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Jewish Journal

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February 18, 2015

Moshe Ninio: A Turkish rug and a trick of the eye

Leave a Comment / Culture /

Step into the darkened Project Room 1 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and you’ll see a rectangular mirror in the middle of the floor. A hologram image flickers above the rectangle as you walk around it, becoming clear only if you stand in just the right spot, a few feet from the center of the room. There, a rainbow of light echoes the shape and texture of a classic antique Turkish rug.

“Rainbow: Rug,” which is nearly 6 feet long, is the work of the Israeli artist Moshe Ninio. This exhibition, which continues through April 18 at the Bergamot Station-based museum, is Ninio’s first solo show on the West Coast, and it contains only the single piece. But this ephemeral “rug” stands out, created with technology that is both costly and already archaic, using lasers emanating from the gallery’s ceiling to etch out the image in space.

“The hologram appears as a pleasant spectrum,” Ninio said during an interview over coffee at Woodcat, a cafe in Echo Park. “It becomes like a horizon which you can traverse, and the rainbow appears but can’t be reached. As a child, you want to go to the rainbow, but it evades you.”

Ninio himself seems similarly elusive. Following a 45-minute interview, the artist initially asked the Journal not to quote or even paraphrase anything he’d said, explaining that he avoids all Internet and social media engagement in an effort to speak only through his art. Search for information about Ninio and his work online and you’ll come up with very little of substance about the Tel Aviv- and Paris-based artist. Only after prodding from the museum, Ninio relented and gave permission to publish his statements.

Ninio’s resistance to adopting new technology is fitting for an artist who uses the holographic medium, first popularized in the 1970s. Ninio only this year swapped his old clamshell-style flip phone for an iPhone, and he spoke of his distrust of smartphones as a tool of state-sponsored surveillance.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1953, he is represented by the Dvir Gallery there and by Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. His work has been shown at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and other major European and Israeli museums and galleries. He also teaches at the prestigious Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.

Ninio made his first holographic rug 30 years ago, and when he decided to recalibrate the work in 2000, to update the color and size, the technology already had become obsolete. “I looked all over the world — in Paris, London — to find somebody who can do it,” he said.

He found the solution at Holographics North, a hologram production company run by astrophysicist John Perry out of the basement of an old school building in Burlington, Vt. Ninio spent a few days there to create the work. 

“We used a pulse laser to make the master,” Perry said. “You first make this master hologram, which is only viewable with laser light. And then, from that master, you make another hologram, basically a hologram of a hologram.”

That second hologram, called a transfer, is viewable under ordinary white light. Perry works primarily with commercial clients, producing images for pharmaceutical or automotive trade shows, and with science museums. But he estimates he’s worked with about 60 artists, most notably James Turrell, known for his light spaces. He also helped Canadian artist Michael Snow fill Vancouver, British Columbia’s original railroad engine house with holograms and was asked to create a hologram from a Frank Stella maquette for an exhibition in Cleveland.

“It offers visual qualities that you just cannot get from any other medium,” Perry said. “The very saturated spectral colors, the 3-D and the movement that you get, holograms can be animated … by a good artist; those qualities can be used to breach new territory.”

The image moves in and out of perception, emerging and receding according to the movements of the visitor, allowing the artist to determine the rules for how it can be seen. “The more the viewer advances toward the hologram after hitting its spectral peak, the more it evades him or her,” Tel Aviv curator and critic Ory Dessau wrote, adding that the artwork “immobilizes the viewer’s body by which it is activated, rendering it passive, motionless, freezing it together with the image.” 

Elsa Longhauser, executive director of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, saw an earlier version of “Rainbow: Rug” while visiting Jerusalem. 

“In 1996, it was installed in a dark, rough space on the lower level of Teddy Football Stadium, which was under construction in Jerusalem,” Longhauser recalled. “Being in Israel for the first time was a poignant revelation; getting to know Moshe Ninio has been similarly poignant.”

Longhauser had met Ninio the previous year, at a symposium at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia, where she taught. “I found him to be an extremely intelligent and insightful and precise critic, but also extremely poetic in the way that he sees the world and expresses what he sees,” she said.

Just as a rug is created through an interlaced network of threads, “Rainbow: Rug” is made through the interweaving of laser rays. The piece uses 20th-century technology to simulate an ancient traditional craft. “The rays reweave the rug and reconstruct it,” Ninio said. “It’s like the process of weaving but with light.”

Ninio said because he is Israeli, visitors often mistake “Rainbow: Rug” for an Islamic prayer rug and therefore a statement on religious and political tensions. But, he said, his work is not at all political. “It’s very radical at this point in time not to be political,” he said. “In Israel, people see a carpet and think it’s Arabic. Not at all.”

