November 4, 2015

Anything-goes Comikaze expo has its serious side

Leave a Comment / Culture / Jared Sichel

Stormtroopers, the Joker, Gandalf the Grey, Data from “Star Trek” — no, this wasn’t West Hollywood on the night of Oct. 31, although it looked pretty similar. It was “Stan Lee’s Comikaze” — a sort of Comic-Con for Los Angeles, which recently held its fifth annual expo from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, virtually assuring its attendees an early start and a late finish to Halloween.

Devotees — children and up — of comic books, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, video games and various corners of the pop culture world descended upon downtown Los Angeles dressed in cosplay that ranged from the hilarious to the revealing to the scary and downright bizarre.

There was even a weapons-check booth, and it wasn’t a joke. Attendees had to follow a strict “costume weapons policy,” which prohibited, for example, swords that could be removed from their sheaths. One official sign humorously informed parents that lost children would “be taken to the show office, and given to the goblin king.”

It also was, well, just a little bit Jewish — above and beyond the fact that Lee, the world’s most famous comic producer, is a Jew. In Sunday’s panels covering diversity in comics and entertainment, and also the religious bases behind some well-known heroes and villains, Jews, Christians, Muslims and atheists in the industry included Phil LaMarr (“Pulp Fiction,” “Futurama”), Aly Mawji (“Silicon Valley”), David Sacks (“The Simpsons,” “Third Rock From the Sun”), Jeffrey Alan Schechter (ABC Family’s “Stitchers”) and moderator Jordan Gorfinkel, a Jewish comic book artist and cartoonist who managed the Batman franchise for DC Comics for nearly a decade.

During a panel titled “Heroes, Villains & Faith,” Gorfinkel kicked off the discussion by relating an experience where he was concerned that the dietary choices of one of his superheroes would make the character less relatable for
some readers.

“The idea behind these superheroes is that we want the maximum number of people to be able to relate to them,” Gorfinkel said, describing a situation in which a draft scene had Nightwing, from the Batman series, in a cave with Batman eating a pepperoni pizza. “I’d rather make it a vegetarian pizza, so that way, if somebody’s halal or kosher or vegetarian, they won’t feel like, ‘Oh, well, he eats salami on pizza. I can’t relate to that character anymore.’ ”

He added that agnosticism “seems to be the better approach” in order not to alienate any readers.

Mawji, who’s an Indian Muslim, when asked how he feels about being cast as a Muslim terrorist for any shows or films, said he feels “a lot of responsibility representing minorities in general on screen,” and that if he does agree to such a role — which he suggested would be a tough sell — he would need to try to “humanize” the character so that he’s not just a “cardboard cutout.”

He said he would have to weigh the impact that playing the role would have on him and his religious community against the benefit that the money would have for him and his family.

“[A] million dollars is a lot of money but I don’t know if I could live with myself,” Mawji said. “Everybody has a price, and I’m no different, because we all have needs, and we all need to provide.”

In the previous panel, “Comics and Diversity,” the main issue, as Gorfinkel said, was whether the industry should pursue diverse casts and characters as an end, “because it reflects the real world more, because it’s what the audience demands on the business side,” or if the attitude should be a “post-racial” one that focuses solely on merit, even if “the most talented person that comes into the audition room happens to be white for 15 years in a row,” referring to a comment by Asian comic artist Joyce Chin, who said a well-known local comedy troupe hasn’t had one minority comic in its main company in 15 years.

“I know plenty of intentionally funny Asians,” Chin said. “There are lots of unintentionally funny Asians.”

“Do you feel, then, that there should be an enforced racial diversity?” Gorfinkel asked.

“Oh no, I don’t think it’s that,” Chin said. “I think they need to switch who’s doing the hiring or who’s doing the casting.”

LaMarr, an original cast member of “Mad TV” and the voice of Hermes Conrad on “Futurama,” said people could “eliminate the dynamic of racial issues” by not “identifying it as such an issue.”

“It doesn’t have to be one,” LaMarr said.

Abdul H. Rashid, a graphic illustrator and Muslim who is Black, agreed that “it’s about the merit of the person, not the color of the skin,” then stopped himself and added as a joke, “I sound like a cliché after-school special.”

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Remembering the November 1938 pogroms known as ‘Kristallnacht’

Leave a Comment / Culture / Michael Berenbaum

What’s in a name?

November 9, 2015, marks the 77th anniversary of the 1938 pogroms launched throughout Germany, a nation that, after March 1938, also included Austria. More than 1,000 synagogues were burned, 7,000 Jewish businesses were ransacked and looted and more than 30,000 Jewish men ages 16-60 were arrested and sent to newly expanded German concentration camps that, for the first time, held a majority of Jewish prisoners.

The pogroms were given the name Kristallnacht, the Night of Crystal, which is often mistranslated as the Night of the Broken Glass. The name itself is misleading. Crystal, as my wife often reminds me, is delicate and beautiful, and to use such a term beautifies and thus falsifies the events of 1938. German historians now refer to it as the November pogroms or the Reich’s pogroms, using a far less aesthetic term but one that at least connotes violence and lawlessness.

