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Jewish Journal

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January 9, 2014

Milken head puts focus on tech

Leave a Comment / Education /

Gary Weisserman’s views on education are decidedly millennial, notwithstanding his more than 20 years of experience in the field. 

“By academic background, I’m a technologist, and I got into technology because of my love for games and puzzles,” the 44-year-old educator said during a recent interview.

Last month, Weisserman completed his first semester serving as Milken Community Schools’ new head of school. His hiring became effective in July.

Gary Weisserman, photo by Josh Tousey

Interested in a school curriculum and culture that blends the religious and the contemporary, Weisserman said one of the problems facing Jewish day schools is instructors’ preoccupation with teaching halachah, Jewish law.

“Traditional textual study is important, and so is learning about haggim (Jewish festivals) and so on, but, for kids, Jewish learning needs to begin with seeing the modern world in Jewish life,” he said.

Speaking in a manner that was both brisk and articulate, Weisserman emphasized that teaching Jewish law and offering instruction relevant to contemporary life do not have to be mutually exclusive.  

“There [are] opportunities to be able to use Jewish thought to guide what we do on a day-to-day basis,” he said. 

Weisserman, who grew up in Detroit, previously served as chief academics officer at Scheck Hillel Community School in North Miami Beach, Fla., one of the largest Jewish day schools in the nation. 

But his background in innovative education goes back much earlier. His years as a graduate student — Weisserman has a master’s degree in educational technology from the University of Michigan (UM) — sparked an appreciation for digital education technology that would become the foundation of his philosophy that technology and learning go hand-in-hand. 

After finishing school, he became a high-school teacher, leading classes in social studies and technology. Later, Weisserman worked as a lecturer at the UM School of Education; served as a faculty member at UM-Flint’s educational technology program; and worked as the director of early college and K-16 initiatives at UM-Flint, during which time he co-founded Genesee Early College. (Early colleges, often located on college campuses, serve grades 9-13. Graduating high-school students earn transferable college credits and even associate degrees.)

Weisserman went on to establish Oakland Early College in Michigan. His work included finding teachers and recruiting students. He proudly notes that students who graduated from Oakland — many of whom were the first in their families to receive an education at that level — frequently went on to be among the highest achievers at four-year universities.

Weisserman’s hiring by the Milken board follows the 2012 departure of Jason Ablin, who spent 13 years at the school (Rennie Wrubel served as interim head of school during the 2012-2013 school year). And it comes on the heels of the severing of ties between Milken and Stephen S. Wise Temple, the large Reform synagogue that established Milken more than 20 years ago. That split in 2012 made Milken, a 750-student middle and high school — and one of the country’s biggest Jewish day schools — a fully independent private school. 

Weisserman, who lives in Beverly Hills, said he sees his role at Milken as part of a larger evolution in Jewish education. 

Recently, Weisserman participated in a tour of a Florida-based Jewish day school that, for him, reinforced part of what is amiss in Jewish education today. Walking into a first-grade classroom, he observed a teacher giving a lesson about the appropriate length of a sukkah’s third wall. Weisserman was stunned. 

“I thought, ‘Is this really what they should be focusing on?’ ” he said.

As he continued touring the school’s higher grades, he found teachers giving that same, highly specific lesson.

“And the older the kids got, the more apathetic students were about it,” he said.

Weisserman said he sees indifference to education everywhere. 

“It doesn’t take a whole lot of exposure to schools to know that, for most students in most schools, school is a form of punishment. If I’m a 14-year-old student at your average school, outside of wanting to be with my friends, I don’t want to be there, and I certainly don’t see a whole lot of innate purpose to what the teachers are asking me to do.

“And that’s a shame, because while school might be seen as a punishment, learning is usually joyous and empowering. This, really, is what we’re after: to suffuse learning with joy, with curiosity, with purpose. Really, at some level, it’s an innately Jewish thing to want to do: to make holy the mundane.”

Milken board chairman Leon Janks (who is also on the board of TRIBE Media Corp., parent to the Jewish Journal) said that Weisserman’s relative youth and his fields of expertise make him compatible with the school’s goals. 

“He’s an ideas guy, a person who is very up-to-speed on science and technology. He is somebody who we believe has the demeanor, personality and charisma to be highly connected to our five constituents — including teachers, administrators, students, parents and the community at large,” he said. “From our point of view, we have been able to … find somebody who will move the school into the future and make changes required in order to adapt the school for the 21st century.”

Weisserman, who attends Sinai Temple, describes himself as a “serious but progressive Jew” — or, more specifically, a “Reform Jew, with some Conservative leanings.” For that he credits his upbringing in Detroit, as part of what he described as an  “economically disadvantaged and assimilated family.”

