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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

November 2, 2011

Schools in southern Israel reopen

Leave a Comment / Israel, News /

Schools reopened in southern Israeli communities after having been closed for three days due to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip.

Children returned to school Wednesday. More than 45 rockets and mortars had fallen on southern Israel in the previous three days.

Many of the schools do not have areas fortified against rocket attacks to protect the students and staff. The Home Front Command announced Tuesday during a meeting of the Knesset Education Committee that all schools within about 15 miles of the Gaza border will have protected spaces by the start of next school year.

Schools in southern Israel reopen Read More »

My Single Peeps: Altara M.

Leave a Comment / Culture, Is Featured?, My Single Peeps, News, Singles /

Altara is an only child, raised in New York. She wants to find a man from the East Coast. And when she wants something, she goes after it. That’s how she got in this column.

“At 27, I bought myself a little Mercedes. I focused on something I was really good at. I sold advertising. Because I had so much success in that, I was able to go to Sundance and become a journalist, do my own radio show, do some acting work. Because I know my pattern of behavior, when I say I’m going to do this as my full-time job, it frees me up to do it.”

She’s 32 now and wants to get her real-estate license and start selling homes. But her passion is entertainment. “When you’re passionate about something, you’ll put all your energy into making it successful because you deem it important.” She tells me about the documentary she’s been working on — “It’s going to be out of this world.”

She’s an only child, and, unlike someone like me — the third of four siblings — she is brimming with self-esteem. She doesn’t seem to have a fear of failure, or any self-deprecation. “A casting director called me in to play the younger version of Barbra Streisand. So when I get things now, they’re pretty big.” I ask her if she got the job. “No. It went to a girl who had her nose and her eyes.”

She takes charge of the interview and asks me, “Do you want to know what I like to do?” I shrug. “Sure.” She says, “Hiking, working out, anything that has to do with working hard and pushing myself. I like to do Bikram yoga when I feel like being really cruel to myself. I hike Runyon [Canyon] five to seven days a week for about an hour and a half per day. I go to the gym for body-sculpting classes and Pilates classes, and I like to use the treadmill and talk to my friends. I love movies, of course. I love to do new things. When I go on a date, I like to do new things. If they do the same thing the last guy did, it’s unoriginal.”

“So, no dinners?” I ask. She says, “It comes down to original conversation. Show me your real personality. Even if it’s just grabbing a bite to eat, if the person is interesting, who cares what we’re doing.”

She wants to meet a man who isn’t on the same page as her — “maybe a little further ahead. Maybe a little older. I’d like to meet someone in the business out here, but I’m not opposed to meeting a doctor.” A Jewish woman looking for a doctor? Shocker.

“I’m looking for the real deal. I’m looking for a soul mate. My parents have been married for 39 years. I think they’re perfect for one another.”

Altara didn’t grow up religious, but she recently started going to Shabbat dinners hosted by a Chabad rabbi. “Everyone I met most recently in the Jewish community is amazing, and it’s like everyone knows each other. I realize I like having that “family” out here. I didn’t realize how powerful it could be. The people I’m hanging out with are amazing, and I guess I didn’t realize that until I needed it.”

She’s decided to start saying yes to more things in life. “I think that’s the moral of the story when it comes to my life. Sometimes you just have to keep moving forward when it comes to doing things. Choose new avenues — and keep yourself open and not be closed off.”

If you’re interested in anyone you see on My Single Peeps, send an e-mail and a picture, including the person’s name in the subject line, to mysinglepeeps@jewishjournal.com, and we’ll forward it to your favorite peep.

Seth Menachem is an actor and writer living in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter. You can see more of his work on his Web site, sethmenachem.com, and meet even more single peeps at mysinglepeeps.com.

My Single Peeps: Altara M. Read More »

Don’t abandon old in pursuit of ‘Next’

Leave a Comment / News, Opinion /

Over the last few years, I have spent considerable time on the inside of what is called the “innovation sector” in Jewish life, even spending two terrific and unexpected years as a professor of Jewish communal innovation at Brandeis University. Most recently, the new organization that I am leading, the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, was named in its first year of existence to the prestigious Slingshot list, which catalogs and profiles the most innovative organizations working in the Jewish community.

Throughout this time, I have heard — and sometimes shared! — a lot of skepticism and antagonism about this terminology about “innovation.” And with good reason. The Jewish community in North America is in dramatic flux, as its defining institutions are vulnerable to cultural changes, leadership crises, dramatically different financial realities, and totally different models of affiliation and membership that threaten their membership rolls and the power that they have wielded for so long. Or we might paint the situation more drastically: Judaism, in general, is still an old religion seeking to make sense of seemingly incompatible modern values and ideas, and struggling in so many of its diverse incarnations just to survive in the marketplace of the present.

