This week’s Israeli creation doesn’t really need an introduction. Balkan Beat Box (BBB,) is one of the most famous Israeli musical groups in the world, and chances are you already know all of their big hits, even if you’ve never actually heard of them before.
Balkan Beat Box was founded by Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan, with Tomer Yosef as a core member. The group plays Mediterranean-influenced music that incorporates Jewish, Eastern European (mainly Balkan) and Middle Eastern traditions, Gypsy punk, and Electronic Music.
The group released its first, self-titled album in 2005, and their follow-up album, Nu Med, was released in 2007. Both received global acclaim, but nothing truly prepared the BBB to the success of their next albums, Blue Eyed Black Boy (2010) and Give (2012.) Key tracks such as “Bulgarian Chicks,” “Move It” and “Dancing With the Moon,” became extremely popular in clubs worldwide.
I invite you to listen to some of their most famous tracks, chances are you already know them, and that you won’t be able to resist the urge to dance…
During the lengthy visits she would have with her great-uncle and great-aunt, David and Rivka Labkovski, at their home in South Africa, Leora Raikin — who was a young girl at the time — recalls these relatives being a bit eccentric.
David owned one pair of shoes, and Rivka — the sister of Raikin’s grandmother Zlata Spektor — had but two dresses. Husband and wife wanted herring with every meal, a carryover from the frugal ways they lived during the years they spent in a Siberian prison camp during the Holocaust.
“He used to take my face in his hands and say, ‘Do you want to be smart or do you want to be pretty?’ and I would say, ‘Can’t I be both?’ ” Raikin said. “With Rivka, it was all about knowledge, intellectual ability and learning something new every day. She always wanted to know, ‘What have you learned today?’ ”
David Labkovski had been an artist in his native Vilna, Lithuania, and during eight years in a Siberian prison camp, where he served as a sketch and tattoo artist. After the war, he resumed his artistic career in Israel, where he lived in the artist colony of Safed from 1958 until his death in 1991.
Labkovski would sometimes give Raikin a painting or a sketch as a present. She always hoped the gift would be “one of the happy ones,” such as a picture of flowers.
Not all of Labkovski’s work was so upbeat.
His imagery covers a spectrum, from images of his homeland, including scenes of everyday life in Vilna and its Nazi occupation during the war and its destruction during the Holocaust. Labkovski returned to Vilna in 1946 and met with survivors, capturing their memories on canvas. He also produced a series of works portraying the characters of Sholem Aleichem.
Works spanning Labkovski’s career are represented in the exhibition “The Art and Life of David Labkovski,” on display at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH) through June 14. The LAMOTH exhibition marks the first time a comprehensive collection of Labkovski’s work will be seen in the United States. His family regained possession of the collection nearly three years ago, after a lengthy court dispute in Israel over ownership of the works.
During his lifetime, Labkovski’s views on the placement of his art were as complex and conflicted as the man himself. He wanted the work seen in the Diaspora, but only when the viewers — particularly the next generation — were ready for it. He refused to sell his work, and, after a 1959 exhibition of his work in Israel, he and Rivka concluded that the time was not right, according to Raikin.
“The audiences in Israel were not ready to confront the horrors of the Holocaust. It was an Old World thing — they wanted to move forward,” Raikin said. “David and Rivka had this absolute belief that one day a generation will come along that will appreciate this life that was lost, the enormity of it.”
According to Raikin, after the deaths of her great-aunt and great-uncle, the artwork was left to the city of Safed. A small museum was badly maintained and eventually fell into disarray, and the art eventually fell under court conservatorship, Raikin said. By the time the court case was settled and the art came to Raikin’s mother and her siblings, more than 20 years had passed.
An artist herself, Raikin wanted the work to be seen, and she found people of like minds in Connie Marco and Lisa Lainer-Fagan, both of whom are parents of students at New Community Jewish High School (NCJHS) in West Hills. Marco, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, also volunteered at LAMOTH and worked closely with the museum’s executive director, Samara Hutman.
Hutman studied the Labkovski collection — the haunting self-portraits, the vibrant depictions of market scenes and shtetl life — and immediately knew that she would put the paintings on display.
“There was something incredibly prescient in the mind of the artist,” Hutman said, “to sort of hold his body of work together to keep the integrity of the collection and of the vision and to save it for when the time is right.