Even the term “pogrom” is quite misleading. Pogroms were generally regarded by Jews as acts of mob violence, lawlessness either sanctioned by the authorities or not significantly opposed by them as outlaw phenomena. But, in this case, the violence of Nov. 9-11, 1938, came at the instigation of the Nazi authorities and with their blessing.

Just before midnight on Nov. 9, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller sent a telegram to all police units letting them know that “in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Rather, the police were to arrest the victims. Fire companies stood by synagogues in flames with explicit instructions to let the buildings burn. They were to intervene only if a fire threatened adjacent Aryan properties.

The precipitating event was the attempted assassination of a minor German embassy official in Paris at the hands of Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jewish youth who had received a note from his sister describing the conditions of his parents, Polish Jews living in Germany who had been expelled from Germany to Poland. Because Poland refused to accept Jewish citizens, Grynszpan’s parents were stranded in limbo. From the border town of Zbaszyn, they wrote to their son in desperation. His immediate response was to seek revenge.

Germany had previously overlooked other assassinations, but the timing of Grynszpan’s attack coincided with the annual celebration by Nazi officials of their failed 1923 putsch against the government, which brought the party’s top leadership to Munich.

The date

The date was important to the perpetrators, as it also represented Hitler’s first — and failed — attempt to gain national power, as well as the emblem of the movement’s growth and maturation from the fringes to the mainstream. Sixty-six years later, in 1989, Nov. 9 again entered German history as the day the Berlin Wall fell. German citizens again took to the streets, this time to celebrate freedom and the reunification that was soon — and sure — to follow. Young marchers said: “This is a date that shall forever enter German history,” seemingly unaware that it had already entered German history, in 1923 and 1938.

The target

The attack on synagogues was far from accidental. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, synagogues became the public face of the German-Jewish community. Often built in prestigious downtown locations, they were near the great cathedrals of Germany and represented the arrival of the Jews within Germany’s economic, cultural and religious life. Some were modest facilities, others were grandiose, commissioned by the wealthiest Jews and designed by some of Germany’s finest architects. Just as Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles was set on Los Angeles’ finest boulevard and is surrounded by grand churches, and Temple Emanuel in New York was built on Fifth Avenue in the tony Upper East Side, Germany’s synagogues were meant to be seen and to connote the power and public face of the Jewish community. They were less the locus of prayer than a symbol of affluence and influence.

More significantly, during the early years of the Nazi regime, the role of the synagogues was dramatically transformed.

We must recall David Marwell’s important admonition: “Just because Jews were powerless, does not mean that they were passive.”

Synagogues became the center of Jewish activity, the lifeline of an embattled Jewish community.

Excluded from German society, many Jews turned inward, toward the Jewish community, toward one another. The synagogues responded accordingly. Persecuted throughout the city, synagogues became an oasis of tranquility and support for the Jews. They also became a hub of activity.

When Jews were excluded from public schools, synagogues housed Jewish schools, staffed by professors who, since April 1933, had been banned from teaching at universities and gymnasiums. It was in the synagogue classrooms that education continued, and not only Jewish education or secular education, but also vocational education to acquire the portable and linguistic skills necessary for emigration. Mobile professions were taught: agriculture and plumbing, electrical repair and mechanics. Music and architecture also are mobile professions, while the practice of law is not. Filmmaking — Hollywood so benefited from the German émigrés — is a mobile profession that can be practiced elsewhere. Nurses are more useful than doctors because the requirements for licensing the former are much less restrictive than the latter.

On a Monday, for example, a synagogue might house a welfare office and a soup kitchen. On Tuesday evening, the Philharmonic might play a concert under the tutelage of one of Germany’s finest conductors who was unable to perform for an “Aryan” audience. Wednesday evening might be the occasion for a theater performance organized by the Jewish Kulturbund, directed by some of Germany’s finest directors and featuring some of their greatest actors, who had been excluded from their profession. These performances were not only good for the morale of the community, but also indispensable for the economic survival of the performers. Each day, the synagogue would also serve as a center for information on emigration, as a place that assisted Jews searching for visas to countries near and far and information as to which countries were least inhospitable to Jews — the double negative is deliberate. Few were hospitable, and none in the numbers that were needed.

Jewish life was far from neglected. Martin Buber, Germany’s most prestigious Jewish theologian, led the efforts on adult Jewish education, preparing his community for the long and arduous spiritual struggle ahead. Jewish history was of interest, as was Jewish philosophy. Spiritual and religious struggles were the companions of life’s struggles. Nathan Glatzer, who later headed the Near Eastern and Jewish Studies Department at Brandeis University, recalled that German Jews were on the verge of a renaissance on the eve of their destruction. Persecution turned people inward. Many who had previously been indifferent to their Jewish roots turned to Jews and Judaism for solace and inspiration.

The synagogues were full on Friday evenings and Shabbat mornings. Prayer was a form of spiritual resistance and also a means of instruction. In his memoirs, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a fiery orator who was a community rabbi in Berlin before he immigrated to the United States in late 1937, recalled that the Nazis prohibited him from preaching, so he asked the Gestapo agent whether he could lead prayers, at a time when prayer was still allowed in Nazi Germany. Granted permission, he had his congregation read aloud, again and again, in a chant, the lines from the private meditation after the Amidah: “And all who think evil of me, speedily frustrate their counsel, undo their designs.” His congregation got the message and recited the verse with greater and greater enthusiasm. Afterward, the Gestapo agent is reported to have said, “Your prayers are more dangerous than your preaching.”