With all of this fear and trepidation, all of this talk of the new, the innovative — read: the different, the better — generates predictable fear and anxiety. This innovation sector tends to emphasize the work of outsiders, of young people and of those willing to challenge the status quo. What does this portend for the austere and august institutions that have served the Jewish community for so long? If so many of these young leaders are products of “the establishment,” why does their attention seem so focused on the marginal? Ultimately, what is going to be the relationship between the mainstream (which needs so much help) and the margins (where there seems to be so much enthusiasm and energy)?

And on the flip side, there is considerable anxiety as well on the innovation side of things. For all the attention flowing to the young Turks, the money has flowed more slowly — and usually in the form of start-up grants that dry up, ironically, as the organization moves into its critical and stabilizing second phase. If the innovation sector is being treated, even by its supporters, as faddish, what is the long-term success proposition for the legitimately good and important ideas that are swept up in this fervor?

But after all this, I think innovation in Jewish life is actually quite a simple proposition: To be cutting-edge or innovative in today’s Jewish community is to see systemic failures in Jewish life — whether organizational, cultural, methodological, or ideological — and to build a bridge from bad practices to good ones. The best Jewish innovators need not be young or iconoclastic; in fact, I would suggest that we will be best equipped to envision the present if we are well rooted in our past, emboldened and empowered by those who have come before us to have both confidence in the present and an optimistic eye toward the future.

The language of innovation is suffering badly from its blending meaninglessly with “newness.” Perhaps it is just Ecclesiastes ringing in my ears from hearing it read last week in shul, but I am not convinced that what we will come up with as “new” will really be new, or, for that matter, that what is new will necessarily be better. Jewish tradition actually embeds the role of innovation into its own integral ecosystem; for all its trivialities and minutiae, rabbinic traditions are driven by the centrality of the hiddush — the innovative idea or interpretation — which takes a stalled understanding or an outdated mode and gives it new meaning. The classical rabbis, I think, were less constrained by failed methodologies than they were by the ways in which those methodologies were understood. Their own surprising self-reflection about the beit midrash — the traditional study house, in so many ways the picture of staid and stodgy old Judaism — is very telling: “There is no study house without innovation.” Put differently, if the work of the past and the present does not involve a constant renewing and refreshing, then the old becomes stale while the new remains uninspired.

In our current work with the Hartman Institute — as one of the older institutions represented on Slingshot, but now one of the newer innovators on the block — we are trying to carry out a very plain but hopefully novel experiment. Our methodology is pleasantly “old school.” We believe in the interpersonal encounter with a text and a scholar, around a table in a classroom (or, more often, in a conference room of a strong Jewish institution). We also continue to rely heavily on the classical canon of Jewish thought and ideas, even as we work both to refresh the ideas and to find new delivery systems for the best of what Jewish tradition has to offer. Sure, we are growing our Web and social media presence, and we use all sorts of technologies both to run our internal operation and to broadcast the messages coming out of the work of our world-class research teams. But at the end of the day, we basically believe that the fundamentals of the educational encounter need not change. What does need to change — constantly and furiously — is the content of our conversations and the roster of the participants around the table.

This then might be one mechanism by which we as a community more effectively blend the old with the new, the fresh with the seasoned, the venerable institutions with the vervy start-ups: By focusing on the seriousness of the content of Jewish life, investing in the major ideas that characterize Judaism and have been its principal legacy, and then massively diversifying the base of participants who can take ownership of this hybrid between new and old. What are the big ideas for the Jewish future? It may just be the stuff of the Jewish past.

Yehuda Kurtzer is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He was visiting assistant professor and the inaugural Chair of Jewish Communal Innovation at Brandeis University.

Don’t abandon old in pursuit of ‘Next’ Read More »

Oh, to be young and stupid again

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

I was 21 years old, a first-year law student at USC, when I walked by a trailer parked on an empty lot off McCarthy Way on the downtown campus. It was late afternoon, and I was on my way home; I only noticed the trailer because it was such an anomaly among the red brick buildings surrounding it. The door was open, and I could hear voices inside, and I saw a young man with dark skin and a sparse, reddish beard standing amid a mess of paper on the floor.

“Come on in,” he said, like the big, bad wolf in the story, and I did.

