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Jewish Journal

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June 16, 2010

“Sons of Tucson”: A Cult Hit in the Making?

Links, Tommywood, Uncategorized /

“Sons of Tucson” is a clever and subversive new sitcom about three sons who’ve fled to Tucson, Ariz., because their father was imprisoned for financial fraud. They then go on to recruit a ne’er-do-well, played by Taylor Labine (of “Reaper” fame), to pose as their father for school and other official purposes. The show is generating some drama of its own.

Fox, which bought the comedy to help revive its sitcom fortunes – dormant since “Malcom in the Middle” ended – originally planned to air the show on Sunday nights at 8:30. Audience testing reportedly indicated that the show would fare better at a more family-friendly time so, of course, Fox decided to air it even later on Sunday. Predictably, the show did poorly at 9:30 p.m., and, after four episodes, Fox put the show on hiatus.

“Sons of Tucson” returned last week, this time on Sundays at 7:30 p.m., a (somewhat) better time slot. Given this reprieve, and with support and goodwill, the show still has some chance at a second season. Justin Berfield (formerly an actor on “Malcolm”) has tweeted that he will donate half his producing fee to charity if the show is renewed. I won’t ask for or make a cash contribution, but I’ll do my part with a plea to watch the show – it’s twisted and weird in surprising and enjoyable ways.

My own track record of picking sitcom winners has been rather uneven in recent seasons. I was a big fan of “Better Off Ted,” a wonderfully edgy corporate satire that never gained much traction; currently, I sing the praises of “The Middle,” which I find to be a contemporary “Roseanne,” one of the best-written, most affecting, most real comedies, but which is known mostly as the lead-in to the gimmicky and much buzzed about “Modern Family.”

So, what is it I like so much about “Sons of Tucson”? Why do I think that, like “Freaks and Geeks,” to which it owes a debt of inspiration, it will develop a cult following for successive waves of viewers? In full disclosure, it could be a matter of bias, as Harvey Myman, my brother-in-law, is one of the producers. But I’d prefer to believe it’s my fascination with the fact that almost every character on the show is, in one way or another, a liar, hiding secrets and a fair amount of rage very near the surface, and that in spite of this, or because of this, they find themselves becoming a family – even as they are lying about being one. That appeals to me.

“There is a lot of humor that lies in people not telling the truth,” show co-creator Greg Bratman told me recently.

Or maybe I was just impressed by Bratman, a first-time TV writer who sold the pilot on spec with his partner, Tommy Dewey (also known as an actor, most recently in the Zac Efron vehicle “17 Again”) – something that almost never happens.

Bratman grew up in Palo Alto (where his father is a Stanford University philosophy professor), majored in philosophy at Princeton and performed in Quipfire, the college improv troupe. After college, he plunged into acting in the New York theater scene, working with the New York Theatre Workshop and playwright Moises Kaufman, and landing a small part in the 2001 Shakespeare in the Park “Measure for Measure,” alongside Billy Crudup and Sanaa Lathan. He pursued his love of improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York, and, with his Palo Alto homeboy Dusty
Brown, Bratman wrote and performed in “The Barrel Brothers,” the adventures of a “Flight of the Conchords/ Smothers Brothers”-esque folk duo from Kansas.

While in New York, Bratman also connected with Tommy Dewey, another alum of Princeton and Quipfire. They started to write together, creating two-man shows, including “Natalie,” a play for eight characters (in which Dewey and Bratman played four each). They presented “Natalie” at the 2003 New York Fringe Festival and then brought it to Los Angeles.

Subsequently, Dewey got cast in a number of WB programs, such as “What I Like About You” and the short-lived “The Mountain,” and Bratman and Dewey decided to try their hands at writing for TV. Somewhere in that process, they met Myman, who mentored them through a few first attempts.

In 2007, Bratman and Dewey pitched the basic idea of “Sons of Tucson” to Myman (who by then was working at J2 Pictures, the production company of Berfield and Jason Felts) – and Myman encouraged them to write it.

The concept was informed by Bratman and Dewey’s experiences sitting in a New York coffee shop and listening to 12-year-olds on cell phones bossing around their parents. Dewey was single, and Bratman didn’t have kids yet (he now has a 1-year-old), and they were amazed at how these kids had no boundaries. “It was hilarious,” Bratman recalled.

