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Jewish Journal

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July 29, 2015

Moving and shaking: Taste of Summer in Santa Monica, Peter Beinart at IKAR and more

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Movers & Shakers, Moving & Shaking /

The sun was gradually setting when nearly 600 people dressed in cocktail attire arrived at the fourth annual Taste of Summer event on July 25 in Santa Monica. 

DJ Mark Chill and DJ Matt Urbano supplied the tunes as young professionals sampled palatable offerings from local eateries, sipped colorful libations and, if they so desired, got their hair braided and makeup done by beauty-to-your-door app beGlammed. 

Hosted by the Fulfillment Fund Leadership Council, a nonprofit that helps high schoolers from educationally and economically under-resourced communities attend college, the event drew CEO Kenny Rogers (not the Kenny Rogers), who stood on the patio of The Victorian, a 19th-century mansion, with a rosé champagne in hand. After clinking glasses, Rogers, 50, asked, “College should be the norm, right?” 

The Fund currently serves 2,700 students in Los Angeles, helping pave the path to college by offering scholarships, mentoring and college trips. 

“Our vision,” said Rogers, a congregant of Temple Isaiah, “is that one day all kids in Los Angeles will have the opportunity to go to college.” This particular summer soiree brought the Fund closer to that goal, raising more than $90,000.

Behind Rogers, a red carpet made the perfect photo-op for honorary chairs upon entrance, including former “Top Chef” contestant Nyesha Arrington and confectioner Valerie Gordon — each of whom attracted crowds when they conducted cooking tutorials during the evening — and KABC food reporter Lori Corbin.

Meanwhile, a silent auction lured bidders who sipped cocktails. Fare included drinks from microbreweries, progressive California cuisine fare and Sprinkles cupcakes (not to mention, chicken-and-waffles-flavored saltwater taffy from Dylan’s Candy Bar). As the night progressed, the crowds grew thicker.

As people continued sifting in, former Fund beneficiary Mario Urbano, 35, bumped into his mentor Sherry Banks, director of program partnerships at the Fund, after not being in contact for years. Urbano, who started with the nonprofit 20 years before and went on to graduate from Cal State Long Beach, said that the Fund helped him attend college. The two embraced like long-lost friends.

“They made the whole process of going to college easier, and I hope to give back and mentor,” he told the Journal.

— Tess Cutler, Staff Writer

The Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education (CIJE), which works with more than a dozen Los Angeles-area Jewish schools, has named Yossef “Yossie” Frankel as a technology specialist, a new position for its West Coast school program. 

Yossef “Yossie” Frankel.

Frankel is a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) educator who previously served as the director of the Consortium for Information and Academic Technologies, an international group that helps Jewish day schools integrate 21st-century education philosophy. 

“I am so excited to be joining the CIJE team,” Frankel said in a statement. “CIJE offers an outstanding and unique curriculum that is similarly aligned with my longstanding vision and focus of experiential STEM education.”

Frankel also has served as IT director at Shalhevet High School in Los Angeles and director of academic technology at Tarbut V’ Torah Community Day School in Irvine, where he taught STEM robotics courses. He was nominated twice for Disney “Teacher of the Year” earlier in his career for his innovative teachings in middle school science.

“Yossie’s passion is helping Jewish schools the world over discover what a ‘21st century education’ really means and how it affects our children — the future of the Jewish people,” CIJE President Jason Cury said in a statement. “We look forward to his involvement in growing the CIJE program in California and ensuring excellence in California CIJE programs.”

CIJE partners with more than 160 American-Jewish day schools to provide them with the tools for a successful education, including an engaging curriculum, teacher training and advanced technology. Since 2001, CIJE has built 100 computer labs and 25 state-of-the-art science labs. 

 

— Amanda Epstein, Contributing Writer

Author and columnist Peter Beinart delivered an impassioned 20-minute lecture about why Israel and the United States don’t see eye to eye on Iran, as well as on the threat Israeli settlements in the West Bank pose to Israel’s democratic character and other topics after IKAR’s Friday night services on July 17. 

Known for his criticism of Israel, Beinart, author of 2012’s “The Crisis of Zionism,” appeared in front of a large crowd of worshipers at the egalitarian synagogue, which congregates every week at the Westside Jewish Community Center. 