There was a maroon yard-sale couch, a creaky desk chair with no desk, a few stacks of books, a tall man wearing a brown-leather jacket, black socks and no shoes. He introduced himself as “the director,” and the young man, Michael, as “the program specialist.” They welcomed me to the “program offices,” offered to answer my questions, handed me a one-page application, and I still had no idea where I was, what “program” they were talking about or why “the director” had no shoes.

It turned out that he was James Ragan, a noted poet who had recently taken over the then-fledgling Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. In retrospect, that just about explained everything, including the modesty of the premises; I promise you the law school deans all had desks and wore shoes at the office. Then again, I had met many a lawyer and dean and professor in my life; I’d never met a poet. Nor had I imagined there were schools that trained people to become writers, or that anyone in his right mind would actually decide he was going to be one. All the writers I’d ever heard of had either committed suicide or stabbed or shot someone. They were depressives and alcoholics; they died young in car accidents or were put in jail and tortured by their governments and then thrown out of helicopters into marshlands.

You have to remember this was before every university and community college and online school discovered that there are more writers in the world than readers, and that every one of those writers can use some instruction, and can create what a literary-minded friend of mine calls “a booklike object,” and that some of those booklike objects go on to become classics or mega-sellers or, at the very least, a safe hobby. And it was before most nice Iranian-Jewish girls like me wanted to grow up to have a profession, as well as a family. And, yes, I was young and stupid and didn’t know just what a risk I was taking, but a few weeks after I made my great discovery, I dropped out of law school and signed up at the trailer.

The jury’s still out on whether this was a good idea in the long run, but I’m forever grateful to James Ragan for encouraging me to write, and grateful to the stars for putting him on my path.

I was reminded of this a couple of Sundays ago, when I went to Orange County for the Iranian-American Women’s Leadership Conference — 680 professional women, 40 speakers, every last one of them impressive and accomplished in her field. It wasn’t the first time I’d been to an event like this, but I found myself having an especially good time and feeling unusually inspired. Late in the day, I went to thank Maryam Khosravani, the brain and the force behind the conference, for inviting me. I heard myself say that the gathering had been a revelation to me, which was true, though it would take a while longer for me to figure out why, and some more time after that to admit it to myself: These women were all Iranian.

The last time I was surrounded by nearly 700 Iranian professional women was — I’ve been raking my mind about this for over a week — never. I’ve known for a long time that there are thousands of brilliant, successful Iranians in this county, but it never occurred to me that so many of them could be women. I’m talking about senior executive positions at the World Bank and Boeing and Texas Instruments and Genentech; about directorships at major research medical centers and universities. It’s not as if any of these people had been hiding herself all these years; it’s more like I had taken an idea with me out of Iran, when I left in 1973, and carried it around for the next 38 years till I happened to go to the Hilton in Costa Mesa. In between, I’ve had a vague idea that leaving Iran has been the best thing that could have happened to Iranian women, but that was mostly because of rights issues and family traditions. And I’ve witnessed the endless hyperbole and unrestrained self-promotion generated by a few women, but, as is often the case, the ones who scream loudest have the least to boast of.

For me, the existence of so many accomplished Iranian women puts the lie to the image so many Angelenos have of Iranian women as being either oppressed and unhappy, or bored, infantile and overly comfortable. It was proof that while some of us might have stayed in a high-school frame of mind well into our 30s and 40s, struggling to be liked and accepted by the “cool” girls or to date and marry the rich boys, and while many of us expect too little of ourselves and our daughters, many more have gone on to scale great heights.

I’m so glad I had a chance to look through this other door, and that the people inside invited me in. Right before I left, I went up to Parisa Khosravi, senior vice president of international news gathering for CNN Worldwide, and told her that in my youth, I had dreamt of becoming a reporter, only I had no idea that an Iranian girl like me could grow up to become a woman like her. I only hope that our children’s generation has a better eye for all the open doors and all the magical figures that reside beyond them.

Oh, to be young and stupid again Read More »

Don’t be fooled!

Leave a Comment / News, Opinion /

Evangelical missionary David Herzog stooped to a new low deceiving the Jewish community with ads which intentionally avoided any mention of their Christian evangelical agenda.

The half-page ads ran for several weeks in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. They promoted a Beverly Hills event offering “supernatural healings” based on what the ad termed Jewish mysticism.

The ads were devoid of any phone number or website that would have facilitated an easy investigation into the true nature of the program.

It turns out Herzog’s duplicity was intentional. He writes on the “In Jesus” website that “due to the highly sensitive nature of these 100% evangelistic meetings dubbed as lectures to the Jewish community we cannot give out the location or details.”

