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Jewish Journal

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January 26, 2012

Rice: ‘No shortcut’ to Mideast peace

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, News, United States /

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, told a Jewish group that there is “no shortcut” to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Achieving a Palestinian state “can only come through direct negotiations and a negotiated two-state solution,”  Rice emphasized during a conversation with American Jewish Committee President David Harris Monday before a crowd of AJC members in New York.

Rice also noted the uncertainty with the Palestinians’ intentions and that “nobody knows for sure what the Palestinians will choose to do, if anything, in the coming weeks or months.”

The Palestinians are adhering to the Middle East Quartet deadline of Jan. 26 for direct negotiations to resume between the parties, but Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Wednesday that there could be a possibility of a resumption of contacts between the parties after he consults with Arab League officials on Feb. 4.

In addition, Rice argued that the U.S. spends “an enormous amount of time defending Israel’s right to defend itself” and that it reflected poorly on member nations that continue to use the United Nations “as a venue in which they can attack and harass Israel.”

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Guide to a master reader’s works

Leave a Comment / Books, Culture, Entertainment, Mobile Sections, News /

In a moment of unwarranted despair, the young Keats wrote his epitaph: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” Yet creative geniuses achieve such immortality as human memory bestows. Those who exalt them disappear. The poet endures; the critic is destined to be forgotten.

Some few critics survive — Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt — but all because they were more, in some sense, than critics. Johnson was a sage, Coleridge a poet, Hazlitt the possessor of the most muscular prose in the language. But the signal critics of the 20th century — Stanley Edgar Hyman, Gilbert Highet, even F.R. Leavis and Northrup Frye and Edmund Wilson — have all faded or are fading into oblivion.

Still, great critics matter because they push us to a deeper understanding of creativity, to understand and weigh our own reactions and to suggest directions of aspiration. Specifically, the legacy of Lionel Trilling matters — that is the burden and achievement of Adam Kirsch’s new book, “Why Trilling Matters” (Yale University Press: $24). Lionel Trilling was a liberal with a tragic sense of life. He believed in improving the human lot but was aware of the limitations in the loose rigging of human character. The utopian social engineering of the day — Marxism and its variants — was too mechanical for his nuanced sensibility. Trilling saw both in his own world and in the novel, that “big bright book of life,” as D.H. Lawrence called it, proof that human beings would always be confounded and periodically elevated by the contradictions in our own nature.

Trilling read through a Freudian lens: the Freud of limitation and complexity and sadness and wry resignation. Earnest though he was (you don’t read Trilling for the jokes), he had a sharp sense of wit and irony in the authors he cherished, such as Henry James, Jane Austen, E.M. Forster. Each of these writers had a keen, at times deflationary view of people in society, their foibles and failures; Trilling found nourishment in those writers whose unsparing eye were antidotes to the slippery ease of modern thought.

Trilling’s essays, as Kirsch points out, are exercises in sensibility. In a masterful explication of Trilling’s take on Jane Austen, Kirsch shows how powerfully we are drawn to the brilliance, the wit, the charisma of the attractive personality. Yet the attraction is also a burden; we cannot lay down the demand to always be “at our best.” And we wish for the relief, at times, of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, who is simply, unsparklingly good. She is not coruscating; she is moral. But for every reader of Austen, it is the uneven Emma, with her bad choices and her almost inadvertent cruelties and her gradual education, who is beloved.

Trilling had a distant, troubled relation to his own Judaism. He came of age at a time when Jewish writers dominated the cultural scene. While he was not of them — the Bellovian tone of irreverent Yiddish low-high-mindedness is very far from Trilling’s elegantly written applications to join the critical mainstream of Western traditions — he could not escape being Jewish. He may have joined the Columbia faculty by virtue of his “goyish” name and critical acumen, but “outsiderness” will out. The beautiful sentence that Trilling quotes in his masterful essay on Isaac Babel, “I was a boy with spectacles on my nose and autumn in my heart,” might easily apply to the critic as well.

