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Jewish Journal

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January 26, 2011

Lifting voices — and hearts — in song at Hava Nashira

Leave a Comment / Camp, Special Sections /

To those who love it, Hava Nashira is less a Jewish summer music workshop and more a calling. Even the name — translated as “come let us sing” — beckons.

Started in 1992 by Debbie Friedman and Cantor Jeff Klepper, the sessions originally intended to train camp song leaders have gone on to have a global impact on Jewish music and synagogue life.

“We want to help people become sensitized to how they can use this music in synagogues, in community centers, in all the places where Jews come to congregate,” said Jerry Kaye, director of the Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute, the regional camp of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) in Oconomowoc, Wis., where Hava Nashira takes place.

Kaye was one of the few there at the beginning, when the program full of soulful songs drew about 50 people. Today, more than 200 song leaders, music educators, cantors and others make the trip. Do the math and the potential ripple effect is huge.

“If somebody can teach a song to Hava Nashira and make it stick, then it’s very likely that the rest of the Jewish community … is going to learn it,” said Emily Schwartz, 23, a song leader from Chicago who has been to the program four times.

True to its purpose, Hava Nashira continues to train song leaders for summer camps through intensive workshops, reviewing old songs, adding new ones and developing the artistry behind the role. This year’s workshop will be held June 1-5, with URJ camp song leaders arriving a day early.

“The first very specific goal was to make sure that there were talented song leaders to go around for all the Union camps, and to that end we have designed a separate program for the song leaders,” said Klepper, who serves as cantor for Temple Sinai in Sharon, Mass.

Hava Nashira is open to participants of any denomination, and those who come range in age from 18 to 65 and older. In the past, they have been able to study anything from composition to music for young families to the power of choral singing with a faculty that draws from the best in Jewish music today.

Mikey Pauker, 25, a song leader from West Los Angeles, said he was in awe when he attended Hava Nashira for the first time two years ago.

“All the people there who were faculty were the people who wrote the songs,” he said. “I was blown away by the talent of the people and the community.”

The sharing goes both ways, as participants learn from faculty members and each other.

“You’re in an environment that it’s sort of like a Petri dish of Jewish culture and music,” said Craig Taubman, who has been on staff for more than 10 years. “It was an opportunity for colleagues to cross-pollinate.”

Danny Maseng, chazzan and music director at Temple Israel of Hollywood, said that one of his goals when he helped direct the program from 1995 to 2000 had to do with helping a new generation rediscover Chasidic, Sephardic and other cool but nearly forgotten tunes. All of this was for one purpose — “to really, really connect with the sacred through music,” he said.

“The main goal certainly wasn’t to have ‘fun’ or to have a good time,” Maseng explained. “The main point was to have a spiritual experience and, even more importantly, a transformative spiritual experience.”

Consider Rick Lupert transformed. He first attended the camp in 1996 and has been back every year since. He met his wife, Addie, there in 2002 and proposed to her at Hava Nashira the following year.

“Everything else that happens in life kind of revolves around making sure that I can make it to that in terms of scheduling,” the Van Nuys resident said.

A music teacher at Temple Ahavat Shalom in Northridge, where he also helps lead a monthly minyan and is involved in other musical endeavors, Lupert, 42, said the program is indescribably powerful.

“Music, when done right with the right people and the right melodies in the right setting, can bring you to tears,” he said.

It can even work miracles. Lupert recalls a time when the power was out at the camp and how it came back on as Friedman led the group in “Yotzer Or” — Creator of Light.

“It was simultaneously hilarious and powerful,” he said.

Lupert and others at the workshop recognize that the time they spend there is not just for themselves, although they share a strong bond with each other; they become emissaries of the music and can use it to create a larger Jewish community worldwide.

What they pick up at Hava Nashira isn’t something that can be downloaded over the Internet, said Cantor Ellen Dreskin, a faculty member since 1998 from Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester in Chappaqua, N.Y.

“It’s really easy to learn new music online, to share resources online, but this craft of song leading is so much about personal connection, about teaching people to use music to build community, to use music to build spirituality,” she said.

As with all things, Hava Nashira is always changing. Aside from growing in size, it has broadened its musical horizons from just using guitar to adding keyboard and other instruments. It also gave rise to a new program, Shabbat Shirah, which began last fall. The program with a smaller faculty focused on people age 30 and up and attracted 54 people, Kaye said.

Looking forward, there is no avoiding the topic of Friedman, the musical luminary who was part of Hava Nashira from the beginning and who died Jan. 9.