The rug uses a Garden of Eden pattern common in Oriental carpets and represents a “simulated Eden,” Ninio said, referring to the biblical area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that lies in present-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey. “The carpet evokes a certain landscape.”

The floating rug does recall the legendary flying carpets of King Solomon as well as the Arabian Nights stories and Disney’s “Aladdin,” but, said Ninio, “The old magic is transformed by a perverse magic, which is holography.”

For more information on Moshe Ninio’s “Rainbow: Rug” exhibition, visit the Moshe Ninio: A Turkish rug and a trick of the eye Read More »

Overlooked, battle for Watiyah air base key to Libya’s future

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Live from the Arab Spring, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Worldwide /

This story originally appeared on themedialine.org.

Russian heat-seeking rockets terrorize the fighters scattered along the front at the Watiyah air base in Western Libya. “Torpedoes are dangerous because they precisely target cars, often full of men,” one of the fighters told The Media Line while adjusting his walkie-talkie in preparation for his deployment along the front lines.

“Thirteen men were killed in one day last week, and three ambulances were destroyed. Also, an ambulance driver got killed by the same Russian guided rocket,” said Dr. Ashraf Al-Mansouri, who is responsible for the field hospital set up in a gas station about six miles away from the fighting. Here, the supply of anesthetics and analgesics often run out.

Over three years after the uprising that ousted former strongman Col. Muammar Gaddafi, Libya is once again drowning in civil war. The fighting has continued unabated since last May, bringing to mind the former dictator’s prophecy about a “Somalia-ization” of the Libyan conflict.

Last August, armed groups led by the powerful militias of Misrata, a city 120 miles east of Tripoli, launched “Operation Fajr Libya” to take the control over the entire capitol, driving out the fighters of the Zintan Brigades, government-funded armed units emanating from the city of Zintan that featured prominently in the revolution that ousted Gaddafi.  Although the two sets of militias were comrades-in-arms during the 2011 uprising, shortly afterward they began to compete to fill the power vacuum left by Gaddafi. Misrata allied with the Muslim Brotherhood while Zintan ended up fighting alongside Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s loyalists.

Haftar is a former Gaddafi-era officer who defected in the 1980s and returned to the country in 2011.  His allies today include security men from the old regime, prominent eastern tribes, federalists demanding greater autonomy for the east, and the Zintan militias. Last May, Haftar launched “Operation Dignity” against the fundamentalist Islamist groups in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

The split reached the national institutions, the House of Representatives (HOR) being supported by Zintan and the outgoing National Congress by Misrata. In August, Misrata drove Zintani armed groups from the capital Tripoli, forcing the internationally recognized HOR to take shelter in the eastern city of Tubruq.

While mainstream media focuses on the struggle between Gen. Haftar and fundamentalist groups in Benghazi, and on the clashes at oil terminals along the eastern coast of the country, the fight for the Watiyah air base remains in the shadow but in reality is one of the key battles that will determine the resolution of Libya’s civil war.  

The war between the Islamists, who nowadays count the Islamic State (ISIS) among its among its ranks, and Haftar’s forces is ideological and threatens to plunge the country into an abyss.

Last September, fierce fighting between militias resulted in conflicting charges of heinous acts, the deaths of thousands and gross violations of human rights.

In October, Haftar used Russian-made MIG 23s to strike ammunition depots in Zawiyah, Sabratah and Gharian, and then bombed Mitiqa airport in Tripoli. The Air Force general in charge of the Tripoli-based forces, Colonel Ali Abudeya, called Haftar a “terrorist because he strikes Mitiqa which is a civilian airport.”

By November, at least eight militias teamed-up to launch an assault on the Watiyah air base to put a halt to Haftar’s airborne strikes in a campaign seen as being the last stand of Haftar’s influence in the west. If the airport falls, Haftar and company will lose access to supplies, food, and weapons.

Zintan, some 50 miles south of Watiyah, would be completely isolated, and the airstrip that was built strategically after the 2011 revolution would not be able to guarantee refueling. As well, Haftar and the Tubruq based authorities would arguably lose the western region of Tripolitania, given that Libya has already begun to divide the country into the National Independence era’s three provinces of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan.

The battle for Watiyah airport also poses an even more insidious threat to the entire country in the form of the radicalization of the local population paving the way for an ideological war that further divides the nation. 

A rebel commander in the city of Amazigh Jado told The Media Line that, “The terrorist groups are already inside the country, although they are still inactive. They are basically waiting until all of the revolutionary forces run out of ammunition to come out and conquer Libya.”  He concluded by saying that, “The international community seems to be blind. They waste their time talking with the national political representatives in Geneva, although the militias control Libya and they do not sit in Geneva.”