“The work is magnificent, and I think there’s something in really incredible alignment for us to exhibit this work,” she added. “It has a lot of symmetry with the narrative of the museum. It is all about finding these little shards and remnants of a world that was blown apart by the Holocaust, and now we’re all in this work of recovery and excavation and redignification.”
The more people who saw Labkovski’s work and heard Raikin’s story, the more his great-niece was encouraged to get the art displayed, and the more the circle of support grew. A smaller version of the exhibition had an initial stop at the school, where a group of art students co-curated the exhibition under the guidance of art instructor Benny Ferdman.
Labkovski’s work resonated not only with the art students, but with a spectrum of departments across the NCJHS campus. In addition to the eight co-curators — who argued and debated which works should be included — two film students are assembling a documentary about the Labkovski experience. Students have written poetry that accompanies the work at the school and at LAMOTH, and a student sang a song in Yiddish about Vilna at the openings.
This was the first time such a cross-department art display had come together at the school, said Ferdman, arts director and artist-in-residence at NCJHS.
“When you look at an artist’s work over time and place, that kind of turns the work into an artifact as well,” Ferdman said. “Beyond its aesthetic value, it becomes the witness to a time and place. It was like a little time machine from the past coming to us now.”
Wherever the journey next takes Labkovski’s art after LAMOTH, Raikin feels that by passing through young hands, the work has found its place again.
“I think we all feel it’s our responsibility to make sure this next generation cares,” Raikin said. “That the [NCJHS] students were so involved and vested, that superseded any dream I possibly could have had. It would have made David and Rivka so, so happy to have seen these students so interested. I can walk away and say I feel safe. I feel that these kids get it. They can pass it on.”
For more information on “The Art and Life of David Labkovski,” visit lamoth.org.
In February 2002, the disgraced New York Times journalist Michael Finkel was hiding out in his home near Bozeman, Mont., alternating pacing, lying burrowed beneath his laundry, and clamping “my palms over my ears and [yelling] at the ceiling until my breath gave out,” he writes in his 2005 book, “True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa,” which has now been adapted into a film starring Oscar nominee Jonah Hill (“Moneyball,” “The Wolf of Wall Street”) as Finkel. “All day, I wore sweatpants and bedroom slippers. … More than once, I crawled into the cramped, dusty space under my writing desk and tore at the carpet, rubbing my fingers raw.”
Finkel was distraught because his dream career as a journalist for the New York Times Magazine had abruptly ended; previously, the now-46-year-old reporter had covered stories such as conflicts in Afghanistan and Gaza. But while reporting on child labor on cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast for a Times magazine cover story, “Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?” Finkel invented a composite character — in part because his editors had wanted him to focus on one child’s story, a fully fleshed-out character of a sort he just hadn’t found in his reporting. When his deceit was discovered, he was promptly fired, which would ultimately place Finkel in the unwelcome company of other highly visible disgraced journalists, such as former Times reporter Jayson Blair, fired from The New York Times in 2003, and Stephen Glass, fired from The New Republic in 1998.
“I lied to my editors … I know what I did was wrong,” Finkel said in a telephone interview from New York.
But as Finkel cowered in his home just hours before the Times’ editors’ note about his firing was scheduled to hit newsstands, he received an unexpected telephone call from an Oregon journalist whom he initially assumed was calling about the Times’ note. Instead, Finkel was stunned to learn the reporter was phoning about something else altogether: Apparently, an Oregon man named Christian Longo, who was accused of murdering his wife and three children, then discarding their bodies in local waters, had just been captured in Mexico, where he had adopted Finkel’s identity as an alias.
“At the moment I had lost my name, somebody else had taken on my name,” Finkel said. “That [was] so far beyond the bounds of probability, I feel very comfortable using the phrase ‘divine intervention.’ ”
Striving to revive his career and also to achieve a measure of “personal redemption,” Finkel said, he reached out to Longo, a Jehovah’s Witness who, upon their first meetings, came off as intelligent, self-assured and eerily normal.
During the ensuing months, the two men not only met in person, but also conducted myriad telephone calls and exchanged hundreds of pages of letters; Finkel learned that Longo had impersonated him because he had been a fan of his writing and coveted the globetrotting journalistic lifestyle Finkel had previously enjoyed.
Along the way, Longo, then only in his late 20s, also became a kind of father confessor figure to Finkel: “I was writing [to him] about my life and my flaws and my sins … so, on that level, the relationship I developed with him had a therapeutic element,” Finkel said.
Longo, he added, was “a fan, and perhaps my only one, and I know for a fact that his admiration of my writing made it very difficult to maintain a journalistic neutrality.” Finkel, who grew up in a Jewish home in Stamford, Conn., told Longo stories about his Grandpa Manny and even taught Longo some Yiddish.
Longo had at least insinuated to Finkel that he was innocent of the murders, even though the communication between journalist and accused killer eventually took on what Finkel describes as not so much a game of cat and mouse as a game of cat and cat. “He was using me, and I was using him … I was trying to revive my career and use this spectacular murder story which I had been involuntarily thrust into … as a way to restart the only job I’ve ever loved and known,” Finkel said.
And Longo, Finkel eventually came to believe, had been communicating with him as a sort of “dress rehearsal” for what he might say to convince a jury of his innocence.
Even so, Finkel said, he was shocked by what Longo eventually declared when he took the stand at his trial in the early 2000s: Longo took responsibility for murdering his wife, MaryJane, and his youngest child, but he also accused MaryJane of killing his other two children and attempting the murder of a third.
“I’ve never felt such hatred for anyone in my entire life than I felt toward Christian Longo at that moment,” Finkel said of Longo’s apparent slandering of his dead wife. And even though Finkel doesn’t believe in the death penalty, emotionally he wanted Longo to be put to death, from that moment until today.
Finkel now believes that Longo, who had previously lied to his family about their financial woes and had even written counterfeit checks to stave off poverty, had “lied himself into a corner and then rather than confess and embarrass himself, he murdered his entire family.”
Penning his memoir, “True Story,” for which Finkel received an advance of some $500,000, has in fact revived the journalist’s career; he has gone on to write for National Geographic and Esquire, and eventually sold the movie rights to his book (James Franco plays Longo in the film).
But the funds and attention Finkel has received for his book and the film also earned him the ire of MaryJane’s family. “Mike Finkel has to be sicker than the murderer to develop a relationship with the murderer in order to make money and a ‘comeback,’ ” MaryJane’s sister, Karyn Baker, wrote in the comments section of a story on the case in the International Business Times in 2014. “Shame on Finkel.”
In response, Finkel told the Journal, “I can’t imagine the pain that Karyn is going through … [But] the most important thing to remember is that I was brought into this story; it’s not like I went chasing some ambulance. Christian Longo took on my identity, [so] I was a part of this story.”
Given that Finkel has lied about things in the past, why should we believe he is now telling the truth? In his book, Finkel says he is well aware that a disgraced journalist might be offered a second, but never a third chance, and so he meticulously checked every fact in his book, even bringing in an independent fact-checker to help him. And, Finkel points out, The New York Times fact checked all his other stories in the aftermath of his disgrace and found only a few minor errors.
Of editors who still won’t assign him stories, he said, “It makes me sad; it hurts, but it’s your right — it’s completely your right to have your opinion.”
Longo, who was found guilty of the murders, today sits on death row in Oregon; Finkel said he will continue to communicate with him, as he is compelled to follow the story to its end and even plans to watch him die if the sentence is ever carried out.
Now that the film is scheduled to open, Finkel has, after some years, agreed to conduct interviews that touch on his past misbehavior: “There’s a vein of mortification or embarrassment,” he said. “There’s a vein of concern that after spending the last 10 years diligently working to regain a job in journalism, that it could bring up bad reminders. … I’m doing two days of talking about this, and I’m looking forward to not talking about it.”
The Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival is starting soon! It runs from April 30th to May 7th at various venues around LA, and it’s an excellently curated exhibit of some of the finest films you’ll see anywhere. For more information or to purchase very reasonable tickets, visit lajfilmfest.org. The Opening Night film features The Outrageous Sophie Tucker directed by William Gazecki.
On another note, I have really been enjoying the AMC series TURN about Washington’s spies in the Revolutionary War. Fascinating account — very well-done! Season 2 is on Mondays at 10 pm on AMC, and you can catch up on Season 1 on Netflix.
What is the connection between kvish “highway” and kibbush, which means “conquest, occupation”; kvushim “pickles; occupied (territories)”; kevesh “movable stairway (for descending off an airplane)”; kivshan “kiln, furnace (where material is heated or smelted)”; makhbesh “(press, clothes) roller”?
The original meaning of the root k-b-sh is “to tread down, press down,” hence “to descend, pave, subdue, conquer, rape; preserve or pickle; withhold (anger, evil impulse),” as “Who is a hero? The one who conquers (kovesh) his impulse” (Abot 4:1).
It is closely related to k-b-s “wash clothes, launder,” (by soaking them in water then treading on them or squeezing them, as is still done in many places).
Yona Sabar is a professor of Hebrew and Aramaic in the department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at UCLA.
This year marks the passage of two major anniversaries that reveal man’s unbelievable capacity for cruelty and evil. It has been 100 years since the outbreak of the Armenian Genocide and 70 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. We experienced these tragedies firsthand. One of us survived the Armenian Genocide. One of us survived Auschwitz.
During this year of commemoration, we have come together as survivors to make clear that the duty of remembrance extends far beyond ceremonies. It calls for action. Each and every person has a responsibility and a role to play. As the number of survivors shrinks and shrinks, we continue to share our stories, year after year, with the hope that others will take from them clear lessons for the future.
We know all too well what happens when the world turns a blind eye to the persecuted.
I, Yevnige, was born in Aintab, Turkey in 1914 – the year that World War I broke out. My first seven years of life were spent hiding in our home in great fear that we would be captured, robbed, or shot, like the many people we knew whose families were murdered before their eyes. As a young child, I remember hearing loud cries coming from the street. Armenian families – mothers, grandmothers, children – were calling out for water and bread. The Turkish soldiers drove these innocent people onward, whipping them as they went on a march to their deaths in the desert.
I, Mala, was born in Lodz, Poland in 1931 – the second youngest of six children. As a child, young Poles would throw snowballs at us because we were Jews. Later they threw rocks. Then they trained their dogs to attack us. I was bitten viciously. The Nazis gathered the Jews together and put us into a ghetto. Not long after, my father was murdered by an SS man on a motorcycle. We were soon rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where most of my family was killed in the gas chambers. Of 60 people in my extended family, 58 were murdered.
Both of us know the incredible power of faith to give people moral clarity and strength in the most difficult of times.
As a child in Turkey, I lived every moment worrying about what my family would eat next.Most of my nutrition came in spiritual form, as my devout Christian mother raised us to trust in God, continually read the Bible, and pray to keep alive the faith that we were being persecuted for. This love for God is what carried me through those years and taught me to forgive those who committed these atrocities.
In 1921, our family finally had to leave Turkey. Two horse-driven carriages came to transport us to Syria in the dead of night. In front of me sat an old grandma. “My little girl,” she begged, “ I don’t feel comfortable here, shall we exchange our seats?” “Sure,” I responded.
On the journey, our driver lost control of the horses. Our carriage overturned and its iron rod pierced the neck of the grandma with whom I had exchanged seats. She died instantly. I was thrown out of the carriage and into a ravine below the road. I was saved miraculously by a rope that got tied around my leg as I flew out of the carriage. They pulled me up by the rope, tearing open my thigh to the bone in the process. For two days, I lay unconscious. I often ask myself, “Who tied me with that rope so that I would not fall into the ravine?” It must have been through an angel that I was saved.
We’ve seen firsthand the power of individuals to bring light to the world in the face of great darkness.
The horrors of Auschwitz will always live in my memory. I remember classical music playing to camouflage the cries of those in the gas chambers. Each evening, instead of saying good night to each other, we would say goodbye, not knowing whether we would live through the night. I’d often wake up to find a frozen or starved body next to mine.
I survived only by the will of G-d and the humanity of those around me. At the camp, the Nazis would line us up. The infamous Dr. Mengele walked through the lines, scrutinizing who would be sent to the gas chambers and who would be used for work. At that critical moment, the older women in the camp would lift me – a child of just 11- years old – up on their shoulders so that I’d look older. They saved my life.
One German supervisor at the munitions factory where we were working was able to look at me and see a child – a human being. Risking his own life, he would give me sandwiches and hide me when the SS men would come through looking for women who did not appear fit for work.
During our lifetimes, we’ve seen many try to claim that the genocides we saw with our own eyes never happened. We’ve seen world leaders turn a blind eye as more than 40 other genocides have taken place since 1945 – from Cambodia to Rwanda, from Bosnia to Darfur. At this moment, many millions are threatened with genocide and mass murder in places like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mankind can do better.
