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Jewish Journal

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September 24, 2013

Going along hand in hand

Leave a Comment / California /

Twenty-three years ago, Lisa Szilagyi gave birth to her first child, Emily, who was diagnosed with tuberous sclerosis, a genetic disease that causes tumors to grow on vital organs. It resulted in severe epilepsy and essentially made Emily nonverbal.

And yet none of this seems to matter when Emily is at Hand in Hand, a program for children and young adults with special needs at Malibu Jewish Center & Synagogue. She loves cooking with her peers, eating meals with them and listening to music. 

“She enjoys being around people even though she can’t verbally communicate,” her mother said. “She loves the noise and activity.”

Founded in 2010, Hand in Hand has activities every Thursday afternoon during the school year, when about 14 child and teen participants show up, along with upward of 30 teenage and adult volunteers.

Hand in Hand — which focuses on hands-on activities, music therapy and community service — was started by Szilagyi, Janet Hirsch-Ettenger and the synagogue’s Cantor Marcelo Gindlin. Each brought a different background to the program.

Szilagyi came as a mother and a professional in the field. Formerly employed in film distribution, she quit her job to see to her daughter’s medical needs. That led her to become a special-education teacher at Malibu High School, where she realized how social interaction for children with special needs was lacking.

“These opportunities are so rare for them,” she said. “They spend a lot of time with adults and in therapy, and they don’t get a lot of social time with peers without disabilities. We’re doing activities that all the kids like.”

Hand in Hand participants cook and  eat together, as well as create arts and crafts and sing with the cantor. They go on field trips to parks and ranches in Malibu, and once a month they volunteer at Jewish Family Service’s SOVA Community Food and Resource Program or at Shane’s Inspiration, accessible playgrounds for handicapped children throughout the area. 

“We feel it’s really important that [the kids] aren’t always the recipients of other people’s generosity and kindness, but that they find ways to give back to their community, too,” Szilagyi said.

Gindlin, who is trained as a music therapist, conceived the program, having run similar ones in Argentina, his native country. He reached out to Szilagyi because of her background and to Hirsch-Ettenger because she helped organize tikkun olam projects for teens at the shul. 

“It helps the kids socialize and make friends, and builds confidence and their self-esteem,” Gindlin said. 

Although the program, which Gindlin said has received support from The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and Windsong Trust, is held at the Malibu Jewish Center, it is nondenominational. For the two-thirds of participants who are Jewish, holiday activities are held. For  the past three years, for example, they’ve put together a latke community party during Chanukah and sold homemade bath salts at the Purim carnival. 

Linda Ellrod of Malibu, vice president of the Malibu Special Education Foundation, whose daughter Kristina, 19, goes to Hand in Hand, said that the program has helped her daughter’s speech and motor skills. But that’s only part of the benefit. 

“I think it’s been good for my daughter because it is a way that she can socialize with her peers. It’s also good for the peers to socialize with people with disabilities,” she said.

Ellrod said that it’s given her the chance to make friends with other parents, too. 

“It’s been really nice for me to socialize with them,” she said. 

Hirsch-Ettenger, a Malibu doula who also works as a childbirth educator, said Hand in Hand has the power to improve the lives of the peer volunteers as well. 

One of those teens, 14-year-old Cubbie Kile, said volunteering with Hand in Hand has been fun and thoroughly enriching. 

“I feel that it has opened my eyes more to what is outside my bubble,” she said. “These kids are just like us.”

The connections that occur between volunteers and participants are priceless, Szilagyi said. 

“The fact that my daughter and my students with development disabilities get the chance to hang out with their buddies and do fun activities is such a revelation for them,” she said. “You have to really see it to experience how much fun the kids have.”

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Cracking open our hearts

Leave a Comment / Judaism /

Tradition tells us that the Gates of Repentance stay open until the end of Sukkot. The intensity of Yom Kippur has diminished, but we still remember the hours together, knocking on our hearts, trying to do spiritual CPR, to wake us up to the truth of our lives. On Yom Kippur, we cracked open our hearts to make them softer, to admit our vulnerability, to forgive others and ourselves for not being perfect. We spoke the words of the traditional Vidui, the Confession, which are written in the first-person plural — “We have sinned” — because we are part of a larger community, and we all have responsibility for one another. Confession is the first step in taking off our masks and beginning the work of repairing the hurt we have caused. Vidui comes from the root that means “to reveal.” 

On Yom Kippur at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, we added a new dimension to the Vidui experience. Just before we chanted it collectively, we asked our congregants to write on a card one or two “sins” that had caused them to feel shame in the past year, some action or behavior for which they wanted to do teshuvah (repentance). People took some time in silence to reflect and then to write. Writing it down, even anonymously, wasn’t easy. But many hundreds of congregants did so. Here’s how one congregant, a fourth-generation member of the congregation, described the experience: “The clergy took a huge risk with this innovative prayer ritual. Writing down my personal sins before the Vidui intensified the experience of confession. And then, just before Neilah, as the gates were closing, the sanctuary lights were dimmed, and while congregants came up to the bimah to stand before the open ark, many of those sins were beautifully displayed anonymously on a PowerPoint presentation on a screen for all to see. I sat with my brother and silently read the displayed sins, and then we turned to each other and nonverbally acknowledged whether that one might apply to us. In many ways it was a fitting bookend to tashlich, where we throw ceremonial sins into the Pacific Ocean.” 

Some of the sins were just a word: “pride,” “greed,” “narcissism.” Some were descriptions of behaviors: “holding a grudge,” “being impatient with my children,” “using substances that are not good for me,” “spending recklessly,” “adultery.” Still others evoked a specific story — “the sin of anger held for years against my sister,” “talking about something that is someone’s private business,” “I said some cruel things to my daughter that I never should have said.” Most of the sins were connected to our families — impatience with children and partners, lack of attention or gentleness with older parents, putting too much pressure on children in order that they reflect well on us. Some sins were connected to work — “lying to colleagues,” “contributing to the petty dramas at work,” “not reporting all my income.” Some related to our engagement in the larger world — “that statistics of massacres evoke no sympathy in me,” “averting my eyes when I see a homeless person,” “not giving enough tzedakah even though I could afford to.” 

