President Obama wished Jews a joyous Chanukah.
The Chanukah story, he said in a message Tuesday, “reminds us to count our blessings, to honor the sacrifices of our ancestors, and to believe that through faith and determination we can work together to build a brighter, better world for generations to come.”
He closed by wishing the “Jewish community around the world” a “Chag Sameach,” Hebrew for joyous holiday.
Obama sends Chanukah wishes Read More »
“A dreidel is a four-sided die that spins,” said Flaster Siskin, sounding very much like the board game designer he is.
Siskin grew up playing classic games like “Monopoly,” strategic war board games like “Risk,” and that quintessentially geeky role-playing game, “Dungeons & Dragons,” which involves dice of many different shapes.
But starting when he was five years old, when Chanukah would roll around, he would set up a formation of small army action figures, pick up a dreidel and try to knock them down with carefully directed spins.
“I thought it was cool, I thought it was fun,” Siskin said, recalling his childhood in Chattanooga, Tenn. Now based in Long Beach, Siskin has incorporated his innovation into his newest Jewish-themed board game, “Operation: Maccabee.”
Like many board games, “Operation: Maccabee” has a back-story. Set in the late years of World War II, each of the four players represents one of the Allied powers. Through a combination of spinning and tossing the dreidel, players work to avoid and defeat Nazi patrols, liberate death camps and save European Jews.
It’s the fifth board game Siskin has designed for his company, Flasterventure (Flaster is Siskin’s middle name; his first name is Dan), and the fourth involving dreidels.
But unlike the prior three—“Maccabees,” “Queen Esther,” and “Matzakoman—which are all tied to Jewish holidays, played on a Star of David-shaped game board and have, according to Siskin, been adopted by some Hebrew schools as teaching tools, “Operation: Maccabee” has been something of a breakout hit within the gaming community.
In September, when Siskin demonstrated the game at Strategicon, a convention in Los Angeles dedicated to strategy games, there were lines of people waiting to play.
“If the game geeks love it, that’s a real compliment,” he said.
Later that month, the game received a favorable review from Marco Arnaudo, an associate professor of Italian at Indiana University who posts reviews of board games on his youTube channel, marcowargamer.
“It is a competitive game, but often as you play the game you forget about it,” Arnaudo said in his 10-minute-long video review of the game. “Maybe it is because everybody is on the same side. Yes we’re trying to do better than other players, but we are liberating concentration camps, if you do it instead of me, that’s okay, that’s still such a good thing.”
“He’s very well respected,” Siskin said of Arnaudo. “He really got the gist of the game.”
Siskin’s games are available for purchase in some stores—Bed, Bath & Beyond is selling his first game, “Maccabees,” in some of their stores, including five in the Los Angeles area—but most of them are being bought from online retailers like ModernTribe, OyToys.com, and Jewishsource.com.
Siskin, who worked in the film and video game industries before launching into board game design full-time. His first game, “Pirate King”—“No dreidels, not Jewish, just pirates”—came out in 2006. Since then, he’s been aiming at Jewish consumers.
“I’m definitely going after a niche market, for sure,” he said.
But he said sales of his company’s five board games are good. His first, “Maccabees,” came out in 2009, and he sold out the first run of 3,000 games in “two Chanukahs.”
And Siskin is hopeful about “Operation: Maccabee,” in part because the game is not tied to a particular seasonal holiday, and so could be sold year-round.
And he’s always thinking about new Jewish-themed game possibilities.
“Maybe I’ll do a Jewish ‘Dungeons & Dragons,’” Siskin said.
Spin Dreidels, Kill Nazis [VIDEO] Read More »
During the 1978 Frankfurt Book Fair, an enterprising bibliophile conducted a meticulous search of the vast exhibit hall with an unusual purpose: to find the oddest book title. Inspired by this valiant quest, the British trade magazine, The Bookseller has been publishing annual lists of the contenders and winners of the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year.
Some titles receiving this dubious distinction include: How to Write a How to Write Book by Brian Piddock (Neil Rhodes Books, 2007); So Your Wife Came Home Speaking in Tongues! So Did Mine! (Revell, 1973); Dining Posture in Ancient Rome (Princeton University Press, 2006); and Design for Impact: 50 Years of Airline Safety Cards (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003). (The magazine did not include a favorite title, probably because this book was published in 1938: The Romance of Proctology.)