Last year, 2,825 people were killed in Libya's protracted conflict, and at least 120,000 people were forced from their homes. The United Nations-led national dialogue for the North African country’s stability is tenuous at best. The truce was systematically broken during the talks and no ceasefire has been scheduled despite the recent United Nations-brokered meeting with Libyan stakeholders in the city of Ghaddames last Wednesday.

Overlooked, battle for Watiyah air base key to Libya’s future Read More »

Design lessons from Oscar-nominated movies

Leave a Comment / Culture, Home, Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News /

This year’s crop of Oscar contenders is filled with memorable performances, meditations on life and death, nail-biting suspense and, yes, valuable decorating lessons. If you’ve ever sat through a movie and wondered not whether the butler did it, but where the butler bought that sofa, you’ll know what I’m talking about. 

“The Grand Budapest Hotel”

Color is a storyteller. It sets the mood. It stirs our emotions. And “The Grand Budapest Hotel” — both the movie and its titular hotel — is drenched in delicious color. From the bubblegum pink exterior in the hotel’s heyday — with the peacock blue rooftops (swoon) — to the glossy red lacquer inside the hotel elevators (double swoon), the movie’s color palette tells its story as much as the script. We know immediately that the Grand Budapest is a place of luxury and whimsy. And when the hotel becomes dilapidated in its later years, the colors turn muddy shades of olive and amber, as our hearts sink a little at its decline. 

What is the lesson here for our own homes? Color, baby! A $20 gallon of paint can transform the mood of a room even more than an expensive piece of furniture. This doesn’t mean you have to paint your walls pink like the Grand Budapest. We’re all different, and we react to colors differently. Any color you choose — even white — is fine, as long as it makes you happy. (OK, I take that back. Swiss coffee is not a color. Don’t pick that one.)

“Gone Girl”

At first, the home of the characters played by Ben Affleck and Oscar-nominated Rosamund Pike seems absolutely perfect. The patrician gray walls, the ebony hardwood floors and the oh-so-tasteful furniture look straight out of a design catalog. But director David Fincher’s lens has purposely drained the interiors of life. The perfection is sterile. There is no soul, no blood. Well (spoiler alert!), except, that is, for all the plasma Pike throws all over the kitchen floor. 

“Gone Girl” shows us that when it comes to home decor, perfection is not all it’s cracked up to be. Making your home look like a model home without showcasing your own unique personality results in a hollow shell. Fill your home with things that reflect the real you, and don’t worry whether it would be approved by the editors of Architectural Digest. Mismatched furniture? A-OK. Flea-market finds? Yes, please. As with people, a home’s personality is much more important than perfect looks.

“Boyhood”

There is not a lot of interior design to get excited about in Richard Linklater’s critical favorite. In fact, the director shows the passage of time not through furniture styles, but through the electronic devices used by the protagonist, Mason. One design element that really struck me, though, was the film’s use of children’s art — from the art taped to walls when the characters are younger, to the photographs and abstract paintings the older Mason exhibits. 

When the film begins, Mason and his sister share a room with a bunk bed, with murals painted next to each of their respective bunks. In a behind-the-scenes featurette on Hulu, Oscar-nominated Patricia Arquette, who plays their mother, reveals that she and the young actors actually painted those murals together. So it’s particularly heartbreaking when she has to paint over them when their fictional family has to move. 

Your home might feature many notable pieces of art, but the most valuable could be your child’s. A child’s artwork offers a snapshot of a particular moment in time. Collected through the years, they represent milestones captured in pencil, crayon and tempera paint. Honor the art. Frame it. Display it. Archive it. I wish my mother had saved all my drawings through the years. Boyhood doesn’t last, but the memories created by art can last a lifetime.

“Birdman”

Almost the entirety of “Birdman” takes place in the dressing rooms and narrow hallways of the St. James Theatre in New York. In fact, however, it was not filmed in the actual backstage area, but on a set so realistic, you can smell the greasepaint. This serves as an apt metaphor: Your life is like a movie, and everything around you is the set. 

Although we probably don’t live this fantasy to the extreme that Michael Keaton’s character does, the concept offers a great brainstorming method for decorating. For example, if your home were your movie set, what kind of scene would you want to live in — a Jane Austen comedy of manners with English antiques? Or a sleek, modern penthouse à la Christian Grey (with or without the Red Room)? Using a movie as a guide can give you ideas on everything from furniture to flooring to accessories.

Perhaps that’s the decorating lesson in all these movies. Create a space for yourself that will make you look and feel inspired — like a winner. You may not win an Oscar, but in a home that’s comfortable and stylish, you’ll certainly feel like a star.