To write a book about a critic is reminiscent of the supercommentaries of Jewish study. It is not enough that Rashi comments on the Torah; someone must explain Rashi’s commentary. One would think it would be sufficient to read Trilling’s subtle, fine-grained essays. Yet to read Kirsch is to be brought into the dialogue between literature and its best readers. Some of the books that live longest with us are the books we do not read alone. 

Trilling lived in a world in which character was shaped not only by society but also by books. Decades ago Harcourt Brace brought out the uniform edition of Trilling’s works, which I bought for next to nothing in college; through the years, reading and rereading him has been one of the best investments I made in the now vanishing book-buying world. But to grasp the larger patterns in this master reader’s work, Kirsch’s book was an indispensible guide.

As Kirsch writes, “Moral thinking, for Trilling, is finally thinking about the kind of character one wants to have.” The best critics help us understand and even shape our own characters. Like Trilling. Like Kirsch.

Editor’s note: Author Adam Kirsch is the son of The Journal’s book editor, Jonathan Kirsch.

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Shorter summer challenges camps

Leave a Comment / Camp, Culture, News, Special Sections /

“Early-start” is finally starting.

After delaying implementation of a new, earlier school calendar last year, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will begin classes three weeks sooner this fall for the majority of students.

Caught in the middle are local summer camps, which are once again working to accommodate the change without compromising the quality of the camp experience. Jewish camps in the Los Angeles area are offering families stopgap deals to make overnight camp feasible for LAUSD students who will have a shorter summer vacation.

At many camps, the problem is twofold: Not only are students squeezed by the early start of school at summer’s end, but as the last academic year on the old calendar wraps up this June, those same kids might have to miss the beginning of camp, too.

“This summer, it hits us on both ends,” said Josh Levine, director of Camp Alonim at American Jewish University’s Brandeis-Bardin Campus in Simi Valley.

The L.A. Board of Education voted in September to move forward with the early-start plan, which members approved in 2010 but then scrapped in early 2011 due to concerns over start-up costs. The district will call school back to session on Aug. 14 and end instruction in early June in 2013, a schedule proponents say is more beneficial to students academically and places high schools in line with college calendars.

LAUSD schools on traditional calendars (not year-round) are scheduled to finish instruction on June 22. But Camp Alonim and Camp JCA Shalom both start their first overnight sessions on June 19, while Alonim’s CITs (counselors in training) are asked to arrive June 18. Camp Ramah and the Wilshire Boulevard Temple Camps’ first sessions start on June 20.

Alonim lets campers whose school schedules conflict start camp a few days late — even CITs, who are required to be present all eight weeks. Around 10 percent of Alonim’s CITs typically arrive late because of school, Levine said.

“We’re actually looking forward to the beginning of our summer not conflicting with LAUSD” in 2013, when the new school calendar liberates kids for summer break on June 4, he added.

As for the end of summer 2012, Alonim’s third and final session ends Aug. 12, two days before L.A. public schools begin. “We haven’t heard any significant issues from our families this year and we haven’t seen an adjustment in enrollment,” Levine said. 

The transition won’t be as easy for Camp JCA Shalom. The Malibu camp plans to run a one-week mini-session Aug. 14-19, which now coincides with the first week of school.

“For those kids in LAUSD, that’s not going to be an option anymore,” JCA Shalom director Joel Charnick said. “We’re looking at the registration very closely to see if that week will even happen” if there aren’t enough sign-ups.

The last of the camp’s three full sessions, traditionally the most popular, clears the start of school by two days. But many families are still concerned that the window to prepare for class is too short. “We’ve heard from a number of parents who are saying it’s very hard and some who have requested they pull their kids out early,” Charnick said.

Still, the camp is discouraging parents from making children miss out on the fanfare and bonding that traditionally marks the last day of camp, he said: “That’s like playing four quarters of football and leaving in the last minute of the game.”

The fact that a “good chunk” of JCA Shalom campers attend LAUSD schools will necessitate talks about shifting the camp calendar for future summers, Charnick said. “If need be, our camp, and probably many others, will have to make the very tough decision of moving sessions around to accommodate that [early-start] schedule. We’re willing to do what it takes to keep our kids coming to camp. Having to miss part of camp every year because of a school change — we’re going to make sure it doesn’t come to that.”