“We will miss her terribly,” Kaye said, “but there’s no doubt that she provided a kind of energy and enthusiasm that we will all look to carry forward.”

Klepper has no illusions that time stands still. Long gone are the days when he grew up learning songs at camp that had to be taught and memorized because recordings weren’t available.  But the best part remains in Hava Nashira: “The idea that there is nothing as satisfying as sitting and singing with a few other people, just strumming guitars and singing and making up your own harmonies.

“It’s sort of like your music version of the slow food movement. We’re just going to put this stuff in the pot and just put the heat up a little bit and let it take a long time to simmer,” Klepper continued. “So maybe that’s why you have to take a couple of flights and a bus to get to this special camp. You have to really want to be here.”

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LAUSD’s new calendar impacts camps, families

Leave a Comment / Camp, Special Sections /

This summer was going to be the one — the one when Prissi Cohen’s daughter, Tillie, would finally get to enroll with a friend in a late-summer overnight session at Camp Ramah. But now Cohen’s not so sure.

If Tillie, 10, winds up going to a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) middle school in the fall, she would have to be at her desk two days before camp ends.

LAUSD officials in December adopted a new, early-start school calendar that will send students back to class this year on Aug. 15, three weeks sooner than the district’s traditional post-Labor Day start date. Schools will also let out earlier next spring, on June 1. While school board members have touted the new schedule as a way to boost students’ exam scores, parents have complained the move will put kids back in stuffy classrooms during some of Southern California’s hottest days. Another side effect is that the change may cut short summer camp and family vacation plans made before the shift was approved.

“I want to be able to give her a nice summer,” Cohen said of her daughter, a fifth-grader at Coeur d’Alene Avenue Elementary in Venice. “But LAUSD is really ruining the summer for so many families.”

At Jewish summer camps across the Southland, the news is mixed. Many camp directors said they had too little notice to change their 2011 dates, as the district made its announcement after camps had already begun enrolling children. But families aren’t out of luck — Jewish camps want parents to know they will work around the revised school schedule, so kids can still get their fill of “color wars” before they have to rejoin color guard.

When news of the early-start calendar broke, Camp Ramah sent out a letter to its returning families saying they would accommodate campers in LAUSD schools, camp director Zach Lasker said. The Ojai overnight camp, which serves grades four through 10, runs sessions June 22-July 19 and July 21-Aug. 17.

Officials will let parents pick up late-summer campers on Sunday, Aug. 14, three days before the end of the second session, Lasker said. The camp might even provide bus transportation back to Los Angeles if enough families request it.

Lasker asks only that parents not take their kids out earlier than Aug. 14 — despite the fact that it’s the day before LAUSD schools start — because the Conservative-affiliated camp doesn’t want kids to miss their last Shabbat together.

“So far, people seem to be OK with that,” Lasker said, adding that only a handful of Ramah families have called in to switch camp sessions because of the new school schedule.

It’s a similar story at Camp Alonim, held at American Jewish University’s Brandeis-Bardin campus in Simi Valley. Alonim’s three overnight sessions run June 21-July 3, July 5-24 and July 26-Aug. 14. Its Gan Alonim day camp runs June 20-Aug. 12.

With the last overnight session set to end the day before the bell rings at LAUSD schools, Alonim director Josh Levine said he hasn’t heard much concern from families.

“We have not felt a need to re-evaluate our scheduling,” Levine said. “We haven’t seen an exodus from one session to another because of this. Most families are handling this fine. People are kind of rolling with the punches, which parents are used to doing already.”

Shifting the camp’s dates would adversely impact Alonim’s staff, which relies heavily on college students who can’t start their summer jobs earlier because they’re still finishing classes or traveling home. So Levine is allowing parents to pick up third-session kids a few days early if they need time to prepare for school.

The situation is tougher at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple Camps — Gindling Hilltop Camp and Camp Hess Kramer — which both run overnight programs in Malibu.

Most of the two camps’ packages run through the end of July or the first weekend in August. But Camp Hess Kramer’s third session runs from Aug. 10-21, ending six days into the LAUSD school year. The popular “mini-camp” session is only 12 days, so it wouldn’t pay for families to take their kids home halfway through. And because the camp’s previous session runs a full 26 days, it might not be a viable alternative for kids who aren’t ready to be away from home that long.

“It really makes it difficult for LAUSD parents” that the district announced its changes after summer camps had already published their dates, said Doug Lynn, director of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple Camps. Some families have switched sessions, but two so far have decided to cancel their camp plans altogether.