Just like we saw righteousness in our darkest hours, we see glimmers of hope today – in the children who hear our stories and promise to never forget them, in the many passionate professionals who work to preserve our history for the future, in the activists who fight to breathe life into the words “Never Again” by protecting those threatened in our time.
This month, thousands of people from the Jewish and Armenian communities – and from many other backgrounds and faiths – will stage a Walk to End Genocide in Los Angeles. Although we are no longer able to participate in such a long walk in person, we will be walking in spirit.
Long after this year of commemoration comes to an end, we hope that the stories of the survivors from our two peoples will live on in the deepest parts of the human soul. In all corners of the world, we must inspire people not just to speak, but to act, heeding the lessons of the past to protect the precious lives of all G-d’s children.
Yevnige Salibian is a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Mala Langholz is a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. Both are residents of Southern California.
In this Torah portion, God commands Aaron and his sons to make the burnt and sin offerings at the Tabernacle. When God accepts the offerings, the people shout with joy. But when two of Aaron’s sons make an offering that was not commanded of them, they die. God describes to Moses the laws of kashrut, making distinctions between land animals, birds and animals in the water. Also in Shemini are some of the laws of ritual purity.
The purpose of these commentaries is to provide Jewish Journal readers with a brief, general entree into the multifaceted study of Torah from different denominational perspectives.
Rabbi Edward Feinstein Valley Beth Shalom (Conservative)
Americans have an infatuation with leaders. The English philosopher Thomas Carlyle believed that history is propelled by “the great man” (Carlyle’s phrase), whose values and energy animate our institutions. For Americans, “leadership” is a sacred word. Read more.
Rabbi Chaim Mentz Chaim Mentz Chabad of Bel Air
In the early years of American Jewish history, there was a debate about whether American life was different from the shtetl life of Europe. Many embraced the idea of assimilation and secularization, yet others held strong and kept their traditional religious practices in this modern “new” world. Read more.
Rabbi Jonathan Hanish Temple Kol Tikvah (Reform)
We are all human, so we all stumble at some point in our lives. If and when our stumble is discovered, we pay the price for our actions through repentance and transformation, and then, hopefully, we move forward and leave the past behind. But, on occasion, our actions come back to haunt us over and over again, like a never-ending echo. Read more.
Rabbi Sarah Bassin Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills (Reform)
If you have spent any amount of time with a 3-year-old, you know this age comes coupled with a barrage of “why” questions: Why do you stop at red lights? Why do you put milk in your coffee? Why do birds chirp? Read more.
Americans have an infatuation with leaders. The English philosopher Thomas Carlyle believed that history is propelled by “the great man” (Carlyle’s phrase), whose values and energy animate our institutions. For Americans, “leadership” is a sacred word.
The success or failure of a business is ascribed to the strength of its CEO. Problems of state are described as a “crisis of leadership.” In sports, it’s the quarterback’s leadership that brings a team to victory; in music, it’s the star conductor we go to see.
These leaders are our heroes, our idols. They’re Steve Jobs at Apple, coach Mike Krzyzewski at Duke and Gustavo Dudamel at the L.A. Philharmonic. And should they fail, we take special relish in destroying them — tossing them out to look for new saviors.
Jews traditionally have a much more complex relationship with leaders. We love our leaders, and in the same breath, we suspect them. We may follow them, but we never surrender to them. This is true even in the ideal: A talmudic tradition teaches that if you’re planting a tree and you hear the Messiah has arrived … finish planting the tree, and only then go to see if it’s true.
We elevate leaders, and then we argue with them. Perhaps “Jewish leadership” is an oxymoron.
Consider the biblical model: priest, prophet, king. The priest, as described in this week’s Torah portion, is responsible for the sacred precincts. His hands alone touch the consecrated objects, the holy symbols of God’s presence. But for all his sacred responsibility and privilege, and though he himself becomes a symbol of God’s holy presence, the priest holds no temporal power. He makes no policy. Though he wraps himself in the flag of the sacred, as it were, he is ultimately powerless.
The king, on the other hand, has all the power. But he is separated from the symbols of the sacred. There is no inherent sanctity to his kingship — his crown is not a religious symbol. His authority is purely functional, and therefore every use of his power must be justified. Even King David, the greatest of Israel’s kings, the progenitor of the Messiah, is sharply castigated by the prophet Nathan for killing his neighbor and stealing his wife. Separating king from priest and power from holiness means that being king does not put one above God’s law. Even the king is accountable.