He echoed an argument he made in a July 15 column in Haaretz, titled “Face It: U.S. and Israel Don’t Have the Same Interests.” Essentially, he said, the reason the United States and Israel have differing views about the dangers posed by the recent Iran nuclear deal — in which Iran agreed to halt its nuclear development program for at least 10 years in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions — is that American leaders believe terrorist organizations such as ISIS pose a greater threat to the U.S. than Iran does, unlike Israel.

Beinart, a New York-based contributing editor for The Atlantic and National Journal, stressed the need for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians and, while denouncing Palestinian terrorism, said that Israel threatens its own existence by providing subsidies to Israelis who are living in the West Bank. He bemoaned how Israeli laws treats Israelis and Palestinians living in the West Bank differently, how Israelis in the region are treated as full citizens under the law and how their Palestinian counterparts are not afforded those same rights. 

IKAR Rabbi Sharon Brous, who also has expressed criticism of Israel’s settlement policies, had words of praise for the visiting speaker. 

“You don’t have to agree with everything he writes to recognize he is incredibly wise and extremely knowledgeable and has a profound sense of moral clarity in whatever he writes,” she said while introducing Beinart. Attendees at the event included actor Theodore Bikel (who died July 21 at age 91), Bikel’s wife, Aimee Ginsburg; and Steven Windmueller, former dean of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s Los Angeles campus.

Moving and Shaking highlights events, honors and simchas. Got a tip? Email ryant@jewishjournal.com. 

Moving and shaking: Taste of Summer in Santa Monica, Peter Beinart at IKAR and more Read More »

Kurdish fighters seen as primary target of Turkey’s Erdogan

Leave a Comment / Live from the Arab Spring, Worldwide /

Following a devastating Islamic State (ISIS) linked attack on a Turkish town near the Syrian border, the Erdogan government has launched a campaign primarily targeting the Kurdish fighters who are ISIS’s most effective opponents, essentially terminating the peace process with Turkey’s Kurds.

Following the July 20 bombing that killed 32 young Turks in the small town of Suruç on their way to cross the border to help rebuild Kobane after it was re-taken from ISIS control, two Turkish police officers were found shot to death in their apartment in nearby Ceylanpınar. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) claimed responsibility, accusing the officers as well as the caretaker Justice and Development Party (AKP) of collaborating with ISIS, and announcing an end to peace talks with the government.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan responded with his own declaration of the end of peace talks with the Kurdish rebels.

“I don’t think it’s possible to continue the peace process with those who continue to take aim at our national security and brotherhood in this country,” Erdoğan said in a public address in Ankara on Tuesday.

In response to the bombing in Suruç and the killings in Ceylanpınar, the government launched airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria and the PKK in northern Iraq, and made over 1,000 arrests of ISIS and PKK members and supporters in Turkey. But critics accuse the AKP of focusing mostly on PKK supporters.

“It’s very clear from the military campaigns conducted by the Turkish state that the priority is the PKK, it’s not ISIS,” Istanbul-based analyst and security expert Gareth Jenkins tells The Media Line.

On July 23, Turkish tanks shelled ISIS forces in Syria, and the next day three fighter jets hit three ISIS targets. But Jenkins says that soon after, a far larger attack was launched against PKK targets in northern Iraq, with 75 Turkish jets hitting 48 targets. Since then no ISIS targets have been hit, but many more PKK targets in northern Iraq and Turkey have been attacked.

“With the campaign against ISIS, the objective appears to be deterrence, and to push ISIS away from the Turkish border close to Kilis. What we’re seeing against the PKK is an attempt to destroy the organization,” Jenkins says.

At the same time, arrests in Turkish cities have been overwhelmingly directed toward PKK supporters and other government critics.

“At least 80 per cent [of the arrests], as far as I can work out, are actually Kurds or leftists. Probably 85 per cent,” Jenkins estimates.

Mesut Yeğen, a sociology professor and Kurdish issues expert at Istanbul Şehir University, says the government’s campaign has little to do with ISIS. “Basically the AKP is trying to limit the power of the Kurdish Movement in general, in Syria and in Turkey,” he tells The Media Line.