School board members have pushed for the early-start calendar because it will give schools time to complete the first semester of classes before winter break, meaning students won’t have to spend their vacations studying for finals. Superintendent John Deasy had urged delaying implementation of the calendar last fall due to a one-time extra cost of $2 million to $4 million. But board members, including Tamar Galatzan and board president Monica Garcia, said the time to enact the change was now — 18 LAUSD schools already on the new schedule, many in the San Fernando Valley, already have shown academic improvement, they said. 

At Camp Ramah in Ojai, the second of the camp’s two four-week sessions ends Aug. 15, the day after LAUSD’s school year starts.

“Any change of timing in any school district will put pressure on families to enroll in a specific session of Ramah,” said Rabbi Joe Menashe, the camp’s director. “But we have not felt a drastic switch this year because it’s only a short overlap at the end of the summer.”

The camp will let families pick up their kids on or after Aug. 12, after campers spend their last Shabbat together. But Menashe is suggesting that parents bring their children back for the end-of-camp banquet the night of Aug. 15. “That way they can still be part of this nice end-of-summer experience,” he said.

Charnick, who was a JCA Shalom camper himself in the 1980s and ’90s, still recalls “every minute” of his last weekend of camp as a CIT — the final Havdalah as a group, hugs between friends, tearful goodbyes.

“Those last few days are just critical to kids’ experience,” he said.

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An appreciation to summers spent in paradise

Leave a Comment / Camp, News, Opinion, Special Sections /

In the classic male-bonding film “Stand By Me,” based on a Stephen King novella, there is a line of dialogue at the end that I have never forgotten: “I never had friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 … does anyone?”

In my case, however, five of the friendships that remain mainstays in my life and that I continue to cherish “later on” are precisely the ones I had nearly 40 years ago, going back to the time when I was 12.

My relationships with these fellows — along with many of the values that define our respective Jewish identities — were forged during idyllic summers spent as campers, and later counselors, at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple Camps in Malibu — Hess Kramer and Hilltop. The camps turn 60 this year and, over that time 45,000 others have enjoyed the same experiences as my friends and I, including most of our group’s own children, who have followed us, l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation), as campers and counselors. I am not so naïve as to think that mine is the only nucleus of life-long friendship to emanate from Hess Kramer and Hilltop. I am personally aware of countless others from our camps, in addition to extended webs of connections and acquaintances, which continue to endure. And likely, these bonds are no different than those forged at other Jewish summer camps.

However, I can only speak to my own childhood and adolescent slice of paradise, and how Hess Kramer and Hilltop became, in countless ways, a tie that binds. Yet, little did any of us realize at the time we were deep in these “Malibu moments” — engaged in hiking, sports, song sessions or arts and crafts — that many of the ethics and beliefs that would subsequently become our compasses subtly were being shaped. For that, the 45,000 alumni — and arguably Jewish campers elsewhere — owe a debt of gratitude to the late Rabbi Alfred Wolf, the longtime spiritual leader of Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

As a young associate rabbi new to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, Wolf envisioned summer camping for Jewish youth based on his own joyful outdoor experiences in pre-Hitler Germany. By 1952, through an indomitable will and spirit, Wolf, more than any other individual, brought this dream to fruition, pioneering a Jewish camping paradigm that influenced what followed on the West Coast, if not the nation as a whole. Two generations later, numerous sociological studies on the beneficial impact of Jewish camping on later religious identification have provided empirical validation for what Wolf seemed to know from instinct and personal passion.

With respect to my five friends and me, I used to think we were connected by nostalgia for place, shared experiences and inside jokes from the years together at camp. And granted, our repressed adolescent humor manages to brim to the surface in each other’s company in ways that make those on the periphery question our political correctness, if not our sanity. However, as the six of us reached adulthood, married wonderful women and began to raise families of our own, it occurred to me that these connections were part of something deeper and far more meaningful. It was not campfire jokes but common tenets and principles. First and foremost, our own parents and upbringings shaped these belief systems and values. But I also appreciate — as do my dear friends — how our Jewish camping experiences factored into that upbringing, as well.