A number of Jewish students attended the recent event, only to discover they had been duped by the Herzog ads.

As the founder and director of Jews for Judaism, I know this is not the first time a community newspaper has been the target of such duplicity. A number of years ago we alerted the community that ads for the missionary movie “The Rabbi” were surreptitiously placed in dozens of Jewish newspapers across North American.

Once the Jewish Journal realized Herzog’s true intentions, it refused to accept any more of his ads.

Herzog has appeared on many of the growing number of messianic television shows. He is part of a long line of Christian faith healers running revival meetings. However, in his case, Herzog has a Jewish name and he gloats at his success at conducting major “Jewish Outreach” on the East Coast, West Coast and Israel.

“Even the Jewish newspapers are begging us to put our ads in their next Health Issue,” he wrote online.

In a pitch to solicit donations, Herzog claims his historic outreach meetings will be, “packed with unsaved Jewish people wide open to the gospel presented with healings and miracles.”

Speaking of past meetings Herzog claims, “miracles broke out, many were healed, and American and Israeli Jews received salvation after God powerfully healed them.”

Although missionaries are less visible on street corners, the Herzog episode demonstrates that attempts to convert Jews have not diminished.  They have simply implemented new tactics and taken advantage of the Internet to reach unsuspecting students and young adults often within the comfort of their homes and dormitory rooms.

As a community we must remain vigilant and increase our positive educational and spiritual promotion of Judaism. Additionally, missionary claims must be continuously refuted and individuals must be taught to think critically to avoid being fooled and taken advantage of.

Jews for Judaism is already planning a campaign to prepare the community for a Chosen People Ministries crusade scheduled to target the Los Angeles Jewish community in 2012.  This time we have enough notice to plan in advance, and it is imperative that the entire community rally together and join us in presenting a strong front.

Rabbi Bentzion Kravitz is the founder and director of Jews for Judaism. He can be reached at la@JewsForJudaism.org.

Don’t be fooled! Read More »

My holy peeps

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

Few things in Jewish life get a rabbi more excited than the chance to help Jews marry other Jews. One reason is the difficulty factor: It’s always been a challenge to convince young Jews, especially the unaffiliated, to limit their marriage options to the 2 percent of the population that is Jewish.

Another, less publicized, problem is that the Jewish community is not immune to the trends occurring in the rest of society, where, among other things, the new generation keeps putting marriage off.

According to a cover story by Katie Bolick in The Atlantic magazine this month, in 1960, the median age in the United States for a first marriage was 23 for men and 20 for women. Today, it is 28 and 26. This new generation is also marrying less. In 1960, more than half the population ages 18 to 29 had already tied the knot. Today, that figure is 22 percent. 

The article states that these numbers reflect “major attitudinal shifts.” According to a study by the Pew Research Center, a full 43 percent of Gen-Xers think “marriage is becoming obsolete.”

Whether Jews mirror these larger trends, it’s clear that the societal landscape is changing, and that rabbis are looking for new and compelling ways to connect single Jews to the time-honored ideal of “a Jewish marriage.” Urging them to come to shul on Shabbat or attend a Torah class during the week is hardly enough. And the high-pressure “singles events” can often snuff out the spontaneity of a romantic encounter.

But, based on my experience last Friday night, I can tell you that one synagogue in Pico-Robertson has found a compelling and even biblical way to attract the single crowd: a great Shabbat meal with lots of singing and plenty of good kosher wine.

Under a new “young adult” initiative, Beth Jacob Congregation is now offering, on at least one Friday night each month, a complete Shabbat experience: evening prayers, a catered meal, recitation of all the blessings, words of Torah from Rabbi Kalman Topp, Shabbat songs, kosher wine, coffee and dessert, schmoozing until the late hours and, of course, the featured (if unspoken) attraction — the opportunity to meet your soul mate.

Since the program was launched earlier this year, attendance has grown from a few dozen to more than 200 singles — helped, no doubt, by the very reasonable price of $15 per person (the synagogue subsidizes about half of the cost).

This idea of reaching out to singles on Friday night is not new. My friend Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, founder of the Chai Center, has been hosting his “Shabbat meal for 30 strangers” at his home for years, with more than a few success stories.

Also, Sinai Temple has its popular monthly “Friday Night Live” events, where hundreds of singles experience a joyous synagogue service led by the charismatic duo of musician Craig Taubman and Rabbi David Wolpe.

The new program at Beth Jacob marries components from both of those:  a synagogue service (Orthodox style, no instruments) followed by a family-style Shabbat meal. This dual model has long been a staple of outreach groups like Chabad, Aish HaTorah and Hillel, but certainly not of old and venerable shuls like Beth Jacob.