Seeing all these sins, our sins, revealed on a screen was surprisingly moving. Many people wept. Even in our privileged community, there is so much pain and shame. And we long for forgiveness and the opportunity to right the wrongs we have done and to begin to repair the hurt we have caused. 

Another congregant reflected: “I was particularly moved by the Vidui cards. I heard numerous comments from other congregants about how powerful and transformative this experience was for them, too. This was a great innovation and use of technology to facilitate genuine constructive repentance.” A third reflected, “The effect of seeing my own confession of sin and that of the members of our congregation was profound. I felt on a visceral level a recognition that I had committed many of the offenses that were on the screen and hadn’t acknowledged them before. I know I was not alone in this reaction, as the Vidui has been a topic of conversation at each gathering of temple members I have been with all week, including my break fast, the book club and other social gatherings. It feels that the revelations and examination of our sins will continue on through the year and hopefully trigger necessary attitude and behavioral change.” Still another congregant commented, “Seeing the sin I wrote, my sin, displayed anonymously among other sins of the people around me, was powerful in ways I hadn’t expected. I felt like I had taken off a mask. During the Ashamnu of Neilah, I felt as though my heart had cracked open.” 

We asked congregants and their families at the family service to write their sins as well. I learned later that one 5-year-old who knows his letters asked his mom: “What letters spell ‘Sorry, God’?” 

Sukkot is almost over. It is called Zman Simchateinu, “Season of Our Joy.” What is the nature of that joy? One answer is that it is the joy of knowing what we learned through the hard work of Yom Kippur: Yes, we are imperfect human beings, but we are also forgiven. So we can enter into this New Year believing that change is possible and that we can begin again.

 As Leonard Cohen so powerfully sings: 

“Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

The gates may be closing, but we have cracked open our hearts and the light came in.

Rabbi Laura Geller is a senior rabbi of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills (tebh.org).

Cracking open our hearts Read More »

Sex research and the single girl in ‘Masters of Sex’

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Hollywood, Mobile, News /

In the prudish 1950s, Virginia Johnson, a failed nightclub singer, caught the eye of St. Louis gynecologist William H. Masters, who was looking for an assistant to help him with his then-clandestine studies of human sexuality. At the time, Masters, a prominent fertility expert at Washington University, was conducting his research by spying through peepholes at prostitutes working in a brothel. He believed that a female partner might help to provide a glimpse into the mysteries of the female libido.

He found his woman in Johnson, then 32, twice divorced and with two children, who was candid about her forward-thinking attitudes about sex. Turns out she would have an intuitive streak when conducting interviews and a penchant for persuading people — including hospital staff and their wives — to participate in sexual experiments, both alone and as couples. Together, the team of Masters and Johnson, now the subject of a provocative new Showtime drama, “Masters of Sex,” went on to become trailblazing sexologists, overturning Victorian myths even as they conducted their own affair, they said, to defuse any sexual tension that might interfere with their research. (They ultimately married, in 1971, but amicably divorced 21 years later).

Lizzy Caplan, who portrays Johnson in “Masters of Sex,” which is based on Thomas Maier’s biography of the same name, has drawn kudos for her sexually frank turn as a vampire-blood-addicted vegan on HBO’s “True Blood” and as a promiscuous, foul-mouthed cocaine addict in the viciously comic 2012 film “Bachelorette.” Yet when she first read the “Masters of Sex” pilot, she said, she found the true sex story “astounding, even mind-blowing.

“If you were to walk into a hospital today and try to get doctors and nurses to sign up for a program that involved taking off their clothes, having electrodes taped to them and having sex in front of two other people, it would be scandalous,” the green-eyed beauty said in a telephone interview. “But Masters and Johnson managed to do just that — in the 1950s.”

Two decades before the women’s liberation movement, their conclusions were decidedly feminist: “A huge cornerstone of their early work was debunking Freud’s claim that a clitoral orgasm is immature, while the vaginal orgasm was the only type that a grown woman should be having with her husband,” Caplan marveled.  

It was only natural that the 31-year-old Caplan was drawn to playing Johnson, who “made no apologies for who she was,” the actress said.

Caplan had previously carved out a niche as Hollywood’s go-to actress for playing bold women who are often as vulnerable as they are sarcastic. She turned heads (and stole scenes) as Lindsay Lohan’s caustic pal in the film “Mean Girls,” as a brittle attorney on TV’s “New Girl” and, of course, on “True Blood,” where her character met her demise while flying through the air. “I wasn’t naked in that scene,” Caplan said, “but that was one of the few.”

On a recent appearance on “Conan,” she regaled the audience with salty tales of secretly perusing her parents’ X-rated cookbook, with its recipes for breast-like tarts and meatloaf in the shape of a phallus.

Caplan wasn’t always so precocious, she said. As a teenager at the Jewish Gindling Hilltop Camp, she recalled, the boy-talk was “incredibly innocent by today’s standards.” For her disco-themed bat mitzvah at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, her mother, a political aide for Assemblyman Wally Knox, nixed her dream dress, a tight spandex number, in favor of a more demure outfit.  

Caplan said she never intended to become an actress in those early years, preferring classical piano and attending Hamilton High School’s Academy of Music to further her studies. But she ultimately found that pursuit to be “both isolating and nerve-wracking,” so, at 15, she switched to drama and within a year had landed a gig playing Jason Segel’s disco-loving girlfriend on Judd Apatow’s TV comedy “Freaks and Geeks.”  