Jonathan Fong is the author of “Walls That Wow,” ”Flowers That Wow” and “Parties That Wow,” and host of “Style With a Smile” on YouTube. You can see more of his do-it-yourself projects on Design lessons from Oscar-nominated movies Read More »

“Felix and Meira:” a rare portrayal of Chasidim as Human Beings

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I recently saw the film “>New York Jewish Film Festival. The film, which stars Hadas Yaron, Martin Dubreuil and Luzer Twersky, tells the story of a married Chasidic woman who feels dissatisfied with the life she is leading and becomes involved with a non-Jewish man. Oscilloscope Laboratories will release the film theatrically on April 17th. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in seeing Chasidic people portrayed onscreen as real people.  My recommendation is a bit ironic, since actual members of the Chasidic community would no doubt disapprove of the film, given its subject matter and the mere fact that it is a film, something Chasidic people aren’t supposed to watch.  However, I’m making that recommendation as a modern orthodox woman who does go to movies.

As I said, I am modern orthodox, but I know and am related to many ultra-orthodox people, including some Chasidim. (“Chasidim” is the plural of Chasid.  Also, even though Chasidim are ultra-orthodox, not all ultra-orthodox people are Chasidic.) Almost invariably, when I see portrayals of orthodox people, especially ultra-orthodox people, in television or at the movies, I cringe.  Besides the outright inaccuracies about the rules and customs of the community, the characters are generally portrayed as either buffoons providing a punchline or as judgmental robots with no emotions except self-righteous anger.  There is judgment in these communities. But there is also humanity.

In “Felix and Meira,” I saw that humanity.  Although the main character, Meira (pronounced Meh-eera, emphasis on the last syllable), is unhappy in the community, her unhappiness appears to stem more from the general insularity and restrictions of the lifestyle than with mistreatment.  Indeed, her husband, who is very devout, genuinely loves her and tries to deal with her unhappiness.  Of course, his support has limits, as he adheres to the restrictions Meira is coming to resent, but his response is still that of a man, not just a machine spouting rules and regulations.

I think one of the main reasons for this realism is the fact that the actor who plays Meira’s husband, Luzer Twersky, was raised as a Satmar Chasid.  In the Q&A at the festival, Luzer said that the film’s director, Maxim Giroux, who is not Jewish, asked for his input on all aspects of the film’s representation of chasidic life.  I also believe that Twersky’s performance, as well as that of Melissa Weisz, who was also raised Chasidic and plays one of Meira’s friends, were among the most compelling of all the performances in the film because they actually lived that life.

In something of a twist, Meira is played by Hadas Yaron, who, while not orthodox herself, played a devoutly ultra-orthodox woman in the award-winning Israeli film “ “Felix and Meira:” a rare portrayal of Chasidim as Human Beings Read More »

Confronting Israel in poetry

Leave a Comment / Culture, Poetry /

Journalists who cover the Israel-Palestine situation understand the difficulty of finding words that don’t bring with them the burden of history and politics. Words such as “occupation,” “settlement,” “terrorist” and “separation barrier” are loaded with meaning and can obfuscate the truth as easily as they illuminate it. As the literary theorist Edward Said wrote, “The language of suffering and concrete daily life has either been hijacked, or it has been so perverted as, in my opinion, to be useless except as pure fiction …”

Two Los Angeles-based Israeli poets, Meital Yaniv and Morani Kornberg-Weiss, know this dilemma well. In Yaniv’s forthcoming book, “Spectrum for an Untouchable,” she writes, “I am exile / There is no voice that speaks my language.” And in Kornberg-Weiss’ book, “Dear Darwish,” she writes, “I want to write poems about Israel and Palestine but I am at loss. What language can I use?”

Meital Yaniv

The two poets will read from their work Feb. 22 at The Pop-Hop, a bookstore in Highland Park. The event, called “Correspondence,” also will feature Israeli-born artist Dorit Cypis moderating a discussion on the themes of memory, trauma, Diaspora and displacement in their work. 

Yaniv, a visual artist, writer and filmmaker, was born in Tel Aviv in 1984 and received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. “Spectrum for an Untouchable” addresses Israel as a person, an imagined dialogue based on real-life conversations that conveys the complex and conflicted relationship Yaniv has with her home country.

Yaniv’s mother’s parents met in the militant Zionist group Lehi, while her father’s parents survived the Holocaust in Poland and then moved to Israel. Her father lost his brother in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. “So I have a lot of heroes in my family,” she said, “and I grew up in a right-wing household.”

Yaniv left the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) after one year, claiming a psychological disorder under Profile 21, the code for someone deemed permanently unfit for military service. Such soldiers receive an exemption certificate instead of a discharge certificate. “It shows in your record that you didn’t serve the amount of time that you were supposed to,” she said.

She traveled the world, as young Israelis often do after they finish their military service, and saw her friends and fellow soldiers who were in combat exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. “I started having all these questions, and I started to see things differently, but I didn’t have language for it yet,” she said. “And I needed, in my journey, to step outside of Israel in order to see it from the perspective that I needed to.”