I recall an article a few years ago, recapping a study of professional men that found the ages from mid-30s to mid-50s are the most solitary, as we devote ourselves to building careers and raising families often to the exclusion of our personal support networks and a sacrifice of socialization needs. While probably more pronounced in some than others, I don’t question the accuracy of the inquiry and have heard firsthand from others around my age about the toll extracted.

Thankfully, I have mostly sidestepped these effects owing to a loving immediate and extended family and a career that continues to bring me immense satisfaction. But I also don’t discount the beneficial impact and solace I get from this core circle of five men. I classify them as “3 a.m. friends” — the kind you can call at any hour of the day or night and know they will be there in an instant. We tease each other mercilessly and with abject cruelty that no outsider could possibly comprehend. Once, in fact, after a particularly brutal exchange of e-mail quips, I offered up an apology for my offenses to my worthy adversary. “Are you kidding?” he responded. “Sometimes this abuse is the only thing that gets me through the day.”

And, for the friends that I had when I was 12 — who remain friends to this day — along with countless life lessons, Rabbi Wolf and Camp Hess Kramer will always have my profound gratitude.

Gerald Freisleben is the president of FoleyFreisleben LLC, a Los Angeles-based strategic communications consultancy.

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Happy wallet, happy camper

Leave a Comment / Camp, Culture, News, Special Sections /

The economy is bad. Money is tight. And yet the news isn’t all negative for youngsters hoping to attend Jewish summer camp this year.

“The truth of the matter is, most of the summer camps have increased their financial aid,” said Jay Sanderson, president of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. “We’ve increased financial aid. So a lot of the challenges of the economy so far have been mitigated. We invest close to $1 million in summer camps.”

Local attendance is down slightly but has been pretty consistent. Over time, though, he said, “We would love to see the number of young people going to camp go from 4,000 to 8,000. Our goal in the medium term is to find ways to double it.”

That goal may seem far-fetched, considering the stranglehold the economy has over so many people and the fact that private, non-Jewish camps have seen national attendance decline by 10 percent or more over the last three years, according to Jeremy J. Fingerman, CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC).

But figures from the New York-based organization indicate that Jewish camp enrollment is holding steady or even slightly increasing. Fingerman expects this past year’s final numbers to be up more than 3 percent nationally.

Get the Grants

Foundation for Jewish Camp Grants and Scholarships – ” title=”jewishla.org/pages/jewish-camping” target=”_blank”>jewishla.org/pages/jewish-camping

“I think it’s been viewed as a communal imperative to make sure that kids have the ability to go to camp in the face of these economic times,” he said. “Federations have stepped up to the plate and increased scholarship assistance, and the camp communities themselves have their own scholarships.”

More than 70,000 kids went to Jewish, nonprofit overnight summer camps this summer, paying an average of between $700 and $1,000 per week, Fingerman said.

To help, FJC distributed more than 10,000 grants this past summer, totaling about $6.5 million, through two programs in particular. One Happy Camper offers $1,000 incentives to youths attending their first summer at a nonprofit, Jewish overnight camp. FJC partners with local Federations, camp movements and sometimes camps for these programs. Then there’s JWest, which is funded by the Jim Joseph Foundation and offers incentive grants for the first and second summers.

In Los Angeles, Federation gives out camper incentive grants to close to 1,000 youths. Some are based on financial need while those in conjunction with One Happy Camper focus on first-time campers.

At Camp JCA Shalom in Malibu, fundraising efforts have gone into overdrive since the recession hit. As a result, more attendees are on financial aid — 42 percent last summer compared to 29 percent a few years ago — but more are enrolling, too.

“Our goal is to get every kid into camp, so we’ve raised the money,” said Bill Kaplan, executive director of the Shalom Institute, which is home to the camp.