The actress traces the ironic streak that would color her personality, as well as those of many of her characters, to her mother’s death from cancer, not long after Caplan’s bat mitzvah. “When something traumatic happens to you when you’re that young, it hardens you,” she explained. “My whole thing was never wanting anybody to worry about me, so I cracked jokes and put on quite a good show of seeming fine with everything.”

Caplan was often relegated to the role of the acerbic best friend rather than the ingénue. That’s shifted in recent years and the actress is now thrilled, she said, to have landed the role of Johnson, her first major dramatic turn.  

As research, Caplan made a number of requests to meet with Johnson, but the elderly researcher declined, because “she no longer wanted to be in the limelight,” the actress said.  Johnson died in July at the age of 88; Masters (played by Michael Sheen) died in 2001.

To tell their story, “Masters of Sex” depicts a jaw-dropping amount of nudity: “It was scary until I realized how protected you are in those situations,” Caplan said. “Nobody is sitting there judging your body; the crew are well-trained people trying to make you look and feel your best, so in a weird way it feels safer even than walking down the beach in your bikini.”

In one amusing sequence, Caplan thrusts a glass dildo in the face of the hospital administrator (Beau Bridges), who only reluctantly has funded their work. “[Beau] gives off the vibe of a friendly uncle, and I don’t think I would like to hold up a glass dildo to my uncle’s face,” she said of that awkward scene.

“But at a certain point you realize that our show is called ‘Masters of Sex,’ and if we’re just going to be babies about this dildo, then we should rethink what we’re doing here,” she added with a laugh.

“Masters of Sex” premieres on Showtime on Sept. 29.

Sex research and the single girl in ‘Masters of Sex’ Read More »

Italian cyclist Gino Bartali recognized as righteous gentile

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

Yad Vashem posthumously recognized the Italian cycling champion Gino Bartali as Righteous Among the Nations.

The Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem said in a statement Sept. 23 that during the German occupation of Italy, beginning in September 1943, “Bartali, a devout Catholic, was part of a rescue network spearheaded by Rabbi Nathan Cassuto of Florence together with the Archbishop of Florence Cardinal Elia Angelo Dalla Costa,” who has been recognized as a righteous gentile.

The Jewish-Christian network, Yad Vashem said, “saved hundreds of local Jews and Jewish refugees from territories which had previously been under Italian control, mostly in France and Yugoslavia.”

Bartali, who died in 2000 at 85, had acted as a courier for the network, according to Yad Vashem, “secreting forged documents and papers in his bicycle and transporting them between cities, all under the guise of training.”

It added, “Knowingly risking his life to rescue Jews, Bartali transferred falsified documents to various contacts, among them Rabbi Cassuto.”

The decision to recognize Bartali was based in part on testimony obtained and published by the Italian Jewish monthly Pagine Ebraiche, including from a man, Giorgio Golderberg, who said Bartali had hidden him and his parents in his cellar.

The recognition drew an emotional response in Italy.

“Gino Bartali was an immense champion, on pedals and in life,” Pagine Ebraiche editor Guido Vitale wrote. “The recognition by Yad Vashem is the just reward for an exemplary human undertaking.”

Florence Mayor Matteo Renzi told the Union of Italian Jewish Communities Web site that it was “the best present to the city and the most serious way to give meaning to the world cycling championships.”

Yad Vashem said a presentation ceremony will be held in Italy at a date to be determined.

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‘The Friedkin Connection’: Living forward, looking back

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment /

In the prologue to his new memoir, “The Friedkin Connection,” Academy Award-winning director William Friedkin writes, “Life is lived forward, but can only be understood backward.”

As he looks backward on a career spanning some 50 years, the director perhaps best known for the iconic films “The French Connection” (1971) and “The Exorcist” (1973), gives the reader a plethora of delicious anecdotes but also conveys a sense of the vicissitudes involved with getting a film made in Hollywood.

“I wanted people to try and understand what my process was,” he explained in a recent interview, “and some of the obstacles I encountered along the way, and where I was successful and unsuccessful in dealing with them. In that way, I thought people might get a deeper understanding of the life of a film director.”

As illustrated in his book, it is a life of constant struggle against people who are trying to interfere with a filmmaker’s vision.

“From all of recorded history,” he observed, “there is the story of a creator whose work is constantly being undermined by a destroyer or a kind of devil. And that’s pretty much how I have viewed a lot of the people I’ve come in contact with making films. I haven’t made that many films, by the way. I think I’ve made less than 20 films in about 50 years of doing it. But, I always come up against the same barriers. There are people who don’t make films, but they’re in charge of the studios where films are made, and you get in their way, as they get in your way.” 

Friedkin didn’t set out to be a film director. He grew up in a rough Chicago neighborhood, the son of immigrant Jewish parents who fled the pogroms in Ukraine. After graduating high school, he went to work in the mailroom of a local TV station, and eventually progressed to directing live television. He never went to college and credits a writer at the station, Francis Coughlin, with exposing him to the world of books, art and other intellectual pursuits. 

Then, he had a life-changing experience. “It was fate, or God, that led me to see a movie called ‘Citizen Kane,’ and that inspired me to want to make films. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but whatever Orson Welles did to make ‘Citizen Kane,’ that’s what I wanted to do. And then, either fate or God put this story in front of me of the black man who was going to the electric chair in Chicago.”

The man was Paul Crump, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a security guard during an armed robbery. Believing the man to be innocent, Friedkin made the documentary “The People vs. Paul Crump,” which was instrumental in getting Crump’s sentence commuted to life in prison. (Crump was later paroled.) It also led to Friedkin being signed by the William Morris Agency and being hired by the famed documentary producer David Wolper, who brought the young director to Hollywood.

