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Jewish Journal

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August 3, 2011

Rob Eshman: Good Leaders

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, News, Opinion, Rob Eshman /

If Republicans want a primer on how to keep losing the Jewish vote, all they have to do is look at what happened in Washington this past week.

The go-to assumption of many people on the right is that American Jews follow a single, unthinking, liberal party line. This became clear to me when my son invited a friend of his to go target shooting with us last weekend.

“Shooting?” the friend said. “I thought you guys were Democrats.”

Most Jews, myself included, are neither knee-jerk liberals nor reactionary conservatives. But many people will try to assert otherwise. How else to explain the June 2011 Gallup poll that showed President Barack Obama’s approval rating among U.S. Jews at 60 percent? The poll revealed that Jews approved of the president’s performance at an average of 14 percentage points above the general public.

The reason you’ll most often hear Republicans offer for this phenomenon is that Jews are locked naively into their parents’ or even grandparents’ voting traditions, as if they haven’t read a newspaper since Franklin Delano Roosevelt died.

It’s true that since 1945 Jews have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate by percentages of up to 90 percent.

But if you poke at the numbers, you’ll find that the Republican candidate who received the largest percentage of the Jewish vote — Dwight D. Eisenhower (40 percent) — was the model Republican moderate.

And if you drill down to state and local races, you’ll find that Jewish voters often vote for moderate Republicans, such as former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan (50 percent in 1993 and 71 percent in 1997) and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (48 percent).

In other words, Jews are not liberal zombies. The record shows that they use their votes to reward candidates or parties they believe adhere not to certain labels, but to certain values.

The debate and vote over the debt ceiling, still dragging on as I write this, provides a step-by-step guide on how to alienate these voters.

Step 1: Let Ideology Trump Common Sense

Moderates, as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman pointed out, would debate the federal deficit in a thoughtful and deliberate fashion, exactly the way a business would take the time to review its budget. Extremists hold the nation’s credit rating hostage to a hurried, gun-to-the-head negotiation in order to get what they want. Linking the approval of an increased debt ceiling — which serves past commitments — to debate over future spending just defies logic.

Step 2: Assume We’re Stupid

Jewish voters are impassioned and informed. Is it a coincidence we are over-represented among the Pundit Class, left, right and center: Brooks, Friedman, Krugman, Krauthammer, Stephens, Podhoretz, Stewart, etc.? The Republicans who try to paint Obama as the progenitor of all our economic problems, ignoring the tax cuts, wars and deficits started by the previous administrations, sound like shills, not statesmen.

Step 3: Don’t Compromise

On CNN, Sen. Rand Paul (R- Ky.) told Anderson Cooper that his side had done all the compromising it could by allowing the nation to avoid default. That sounds just a tad extreme. Even the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal took issue with the way the Republican center seemed to slouch fringeward.

“The same supposedly conservative Republicans and their talk radio minders may denounce this deal as a sellout,” The Wall Street Journal wrote on Aug. 1, “but we’ll be charitable and assume they’ve climbed so far out on the political ledge they don’t know how to climb back without admitting they were wrong. …

“The debt ceiling is a political hostage the GOP could never afford to shoot, and this deal is about the best Republicans could have hoped for given that the limit had to be raised. … Sooner or later the GOP had to give up the hostage.”

Hint: If your strategy involves the words “hostage” and “ledge,” you will probably alienate Jewish voters.

Step 4: Avoid Nuance

Jews understand that black and white is for cookies, not politics. Things aren’t so simple — paradox and unresolved questions are at the heart of the universe.  

It’s not guns versus butter, but balancing guns and butter, balancing the need for jobs with the need to contain spending, fine tuning the effectiveness of the free market and the rights of the individual with the needs of the larger society.

Step 5: Attack Government Itself

The anti-government meme that infuses so much of the Tea Party rhetoric is off-putting to people who have thrived and prospered under a strong federal government. If it’s not perfect, you improve it, you don’t shut it down.

“After the debt crisis ends, the democracy crisis must be tackled,” wrote Jacob S. Hacker and Oona A. Hathaway in The New York Times. “Nobody wins when our constitutional system falters: not the president, who gains unilateral power but loses a governing partner; not Congress, which gets to blame the president but risks irrelevance; and certainly not the American people, who have to bear the resulting dysfunction.”

You can certainly win elections without the Jewish vote. But the money and activism Jews bring to the table is helpful, especially in state and local elections, and in the primaries.

If Republicans want the kind of landslide Jewish numbers Democrats rack up, find candidates who promote strong, effective and fiscally sound government that provides security for the nation, opportunity to the entrepreneur and help to the needy.