AKP officials have repeatedly said there’s no difference between the PKK and ISIS, a claim which has infuriated millions of Turkey’s Kurds and damaged Kurdish support for the party.

“To equate [the PKK] with ISIS is completely unfair,” says Aliza Marcus, author of a book about the PKK, over the phone from Washington DC. She points out that the group hasn’t targeted civilians in many years and the attack on the police officers in Ceylanpınar was very uncharacteristic, a claim that every analyst The Media Line spoke to echoed.

Many Kurds switched their votes from the AKP to the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) during the general election in June. The HDP crossed the 10 per cent threshold to enter parliament, which prevented the AKP from being able to form a government. Now the AKP rules as a caretaker government since the parties in parliament have so far failed to form a coalition.

The HDP, which is separate from but heavily influenced by the PKK, is now being targeted by the AKP and other parties.

Far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) head Devlet Bahçeli called for the HDP to be shut down, and President Erdoğan wants HDP members to lose their parliamentary immunity so they can “pay the price” for links to “terrorist groups.”

The HDP’s co-chair and public face Selahattin Demirtaş welcomed the idea of stripping parliamentary immunity, asking the AKP to do the same. “Are you in? Let’s strip [our] immunity all together if you are not afraid of it,” he said at a parliamentary meeting.

Demirtaş in fact denounced the PKK’s killings of police officers and soldiers.

“They should not have been killed. Nobody should be killed […] I do not find a motive or justification,” he told Turkish daily Radikal. “The PKK acts should stop. The state’s operations should stop.”

 “He’s done more than any other Kurdish nationalist politician to distance himself from the PKK,” says Jenkins.

AKP Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç made a statement asking why HDP members weren’t among those killed in the Suruç bombing, evidently implying that they were behind it. However, two HDP members did die in the bombing, including Ferdane Kılıç, her son Nartan; and Duygu Tuna. Three HDP supporters also died in an ISIS-connected bombing of an HDP election rally in Diyarbakır in June.

Soli Özel, a professor of International Relations and Political Science at Istanbul Bilgi University, says attacking the HDP, the most moderate element of the Kurdish movement, could have devastating consequences.

“My real concern is how far the government will take this effort to de-legitimize the HDP, which after all does have 80 seats in parliament,” he says. “The real task is to maintain them in the political space. If we lose that, then anything can happen, I think.”

Aliza Marcus says the peace process is impossible without the PKK, who she says “the overwhelming majority of Kurds” support.

“The PKK is a necessary part of this. Erdoğan himself recognized this two years ago,” Marcus says, referring to previous talks between the government and imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan.

“The problem is that Turkey hasn’t really seriously engaged with them,” Marcus says. “There’s just been letters back and forth and meetings, but there hasn’t been an actual organized negotiating process where the two sides can really see where they can reach agreement and where they can’t.”

Professor Özel says that President Erdoğan is a major hindrance to peace. “The president has no intention of picking up the peace process where it was left off.”

Marcus is equally pessimistic. “It does seem like Erdoğan has decided that there’s nothing more he wants to give Kurds.”

Jenkins thinks the renewed fighting between the PKK and the government is pointless. “This appears to be motived by short-term political goals. It’s not going to solve anything. It’s going to deepen the wounds already in Turkish society. It’s going to result in more people being killed.”

He says the main threat is street violence. “The great fear is that we get an increase in ethnic clashes […] between Kurdish and Turkish nationalists on the streets. And I think that risk is now quite high.”

Jenkins believes the only road to peace is a political solution. “The PKK cannot win militarily and it cannot be defeated militarily. Ultimately there has to be some negotiations, and I think everybody rational knows that. Certainly people in the Ak Party [AKP] also know it.”

Marcus predicts the fighting will only increase Kurdish support of the PKK. “Recruitment will certainly go up.”

Meanwhile the United States and Turkey concluded a deal in which the US can use bases on Turkish soil to strike ISIS and an “ISIS-free zone” is to be established in northern Syria along the Turkish border.

“Anything ISIS-free is a good idea, but the real question is, is it a plausible idea? Who’s going to replace them?” asks professor Özel. “If the groups that replace them are just a degree away from what ISIS is like, then does it really make a difference? And how are you going to do it without boots on the ground? I really don’t know.”