Now the camp, which usually hosts 800 youths over the course of a summer, gives out $250,000 in scholarships based on financial need. Some campers receive assistance from other sources as well. The cost of attending Camp JCA Shalom generally is between $900 and $1,000 per week, Kaplan said.

There is a new challenge, though: Some potential campers simply aren’t asking for help.

Josh Levine, director of Camp Alonim, part of American Jewish University, said, “There are families out there who don’t send their kids to Jewish camp because they think they won’t qualify for financial aid, or they don’t know that financial aid is available. It is available, there is certainly no stigma in applying for financial aid, and it exists for a reason.”

Still, summer enrollment at the Simi Valley camp has increased to more than 900 overnight campers and 270 day campers. On average, overnight camp costs $850 to $900 per week and day camp costs $250 per week. Increased financial aid has certainly helped attendance.

“We have been raising more for scholarships,” Levine said. “I think the community is responding in knowing that there’s been an increased need out there, which is very heartening.”

Finding ways to get kids into Jewish camp despite the recession is incredibly important to the Jewish future, Sanderson said.

“If you go to camp for two or three years minimally, your Jewish identity is solidified,” he said. “Almost everybody I know, including myself, among the most meaningful experiences we had in terms of Jewish engagement was camp. That’s where lifelong friends are met. It’s where love of Judaism happens.”

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Your sedentary life is getting old

Leave a Comment / Culture, Living Well, News /

One of the best anti-aging activities you can do for your body is exercise. For years, it has been widely accepted that we start getting slower, weaker and more fragile with age. But more recently, this has been proven otherwise by studies on the cellular process of aging and the impressive performances of older athletes.

Most research is now showing that when it comes to your fitness, if you use it, you lose it far less quickly. And you’ll also age more slowly and have a higher quality of life in your later years.

It can certainly get a bit more difficult to jump, sprint and move just as powerfully as you may have been able to do when you were younger. But most of the fitness loss can be drastically slowed by engaging in regular bouts of physical activity through adulthood and into your older years.

Muscle strength

Weight lifting machines are perfect for introducing a senior to exercise, especially because there is significantly lower risk of falling or injury.

Cardiovascular endurance

Treadmills can easily be used by seniors and can actually help with building both cardiovascular fitness and balance, as a rail is there to help. Elliptical trainers and bicycles are also good for cardiovascular endurance, and for beginners, a recumbent bicycle is a great option.

Metabolism

Rather than simply riding a bicycle at a set pace, seniors should attempt to include a few intervals that involve hard breathing and burning muscles. This will help to boost the slowing metabolism.

Bone density

Bone grows stronger in response to loading and impact. While impact-sprinting on a treadmill may be difficult for seniors, loading of the bones and spinning along the long vertical axis is a very good idea, and can be achieved with exercises such as squats, overhead presses, chest presses or lunges.

Flexibility

While many yoga classes require a degree of balance that can be difficult for seniors, a beginner yoga class is the perfect activity for improving flexibility. In addition, a full-body stretch routine can be included after exercise, when the muscles and joints are more warm and pliable.

A WORKOUT PROGRAM FOR SENIORS

For an aging individual who is just getting into exercise, I’d recommend starting with the following routine, three to four times per week:

• Warm up for 10 minutes on a recumbent bicycle, alternating 2 minutes of easy pedaling with 2 minutes of hard pedaling.

• Perform a full-body stretch, including flexibility moves for the upper and lower body such as arm circles, leg circles, toe touches, reaching for the sky and torso twists.

• Do a full-body circuit on exercise machines that consists of 2-3 sets of 10-12 repetitions of chest press, seated row, shoulder press, pulldown, leg press, leg extension and leg curl.

• Finish with abdominal bracing on the ground, which simply involves lying on the ground with the knees bent and feet flat on the floor, then pressing the low back down and tightening the abs, holding for 5-10 seconds, releasing, and then repeating for 10-12 repetitions. This does not involve low-back bending and extending, and can build abdominal strength while being easier on the spine.

Remember, it’s never too late to start exercising.