Among all the nominated Diagram Prize titles, there are surprisingly few that deal with Jewish themes. Perhaps, if you really stretch your imagination, you could find a few that seem to do so, such as: Circumcisions by Appointment: A View of Life in and Around Manchester in the Eighteenth Century (Reword, ca. 1999) and the 120 Year Diet (Simon and Schuster, 1988).
But this is clearly not enough. Isn’t it about time for a contest devoted solely to Jewish titles? While the description “unusual” or “odd” is a subjective judgment, somebody has to make these hard decisions, so I humbly offer the following nominations:
• Jewish Chess Masters on Stamps by Felix Berkovich (McFarland, 2000) is a lavishly illustrated book on this often overlooked topic. One critic declared that it might be the best book ever written on the subject.
• The Beard in Jewish Law by Rabbi Sholom Yehuda Gross (Mosad Brochas Tova, 1981) is easily accessible through a Google search. After perusing this work, some historians of German Jewry may need to reconsider their previous theories. According to the author, “it is plainly seen that one of the main reasons that assimilation, heresy and non-Jewish ideas were so rampant in Germany, was because they had entirely done away with the wearing of beards (p.17).”
• A search of the Harvard University Library catalog using the compelling subject heading, “Running Races in Rabbinical Literature” will bring up the following title: Sport bei den Juden im Altertum: die Rennbahn des Konigs Salomo: nach einem handschriftlichen Midrasch der Staatsbibliothek Munchen, cod. 222 fol. 50a-56b. (Sports among the Jews in Antiquity: King Solomon’s Running Race).
• Another search using the subject heading “Weather—Religious Aspects—Judaism” will yield the catalog record on a Hebrew-language volume on the flaky topic of snow and halacha: ha-Noten sheleg: be-inyene ha-sheleg, ha-barad ve-hakerah ba-halalkha by Yishai Mazlomyan.
• A published lecture entitled Views on the meaning of Zionism and of applied mathematics fifty years ago and now by Sydney Goldstein (Leeds University Press, 1973) demonstrates the remarkable scholarly skill of relating a Jewish theme to almost any academic topic.
Quite apart from their titles, the contents of some books reflect rather odd contrasts. The following two books could aptly be compared to the stark contrasts of the joy of a wedding coupled with the sadly resonant ritual of the breaking of the glass under the chuppah.
Simon Wiesenthal’s Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom (Henry Holt, 1987) takes the lachrymose conception of Jewish history to its utmost extreme. Wiesenthal writes that this book “commemorate(s) horror arranged by date … the calendar relates the atrocities committed against the Jewish people over two thousand years.”
A very different sort of book, Day by Day in Jewish Sports History by Bob Wechsler (Ktav, 2008), is an exuberant work inspiring readers to revel in the athletic achievements of the People of the Book. But if you read these two volumes in tandem, you may be struck by the following unusual juxtaposition:
June 24: In 1096, Crusaders approach the town of Neuss near Cologne and slaughter 200 Jews who are hiding there. But on the same date in 1956, Al Rosen collected his 1,000th career hit, a home run in the Cleveland Indians’ 7-2 six inning win over the
Washington Senators.
Optimists who reject the lachrymose theory of Jewish history may take heart: Perennial optimists might point out that the sports volume boasts 404 pages while the calendar of Jewish martyrdom has only 320 pages. So the future may be promising!
Donald Altschiller is a librarian at Boston University.
‘Unusual’ Jewish books Read More »
I once had this fantasy that I would read a dying man poetry by his bedside. There would be low lights and rain trickling past the windowsill and it’s only now I realize how much I had glamorized a hospital scene. Death is not romantic so I thought I’d make it so. Poetry seemed, to me, the only way to get close to someone leaving, the consummate end to a doomed relation. It’s only now I realize our relations go on even after someone is gone. We all live with ghosts. The wilting flowers in the wooden box, mosaic hearts like shards of glass, the apparitions that haunt the doors at night.
I would’ve liked to have read poetry with Christopher Hitchens. But since I never knew him, well, at least not in the conventional sense (we all feel we know the writers we read) I’m grateful Ian McEwan was there, bedside, with Hitchens, piloting him through poetry into the world from which there’s no return. Least not according to Hitchens.