And it is the prophet who carries this message. The prophet is the nation’s conscience. He incessantly and adamantly demands moral purity. But there’s a tension: No government or leadership can be morally pure. All leadership ultimately is a matter of negotiating compromises. Diplomacy, policy, planning, budgeting or any leadership decision is a matter of trading away some of your principles to preserve others.
Were a prophet to find himself invested with power, he would soon despair. It’s no wonder Moses was not allowed into the Promised Land — into the real world of limitations and accommodations.
The Greek philosopher Plato argued for a philosopher-king. He was wrong. Philosophers are like prophets. They deal in the realm of the pure, the theoretical and the ideal, and they make very poor kings. When philosophers/prophets take power, they tend to become tyrants, forcing everyone into the mold of their theory.
Kings need prophets. The tension between them is essential. Those in power need to be reminded of the ideal and the pure. They need to hear the truth. And even while they make moral compromises, let them be reminded that their compromises are in fact compromises. Let them know what they’re compromising and the costs of compromise. Let them remember that, while necessary, it’s not ideal, and while pragmatic, it’s not perfect. Let them hear again and again: We can do better.
The Jewish model of leadership is filled with conflict, tension and stress. We are always arguing. Is this any way to do leadership?
It isn’t orderly or clean or decisive. But it befits a people who began by running away from Pharaoh, and bears the scars of every subsequent ruler who thought himself a god. It befits a people who share God’s lofty vision of justice, but who know this world all too well. This week, in Parashat Shemini, we consecrate this model of leadership. Our priests will lead us in worship of our God, the God who demands ever-higher levels of holiness from real people, living in a real world.
In the early years of American Jewish history, there was a debate about whether American life was different from the shtetl life of Europe. Many embraced the idea of assimilation and secularization, yet others held strong and kept their traditional religious practices in this modern “new” world.
Each side preached to their choir: “America is different.” But while one group argued we must modernize to fit in to our new world, the other preached, “America is a ‘treif midena’ (a non-kosher place) and we must create shtetlach to keep the assimilation out.” Each side felt their way was the true way to preserve Jews and Judaism in America.
Through Divine Providence, God led millions of us here to America. God obviously would love to see Jews thrive with Judaism in this land of freedom. But which path is the proper path? Go out and leave the shtetl behind? Or build shtetlach with walls around us and do all we can to keep America out of our lives?
Whenever a dilemma in Jewish life comes up, one must turn to our Jewish handbook, the Torah, for guidance. In the Torah is an answer for every Jewish issue.
In this week’s Torah portion, God reveals to us the laws of kashrut. God goes into great detail which animals are permissible (kosher) and which ones are not. For example, an animal that has split hooves and chews its cud, such as the cow, lamb or goat, is kosher (they have the spiritual permissible qualities for us to digest).
When it comes to the laws of fish, God tells us that a fish must have fins and scales to be kosher. Simple — two signs. If you catch a fish with fins and scales, it’s kosher and you can now make sushi!
The rabbis ask a question: We know that God is very precise in his wording in the Torah. Every word is calculated. Why did God add the word “fins” to the signs for being kosher? We know every fish that has scales has fins, but not all fish with fins have scales, so why not just write simply any fish with scales is kosher?
The Lubavitcher Rebbe explained that God is teaching us an important Jewish life lesson from the laws of the kosher fish. A fish is a navigator — it goes out and seeks the world, using its fins, yet it has its scales to protect it from foreign elements that may cause harm. God chose the Jews to be his ambassadors to the world, to spread his light and teachings to the world.
America is a wonderful place to navigate, but we must have strong shields to protect us from assimilation or anything that may threaten our Jewishness. A perfect example of a kosher fish in America is former Connecticut senator and vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman. He lived within the American life, but observed the laws of kashrut and Shabbat, so he didn’t lose any of his Jewish identity.
A Jew must be an ambassador for God, we must navigate the world; but we must keep our shields up and carry on the mitzvot of Judaism. So there really isn’t a debate anymore. America is not different! You can live a productive Jewish life while being a lawyer, doctor or even a senator.
Today, through the efforts of Chabad houses all over the United States, many young, modern American-Jewish families are returning to the “Old World life” in this “New World.” They have kosher homes, they are observing Shabbat, and even wearing kippahs in public places — because America is a place where a Jew can live to his or her highest Jewish potential.
Being that the debate is over, please join me for some kosher sushi — you may like it! I look forward to meeting you.