The plan is to give control of the safe zone to “moderate rebels,” but the most moderate and militarily effective group in the region is likely the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Syrian offshoot of the PKK that US forces have been working closely with but which Turkey considers a major threat.

The Turkish government “doesn’t particularly like that the PYD operates alongside American forces and has good relations,” says Özel.

The PYD and activists accused Turkish forces of shelling their fighters near Kobane and attacking a nearby village on Monday, an incident the Turkish government, which says it’s not targeting the PYD, said it would investigate.

The other “moderate” force the US and Turkey may be thinking of is the Free Syrian Army (FSA), but Özel says that group would be a poor choice to control a safe zone in Syria.

“The Free Syrian Army is something that exists by-and-large in name only. I don’t think it’s a very successful or competent fighting force,” he says.

NATO members expressed solidarity with Turkey’s campaign against IS and PKK militants during an emergency meeting called by Turkey on Tuesday, but cautioned the government to use “proportionate” force and to preserve the peace process.

Kurdish fighters seen as primary target of Turkey’s Erdogan Read More »

A new tzedakah box from an old album cover

Leave a Comment / Culture, Home, Is Featured? /

Making a tzedakah box is a fun craft activity for kids from age 8 to 80, and creating the box provides a valuable lesson in the importance of charity. This tzedakah box made from an up-cycled record album cover is eco-friendly, so it’s good for the community — and the environment. 

Of course, I don’t encourage you to sacrifice a prized record from your collection. Step away from that Beatles “White Album.” Instead, look in thrift shops and garage sales for old albums with interesting artwork. I actually found the Eydie Gorme album pictured here at an Out of the Closet thrift store. It didn’t even come with the vinyl record inside, so the clerk gave it to me for free.

And yes, because I know you’re wondering: I have made a tzedakah box from a Neil Sedaka album cover — which proves that although breaking up is hard to do, making your own tzedakah box isn’t.

What you’ll need:

  • Album cover
  • Ruler
  • Hobby knife
  • Hot glue gun
  • Duct tape

 

Follow the template available for download on jewishjournal.com in cutting the album cover. It indicates how large of a section to cut out of the album cover (11.5-by-7 inches). The black line indicates where to cut this section in half, and the red lines indicate where to score the cardboard.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6

” target=”_blank”>jonathanfongstyle.com.

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The mystery of creative blocks

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

My client has set aside savings from his side business so that he can finally clear his schedule and finish that screenplay he started last year; he has two beautiful, free months just to write. After creating a long-term plan, we sit down to draw up a daily schedule. I ask him how much time per day he plans to spend writing. 

“Half an hour,” he says.

I look at him, taken aback. Half an hour? When his entire schedule is otherwise clear? Maybe I’m understanding him incorrectly; maybe he means to do half-hour intervals like a sprinter, with 10-minute breaks? After all, studies show that bursts of intense concentration followed by periods of rest offer the best means of sustaining productive work. 

But no, my client clarifies: He really does mean to write for only a half an hour a day. Because my job as a life coach is to support, not to judge or advise, I draw those half-hour boxes on every day of his schedule, where they look hopeful in all that empty space. And tiny.

Another client has a far more strenuous and detailed plan for the way she’s going to approach finishing her novel; we write a long to-do list full of all the things she needs to accomplish. The next week, she returns and has done only a fraction of what she’d planned. 

These clients are composites, but as I finish my first year of coaching, they represent a subset of the clients I see: creative, talented, highly intelligent people who are generally highly functional. They have jobs; they have friends; they are otherwise quite happy. 

Except in one way: They want to write or record an album or complete a series of paintings. They have a plan to do it. And they simply cannot do it. 

It’s as if an invisible force has power over them, a force so powerful at times that if I were a superstitious person, I actually would believe there was some kind of invisible demon at play here, one with an inexplicable hatred of the arts, committed to blocking creative accomplishment with the unilateral fixation of the Grinch blocking Christmas.

But as a citizen of the 21st century, I don’t believe in demons, so instead, I conceive of the issue as a kind of cognitive knot, with warring parts of the mind locked down in their trenches — the imaginative mind longing to get out, the fearful mind standing with guns drawn, ready to shoot down any idea foolish enough to come racing out. The common phrase used to describe this condition is “writer’s block,” but the word “block” sounds too neutral to me, like traffic cones set in a street. 

What I believe I’m seeing in my clients is more along the lines of a phobia, an irrational fear or aversion to something, in this case, the creative process (not of work itself, because my clients often juggle multiple jobs and work long hours to pay the bills). But most other phobias involve situations that a person encounters and tries to avoid, like centipedes or airplanes or, in some cases, social situations. 

The phobia my clients experience, on the other hand, of sitting down to do creative work, is entirely self-induced. My client’s novel-writing process, for example, is not going to dart out at her from under a rock. Her task of writing a novel is entirely optional; in fact, part of her problem may be the nagging suspicion that in the scheme of things, as a matter of the survival of the species, her novel might be entirely unnecessary. It’s as if I, with my pathological fear of spiders, also had an overwhelming personal need to hang out with spiders all day long — spiders that were created by me.

It’s as if my clients’ real phobia is of encountering their deepest selves. And who wouldn’t be terrified? Shouldn’t we all be, really?

The more I do this work, the more I am moved by the courage it takes to create art of any kind. It is the courage to believe that your deepest self, in all its mess and dreams and darkness and memories, might actually, if you could give it shape, have astonishing beauty. The courage is born from a longing to connect and make others feel connected, to make people laugh or sing or see a vision they can never forget.

My clients move slowly but steadily. Sometimes, surprising even themselves, they make enormous, startling leaps forward. Half an hour a day may sound tiny, but it also can be a powerful stand, a statement of belief every day that your life might matter. 

Ellie Herman is a writer, teacher and life coach.  She blogs at gatsbyinLA.wordpress.com.

The mystery of creative blocks Read More »

Ladies sing the blues

Leave a Comment / Blogs /

Before she became the chart-topping, Grammy-winning, pill-popping artist, Amy Winehouse was just a nice Jewish girl from a suburb in London. She even looked the part. The long angular nose, creamy skin, high cheekbones, the dark shtetl hair … 

According to the new documentary “Amy,” she was barely out of high school when she began crooning in nondescript jazz clubs, acne still dotting her face, while her signature sultry voice was already crisp with the wisdom of many years. As it slides up and down syllables with the smoothness of a glass elevator, it’s clear she was born to do this.

But her destiny was short-lived. The wrenching documentary by Asif Kapadia follows the meteoric rise and fast fall of Winehouse, the stunningly gifted British-Jewish jazz singer who died in 2011 from alcohol poisoning at age 27. The film is at times so painful to watch, between her raw performances, spiraling addiction and the parasitic chorus of enablers who freeloaded on the star’s “gravy train,” I half-wondered why it was the other Amy’s movie that was titled “Trainwreck.” 

Compared to “The Outrageous Sophie Tucker,” another documentary about a white, Jewish jazz chanteuse, Winehouse makes the outrageous seem tame. Tucker scandalized with songs like “The Angle Worm Wiggle,” which she paired with suggestive gestures in hopes a public arrest would drive up ticket prices. Winehouse didn’t need stunts. Paparazzi stalked her all over London for play-by-play images of her public addiction and cringe-worthy unraveling.

But if ever there were examples of Jewish women breaking boundaries and beating the odds, they are Tucker and Winehouse: Both hit the big time in a genre widely considered black music; they also shared a heritage, a talent for vocal technique, a proclivity for provocation and mega-fame. At a time when talk of race and race relations crowd the headlines, it is refreshing to be reminded of how two women integrated themselves so seamlessly into black culture, as if it were not “other” but their own. 

Their life stories couldn’t be more different; nor could their respective temperaments. Tucker was a publicity-loving dramatist with a talent for self-parody (“Nobody loves a fat girl,” she often sang, “but oh, how a fat girl can love …”); Winehouse was a vulnerable poet-artist who cared little for fame and lyricized her self-pity (“I cheated myself / Like I knew I would / I told you I was trouble / You know that I’m no good”). Beyond their syncopated sentences and varicolored voices, they traversed almost opposite trajectories: Tucker lived long enough to see herself placed among legends, while Winehouse tumbled to an early grave.

Family life was no picnic for either one. 

The Ukranian-born Tucker grew up in Hartford, Conn., where her immigrant parents owned and operated a kosher restaurant. Tucker quickly grew bored with washing dishes, so at 16, she eloped and later fled to New York City. She didn’t seem to mind leaving behind her young son, who grew up to have a host of problems, or parading through a string of shallow marriages that all ended in divorce. But onstage, Tucker could make you believe anything, and the family-averse star made a worldwide hit of the song “My Yiddishe Momme” — an ode so adoring of Jewish mothers that it was banned in Nazi Germany.

Winehouse was born in North London to a middle-class family that broke apart when she was 9. Her mother was a pharmacist who admits in the film she wasn’t “strong enough” to parent her child; her father, Mitch, was a window-panel installer and taxi driver before becoming one of the chief exploiters of his daughter’s fame and fortune. 

One of the saddest and most exasperating moments in “Amy” is when images of a self-destructing Winehouse, bloodied by heroin and blasted by booze, are paired with her father’s declaration that she doesn’t need help. Soon we see why: During a period of self-imposed seclusion on a tropical island in which Amy tries to abstain from drugs, Daddy Winehouse shows up with reality-show cameras and a production deal. Mitch’s willful blindness to his daughter’s deep-seated addiction was made famous in the lyrics of her hit song, “Rehab”: “I ain’t got the time / And if my Daddy thinks I’m fine …” — and in the end, we know, she needed to go, go, go.

It is ironic that Winehouse came of age in an era of obsessive media attention and self-documentation but was humiliated and hurt by it, while Tucker obsessively documented herself in 400 scrapbooks compiled over 60 years and relished every last clipping. If only Tucker had been around to teach Winehouse how to work her spotlight, maybe it wouldn’t have burned so much. 

Instead, drugs and alcohol became the border between Winehouse and the world, crowding out her music and replacing it with mayhem (“Life is like a pipe / And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside”). There was also the bulimia, the pitiless public and the monumentally bad choice of spouse. All became her undoing. Where Tucker was born for the warm, fun glow of the limelight, Winehouse was a tortured soul who seemed to want to disappear. 

The great tragedy of “Amy” is also its sharpest insight: that Winehouse was seriously, spiritually, soul-shiftingly gifted and had only begun to scrape the surface of her extraordinary talent as a singer and songwriter before her untimely death.

Her last recording, the fittingly titled “Body and Soul,” was a duet with Tony Bennett, who makes cameos in both documentaries. Bennett saved his most exquisite praise for Winehouse, insisting she belongs among the greatest female jazz vocalists of all time — with Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Nina Simone. But Bennett’s revelation about Winehouse and her gifts came too late. He said he wished he had met her sooner and told her to slow down, that “life teaches you how to live it, if only you live long enough.”

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Israel reportedly strikes Syrian car, killing 5 militants

Leave a Comment / Israel /

An Israeli surveillance plane reportedly bombed a car in Syria, killing five men with ties to a pro-Assad Druze militia and the Hezbollah terrorist group.

The attack Wednesday in Quneitra, near the Israeli border, was said to be targeting Samir Kuntar, a terrorist released from an Israeli prison in a 2008 swap with Hezbollah, according to several media outlets. It was not known whether Kuntar was killed.

According to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, three of the dead were members of the pro-Assad militia and two belonged to Hezbollah, the Times of Israel reported.

Kuntar, who served 29 years in Israeli prison, was responsible for the death of four Israelis, including a 4-year-old girl and her father in a 1979 attack in Nahariya. He is suspected of planning multiple attacks against Israeli soldiers in the Golan Heights.

 

The Israel Defense Forces has not confirmed the attack.

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Tu B’Av: Love at first swipe

Leave a Comment / Culture, Judaism /

Eli Wiesel once said in an interview: “In Jewish history, there are no coincidences.” 

That might seem hard to believe in the world of Jewish online dating, where finding the right match is in the hands of an operating system or, with increasing frequency, the swipe of a finger.

The options, including Jewish mobile apps claiming to streamline the dating experience into something flirty and user-friendly, continue to multiply. There’s Tinder, Coffee Meets Bagel, Hinge and Grindr, none of which is geared toward any specific religion or ethnicity. Online dating staples such as Match, eHarmony and OkCupid have rolled out mobile platforms to keep up with the growing demand for convenient and clean interfaces. 