The LAUSD school calendar will be “a big topic on the table” when camp officials meet to discuss dates for next summer, Lynn said. Until then, he’s urging parents not to abandon the idea of camp entirely.

“If families are hesitant to go to a longer session, I hope they still keep Jewish camping in mind as a positive experience and look at other Jewish camps that might offer a better option for them,” he said.

Some day camps are able to be more flexible, as parents can choose to sign up for just a few days per week. Agoura-based Camp Kinneret, for example, allows kids to miss up to a week of their registered camp session and make up the days earlier in the summer. Kinneret, which is not a Jewish camp but serves a large Jewish population, has sessions from June 20-July 22 and July 25-Aug. 19.

The LAUSD decision hinged on students’ test scores. Under the current schedule, kids have had to wait until after winter break to take their first-semester final exams. The new calendar moves up the testing period to before the break, while lessons are still fresh. This arrangement also allows kids more time to relax during the holiday season, school board members have said.

But for some parents, the shift is one big headache.

Cohen, who relishes her own summer camp memories, is hesitant to make her daughter skip out on precious time with new friends while camp is still in session. She’s now putting off applying to camp to see if Tillie will get into a non-LAUSD school, in which case the early start date won’t matter.

Besides, she said, the new LAUSD schedule is cutting into more than just camp and vacation time — it also eliminates the period of unrushed family togetherness that has traditionally marked the end of summer.

“To take away that needed family time is really a shame,” Cohen said. “It’s something that I have from my childhood. It’s been such a nice feeling to end the summer on that note.”

UPDATE: On Wed., Feb. 2, LAUSD announced it would delay implementation of the early-start calendar until the 2012-2013 school year.

LAUSD’s new calendar impacts camps, families Read More »

Marty Kaplan: My favorite blowhard

Leave a Comment / Marty Kaplan, Opinion /

I owe Keith Olbermann for enabling me to identify with Bill O’Reilly’s fans.

I know: Oh, the irony. “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” and “The O’Reilly Factor” battled in the same time slot. Except when O’Reilly had Jon Stewart as a guest, it’s hard to imagine two audiences more different. O’Reilly won the “Countdown” Worst Person in the World award so often, it might as well have been called the Bill-O, after Olbermann’s snarkname for him. Olbermann mercilessly mimicked O’Reilly’s voice. (He mimicked his boss Rupert Murdoch’s voice, too, though it sounded more like a pirate’s parrot than an Australian-born media mogul.) Former Fox News producer Andrea Mackris’ sexual harassment suit against O’Reilly provided Olbermann a steady stream of material, as did the ambush tactics of his producers. Plus there’s an ideological light-year between the progressive Olbermann and the conservative O’Reilly, though “pinhead” and “liar” are more like labels they’d use for each other.

So, with “Countdown” now off the air, it wouldn’t be surprising if there’s a jig being danced in “Factor”-ville. What is surprising is how being an Olbermann fanboy makes it easier for me to imagine how anyone could love O’Reilly. Opposites can sometimes be more alike than it’s comfortable to admit.

No, I’m not falling for the moral equivalence fallacy. Sentence for sentence, the accuracy of the two shows — the content that can be objectively graded true or false — was far from similar. Olbermann was by no means error-free, but he respected facts; O’Reilly, not so much. Saying so does not make me a partisan, unless reality, as Stephen Colbert said, has a liberal bias. It’s a safe bet that O’Reilly’s audience holds the opposite view of the shows’ comparative pants-on-fire scores, but I’m not ceding an inch of this ground. That O’Reilly’s people and Olbermann’s are equally passionate about their guy’s veracity has nothing to do with objective reality.

But it’s no fallacy to find equivalence in their vanity.

Keith, like Bill-O, is a blowhard. They are both splendidly full of themselves, pompous pontificators, preeners. Their outrage is manifestly authentic — “only an entertainer,” a duck blind where Rush hides when it’s convenient, doesn’t apply to them — but when something pisses them off, they just can’t help themselves from puffing up like a blowfish.