Personally, I’d love every shul in America to follow this model. For one thing, going through the Shabbat meal experience puts people in a holy mood. It makes you think of family and of sharing the warmth of tradition. The event I attended at Beth Jacob was imbued with holiness. How could it not be? The Friday night meal is so full of holy rituals it might as well be a mini-seder.

These holy rituals bring home the notion that the act of meeting your soul mate is as holy as the act of marriage itself. In many ways, Friday night is when a Jewish marriage comes to life — when a couple learns the art of sanctifying time. And what is a loving marriage but the sanctification of time? And what is the sanctification of time if not those moments in the presence of your soul mate, when you are moved to carry yourself with Shabbat-level holiness and dignity?

I can’t say what level of holiness the 200 single Jews felt on Friday night or whether anyone met their future soul mate, but I can say that the holy energy of Shabbat seemed to diffuse the usual anxieties of being at a “singles” event.

As I watched the joyful scene, I thought back to a somber morning in that very same hall, a little over a week earlier, when hundreds of people gathered there for a memorial service for longtime synagogue member Jack Slomovic.

Slomovic was a Holocaust survivor who went from the horror of the Shoah to the glory of fighting in Israel’s War of Independence. Eventually, he made his way to California and became a major philanthropist in our community, with a special place in his heart for Israel and Jewish education.

At his memorial, one speaker after another described Slomovic’s lifelong passion for helping young Jews stay connected to their faith and to one another.

If there are eyes in heaven, I have little doubt Jack Slomovic was looking down at the joyful scene on Friday night and ­smiling.

My holy peeps Read More »

Occupy L.A. raises more questions than it answers

Leave a Comment / Community, Cover Story /

From the very beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement, people wanted to know why.

Why did a group of protesters calling themselves “the 99 percent” take up residence in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 17?

Why were so many people galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street protest, and why have similar encampments since sprung up in more than 100 cities across the country?

And now that authorities in some cities have begun forcibly removing the protesters, why are the Occupy Los Angeles protesters so determined to hold their ground in the park surrounding Los Angeles City Hall — especially considering that they haven’t yet agreed on what they wish to achieve?

Last week, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hinted that the end of Occupy L.A. might be near, telling the Los Angeles Times that the protest “cannot continue indefinitely.” But as of press time on Nov. 1, the encampment was still very much in operation.

And even if authorities somehow do clear the park of the hundreds of protesters and their scores of tents, basic questions about this still-evolving movement likely will remain unanswered for many.

Who are these local occupiers? What drove them to take up residence in the tent city downtown? And could the Occupy Wall Street movement really impact the future of the country?

For the perplexed, or the simply curious, here are a few observations.

Occupy L.A., like the Occupy Wall Street movement as a whole, is most clear in its generalized outrage at the inequitable distribution of wealth in the country.

Every evening at 7:30 p.m., Occupy L.A. holds a General Assembly (G.A.) meeting. A recent one began with a call and response:

“Who are we?” a young man asked.

“The 99 percent!” the occupiers responded.

The inchoate frustration of the vast majority of the American population at the current economic troubles is what drives the Occupy movement, and the occupiers — the “99 percenters,” as they call themselves — are united in opposition to the excess gains in wealth of America’s super-elite, the top 1 percent.

These days, statistical evidence of the yawning gap between the super-rich and everyone else is easy to come by. A Congressional Budget Office report released on Oct. 26 showed that over the past 30 years, the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans grew by 275 percent, while everyone else experienced growth of just 65 percent.

The evidence of economic hardship is also easy to see among the occupiers, many of whom are unemployed. Emilio Arreola, 25, has been involved in Occupy L.A. since its beginning in late September at Pershing Square downtown. Arreola has been unemployed since leaving the Navy two years ago. His tent is his only residence.

“I went out and got all five of my forklift licenses, I’m working on my CDL [Commercial Driver License], and it’s just so horribly hard to get a job,” Arreola said.

Beyond their dissatisfaction with the current economic system, it is hard to discern what the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to achieve — because the members of this leaderless movement themselves have not yet decided on goals.

Like the protests that swept through the Arab world this spring, the movement proudly proclaims itself a leaderless uprising. But unlike, say, the protests that toppled former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the Occupy Wall Street movement has not yet targeted a single agreed-upon villain or united behind any clear goals.

Occupy L.A. raises more questions than it answers Read More »

Kardashian marriage proves little about marriage

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /