Birthright Shabbat
How do we keep Jews connected to their Judaism and prevent the further erosion of Jewish identity in American Jewry? It’s a simple question, but it’s the defining issue of our time — the one that preoccupies Jewish community leaders perhaps more than any other.
As I see it, there are two ways to approach the problem.
The first way is to dissect the problem strategically, which was done by Steven Windmueller in a recent essay titled “Sustaining 21st Century American Judaism: Examining New Options.”
In his essay, Windmueller, who is the Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk Emeritus Professor of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (and a Jewish Journal blogger), begins by setting out the premise:
“Based on current research related to the status of religious movements, it is important to begin to design strategies for synagogue organizations and their affiliates to move toward ‘sacred innovation,’ the idea of re-imagining congregational life. These initiatives come up against the new realities of the decline in American religiosity.”
Windmueller identifies “a number of operational roadblocks facing our established national religious movements and their affiliates,” such as: “Decision-making malaise, defining the competitive edge, focusing on leadership capacity and identifying alternative revenue streams.”
To address these roadblocks and confront “today’s complex realities,” he adds that movements and their congregational affiliates will need to pay specific attention to things like establishing institutional identity, managing partnerships and collaborative arrangements, and operating from “the outside in.”
They will also need to understand and examine “new models of religious engagement,” or what he calls “emergent” or alternative religious communities.
He identifies several characteristics of these new communities, such as their underdeveloped infrastructure and a greater propensity for entrepreneurship and risk tolerance.
Windmueller’s piece is important in that it analyzes the strategic “big picture” for a major community challenge.
What it doesn’t do, however, is offer practical ideas that might help us meet that challenge.
That’s why there’s a second way of approaching the problem: To focus not on analyzing the “big picture” but on finding the “big idea.”
Specifically, to find that one simple, practical, overarching idea that, if well executed, can revitalize Judaism in America.
Here’s my candidate for that big idea: the Friday night Shabbat table.
I know what you’re thinking — too simple, too easy.
Yes, but that’s precisely what makes big ideas work: They’re simple and easy and flexible.
The Friday night Shabbat table is the Swiss Army knife of Jewish connection. Think about it. You’re the typical Jew of the new generation who’s not into Judaism or “organized religion” in general. As soon as you hear the word synagogue, you run. What can be more inviting than a great meal?
The Shabbat meal takes an idea everyone loves — Thanksgiving — and makes it a meaningful weekly experience.
The beauty of this meal is that it can be tailored to attract any taste: a poetry Shabbat, a spiritual Shabbat, a literary Shabbat, a culinary Shabbat, a storytelling Shabbat, a Zionist Shabbat, a singles Shabbat, a green Shabbat, a social justice Shabbat and so on.
Most important, by incorporating Jewish rituals, the meal glows with Jewish content. Each ritual can have personal meaning. So, while a “poetry Shabbat” would celebrate great poetry, it would be enveloped by Shabbat rituals — lighting the candles, welcoming the angels of peace, blessing the wine and bread, singing Shabbat songs, etc. — that would encourage a personal “Jewish connection.”
Over the years, outreach groups like Chabad, Hillel and Aish HaTorah have devoted major resources to the Friday night experience. Our local Jewish Federation, as well as other groups throughout the country, also have made efforts in that area.
What the American Jewish community has missed, however, is the opportunity to develop a comprehensive Shabbat initiative on the scale of Birthright Israel. Just as that program gave the new generation a taste of Israel, this program would give them a taste of Judaism.
No one idea will address all the issues outlined in Windmueller’s essay. But a Birthright Shabbat program, planned on a major scale and adapted to the needs of different communities, has as good a chance as any to ignite a revitalization of Judaism in America.
How appropriate that the future of Judaism would rest on an idea that is 3,300 years old.
David Suissa is president of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal and can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com.
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The immigration cliff?
While Washington obsesses about cliffs, ceilings and other metaphors for budget catastrophe, we should keep an eye on the issue of immigration. On Jan. 2, the federal Department of Homeland Security announced that it would stop requiring some undocumented immigrants to return to their countries of origin to apply for a visa as long they are immediate relatives of a U.S. citizen, and demonstrate that the denial of the waiver would result in extreme hardship to his or her U.S. citizen spouse or parent. As many as 1 million undocumented immigrants in the United States may qualify. When added to the policy announced last June that allows qualified young people to avoid deportation, the rules on immigration are changing.
Soon the administration will open its spring offensive, hoping to find bipartisan support for comprehensive legislation to break the deadlock on Capitol Hill on immigration reform. There’s reason for hope: Vice president Joe Biden has called Latinos “the center of the nation’s future,” while conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, writing in the Washington Post, urged Republicans to follow her father’s advice: “Learn Spanish. You will need it to survive in the world you will inherit.”
What a long way we have come since 1994, when California’s Proposition 187 passed by a nearly 60 percent majority. That’s the proposition that denied basic public services like education to undocumented residents. The federal courts eventually overturned Proposition 187, but the impact of its overwhelming support on politics ever since has been undeniable.
While we think today of Proposition 187 as the catalyst for a Latino surge in California and national politics, it certainly did not seem that way at the time. Proposition 187’s margin of victory stemmed from white voters, Republicans and conservatives (especially white men) in an off-year election that saw a huge Republican win nationwide. Whites cast 81 percent of the votes in California’s election, which also saw Gov. Pete Wilson ride to re-election on the strength of 187. The immigration issue provided a burst of political strength for Republicans in an era when they could not dislodge Bill Clinton from the White House.
Immigration also divided Democrats and the racial and ethnic groups on which the party relies. According to the Field and the Los Angeles Times Polls following the 1994 election, 36 percent of Democrats, half of African-American and Asian-American voters, and even a quarter of Latinos, voted for Proposition 187. Among white voters, only Jews and white liberals swam against the tide. This was a disaster both for California Democrats and for the party nationwide.
Immigration became a volatile issue for Democrats, one that they have feared to raise for decades since, and which Republicans used to advance their own political prospects. Even as the Latino and Asian electorates steadily grew, Democrats feared to push too hard for immigration reform. It was safer to let moderate Republicans take the lead.
Some Republicans made a stab at progressive immigration reform in the mid-2000s, when President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain proposed a plan that resembles today’s Democratic proposal. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the party’s right wing scuttled it. As for the Democrats, even after Barack Obama won the U.S. presidency in 2008 with the help of Latino votes in key states, they were reluctant to push hard. And although Latino votes saved Harry Reid’s Senate seat in Nevada in 2010, the overall devastation of that year’s electoral sweep nationwide further increased Democratic worries. President Obama relied on Republican opposition to immigration reform (noting that he could not get the opposition to support his bill), even as he pursued active deportation policies.
Given this history, it is quite remarkable that today immigration has not only once again become a Democratic issue, but that African-American and Asian-American voters are now joined with Jews in supporting a more progressive stance on the issue. Meanwhile, immigration continues to be divisive for Republicans, and the 2012 race demonstrated that it places their political prospects in great peril.
Democrats’, specifically Obama’s, new stance on immigration did not hit home until June 2012 — in the middle of the presidential election — when Latino activists made clear their dismay that Obama was delivering so little that mattered to them.
Obama finally used his administrative authority after Latino groups began to meet with Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio on a similar plan. By April 2012, Rubio was making inroads with frustrated Latino groups, and the White House was very concerned. Had Mitt Romney, who in the primaries had been adamantly opposed to reform, jumped on the Rubio plan, the Democrats would have had a real problem. Competition with Republicans had a real tonic effect on the White House.
And the Rubio immigration reform boomlet showed that if Republicans ever do get their act together, and if Democrats fail to deliver, the Democratic lock on minority votes that helped them in 2012 may not hold.
Meanwhile, throughout, Jews have remained largely where they always have been: more open to immigration reform than most white voters, except the most liberal, and closer to the position of the minority group — in this case, Latinos — who have been challenging the status quo. At the same time, African-Americans and Asian-Americans have moved much closer to the position of Latinos than they had been when immigration blasted into the public consciousness in 1994. What once seemed likely to become an era of inter-minority conflict has instead become a strong minority alliance behind the Obama presidency.
History tells us that what changes gridlocks like those we have faced in recent years is not some grand bargain or high-minded bipartisanship. Change actually happens when voting blocs, demographics and coalitions shift, bringing along with them a new balance of ideas. Something like that happened a century ago, when waves of European immigrants, including ancestors of most of today’s American-Jewish community, first influenced cities, then states and then the nation. They were taken for granted at first, and then, when they generated political activity, policies emerged to appeal to them and further motivate them to vote. Today we are seeing a new historical era in which ethnicity will once again change how Americans see their politics and their government. The Jewish community has been part of that conversation twice now, once as immigrants themselves and today as a constituency for immigration reform.
Raphael J. Sonenshein is executive director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles.
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The future of technology: Fear of fun
Some day not all that far in the future, a new kind of entertainment is going to be perfected that will either be the coolest video game ever or the media equivalent of a lethal man-made super-virus.
You can predict what that entertainment might be like just by extrapolating from technology that already exists.
Start by imagining CGI on steroids, a future version of the computer-generated imaging that today enables battalions of post-production wizards working for movie-makers like James Cameron and Peter Jackson to put up on the screen real-seeming 3D renderings of anything that anyone can dream up.
Add to that the successor to the virtual reality technology now used in Google goggles, which relocates those digital fantasies from the screen into the real space all around us, but swap the goggles for contact lenses or neural implants.
Combine that with the power to convincingly simulate the feel of touching objects that don’t exist, which haptic gloves can currently approximate, and extend that capacity to your whole body, whose entire anatomy will become an exquisitely sensitive, interactive input device, the nth gen of game controllers like Wii and Kinect.
Throw in superb 360-degree sound, plus a way to trigger micro-spurts of the molecules that cause the sensations of smell and taste.
Miniaturize everything down to the atomic scale, which is where computing is already going, so that the gizmos that do all this are featherweight and forgettable.
Store the content — the entertaining stories and experiences that this technology delivers — in the cloud, which is where more and more software is heading now, so that it’s ubiquitous, available (for a price) to anyone in any place at any time.
And just as advances in processing power have turned laptops into animation and recording studios, imagine that this new entertainment content will be produced not only by the Comcasts and News Corps and Activisions, but also by scrappy startups and kids in dorm rooms.
Think of the porn that will make possible.
And the first-person shooters.
And the trips to the rain forest, the Sistine Chapel, the moon, the gates of heaven and of hell.
It’s not a question of whether the technology to confect and convey this digital dream, or nightmare, will one day exist; it’s only a matter of when.
In 1975, as molecular biologists were recognizing the potential dangers of the recombinant DNA technology then becoming widespread, Paul Berg, a future Nobel Prize winner, organized a conference at Asilomar State Beach in California, where some 140 researchers, doctors and lawyers drew up voluntary principles of self-regulation, in order to prevent labs — both at academic institutions and in industry — from unleashing untold horrors on humanity. Today, it’s next to impossible to conceive of a comparable convening of itself by the entertainment industry and the innovation labs that supply them with new wonders.
It’s easy to brush off the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) response to the Newtown massacre: Violent video games have created a culture of violence that has spawned deranged killers. It’s easy because, for starters, there’s no scientific evidence connecting the dots between exposure to video game violence and actual violent behavior.
But there’s plenty of research supporting what we all intuit: Entertainment really does influence us. It affects what we know, how we feel and how we behave. If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be an advertising industry or propaganda films or “Sesame Street,” and DJs wouldn’t be pied pipers, Putin wouldn’t have prosecuted Pussy Riot, Plato wouldn’t have banned poets, Romans wouldn’t have run circuses, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would have just been a best-seller and Scheherazade couldn’t have saved her life by withholding the endings of the stories she told.
There’s a debate raging now about whether the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” depicts torture as an effective way to get intelligence. Critics are passionate because the stakes seem so high — for politics, history, public opinion and public policy. We’ve been here before. In one of the best-known storylines on the series “24,” Jack Bauer used torture to get useful information from terrorists. The scenes were so powerful that, as Jane Mayer reported, the dean of West Point flew to Hollywood to meet with “24’s” writers and producers to explain that real U.S. soldiers — instead of paying attention to their teachers and their textbooks; instead of learning that torture is wrong, counterproductive, inefficient and produces false intelligence — were instead trusting the instruction about interrogation methods that they were tacitly getting from a fictional, made-up TV show.
The NRA is obscenely wrong about the relation between gun regulation and gun violence. But before we dismiss its case about popular culture out of hand, we might want to take seriously the way that entertainment thrills, enthralls, enrages, instructs and inspires us — all of us — no matter how sophisticated and media-savvy we may think we are. One fine day, awesome technology will enable the pleasure industry to pretty much erase the line between simulation and reality. I wonder whether we’ll arrive at that point without first having wrestled with the consequences that might follow from that fun.
Marty Kaplan is the Norman Lear professor of entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He can be reached at martyk@jewishjournal.com.
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Life in the Lopez Beatles [VIDEO]
Newspaper-reading Angelenos may recognize the byline Robert Lloyd.
What they may not know is that the Los Angeles Times television critic once was more concerned with singing about a “Bitchen Party” than with covering the Golden Globes, which take place this year on Jan. 13.
Back in the early ’80s, Lloyd sang and played guitar on a catchy single with that name by a group called Lopez Beatles. It aired on MTV and local programs nationwide, including Richard Blade’s “MV3” on Channel 9.
Don’t tear your gray hairs out if you can’t remember. Neither Lopez Beatles nor their facetious song got very far — not that it matters to Lloyd.
“It was a true, fun experience,” he said. “A lot of music at the time was sort of dark, and we weren’t dark.”
The tongue-in-cheek video for the song featured the happy-go-lucky Lopez Beatles rocking out at a prom-like party, riffing on who was going to attend: “Student drivers are gonna be there, and easy riders are gonna be there. The heads of NATO are gonna be there, and Quasimodo is gonna be there.”
The video’s dead ringer for Rick Moranis, Lloyd co-wrote the song with the band’s chief songwriter/founding frontman, Bruce D. Rhodewalt.
Story continues after the video.
Lloyd, of Ukrainian descent, grew up in Encino and attended California State University, Northridge, and New College of Florida in Sarasota. The art major said his “aspiration was not to work in an office or to do anything where I was required to wear a tie.”
Ground zero for Lopez Beatles was Echo Park, where Rhodewalt and his roommate Lloyd Ehrenberg, who played guitar, lived in an Angeleno Heights duplex. In 1981, assistant music editor Rhodewalt and typesetter-cum-music reviewer Lloyd became friends at LA Weekly. Together with Ehrenberg, they formed the band, which eventually came to include drummer Jim Goodall and bassist Doug Freeman.
“I thought it’d be a great idea to call ourselves the Beatles,” Rhodewalt said. “We’d get sued, get our names in the paper. … Since we lived in Echo Park, every other tire store, every other carniceria is called Lopez, so … the Lopez Beatles.”
Glenn Morgan directed the “Bitchen Party” video with co-director/producer Ellen Pittleman, who later became a Paramount executive.
“Originally, the song had no fixed lyrics except for the chorus,” Lloyd said. “We would just make up who was going to be there on the spot, sometimes naming people in our terrifically tiny audience. We wrote set lyrics [and recorded the song] in order for our friend Glenn to make the video, as a calling card for his directing.”
Morgan had entered the business as editor on Mary Lambert’s videos for a suddenly hot Warner Bros. artist.
“We both rode Madonna’s coattails to great success,” joked Morgan, who edited the singer’s breakthrough video “Borderline,” as well as “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl.”
After Janet Jackson’s “Nasty Boys,” the Knoxville, Tenn., native yearned to direct. So he, Lloyd, Rhodewalt and Pittleman finalized lyrics to “Bitchen,” conscious of their $5,000 budget. At former bassist David Vaught’s Van Nuys studio, the band recorded the definitive version of the video, with the Lopez Beatles jamming to an empty room, ticking off an eclectic list of expected party guests.
Morgan shot exteriors near Farmers Market at Third Street and Fairfax Avenue, but a shutter problem junked the footage. Reshooting weeks later, Morgan enlisted video-world colleague Bill Pope, who went on to be director of photography for the “Matrix” and “Spider-Man” movies.
“We did a better job the second time,” Morgan said, smiling.
“Bitchen Party” ran on MTV’s “Basement Tapes” co-hosted by Martha Quinn and special guest Billy Crystal. The Los Angeles Times’ Calendar section, which now regularly runs Lloyd’s byline, praised the clip over Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.”
In 1985, John Schweitzer’s minuscule label Shanghai Records pressed 1,000 copies of a “Bitchen Party”/”Spin-a-Roo” single.
“I remember hearing it on the radio,” Lloyd said.
Failing to capitalize on any momentum, Lopez Beatles faded away after Rhodewalt moved to Long Beach to start a family. Occasionally, they reunite for friends.
“We weren’t careerist about it,” Lloyd added.
After editing LA Style magazine, Lloyd returned to LA Weekly from 1996 to 2001, writing the Critical List column. In 2003, he jumped to the Times.
Today, Freeman, who jams Thursday nights at the Culver Hotel in Culver City, supervises editing on documentaries, while La Quinta resident Rhodewalt teaches math at Palm Springs High School. Goodall toured worldwide with band Medicine.
Tiring of videos, Morgan settled into television in 1994. Since 2008, the Malibou Lake resident has worked post-production on “Project Runway.” Work relocated graphic artist Ehrenberg to Oakland. He returned to Ocean Park and, in 1994, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at 36.
“Bitchen Party” may not have become a major part of the pop-culture musical canon, but, Lloyd said, “That video does seem to have made its way through the world. It’s authentically celebratory, and we were authentically excited when we recorded it. I think that’s why people responded to it. It was very simple.”
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‘Where are we going?’: Against the lessons of history
It is an oft-repeated cliché of the Holocaust that “those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” That statement — first made by Edmund Burke and usually attributed to George Santayana, who wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — is too simple a truism. Life is far more complicated. Miriam Finder Tasini’s survival, as told in her new memoir, “Where Are We Going?” (Gordian Knot Books), resulted from the fact that her parents paid no attention to the lessons of the history of World War I and gave full credence to what was being said by the Germans. That was also true of hundreds of thousands of other Jews who escaped to Soviet-held territories and survived. Permit me to explain.
For more than 150 years, safety for Jews had been found in moving westward, not eastward. Seemingly, the further west Jews moved, the more rights and protections were gained. During World War I, the Russians were a cruel and dangerous occupying power, and the Germans were far more benign. Had one applied the lessons of history, those Jews who faced a choice between living under German occupation rather than anti-religious Soviet occupation would have moved westward toward the Germans, not eastward toward the Soviet Union.
Yet when Tasini’s mother and father each separately faced the decisive choice of which direction to go, both chose to journey to Lvov, then in the Soviet zone of the occupation of Poland. They suffered greatly from starvation and disease, from slave labor and the harshest of winters as they were moved from Lvov to Siberia. They faced life-threatening conditions, and many who journeyed with them died of malnutrition, frost, despair and illness, but they never faced systematic murder. Because they fled to the east, they did not live — or die — under the German policy of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.”
A trained psychoanalyst, Tasini does an admirable job of reconstructing the narrative of her own survival, along with that of her sister and parents, Markus and Rena; and her aunt, uncle and cousin, who shared this long struggle. She was but a young child, and her direct memories of the events she lived were few, but that did not hamper her as a writer and storyteller. She clearly had absorbed the stories of family lore. She had listened in detail to the family histories, and she knows how to write.
Natives of Krakow, Miriam’s father and grandfather were men of influence and affluence. A noted grain merchant, her grandfather Jacob Finder had built a riverfront factory in Krakow with its own railroad spur; a self-made man, Jacob lived a life of luxury and educated his son, Markus, in fine schools; Markus wore the best clothes, traveled to the great cities of Europe and was trained to take over the business that he would inherit. Tasini begins the book with the fateful day of the German invasion of Poland, the first day of World War II, Friday Sept. 1, 1939, and flashes back to the marvelous life she and her parents enjoyed before. She captures the life of her grandparents, their courtship and their personalities, with the expertise of her profession and with the skills that she developed to piece together fragments of memory into a coherent and meaningful narrative. She does the same for her maternal grandparents, the Feilguts, as well as for her own parents’ courtship and marriage. She captures differences of class and piety, of education and of aspiration between the Finders and the Feilguts, a more secularized, less affluent but still solidly middle-class Krakow family.
As we learn of the generations, we see the world of Polish Jewry in transition. Tasini offers a rich and empathic understanding of the world that was destroyed.
As the war begins, Rena Feilgut Finder escapes with her two daughters and father-in-law, Jacob, from the battlefield of Krakow, only to discover that German troops had overrun all of Poland, its backwater towns and hamlets as well as its major cities. Rena moved on to Lvov, not yet under Soviet control, with her daughters, leaving her father-in-law behind. Within days, her husband learned that everything he had in Krakow — home and factory, employees and wealth — was suddenly taken away. He, too, sought to rejoin his wife and children and presumed that they would go to Lvov — their second choice, should they be forced to flee. His crossing into Soviet territory was not without incident: He lost his right hand and nearly lost his life. He arrived in Lvov nearly dead, and his hitherto pampered wife had to become both his caretaker and provider.
Along the way, the entire Finder family was helped by several non-Jewish Poles who had personal ties to them or whose inherent decency led them to lend a hand and facilitate a Jew’s flight to safety. Decency took many forms, including the simple act of offering a loaf of bread or a barn loft for a night’s sleep.
Tasini recounts their journey eastward to Sverdlovsk and Krasnoyarsk to Gulag Posiowek 45, where the winters were dark and paralyzingly cold, and summers included arduous labor and swarming mosquitoes. Ironically, the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 improved their circumstances, as Poles were no longer regarded as enemies, but allies of the Soviet Union, two people — Poles and Russians — suffering under cruel German occupation. But such awareness came only after a very long wait, as hard news and even rumors took months to reach the gulag.
And with those changed circumstances, the Finders sought to leave the gulag and journey southward. Their path was shared by many Polish Jews who had countered the lessons of history and moved into the Soviet zone of occupation. Each has a story, and each story is clearly secondary to the fate of Jews living under German occupation, who went from ghettos to death camps, and — if they survived the world of Auschwitz — to death marches to concentration camps in Germany, where daily living conditions were actually even worse than in Auschwitz. Usually regarded as second-class survivors, they, too, have a story well worth telling.
For the Finders, liberation came when they crossed into Persia. During the Holocaust, the Jews of Iran were unharmed and untouched. Unlike in Iraq, where a deadly pogrom, instigated by the mufti of Jerusalem, cost Jewish lives, Iran was a safe way station for Jews. Given Markus Finder’s experience in food distribution and his fluency in languages, he was able to transition from penniless refugee to a secure a job with the British in food distribution, living a comfortable life in Iran with a driver and swimming pool, while the Jews in Poland were being slaughtered. He abandoned that life toward the end of the war to enter Palestine and reunite with family who had chosen in the prewar period what too few Jews had chosen: to move from Poland to Palestine, where they were expected to experience a very difficult life, but where they instead lived in safety duri ng the turmoil of World War II.
Ironically, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust today, he is denying the decency of his own people and their admirable behavior during the dark years that enveloped all of Europe. The story of Iran during the Holocaust remains to be told.
Tasini has written a deeply personal story: the five-year ordeal of her family that led to their survival and their arrival in Palestine, where they rebuilt their lives. Her own achievements as a practicing psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and as president of the American College of Psychoanalysts, are further examples of the strength of this family and its endurance. We learn from this work that it took more than luck to survive; it also took fortitude, endurance, cunning and indomitable will.
Michael Berenbaum is professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at American Jewish University. Find his A Jew blog at jewishjournal.com.
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Artists from inside the concentration camps
The Nazis gassed and murdered 1 million prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex, but they could not kill the human urge to create and leave behind a sign of their existence for future generations.
Some 20 examples of the prisoners’ artistic legacy are on display in the exhibition “Forbidden Art,” continuing through Jan. 31 at UCLA Hillel and the neighboring St. Alban’s Episcopal Church.
These works — miniature sculptures, drawings and pages of diaries — represent “ ‘art as a message in a bottle’ sent from the grave to future generations,” said Todd Presner, director of the UCLA Jewish Studies Center.
The art here was more than a figure of speech; prisoners actually inserted their messages into bottles and jars and buried them throughout the campgrounds.
Presner will speak on this topic at a symposium at 4 p.m. Jan. 17 at the Hillel building. Art historian Lisa Saltzman of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania will give the keynote address on “Images in Spite of All,” and Elzbieta Cajzer of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum will explain the exhibition’s origin.
Artists have been persecuted for their works throughout history, but the prisoner artists in this exhibition risked the death penalty, if caught. Against this background, the works are truly remarkable. A 5-inch sarcophagus holds a human figurine made of a partly burned human bone. A tiny sculpture of a prisoner was whittled from the leg of a chair.
Appended to the portrait of an inmate is the request by the subject that it be smuggled to the outside to reassure his family that he “still looked like a human being.”
A miniature figure of a devil, made from tape and a piece of wire, did double duty because its hollow leg was used to smuggle messages between barracks.
Franciszek Jawiecki, panel detail: “A Portrait of Piotr Kajzer,” 20×14 cm, paper, pencil, crayon, KL Buchenwald, 1944. Photo courtesy of the UCLA Center for Jewish StudiesPolish prisoner Franciszek Jazwiecki made drawings of 114 fellow inmates, which, after being discovered by the SS, drew a relatively “mild” sentence of three months in an especially harsh penal colony.
The artist said that his defiance of the Nazi rules required no great bravery on his part, because it allowed him “to stay and create in my own world.”
Some prisoners put out of their minds the brutality of their existence by creating escapist fare, such as books for children, caricatures of their oppressors and an album of drawings for women held at an Auschwitz subcamp depicting romantic scenes in rustic settings.
These idealized scenes were particularly ironic, since almost all women prisoners at Ravensbrück and other camps were disfigured by ulcerations, furuncles and festering wounds.
All works here are shown through photographs of the originals, which remain at the Auschwitz memorial.
Each image is framed by a massive wooden display case, as if looking out from the door of a camp barracks. The sheer size of the exhibition led Hillel artistic director Perla Karney to seek additional space from the Rev. Susan Webster Klein, rector of the neighboring St. Alban’s Church.
Klein readily assented, observing, “This exhibition is a powerful reminder that the presence of God — and the beauty of the human spirit — can be found everywhere.”
This first-time joint endeavor between these Jewish and Christian institutions in Westwood is complemented by other collaborations to underwrite the transfer and setting up of the exhibition, Presner said.
For example, sponsors include the Polish and German governments, UCLA’s history and German language departments, the “1939” Club of Holocaust survivors, the Gilbert and Goldrich foundations, and the Wolfen family.
“Forbidden Art” is open for viewing 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday through Friday through Jan. 31 at Hillel, 574 Hilgard Ave., and St. Alban’s, 580 Hilgard Ave. Admission is free.
Speakers at the Jan. 17 symposium will also include Hillel’s Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, Polish Consul General Joanna Kozinska-Frybes, German Consul General Bernd Fischer and Jacek Kastelaniec, director general of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. Patrons planning to attend the symposium must pre-register by phoning (310) 267-5327 or by e-mailing cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu.
Parking is available for $11 at UCLA Structure 2, Westholme and Hilgard avenues.
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Department of the Army: Fulfilling a calling with no regrets
The call from the Department of the Army came to me on a random day in the summer of 2012, an unexpected offer to serve our country as an Army civilian. The opportunity presented to me that afternoon had all the perks that any young professional would dream of — on-the-job training, continuing education, mentorship and apprenticeship in addition to job stability and security with lifelong benefits and opportunity for job growth with the federal government. The catch, however, would be a commitment of two years of public service to our military — anywhere in the world.
The offer came from the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs, known within the Army as OCPA. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., OCPA is the U.S. Army command responsible for explaining and justifying the intricacies of the Army to the public. OCPA fulfills the Army’s obligation to keep the American people and the Army informed. The job is not an easy one; one must explain the U.S. Army while protecting national security interests. Upon learning more about the position and its responsibilities, I began to realize what an honor and privilege it would be to join a group of unique individuals who undertake such a complex mandate with integrity and pride. Who was I to turn down such an offer?
The average young professional fresh out of graduate school with limited job experience, especially in today’s economy, would more than likely not think twice of accepting this job offer. I, however, as an Orthodox Jew, had to think twice about it. At the time of the offer, I was living on New York’s Upper West Side, a bastion of Modern Orthodoxy and the place to live if you are young, single and Jewish. I was told by OCPA officials that I would have to leave New York, as the initial assignment would be in Philadelphia with later assignments in Maryland and Washington, D.C. Upon completion of my training, I would be assigned to a yet-to-be-determined location based on the needs of the U.S. Army. While many would probably hesitate to move multiple times over two years, I saw it as a unique chance to live in and explore other cities while serving the needs of our country.
As I began work at the Department of the Army, I quickly came to realize, just as I had realized previously when I was interning at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, just how few Orthodox Jewish people there are working for our federal government. This is especially apparent in national security agencies like the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and State. As a student at Yeshiva University, I remember being encouraged to understand political developments and realities via working through the dozens of Jewish organizations that exist, but never to help shape policy decisions directly from inside the government. Why is there such apathy within our community toward participating and working within our government?
There is, I believe, an unspoken fear among many Orthodox Jewish people that leaving their communities would mean risking the loss of their Jewish identity and potentially losing their religious observance. I can tell you from personal experience, this fear has no basis. I have found that since taking on my new role, quite the opposite has occurred. If one has been empowered with a tightly rooted Jewish identity by family, school and community, working then in the secular realm, in a country that allows freedom of religion, should assuage any fears of alienation.
In my new career, my Jewish identity has been strengthened, and I have not changed who I am and what I believe, nor been swayed by anyone. The non-Jewish community and, in particular, the military community, has treated me as an equal and has welcomed me into their ranks. I am respected for who I am and what I believe in. Since many of my co-workers have not worked with Orthodox Jews in the past, I am many times seen more as a curiosity. I am asked many questions about my practices simply because most people are unaware of what we believe and why we practice the way we do. I find it sad that many members of our community have isolated themselves to the point where we are aware of our secular neighbors, yet they know nothing about us. How can we in this country create unity and religious tolerance if we refuse to proudly show who we are?
For me, working for the U.S. Army is much more than just a paycheck. In addition to its being an exciting and fulfilling career, my job is filling what I consider to be a real void within the Orthodox Jewish community. The federal government invests a significant amount of money into training individuals for fellowships and internships in all branches of the government with the promise of enriching and rewarding careers. But, by and large, the government does not go to Orthodox Jewish colleges such as Touro and Yeshiva University to recruit new talent. This is in part because our community does not show an active interest in public service. It is vital for religious Jews of all ages to be involved in public service in some form. Yet the numbers of those opting to pursue professional career paths in this field are embarrassingly low. My passion and commitment to public service make it all the more disappointing that most of my fellow Orthodox friends do not consider it for a career. I firmly believe and hope that by educating my peers in the Orthodox community, I can show them that one is capable of working in a government position while maintaining one’s religious practices.
Once Orthodox Jews show an active interest in such careers, government recruiters will take a more active role in hiring people from within the Orthodox Jewish community. We should be proud to not only serve our community but our country as well. I encourage everyone in my community to get involved.
Dovi Meles holds a master’s degree in social work from Temple University and a B.A. in psychology from Yeshiva University. He has held numerous positions within Jewish nonprofit organizations. In his current position, he works for the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs of the United States Army. He can be reached at admeles@gmail.com.
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The Torah of Les Misérables
So what if the Les Mis cast of characers are thoroughly Christian and utterly French — there's still Torah to be found in Victor Hugo's epic tale of redemption, writes Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, a liberal-minded Orthodox rabbi in West Los Angeles. “[A]lthough Jean Valjean’s fall and rise is a great Christian drama of grace and self-sacrifice, Jews can easily enough transpose it into a story of profound teshuva, repentance. The sort of teshuva that Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik described as 'redemptive,'” Kanefsky writes.
After tackling Hugo's epic novel and seeing its latest incarnation on screen, Kanefsky penned a lovely note on the Jewish lesson he encountered in the Christian tale, but alas, one that didn't make the Oscar-hopeful's final cut. He writes of a scene early in the story when a bishop treats Jean Valjean with incredible grace, allowing him to keep candlesticks he had stolen before being caught by the French police. Instead of prosecuting the desperate man, the bishop sends him on his way, telling him he is good and that his soul belongs to God. But moments later, Valjean finds himself torn between good and evil yet again, when a destitute child drops a coin and Valjean stomps upon the lucre, ignoring the child's pleas to have it back. Soon enough, remorse overwhelms him…
Kanefsky writes:
Jean Valjean searches frantically for the child, screaming his name like a wildman and asking every passer-by if they had seen him. But all this proves futile, and the child is nowhere to be found.
[Hugo writes:]
“…his legs suddenly gave way beneath him as if an invisible power had suddenly bowled him over with the weight of his guilty conscience. He dropped, exhausted, onto a big slab of rock, his hands balled into fists and buried in his hair, his head propped on his knees, And he cried, “I am a miserable bastard”.
He burst into tears. It was the first time he had cried in nineteen years.”
And the story of course pivots right there. This is teshuva’s primal essence.
All of us have felt regret over particular deeds that we’ve done. But how often do we part the clouds and see that it’s not the deeds, but the doer that is twisted and corrupt. How often does our introspection and reflection bore through the layer of specific actions we wish we could retrieve, and touch the heart the matter, the person who we are?
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Celebrating human rights in Israel
Because I suffered through an international human rights (IHR) class I took in law school, I used to joke that I hated human rights. In my learned view, IHR wasn’t law but a series of well-meaning declarations written and signed by diplomats on paid vacation in Manhattan. The meager IHR jurisprudence of various international courts paled in comparison to the intricate web of constitutional precedent and statutory protections that have developed around our Bill of Rights over the course of more than two centuries. Studying civil and criminal rights law was inspiring and challenging. Studying human rights law was like reading a phone book.
I never doubted that people are endowed with rights — in practice, however, this endowment only seemed relevant to the extent it was codified into the laws of a state. The United Nations could keep their declaration on human rights — I had my civil rights, chief among them the due process of law, guaranteed by the Constitution and enforced by the courts. Standing on the shoulders of giants, I was content to simply enjoy the view. It never occurred to me that the giants were once humans — lawyers and activists who took up unpopular causes with nothing but lofty ideals for support.
Israel, where I live today, has no bill of rights. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty lays out certain general principles (e.g., “All persons are entitled to protection of their life, body and dignity”) and affords them with presumptive constitutional authority, but they can still be modified or overturned by an ordinary act of parliament. Although Israel’s Supreme Court, notably under the leadership of former Justice Aharon Barak, has read several substantive rights into the Basic Laws, without a constitution and without the benefit of comprehensive legislation like Title VII of the United States Code, these rights are still precarious.
Substantive civil rights in Israel are thus yet few in number and far from enshrined. Even more glaring is the absence of absolute procedural guarantees; though the right to due process is recognized in Israeli jurisprudence, the particulars remain vague. Unfortunately, the country’s infamous ad hoc approach to everything from geopolitics to street parking extends to the legal process here. Even where courts have laid down certain procedural protections, police and other enforcement agencies often find ways to avoid adopting them.
Eventually, civil rights (by which I mean the human rights codified in the laws of a state) will be as fundamentally entrenched in Israeli law as they are in the United States. In the meantime, the importance of vibrant discourse, zealous advocacy and active jurisprudence in the field of human rights is imperative to the continuing health of the state. Yet when it comes to human rights in Israel, many people otherwise committed to civil liberties feel conflicted.
Part of this conflict is born of IHR’s highly politicized branding, especially with regard to Israel. But the intensity with which human rights and human-rights workers are vilified by the current Israeli government’s domestic and international supporters suggests something more fundamental than opposition to the IHR brand.
More frightening, and arguably more effective in shaping public opinion on IHR, is the false perception that the only beneficiaries of human-rights work in Israel are Arabs, coupled with the embattled notion that if you’re for the Arabs, you’re against the Jews. In today’s Israel, telling people you’re a human-rights activist is like telling them you’ve got a job house-sitting for Hassan Nasrallah. The stereotypes are not only wrongheaded and misleading; they also obscure the real tensions inherent in the relationship between the state and the individual in the context of rights.
The true substantive core of the IHR conflict is the need to balance the rights of individuals against the interests of the state. Because rights are guaranteed by the state, it is natural that it (or one of its agencies) is the respondent in the vast majority of legal petitions seeking to enforce such rights. In Israel, most rights petitions are filed by civil society organizations such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), either on behalf of an individual or on their own behalf (these organizations have standing to prosecute many types of rights claims in Israel). A petition called “ACRI vs. The Ministry of Defense” gives the impression that the civil organization is anti-government, anti-state or even anti-Israel.
But nothing could be further from the truth. The true party in any human rights litigation is not the petitioner but society, present and future. At issue isn’t just a prisoner who hasn’t been informed of the charges against him, a village wrongly denied access to water or a protestor whose freedom of speech has been unduly stifled. At issue are the principles behind these actions.
Human-rights advocates were the ones who urged an Israeli court to rely on the IHR principle of “the child’s best interest” in a human rights case involving children. That principle is now an accepted part of Israeli law, applicable in all kinds of cases involving children. And human-rights advocates were the ones who sued the Israel Lands Authority in 1995 on behalf of an Arab-Israeli citizen who was told flat out by the regional council that he could not buy land in a “Jewish” town because he was an Arab. The decision in that case is now the basis for the principle that prohibits discrimination in the allocation of land, whether by the state or by third parties, and protects a diverse range of people, including Asian Jews, single parents, disabled people and same-sex couples from being excluded from communities.
On Dec. 7, I had the privilege to join thousands of people at the annual Human Rights March in Tel Aviv. The march celebrates myriad organizations and initiatives in Israel that view human rights as the moral and social foundation for change. Together we communicated a united front — to Israel and the world — that a large and thriving community is dedicated to advancing human rights for all people in Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Holding the state’s feet to the fire is not a method of attacking it but rather a way of strengthening it. The economic and social health of a country depends heavily on the predictability of the law and its guarantees of equality. Although the existing jurisprudence affords protection for our fundamental civil rights, the extent to which government agencies routinely circumvent their implementation undermines their substance. Until civil rights law is firmly enshrined in statutory and constitutional jurisprudence, Israel’s civic organizations will continue relying on human rights law to enforce and entrench the basic protections that millions of people around the world take for granted. Case by case, Israel’s human-rights organizations are building the infrastructure of a legal system crucial to the ongoing development of the country.
Marc Grey is the international press liaison at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School.
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