If you think that’s impossible, read about FDR.

Rob Eshman: Good Leaders Read More »

David Suissa: Fair-weather Zionists

Leave a Comment / David Suissa, Is Featured?, News, Opinion /

What do you do if an annoying and exasperating friend gets in trouble and really needs your help? And what do you do if that friend is also a blood relative, like Israel? I often ask myself that question about progressive, pro-Israel Jews who are furious at the direction in which their beloved Israel is going.

Is there a point when they will just decide to “dump” Israel?

I got a sobering answer last week when I read in Haaretz about a Jew whose “resume reads like a love poem to the world of Jewish activism.” According to the article by Adam Chandler, this Jew has been “an extremely visible advocate for progressive Israeli and Jewish causes as well as an outspoken watchdog against anti-Semitism.”

It turns out that a few weeks ago, this progressive, pro-Israel Jewish activist, Daniel Sieradski, announced to his 2,400 followers on Twitter that he had had enough.

“I’ve decided that after 10 years of fighting for a progressive Israeli course correction, that our efforts are futile,” he wrote in June. “I officially give up. As the Jewish nation proceeds to march off a cliff, I will now go back to caring about everything else I cared about before Israel.”

Sayonara, Israel. I’m done with you, and I will make sure all my followers know that I’m done with you.

As Chandler warns us: “Considering Sieradski’s large following and his pioneer status, one might expect his declaration to precipitate a similar wave of emotional and ideological disengagement from Israel by other young, like-minded American Jews.”

But in Chandler’s view, Israel had it coming: “It’s no surprise that progressives are disillusioned. The continuing expansion of settlements and the Boycott Law are manifestations of trends in Israel that make it increasingly difficult for many of us to speak in its favor in public forums abroad, on college campuses, even at kitchen tables.”

Well, what do you readers think? Does Israel really have it coming? Has it screwed up so badly that it deserves to be “dumped” by disappointed Jewish progressives?

I took that question to my friend Gerald Bubis’ house last week, where he was hosting a salon in honor of Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the New Israel Fund.

After hearing Sokatch rattle off a long list of progressive projects that his organization supports in Israel — programs dealing with civil and human rights, social and economic justice, religious pluralism and tolerance, Israeli Arabs and Bedouin citizens, the environment and women’s rights — the only question on my mind was: Is Sieradski out of his mind? Has he not seen the progressive activity happening all over Israel?

Sokatch didn’t try to hide his dismay with some recent decisions by the Israeli government. But the extraordinary effect of his presentation was this: Government policy notwithstanding, there’s a whole lot of democratic action going on in Israel.

In fact, I think a great PR idea to engage young liberal Jews would be to have Sokatch go on college campuses and talk about how his group is helping advance progressive efforts in Israel: helping disadvantaged children of immigrants integrate into Israeli society; promoting empowerment activities for women and youth in Arab villages; providing legal help to establish and protect civil and human rights throughout the country; advancing the status of Jewish women whose rights have been violated by religious laws; helping protect the environment in the Galilee; and so on.

Sure, critics on the right have accused the New Israel Fund of supporting groups with anti-Israel views — but that kind of extreme liberalism is even more of a reason for progressives like Sieradski not to jump the Zionist ship.

Even a paper like the Los Angeles Times, while reporting on the Boycott Law, tried to keep things in perspective: “Examples of free speech in Israel are easy to find. Arab-Israeli lawmakers frequently attack the government as ‘racist’ on the Knesset floor … newspaper pundits don’t hesitate to launch character attacks against the prime minister.”

So, here’s my question. You’re a progressive supporter of Israel and you see the government doing things that really upset you. What do you look at — the government’s mistakes or the “corrective mechanism” that’s working on the ground to correct these mistakes? Do you get demoralized by the faults or rejuvenated by the freedom to fight these faults?

When you look at the thousands of people protesting right now throughout Israel, many of them sleeping in tents, do you think only of criticizing the government or do you also think of helping the protesters?

Someone like Sokatch looks at Israel’s faults and says, “What can I do to help?” Someone like Sieradski, after years of helping, now looks at Israel’s faults and says, “What can I do but bail?”

The truth is, Israel is a mess in progress. It is a country surrounded by enemies that has nevertheless created a civil society like no other in the Middle East. For all its many faults, there is a restless energy to make things better — what Sokatch calls “democracy in action.”

Progressive Zionists who don’t appreciate this duality, and who end up bailing on Israel, are like friends who only love you when you’re not around.

David Suissa: Fair-weather Zionists Read More »

To Every Thing There Is a Season

Leave a Comment / Culture, Entertainment, News /

I am still reeling a bit from the experience of attending Anna Deavere Smith’s riveting but also devastating show about death and dying, “Let Me Down Easy,” which just closed at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica.