The end of one stage, beginning of another

From 1933 onward, once the Nazis came to power, they imposed conditions on the Jews that would cause them to emigrate. The killing process did not begin until 1941, but the Nazis reasoned that if they made it impossible for Jews to live as Jews in Germany, they would leave. Two conditions made this plan unrealizable: No country was willing to receive the Jews in the numbers that were necessary, and the Reich kept expanding, so that with every expansion more and more Jews came under German rule. Between 1933 and 1938, some 150,000 Jews had emigrated from Germany, yet in March of 1938, when Germany incorporated Austria, more than 200,000 Jews came under Reich domination. With the annexation of the Sudetenland, its Jews came under German control. So, too, when, in 1939, Germany conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia, And in September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and Poland was divided between the Soviet Union and the Reich, more than 2 million Jews came under German control. This vast a number of Jews could not be handled by emigration, not even to reservations or to islands, as the Nisko and Madagascar plans suggested.

So from 1933 to 1938, Jews faced severe discrimination in Nazi Germany. The goal of Nazi policy was a two-fold expropriation of Jewish property and possession, followed by forced emigration. The November pogroms intensified this policy and finalized the exclusion of Jews from German society.

After Nov. 9, 1938, most Jews were without illusions. Jewish life in the Reich was no longer possible. Many committed suicide. Most desperately tried to leave. Unwanted at home, Jews had only a few havens abroad. They could not stay. Yet they had nowhere to go.

Germans, too, had learned important lessons. Because of the bourgeois sensibilities of the urbanized Germans, many opposed the events of Kristallnacht. The sloppiness of the pogroms and the explosive violence of the SA, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, were soon replaced by the cold, calculated, disciplined and controlled violence of the SS. They would dispose of the Jews outside the view of most Germans.

Violence was not the last word. Violence was followed by rational, disciplined planning.

On Nov. 12, 1938, Field Marshal Hermann Goering convened a meeting of Nazi officials to deal with the problems that resulted from Kristallnacht. Historians are fortunate that the stenographic records of that meeting survived, for few documents reveal more candidly or more directly German policy toward the Jews at this transitional moment. Joseph Goebbels, a Ph.D. from Heidelberg and Hitler’s minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, attended the meeting. Several ministries had urgent matters, including justice and economic ones, and one industry in particular had much at stake in the outcome of the meeting — the insurance industry, which stood to lose huge sums of money if it were to pay claims from those whose property had been destroyed, yet risk losing credibility and customers if it did not pay for the losses.

Goering was clearly disturbed by the damage of the two-day rampage — not to the Jewish shops, homes and synagogues, but to the German economy. It’s insane to burn a Jewish warehouse and then have a German insurance company pay for the loss, he said. We suffer, not the Jews.

The idea was introduced to solve the Jewish problem once and for all, but in 1938, that meant in economic terms. Only later, in 1941, would the language be genocidal.

There was still the concern for “legality,” for maintaining the stability of the economy. Thus, while the economic elimination of the Jews could not be done all at once, the change in direction of policy is clear. Jews were to disappear even more from German economic life. When concerns were raised about foreign Jews, the Foreign Ministry expressed interest, not willing to surrender its authority or pre-eminence. Its concerns were assuaged, but not fully satisfied. The ministry would be consulted only for important cases, but not for every case.

There was much give-and-take at the meeting and some brainstorming. Several concrete results were achieved, all economically lethal to the Jews. The community would be fined 1 billion reichsmarks ($400 million); Jews would be responsible for cleaning up their losses and would be barred from collecting insurance. The insurance companies could offer to pay, but Jews could not collect.

Apartheid was introduced. Jews were barred from theaters; they would travel in separate compartments on trains; they would be denied entry to German schools and parks. By Jan. 1, 1939, Jews were forbidden to operate retail trades.

Concern was expressed not for those who were looted from, but for their possessions — the booty in furs and jewels belongs to the state, not to individuals. In the end, Goering expressed regrets over the whole messy business: “I wish you had killed 200 Jews and not destroyed such value.” He concluded, on a note of irony, “I would not like to be a Jew in Germany!”

Through a series of policy decisions, the Nazis transformed these pogroms into a program eliminating Jews from German economic life.

On Nov. 15, Jews were barred from schools. Two weeks later, authorities were given the right to impose a curfew. By December, Jews were denied access to most public places.

The November pogroms were the last occasion for street violence against Jews in Germany. While Jews could leave their homes without fear of attack, a lethal process of destruction that was more effective and more virulent was set in place.

No event during the first years of the Nazi regime brought as much protest from abroad. Americans were united in their condemnation — religious freedom was a core American value. Clergy of all denominations protested, as did politicians of all points of view. The president of the United States called back the U.S. ambassador to Germany, one step shy of severing diplomatic relations. Yet while more than nine in 10 Americans opposed the attacks on synagogues in Germany, this did not translate into support for immigration to the United States.

What are we to learn from the events of the November pogroms? We live in a world in which synagogues, mosques and churches continue to be blown up. When we see them set aflame, we must ask: What did this institution mean to those who regarded it as sacred? What does setting these buildings aflame say about the perpetrators and their intentions? What is next? And what is to account for the rage?