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It keeps you young

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Jonathan, my older son, recently cradled our 7-year-old Cavadoodle in his arms and made dog-year calculations in his head.

“I don’t think Pawsy is going to have children, because he’s 49 years old,” he said.

Then he looked at me. “Although you had me when you were 46,” he added.

I’m a 60-year-old father with two young boys — 14 and 6 years old. My Orthodox Beverly Hills day school classmates and my older brother, by three years, all have grandkids now. A few of the ultra-Orthodox ones even have great-grandchildren.

When Joey, my youngest, graduates high school, I’ll be 72. I’m looking at actuarial charts along with sales ads at Gap Kids and The Children’s Place.

But I’m not the only older parent picking up my kid at kindergarten. More couples are having children later in life.

The average age of parents at first birth has been increasing in many developed nations. In the United States, the average age of first-time mothers increased by 3.6 years, from 21.4 years in 1970 to 25.0 years in 2006.

The trend of delayed first births is highly associated with educational attainment. Researchers Harriet and Moshe Hartman found that among Jews, women who had their first child after they were 35 years old were seven times more likely to have attained a doctorate or professional degree than Jewish women who had their first child before the age of 21. Women with educational attainment tend to marry men often two to five years older than they are, hence older fathers. This trend is likely to continue as Jewish women’s educational attainment continues to rise. Along with the longer delay of first births, there is an increasing likelihood of children being born to these relatively older couples.

Women’s educational attainment began to surpass men’s in the mid-1980s, and other research suggests that the reversal of the gender gap in education among men and women quickly translated into a reversal of the education gap among husbands and wives. At nearly the same time as women’s college completion outpaced men’s, newly married wives’ educational attainment began to exceed their husbands’. By 2003, 55 percent of married couples in the United States with different education levels were those in which the wife’s education exceeded her husband’s, up from less than 40 percent in the mid-1970s, according to a 2005 study, “Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003,” by Christine R. Schwartz and Robert D. Mare.

The Hartmans found that Jewish wives were also more likely to have the same level of education as, or higher than, their spouse. When these highly educated women have their children is changing as there is evidence that marriage and childbearing is becoming more compatible with higher education and going to work. In addition, the proportion of highly educated women with two or more children has increased in the last decade. The spacing between the children might also be increasing. Even as the age gap between parent and child is fluctuating, so, too, could the age gap between siblings. 

The likelihood of witnessing the death of someone in the close family or social circle is significantly higher for these kids, but when my boys fret about my older age and whether I will die, I can point out that my life span might be similar to that of their grandfather, who passed away three years ago, living to 10 weeks shy of his 100th birthday.

Children of older parents come into direct contact with a much richer and greater time span of personal histories. I’m able to tell my boys that when their grandfather, who was present for most of their lives, was a child in 1917, he was using the dim light of a burning oil lamp to read and study by. The reason: Brighter-burning kerosene lamps were in short supply because of World
War I.

And an older parent (or grandparent) doesn’t mean they’re less active. Even now, my 88-year-old mother attends my boys’ activities and cooks their favorite foods each week for Shabbat dinner.

When I was born in Europe after the Holocaust, my father was 43. When I was 17, my 60-year-old father taught me how to ice skate. He fell during the lesson, but got up and continued to teach me for over an hour. Only years later did I learn from my mom that he had broken a rib in the fall. My dad was in pain for weeks and suffered in silence.

At 60, I’m teaching my youngest child, who is 54 years younger than I am, how to skateboard. I’m reminded of my father teaching me to ice skate, and I think I understand why he continued after the fall: It keeps you young.

Pini Herman has served as assistant research professor at the University of Southern California’s geography department; adjunct lecturer at the USC School of Social Work; research director at The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, following Bruce Phillips in that position; and is immediate past president of the Movable Minyan, a lay-lead independent congregation in the Third Street area. Currently he is a principal of Phillips and Herman Demographic Research. He can be reached at pini00003@gmail.com.