As it turns out, the show was an appropriate way to prepare for Dr. Marc E. Agronin’s “How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Growing Old” (Da Capo, $25). The very first passage in the book describes the dissection of the corpse of a 98-year-old woman, a class exercise in medical school and “a dehumanizing rite of passage,” as the author puts it. 

Now practicing as an adult and geriatric psychiatrist at Miami Jewish Health Systems, Dr. Agronin invites us to join him in confronting the human soul within the aging body, an experience that “force[s] us to look momentarily into an eternal abyss and trigger[s] unanswerable questions about life and death that can bring wonder as easily as fear and despair.”

No prescriptions for long life are offered here, as Dr. Agronin warns us. “I am interested solely in honestly exploring the experience of old age through the lives of my patients,” he writes. But he does hold out the hope that we will learn some lessons about an inevitable and often distressing rite of passage. “These lessons promise not the end of aging but a new beginning even as we continue to age.”

Like Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland (“How We Die”) and Dr. Spencer Nadler (“The Language of Cells”), the author is a practicing physician who is also a gifted writer, a compassionate healer, and something of a philosopher, too.  He is deeply literate, and he decorates his book with apt selections from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and T. S. Eliot, among many other sources. But he is too brave and too honest to content himself with rhapsody, and his book — exactly like Anna Deavere Smith’s show — confronts us with moments of pain and loss. Sometimes, he confesses, it is the patient who makes the final prescription: “There is nothing more you can do for me,” said one dying woman named Emma. “It is time to die.”

He writes frankly about the challenges that he faces in his medical practice — the hard cases and the hopeless cases .— but he also looks for and finds moments of redemption.  “As a doctor to the aged, I have discovered that I must embrace this uncertainty and hold on tightly, often plunging in up to my elbows and hoping — sometimes against hope — that persistence and faith will prove correct,” he writes. “I have seen, however, that regardless of the outcome, our greatest humanity emerges in the desperate process of caring for someone old and ill.”

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve.

To Every Thing There Is a Season Read More »

Letters to the Editor: Norway, Jacob Dayan, Redistricting

Leave a Comment / Letters to the Editor, News, Opinion /

Christian Hate Claims Jewish Roots

While Rob Eshman makes an important and necessary argument in his editorial, he misses a serious point (“Web of Evil,” July 29). Fundamentalist, right-wing Christian extremists can claim brotherhood with Zionist Jews because their perception — sadly correct often enough — is that regardless of population demographics, regardless of the laws of Torah and the basic laws of Israel, regardless of our well-documented activities promoting tolerance and understanding, there are serious and continual examples of discrimination against the Israeli Arab population and a visceral antipathy among a significant portion of the in-and-out-of-Israel Jewish population for Arabs and Muslims. Where have I heard, “The only good Arab is a dead Arab”? From local Israelis. Where have I heard, “They’re all liars and can’t be trusted”? From American-born Jews.

Ironically (though they don’t see it this way), the defensive, underdog position defenders of Israel have been forced into has led them to embrace an Evangelical Christian right that, while professing fervent support of Israel, teaches in its dogma an ultimate Armageddon that leaves Israel with, at best, a caliphate-level Jewish population (separate and unequal) or, at worst, Judenrein. It is inherently anti-Semitic.

Yes, the Jewish community must do everything possible to distance itself from the malignant hate seething from an Anders Breivik and his ilk (Pat Buchanan?), but we must also face honestly the extent to which we fertilize the ground he walks on.

Mitch Paradise
Los Angeles

Praise for Jacob Dayan

Thank you for your articles about departing consul general Jacob Dayan and his wife, Galit (“A Diplomatic Partnership,” July 29). The Dayan family have been a perfect representation to Angelenos of the very best that Israel has to offer. Yaki has been a passionate and tireless advocate for the state of Israel at a time when the Jewish state has been under constant attack, both at home and abroad. He has also been an inspiration and source of strength and support to the local Israeli community.

It has been an honor and a pleasure to have hosted Yaki at our synagogue, Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel.

I am confident that we will be hearing much more in the years to come about this very special man and his exceptional family.

Tzetchem B’shalom. L’hitraot.

Rabbi Jay Shasho Levy
Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel

Another View of the Redistricting Issue

The fundamental premise — that Jewish political power increases when we’re clumped into a single district — is flawed (“Berman vs. Sherman?” July 22). It is equally likely that when a Jewish neighborhood is split into two or more political districts, two or more politicians can be made to pay attention to our concerns. That doesn’t dilute our political clout, it strengthens it.