McEwan writes in The Globe and Mail:
In the afternoon I was helping him out of bed, the idea being that he was to take a shuffle round the nurses’ station to exercise his legs. As he leaned his trembling, diminished weight on me, I said, only because I knew he was thinking it, “Take my arm old toad …” He gave me that shifty sideways grin I remembered so well from healthy days. It was the smile of recognition, or one that anticipates in late afternoon an “evening of shame” – that is to say, pleasure, or, one of his favourite terms, “sodality.”
That must be how I came to be reading The Whitsun Weddings aloud to him two hours later…
I set the poem up and read it, and when I reached that celebrated end, “A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain,’ Christopher murmured from his bed, “That’s so dark, so horribly dark.” I disagreed, and not out of any wish to lighten his mood. Surely, the train journey comes to an end, the recently married couples are dispatched toward their separate fates. He wouldn’t have it, and a week later, when I was back in London, we were still exchanging e-mails on the subject. One of his began, “Dearest Ian, Well, indeed – no rain, no gain – but it still depends on how much anthropomorphizing Larkin is doing with his unconscious … I’d provisionally surmise that “somewhere becoming rain” is unpromising.’
And this was a man in constant pain. Denied drinking or eating, he sucked on tiny ice chips. Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature. Over the three days of my final visit I took a note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian novelist; whether Dreiser in his novels about finance was a guide to the current crisis; Chesterton’s Catholicism; Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, which I had brought for him on a previous visit; Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain – he’d reread it for reflections on German imperial ambitions toward Turkey; and because we had started to talk about old times in Manhattan, he wanted to quote and celebrate James Fenton’s A German Requiem: “How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times.”
In Walter Pater’s famous phrase, he burned “with this hard gem-like flame.” Right to the end.
Christopher Hitchens and deathbed poetry Read More »
Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer is President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and author of the forthcoming Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past (due for release in spring 2012). He previously served as the inaugural Chair of Jewish Communal Innovation at Brandeis University, and lectures and teaches widely in both academic and educational settings.
An essay written by Kurtzer recently won first place in Moment Magazine’s inaugural Elephant in the Room Contest. The topic this year was “Can there be Judaism without belief in God?”
“Our tradition is riddled with a kind of theological pluralism” – yes. But your portrayal of open-border Judaism as the golden standard for traditional Judaism isn’t exactly a fair description of most Diasporic Jewish communities, is it?
If by “gold standard” you mean the best of what we can and should be aspiring for, then yes, absolutely! Diaspora has long been a creative breeding ground for Jews to test out the good kind of assimilation in practice, the kind that absorbs the best of the world of non-native ideas and makes Judaism better as a result. And the reality is that Jewish communities are moving in the direction of open-borders especially in the Diaspora – more on Israel later – with growing trends around embracing interfaith families into Jewish life, a wider recognition of the need for bigger and wider tents of Jewish ideas and commitments, and more and more institutions premised on pluralism as both an ideal methodology and as an aspirational vision. Now, turning pluralism into reality is both philosophically and practically complex. After all, being part of a Jewish community should mean something, and there should be boundaries as part of any belonging – otherwise belonging is somewhat insignificant. But I would rather invest in a serious engagement with the content and consequences of belonging than a fixation with the enforcement of what keeps people in or out.
“We are not Jewish because we believe”. Yes, but that’s easy – saying what isn’t the answer is always easy. Why are we Jewish? That’s the real question; do you have an answer?
Actually, this was the least controversial line in my piece. I don’t think anyone prior to Maimonides would have even dared to propose that lack of belief would cast you out of belonging in the Jewish people, even if – and I am not sure that classic sources would be clear on this point – certain ideas or the lack of belief in some axioms might be met with eternal damnation. The real threats to being Jewish are and always have been an unwillingness to be part of the Jewish people or to contribute meaningfully to Jewish life, neither of which requires the theological category of ‘belief.’ I think that being Jewish means belonging to an extremely powerful story, which brings with it the implications both of the story itself – commitments born out of the accident of birth, the consequence of a marriage or as part of deciding to join – as well as towards both the past legacy of the story and its future success. Rabbi David Wolpe has said about the stuff of Jewish tradition that it is usually subjected to these kinds of inquiries of faith and doubt: “I don’t know if it’s true, but they don’t tell stories like that about you or me.” I don’t think I can answer why we are Jewish in the metaphysical sense, but I think there are ideas and ideals that Jewishness can still bring to the world, and I think that athe Jewish people have an extraordinary past and destiny that still needs to be carried and fulfilled, independent of any theological passports to entry.