He knows, too well, the feeling of being in the minority, he said. When much of Metro Detroit’s Jewish population moved to the suburbs and elsewhere, Weisserman’s family stayed.

“By the time the 1980s rolled around, the running joke in our house was that we were the last Jewish family in the city proper,” he said. Particularly formative for Weisserman was moving from public school to a Jewish day school. 

When he isn’t working, Weisserman spends time with his wife, Dolly, a pediatrician, and two boys, ages 8 and 11, who are enrolled at Sinai Akiba Academy and Milken. 

Meanwhile, his observant — albeit open — background informs his viewpoint that a Jewish school can transcend the Jewish part of its description. 

“My interest isn’t so much in leading the best Jewish school as it is to make sure the best school in the country is a Jewish one.” 

Milken head puts focus on tech Read More »

Police: Caleb Jacoby found safe in NYC

Leave a Comment / Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, United States /

The police department in Brookline, Mass., told JTA that 16-year-old Caleb Jacoby has been found safe in New York City.

Jacoby, an 11th-grader at the Maimonides School in suburban Boston, had been missing since midday on Jan. 6.

The case drew national attention, in part because the youth is the son of Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby.

Some 200 volunteers, including friends and neighbors of the family as well as members of local Jewish groups, searched throughout the Boston area in a coordinated effort on Wednesday. The effort was spearheaded by the Maimonides School.

“Our prayers have been answered,” Jacoby said via Twitter. “We are thrilled to hear from the Brookline Police that our beloved son Caleb has been found and is safe. Words can’t express our gratitude for the extraordinary outpouring of kindness and support that we have received from so many people. All we can think of at this moment is how wonderful it will be to see Caleb again and shower him with love.”

Police: Caleb Jacoby found safe in NYC Read More »

Growing up Jewish in post-WWII Germany

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment /

Yascha Mounk’s “Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) starts on an ironic note and stays there. Two decades after the end of World War II, when the latest wave of official anti-Semitism swept over Communist-ruled Poland in the 1960s, Mounk’s family sought places of refuge around the world, and his grandfather, Leon, ended up not in Israel or America, but in Germany.

“Leon had once taken the last train out of Warsaw to escape the approach of the Wehrmacht,” the author writes. “Now, with the help of an aging Austrian comrade, he successfully smuggled himself into Germany.”

So it happened that the author was born and raised as Jew in post-war Germany, an experience he shares in the pages of his rich and remarkable memoir.  Amid the tectonic upheavals of history that his family endured and survived, one human life seems frail indeed.  But, for Mounk, history remains a dream, as James Joyce famously put it, from which he struggles to awaken. “As a German Jew, you don’t have to make a special effort to remember the past,” he explains. “The past, usually in manners most surreal, will find a way of imposing itself on you.”

Here is yet another point of irony. Like many other assimilated Jews in Germany in the era of the Holocaust, Jewishness was imposed upon Mounk by his fellow German citizens.  “[I] never celebrated my bar mitzvah, and feel far more comfortable on a soccer field or at the library than in a synagogue,” he explains. “Even so, as I grew up, I came to feel more and more Jewish – and less and less German.”  The reason, he reveals, is not the “dark underbelly of lingering, even resurgent anti-Semitism” in Germany.

“Far from being openly anti-Semitic, most Germans I met were so keen to prove to me that they weren’t anti-Semitic that they treated me with the kind of nervous niceness usually reserved for the mentally handicapped or the terminally ill,” he writes in phrases that obliquely refer to the first victims of Nazi mass murder. “The effect of their pity and their virtue was to leave both of us with the sense that I couldn’t possibly have anything in common with them.”

Mounk concedes that German attitudes toward the Nazis and their Jewish victims were “radically transformed” starting in the 1960s.  On the 40th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat and surrender, the president of Germany declared that “the 8th of May was a day of liberation,” because, as he put it, “[i]t liberated us all from the dehumanizing system of National Socialism’s violent rule.”  Even so, the tiny numbers of Jews in Germany — measured in the tens of thousands among a German population of 60 million as late as the 1990s — meant that few Germans had any contact with a living Jew: “Each Jew,” the author jokes, “had to be shared out among two thousand Gentiles.” Only with the fall of the Soviet bloc did the Jewish population grow by 200,000 or so.

Yet the taint of anti-Semitism, both historical and contemporary, is shown to reveal itself in subtle ways.  In 1993, several of the shops in the small town of Laupheim, where Mounk and his mother then lived, announced the celebration of their 60th anniversaries, an unexplained reference to the year when the Nazis came to power and Jewish shops were “Aryanized” by compulsory transfer to their new German owners. Even when a gesture of reconciliation was made, as when Willy Brandt fell to his knees at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970, graffiti could be seen on the streets of Germany: “Brandt an die Wand!” (“Up against the wall, Brandt!”). Mounk himself recalls that when he identified himself as a Jew in a middle-school classroom, the rest of the students broke out in laughter, and he was sent out of the room to sit with a Turkish student while the other students were given Catholic or Protestant religious instruction.

Even the phenomenon of “philo-Semitism” in certain German circles was paradoxical, according to the author. “[T]he very same impulse to draw lessons from Auschwitz can have much more pernicious consequences,” he writes. “The slow descent of the leading members of Germany’s 1960 student movement into violence and terrorism is perhaps the most extreme example.”  Once again, the Jews were victimized: “Eventually, the violent fringes of the 1968 movement would invoke the name of Auschwitz to justify lethal attacks on Jews,” he explains. “Identifying fascism with capitalism, capitalism with the Federal Republic, the Federal Republic with the United States, the Untied States with Israel, and Israel with all Jews, they soon came to think of Jews as the true Fascists.”

Mounk’s engaging and provocative book amounts to a kind of intellectual and emotional self-portrait of the author himself and, at the same time, a historical and cultural profile of post-war Germany.  “Perhaps Germany really is on the way toward becoming unreflectively, unselfconsciously normal,” he allows. But Mounk, who is now a doctoral candidate at Harvard, has voted with his feet: “[A]s I decided to leave Germany, thoughts about what it would mean to live there as a Jew were at the front of my mind,” he writes. “Today, they remain a good part of the reason why I can’t really imagine ever moving back.”

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal.  His latest book, “The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris” (Norton/Liveright) has been selected as one of the Best Books of 2013 by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Public Library.

Growing up Jewish in post-WWII Germany Read More »

Chicken Little, chicken soup and the Reform moment

Leave a Comment / Blogs /

Almost half a century ago, a cover story in Look Magazine described “The Vanishing American Jew.” Extrapolating from demographic trends on intermarriage, birth rates and generational assimilation, the author predicted that the Jewish community in America would blend in and disappear before the end of the century.

One year later, 1965, the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations in North America, invited Rabbi “>Pew Research Center in its recent study of Jewish Americans (the ““>here and “>considered the results to be “sobering,” if “not unexpected.” A Forward editorial “>said that Pew has presented a “very grim portrait of the health of the American Jewish population in terms of their Jewish identification.” And Daniel Gordis, American born Senior Vice-President of  Shalem College in Jerusalem, “>writing about the “extinction” of American Jewry and how necessary it was to “give mouth-to-mouth to our dying community.” Chicken Little had nothing on these folks.                                  

Why so many David and Devora Downers? Well, according to the Pew Portrait, the percentage of the population of the United States that identifies as Jewish is much less than it was two and even one generation ago and Jewish Americans are older and are having fewer children compared to the general population.  Indeed, the Jewish American fertility rate is less than that required for zero population growth in a developed country.

In addition, according to Pew, the strength of each leg of the traditional triad which has supported Judaism – God, Torah and Israel – has been impaired. Only 34% of Jewish Americans believe with absolute certainty in God or a universal spirit and 23 % do not believe in either. Only 19% believe that observing Jewish law is essential to being Jewish and only 28% think that being part of a Jewish community is essential.

The boundaries between the Jewish community and others seem to have dissolved. While the majority of Jews currently married have a Jewish spouse, almost six of every ten Jews married since 2000 has a non-Jewish spouse. And inter-marrieds and their children are not as well connected to the Jewish community as are two Jewish parent households. 

Conversely, conduct previously seen as not acceptable seems to be becoming more prevalent within the Jewish community. According to Pew, Christmas trees can be found in 30% of Reform, 18% of Conservative and even 4 % of Orthodox homes.  Commentary’s Senior Online Editor Jonathan S. Tobin “>points out that the percentage of children of intermarried couples who identify as Jewish is greater than was predictable based on data collected two decades ago. Indeed, Senior Research Scientist and Brandeis Professor Theodore Sasson “>concludes that “Jews are fine.”

Finally, the positivists see not so much a decline, but a change in Jewish identity. Pew found that around one-half of Jewish American Millennials (ages 18-29) do not identify with the conventional denominations of Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. But some see this phenomena not as a rejection of Jewish identity, but a recognition that denominations are not Mi Sinai, i.e., not ordained, and that models of Jewish expression are changing, just as is the composition of Jews. The duel message is underscored by George Wielechowski, a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. A first generation Latino American, a convert and an agnostic, he “>Limmud and “>Oy Vey! Isn’t a Strategy is not about the Pew Portrait, but the clever title is apt. For all the ink spilled and electrons spun since the publication of the Pew Portrait, the ideas raised to address the issues discussed in the report have been few in number, less than original, small in focus, sometimes self-serving (or at least self-justifying) and often risk free. So, for instance:

·       A Federation official “>proposes shifting from a “synagogue-forced paradigm” to a “more authentic” model that “emphasizes the personal observance of mitzvot.” 

·       One writer “>wants synagogues to offer a broader “Jewish buffet” than they presently do.

·       A clinical professor of psychiatry also “>calls for more respect for rabbis and more pay for day school teachers, while another “>believing that a smaller Conservative movement will allow for a greater focus on quality, but his view may also just be another example of hope overcoming experience. Halakhically oriented Conservative Jews can find comfort in a vigorous, intellectually honest emerging Modern or Open Orthodox movement. Other Conservative Jews may be more comfortable in Reform or Reconstructionist settings or in one of the various independent and energetic traditional minyamim that have sprouted around the county.

Third, the Reform movement, even though its congregational affiliates and their membership have decreased, is still the movement with which the largest number of American Jews identify. Its leadership and membership seem in sync. And for all of its internal problems, and a closed and top-down management mentality, the Reform movement has the largest Jewish infrastructure with which to advance change in Jewish American life. Reform Judaism may not be the first to come up with an idea or the most nimble about implementing it, but it has the resources and the reach to make an impact across the nation.

At its recent biennial convention, Union of Reform Judaism president Rabbi Rick Jacobs spoke at length to 5,000 true believers in Reform Judaism. His Beyond Pew:

1.     What is the driving mission today for Jewish Americans, one which is both as distinctively Jewish and as compelling as establishing the State of Israel was two generations ago and saving Soviet Jewry was one generation ago?

2.     Is the Reform movement willing to disrupt what “>Rabbi Ed Feinstein envisions as places of relentless, innovative and radical experience, where failure is allowed?

3.     The Reform movement has been committed to individual autonomy in matters of religious belief and practice. In an age of the sovereign self and instant gratification, will the Reform movement be willing to teach the language of community and of a covenant among Jews?

4.     As it seeks to attract Millennials and non-affiliated Jews, will the Reform movement reinstate serious learning opportunities like its abandoned Summer Learning Institute for already affiliated, more mature Jews?

Conclusion

    We began with two true stories and a children’s fable. What have we learned?

(1)    To paraphrase a great admirer of the Jews, Mark Twain, the report of the death of American Jewry has been greatly exaggerated. Look Magazine was wrong fifty years ago and it is now gone. By contrast, Jews are still here, indeed more of them than ever. This time may be different, but American history suggests that the Jews in this country are as resilient and adaptive as the Jewish People has been in other countries and at other times. The Judaism of the future will not be like your father’s or mothers, much less like zayde’s or bubbe’s, but there will be a Jewish future.

(2)   Heschel was a wise man, but he was never asked to speak to the GA again. Jews love crises, and surveys, too. As Chicken Little learned, a bit too late, however, the imperfect collection of data and faulty analysis can lead to disastrous consequences. One of the problems about measuring the health of the Jewish American community based on the Pew study is that Pew asked questions about what it viewed as certain religious practices, as if Jews were like other socio-religious groups it had studied. But Jews have never really been purely or even primarily a faith community like Baptists or Mormons. There is no Baptist People, no Mormon Civilization. Jews are different.

(3)   To compound the problem, with certain conventional markers in mind, Pew sought to determine “How Jewish are Jews?” More interesting and more important questions are “How are Jews Jewish?”  and “Are Jews, as a community, still committed to anything unique?” In short, if the community wants to treat the Pew Portrait as evidence of crisis, fine, but the inquiry must go beyond the Pew data.

(4)   Reform Judaism, as the movement with which a plurality of American Jews identify, now has the greatest responsibility for the future of Judaism in America. As Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel teaches, one must be careful not to waste an opportunity created by a perceived crisis.  Consequently, a successful future for Jewish life in America depends on only two things: leadership and followship. Simple, huh?

A version of this article appeared previously at Chicken Little, chicken soup and the Reform moment Read More »

Tourism to Israel reaches all-time high

Leave a Comment / Israel, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News /

Israel reported an all-time high in annual visitors in 2013.

A record 3.54 million visitors arrived in Israel in 2013, half a percent more than the previous record year. Meanwhile, some 272,000 tourists arrived in December, a 14 percent increase over December 2012, setting a record for most arrivals in the Jewish state in one month.

The figures were released Thursday by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

Nearly 18 percent of tourists arrived from the United States, with some 623,000 Americans visiting. Russia sent 603,000 tourists, and France 315,000.

More than half the tourists, or 53 percent, were Christian; only 28 percent were Jewish.

Overall, tourism contributed about $11.4 billion to the Israeli economy in 2013, according to the Ministry of Tourism.

“The year 2013 is a record year for tourism, and we are proud of that. Despite Operation Pillar of Defense and the security situation in the region, tourists voted with their feet,” said Tourism Minister Uzi Landau.

Tourism to Israel reaches all-time high Read More »

Menachem Stark, slumlord or saint? Depends who you ask

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, United States /

The murder of Menachem Stark has sparked intense media scrutiny of the Brooklyn real estate developer’s troubled business record, prompting the New York Post to ask “Who didn’t want him dead?” on its front page.

But while mainstream media outlets scrutinized the Satmar hasid’s relationships with tenants, contractors and lenders, haredi Orthodox publications offered a decidedly different take — looking not for clues to why someone would kill Stark, but celebrating his many virtues.

Yated Ne’eman, a prominent haredi weekly, praised Stark as a “loving father and baal chesed,” or charitable giver. Hamodia, a leading haredi daily, called Stark a “greatly beloved member of the Williamsburg community,” citing anecdotes that showed his generosity within his Hasidic neighborhood. Another Hamodia article condemned the Post for publishing “a litany of untruths to malign the integrity of Mr. Stark,” though it made no mention of the nature of the tabloid’s allegations.

“It’s irrelevant if the allegations are true or not,” Yochonon Donn, the Hamodia editor who wrote the article, told JTA. “Now is not the time to dance on the family’s blood.”

The haredi media’s approach to the case reflects its journalistic ethos, which aims to report the news while complying with traditional Jewish prohibitions against lashon hara, or “evil tongue,” a term that encompasses gossip, slander and malicious speech.

“The contrast between the haredi media’s treatment of the case and that of the general media reflects the chasm between how journalism is defined by each,” Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for the haredi umbrella group Agudath Israel of America, wrote in an email. “Halacha-respecting journalism will always endeavor to shun the negative, particularly when it is sourced in innuendo and one-sided ‘interpretations.’”

Stark was abducted Jan. 2 outside his office in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Video footage from the scene showed Stark struggling in a snowstorm with assailants who forced him into a white van.

The following day, Stark’s partially burned body was found in a dumpster on Long Island. A medical examiner concluded he had died from compression asphyxiation. New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said police have “no significant leads” in the case.

Stark, who reportedly owned 17 properties in Brooklyn, was a prominent figure in Williamsburg’s Satmar Hasidic community. At the time of his murder, however, he was deeply in debt. In 2008, Stark and his business partner, Israel Perlmutter, defaulted on a $29 million loan, and they declared bankruptcy the following year, according to The New York Times.

New York newspapers reported on numerous tenant complains and building code violations at Stark’s properties. While some tenants criticized conditions in his buildings in online postings and elsewhere, other tenants have come to their late landlord’s defense. The Post’s controversial cover story called Stark a “slumlord” and cited anonymous law-enforcement sources who suggested he was a “scammer” with plenty of enemies.

But coverage in the haredi press sidestepped Stark’s business woes and allegations of improprieties. This is consistent with the high regard in which he was held in his community, where one of the Satmar sect’s two rebbes, Zalman Teitelbaum, delivered an emotional eulogy.

The New York Post’s Jan. 5 cover.

In a December 2013 editorial, Hamodia publisher Ruth Lichtenstein explained her publication’s general approach, noting that the paper’s concern not to “inadvertently embarrass or hurt an organization, individual, or child” plays a large role in editorial decisions.

“A crucial part of our mission is protecting our readers’ right ‘not to know,’” Lichtenstein wrote. “Far more difficult a task than providing you with newsworthy and ethical reading material is ensuring that you, our loyal reader, aren’t exposed to material you would find unfit to enter your home, your mind, and your heart.”

Meanwhile, the haredi community has rallied against the Post, organizing a Jan. 5 press conference with local elected officials at Brooklyn Borough Hall. Brooklyn’s borough president, Eric Adams, denounced what he called “hateful coverage.” New York City’s public advocate, Letitia James, accused the Post of having “given license to murder” and called on elected officials to stop placing advertisements in the paper.

Hamodia published an editorial Wednesday blasting New York City’s newly elected mayor, Bill de Blasio, for not joining other elected officials in condemning the coverage or publicly extending his condolences to the Stark family.

“The Jewish community must not feel, as they’ve felt several times in the past, that they are alone in this,” Hamodia wrote. “The mayor’s silence is a shocking blow.”

In a letter to the New York Post, the Anti-Defamation League called the Post’s headline “insensitive” and also took issue with the accompanying article for referring to Stark as a “millionaire Hasidic slumlord” in its lead sentence.

“Just substitute any other minority for ‘Hasidic’ in such an opening description and it would be understood how provocative it is, particularly associated with the descriptor ‘millionaire slumlord,’” wrote Evan Bernstein, the ADL’s New York regional director.

Yated Ne’eman staffers declined to discuss their coverage of the Stark murder. In lieu of comment, they forwarded a poem they planned to publish by the paper’s editor and publisher, Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz. A Yated Ne’eman reporter said the poem was “indicative of the direction” of the paper’s coverage.

Titled “Who Didn’t Want Us Dead?” the poem describes Stark as a “Giving, loving/Holy soul/Snuffed out.” Accompanied by an image of the New York Post’s front page, the poem referenced historical anti-Semitism, mentioning Hitler, Stalin and Ferdinand and Isabella.

“Jewish blood has always been cheap,/nobody cared when they came after us,” Lipschutz wrote.

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Israel pulls ‘fat-shaming’ childhood obesity awareness ads

Leave a Comment / Blogs /

An ad agency in Israel recently pulled an ad campaign that “fat-shamed” children as a form of obesity awareness.

The ads ranged from a photoshopped child whose face was blown up like a balloon with his features made miniscule to illustrate how obesity affects a child's smile, to one featuring four stick figures on a see-saw, with one on one end, and three in the air on the other end.

Yet another ad showed the overweight belly and torso of a child, with a nose drawn over the navel to turn it into a sad face.

You get the picture.

Well, many people were understandly upset about the campaign, concerned that the ads would only harm the children they were targeting, rather than “shame them into action.”

The campaign was pulled, and I couldn't agree more with that decision.

The belief that shaming a child about his or her body motivates them to lose weight is up there with the belief that hitting a child teaches them to be a better person.

I was never an obese child, but I was overweight (it turned out it was due to a medical condition, not lack of exercise or unhealthy eating habits).

I remember, very distinctly, being six years old and having my grandmother take me dress shopping. I tried on a black, crushed-velvet dress that I just adored, but when I went to show my grandmother how it fit, all she said was, “You're too fat for that dress.”

The feeling of hot, red-faced shame that was brought on in the moment is still tangible. And guess what? Being fat-shamed as a child didn't motivate me to do anything other than want to disappear.

Once the medical condition got bad enough, the weight came off because I was too sick to eat. I was nine years old and remember being praised by neighbors for losing weight. The lesson I came away with? Better to be sick and thin, than healthy and chubby.

Praising (or shaming) a child strictly on how they look is destructive. There are plenty of ways of encouraging healthy behavior without emphasizing looks or a number on a scale.

As adults, it's our responsibility to nurture the next generation–to give them the tools and knowledge they need to lead as good a life as possible. When we crush the self-esteem of an 11 year old, we should be shamed for that destruction.

There are a lot of people to blame for the obesity crisis–both here and abroad, but blaming the children is ridiculous.

They are not adults and shouldn't be treated like adults. They have a lifetime of blame and responsibility ahead of them. Now is the time for them to build their character, personality, knowledge and empathy. Now is the time for us to teach them that to shame others is destructive and wrong.

Instead, when we shame children, we teach them that it's okay to make someone feel bad about themselves if WE deem them as inadequate.  Insitutionalized shame (like via an ad campaign) is that point of view on steroids.

Shame doesn't teach children about health or self-worth.

We teach them that their worth in society is directly related to how they look.  And as a society, we've made that the 'truth' of our world. Those who aren't as thin or attractive often have a harder time in life.  We've devalued some of the most valuable aspects of a community when knowledge, kindness and talent are all relegated to a lesser status than looks.

To ad agencies and adults alike: please stop shaming children for their bodies. If you want them to learn that their body is sacred, teach them that it's valuable (and worth taking care of) rather than teaching them that their body is 'wrong'.

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Memo to the Zionist Organization of America: Hire Olivia Pope

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Hollywood /

It's too bad ABC's “Scandal” is on hiatus right now, because the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) could learn a thing or two from PR fixer Olivia Pope.

This morning, the hawkish right-wing group known for its besieged mentality and reactionary portrayal of Israel as imminently doomed sent out one of its notoriously excoriating press releases. Today, however, the ZOA’s ire was not directed towards Iran or Hamas or civil war in Syria; it was reserved for British actress Emma Thompson, the star of Disney’s “Saving Mr. Banks.”

“Saving Mr. Banks' Star Emma Thompson Calls For Boycotting Israel's Habima Theater” it declaimed. Tit for tat, ZOA then called for a boycott of its own, urging audiences not to see the film.