Remember, Republicans enthusiastically embraced “majority-minority” districting in the South because, while it increased the number of black representatives, it decreased the total number of Democratic representatives. How? By bunching blacks, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, into fewer districts, thereby creating more majority Republican districts.

When it comes to political influence, building relationships with officeholders and coalitions with other voters is a better strategy than huddling together.

Paul Kujawsky
Valley Village

Circumcision’s Other Health Advantages

The article on the San Francisco circumcision ban by Jonah Lowenfeld (“The Great California Foreskin Fight of 2011,” June 24) thoroughly covered the characters co-sponsoring the anti-circumcision bill, but it failed to emphasize the multiple proven scientific lifetime preventive health advantages of newborn circumcision. During infancy and childhood, uncircumcised infants have a tenfold increased risk of getting severe kidney infections as well as being uniquely susceptible to foreskin infections, retraction problems (phimosis) and difficulties with genital hygiene. In young adults, circumcision helps prevent HIV/AIDS, genital herpes, HPV and other sexually transmitted infections, as well as cervical cancer in female partners. In old age, penile cancer and difficulty maintaining genital cleanliness are foreskin-related problems. Emphasizing these proven lifetime benefits is more important than getting out the anectdotal anti-circumcision party line.

Edgar Schoen
Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, Emeritus
University of California, San Francisco

The Arab Mentality

Rabbi Laura Geller, in her Torah Portion column, speaks out against an e-mail, “The Arab Mentality,” about a Palestinian woman arrested as a suicide bomber even though, after checking the story, she found the story to be true (“Silence Is Consent,” July 22). One objection was that the author was a member of a right-wing party. If the story came from a left-wing party member, would the story be OK? The author of the article ascribes a characteristic to a whole group (Arabs) and Rabbi Geller ascribes a characteristic to a whole group (right wing parties, not to be trusted even if what they say is true). What’s the difference between saying “The Arab Mentality” and “The Right Wing Mentality”?

Rabbi Geller is correct that we must speak out against something that is wrong, even if it comes from a rabbi.

Bill Azerrad
Los Angeles

Letters to the Editor: Norway, Jacob Dayan, Redistricting Read More »

Culture clash

Leave a Comment / Gina Nahai, News, Opinion /

In case you were too busy watching Congress make a fool of itself last month to have noticed, a parallel, no-less-wrenching debate was raging in the halls of Beverly Hills

City Hall at the same time. Instead of the debt limit, the issue in Beverly Hills was the city’s noise ordinance — specifically, how late people can party in their homes without having the police show up at their door and demand that the music be turned off. Currently, the law stipulates that residents can make noise until 6 p.m. on weeknights and 10 p.m. on weekends. It’s safe to say that whoever drafted that law was 1) not Iranian and 2) not aware that Iranian parties don’t really start until 10 p.m. on any night of the week.

The Iranians, in turn, seem to have been unaware that 1) not everyone who lives in Beverly Hills is Iranian and 2) the other residents of Beverly Hills don’t really care what time Iranian parties start or end, they just want some peace and quiet at the end of the day; they’re quite happy with the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. arrangement, thank you very much. A few months ago, some Iranians began to lobby for more indulgent noise limits. That, in turn, unleashed 30 years’ worth of resentment over the sound and the fury that Iranian parties seem to have generated in Beverly Hills. The ensuing standoff is not unlike the Roman siege of Masada, with the Iranians playing the part of the Jews.

Lest you suspect that I have an ax to grind on either end, I don’t live in Beverly Hills and have no vested interest in the outcome of this fight. It’s true that in the grand, life-and-death-and-world-peace scheme of things, how late the DJ should be allowed to play is a rather trivial question. Then again, this is great drama: a conflict in which both sides are right, yet separated by vast, forbidding and solid ground. I know because I’ve had the good fortune of eating dinner on both sides of Masada’s walls, and I’m here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, you might as well be talking about two different planets.

I’ve been to many an Iranian party where the music nearly made my ears bleed, the conversation was shallow and overly spirited, and cars were backed up two blocks waiting for the valet. But I’ve also sat through many an American dinner at which the guests didn’t utter a word to each other while they ate.

I’ve yet to go to an Iranian dinner party where the host hasn’t prepared 12 dishes when two would have sufficed, but I’ve also been to more than one American BYOM (Bring Your Own Meat) dinner where the only thing the host provided was the fire on which to cook the meat. Fights broke out when two people claimed the same piece of steak as their own.