The result is a story about kids operating without parents in a world that requires at least one, and then discovering how much they need family. Fox bought the pilot, and 20th Century Fox
Television got involved. J2 Pictures recruited director Todd Holland of “Malcolm” fame as part of the creative team and to direct the pilot. As a neophyte, Bratman was grateful to be involved at every step, including casting and editing the pilot; Matthew Carlson, a veteran TV writer, came aboard as executive producer.

Thus far, “Sons of Tucson” has managed to be funny, at times sweet and often weird.  True to the writers’ original invention, everyone seems to be lying about something – for pragmatic rather than altruistic reasons. Yet – and this is what makes the show worth watching – you never know which way their weirdness is going to turn, despite the best of intentions.

As if writing a TV show were no small accomplishment, Bratman is also a doctoral candidate at Stanford in environmental studies. Surprising, right? A few years ago, while Dewey was pursuing acting, Bratman found himself under a four-month enforced vow of silence to repair vocal nodes damaged while performing as the Barrel Brothers. Having that much time to think had an impact. “I refocused,” he said.

“If all you are doing is trying to promote yourself as an actor and writer,” Bratman said, “you’re at risk of going into full ego mode.” He decided he needed “something bigger than myself.”

What he did was get a master’s degree in environmental science at UC Santa Barbara, studying eco services systems – which, in case you were wondering, are the services nature provides for humans, such as water purification, pollination or dam control – that are rarely valued. He was subsequently accepted at Stanford, and he is supposed to begin there next September.

“Sons of Tucson” will air its remaining episodes over the next two months – I have seen some of the upcoming episodes, including a funny and touching “Father’s Day.” The show’s immediate fate is uncertain, but see if you don’t think its future as a cult classic is assured. As for Bratman, when I asked him whether next fall would find him in Hollywood or in class at Stanford, he answered:

“I’ll have to see where life takes me.”

I’ll be watching with interest.

###

Photo credit. From left: Frank Dolce, Tyler Labine, Benjamin Stockham and Matthew Levy star in the Fox sitcom “Sons of Tucson,” Sundays at 7:30 p.m. Photo by Greg Gayne/FOX

“Sons of Tucson”: A Cult Hit in the Making? Read More »

Haredim riot in Jaffa over excavations

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Hundreds of haredim rioted in Jaffa, attacking police officers with bricks and rocks, over an archeological dig.

Five policemen were injured and 15 ultra-Orthodox Jews were arrested in the riots Wednesday over the dig, which the demonstrators say is disturbing a nearby Jewish burial site. A luxury housing complex is set to go up on the site once the dig is completed.

Demonstrators called police “Nazis” and “murderers.”

The demonstrations have been going on for several weeks. Earlier in the week, demonstrators damaged an archeological excavation of ancient buildings, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Haredim riot in Jaffa over excavations Read More »

Fight for kids

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

Last week, Los Angeles voters followed a long-time tradition of generosity toward public education with a majority “yes” vote for Measure E, which would have provided emergency funding for neighborhood schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.  But the 53 percent the measure garnered was nowhere near the two-thirds vote required by law to pass the funding initiative. We must now look elsewhere for the funds to bridge our children through the worst economic times since the Great Depression. That includes leaving no line item unexamined in an effort to eke out funds for our classrooms.

So, where do we go from here with a school district facing a $640 million deficit this year?

Long before all the votes were counted on election night, I knew I would need to get up the next morning to fight for our students’ future. In a democratic society, it is the responsibility of government to provide an education for young people. Public education has been part of building America’s unified culture and has helped level the playing field so that talented, hardworking young people can advance and achieve.

L.A. Unified is not the only district in dire financial straits. There is a national educational emergency in progress as districts across the country, devastated by their states’ weak economies, are cutting teaching positions. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan estimates that as many as 300,000 teaching and support staff positions are targeted for elimination nationally. Never before has our nation contemplated such a wholesale gutting of the public education system.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey has shown leadership on the issue that reflects a commitment to education as a public trust.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, had originally planned to add a $23 billion emergency education fund to the supplemental appropriations package of war and disaster spending that is moving through Congress this week. Harkin withdrew his amendment in the face of a growing outcry in Congress about the nation’s deficit; he could not muster enough votes to circumvent opposition in the Senate. (Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., was a Harkin bill co-sponsor; Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., opposed it despite steady grass-roots pressure.)

Obey moved to add the $23 billion to the House supplemental bill. His efforts have also been weakened by deficit hawks in both parties, and the original $23 billion in the House version has been scaled back to $10 billion. Even worse, as I write this, House leaders are considering scrapping their own version of the bill and going with the Senate-passed one—the bill without the education funding.