Michael Berenbaum is professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at American Jewish University.

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Israel baseball creating diamonds in the desert

Leave a Comment / Culture, Sports / Jewish Journal

America’s pastime, meet the Holy Land.

While soccer and basketball have long ruled the Israeli sports scene, a new program by Masa Israel aims to make inroads in the Jewish state on behalf of baseball, and one of the faces of the effort is none other than former Los Angeles Dodger (and member of the tribe) Shawn Green.

“I think it’s a great idea, and I think it’s going to be very positive for Major League Baseball, who’s trying to expand the world footprint of the game, as well as for Israel, which has a strong contingent of fans that are in need of something like this,” Green told the Journal in a recent phone interview.

Green is teaming up with Art Shamsky, a member of the 1969 World Series champion Mets, to serve as stateside ambassadors for Masa Israel’s initiative, the Israel Baseball Experience, in partnership with the Israel Association of Baseball.

Masa Israel, an initiative of The Jewish Agency for Israel and the Israeli government, connects young Jewish adults (ages 18 to 30) with a wide range of opportunities, including study abroad, internships, service learning and educational content. The new baseball program will be fully launched in January.

Alex Elman, Masa’s director of marketing and communications, said the five-month internship will bring 10 to 20 ballplayers, perhaps former college or minor leaguers, to live in Israel, play and coach in the country’s premier league, and run clinics with local youth to help build the game on a grass-roots level.

The cost is $9,400, which includes housing in Tel Aviv, all baseball coaching, uniforms, cultural and language programs, and more. To apply, go to athletics.masaisrael.org. Scholarships and grants are available. (Applicants do not need to be Jewish, but it is required for grants.)

Elman said the initiative is a recognition that athletics can be one more way to provide young people with an immersive experience in Israel.

“All our Masa Israel programs are focused on long-term engagement,” he said. “We’ve realized that there are so many interests there among young Jewish adults. How can we get them over there? … Sports is obviously something — if you love to do it, why not do it in Israel?”

Currently, baseball is an afterthought to many Israelis, and one might expect those trying to pioneer the legitimacy of baseball in the Jewish state to be facing an uphill battle. Josh Scharff, a St. Louis native and former Yale University first baseman, is the program’s first participant. He arrived 2 1/2 months ago as a sort of guinea pig and so far he doesn’t disagree with that assessment.

“Baseball is a part of being American,” Scharff said. “When you come to a place that doesn’t have that, especially when you have 45 minutes with a kid in a school, you have to come in there and be the coolest person in his entire life. It’s a great challenge. You have to have a great session and be really impactful.”

According to Nate Fish, leader of day-to-day operations for the Israel Association of Baseball (the body that runs Israel’s youth leagues as well as its professional one), the state of Israeli baseball looks something like this: There are approximately 800 registered baseball players of varying competitive levels in the country, and only one high-quality baseball field. It’s in the city of Petah Tikva, is owned by a Baptist church, and has to be rented out for use. A lone baseball academy exists in Israel, which is recognized by the Major League Baseball (MLB) academy system. Fish started the academy two years ago; now he and Scharff run it together.

“We have 17 kids in the academy this year. We send them to MLB elite camps in Europe to help them get scouted for college and pro ball,” Fish said.

Fish grew up in Cleveland and played college ball at the University of Cincinnati with future Jewish major leaguer Kevin Youkilis. Fish’s major league ties don’t end there. He coached and played for Israel’s national team in several 2013 World Baseball Classic qualifiers, alongside Green and Hollywood native Gabe Kapler, who played for numerous major league teams and is now the Dodgers’ director of player development.

Fish’s own professional career has included time spent playing in top European leagues. Now he has his sights set squarely on building Israel’s four-team premier league (currently with teams in Jerusalem, Modi’in, Tel Aviv and the academy’s team based in Petah Tikva) into something comparable to European ones. Fish sees Masa’s role in bringing over seasoned American players as crucial.

“This is a model used in Europe. They bring in two or three Americans, add them to rosters and bump up the level of play. We can definitely improve and move up to the quality of play in midrange European countries’ leagues,” Fish said.

Once the league’s American imports arrive in early 2016, Fish said, he plans to expand the league, adding two more teams. Fish and Scharff — the Israel Association of Baseball’s only full-time employees — are hard at work to keep things moving forward until the cavalry arrives.

At least, that’s the idea. There is a dedicated base of volunteers helping, but manpower is still stretched thin. Resources might be in relatively small supply but optimism certainly isn’t.

“You can find us at headquarters — my apartment in Tel Aviv,” Fish joked about their day-to-day. “If we’re in my car, we’re fully mobile.”

“Just call us the Israel Baseball Road Show,” Scharff added.

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Review: Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, Danny Elfman perform ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ live

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Hollywood / Jewish Journal

On Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, led by John Mauceri, performed notorious “Halloween Jew” Danny Elfman's music for Tim Burton's “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” live at the Hollywood Bowl in front of thousands of enthusiastic fans. The program began with an extended version of the overture (which, while on the soundtrack album, never appeared in the film). Then singers began to file onstage, and the film began.

For the next two hours, the orchestra and singers perfectly synced to the film. If the performances had matched the original soundtrack, that would have been sufficient to make for a great concert. But, as it turned out, the performances far exceeded the original.

