the sidelines. Is it too much to ask Storm to do the same?
Nobody expects Storm to be covered in burka, but …
Andrews, of course, looks respectable in any outfit and is, according to the Greenbergs, the best female reporter in sports. Read the rest here.
Opposition leader and Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni on Tuesday praised the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai last month, marking the first such comment from a top Israeli official.
Tzipi Livni, speaking at the closing panel of the board of trustees of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, said the death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was good news, but did not say who was behind the killing.
Authorities in Dubai have said they were nearly certain Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, was behind the death of Hamas chief Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a luxury hotel room in Dubai on January 20.
SUSPENDED! Tony Kornheiser of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption (PTI) has been suspended over recent comments he made on air about his ESPN colleague Hannah Storm.
Apparently Hebrew school didn’t teach Tony how to control that wicked tongue his.
Tony’s best remark:
“She’s got on her typically very, very tight shirt. She looks like she has sausage casing wrapping around her upper body … I know she’s very good, and I’m not supposed to be critical of ESPN people, so I won’t … but Hannah Storm … come on now! Stop! What are you doing?”
“If you want to make something where everybody will come together, focus on things that people have in common, [like] love of music,” said Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, organizer of the Jewlicious Festival. Indeed, music, art and family took center stage last weekend for the three-day, sixth annual Jewlicious, which brought nearly 1,000 people— including Jews of all denominations—from 22 states to Long Beach’s Alpert Jewish Community Center.
The weekend saw strong musical performances from Matisyahu, Moshav and Rav Shmuel. It also highlighted boxer Yuri Foreman, the current welterweight champion of the world, conducting a lighthearted boxing workshop.
Sharp observational comedy was also in the mix, thanks to Joel Chasnoff, who performed in the comedy café and served as master of ceremonies for Saturday night’s main concert event.
Many attending slept in the converted gymnasium, which was divided to separate the sexes. A hotel across the street also served as home for many. And while there were panel discussions or events happening at every moment, it wasn’t unusual to find people opting instead to just make their own fun, playing ping-pong, basketball or cards.
Matisyahu headlined on a candlelit acoustic stage on Sunday afternoon. His 45-minute set included his hits “Jerusalem” and “One Day,” the latter of which is the official anthem for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
Dressed in street clothes, Matisyahu, who comes every year to the festival, kept the mood improvisational and casual, extending his songs with skillful beat boxing. He also fielded questions from the audience and joked that if anybody asked about his musical influences, they would have to leave. Most of the questions were about his marijuana use.
“[You] just have to be smart about the way you do it,” said Matisyahu. “Which is the way I feel about most things.”
His 45-minute set was the final performance of the festival, though he had made surprise appearances over the weekend. On Saturday, he joined comedian Smooth-E for a parody of “King Without a Crown.” He could also be seen walking with his family in the main hallway, gym, auditorium and the several event rooms of the JCC.
During the concert, one of Matisyahu’s children, dressed in a Superman costume, went up to the stage and said, “Hi, Daddy.” To which his famous father replied: “Hi, Superman,” a simple, normal exchange that captured the spirit of the weekend.
Adam Weinberg, music director for the festival, reinforced that there should be no preaching at the festival—that attention, instead, should be on the music. “I think music should speak for music’s sake,” Weinberg said.
Weinberg, also a musician, accompanied Matisyahu on acoustic guitar, as did Dave Holmes, a member of Matisyahu’s band.
Matisyahu spoke afterward about how strongly the performance resonated with him. “When you have an audience listening, taking the journey with you, it’s pretty special,” he said. “For some reason, we seem to be having these kinds of performances at Jewlicious shows.”
Leaders of five Jewish student organizations at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) denounced calls by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) for donors to cease contributing to the Orange County campus because of alleged inaction by university administrators in the face of ongoing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activity. The New York-based ZOA also urged potential students not to apply to the university.
The ZOA’s appeal followed the Feb. 8 speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, at the UCI Student Center in which he was repeatedly heckled and jeered by anti-Israel protestors. The incident resulted in 11 arrests, including students from UCI and UC Riverside (UCR), among them the president of UCI’s Muslim Student Union (MSU).
In an open letter, Moran Cohen, president of Anteaters for Israel, UCI Hillel President Ami Kurzweil, and the heads of the campus Chabad, AEPi fraternity and AEPhi sorority called the ZOA’s directive “counterproductive and one of the worst ways to deal the MSU at UCI.”
“As students on this campus, we feel that one of the very best ways to send a message to the MSU is to increase the attendance of students who will speak out against them and stand up for the American principles such as freedom of speech. One of the greatest advantages of living in this country is access to a quality university education, and we are proud that UCI is one of the finest and safest academic institutions in the nation.”
The students decided to issue the letter in response to sentiment among their peers that their voices needed to be heard, Cohen said.
“This is to show the perspective of the students who are here every day, to show what we feel about our campus. In the past few years, we’ve really grown the Jewish community and the only way to continue this is to bring more students and to show Israel in a more positive light.”