But Obey is not backing down.  A story in Politico last week reported that he is pushing to find the funds in unspent money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, aka the stimulus package. In doing so, he is pressing his Congressional colleagues and the Obama administration, which has supported the emergency education funding, to reaffirm their commitment to public education as a central priority. 

Here in California, Assembly Speaker John Perez has rolled out a California Jobs Budget that includes $3.8 billion in repayment of funds borrowed from local school districts. It is an ambitious proposal as California struggles for the third year in a row to close a multi-billion-dollar budget gap, and in the next few weeks we will see exactly how far apart the Senate and the Assembly are in their budget priorities.

But it is also true that before Perez made his proposal, there was talk of suspending Proposition 98, the state law that requires full funding for grades K-12. Discussion of a plan that would introduce more funds instead of cutting has taken the suspension of Proposition 98 off the table for the moment.

That is not a final victory. We all know the budget process is long and contentious. But the proposals at the state and federal levels provide us with openings to fight and push for more money for public education, not less.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the state of the economy and the crash that started the slide. We can argue about who caused it, but I can tell you who didn’t—the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The kids are not the cause of our economic problems, and they should certainly not be the victims. We must recommit ourselves to their future.

Steve Zimmer is a LAUSD board member.

Fight for kids Read More »

Stopping torture needs unswerving commitment

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

A recent report by Physicians for Human Rights has found that in the period after Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government engaged military and civilian health professionals in “human research and experimentation on prisoners in U.S. custody.” Appalled by these findings, a number of religious leaders representing the National Religious Coalition Against Torture have joined the growing chorus of American voices demanding that Congress establish a commission of inquiry to determine how this could happen in a democracy—and how to ensure that it never happens again.

Human experimentation abetted by medical professionals recalls the heinous acts committed by the Nazis in the concentration camps. Indeed, present-day human experimentation, conducted for the purpose of further developing torture techniques, is a violation of accepted standards of medical ethics and of domestic and international law, including the Nuremberg Code, adopted in response to Nazi atrocities.

To be sure, Nazi medical experimentation in the concentration camps was an unparalleled horror, significantly different from the research conducted on prisoners in U.S. custody. Nevertheless, the Holocaust has provided vitally needed moral lessons to the world. Among the most crucial is the need to stop abusive activity and violations of international law when they first begin.

During World War II, licensed doctors engaged in experimentation in Nazi concentration camps. As Robert Lifton noted in his book “Nazi Doctors,” not only did doctors use human subjects for perverse, pseudo-scientific study, they worked with the Gestapo to develop and refine information extraction techniques by experimenting on Auschwitz inmates. This grave misuse of medical knowledge grossly distorted a profession designed to ease suffering, not to create it.

Lifton described the step-by-step process that drew otherwise ethical doctors into this evil. Spurred by social and political pressures, they became implicated in the medical experimentation. Lifton calls this the “socialization of evil.”

The Nuremberg laws were intended both to prevent the suffering of future human subjects and the harm done to doctors by co-opting them in violations of the law and their ethical obligation.

Following World War II, the global community made a commitment to preventing future holocausts by identifying and condemning the cultural and societal norms that allowed these inhumane acts to occur and creating clear guidelines for acceptable behavior. The result was the adoption of the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Code, which constitute an internationally recognized framework for treatment of prisoners and the laws governing human experimentation.

Directives of the Nuremberg Code require voluntary consent of human subjects and implementation of safety measures to protect subjects against injury, disability or death.

Drawing such lines was a key factor when the issue of torture came before the Supreme Court of Israel, which like the United States today has faced persistent threats from terrorists. Proponents of the use of torture under certain circumstances pointed to the distinct dangers posed by terrorists, the same concern of the CIA. Opponents argued strongly that limitations must be imposed to prevent torture.

The Israeli high court affirmed that the elimination of inhumane treatment of detainees is “the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it.” It said also that “Although a democracy must fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand.”

Of course, it’s not just our history as Jews that compels us to condemn torture in all its manifestations but also our values as Americans. The issue of torture touches on core moral principles of concern to the American Jewish community, principles that go to the heart of both American and international humanitarian values, as well as to the very essence of democracy.

There is no question that in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. faced significant security challenges that continue to test our nation in unprecedented ways. Yet as we seek to thwart those who wish us harm, we must not abandon the values and ideals that have been the hallmarks of our nation’s greatness. Indeed, as a democracy committed to human rights we may not, dare not, in good conscience avail ourselves of barbaric practices, no matter how tempting the results may seem.