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Eyewitness weaves tale of Iran’s revolution

Leave a Comment / Blogs, News, Worldwide /

On Nov. 4, 1979, Islamist students and militants loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini took over the American Embassy compound in Tehran and captured 52 Americans — a diplomatic crisis that lasted 444 days.

Simon Sion Ebrahimi, a local Iranian Jewish author, remembers that day well. It was the same day employees at his accounting firm, which faced the American Embassy, took him hostage.

Now a 73-year-old retired banker living in Woodland Hills, Ebrahimi has incorporated his hostage ordeal in Tehran as well as other experiences before and during the Iranian Revolution into “Veiled Romance,” the first in a planned series of novels depicting the multigenerational saga of an Iranian Jewish family.

Ebrahimi says he chose to write the novel in English in order to inform a wide audience about the plight of Jews in Iran during the country’s 1979 revolution.

“While numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been written in Farsi about the events surrounding the 1979 revolution in Iran, there is a big vacuum — especially in fiction, and more specifically in English — not only on this subject, but also on how Persian Jews have lived in Persia for over 2,500 years,” said Ebrahimi, who is donating proceeds from the novel to the Iranian American Jewish Federation’s emergency fund, which helps local Iranian Jews dealing with financial difficulties.

“Veiled Romance” recounts the love story of two young Iranian Jews swept up in Iran’s revolution. Leila, the novel’s female protagonist, narrates the tale.

Although the characters are fictional, many of their experiences, including the hostage ordeal, are drawn directly from Ebrahimi’s own experience. 

“[I was] an Iranian Jew who was taken hostage by his 500 employees because of his position, knowledge of the world, and perspective on government and law that made me an equal threat to the new regime in Tehran,” said Ebrahimi, who at the time was a partner in a large international CPA firm.

The author says his novel offers an accurate portrayal of the anti-Semitism many Jews faced before and after Iran’s revolution — including some of the intolerance Jews experienced while living in the Jewbareh, or the Jewish ghetto, in the city of Esfahan.

“The brutality of our neighboring nomads was beyond words. Admittedly, some of my childhood memories are vague, therefore I conducted extensive research by interviewing the elders of my community to corroborate my own memories,” Ebrahimi said. “My hope is that with ‘Veiled Romance’ my Muslim readers learn of the intolerance we as Jews experienced in Iran, because it is through knowledge that the walls of prejudice can be destroyed.”

Unlike the 52 hostages held at the American Embassy in Tehran, who were seen by Khomeini as agents of “The Great Satan,” Ebrahimi said his captors viewed him as “a lesser Satan.”

Employees demanded $20 million, telling Ebrahimi to get the funds from his “hidden bank accounts in Israel and America.” Guards were posted outside his office, and he was told by his captors, “Please don’t go home.”

Four months later, Ebrahimi was allowed to leave when he struck a deal to pay $60,000 — the exact amount a French client owed the firm. He flew to Paris to collect the money, and while there he secured a six-month visa. After he returned to Iran and paid his captors, Ebrahimi was miraculously able to flee the country with his family even though he had been placed on a no-fly list.

Despite a difficult captivity, Ebrahimi said he harbors no ill will and is grateful to many of his Iranian Muslim friends who were integral in helping to secure his release from captivity and his escape from Iran.

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Frank praised the novel, and “Walking the Bible” author Bruce Feiler called the book “an irresistible and touching view into a lost world.”

Ebrahimi said feedback from Jewish and non-Jewish readers has been overwhelmingly positive, and he noted that he has also received feedback from non-Jewish readers in Iran.

“As a woman who lived through the revolution I could easily identify with the issues Leila was facing, albeit in a factually fictional novel,” Homa Oskoui, a Muslim reader living in Iran, wrote in an e-mail to Ebrahimi. “I read a lot of the story with moist eyes, feeling sad, heartbroken, and even angry at times, for the loss of our ‘homeland’ that we won’t get back in my lifetime.”

For more information, visit this story at jewishjournal.com. To read a Q-and-A with Simon Sion Ebrahimi, visit Karmel Melamed’s blog at jewishjournal.com/iranianamericanjews.

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