I know that Iranians often go overboard trying to impress their guests with their wealth and good taste. They pay way too much to the florist because they know he will rat them out to his other clients if they “act cheap,” and they are afraid to ask the DJ to turn the music down after they’ve paid him $10,000 for five hours. But I’ve also been to a dinner party thrown by a French woman in $500 sandals who asked guests how many olives they would eat (the limit was three each) then counted that exact number and put them in the salad. When the main course — spaghetti with sauce from a jar — was served, she spent 10 minutes arguing with her mother over whose Parmesan was in the fridge. The mother won, and we ate our pasta without cheese.

Some of my Iranian friends spend too much precious time and valuable brain power preparing for parties, gauge their popularity by and draw their self-esteem from the number of parties they get invited to. Iranian hosts would be shocked if any of their guests shows up less than an hour late. When they say they’re having “a few people” over, they’re really talking about “a few hundred.” They serve dinner at midnight, coffee at 2 a.m. Sometimes, they serve breakfast as well.

Then again, my very dear American friend Madeleine likes to do laundry and make the beds while she has people over. She usually serves cold cuts. The one time she planned to cook, she waited till all the guests had arrived, then decided to take a piece of raw, cryogenically frozen meat out of the freezer to let it thaw. The meat was the only potentially edible item in the house. Madeleine uses her fridge as a filing cabinet — to store important documents that may otherwise be destroyed in a fire.

My other friend Nora, a WASP who lists her profession as “heiress” on every questionnaire she has to fill out, met me at the door of her Hollywood Hills house on a Saturday night only to announce that she had canceled her party and failed to tell me. She had invited 34 people weeks earlier, then called every one of them to say she had just bought a new Ferrari with a $10,000 sound system and would rather drive top down on Sunset Strip than see any of their faces. She insisted on taking me for a joy ride. The Ferrari was a stick shift; Nora didn’t know how to drive a stick shift. Her house was high on top of a steep hill with narrow streets and no sidewalks. Every three minutes, the car roared to life, lurched forward, slammed to a stop and took another year off my life.

My husband says I have some very strange friends. Maybe so, but someday, I’ll tell you about the pork-and-beans dinners I’ve endured at the homes of his Beverly Hills Jewish American friends. The point is, I wouldn’t give up any of these events — not the noisy Iranian parties, not the olive-counting, Parmesan-fighting Americans — in favor of the other. I remember when I first came to Los Angeles in 1974, how plain and provincial and downright boring a city it was. Beverly Hills’ idea of “ethnic” food was Nate ’n Al’s on one street and a Polynesian restaurant called The Luau on the next. Not that anyone’s asking, but I think the great Rochelle Ginsburg, a human relations commissioner in Beverly Hills, had it just right when she suggested that the two sides split the difference and move on. The Jews of Masada should fire the DJ if he won’t lower the volume (and they should really fire that florist, too), and the Romans should let their hair down a little and think about all the peace and quiet we’re all going to get when the music really stops.

Culture clash Read More »

Norway and multiculturalism

Leave a Comment / News, Opinion /

In a recent New York Times article, Scott Shane describes how the violence in Norway emerged from a distinct rhetorical and ideological context, and perhaps the left appropriately will admonish the right for the vitriol of its tirades against multiculturalism. If so, however, it is also incumbent upon progressives — and Jewish progressives in particular — to take this moment to articulate a serious, affirmative vision for a successful multicultural future.

First of all, the progressive position is rooted in an undisputed fact: We live in a multicultural society.

Second, progressivism generally welcomes this fact as a source of societal enrichment rather than cultural dilution or endangerment.

Third, American liberalism does not propose the laissez-faire cultural autonomy that is attributed to some European nations. Though conservatives sometimes depict liberalism as so much relativism run amok, this is an inapposite caricature. Progressivism does not seek to abolish the reasonable limits imposed by the ethical and legal norms of mainstream society.

American Jews have a particular stake in this progressive position. We are the direct beneficiaries of it, and we have much to teach about striking the balance between committed citizenship on the one hand, and unapologetic difference on the other.

Having enshrined the religious principle that “the law of the land is law,” we have at the same time vigorously promoted our distinct religious and ethnic culture. We know from experience that this can be a delicate negotiation and sometimes a costly one. But the Jewish community, including progressives, does not shy from it, nor does it exempt other minorities from it.

Where Jewish progressivism is classically liberal is in its expectation that, within those limits, mainstream society makes room for, and even allows itself to be queried by, minority values, attitudes and aesthetics.

The success of the American Jewish experience has, by and large, vindicated this perspective. Judaism inherently challenges Christianity, and yet we American Jews will not accede to a vision of Americanism that relegates us to the merely tolerated. We cite, with vigor and pride, Article VI of the Constitution, the First Amendment and George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue, rejecting the notion of toleration, “as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States … requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

“Demean” is a helpful word because, though archaic in usage, it captures the fact that civic participation necessitates some degree of self-abnegation. Once established as the bounds of cultural and religious expression, however, good citizenship also protects it and, by extension, legitimates it.