Even in Los Angeles, Yaniv can’t escape her past. In one of her poems, strangers who meet her at a party and learn she’s Israeli immediately ask about her army service. In another, Yaniv is in L.A. watching the news on TV while texting with her brother about three Israeli teenagers who were kidnapped and found dead. “I know it’s a weird feeling, the reactions on Facebook are so extreme, everyone is on a revenge rampage, eye for an eye, I hope this situation is not going to escalate,” she writes.

In a later poem, she declares her disillusionment with the official Israeli line on the Palestinian situation. “I don’t believe this myth anymore,” she writes. “It’s difficult to think about your own child as an equal to your enemy, it might even be impossible, but unless we start seeing everyone that lives in Gaza as an equal human to everyone who lives in Israel we will never solve this conflict, our skin burns the same and our hearts hurt just the same.”

Besides writing the book in Los Angeles, Yaniv also wrote it in English, partly to avoid the loaded terminology she learned as a child. She hopes Israelis read the book but doesn’t think it should be translated.

“I grew up there. I’m from there. And I couldn’t write this book in Hebrew. It had to come out of me in English. And I think it will be easier for people to read it in English and not read it in their mother tongue,” she said.

Like Yaniv, Kornberg-Weiss was born in Tel Aviv. She was raised in Tarzana from age 4 to 14, and returned to Israel to finish high school, serve in the IDF and get her undergraduate degree. She’s a poet and translator, currently working toward her doctorate in Hebrew protest poetry at the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo. Her book “Dear Darwish” was published by BlazeVOX in 2014. Modeled after poet Jack Spicer’s “After Lorca,” a series of imagined conversations with the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, it’s written as a series of letters and poems addressed to the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

“He’s one of the most famous Arab poets in the world, and in Israel we are literally denied of learning about him. The former minister of education, Yossi Sarid, tried to implement two of his nonpolitical poems into the educational system, and the Israeli Knesset totally went against that,” Kornberg-Weiss said in an interview. “So this is a poet whose existence was literally denied to me.”

The book begins with the 2011 Palestinian prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held captive by Hamas militants for over five years. “After that happened, I tried to make sense of how one soldier could be exchanged for over a thousand lives,” Kornberg-Weiss said.

She writes in the opening poem of “Dear Darwish”: “There were images of Palestinians who had blood on their hands and then I met J.H. and he asked me if Gilad Shalit also had blood on his hands and I wonder how many Palestinians died while he was serving in a tank. I imagine a frightened young Gilad in a deafening tank following dumb orders dumbly. We all saw photos of Aziz Salha with blood on his hands but nobody thought about the blood on Gilad’s hands, myself included.”

Such provocative imagery has been received critically by many readers, Kornberg-Weiss admitted.  “People have called me a traitor, have told me I should protect Israel’s good name. My role, especially in terms of my research, is to uncover the multiple layers of history that are often denied to the Israeli public. It’s not easy for many Israelis to think of their history in terms of colonial discord, in terms of military occupation. And so once those terms enter the discourse, people respond in a negative way.”

Like Yaniv, Kornberg-Weiss said it’s only possible for her to write about Israel and Palestine from a distance. “I honestly felt like I was forced to wear blindfolds in Israel, and coming to the U.S. kind of slowly loosened the seams of the blindfold and allowed me to learn more about my own history,” she said.

 

You can hear Yaniv and Kornberg-Weiss read from their work at The Pop-Hop, 5002 York Blvd., Los Angeles on Feb. 22 at 4 p.m. More information at Confronting Israel in poetry Read More »

Shimon Peres offers a taste of history, positivity

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles /

Shimon Peres, Israel’s former longtime president and two-time prime minister, appeared at a gala for top funders of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles Feb. 11 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. In an onstage conversation with Federation board member Sharon Nazarian, Peres was not asked about current events, including Iranian nuclear ambitions or the hot topic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans for a March 3 speech before a joint session of Congress in Washington, D.C. The subject of the Israeli prime minister, who is in the midst of an election campaign in Israel, did not come up at all. Instead, Peres, seated across from Nazarian and in front of a trio of flags from Israel, the United States and California, reminisced about the founding of the State of Israel and dished about his fellow founding statesmen — including David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin — all now deceased. He called Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, the “greatest leader of the 20th century.”

Peres also offered advice about how to remain young in spirit and live life Jewishly: “Count the dreams of your mind; if the numbers of the dreams exceeds the number of achievements, you are young,” the 91-year-old, who was in town for several private L.A. Federation events, said. 