The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra was, as usual, perfect. An especially expressive principal oboe gave the most tender moments a strength of emotion far beyond the original recording. The French horn section also deserves extra mention for playing with a strength and enthusiasm that kept the music fresh. The addition of saxophones and accordions to the orchestra for this score kept the quirky energy flowing.

After the opening chorus of “This Is Halloween,” the music's composer, lyricist and former Oingo Boingo front-man Danny Elfman took the stage to sing the part of “Jack Skellington.” For the first time in exactly 20 years, Elfman was onstage singing for a huge crowd, and in that moment something seemed to awaken in him. Midway through his first number, “Jack's Lament” Elfman took his microphone from its stand and began to perform like a rock star. It was like seeing him in his Oingo Boingo days as he worked the stage, all the while perfectly in sync with the onscreen images of Jack Skellington.

Other original cast members joined the stage: Catherine O'Hara was there to sing Sally's parts. After a brief intermission, Ken Page took the stage to sing the part of Oogie Boogie, his rendition of “Oogie Boogie's Song” exuding a jolly, bluesy menace that stopped the show as the audience erupted into a standing ovation.

Flawless, yet very personal performances flowed from one to the next until the end credits of the film. At that point, many audience members forgot they were in a concert and began filing out of the Hollywood Bowl while the orchestra was still playing.

The end credits finished with curtain calls for all the performers. The orchestra rose to take their bow, and Elfman took the microphone to announce the encores, which included reprises of O'Hara, Elfman and Paul Reubens’ “Kidnap the Sandy Claws,” and Elfman's own version of the Oogie Boogie Song (complete with his version of Cab Calloway's famous dance from his rotoscoped appearance in a “Betty Boop” cartoon), with Mauceri performing the part of Sandy Claws.

For a final encore, African and Indian percussionists were brought onstage, and Elfman reappeared carrying a guitar. He introduced his orchestrator, Steve Bartek, who has worked with him on more than 100 films and who was also the guitarist and arranger for Oingo Boingo. And for the first time in exactly 20 years, they strapped on guitars and performed “Dead Man's Party.”

In the tradition of “Halloween Jews” stretching back to Carl Laemmle and Boris Karloff, Danny Elfman's music delivered a night of secular thrills that exceeded audience expectations, and mash-mixed two of the greatest targets of rabbinical ire, Halloween and Christmas. But, then again, if you can't fly in the face of religion on Halloween, when can you?

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There Will Be (lamb’s) Blood

Leave a Comment / Blogs / Rob Eshman

The night before the slaughter, the goat appeared in my dreams, crying. I awoke, startled, at 3 a.m., then tried to go back to sleep. But when I closed my eyes, I saw the damn goat. This time it was curled up, asleep in its barn, unaware that in just a few hours, a rabbi would slit its throat.

I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night — the thought of dinner was giving me nightmares.

Meanwhile, my wife, Naomi, slept soundly beside me. We were at a Jewish food conference called the Harvest Gathering. The invitation to attend had been too good to pass up. I often write and teach about food, and Naomi — Rabbi Naomi Levy — deals in the realm of the soul. In a Venn diagram of our interests, a Jewish food conference is smack center.

My problem was that along with tastings of cannabis-infused matzah balls, marijuana-cured lox and a dinner in a sukkah, the day’s activities would include a demonstration of kosher slaughter, or shechitah.

We had talked about the goat slaughter just before going to bed. I was resolved to watch, even though for seven years, until not long ago, we kept two pygmy goats as pets in our backyard. Goldie Horn and Ollie now live in Simi Valley at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, where the campers renamed them Shlomo and Yaffa. The goat in my nightmare looked a lot like Shlomo.

Naomi told me she had no intention of watching. But, I said, the whole point of the experience was to connect us to the reality of the food we eat. We both eat meat, yet, like most people, neither of us had witnessed the process of turning a living, breathing mammal into food.

“You eat it,” I’d said to Naomi that night. “You should see how it’s done.”

“I’ve had surgery too,” Naomi shot back, “but I don’t need to see an operation.”

This is what happens when you challenge someone trained in talmudic disputation. You tend to lose.

Naomi was right. We are at the end of the line of so many unpleasant processes we don’t feel compelled to see. How awful is a gold mine in Africa, or an underwear factory in China? Even the most vegan of rabbis still reads a Torah written on the skin of goats — who presumably didn’t volunteer for the honor. It is good to see the world as it is and fix its broken parts. But we choose what veils to peel back, and which to leave, well, veiled. Must we watch our food die?

But confronting dilemmas such as these is what we had traveled to Colorado to do. We had been invited to Devil’s Thumb Ranch, a high-end resort nestled among pine-crusted mountains north of Denver, along with 70 mostly young food professionals — chefs, entrepreneurs, writers and activists — all foodies who also happened to be Jewish, but with varying degrees of connection to their heritage. The late September conference — which was organized by Hazon, the Jewish food renewal movement, and funded by the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation — had as its goal, in the words of organizer Sarah Kornhauser, “to combine food identity with Jewish identity.”

It was a simple, brilliant approach to two very different problems. The first is the weakening of Jewish identity among 20- and 30-somethings who are fully assimilated into the larger culture, a particular focus of the Schusterman Family Foundation. The second problem is our nation’s industrial food system, which serves up massive quantities of cheap food at the expense of our environment and our health. Hazon has long sought to rally the Jewish community to create, in founder Nigel Savage’s words, “a healthy and more sustainable world.”

Food is a particularly good way to reach younger Jews, because Jews, it turns out, are just like other people. What rock ’n’ roll was to the boomers, food is to GenXers and the tweens. It’s their cultural touchstone, their way in to the world.

Last spring I taught a course at USC Annenberg School of Journalism called “Food, Media and Culture.” It struck me how much time and money my young students spent eating out (and posting their meals on Instagram). Then I realized: For a generation that spends more and more of its time virtually, food is tangible, immediate and gratifying. Young people may not have to pay for music or TV, but you can’t pirate food. Entertainment, even sex, comes to this generation via a screen, but no tech guru has been able to figure out a way to digitize dinner. In an increasingly virtual world, food is their last real, authentic experience.

By exposing young food professionals who happen to be Jewish to the ethical and ritual traditions of food in Judaism, you strengthen their connection to their tradition. At the same time, you spread the best Jewish ethical values about food to the larger world of consumers and suppliers.

“This is the vanguard of Jewish leaders who have the power to shape the world,” the Schusterman Family Foundation’s Lisa Eisen said at the conference. “The world needs the intentionality and the compassion that our tradition literally brings to the table.”

The conference program aimed to present both Jewish food traditions and ethics, and to examine how those translate into the real world. So, for instance, on the first day, Woody Tasch, the leader of a social movement called Slow Money, spoke about how local investment can create a sustainable, healthier food supply. Then author Joan Nathan, who was treating Jewish food seriously a generation before the rest of the world caught on, called upon the chefs and professionals to become Jewish home cooks.

“Jewish food goes through the lifecycle of the year,” Nathan said. “Memories are made from traditions. The importance of home cooking is that it is what our kids remember.”

The meal that first night, like a Passover seder, symbolized everything we had been talking about during the day. The theme was, “a whole boat dinner.” A company called Whole Boat Harvest in Denver, which specializes in selling species the industry ignores or throws away, provided a different sustainable kosher fish for each course.

“It’s all about translating values to the plate and out into the world,” said Denver chef Daniel Asher, who oversaw a team of five participant-chefs, each one responsible for one course.

Asher is Denver’s own “rock star chef,” a burly young man with a ponytail and a wide-open face. He described each course the way a boomer might have described a new Stones song: from a first course of halibut with harissa butter, lightly pickled celery, fresh radish and salsify from chef Lior Hillel of Los Angeles’ Bacaro L.A. restaurant, to a dessert made by L.A. chef Deborah Benaim — panna cotta topped with sustainable caviar.

As a survivor of innumerable Jewish banquets featuring factory-raised chicken or endangered Chilean sea bass served with indifferent vegetables, I couldn’t help but notice how serving great food, thoughtfully sourced, infused our evening with what Asher called “sacredness.”

The next day, chef Ann Cooper led a workshop on improving school lunches, something her Chef Ann Foundation, based in Boulder, Colo., is doing in districts throughout the country. Ari Weinzweig, co-owner of Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Mich., spoke to the group about the importance of extending the ethic of good food to all aspects of one’s business.

“Here’s a big problem in the restaurant world,” the gangly, bearded Weinzweig said. “Everybody wants sustainability, but they treat employees like sh–.”

If the night before was about embracing what Asher called “the sacredness of joining around the table,” this day was about the Jewish value of repairing the world, and the many ways food enables us to do that.

This was when I realized I was at a Jewish conference in fall 2015 with no panels on continuity or intermarriage, no hand-wringing over Iranian nukes or Palestinian knives. Too many Jewish conferences dwell on what’s wrong with the Jewish world. This one brought together a room full of people who are doing their best daily, meal by meal, to make things right. It made me wonder whether the Jews with the most radical agenda and greatest opportunity to fix the world are the ones working in the food industry.

Then came evening. Naomi and I had hashed over whether to watch or not to watch the slaughter, and now the moment had arrived.

At dusk, a bus dropped us on the shores of Lake Granby. A large white tent, the conference version of a sukkah, was set with long tables for the feast. Outside the tent, a whole lamb was splayed above a pile of burning embers. It had been roasting for hours; its gums shriveled to reveal its massive white teeth. This would be our dinner, as there would not be enough time to prepare and cook the goat we were about to slaughter.

And where was it?

Kornhauser pointed us to the other side of a tent, where a large dog crate sat on a wide, blue tarp.

“We were going to do a goat,” she said, “but the goat fell through.”

I looked inside the crate, and a lamb stared back at me. It was creamy white, the size of our spaniel.

At least I wouldn’t have to watch a goat die. Phew. But a line from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Eating Animals” popped into my head. To eat meat, he wrote, is to suppress “a gnawing dread that we are participating in something deeply wrong.”

Two rabbis asked us to circle around the tarp. A long explanation of the laws of kosher slaughter followed.

The process does not permit any pain to be inflicted on the animals, the rabbi said. Kornhauser asked us to keep quiet, but there was nervous chatter. A man stood up and asked people to honor the request for silence. It was funeral solemn.