What happens if I try to translate your article and draw real-life lessons from it. What message could I draw from it on, say, intermarriage?
Since it is Hanukkah time, let’s use the metaphor of Hellenism to deal with this question. Though our most pedagogic retellings of the Hanukkah story refer to it a battle between Jews and Greeks, we know very well that these absolutes are not so useful, that in reality we experienced a battle between people struggling along a continuum of ethnic complexity. The Maccabees and the Jews they opposed had different red lines that they felt couldn’t be reasonably crossed in the interest of preserving a vital and intact Jewishness, and one set of cultural choices won out. Now today we face the same challenge. We know – and that includes even the most ardent anti-intermarriage voices – that we all benefit from assimilation and exogamy; some of our best ideas are shared with or learned from other communities, and frankly ethnic diversity is good for the gene pool. The question is just whether we are taking seriously enough when these boundary-crossings are jeopardizing the core commitments of Jewishness. The Jewish community has a ‘thickness’ problem everywhere, and not just among the intermarried. We make insufficient demands of those who belong to Jewish life, and offer not enough deep and rich content to make belonging worthwhile. We also confuse intermarriage with interfaith blending, as though raising your children as deeply and genuinely Jewish is identical to a Hanukkah ornament on a Christmas tree because both of those choices are made by someone not actually born Jewish or converted to Judaism. If we did a better job at promoting Jewish “thickness” – making Jewish commitments serious and rewarding, building institutions premised around deep meaning and talking about the consequences of belonging – I think in the long run we would worry a lot less about ‘intermarriage’ as its own problem – or in other words, “Hellenism.”
“Fluid boundaries” might work for the American Jewish community, but you can’t have “fluid boundaries” in Israel, where Jewishness also means that one is eligible to become a citizen – or can you?
In the current model, we have allowed the category of Jewishness that the state uses to determine citizenship in Israel to be restricted to theological and halakhic categories of belonging; and have left the administration of that category to people with dogmatic and antiquated beliefs. Both of these are historic mistakes, but neither are inevitable. My colleague Rabbi Mishael Zion likes to point out how overwhelmingly prevalent the obligations are mentioned in the Torah to care for the widow and the orphan, in contrast to – let’s say – eating pure or kosher animals. But which of them do we use to determine serious Jewishness? Which do we choose as criteria of belonging or as characteristics of distinctiveness? My point is that Israel can and should be a Jewish state, but the hallmarks of the Jewish state should be Jewish values that express the best of our tradition – and not the most rigid and exclusive. Anyway, why must the criteria of citizenship for the Jewish state be identical as criteria for halakhic marriageability, and especially for those with the most stringent standards? But just to be clear: if we want an alternative, we need to invest in Judaism in Israel that promotes these alternatives. It is not better or sufficient to advocate for less Jewishness in the mechanisms of the Jewish state; we need to foster more and better Jewishness that is equally credible to the tradition we have inherited, but creates better public policy alternatives to the realities we currently endure.
You say that Judaism was never about belief. This might be true, but it is also true that most Jews did believe, or at least behaved as if they believed for many generations. So – I’m not asking if Judaism should be about belief, I’m asking whether Judaism can survive without the commitment of the believers?
You know, I have no idea whether that assumption is true. We do the past and ourselves a disservice when we make it more holy and pious than ourselves, either in order to say that it holds no sway over us, or equally perversely to say that we can’t live up to its standards. I’ll give you an example: when Alana Newhouse exposed a few years ago that Roman Vishniac’s famous photos were arranged and edited to reflect a very different reality than what they plainly showed, many were distraught by the shredding of what was at the time an extremely useful myth for Jewish identity. Leon Wieseltier was quoted in the article as saying that he wished people would be relieved at this new discovery, and would exclaim “Good, they were blessedly like all of us?” It seems to me that you need the piety of the past to sustain the underlying question that you are asking: will a lack of piety in the present make us worse in the long term? will it give up the tool of Jewish survival that has gotten us here? To this I have two answers: No, because I’m not at all convinced that the creativity, commitment and continuity that defines the successful Jewish past was really ever rooted in and driven by faith in the Christian sense as we know tend to talk about; and No, because in so many ways the present, for Jews, is much, much better than the past – however pious! – ever was.