The audience of approximately 300 gave Peres a standing ovation as he entered the room around 7:15 p.m., and, during the 40-minute conversation, appeared to enjoy the easy manner in which Peres talked about his life, which includes one of politics’ most illustrious careers. 

Nazarian, an adjunct professor for political science at UCLA and the founder of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, urged Peres to discuss personal fears. Peres insisted he has never been afraid throughout his long life,.

“I don’t think I was ever scared,” he said.

“That’s amazing,” she responded.

“It’s not amazing. I think everybody can behave the same way. Unfortunately, there’s great fear in our time,” Peres said, then elicited laughs when he added: “I thought all my life that optimists and pessimists pass away the same way, so why be a pessimist?”

Perhaps the most spellbinding part of the evening came when Nazarian asked Peres to say the first thing that came to mind as she mentioned deceased leaders Ben-Gurion, Begin, Rabin and Meir. Peres, a living link to the founding of Israel, spent more time during this segment talking about Ben-Gurion than any of the others, recalling when Ben-Gurion took him, then a 24-year-old kibbutznik, under his wing and showed him what true leadership is.

“All his life, he just wanted one thing, the establishment of a Jewish state,” Peres said of Ben-Gurion.

He recalled Meir, Israel’s first and, to this day, only female prime minister, with glowing words, as well. Noting her strength in the face of the Yom Kippur War, Peres said he and Israeli leaders used to call Meir “the only man in the [Israeli] cabinet.” That remark, of course, won laughs. 

As for Begin, he was the only leader Peres discussed in both positive and negative terms. Peres was a left-wing Labor Zionist — as was Rabin — while Begin founded the right-wing Likud Party, which is also the party of Netanyahu. Lauding Begin for signing a historic peace deal with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Peres also criticized Begin’s party for relying too much on speeches over action. 

He acknowledged that he’d had many disagreements with Rabin during their many years working together, but called Rabin a “straightforward man … who spoke to the point and tried to look at facts as they are.” 

Looking outside his country, Peres praised Pope Francis, calling him “the first pope who really is a friend of Israel.” 

And, when Nazarian asked what advice he has for young people today who find themselves ambivalent about Israel, Peres did not reply directly, but said the main thing parents need to ensure is that their children love Judaism, which means adhering to the “moral code” of the Ten Commandments. He also advised parents to raise their children to be intellectually curious. 

“If you are becoming satisfied, you are in danger of not being Jewish,” he said.

The evening also featured an appearance from an Israeli resident of Sderot, Michal Kakoon, who has experienced the frequent attacks from Gaza. Kakoon told of how Federation’s assistance has helped ease post-traumatic stress conditions caused by Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas. She appeared in dialogue with Aaron Goldberg, senior vice president of L.A. Federation’s Israel office.

“Sderot is my home,” Kakoon responded, when Goldberg asked why she continues to live in such a dangerous and vulnerable region of Israel. 

Federation President and CEO Jay Sanderson and philanthropist Julie Platt, the organization’s general campaign chair, also offered remarks. Sanderson highlighted the role that Federation serves, and will continue to serve, in the Jewish community, while Platt, among other things, spoke of the work Federation does overseas to help Jews in need, including in Ukraine and Paris.

“Tonight, as we listen to the … history of the State of Israel from one of the greatest leaders of the Jewish people ever, President Shimon Peres, we want to think about the future, as well,” Sanderson said. 

Shimon Peres offers a taste of history, positivity Read More »

Thomas L. Friedman on what’s wrong with Islam

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

The following is excerpted from remarks New York Times columnist Tom Friedman gave Feb. 8 at Stanford University at the annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture. We’re reprinting here because it is one of the most succinct and cogent approaches to the heated debate over whether Islam is inherently violent. A student journalist asked Friedman to address the Muslim nature of the Muslim extremist problem. This was Friedman’s response. Below is video of the full presentation:

I do not believe we should be in the business of telling Muslims what their religion is or isn’t. So I kind of recoil from anyone who says it’s all this, or anyone who says it’s not any of that.

I think we should be in the business of asking them, “Why is this happening?” We don’t know. We have an overwhelming number of Muslims who are American citizens living in this country and who are wonderful citizens. So we don’t have this problem. So maybe you could explain it to me, but I sort of recoil at anyone sitting back who’s not a Muslim, saying, “That is not Islam.” What the hell do you know what Islam is? “Oh, I read the Quran in college” … you don’t know anything, OK? And that’s not our job, it seems to me.

So, the way I’ve written about it is that obviously this is emerging from their faith community. First of all, it’s not emerging from across their faith community. It’s not a problem in Indonesia, the world’s biggest Muslim country. It’s not a problem in India, the world’s second-biggest Muslim country. We’re talking about a problem that has clearly been emerging from the Arab world and Pakistan, primarily. Now what is that about?