The Jewish dating juggernaut JDate, which had 750,000 active users as of last year, has developed a mobile dating app that extends its website capabilities to the mobile scene (pricing starts at $39.99 per month). Competitors JCrush and JSwipe are both Jewish dating apps that were specifically developed for smartphones and pull in thousands of users a month. 

On this Tu b’Av — the Jewish Valentine’s Day, which this year begins the evening of July 30 — which will you choose? 

Most apps are free or have a discounted trial period, and most mobile apps now employ a “swipe” method, meaning users can swipe their thumbs left or right on their screens to accept or reject potential matches. 

Ryan Bort, on the business news website Quartz, wrote that the swipe method appears to be gaining in popularity: “While mobile commerce is growing at an astonishing rate, the effectiveness of elaborate personal profiles, the bedrock of the appeal of desktop-based sites, has been largely disproven. For older millennials, cultivating a digital persona was a social necessity. For teens and younger 20-somethings, however, one-touch swiping, liking, and commenting is beginning to feel more natural than the more old-fashioned face-to-face courtship rituals.”

David Yarus, 29, founder of JSwipe, said his creation came from a personal motivation.

“As a single millennial Jew, I was using different dating apps, specifically Tinder. I thought it was the sharpest, most efficient, most forward-thinking way of connecting people,” he said. “It was, however, inefficient for someone who was looking to date and marry someone Jewish.” 

Unlike eHarmony or JDate, many mobile dating apps do not have a way to filter a search in order to find a Jewish match. 

So Yarus, who grew up in Miami Beach, Fla., and who has worked with organizations such as Taglit, Hillel and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation to help connect Jews around the globe, got to work on an alternative. It launched last year and, as of last month, JSwipe has attracted more than 300,000 users in more than 70 countries. 

“I set off to bring the Tinder utility and experience to the Jewish community,” Yarus explained. “The process was pretty blessed. I had a great team of smart minds from across the app and technology space to design and launch the product. 

“We strategically launched it over Passover over two years ago. We figured that everyone would be home with their family and friends. The app would be a funny thing to talk about,” he continued. “It became buzz-worthy over Passover and then everyone went back to their community — whether it was college, work or a young professional group — and continued the conversation. There was an exciting gust of activity right after launching. It can be attributed to the combination of social media strategy and a clean, user-friendly, fun and safe app that builds community and spreads the love.” 

Yarus, who is based in New York City, said 90 percent of the app’s users are millennials, though the fastest growing demographic is people 35 and older. JSwipe’s design, he said, is a reflection of changing times.

“Millennials don’t have time to log in and craft lengthy messages and search for people. It’s not the way we think, and it’s not the way we are programmed — or wired — to interact anymore,” he said.  

“In the course of a year, we were able to go from a brand that no one had heard of to being a staple brand of the millennial Jewish community,” he concluded. If you’re a single millennial Jew, it’s likely that your friends are swiping, or that your mom is nudging you to join in a funny way. We work a lot and think about de-stigmatizing the swipe dating experience. People are swiping at brunch with their friends or at home with their bubbes. It’s a funny and social experience.” 

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What Huckabee could learn from Bibi about Holocaust analogies

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

Much of the outrage over Mike Huckabee’s Holocaust-Iran analogy was about sense and sensibility.

First, sensibility. Sure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compares the ayatollahs to the Nazis all the time — and warns that permitting them a pathway to the bomb is opening the door to another Holocaust. But in Netanyahu’s analogy, the Obama administration and the West are playing the role of Neville Chamberlain. Huckabee, on the other hand, cast President Barack Obama as Hitler when the Republican presidential hopeful declared that the Iran deal “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” And even some major critics of the deal think that’s more than a little unfair.

As for sense, Huckabee’s comment just made it tougher for Israel and its allies in Washington to round up Democratic votes needed to override a presidential veto.

Less noticed was the response from Israeli Transportation Minister Israel Katz, a Likudnik, who objected to Huckabee’s remarks on entirely different, classical Zionist grounds.