Oren’s speech was interrupted 10 times by protestors and culminated in dozens of students boisterously walking out of the auditorium to stage a demonstration outside. This was the latest in a series of anti-Israel actions by the MSU in recent years. The group has hosted several anti-Israel speakers, including Oakland-based Muslim cleric Amir Abdel Malik Ali and British politician George Galloway. The latter incident resulted in a pending FBI investigation into alleged fundraising by the MSU for Hamas, following a complaint in October 2009 by the ZOA to the university and the U.S. Department of Justice.
In 2004, the ZOA filed a federal complaint charging UCI officials with failing to rectify long-standing anti-Semitic harassment. Civil rights investigators found insufficient evidence to support the allegation.
Speaking from Israel, ZOA National President Morton A. Klein called the students’ criticism a “legitimate difference of opinion” on tactics, adding that he believes the real issue is why the university has not condemned the MSU’s activities. He said his organization had consulted with UCI students and faculty, many of whom urged even stronger action, before issuing its statement.
Cohen said she had not spoken to ZOA representatives, nor had the other four signatories to the student missive, to the best of her knowledge.
“We have taken this approach after six years of trying every other avenue,” Klein said. University inactions have forced our hand to take a more serious step.”
B’nai Brith International and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called on UCI Chancellor Michael Drake to step up efforts to deal with manifestations of anti-Semitism on campus following the incident, but ADL National Director Abraham Foxman criticized the ZOA’s call to boycott the university, calling it “inappropriate, harmful and counterproductive.”
Jewish Federation Orange County CEO Shalom Elcott said in a prepared statement that he is pleased thus far with university’s actions against the protesters.
“We have faith that the University is going to follow through and do the right thing: to prosecute the 11 Muslim students who were arrested, and to take the necessary disciplinary action.”
Eight UCI students have received letters from the disciplinary office of the Department of Student Affairs charging them with violations of the student code of conduct, according to UCI spokesperson Cathy Lawhon. They had one week to respond to the charges, though Lawhon would not comment on whether the students answered their notices, citing the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. UCR Dean of Students Susan Allen Ortega said administrators at the inland empire campus are conducting their own investigation but have yet to decide on a course of action regarding the three UCR students who were arrested.
When it comes to nature, I pretty much have a fear of it – like Monk (the Obsessive-Compulsive Detective that was played by Tony Shalhoub). I am sure there is a name for that sort of thing. Ok, so maybe I exaggerate a little. It is not so much a fear of nature, as it is the fear of being outside in nature and being eaten alive by a mountain lion or bitten by a poisonous snake or coming face to face with Jack the Ripper who goes out on hiking trails to find unsuspecting victims. So, I guess those are more my fears than nature itself, although nature has proven to be quite scary at times. I.E.: tidal waves, earthquakes…you get my point.
Also, my past experience on hiking trails has not been so pretty. (Which probably adds to my fear of ever hiking again.) For example, when I vacationed in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico years ago and joined an “easy” hike, it turned out, well, not so easy. We had to walk across a “narrow bridge” (or as I like to call it, a “tightrope”) that hung about fifty feet over roaring rapids. Everyone made it across, thankfully, while I had to be dragged and carried by two tour guides. That was not the end. Then we had to simply jump across stones in a river. Again – everyone made it across – let’s just say I made it “through” and was very, very wet.
Then there was my time camping in my early twenties. All was well (better than I had expected) until bears circled our camp on our second night there for the food we had left out accidentally. I also returned from that trip beet-red, covered in blisters. Turned out I had third degree burns even though I went through at least three bottles of SPF 80 or so for the two days that we were there.
So, with these ever so wonderful experiences, you can imagine how uncooperative I have been with my husband throughout our marriage whenever he suggested nature hikes. (And he looooooooves them.) We would make a plan, I would actually get there, take five steps and head home. (Sorry, hubby.)
My idea of the perfect hike is a trek uphill through crowded streets like in Downtown L.A., or a walk from the Upper West Side to the East Side of New York City. Anything that involves paved roads (most of the time) and no mountain lions in sight. City life is my idea of “nature.”
So, much to my surprise (well, not really), my husband had had enough of me and told me it was time to “take a hike!” Of course he meant the scenic kind with him included. So, the opportunity arose and I ventured out on my first hike in years.
We joined another family we had met and brought our son as well. We took a hike and I actually liked it.
Of all places, it was in the San Fernando Valley. Ok, above it. Who knew a view of the good ol’ San Fernando Valley could be so beautiful after the rains (there was actually no smog).
We simply took Reseda Boulevard south – way south – past Ventura Boulevard until we hit the trail. It was a beautiful hike up the Santa Monica Mountains. Wow! My son loved it as well. Hubby was a given. The trail was a little steep at first, but great. No mountain lions in sight or cannibals (that I knew of) – just runners, bikers and families like us.
What a great way to start the day. A way that every day should start. I enjoyed my time well-spent in nature (of all places…for me) with great views, great company and a great nap I was hoping would follow, but never did.
So, now when my hubby tells me to “take a hike,” I will – well…if it is the nature trail-type he is talking about…and only if he comes along, of course.