Just as the world committed to creating new boundaries after World War II, so we must now commit to ending U.S. use of interrogation methods that amount to torture and to act in a way that reflects the ideals on which our country was founded.

With these principles in mind, the American Jewish community must affirm its unswerving commitment to ending torture, including illegal human subject research, by calling for a commission of inquiry into human rights violations against detainees in CIA custody and demanding passage of legislation that will permanently end U.S.-sponsored torture.

The lessons of our Jewish history and our American values demand no less.

Rabbi David Saperstein is the director and counsel of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Stopping torture needs unswerving commitment Read More »

Israeli soldier facing charges in Gaza war shootings

Leave a Comment / Israel /

An Israeli soldier is facing charges in the shooting deaths of a Palestinian mother and daughter during the Gaza war.

During a hearing scheduled for next week, the chief army prosecutor will determine the exact charges in the killings, Haaretz reported Wednesday, citing army sources.

The soldier allegedly broke the army’s rules of engagement when he fired on the women, aged 64 and 35, south of Gaza City on Jan. 4, 2009. The women reportedly were among a group of civilians waving white flags.

The soldier reportedly joined other troops after an order was given to fire warning shots at the legs of the group. It is unclear if the soldier heard or understood the orders, as he had arrived late.

If charged, he would be the third soldier to be tried for actions taken during the Gaza war in the winter of 2008-09. These would be the most serious charges.

Israeli soldier facing charges in Gaza war shootings Read More »

Turkish group ready for new flotilla

Leave a Comment / Flotilla Crisis, Israel /

A Turkish humanitarian group that purportedly has ties to terrorism said it will send another flotilla to break the Gaza blockade.

Representatives of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, or IHH, said Wednesday during a news conference at the European Parliament in Strasbourg that it will participate in another flotilla of aid and activists next month. According to IHH, which Israel and some U.S. Congress members say have ties to terrorism, it already has acquired six ships for the late July flotilla and called on others to add vessels.

Several pro-Palestinian groups are scheduled to participate in what has been dubbed the Fleet of Freedom 2, including Turkish, Greek and Swedish nongovernmental organizations, Free Gaza and the International Committee to Lift the Siege on Gaza.

Violence broke out on board a Turkish-flagged ship after it was intercepted by Israel and boarded by naval commandos in international waters off Gaza on May 31, leaving nine passengers dead. All of the dead were Turkish citizens; one was Turkish American. A group affiliated with IHH was aboard the ship, the Mavi Marmara.

Meanwhile, a Turkish newspaper reported Wednesday that Turkey’s government is deciding how its future ties with Israel will look, according to Reuters. Citing unnamed sources, the Star reported that Turkey could halt all future military cooperation with Israel and not send back the envoy it brought home following the flotilla clash.

The Turkish government also reportedly has set up a committee to study the flotilla incident in preparation for a possible international investigation, according to reports. The committee was formed Monday and has met twice.

Also Wednesday, Israel’s Turkel Commission investigating the incident met for the first time.

Turkish group ready for new flotilla Read More »

Baby Got Book

Leave a Comment / Blogs /

God- So I need you to go down to earth get broke, loose your house, get rich, then get broke again, get divorced, live through a world war, and lose your favorite restaurant to a bowling alley. But here’s the deal, continue to love me unconditionally and not blame me for your stupid choices. You good with that?

Soul- uh, God?

God- Yes

Soul- Can I get life insurance?

Baby Got Book Read More »

What Mahony said about protecting pedophile priests

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Don’t worry, Cardinal Roger Mahony, you’re name couldn’t be any more besmirched as your tenure atop the Archdiocese of Los Angeles comes to a close. The latest information comes from a deposition about whether Mahony should have informed police in 1986 of what the once-Rev. Michael Baker was up to. From the LAT:

Mahony has long said he made mistakes in allowing Michael Baker to stay in the priesthood after he confessed to having sexually assaulted young boys.

But in the deposition — the first to be publicly released covering Mahony’s handling of Los Angeles Archdiocese molestation cases — the cardinal gives the clearest picture yet of his actions regarding Baker, who is serving a 10-year prison sentence for child molestation.

The archdiocese attempted unsuccessfully to have a judge seal the document from public view.

(skip)

Mahony said in the Jan. 25 deposition that church policy at the time was to deal with problem priests “pastorally” by providing counseling in church facilities and restricting their duties in subsequent ministries to keep them away from children.