The rabbis had to tip the crate to urge out the lamb, which they quickly put onto its back. It didn’t bleat or protest in any way. The older rabbi, Moshe Fayzakov, ran his fingernail 12 times over a razor-sharp blade to make sure it was smooth. A chef beside me winced.

The younger rabbi, Yisroel Engel, quickly bound together three of the animal’s legs with a string that looked disconcertingly like the fringes of a prayer shawl. Rabbi Fayzakov recited a blessing, then Rabbi Engel dipped his hand into a bucket of water and washed the lamb’s lengthened neck to make sure no pebbles or dirt would nick the blade.

I was sitting three feet away and watching as Rabbi Fayzakov bent down and made a quick slice across the lamb’s throat. My eyes closed involuntarily. When I opened them, blood was everywhere.

Quickly, the older rabbi pulled the blue tarp completely over the animal. Someone asked if that is part of the ritual.

“No,” Rabbi Fayzakov said, “but it’s not pleasant to see what comes next.”

“Unfold it,” several of us said.

He did, and we sat in silence, staring at this once-beautiful animal, its head at an unnatural angle from its neck, bright red blood pumping onto the sky blue tarp.

And then the lamb kicked. I grabbed the leg of the man sitting next to me.

The rabbi explained that while he cuts the jugular, he leaves the spine intact in order to keep the blood moving. Jewish law prohibits the eating of blood, and the process drains as much of it as possible. The unbound leg serves as a kind of pump. “The nerves kick in,” said the rabbi, “but the animal is dead.”

The worst was over. I moved in close for a photo — and failed to notice that a thin stream of blood was running onto my pants and shoes.

I knew what we had witnessed was kosher done right, in the best of circumstances, with an animal that had had a short but happy life. The preparation, the prayers, the sheer intentionality of the moment did as much as may be possible to ennoble what is an undeniably gruesome act. If the organizers had been searching for the best way to dramatize what Jewish food ethics bring to the table, they’d found it.

The cannabis tasting that followed right after? I’m still trying to figure out what was so Jewish about that — but no one seemed to complain.

We moved to a table laid out with cured salmon filets and rows of matzah balls on sheet pans.

As Colorado’s legalized marijuana industry booms, trained chefs are now looking for ways to expand the offering of what are called “edibles.” Josh Rosenberg, the young owner of Rosenberg’s Bagels & Delicatessen in Denver, turned, of course, to his tradition.

“Food and cannabis are two things very dear to my heart,” Rosenberg explained.

He’d cured the lox in alcohol infused with cannabis. He made the matzah balls by sautéing marijuana in chicken fat and incorporating that into the dumplings.

“Pot shmaltz?” chef Asher called out. “Josh, you are a visionary.”

No one got wasted. But I can say a little lox took the edge off the kosher slaughter.

After a while, we gathered and talked about the rituals of Sukkot, the harvest festival, then filtered into the sukkah for a dinner. Naomi, the resident rabbi — who, by the way, stayed edible-free — was asked to offer a brief teaching. She stood up. After the lox and matzah balls, she joked, would anyone remember anything she said?

I did. She spoke about time — as Ecclesiastes does on Sukkot — about time spinning out of control and the need to slow it down. She talked about how Sukkot, during which we are asked to dwell in huts outside our homes, forces us to think “outside the box.” If we are to thrive, she said, we need to do the same — rethink the structures that no longer serve us well, whether in Jewish community or in the food industry. Blessing our food, she concluded, teaches us to be open to all the blessings in our life.

Maybe it was the beer, the matzah balls, the PTSD of the lamb slaughter — but I looked around and saw quite a few tears around the table. The lamb had entered our bodies, and words of Torah our souls.

“The road to the sacred,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “leads through the secular.”

The whole conference had been a keen reminder of that: how the everyday act of getting and making food presents us with constant moral and ethical choices that either can elevate us and our society or drag us down. Over 3,000 years, Judaism has had a lot to say about those choices.

“Synagogue is not a place I connect with being Jewish,” food entrepreneur Tal Nimrodi said at a closing circle, “but this is the kind of place I can connect. I am surprised how many of my food values are Jewish values.”

The conference organizers understood this and saw food as one of the best ways — maybe the best way — to bring Jewish learning to a new generation.

For so many of us, and especially the chefs, that was the revelation at Devil’s Thumb Ranch: that Jewish teaching and practice can inform and enrich their professional lives. Great food and Jewish life and learning are not separate. They are, like me and the rabbi, married.

Below is video of the kosher slaughter. The content may be too graphic for some viewers

You can follow Rob on Instagram and Twitter @foodaism

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There will be blood

Israel blasts Palestinians after accusations of organ-harvesting

Leave a Comment / Israel / Jewish Journal

The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday rejected Palestinian allegations that Israel had recently harvested organs from Palestinians its forces had killed, condemning the charges as anti-Semitic.

In a letter to British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, president of the U.N. Security Council this month, the chief Palestinian delegate at the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, described what he said was the alleged harvesting of body parts of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.

“After returning the seized bodies of Palestinians killed by the occupying forces through October, and following medical examinations, it has been reported that the bodies were returned with missing corneas and other organs,” Mansour wrote Rycroft on Tuesday.

He added that this was confirmation of “past reports about organ harvesting.”