“Respected Mr. Huckabee: Nobody marches the Jews to ovens anymore,” Katz said. “To this end we established the State of Israel and the IDF; and, if need be, we will know how to defend ourselves, by ourselves.”

Katz’s response speaks to a deeper, longstanding tension in the Israeli psyche over the Holocaust and its relevance to modern-day Israel.

The Holocaust, to put it lightly, is still a salient issue for Israelis.

Some Israelis mock Netanyahu for his dire pronouncements on Iran — but in bringing up the Holocaust, he’s of a piece with Israeli culture. This is a country where the equivalent of “Saturday Night Live” ran a sketch that was one long Holocaust joke. It’s a place where a Holocaust survivors’ party has contested national elections, and where protesters invoke the Holocaust in service of their cause — whether it’s religious traditionalism or the settlements.

The enduring salience of the Holocaust is why foreign dignitaries visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum when they come to Jerusalem, and why a recent poll found that nearly half of Israelis are worried about the state’s destruction.

But that fear is coupled, perhaps paradoxically, with confidence in the Israel Defense Forces’ ability to beat back any threat. After decades of near-constant war, Israelis know their country is a regional military power, and they’re proud of it. Among Netanyahu’s critics, some roll their eyes at his constant Holocaust analogies because they see it as using the Shoah to score political points. Others object to any analogy that puts mighty Israel in the same boat as the Jews of Europe.

Just ask Michael Oren, who preceded Ron Dermer as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. In his new book, Oren recounts being scolded after he warned in an interview that “Iranian rulers could accomplish in a matter of seconds what they denied Hitler did — kill 6 million Jews.”

Ehud Barak was Israel’s defense minister and a leading hawk on Iran, but he called Oren to complain.

“Israel can defend itself. Period,” Barak said, packing about a century’s worth of Zionist machismo into four words and a punctuation mark.

This tension is even apparent in Netanyahu’s own rhetoric.

At the same time that he was insisting on his need to seize the chance to speak to Congress about the dangers of the emerging Iran deal because it represented a Nazi-like threat to Israel, he was telling French Jews to come to Israel where they would be safe.

When Netanyahu finally did speak to Congress in March, he sounded both themes. First he lamented that the world hadn’t learned the lessons of the Holocaust. But immediately afterward he said, “the days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over.” Later he added, “Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand.”

 

That’s a lot to keep in mind next time Huckabee makes a Holocaust analogy. Of course, next time he feels the urge, his critics would probably counsel a simpler course: never again.

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Poem: Dwelling Place

Leave a Comment / Culture, Poetry /

Summer beetles augured blue ponds in every leaf

of the cherry tree.

Cooler that way. The load lighter.

Open wells for the sun to fall through.

                    Pennywhistles for wind. 

                                Burn marks from God’s magnifying glass.

Is that what seeking is?

Asking to be prospected.

Prospecting

Emily Warn’s latest book is “Shadow Architect,” a meditation on the 22 letters of the Alef Bet. She most recently served as founding editor of poetryfoundation.org and now teaches and lives in Seattle.

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Hebrew word of the week: Hekhal

Leave a Comment / Culture /

It is amazing how a word that signifies “holy of holies of the temple or tabernacle” is actually a loan word from a “pagan” language: the Sumerian word akkadian, which became e-kal or “big house, palace” (Isaiah 29:7; Daniel 1:4; 4:1).* 

In the Bible, hekhal Adonai, “the palace of the Lord,” refers to the temple in Jerusalem (2 Kings 24:13) or the holy tabernacle used before (1 Samuel 1:9; 3:3). Hekhal also seems to refer to God’s temple in heaven (2 Samuel 22:7; Psalms 29:9).

In modern Israel, hekhal is used in expressions such as Hekhal ha-Tarbut “cultural center” (as for an orchestra), Hekhal ha-Sefer “the shrine of the book” (where the Dead Sea Scrolls are stored at the Israel Museum), and even Hekhal ha-Sport (a sports center).

*Among Sephardim, hekhal refers to the holiest room in the synagogue, where Torah scrolls were kept (similar to the aron kodesh among the Ashkenazim).

Yona Sabar is a professor of Hebrew and Aramaic in the department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at UCLA.

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