Jewish liberalism celebrates both sides of this equation, especially their mutual promotion such as the Jewish community has, in significant measure, achieved.

It is high time that the cultural debate about multiculturalism, which the Norwegian tragedy now risks polarizing, recognize the nuance of this posture, which is the dominant liberal one in this county and which the Jewish community has, in its majority, historically espoused.

Norway and multiculturalism Read More »

Where hope is to be found

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, News, Opinion /

Recent events have cast a dark pall over Israel. The total collapse of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) has led the latter to pursue the course of unilateral action, as reflected in the drive for United Nations affirmation of Palestinian statehood in September. Meanwhile, a wave of parliamentary activity, instigated by Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party, threatens to undermine key foundations of Israel’s democratic tradition by seeking to stifle dissent and free expression.

And yet, on a visit in late July, I discovered that there are persistent and rather unlikely signs of vitality in Israel — and Palestine as well — that allow for a measure of hope. What is distinctive about these signs is that they eschew the kind of sweeping, top-down political solutions that have been the source of so much expectation and accompanying disappointment. Quite to the contrary, they emerge from the bottom up, from grass-roots efforts that seek not a grand resolution to the simmering conflict, but a measure of justice and dignity for individuals.

The first sign of this kind is the remarkable social ferment that has gripped Israel for the past several weeks. On the night of July 30, 150,000 people took to the streets to protest the unaffordable prices and insufficient stock that make housing a desperate concern for many Israelis. Protesters across the country began to dwell in tents in streets in dozens of cities and town to express their opposition to the unrestrained free market that has priced out most Israelis from purchasing or even renting apartments. The protesters are students, parents, religious, secular, individuals, families, Jew and Arab. 

Until recently, this curious collection of Israelis would have said that efforts at large-scale change in their society would lead nowhere. They were shaken out of this belief by the unlikeliest of catalysts — a lightning response, fomented by Facebook, opposing an overnight 100 percent increase in a basic Israeli staple, cottage cheese. The “cottage cheese boycott” of mid-June not only forced a rollback of the extortionist price increase, but also encouraged young Israelis to take to the streets to express their dismay at the fraying social compact in Israel. It is not clear where the protests will lead — whether, for example, they bear the potential to force serious reforms to Israel’s economic privatization strategy (which widens the gap between rich and poor by the day). But it has been an exhilarating example of social enfranchisement for many — a sort of Tahrir Square for Israelis, 87 percent of whom indicated support for the tent protesters in a recent poll.

On a far smaller scale, and without the overwhelming support accorded the tent protesters, rays of hope can be found in the work of small and dedicated groups of activists who fight every day to make Israel live up to the ideals of its own Proclamation of Independence. I spent time with one of these activists, a co-founder of the Israeli group Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence). This group has the mission of collecting testimonies from Israeli soldiers about aberrant practices they observed during Israel Defense Forces (IDF) operations in which they participated. Breaking the Silence also conducts regular tours to the Jewish quarter in Hebron with the mission of exposing the ugliest face of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. 

Hebron was the site of the brutal uprooting of the ancient Jewish community in 1929, in which 67 Jews were massacred. Bent on restoring a presence in Hebron, groups of extremist settlers forced their way back into the city after the Six-Day War in 1967. In order to secure the safety of this small group of settlers, the IDF, along with the police and border patrol, have created a virtual ghost town in the once-teeming marketplace of Hebron — this to assure that hundreds of Jews have free movement while thousands of Palestinians are restricted in gaining access to their homes, cars and businesses. It is a haunting, Orwellian maze of streets and checkpoints that costs millions of dollars a year to maintain and yields blatant discrimination based on race and religion. (One wonders how Israel’s housing crisis would look if the massive government investment in the settlement project were reversed.)

The work that Breaking the Silence does in calling attention to the unconscionable situation in Hebron brings down upon it much criticism. Its activists are labeled traitors, anti-Zionists and even “terrorists,” according to the delusional rhetoric of a recent Knesset proposal. They are anything but. The guide who took me on a site visit to Hebron is a proud Israeli and observant Jew who is motivated by what he regards as the best of Jewish and Zionist values. He seeks not the dismantling of the State of Israel, but the realization of its fullest potential. He does not hold his breath for a breakthrough in high-level negotiations, but rather than sit on his hands, he works from the bottom up to effect justice at the local, individual level. He has hope, because he refuses to succumb to the alternative.