“The challenge is trying to look at 1986 through the lenses of 2010,” Mahony told attorney John Manly, explaining that more proactive measures are taken now after reports of abuse.

Read the rest here.

What Mahony said about protecting pedophile priests Read More »

Op-Ed: Repairing a world shattered by Agent Orange

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

The Vietnam War looms large in America’s collective memory. Yet for most of us, that’s where the war remains: in memory. Not so for the Vietnamese.

Thirty-five years after its conclusion and 15 years since our countries re-established diplomatic ties, the daily lives of many Vietnamese are still shaped, quite directly, by our military’s policies and tactics.

Thirty-five years later, Agent Orange continues to shatter real people every day.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military used several dangerous chemical agents to defoliate the Vietnamese countryside. One of the chemicals was the notorious Agent Orange, a compound containing dioxin—a lethal poison that contributes to a host of deadly and debilitating diseases, the effects of which can linger decades after first deployed. It is unlikely that we understood its toxicity when we used it during the war.

Now we know. Far too many of our own veterans continue to suffer the impact of this deadly chemical, but in recent years the American government has begun to acknowledge and attempt to address the damage.

These efforts must be improved, but there can be no doubt that they dwarf the efforts made by the United States for Vietnamese victims. And for the Vietnamese, Agent Orange
remains a regular fact of life.

I traveled recently to Vietnam as part of an interfaith delegation sponsored by the Ford Foundation with a diverse group of individuals dedicated to advocating for those still hurt by Agent Orange. Former congressman and CEO of Common Cause Bob Edgar led the group, which included the likes of Sister Maureen Fiedler, host of public radio’s “Interfaith Voices”; Paulette Peterson, a clinical psychologist in the U.S. Veterans Administration; and Susan Berresford, convener of the U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange.

We spoke with government officials, medical personnel and victims. We toured centers for disabled youth, homes in the impoverished countryside and an Agent Orange “hot spot”—the Da Nang Airport, where enormous deposits of the deadly compound left behind by American forces continue to wreak horrific damage on the health and environment of those who live nearby.

At rehabilitation centers we met children with frighteningly enlarged heads and teenagers confined to cribs, for fear their brittle bones would snap. We visited with the director of Saigon’s Disability Resource and Development Center, herself disabled by dioxin poisoning, and saw the nurturing environment she was able to create. We traveled to the homes of affected children living in rural communities—communities so poor that merely meeting a family’s basic needs is a constant struggle, with little left for children whose lives have been cruelly shaped by the toxins America left behind.

And at Da Nang Airport, we struggled to comprehend the sheer quantities of the Agent Orange deposits left behind. The site contains dioxin in amounts over 365,000 parts per thousand (ppt); in most industrialized nations the parallel contamination is less than 12 ppt.

The one thing standing between the people there and this deposit of poison? A concrete slab.

After years of using legalisms to deny our responsibility to America’s Vietnam veterans, the American people and government ultimately came to understand that an honorable nation may not turn its back on those who carry a burden we placed on their shoulders. Now we must finally come to a similar understanding regarding the Vietnamese.

There is but one moral response to the suffering we left behind 35 years ago: We must acknowledge our role in the devastation and turn our attention, our funds and our scientific knowhow toward healing lives and repairing the environment.

As a rabbi, as a Jew, I’m taught to bear witness to the pain of this world, and then to take action to remedy that pain. It’s not enough to merely see it—I am compelled also to do whatever I can to bring peace and restoration.

We like to believe that when the troops come home, the war they fought has ended and we all get to move forward with our lives. But wars do not end simply because hostilities cease. So much is left behind, so much to rectify, so much to change.

On our trip we saw a great deal besides suffering in Vietnam. There also was so much beauty, from the vibrancy of Hanoi, to the striking blue waterways, to the emerald farmlands. We were warmly welcomed everywhere, and wherever we turned we found creative people applying themselves to resolve the problems before them.

Vietnam is a nation striving to move ahead, a nation committed to repairing its relationship with our own. We may not do any less than stand with Vietnam and find solutions to the horrors caused by the poisons our war left behind.

This is my duty—as a Jew, as a rabbi and as an American. Nothing less will do.

(Rabbi Steve Gutow is the president and CEO of The Jewish Council for Public Affairs.)

Op-Ed: Repairing a world shattered by Agent Orange Read More »

In Venice, a Jewish disconnect between locals and visitors

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

It was a Friday afternoon in the heart of the historic Venice Ghetto, and I was chatting with the city’s chief rabbi, Elia Riccheti, when his cellphone beeped.