Friedkin ultimately delved into feature films. His first three efforts were “Good Times,” a musical spoof of various movie genres with Sonny and Cher; “The Night They Raided Minsky’s,” an homage to old-time burlesque; and “Boys in the Band,” one of the first films to deal openly with homosexuality, about a birthday party attended by a group of gay friends and one supposedly straight man. The movie was well received by film critics.

Then Friedkin exploded on the scene in 1971 with “The French Connection,” about two New York City cops pursuing drug smugglers who get their product from France. It was second only to “Fiddler on the Roof” in grosses for that year and won five Academy Awards, including best director for Friedkin, who also won the Directors Guild and Golden Globe awards. The film has become legendary for its unique car chase sequence. 

Two years later, Friedkin made what many consider his signature film, “The Exorcist,” which depicts the demonic possession of a young girl. With some exceptions, it garnered rave reviews and has been re-released several times, earning a worldwide gross of more than $400 million.

In his memoir, which he will discuss at the West Hollywood Book Fair on Sept. 29, Friedkin writes of “the roller coaster that is Hollywood, where dizzying heights are followed by gut-wrenching depths.” He chronicles the years following the heady success of “The Exorcist” as a succession of ups and downs, with some of his films being highly praised or finding more favor with age, while others have had disappointing outcomes. But, he stressed, they were the kind of films he would want to see, while the movies with mass appeal are of no interest to him.

“The film that I’m most proud of is this film ‘Sorcerer,’ he stated. “It was one of my least successful. And now, at the recent Venice Film Festival, on my birthday, Aug. 29, they ran a restored version of ‘Sorcerer’ that looks like it was made yesterday, and now it’s coming out again in theaters, in home video, and on television. The film was dead. It’s been raised like Lazarus.” The story concerns four fugitives who accept a job driving nitroglycerin for 200 miles over dangerous territory in South America for an American oil company.

He added, “I’m not interested in superheroes, somebody who puts on a spandex suit and flies around and saves the world. I wouldn’t be interested in either making that kind of film or watching it. … I’m way out of step with public taste, because the public flocks to that kind of film, films about vampires and zombies, and films that are video games.”

But Friedkin, who has lived through heart attacks and major surgeries, continues to make movies, and his latest film, “Killer Joe,” a dark comedy about a young man who is in debt to a drug dealer and who plans to kill his mother for the insurance money, has been welcomed by most film critics. 

Friedkin has also expanded his horizons to direct plays and numerous operas. A few years ago he staged Camille Saint-Saëns’ opera “Samson and Delilah” in Tel Aviv. And he starts rehearsals in January for a production of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” at the Geffen Playhouse.

He confesses to having mellowed with age and with his marriage to Sherry Lansing, a pioneer who, in 1980, became the first woman to head a major movie studio.

As for what he feels it takes to be a successful filmmaker in Hollywood, he cited “ambition, luck and the grace of God. I don’t believe talent figures into that equation at all. Sometimes it does. Sometimes very talented people succeed. Other times, very talented people don’t even get an opportunity. Without ambition or luck and the grace of God, it doesn’t matter how great your talent is.”

William Friedkin will appear on the Park Stage at the West Hollywood Book Fair on Sept. 29, 2 p.m. at West Hollywood Park, 647 N San Vicente Blvd., West Hollywood. For more information, call (310) 659-5550 or visit westhollywoodbookfair.org.

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Seeking consolation

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

How does an irreligious Jew find consolation at a religious service?

Seeking such consolation, I attended the Hillel at UCLA High Holy Days services conducted by Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller. I don’t often go to services, but in February our oldest daughter, Robin, died, and I felt drawn there.

Rabbi Seidler-Feller — people simply call him Chaim — is a comforting presence, at least to me. I have attended a few High Holy Days services at UCLA Hillel in the past and have interviewed the rabbi for my column in the Jewish Journal. He has a scholarly yet freewheeling mind, an ability to explain our religion to skeptics like me and to welcome us into the flock, even for a brief time. He has an understated sense of humor that appeals to me, and he is a warm and approachable man.

I went alone on Rosh Hashanah. Nancy, my wife, is an abstainer. My late father once asked her why she didn’t go to temple. “Dad,” she said, “I don’t believe in it.” 

“Believe in it,” he replied. “Why, nobody believes in it.” In his mind, it was simply his duty to go. 

As the services went on around me, I was thinking of Robin. Images of our family life flashed through my mind, mostly the good times we had, but also the tough ones experienced by Robin, her sister, Jennifer, Nancy and me, a mental slide show of the Boyarsky family story.

Another family — a dysfunctional one — was the subject of the Torah reading and of Rabbi Seidler-Feller’s words to the congregation. It was the family headed by Abraham, including his wife, Sarah, and her maid, Hagar. As is well known, Sarah, unable to conceive, persuaded Abraham to father a child with Hagar, who gave birth to a boy named Ishmael. After his birth, Sarah conceived and gave birth to Isaac. The two mothers did not get along. Sarah, feeling Ishmael was a bad influence on Isaac, persuaded Abraham to send mother and son away. He complied, but after their banishment, they had a harrowing experience in the desert until an angel of God appeared to save them. God promised that Ishmael would lead a great nation. Isaac, too, was chosen to lead a great nation, and the conflict continues to this day: Isaac’s Jews versus Ishmael’s Arabs. 

Rabbi Seidler-Feller, I am sure, had told this story and commented on it countless times. Yet, in his telling, it was fresh, dealing as it does with the insoluble issues of relationships with God, with husbands, wives, siblings and, as it eventually turned out, among Arabs and Jews, although the rabbi did not dwell on this point.

With so many angles of the story to consider, I lost myself thinking about it, not paying much attention to the service. What was wrong with Abraham? How could he kick out Hagar? Of course, what could you expect from a man who later was about to sacrifice Isaac on God’s command until God rescinded the terrible order? I wondered how that defense — God told me to do it — would stand up in a trial in the Criminal Courts Building.

In early afternoon, we approached the time for the recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish, and my thoughts returned to Robin. By the time of the prayer, the congregation had thinned out. I looked around at others saying the Kaddish, wondering whom they had lost, what they were thinking about and whether they were as sad as me. Not entirely sad, however. I smiled, thinking of how the witty Robin, although appreciating the fact that she was loved and being remembered, would have had some ironic comments about the event.

On Yom Kippur, I again went to services at Hillel, this time with my cousin Rhona Singer. She is as irreligious as me. We enjoy going together, because it brings back memories of growing up in Oakland with our large family and of old friends and religious school at Temple Beth Abraham, where my mother was the principal. 

I understand the solemnity of the day, but I find it difficult to repent for the many sins listed in the Al Chet recited by the congregation, even though Rabbi Seidler-Feller explained it didn’t mean we had committed them all. We were repenting for Jewish community members who had committed them.

One sin always stops me — “For the sin which we have committed before You by scoffing.” Scoffing is what I have done for a living throughout my career. Scoffing is central to my character. I couldn’t very well repent that.

During the Yizkor service, Robin’s name was among those recited by the rabbi. Rhona touched my arm in sympathy. 

I left Hillel consoled, helped by a rabbi who makes a place for the religious and the scoffers. Feeling welcome there, I was free to let my mind roam through thoughts of family, including the daughter we’ve lost. Over the years, we’ve had more happy moments than sad, and I’m thankful for that.

Bill Boyarsky is a columnist for the Jewish Journal, Truthdig and L.A. Observed, and the author of “Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times” (Angel City Press).

Seeking consolation Read More »

Calendar: September 28–October 4

Leave a Comment / Picks and Clicks, What's Happening /

SAT | SEP 28

“THE GUARDSMAN”

If you thought your beautiful new spouse was cheating on you, wouldn’t you create a disguise and test her fidelity? Ferenc Molnar’s comic game of love and marriage may or may not remind you of you and yours, but with wit and deception aplenty, it’ll certainly be fun to watch. Directed by Michael Michetti. Sat. 8 p.m. Through Nov. 30. $34-$54. A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. (626) 356-3100. SUN | SEP 29

PEDAL FOR PEACE

StandWithUs wants you to ride with them! The international nonprofit is cycling 60 miles from West Los Angeles to Oxnard in support of Israel. If that sounds a little far, participants can opt for a shorter ride and three-mile walk in Oxnard. And don’t worry, if you can’t find your sneakers, you can still sponsor someone! The journey will conclude with a kosher lunch at the Emerson beach house along with free T-shirts. Suggested donations for walkers and riders. Sun. 6:30 a.m. Meeting location to be announced. (310) 836-6140. ” target=”_blank”>westhollywoodbookfair.org.

WILSHIRE BOULEVARD TEMPLE DEDICATION

It’s a coming-out (again) party! Renewed and ready for action, come celebrate the community-wide (and interfaith) dedication of the newly transformed Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The choral concert will include 150 voices from the Cantorial Choir of the Academy for Jewish Religion and a special closing performance by Burt Bacharach. Sun. 5 p.m. Free. RSVP required. Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Erika J. Glazer Family Campus, 3663 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. (424) 208-8932. MON | SEP 30

“PHOTO OPPORTUNITY”

It’s a presidential election year. A candidate makes a campaign stop and meets an elderly Jewish woman — what they learn about each other is a secret that haunts her and threatens him. Joshua Metzger’s play, directed by Elizabeth Sampson, will be read featuring actors Judith Scarpone, Amy Tolsky, Chet Grissom and Laurie Okin. The playwright, a prior winner of the National Playwrights Conference, will be in discussion after the performance. Tue. 8 p.m. Free. NoHo Senior Arts Colony, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. (818) 761-8838. TUE | OCT 1

“ETGAR KERET: IS REALITY OVERRATED?”

 

The Israeli author, filmmaker, professor, thinker, mover and shaker is in conversation with Literary Death Match host Adrian Todd Zuniga. Internationally acclaimed for his short stories, which have been published in more than 20 languages, Keret will read from his newest collection, “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door.” A signing and a reception follow the discussion, which is sure to be a reality check. Tue. 5:30-7:30 p.m. Free. RSVP required. UCLA Fowler Museum, Lenart Auditorium, Room A103B, Los Angeles. (310) 825-9646. THU | OCT 3

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

The globally revered journalist discusses his new book “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation.” Chronicling the 40-year story of the soldiers who reunited Jerusalem and divided a nation, it’s one of the year’s more controversial stories. Sponsored by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and UCLA Hillel. Thu. 3-4:15 p.m. Free. Please register. UCLA School of Law, Room 1314, Los Angeles. (310) 825-9646. ” target=”_blank”>lajfilmfest.org.

DUDAMEL & BRONFMAN 

As part of its 10th anniversary celebration, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is honoring composer Peter Lieberson. Having premiered Lieberson’s “Neruda Songs” in 2005, it is only fitting that the L.A. Phil premieres the late composer’s last piece: “Shing Kham.” Under conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the orchestra, international pianist Yefim Bronfman and percussionist Pedro Carneiro collaborate for a memorable and moving night of melody that includes Schubert’s Symphony No. 4 and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Through Oct. 6. Thu. 8 p.m. $77.50-$180. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown. (323) 850-2000. Calendar: September 28–October 4 Read More »

Moving and Shaking: Shawn Landres receives NextGen Award, ADL honors philanthropists

Leave a Comment / California, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, Moving & Shaking, News /

NextGen Award recipient Shawn Landres. Photo via Google+

Jewish-innovation advocate Shawn Landres praised the Liberty Hill Foundation when the social change organization named him the recipient of its 2013 NextGen Award during its recent Change L.A. ceremony, but he could have just as easily been speaking about the diversity of the city he calls home. 

“Liberty Hill celebrates all of us for who we are and the communities we come from: religious, spiritual or secular, immigrant or homegrown, LGBTQI or not; African-American, Asian-American, Latino, European or all of the above; Boyle Heights, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Lynwood, Calabasas and beyond,” the co-founder and CEO of Jewish think tank Jumpstart said, accepting his award on Sept. 8.

Given out annually, the NextGen award recognizes individuals who contribute toward the advancement of social justice.

Kafi Blumenfield, president and CEO of the Liberty Hill Foundation, presented Landres with the honor. Incoming Liberty Hill CEO Shane Goldsmith accompanied her onstage during the event, which took place at mid-Wilshire bar Busby’s East. L.A. City Controller Ron Galperin gave Landers a certification of recognition on behalf of the city as well.

Community members in attendance included Jumpstart co-founder Joshua Avedon and board members Richard Siegel, Rhoda Weisman and Adam Weiss; Rabbi Sarah Bassin of NewGround; L.A. City Councilman Bob Blumenfield and others. 

Sponsors included the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, Bill Resnick, Paula and Barry Litt, the Jumpstart board of directors, IKAR; Julie Hermelin and Sinai Temple. Several Jewish organizations and leaders served on the ceremony’s host committee.

From left: Anti-Defamation League honorees Leonard Comden and Steve Wasserman.

Mitch Dunitz, Leonard Comden and Steve Wasserman were honored for their philanthropic support of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Sept. 11 at the 30th annual ADL/El Caballero Golf Tournament, a collaboration between the ADL and El Caballero Country Club in Tarzana. The event helped raise more than $250,000 for the ADL, according to the organization’s Web site.

Dunitz offered inspiration for other potential philanthropists when he said, “There is no shame in making the calls; there is only shame in not answering the calls when you’re in a position to help.”

Dunitz of Sherman Oaks, who received the Sam Saltsman Award, named after the late Jewish community leader and founder of the annual tournament, is a former president of the Tarzana country club and founder of the real estate investment firm MD Investments. The Distinguished Community Service Award went to Comden of Tarzana and Wasserman of Woodland Hills, who run the law firm Wasserman, Comden, Casselman and Esensten, LLP.

The honors were well deserved, according to an ADL statement that read: “ADL is pleased to celebrate these three honorees for their work in the community and their commitments to philanthropy.” The civil rights agency’s mission is combating anti-Semitism, hate and bigotry.

The event featured 18 holes of golf, dinner, an awards presentation and a live auction.

Alison Diamond and Ron Salter served as event co-chairs.

Moshe Willner addresses the IEEE Photonics Conference. Courtesy of Yeshiva University Los Angeles.

Spending the summer cooped up in a science lab paid off for YULA Boys High School student Moshe Willner. This month, the high school senior was invited to appear at the IEEE Photonics Conference, an annual symposium that draws leading scientists and engineers in light and optics, held in Bellevue, Wash., after a paper he worked on was accepted by the conference.

During his 10-minute presentation, Willner discussed how light sends information. His talk drew from experiments he helped conduct while working at a lab at University of Southern California (USC) this past summer. 

“I loved the idea of discovering something new, something that doesn’t exist, that you can’t find in a textbook already,” Willner said in a statement. “Working in the lab doing research on optical engineering provided me with that exciting feeling of discovery.”

Willner knew little about photonics before spending the summer at USC, where his father, Alan Willner, works as a professor in the department of electrical engineering. 

Willner discovered that he’d been accepted into the conference — which took place from Sept. 8-12 — while building a sukkah with his classmates in preparation for this month’s holiday. It gave him only one day’s notice to make his way to Seattle.

At YULA, a Modern Orthodox high school, Willner is a member of his school’s varsity basketball team. YULA Head of School Rabbi Dov Emerson described him as a “hard-working student” and a “well-respected student leader.”

“Moshe truly represents the best of YULA,” Emerson said.

Moving and Shaking acknowledges accomplishments by members of the local Jewish community, including people who start new jobs, leave jobs, win awards and more, as well as local events that featured leaders from the Jewish and Israeli communities. Got a tip? E-mail it to ryant@jewishjournal.com.

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United and divided: Inside ‘Like Dreamers,’ Yossi Klein Halevi’s extraordinary new book

Leave a Comment / Books, Cover Story, Entertainment /

The stirring scene that opens “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation,” by Yossi Klein Halevi (Harper, $35), is a flashback to the night of June 6, 1967, when the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces crossed the no man’s land from West Jerusalem and approached the Old City, a sacred place that had not been under Jewish sovereignty for nearly 2,000 years.

“They changed the history of Israel and the Middle East,” Halevi observes. But Halevi has not written a hagiography of those courageous young men. Some of them were secular kibbutzniks and some were religious Zionists, a fact that strikes Halevi as emblematic of the tensions that have reshaped Israel during the half-century that followed what is now known as the Six-Day War. Their story, he insists, is really about “the fate of Israel’s utopian dreams, the vast hopes imposed on this besieged, embattled strip of land crowded with traumatized Jewish refugees.” In that sense, “Like Dreamers” is as much about the future of Israel as it is about what the author describes as “Israel’s most transcendent moment.”

Halevi is a journalist, memoirist and commentator with a unique perspective on both Jewish history and the destiny of Israel. Born in Brooklyn, he was an early follower of the late Meir Kahane, a member of Kahane’s controversial Jewish Defense League and an activist in the movement to liberate Soviet Jews. As he recounts in his autobiography, “Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist,” he gradually moved from the far right of political Zionism into Orthodoxy and ultimately emerged as an advocate for rapprochement among Jews, Muslims and Christians, as he advocated in “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden.”