It took me a while to get past Olbermann’s ego. “How can you watch this guy?” my son asked me years ago, and the best I could muster was, “If you focus on what he’s actually saying, it kind of makes up for how much he loves himself for saying it.”
Sometimes, as in the “Worst Person” segment, it was fun to see him play a caricature of Keith; we were all in on it. But when it came to the “Good night and good luck” tag appropriated from Edward R. Murrow, the hagiographic camera work of the “Special Comment” segments, and the stentorian flourishes that even Robert Byrd couldn’t get away with at the end, it was Olbermann’s unalloyed sincerity that made him hard to take. His moral indignation thrilled me; what infuriated him, infuriated me. I just wish he’d had a lighter foot on the rhetorical organ music, and that the register of his tone had ranged more widely than Elijah to Jeremiah.

Of course, O’Reilly is just as over-the-top, and, as with Olbermann most of the time, there’s no whiff of performance or artifice; you don’t wonder whether, when the studio lights go out, he can slough off his persona the way you know Stephen Colbert can. That’s what makes me think I can slip into the skin of O’Reilly’s audience. If I didn’t believe that an egomaniac like Keith Olbermann could nevertheless be an effective champion of my team’s values, I could never imagine how anyone on the other team could get past Bill O’Reilly’s insufferability.

I suppose there’s also the possibility that O’Reilly and Olbermann are loved not despite their infatuation with their own righteousness, but because of it. That’s not my take, but I can see how their no-doubt-zone authority could be attractive. Again, I’m not saying they’re twins in truthiness. There’s a difference between bombast and bull. But it’s likely that, for some of their fans, the certainty that these guys radiate is a political aphrodisiac.

I’m grateful that Keith Olbermann offered the first TV alternative to Fox News besides CNN’s anemic “we’ll have to leave it there.” He demonstrated that polemical journalism could still be journalism. He provided venues for guests like Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall, whose intelligence broke the Punch & Judy template of cable news. He proved that there’s an audience avid for hosts like Rachel Maddow — Rachel Maddow! — and Lawrence O’Donnell. He became a punching bag for Democrats who wished that the base would shut up and for Beltway journalists who fetishize access and seriousness, and he just didn’t care.

It’s easy to believe that having Keith Olbermann as an employee was no walk in the park for MSNBC. For the length of his run there, I imagine that his network, like his admirers, learned to deal with his difficulty. That’s just how it sometimes is with these outsize personalities; it’s part of the package. With “Countdown” off the air, I’m no more likely to watch Bill O’Reilly than I ever was. But I do feel an unexpected kinship with his audience — maybe not the ones who love him as much as they love Sarah Palin, but the ones who realize they’re indulging the crazy uncle in him, like the fans of Keith Olbermann who never let his being a blowhard be a deal-breaker.

Marty Kaplan is the Norman Lear professor of entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.  Reach him at {encode=”martyk@jewishjournal.com” title=”martyk@jewishjournal.com”}.

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Ethan Bortnick: Child prodigy, entertainer, mega-fundraiser

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Music /

Ethan Bortnick was just 6 when he first appeared on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” playing snippets of piano works by Bach, Mozart and Scott Joplin. He even performed his own composition, “The Tiger Ran Away at the Zoo.” By that age, he had already raised $12 million for Miami Children’s Hospital. Since then, he has performed for the Chabad Telethon and the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, among other charities.

Now 10 and having just embarked on his longest tour to date, the accomplished entertainer is, naturally, excited. The 20-city tour of “Ethan Bortnick and His Musical Time Machine” began Jan. 20 in Nashville, Tenn., and stops at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Feb. 5, before continuing on until March, when Ethan returns home to Hollywood, Fla.

Speaking by phone from Florida, Ethan recalled his debut on “Leno.”

“That was very long ago, like four years ago,” Ethan said, noting that he’s been on the show three times since, most recently in 2009. He’s also appeared on “Oprah.”

He said his interests are wide. “I love all kinds of music — classical, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, the Beatles. I love Jewish folk songs. I’m not working on one kind of music. I do everything at the same time.”

Even over the phone, Ethan’s irrepressible energy and impressive focus come through. He displayed a disarming candor about a potentially painful subject.

“My brother, Nathan, is 5 years old, but when he was born, we were told he was missing two out of the four chambers from his heart,” Ethan said. “He had half a heart. But at Miami Children’s Hospital, they saved his life. I really wanted to help the hospital, which I did. At the last event, we got Beyoncé, Smokey Robinson and Gloria Gaynor to come. It was amazing.”

Ethan explained how he and his management team arranged a Children’s Miracle Network fundraising event in Orlando, Fla., so they would be at Disney World for his brother’s birthday. “They’re an amazing team that raises money for children’s hospitals. I wrote [the song] ‘It’s a Miracle’ for them.”

Story continues after the jump.