I encountered a similar sentiment while giving a lecture at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian students were attentive, curious and engaged. As we sat together in the university cafeteria, they told me that they, too, harbored little hope of a negotiated settlement. All the talk of a two-state solution that attended the Oslo peace process had brought a Palestinian state no closer to fruition. Later, they gave voice to the view that the average Israeli, in their experience, is a violent, gun-toting soldier.

Hearing them talk this way was disheartening, an indication of the deep chasm between the two proximate societies. And yet, quite remarkably, many of the students, just minutes after describing their fear of Israelis, expressed the strong desire to meet their contemporaries across the Green Line. Some had even organized surreptitious encounters between Israelis and Palestinians, social opportunities in which politics was set aside in order to order to get to know one another. The students had fought through their own fears, in extremely trying conditions, to recognize the innate and core humanity dwelling in their fiercest of rivals. 

It is at such moments that glimmers of hope enter the dark chamber of despair. Israel is not bathed in hope at present. But it was important to be reminded, especially by the young people of the region, that we are not at liberty to surrender to despair.

Where hope is to be found Read More »

Is Tel Aviv/L.A. partnership still working?

Leave a Comment / California, Community, Is Featured?, Israel, Lead Story, News /

It’s one of those visions that becomes so natural in its realization it’s easy to forget just how cutting-edge it once was.

In 1995, leaders of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles sought to establish a connection with a community in Israel that would be based on intimate and mutually beneficial relationships, not on the rich uncle-poor nephew model that until then had characterized how U.S. Jews related to their Israeli cousins.

Federation established the Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership in 1997, a sister city network that involved schools, professionals and artists in collaborative projects and exchange programs.

The Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership became the first and eventually largest of the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Partnership 2000 program, and by all accounts evolved into an international model for fostering a more mature relationship between Israel and the Diaspora.

Now, Federation is putting that relationship under a microscope, to determine what it can learn from the successes of the past 16 years and where there is room for expansion, improvement or elimination of some elements of the program.

Nearly all agree the most successful component of the program has been the School Twinning Program, through which 38 middle and high schools, 19 each in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, collaborate on joint curricula, participate in video conferencing and exchange delegations annually. Federation estimates that, since its inception, the School Twinning Program has touched some 60,000 people — including, in addition to the students, the educators and families who house the delegations — and alumni of the program attest to the lasting relationships built through it.

A cinema master class, which brings together top film and television professionals from both cities for a summer workshop (a group that included Jerry Bruckheimer and J.J. Abrams, among others (see related story on Page 15), met with Israeli filmmakers in Los Angeles this month), has resulted in collaborative film projects and adaptations of Israeli shows — such as “In Treatment” — breaking into the American market, thus indirectly reaching millions.

While the school twinning comprises 85 percent of the roughly $1.4 million budget of the Partnership, and the master class another 10 percent, many smaller programs have also built bridges in other areas — master classes in opera, choreography and the visual arts, and initiatives on poverty, school violence and fundraising. Mayor’s councils in both cities have at times involved top municipal leadership and led to a collaborative environmental effort, including a Sister River agreement signed in 2008 by Mayors Antonio Villaraigosa and Ron Huldai, involving the Los Angeles and Yarkon Rivers. Collaborations between museums, galleries, universities and municipal agencies created connections with Jews and non-Jews.

In the process, according to both external and internal evaluations, Angelenos have connected in a real way to Israel and Israelis, and secular Tel Avivians experienced, often for the first time, what liberal Judaism could look like, and have built a connection to Diaspora Jewry.

But even with that success, the Partnership needs some fresh energy to move forward, according to Federation.

“The Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership was the flagship project of [The Jewish Agency for Israel’s] Partnership 2000, and people sort of took it for granted that it was smooth sailing and very effective,” said Gidi Grinstein, president of the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv strategy group that conducted a study of the Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership in 2010.

“In 1995, this Partnership was the most far-sighted, cutting-edge, break-through idea. And if you look at the documents of 15 years ago, even today they are relevant. They were way ahead of their time.” Yet, he said, “What we found in our study is that in order to continue to lead and serve as a model partnership, it needs to be restructured and transformed.”

The re-evaluation is part of a comprehensive review of all its programs that Federation began undertaking in the last five years, first under the chairmanship of Stanley Gold, and then more intensely when Jay Sanderson was hired to fill Federation’s top professional position, becoming president in January 2010. Federation traditionally has been a funding umbrella for the Jewish community, but its campaign of roughly $40 million has been relatively flat through the last decade.