“It’s a text message from Gam-Gam Goodies, the Chabad-run pastry shop around the corner,” said the bespectacled Riccheti, whose wispy white beard spills down to his chest.

He read me the message, a reminder that there were still some chocolate, poppy-seed and cream-filled kosher pastries left—and still time to pick them up before Shabbat.

“They really know how to use technology,” Riccheti said, smiling.

Many of the circles that make up Jewish Venice converged in that moment.

Riccheti, who is also the president of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly, was speaking with me in the well-stocked Jewish bookstore and kosher cafe that form part of the Venice Jewish Museum, an institution founded by the Jewish community in 1953 that encompasses several of the ghetto’s centuries-old synagogues.

Jews have lived in Venice since the Middle Ages; the old Jewish cemetery on the Venice Lido was founded in the 1300s. Venetian rulers established the ghetto as Europe’s first enclosed place of Jewish segregation in 1516 on the site of an old foundry—or getto, in the Venetian dialect.

The museum draws nearly 70,000 visitors a year, and locals say the annual number of Jewish visitors to Venice far exceeds that.

But the Venice Jewish community itself numbers fewer than 450, only a handful of whom live in the ghetto area. Only a few local Jews seek contacts with the tourists, other than as customers in their shops or bodies to make up a minyan.

“There is a paradox here,” said Shaul Bassi, who heads the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies, an institution founded last year aimed at fostering intellectual and cultural interaction between Jewish visitors and Jewish Venetians.

“The Jewish community as such is eroding, and many are unaffiliated or disaffected,” Bassi said. “But at the same time the ghetto has never been so famous. There has never been such a profound interest in the ghetto as a site of memory.”

Picking up the slack, as far as foreign tourists go, is Chabad-Lubavitch, which in two decades of activity here has become the most prominent public face of Judaism in Venice.

There is a Chabad house and yeshiva on the main ghetto square. In addition to Gam-Gam Goodies, Chabad runs a popular kosher restaurant, Gam-Gam, which provides Shabbat hospitality, including free Friday-night meals for tourists. Sometimes hundreds attend and spill out into the street singing and dancing.

“Join us for candlelighting, join us for dinner,” urged Shachar Banin, the American-born wife of Chabad’s Venice director, Ramy Banin, when I stopped in at Gam-Gam Goodies after my meeting with Riccheti.

I didn’t buy any pastries, but I did get drawn into a lively discussion with four or five visiting American Jews about the role of women in the Torah and in the home.

Along with a dozen other visiting women, I lit Shabbat candles that night at Gam-Gam. The next morning I attended services led by Riccheti in the centuries-old Spanish synagogue. Only about 15 of the 80-member congregation were locals.

“Chabad understood before anyone else that Jewish Venice is not just a local place but an international one,” Bassi said. “They clearly are the ‘real’ Jewish Venice on the Internet. And paradoxically, they are the most Orthodox—and the most open.”

The relationship between Chabad and the resident Jewish community has been rocky over the years, with local Jews accusing Chabad of trying to usurp the community’s position and undermine its activities.

“Before they came, no one here knew what Chabad was,” Anna Vera Sullam, a member of the local Jewish community leadership, told me. “Our traditions are very different.”

After two decades a truce—or at least a modus vivendi—exists, but frictions are still apparent, both in Venice and in cyberspace.

If you Google Jewish Venice, for example, the Chabad website is the first to come up—and it includes no mention of Riccheti, the historic Spanish synagogue where regular services are held or, aside from the museum, any of the other local Jewish institutions.

Likewise, on the local Jewish community’s own website, Chabad and its activities are not mentioned; even the notable presence of Gam-Gam is ignored. Only kosher establishments under Riccheti’s supervision are listed.

Bassi, whose family has lived in Venice for generations, hopes his new center can foster a concept of Jewish community that will harness the dynamics of centuries of Jewish tradition in Venice with cultural and intellectual input from abroad.

“The future can’t rely on the continuation of the Jewish community as such, nor on the presence of tourists,” he said. “The only real future community is one made up of Venetian Jews and a rotating community of international Jews who come to live here but also to do something cultural that is internationally viable.”

It’s far from certain how much impact such a program might have, given the demographic decline of the local community and the overwhelming presence of tourism.

“In theory it’s a beautiful idea,” said Riccardo Calimani, a Venetian-born novelist and historian who has written widely about the ghetto and Venetian Jewry. “But in practice, who knows—it’s a road to take that has not yet been taken.”

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