Today, at 60, Halevi lives with his family in Jerusalem, where he serves as a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. His byline is familiar to readers of many publications, among them the New Republic — where he holds the position of contributing editor — The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs magazine. He is much sought after as a commentator on the Middle East, and he brings a hard-edged, highly realistic perspective to his work. To his credit, he refuses to mythify or idealize the people whose exploits he is writing about, and yet he is capable of showing how seemingly ordinary men and women are capable of doing great things.

Thus, for example, Halevi is quick to point out that all of the main characters in his book are Ashkenazim — Jews of European ancestry — even though nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population today is of Middle Eastern origin. And he emphasizes that the seven members of the 55th Brigade whom he interviewed over a period of 10 years are markedly unsentimental; he is impressed by their “faith in human initiative and contempt for self-pity,” and “their daunting quest for solutions to unbearable dilemmas that would intimidate others into paralysis.” Above all, their feat of arms in 1967 — which united Jerusalem as an Israeli city, taking what had been ruled by Jordan — can be seen as an augury of the problems Israel still must resolve: “To a large extent,” he writes, “Israel today lives in the partial fulfillment and partial failure of their contradictory dreams.”

Halevi uses the biographies of those seven Israeli soldiers as a device to tell a much larger tale about the influences and pressures that shaped them. Avital Geva, for example, grew up on a kibbutz that belonged to Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist movement with distinctly Marxist values.  “Avital and his friends had been raised to revere the Soviet Union as the ‘second homeland,’ ” he explains, and he reminds us that Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 was mourned on the front page of the movement’s newspaper. By contrast, Yoel Bin-Nun was a member of a religious Zionist youth organization Bnei Akiva, and when he confided his “deepest longing” to a girl of his acquaintance, it was to see the construction of a third Temple.  “With animal sacrifices and blood and all of that?” she asked. “That’s what is written in the Torah,” he answered.

Halevi allows us to see the conflicting Israeli views of the Holocaust barely 20 years after the liberation of the camps. Some native-born Israelis were astounded by and contemptuous of the survivors, whom they called sabon — the word for soap, a reference to the notion that corpses were rendered into soap. Only when Arik Achmon, chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, met the survivors who had founded Kibbutz Buchenwald did he come to see that they were worthy of his respect: “They’d survived through not passivity but constant alertness,” Achmon came to realize. “Sabon: what jerks we were.” But Halevi reminds us that one of the enduring victories the 55th Brigade achieved was to “[replace] skeleton heaps in death camps with paratroopers at the Wall as the enduring Jewish image of the century.”

The centerpiece of the book, of course, is the operations that took place on the night of June 6-7, 1967, when the 55th Brigade was assigned a mission that had been a failure when it was tried during the War of Independence, in 1948. A tactical map of the battle lines will come as a shock to anyone who has since visited Israel as a tourist and strolled through the streets of Jerusalem where, on that night, the trenches and minefields were laid out. At the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces, the fast-changing situation on multiple fronts was under constant scrutiny, but at least one order was clear and unequivocal: “Be prepared to take the Old City,” Gen. Uzi Narkiss, commander of the central front, told Arik Achmon. “I hope you will erase the shame of 1948.

Exactly here, I think, is where we glimpse the unique importance of the battle for Jerusalem, and the various reasons why it was so consequential. For the battle-hardened officers of the high command, the taking of the Old City was a point of honor as well as a crucial strategic objective. For others, it was a religious undertaking with messianic implications: “Next year in Jerusalem,” sang a group of soldiers, echoing the closing words of the Passover seder. A student watching them provided a new lyric: “Next week in Jerusalem — in Jerusalem rebuilt.” For just about everyone, including the largely secular popular of the Jewish state, the strains of a new hit song called “Jerusalem of Gold” represented “the nation’s suppressed anguish for the Old City of Jerusalem.”

But Halevi presses on in his search for the layering of meanings contained within the taking of the Old City. The tensions within the 55th Brigade are now writ large in Israel — the divisions between the religious and the secular, the settlers and the kibbutzniks, and the arguments over whether and how to change the “facts on the ground” that were first established in 1967. We read of how the veterans of that fateful mission go on to live their lives, to reinvent themselves, to enter and leave relationships, to pursue careers and enterprises in civilian life, to endure illness and confront death, and Halevi shows us how the same urgent issues that stirred in their hearts and minds in the heat of battle remain the same issues that the whole nation confronts today, often with heartbreaking and even fatal consequences.

That’s why “Like Dreamers” is such a rich, complex and eloquent book, both challenging and enlightening, an extraordinary effort on the part of the author to capture a vast historical saga through the lens of the lives of seven flesh-and-blood human beings.  

“In their disappointment, some Jews had forgotten to celebrate, how to be grateful,” Halevi concludes. “It was a recurring Jewish problem, as ancient as the first Exodus.” His achievement in “Like Dreams” is his own ability to celebrate the courage of the men of the 55th Brigade, without for a moment overlooking the perplexing aftermath of their victory on that remarkable day.

Rabbi David Wolpe and Sinai Temple, together with the Jewish Journal, host a discussion with Yossi Klein Halevi on Oct. 3, 7:30 p.m. For more information, call (310) 481-3243 or visit  United and divided: Inside ‘Like Dreamers,’ Yossi Klein Halevi’s extraordinary new book Read More »

Yossi Klein Halevi’s dream

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, David Suissa, Mobile, News, Opinion /

Too many books about Israel try to tell us what to think or feel. Whether from the left or right, it seems that the subject of Israel brings out the emotional partisan in many of us. We feel strongly one way or the other, so we like to read books or articles that support our opinions.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong or surprising about that — it’s just that it usually doesn’t make for fascinating reading.

In his new, magisterial book about Israel, “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation,” my friend Yossi Klein Halevi has taken a different approach.

