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January 6, 2016

Democratic lawmakers call for immediate sanctions on Iran

Leave a Comment / Iran Deal, Worldwide /

Democratic lawmakers – opponents and supporters of the Iran nuclear deal – on Wednesday called on the Obama Administration to impose punitive sanctions on Iran without delay.

In a letter sent to President Barack Obama, House Representatives Nita Lowey, Eliot Engel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Albio Sires, Gerry Connolly, Susan Davis and Jerry Nadler called for immediate punitive sanctions in response to Iran’s recent violations of UN Security Council resolutions law by conducting two ballistic missile tests.

“Iran’s destabilizing behavior in the region and continued support for terrorism represent an unacceptable threat to our closest allies as well as our own national security,” the Democrats write in the letter. “As the international community prepares for implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran must understand that violating international laws, treaties, and agreements will have serious consequences. We call on the Administration to immediately announce new, U.S. sanctions against individuals and entities involved in Iran’s ballistic missile program to ensure Iran is held accountable for its actions.”

During the congressional review of the Iran nuclear deal, President Obama promised Democratic lawmakers he would respond forcefully to Iranian malfeasance and would swiftly impose sanctions for non-nuclear issues outside of the JCPOA—including ballistic missile activity. In a letter to Rep. Nadler, before getting him on board in support of the deal, President Obama wrote, “I made sure that the United States reserved its right to maintain and enforce existing sanctions and even to deploy new sanctions to address those continuing concerns, which we fully intend to do when circumstances warrant.”

Last week, the administration notified Congress that it intended to impose sanctions on nearly a dozen companies and individuals for providing support to Iran’s ballistic missile program. But the White House quickly walked back the announcement. On Saturday, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said, “We just have additional work that we need to do as the U.S. government before we would announce additional designations.”

Read the full text of the letter below:

January 6, 2016

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear Mr. President:

We write to express our serious concern with Iran’s recent violation of international law by test-firing medium-range ballistic missiles in October and November 2015.

As you know, the United Nations (UN) Security Panel of Experts concluded that the October test was a blatant violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1929. While the UN Panel has yet to characterize Iran’s second medium range ballistic missile test in November as a violation, both exercises foster insecurity in surrounding countries about Iran’s military capabilities and intent.

Additionally, an Iranian rocket—fired by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps during live-fire exercises—came within just 1,500 feet last week of the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman that was operating in the Strait of Hormuz.

Such aggressive and destabilizing behavior is deeply troubling, particularly preceding implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and demands a U.S. response. While not all of us share the same opinion on the JCPOA, we are united in our desire to ensure it is vigilantly enforced and to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

For this reason, the United States and our allies must take immediate, punitive action and send a clear message to Iran that violating international laws, treaties, and agreements will have serious consequences. We understand the Administration is preparing sanctions against individuals and entities involved in Iran’s ballistic missile program, and we urge you to announce such sanctions without further delay.

Inaction from the United States would send the misguided message that, in the wake of the JCPOA, the international community has lost the willingness to hold the Iranian regime accountable for its support for terrorism and other offensive actions throughout the region—including in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip. This behavior—including these ballistic missile tests—poses a direct threat to American national security interests and those of our allies.

As Members of Congress committed to regional and international security and stability, we stand ready to assist you in holding Iran accountable for its actions. Thank you for your attention to this critical matter, and we look forward to your response.

Democratic lawmakers call for immediate sanctions on Iran Read More »

The real victims of Syrian migrants

Leave a Comment / Danielle Berrin, Opinion /

We’ve all heard the fear mongering about how Syrian refugees are mostly men — which somehow makes them more susceptible to becoming terrorists, and therefore dangerous to the West.

“You look at the migration, it’s young, strong men,” Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump told Yahoo last November. “We cannot take a chance that the people coming over here are going to be ISIS-affiliated.” 

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump further conveyed his distrust of his gender: “Where are the women? Where are the children? We’re taking in people we have no idea who they are. … So I think … you know, it could very well be the ultimate Trojan horse.”

This sort of talk got some people very excited, to the point where the State Department had to address the issue during a November briefing on refugee screening and admissions. At that briefing, Fox News correspondent William La Jeunesse asked for a demographic breakdown of all Syrian refugees already admitted to the U.S. 

“Half of the Syrian refugees brought to the U.S. so far have been children, and a quarter are adults over 60,” a senior administration official responded. The official continued, rather deliberately: “And I think you will have heard that only two percent are single males of combat age. So … there’s slightly more [men] … it’s roughly 50-50 men and women, slightly more men I would say, but not — not a lot more men.”

But if we look at Europe, where perhaps the larger population of migrants is more representative, we would see the gender disparity that politicians were talking about. Of the roughly 1 million refugees who arrived in Europe by sea in 2015 — mostly from Syria, but also from Afghanistan, Iraq and a handful of other “refugee-producing countries” — about 25 percent were children, 17 percent women and 58 percent men, according to figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). I never thought I’d say this, but, in this one area, it seems Trump got his facts right. 

However, I part company with the calculus behind The Hair in this: So far, the most urgent threat Syrian migrant men pose is to their own women.

Based on interviews with dozens of migrant women at refugee shelters in Germany, The New York Times reported that the perils of the already hazardous refugee flight “are amplified for women.” 

When one husband ran out of money to pay the smugglers transporting his family, he offered his 30-year-old wife, a mother of four, as payment instead. “For three months, she was raped almost daily to earn her family’s onward journey,” the Times reported. Another woman, Samar, who said she had worked for the Syrian Finance Ministry, said, “Everybody knows there are two ways of paying the smugglers – [w]ith money or with your body.”