Israel's U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon responded on Wednesday with a letter to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon demanding that the U.N. chief condemn what he described as Mansour's open anti-Semitism.

“This blood libel by the Palestinian representative exposes his anti-Semitic motives and his true colors,” Danon said in the letter, according to a statement from the Israeli mission.

“Anti-Semitism has no place in the halls of the United Nations and must be denounced,” he added. “I call on you to repudiate this sinister accusation and to condemn the ongoing incitement by Palestinian leaders.”

The focus of Mansour's Nov. 3 letter to Rycroft was the recent violence in Palestinian territories and East Jerusalem.

Eleven Israelis have been killed in stabbings, shootings or other attacks. At least 68 Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli forces, including 41 who Israel says were attackers. Many were teenagers.

Mansour wrote that “far from de-escalating, the situation remains precarious due to Israel's insistence on the use of violent force and oppressive measures.”

Israel has accused Palestinian officials of inciting the violence by spreading what it says are false allegations.

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The UC’s new dilemma: to name or not to name  

Leave a Comment / Judea Pearl, Opinion / Judea Pearl

Dozens of speakers representing a variety of views testified last week at UCLA before a university committee tasked with crafting a University of California systemwide policy to combat anti-Semitism on campuses.

Many of the speakers favored adoption of the U.S. State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, which includes the demonizing of Israel and denial of its right to exist. They argued that, because the ultimate goal of anti-Jewish assaults on campus is to intimidate Israel’s supporters into silence, adopting the State Department’s definition would somehow temper the venom of those assaults.

Opponents, mostly from the anti-Israel camp, cited “freedom of speech” as a reason for ambiguity over clarity. I believe both camps are missing the point.

The issue is not how to define anti-Semitism, but whether to name the problem at hand, thus contributing to its solution, or to let the problem linger in ambiguity until incitements and hostilities get out of hand. As I have argued previously in these pages, among the phobias that currently drive campus racism, Zionophobia trumps anti-Semitism, and therefore, treating anti-Zionism as the lesser of the two evils gives racist forces the legitimacy to continue their assaults unabated, under the cover of a “political debate,” exempt from norms of discourse that protect other campus groups from similar attacks.

I believe not only UCLA, but also the University of California Regents, must explicitly name “anti-Zionism” as a major contributor to campus intolerance, and a major threat to the academic climate. When my turn came to speak before the committee, I said the following in an attempt to make this clear:

“My name is Judea Pearl; I am a professor of engineering and applied science at UCLA, and I have served on the faculty since fall of 1969.

I came to speak here today because, after laboring my entire career to make this campus a center of academic excellence, I find that I am not exactly welcome here. I was awakened one day to discover that the university I knew was hijacked by proxies of a racist movement called BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions], who turned our public square and many of our classrooms into a stage for incriminating me, my colleagues, my students, my scientific collaboration with Israel, and my identity as a Jew with one fabricated crime after another.

It has been part of their relentless and obsessive crusade to defame Israel, deny her right to exist, intimidate her supporters, and thus weaken her chances for survival. As a Jew, I am one with my people through the bonds of common history. Israel, the culmination of that history, is the central symbol of our identity as a people.

I submit to you that campus events such as “The World Without Israel,” “Anti-Zionist Week” or “Israel Apartheid Week,” organized by publicly funded student organizations and tolerated by the administration, are direct assaults on the identity of every Jew on this campus.

If you are serious about restoring academic reputation to this university, you must be EXPLICIT about the root cause of campus intolerance, which is not classical anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism or Zionophobia. I prefer the term Zionophobia because it rhymes with Islamophobia, and thus reminds us that all forms of racism should be equally deplored and all identity-forming symbols should be equally respected.

Religion has no monopoly on human sensitivity.

Two words about free speech:

First, you will not be curtailing anyone’s right to free speech by recognizing “the denial of a Jewish homeland” as an unacceptable topic for public discourse on campus, no less unacceptable than “the denial of human rights to Blacks, women or Arabs.” Rather, you will be merely affirming the right of the Jewish people to a homeland — which is what Zionism is all about — no more, no less.

Second, no one expects the regents to police speech on campus. We ask only that you set the norms of civil discourse. This, I believe, is both your charter and responsibility: EXPLICITLY labeling anti-Zionism speeches as obstacles to a respectful academic climate is a necessary first step toward that goal. Not to silence such speeches, but to mark them as unbecoming.

Thank you.

Readers may ask why I emphasize the word “explicit” when it comes to Zionism or Zionophobia. The reason is obvious. The UC Regents know that Zionophobia is the main source of campus intolerance and hostility, and yet the word “Zionism” — a people’s quest for self determination — has never been identified as a moral imperative by those in charge of campus climate. You can’t cure a problem unless you name it! The effectiveness of any recommendation or report summing up the regents’ deliberations hinges upon one simple word: Zionism. Any attempt to circumvent this word through ambiguous, roundabout surrogates would mean abandoning the campus to amplified BDS megaphones and intensified anti-Jewish hostilities.

Judea Pearl is the Chancellor Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation (danielpearl.org), named after his son. He is a co-editor of “I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl” (Jewish Lights, 2004), winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

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At a Jewish food conference, dead lambs and pot lox help reach a new generation

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, Food, Rob Eshman / Rob Eshman