I think it’s a really complicated mix of a product of years of authoritarian government, mixing with the export of Wahhabi puritanical Islam from Saudi Arabia, all over that world, that has really leached out the more open, joyous, synchronistic Islam that you had in Egypt. You look at pictures of graduates from Cairo University in 1950, you’ll see none of the women were wearing veils. Today you look at the picture and probably most of the women will be wearing veils. Thank you, Saudi Arabia. That is the product of the export of a particular brand of Islam from Saudi Arabia with the wealth of that country. And that’s mixed in also with the youth bulge and unemployment.

And so where Islam starts in that story and where authoritarian begins, how much people hate their own government, bleeding into Wahhabism, bleeding into massive amounts of young men who have never held power because they’re not allowed to in their country, never held a job, never held a girl’s hand. And when you have lots of young males who have never held power, a job, or a girl’s hand, that is real dynamite.

And so I like to talk about it in its full complexity. But I also don’t want to excuse it. We need to have a serious conversation. But we should be in the business of asking them, not excusing them, not accusing everyone. 

We need to understand there is a pattern here. You can talk about the Crusades in the 13th century — we’re not living in the 13th century anymore, OK? It’s very hard, I think, for us to get into someone else’s narrative. Only they can get into that narrative. And we need to leave it to them. But I think it is important to ask, to probe, and to challenge in a serious way and stop telling them who they are. 

 

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American Jewish former diplomat speaks in Cairo

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

Daniel Kurtzer, the former diplomat, continues to be soft-spoken, and his outlook envisions opportunities for conflict resolution. But his assessment for future prospects for a Mideast peace settlement concentrate on Washington’s failure to hold Israel accountable for actions he believes endanger implementation of a meaningful agreement. 

Kurtzer, 66, served as United States Ambassador to Egypt from 1999 to 2001 and to Israel from 2001–2005.  

He is also an Orthodox Jew whose appointment to the senior posting in Cairo during the presidency of Hosni Mubarak elicited hostile responses in Egypt’s popular media, including anti-Semitic caricatures.

“I’ve chosen to talk in Cairo about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, because here it is possible to have a discussion about it,” Kurtzer said during a recent speech at the American University in Cairo (AUC).

“Unfortunately, in Washington, much of that conversation has been stifled over the years by a kind of consensus that runs the gambit from, ‘Its impossible to achieve’ [to] ‘It’s too dangerous to even try.’ ” Kurtzer said. 

“A third Intifada is inevitable without some progress toward resolution of the conflict,” Kurtzer warned his audience.

“Status quos are not static in this region, and at some the point pressure builds up — you either relieve that pressure by showing people there is an avenue to reach agreement, or the situation explodes.

Kurtzer now serves on the board of trustees at AUC, the institution commonly considered to be the premier center of private higher education in Egypt. 

The former ambassador identified Washington’s muted response to continued Israeli settlement activity as the major factor impeding a two-state breakthrough.

“You can’t aspire to a territorial outcome while at the same time settling the territory on which the other side is eventually going to exercise sovereignty … it makes no sense. It sends exactly the wrong signal to the other side, that negotiations are a sham,” said Kurtzer, who believes the administration could jolt Israeli complacency on the issue by excluding goods produced in the West Bank settlements from the benefits of the free-trade agreement with the United States.

Kurtzer was part of George H.W. Bush’s policy team that obtained concessions from former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to refrain from using American loan guarantees to build housing for newly arriving Russian immigrants in the West Bank.

“If the president of the United States came along and simply wondered out loud about why we are providing free trade benefits to the settlements, and all of a sudden the question were raised, that would probably be enough to move the numbers,” Kurtzer asserted.

Egyptian novelist and diplomat Ezzedine Fishere expressed admiration for Kurtzer’s persistent pursuit of a negotiated outcome, even as he articulated a widely shared Arab view that the forces in Israel opposed to compromise are too firmly entrenched to move on the core issues.

“At what point are you ready to declare that the two-state solution is dead?” asked Fishere, who spent a year in Tel Aviv as Egypt’s political attaché and is currently a member of the Liberal Arts faculty at AUC. 

Kurtzer responded that it was too early to give up attempts at working out an agreement because, in his view, the U.S. still has not mustered all its negotiation efforts to “get the diplomacy right.”

“John Kerry started out quite positively in his diplomacy because he didn’t just try to get the two sides back to the negotiating table; he tried to create a kind of infrastructure as a safety net for the talks,” Kurtzer said.

Kerry’s “architecture” included getting foreign ministers from Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to come to Washington to reiterate the Arab Peace Initiative and appointing Gen. John Allen to pinpoint security issues and propose solutions. 

“[Allen] was there to provide answers when Israel [said], ‘We need defensible borders,’ ” Kurtzer said.