My first thought was that Emma Thompson should fire her publicist. On Sunday, the actress stands a chance of winning a Golden Globe award for her performance as P.L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins who whirls to life while negotiating a movie deal with Walt Disney (played by Tom Hanks). It is also expected that Thompson will receive an Oscar nomination when those are announced next week. One need not be Olivia Pope to realize that with older white Jewish men compromising the majority of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voting bloc, it does not bode well for one’s Oscar chances to ostracize Israel 8 days before voting begins.

Fortunately for Thompson’s publicist, I was quickly disabused of my inclination for PR shaming. It took but a click to realize the ZOA’s ploy was painfully misleading. 

While it is absolutely true that Thompson and a group of three-dozen other British actors, directors and writers protested the inclusion of Israeli theater troupe Habima at the Shakespearean Festival, Globe to Globe, a 2-year world tour for Shakesperean theater, the call for boycott occurred two years ago — in 2012. That fact, however, is impossible to tell from the ZOA's press release directly, which cites an April 2014 report from Israeli newspaper The Times of Israel (yes, as in the April 2014 of the future) which was really published 20 months ago in April 2012.

That didn’t stop the ZOA from making it sound like it happened last week:

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has condemned actress Emma Thompson and three dozen other British actors, for seeking the boycotting of Israel's celebrated Habima Theater troupe, which is to perform later this year in a six-week theatrical festival taking place at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London….

In a letter to the British Guardian newspaper, Thompson and her colleagues accused Habima of having… 

The letter to the Guardian the ZOA is referring to was also published in 2012. And as for Habima performing in London “later this year,” there is no travel schedule currently posted on the theatre troupe's Website.

So why on earth is this press release being sent out today?

If the ZOA is so intent on trying to mar Thompson’s Oscar chances, I'll bet Olivia Pope would suggest this: Why not edit the press release to say that Thompson participated in a disturbing boycott of Israeli artists two years ago and this is just a friendly little reminder to an organization that represents artistic integrity and excellence? Besides, artistic freedom is never out of fashion. And uglier things have happened during Oscar season.

No matter when it occurred, Thompson’s boycott of Israeli artists — not policy makers, but fellow artists — is an unfair and hypocritical censure that does little to enhance the human rights record in Palestine while causing untold damage to the notion of free artistic expression artists like Thompson depend upon. But the ZOA’s ill-timed and sloppily concocted smear also hurts Israel more than it helps.

The tone. The content. The truth. All of these things matter when trying to sway public opinion. So, Mort Klein, if you want to take people to task for hurting Israel, the least you can do is get your facts straight. And when you're ready for a complete image overhaul, you know who to call.

Memo to the Zionist Organization of America: Hire Olivia Pope Read More »

Moving and shaking

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Etta Ohel celebrated its 20th anniversary at its annual gala at the Beverly Hilton Hotel that honored a number of local contributors to the organization that provides services to people with special needs.

Michael Baruch, founder of Baruch Enterprises, received the Visionary Award in recognition of his longtime support for Etta. Michelle Wolf, a special needs parent activist, nonprofit professional and Journal blogger, was honored with the Professional Leadership Award at the Dec. 17 event. 

Additional honorees included Liebe Geft, director of the Museum of Tolerance, and her husband, Ivor, a Cedars-Sinai Medical Center cardiologist. They were named Etta’s Champions. 

Moishe Bienenfeld, a young man who is diagnosed with autism, was honored with the Young Leadership Award.  

State Assembly members Richard Bloom and Adrin Nazarian, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, L.A. County Democratic Party chair Eric Bauman and state Senate candidate Robert Hertzberg were among the attendees. Comedian Mark Schiff served as emcee.

Hollywood talent manager David Lonner has been named to the board of Friends of Yemin Orde (FYO). The organization raises money to support the Yemin Orde Youth Village in Israel, which is home to more than 500 children from around the world, and Yemin Orde Educational Initiatives.

“By giving children a connection to their roots and a safe and loving place to be educated and nurtured, Yemin Orde has produced exemplary citizens for the State of Israel,” Lonner said in a statement on the FYO Web site. 

Lonner, founder of management and production company Oasis Media Group, was voted unanimously to the lay leadership post during the FYO December 2013 biannual board meeting in West Palm Beach, Fla. 

He brings experience working with Hollywood power players, including J.J. Abrams (“Star Trek”), along with a passion for Israel, to the position. Lonner’s past efforts on behalf of the Jewish state include co-financing programs with The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles taking Hollywood professionals there on trips. 

Friends of Israel Defense Forces Young Leadership regional board member Michele Stone and regional president Aaron Leff. 