“When Stanley and I first got involved, one of the issues we addressed was where does Federation spend its money. Does a program get Federation money just because it got funded last year?” said Richard Sandler, who served as vice chair with Gold and is now Federation chairman, the top lay leadership post. “I came into this position first and foremost as a donor, and as a donor I want to know where my money is going, and whether it is being spent in a way that makes the greatest impact.”

While the evaluation was taking place over the last 18 months, Federation suspended all Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership programs except for the school twinning and the master class. The lay steering committee and chairmanship of the Partnership has also been dissolved both in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv.

Federation is in the process of convening a group of lay leaders and professionals to examine which programs will continue, which will expand, which will get cut and what new programs might be added.

Sanderson and a large team of top Federation professionals met in June with lay leaders in Los Angeles, and he is meeting in August with leaders in Israel.

“Once we have new leadership in Tel Aviv, and we have some new thinking and new ideas and new people, then we will reconstitute the Partnership in a way where we can look at creating programs that speak to our new priorities and integrate into our work,” Sanderson said.

The Reut Institute believes the international Partnership model is a key element in a successful Jewish future, and is deeply involved in supporting and shoring up the Jewish Agency’s Partnership 2000, recently renamed Partnership2Gether, or P2G. When Grinstein heard that the L.A. Federation was re-evaluating its partnership, he offered to conduct a study. Reut interviewed more than 50 participants in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv last summer, absorbing the cost of the study.

The study found that the Partnership can continue to hold great relevance and enrich both communities.

“For this to happen, there needs to be much greater focus on partnership and mutuality around a much smaller number of bigger efforts, because one of the things we have heard from many, many people is that the Partnership is not creating the critical mass of value for the communities,” Grinstein said. “It creates a lot of value for those that participate in the different activities, but not necessarily for the wider community.”

The report also recommended that the two cities identify and focus on common narratives — such as the entertainment industry or Jewish innovation and creative spirituality.

The report suggests integrating the partnership into Federation’s overall vision and focusing its diverse programs into a unified vision.

To date, the Partnership has served as an umbrella for many diverse efforts. Jewish Family Service introduced Tel Aviv to its Café Europa, a social and resource program for Holocaust survivors, and the cities regularly exchanged social workers to learn from each other’s best practices. A health initiative involved Tel Aviv University and UCLA, and medical exchanges involved major hospitals in both cities.

Is Tel Aviv/L.A. partnership still working? Read More »

A Road Trip Without Roads

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Our family does many things differently from other families.

This weekend, my husband (who used the money he earned as a Torah reader in his teens to pay for flying lessons), flew the four of us to the Gilroy Garlic Festival and then to Sacramento in a rented 4-seater Cessna182 RG for a weekend of fun in the sun (not to mention all that garlic). Even after 22 years of flying with my husband, I still find myself reciting the Shema under my breath while sitting in what is basically a Mini Cooper with wings, but not Danny. He now loves flying in a “small plane” and craning his neck to see, as he calls it the “view LA” especially at night, when the carpet of lights twinkle from the mountains to the sea.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, when Danny was younger, he was very challenged with sensory integration disorder The slightest noise—a can opener, an espresso machine, even hearing a shofar blow, would send him into a crying jag. In his first few trips in the small plane, he fussed and yelled and refused to wear the headphones which help to cancel out the very loud engine noise. We weren’t sure he was ever doing to be able to adjust to the sensory issues inherently present in small plane flying. But, then as he worked with an occupational therapist, and we did a “brushing” program with a non-scratching surgical brush and also deep joint compressions, he gradually become more tolerant of all types of sounds. In fact, Danny now seeks out the speakers at a concert, getting in as close as possible.

In preparation for a three-week western states “road trip” in 2005, my husband decided to take Danny a few short trips, just the two of them, so Danny could gradually acclimate to the whole routine, including the pre-flight “run up” in which the engine is tested and is incredibly noisy.

We ended up logging slightly over 21 hours of actual airtime, flying 3,000 miles in total. Our route took us from Southern California to the Grand Canyon in Arizona; Bryce Canyon in Utah; Santa Fe; New Mexico; and then north to Salt Lake City; up to Boise, Idaho; west to Gold Beach on the rugged Oregon coastline and finally to Sacramento for an old-fashioned July 4th complete with fireworks with my sister and her family before coming home to Los Angeles. We had varied experiences at different airports along the way—we landed our plane at small strips in the middle of the Arizona desert with sagebrush tumbling over the runway and at fancy private jet operators where the Cessna was like a broken down 1990 Honda being parked next to a BMW at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

After that vacation, Danny truly earned his “wings” —in fact we now use the reward of a future trip in small plane to encourage positive behavior. Like I said, we just do things differently.

A Road Trip Without Roads Read More »