But let me also give a more positive answer: For those fortunate to believe in God, Torah, etc. as a feature of their Judaism – what a blessing! I certainly think these folks have the potential to use their belief as a means of improving Jewish life and contributing to the betterment of Judaism. But it doesn’t come easy to everyone, even serious Jews (myself included); and frankly, faith does not exonerate its possessors from studying Torah, feeding the hungry, keeping Shabbat… all the activities that ostensibly everyone can do. Without maligning the believers, I think our community is stronger when we create and support broader contexts for meaningful participation, rather than focusing on the fortunate few.
Israeli officials are stepping up their criticism of The New York Times, slamming columnist Thomas Friedman and arguing that the newspaper is an unfit venue for an Op-Ed from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a scathing letter first leaked last week to The Jerusalem Post, Ron Dermer, a top aide to Netanyahu, declined an invitation for the prime minister to write an Op-Ed for the Times. By way of explanation, Dermer cited what he alleged was the newspaper’s anti-Israel tilt.
“It would seem as if the surest way to get an Op-Ed published in The New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel,” he said.
Dermer’s letter came just days after Friedman, a frequent critic of Israeli settlement policies, asserted that U.S. congressional support for Netanyahu was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”
Rep. Steve Rothman (D-N.J.), a top congressional appropriator, joined a chorus of commentators in decrying Friedman’s allegation. And Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, said Friedman had “strengthened a dangerous myth.”
“This allegation is profoundly disturbing,” Oren told JTA. “The term ‘Israel lobby’ implies the existence of a Zionist cabal wielding inordinate economic and political power. Unintentionally, perhaps, Friedman has strengthened a dangerous myth.”
The recent flaps are casting a light on the degree to which the Israeli government believes it has not been getting a fair shake from what is arguably the most influential newspaper in the world.
In September, in an editorial about the push for U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood, the Times declared in an editorial that it put the “greater onus on Mr. Netanyahu” for the stalled Israeli-Palestinian talks, claiming he “has used any excuse to thwart peace efforts.” In another editorial a few days later, the newspaper accused Netanyahu of refusing “to make any compromises with the Palestinians.”
The Times published a response from Israeli Embassy spokesman Lior Weintraub in which the Israeli official noted that during his current tenure, Netanyahu has endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state, pushed for direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without pre-conditions, ordered the removal of hundreds of checkpoints and implemented an “unprecedented 10-month moratorium on new West Bank settlement construction.”
Netanyahu “offered to extend the moratorium for an additional three months if the Palestinians would return to the negotiating table. But they did not,” Weintraub continued, adding that in his May speech to Congress the prime minister said that “some settlements will end up beyond Israel’s borders” and pledged that the Jerusalem issue could be resolved “with creativity and with good will.”
Weintraub argued that “obscuring Mr. Netanyahu’s record in pursuing peace only emboldens the Palestinians to avoid direct negotiations with a genuinely willing and eager partner.”
Dermer in his letter suggested that ignoring Netanyahu’s outreach amounted to bad will. Times columnists, Dermer said, “consistently distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu and virtually every Israeli official somehow reflects government policy or Israeli society as a whole.”
The letter has created a Washington buzz, with some officials with pro-Israel groups scratching their heads at the strategy. Off the record, they say they agree with Dermer’s assessment of the Times, but wonder at the wisdom of turning down an opportunity to appear on one of the most influential Op-Ed pages in the United States.
David Harris, the American Jewish Committee’s executive director, would not comment on the strategy, but said it was clear that the Times had a problem with Israel, noting some of the trends Dermer listed in his letter: The Friedman column and others critical of Israel by Nicholas Kristof; publishing, without adequate redress, an Op-Ed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that blames Israel for rejecting two states in 1947, when it was the Arabs who rejected the U.N. partition plan; and a column suggesting that Israel’s gay rights advances were merely a function of a propaganda campaign to make Arabs seem backward.
“There has been a clear imbalance on the editorial and Op-Ed pages of The New York Times,” Harris said. “If the Times aspires to a balanced range of views on those pages, it needs to engage in some reflection.”
Friedman in his column listed reasons he believes American Jews like himself are growing uncomfortable with Israel: the closeness of the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to Russian autocrats and their anti-democratic leanings; the controversy about segregating women from men on buses that serve haredi Orthodox neighborhoods; a slate of laws seeking to limit the influence of human rights groups; and attacks by extremist settlers on Palestinians and the Israeli army.