Last month, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) drew hundreds of young professionals to its seventh annual Young Leadership gala and raised nearly $300,000 in the process. 

The Dec. 14 event at the Park Plaza Hotel drew FIDF Young Leadership Los Angeles chairman Ari Ryan; FIDF Los Angeles founder Leo David; FIDF Western Region Executive Director Miri Nash and FIDF Young Leadership Los Angeles president Aaron Leff. Additionally, David Siegel, the consul general of Israel in Los Angeles, attended. 

Established in 1981, FIDF supports Israel Defense Forces soldiers currently serving in the military as well as the families of fallen soldiers. The Young Leadership division of FIDF Western Region helps with that mission, organizing programs for young professionals. 

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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A new left view on Israel

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A symptom of our dysfunctional times is that political opponents — whether Republicans versus Democrats in Congress or Zionists versus Israel bashers on campuses — not only disagree on fundamental issues, but they also do not even share the same language and terminology.    

So posits Gideon Aronoff, CEO of Ameinu (Our People), whose organization has published a kind of lexicon for “progressives” in an attempt to counter the verbal attacks by the “far left” on the latter’s own grounds.

Titled “The Third Narrative,” the 25-page pamphlet takes on such blood-pressure-raising discussion points as “Is Israel an ‘apartheid state’?” “Is pro-Israel and progressive an oxymoron?” and “Does the pro-Israel lobby have a stranglehold on the U.S. government?”

“In the Near East conflict, there is an Israeli narrative, and there is a Palestinian narrative,” Aronoff said during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “There won’t be any settlement until both opponents understand that there is some good and some bad on each side’s position.”

The booklet, written in clear and concise language by Dan Fleshler, an Ameinu board member, summarizes its viewpoint in an introductory statement: “We think the American left — Jewish and non-Jewish — could use a third narrative, one that neither reflexively attacks, nor reflexively justifies, Israel’s policies and actions.”

Ameinu seeks to draw a clear line between criticism of Israel and delegitimization of the state, and perhaps a more difficult line between the far left and progressives.

Aronoff defines the former as “activists who are committed to a particular strict political orthodoxy, with the Palestinian narrative as one of its core beliefs. Progressive activists are inclined toward liberal or left positions, but are open to a broader array of facts and interpretations, so are likely to be open to a Third Narrative approach on the Middle East.”

The Third Narrative campaign is one sign of a new level of energy and activity at Ameinu, which describes itself as “the leading grass-roots progressive Zionist organization in North America.”

It was established in 2004 as the successor organization to the venerable Labor Zionist Alliance, which for decades reflected and supported the policies of Israel’s founders, such as David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir.

Another and complementary indicator is the hiring of Aronoff, who represents the third generation of Habonim (Labor Zionist youth movement) alumni in his family. For the preceding 12 years, he was the president and CEO of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, active in a dozen countries, including Israel.

In parallel, Ameinu has beefed up its national board of directors by adding six well-known Jewish community activists and has started a drive to expand its membership and add new chapters to its existing ones in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

In line with its pro-labor tradition, Ameinu plans to reinvigorate its role “as a passionate advocate for economic and social justice in America and the world,” according to Kenneth Bob, Ameinu’s president.

Currently, Ameinu lists some 2,000 to 3,000 supporters in the United States and Canada, and it has established beachheads in Australia and South Africa. It runs — with a small staff — on an annual budget of close to
$1 million, Aronoff said.

He is casting a wide net to boost membership among “mainstream Jews who speak in the language of the left, progressive American Christians, especially among Presbyterians and Methodists,” and liberal Arab Americans.

As one step, he plans to reach out to the kind of progressives who read such magazines as Mother Jones, The American Prospect and the English edition of the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Most recently, Ameinu’s statements have strongly condemned a tough Israeli law to crack down on “asylum seekers,” or illegal immigrants from Africa, and government plans, later halted, to relocate thousands of Bedouin from their villages.

Locally, Ameinu leadership includes such veterans of liberal causes as Martin Taft and Alisa Belinkoff Katz, both of Los Angeles, and Sharon Bershtel of Long Beach. As members of Ameinu’s national board of directors, all three have been involved in launching the Third Narrative campaign.

At present, this effort is only in its beginning stage on the local scene, said Taft, a mechanical engineer and management consultant, and Katz, who has served as Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s chief deputy for 25 years.

One recent achievement of the local group was to finalize the purchase of the Habonim camp in Big Bear, while on Jan. 22 the group will confer its Tzedek award on Raphael J. Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, and a columnist for the Journal.

To download the contents of “The Third Narrative” or request a printed copy, visit this story at jewishjournal.com.

A new left view on Israel Read More »