He’s written a book not of opinions, but of stories. Stories and dreams. By following the lives of seven soldiers bonded by a seminal event, and recounting their divergent narratives, he’s captured the complexity of Israel in human terms.

Yossi’s own dreaming began after a miraculous Israeli victory during one unforgettable summer.

“In late June 1967, a few weeks after the end of the Six-Day War, I flew to Israel with my father,” he writes in the book. “I was a fourteen-year-old boy from Brooklyn, and my father, a Holocaust survivor, had decided that he couldn’t keep away any longer.”

These paratroopers who “fulfilled a dream of two millennia” didn’t just change the history of Israel and the Middle East, he writes, they also changed his life.

“At the Wall, I watched my father become a believing Jew. He had lost his faith in the Holocaust; but now, he said, he forgave God. The protector of Israel had regained His will. It was possible for Jews to pray again.”

“That summer,” he writes, “everyone in Israel felt like family … Israel celebrated its existence, life itself. We had done it: survived the twentieth century. Not merely survived but reversed annihilation into a kind of redemption, awakened from our worst nightmare into our most extravagant dream.”

The young Yossi dreamed of returning one day to become an Israeli, and for good reason: “The great Jewish adventure was happening in my lifetime; how could I keep away?”

He made aliyah in the summer of 1982, but was hardly prepared for the messy adventure that awaited him. Israel had just invaded Lebanon in response to terror attacks on the Galilee. This was no summer of love.

“Instead of uniting Israelis, as it had in 1967, war now divided them. For the first time there were antigovernment demonstrations, even as soldiers were fighting at the front.

“The euphoria of the summer of ’67, the delusion of a happy ending to Jewish history, had been replaced by an awareness of the agonizing complexity of Israel’s dilemmas.”

Making sense of this agonizing complexity would come to define Yossi’s next 30 years.

This wasn’t exactly the dream he had in mind when he made aliyah — the dream shaped by his idealized view of Israel in that heroic summer of 1967.

This was a grown-up type of dream, where the test of love would be trying to understand all sides and not rush to judgment.

I’ve known Yossi since the summer of 2000. When I first met him, I knew only about his reputation as one of Israel’s most astute political analysts. I had no idea he was also deeply spiritual and meditated every morning. I learned more about that side of him from his last book, “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for Hope With Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.”

These two sides — the spiritualist and the realist — have melded together in “Like Dreamers.” He has married the heartfelt sensitivity of spirituality with the hard-nosed demands of reality. 

“I tried to listen to the conflicting certainties that divided those who saw the results of 1967 as blessing from those who saw it as curse,” he writes. “Israel was losing the feeling of family that had drawn me there in the first place. Much of my career became focused on explaining the unraveling of the Israeli consensus.”

Not satisfied with producing only the piercing essays for which he is well known, in 2002, Yossi embarked on a decade-long journey to better understand the country he loves — to feel the Israeli reality through Israelis themselves — and to write about it.

The result is a poignant and deeply human portrait of a little nation navigating existential rapids through four tumultuous decades.

His masterstroke was to tell this story through the lives of the paratroopers who liberated the Western Wall where his father regained his faith in that fateful summer of ’67— when Yossi first began dreaming about Israel.

In thinking about these soldiers, he wondered: “How had the war changed their lives? What role did they play in trying to influence the political outcome of their military victory?”

It took hundreds of interviews all over the country, years of research, plenty of midnight meetings and more than a little soul searching to get at those answers.

In his journey, he discovered a group of Israeli soldiers who grew to become remarkably diverse — kibbutznik, religious Zionist, artist, peace activist, settler leader, capitalist, even an anti-Zionist.

The group came to represent some of the major schisms within Israeli society who “not only helped define the political debate of post ’67 Israel, but also its social and cultural transformations.”

Each of the paratroopers has a powerful story, but what truly distinguishes the book is how Yossi tells these stories.

By infiltrating the lives of these seven main characters over so many years, by observing and faithfully recounting their distinct and often-clashing narratives, by showing empathy even when it was difficult and by weaving in his insightful commentary, Yossi has delivered an Israel that dares to be authentic. 

An Israel that transcends caricature and humanizes the flawed heroes and dreamers of the Jewish nation, including, yes, even the much-maligned settlers.

An Israel gritty enough to face the reality of life-threatening problems with no easy answers.

An Israel that can be both united and divided, as when he writes: “Secular kibbutzniks and religious Zionists disagreed about God and faith and the place of religion in Jewish identity and the life of the state.

“Yet for all their differences, religious Zionism and the secular kibbutz movement agreed that the goal of Jewish statehood must be more than the mere creation of a safe refuge for the Jewish people.”  

It is this unifying and aspirational idea that fuels the book.

As its title suggests, the book is indeed a story of dreams, “a story about the fate of Israel’s utopian dreams, the vast hopes imposed on this besieged, embattled strip of land crowded with traumatized Jewish refugees.”

It’s a story of dreams that don’t go away, dreams that crash on each other, dreams that sometimes overlap, dreams that grudgingly evolve, dreams that are never fully realized.

It’s a story, above all, of complexity.

Here in the Diaspora, we’re tempted to look at this complexity and feel exhausted and get impatient and say, “Yeah, but the bottom line is that Israel must do this, or Israel must do that,” as if there really were only one bottom line.

Maybe the hidden message in “Like Dreamers” is that the absence of one bottom line is the bottom line.

And maybe the broader message in “Like Dreamers” is that if you had to pick one bottom line, it would be having the very freedom to follow one’s dreams.

That may well be Israel’s least-noticed and most notable achievement — how an embattled Jewish nation surrounded by enemies managed to create a society where its “traumatized refugees” felt free to follow their dreams, even when those dreams threatened to tear the country apart.

In giving us such a compelling portrait of Israel’s complex humanity, Yossi Klein Halevi has followed his own evolving and never-ending dream.

David Suissa is president of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal and can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com.

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