“But at the critical moment, when the two sides had proved unable to reach an agreement on terms of reference, the United States walked away rather than using that moment to put forth an American idea — or, even better, to bring in the international community and put forward a security council resolution,” Kurtzer said in describing the collapse of the Kerry initiative. 

Despite his focus on American and Israeli shortcomings in returning the two-state framework to viability, Kurtzer challenged some common assumptions voiced by AUC graduate students during the audience question period.  

“This summer’s war in Gaza was not an Israeli attempt to regain control of territory or of Palestinian gas resources in the Mediterranean,” Kurtzer said.

“In the past, the United States and Egypt may have had different views of Hamas; we don’t have those differences anymore,” he noted.

“Hamas is now seen by a growing segment of opinion here as a terrorist organization, and not just as an organization that is threatening Israel, but also the security and stability of Egypt, as well. “

The former ambassador also questioned the effectiveness of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, if the intended outcome is meant to change Israeli thinking.

“If you are going to try and punish, you might also think about incentivizing — maybe there are carrots here, even if you are contemplating using sticks.“At the risk of rankling some people in the audience, I believe that if there were more participation in civil society initiatives bringing Arabs and Israelis together even before final status issues were resolved, it would be a lot easier for negotiators to win political support for their efforts.”

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PBS documentary traces 350 years of Jewish migration

Leave a Comment / Culture /

“You survive, you honor us by living,” Martin Greenfield’s father told him. Greenfield, now a New York master tailor, recalled the words after his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The quote could be taken as the theme of “The Jewish Journey: America,” a PBS documentary that tracks the migrations over 3 1/2 centuries of Jews fleeing the Latin American Inquisition, czarist Russia, Nazi Germany and Islamic nations.

Although many Jews came to America seeking refuge from persecution by authorities in those and other countries, millions more came for economic reasons — to build better lives for themselves and their children in the New World.

The one-hour program, which opens with a majestic rendition of “America the Beautiful,” is produced, directed and written by Andrew Goldberg, who has become the semi-official Jewish chronicler for PBS, with such previous productions as “The Yiddish World Remembered,” “Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence” and “Jerusalem: Center of the World.”

The first Jews to arrive in the future United States, in 1654, were 23 Sephardim fleeing the Portuguese-imposed Inquisition in Brazil. They settled in New Amsterdam, which would later become New York.

More would come to the U.S. after failed revolutions in Germany and other European countries in the 1840s, and then later by gold rush fortune seekers. Yet by the 1870s, Jews in the United States numbered no more than 200,000.

The number skyrocketed to more than 4.2 million by 1927, spurred by a massive influx of 1.5 million Jews from Eastern Europe, predominantly Russia, between 1880 and 1910.

The film also speaks to the Jewish penchant for founding communities, then splitting and re-forming into even more separate groups — some 17,500 Jewish organizations existed in the U.S. in 1927.

The mass immigration from the czarist Pale of Settlement gives the film an opening, drawing upon on various archives, to illustrate the lives of poor Jews — the wealthy ones mostly stayed put — both in the shtetl in the old country, and then in New York’s crowded Lower East Side.

Often overlooked in the triumphant rendition of the American dream is the emotional price depicted in the film that was paid by emigrants as they separated from the families and traditions that had bound them together for generations.

Although the new immigrants went through hard times in the New World, they usually wrote glowing letters of their success to the folks they’d left behind, which triggered even more immigration.

With the post-World War I recession and fear of the communist revolution in Russia came growing xenophobia, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, which narrowed the once wide-open entrance to the United States, especially to applicants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

A small but steady trickle of Jews arrived after World War II from displaced-persons camps. More came after establishment of the State of Israel, fleeing hostility to Jews in Islamic countries in North Africa and the Middle East.

Another wave arrived after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, followed by Soviet Jews in the 1990s.

Integration of these new immigrants was rarely easy. In an illuminating interview, New York Rabbi Marc Angel recalled the dual pressure from his grandfather to strive for success in the new country, but to also retain the Jewish traditions.

Yet, Angel concluded, the real miracle was that after so many generations in America, Jews have remained Jews.

Producer-director Goldberg, who founded and heads Two Cats Productions, ascribes much of his interest in Jewish-themed films to his own heritage but says there are other reasons, as well.

“For one, PBS likes our work, and also there is a community that is willing to fund such documentaries,” he said.

It should be noted that only about one-third of Goldberg’s productions focus on Jewish themes, and his interests extend to many other areas. Now in the pipeline are a documentary on animal cruelty and another on the interpretation of classical music.

“The Jewish Journey: America” airs March 5 at 8 p.m. on KVCR and March 18 at 7:30 p.m. on KOCE (PBS SoCal). The program will be repeated in subsequent weeks. 

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