“I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics,” Friedman wrote, referring to Netanyahu’s address to a joint session last May. “That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”
Friedman on Tuesday told The New York Jewish Week that “in retrospect I probably should have used a more precise term like ‘engineered’ by the Israel lobby—a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don’t subscribe to.” Otherwise, Friedman added, he stood by the column.
In response to Friedman’s column, Rothman issued a statement saying that the characterization of the nature of congressional support for Netanyahu reinforced a “dangerous narrative” about supporters of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.
“I gave Prime Minister Netanyahu a standing ovation not because of any nefarious lobby, but because it is in America’s vital national security interests to support the Jewish State of Israel and it is right for Congress to give a warm welcome to the leader of such a dear and essential ally,” Rothman said. “Mr. Friedman owes us all an apology.”
Dermer is among Netanyahu’s most influential advisers. He is an American immigrant whose late father, Jay Dermer, and brother, David, have both been Democratic mayors of Miami Beach.
Dermer became a Republican in adulthood, and the no-holds-barred political style he acquired from mentors such as Frank Luntz transitioned easily to Israel’s rough politics when he made aliyah in the mid-1990s. Netanyahu, who himself was raised partly in the United States, bonded with Dermer soon after they were introduced.
JTA Editor in Chief Ami Eden contributed to this report.
Israeli officials escalate war of words with N.Y. Times [UPDATE] Read More »
A radical Islamist party in Egypt said it will respect the country’s peace treaty with Israel.
The spokesman for the Salafi Al-Nour party, which won up to 30 percent of the vote in the first round of parliamentary elections in Egypt, announced Tuesday that the party would respect all treaties signed by Egypt, including the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Party leaders later clarified that the party is looking into the matter, Ynet reported.
The Salafi Al-Nour party finished second behind the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party; the Muslim Brotherhood refuses to negotiate with Israel.
Meanwhile, violence continued for a fifth day in Egypt as soldiers and police fired live ammunition and used batons on protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. At least 13 protesters have been reported killed and hundreds wounded as protesters demand an end to military rule.
Egyptian Islamist party says it will recognize treaty with Israel Read More »
Maynard Wishner, a past national president of the American Jewish Committee who also headed other Jewish groups, has died.
Wishner, a Chicago attorney and activist who served as the AJC’s national president from 1980 to 1983, died Monday at 88. He had been serving as honorary president and a member of its Board of Governors until his passing.
He also was chair of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs when it was called the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, and served as president of the Council of Jewish Federations, the precursor to the Jewish Federations of North America.
Wishner traveled throughout the world as an advocate for the Jewish people and Israel. Throughout his legal career and Jewish communal volunteer involvement, Wishner was a vocal proponent of advancing cooperative intergroup relations to strengthen American society and build enduring friendships for the Jewish community, according to an AJC statement. He also was an outspoken advocate for securing the freedom of Jews in the Soviet Union,
In Chicago, Wishner led the Chicago Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation, the Jewish Community Relations Council, Jewish Family and Community Service. He also served as executive director of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations and assistant corporation counsel for the City of Chicago before entering private practice.
He guided many other organizations and commissions at the local, state and national level.
His awards and accolades include the Chicago Jewish federation’s Julius Rosenwald Memorial Award and the American Jewish Committee’s Mensch Award. He was honored by the countries of Greece and Poland for his work to further Jewish relations with both of those communities and nations, and led Jewish outreach to the Latino and African-American communities.
“Maynard Wishner’s passionate, lifelong activism should always serve as a model of leadership for the American Jewish community,” said AJC Executive Director David Harris. “We will forever miss Maynard’s love of Jewish life, and, yes, incredible sense of humor, derived from an early career in the Yiddish Theater in Chicago. If ever there was a true mensch, it was he!”
Maynard Wishner, national AJC leader, dies at 88 Read More »
Apple reportedly has purchased its first Israel-based company, Anobit Ltd., a flash storage solutions provider, for an estimated $500 million.
The deal for the Herzliya-based startup reportedly was finalized Tuesday. Anobit’s management was gathering its staff early Tuesday afternoon to formally announce the acquisition by Apple, the Israeli financial daily Calcalist reported.
The purchase comes on the heels of an announcement last week that Apple will open a development center in Israel focusing on semiconductors, reportedly the first to be opened outside of Apple’s California headquarters.
Apple reportedly acquires Israeli startup Read More »