Another woman interviewed said she stopped washing during her journey and began dressing as a boy in order to fend off unwanted attention and aggression. Even in Europe, within the relative safety of refugee shelters, many women still find themselves feeling vulnerable or in danger; several reported pushing cupboards in front of their bedroom doors at night.

Sexual assault among migrants is an under-reported phenomenon, and it isn’t happening only among those fleeing the Middle East. In 2014, National Public Radio (NPR) reported on the widespread problem of sexual assault among female Mexican migrants while crossing the border into the United States. Again, here, women often were forced to pay smugglers with their bodies, and some wound up captives, sex slaves or prostitutes. Sexual assault is so prevalent among female migrants entering the U.S., many women actually expect to be raped or assaulted en route, and come prepared for the journey with birth control and condoms to at least minimize the risks of pregnancy and the spread of disease.

“When a woman is raped in remote stretches of the border region, it almost always goes unpunished,” NPR reported. The same could be said of the Syrian migrants in Europe — so many are in transition, living in temporary shelters, not knowing the local language and often unaware of civil protections. What recourse do women in these positions really have?

It is also worth asking: Do men who feel at ease abusing their wives or assaulting other women and girls become more likely to commit other types of violent crime? I like to think one of the best measures of a healthy society is how it treats its women.

But when society fails, Hollywood sometimes offers a good alternative. 

In the movie “Ex Machina,” about a tech billionaire who uses his fortune to create artificial intelligence, we meet Ava, a dream-droid who lives under the lock-and-key of her brilliant but demented creator. Alone in his remote, wooded compound, the god-like Nathan decides to sexualize his femme-bots — both so that he can “use” them, and so that they can elicit feelings from humans beings — a sign, Nathan believes, of their true power and intelligence. 

But as it turns out, female dream-droids are not very docile. The beautiful bot Ava, played by Alicia Vikander, whose performance could earn her a Golden Globe on Sunday, tires of the male-run prison in which she is tightly controlled and terribly confined. Her “intelligence” demands her autonomy. Ava soon outsmarts the men holding her captive, killing one and entrapping another, because she knows the unequal origins of her existence will always restrict her. She doesn’t want rescue; she wants liberation.

“Almost all men in the world are bad,” is the sad conclusion of the Syrian refugee and mother, Samar. 

It is also the conclusion of “Ex Machina.” Yet Ava is a heroine who needs no prince to save her. From slavery to self-determination, she saves herself. 

Welcome to the female liberation story of the future.

The real victims of Syrian migrants Read More »

North Korea bomb claim a new challenge for Clinton campaign

Leave a Comment / Election 2016, Worldwide /

To Republican presidential contenders, North Korea’s claim that it tested a hydrogen bomb may further make the 2016 race what they dearly want it to be: a referendum on President Barack Obama's foreign policy and, by extension, Hillary Clinton’s. 

For months, these Republicans have liked to say the world is “on fire,” pinning the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, and the recent tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia on Obama’s administration and Clinton’s stint as his secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. 

Now, they can add North Korea to the threats they say face American voters.

“When China fell to the communists (in 1949), the question that dogged the Truman administration was: 'Who lost China?'” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist. “The question that will dog the Democrats is: Who lost North Korea?”

The criticism on foreign policy has ratcheted up the pressure on Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee in November's election, to take a harder line on national security without handing Republicans more ammunition to argue that Obama's stewardship has been a failure. 

Analysts said Republicans may have little room to maneuver since the Obama administration's approach toward containing North Korea did not differ materially from the one used by Republican George W. Bush's administration before it. 

“They’ve been a headache for every Democrat. They’ve been a headache for every Republican,” Michael Rubin, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said of the North Koreans. “North Korea may be the last remaining foreign policy quagmire that hasn't been politicized in a partisan fashion.” 

That does not mean Republican candidates did not try on Wednesday after North Korea's announcement.

They said Obama's foreign policy let North Korea bolster its nuclear arms capabilities, and also assigned blame to Clinton.

“Three out of the four nuclear detonations that the North Koreans have done have happened on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's watch,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told Fox News, “and they have just not acted strongly at all around the world.”

Clinton condemned North Korea's move as “dangerous and provocative,” and said the United States should respond with more sanctions and stronger missile defenses. She also defended her performance as Obama's top diplomat.

“As secretary, I championed the United States' pivot to the Asia Pacific – including shifting additional military assets to the theater – in part to confront threats like North Korea and to support our allies,” Clinton said in a statement. “I worked to get not just our allies but also Russia and China on board for the strongest sanctions yet.”

PRESSURE ON CHINA

Businessman Donald Trump, leading the race for the Republican nomination, urged China to rein in its ally North Korea or face trade repercussions.

“China should solve that problem,” Trump told Fox News.

“And if they don't solve the problem, we should make trade very difficult for China. … North Korea is totally under their control. Without China, they wouldn't eat,” Trump added.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz blamed North Korea's test on the “folly” of failed policies by Obama and Clinton. Cruz said as president he would “rip to shreds” the international agreement on Iran's nuclear program and predicted if Clinton is elected in November Iran would detonate a nuclear weapon, “sadly not as a test,” over a city like Tel Aviv, New York or Los Angeles.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul advocated drawing on China's influence with North Korea and possibly increasing sanctions on the isolated communist state.

“There are no easy solutions,” Paul told CNN. “You want me to magically wave a wand and all of a sudden their nuclear weapons are gone?”

Paul's remarks illustrated the bind Republicans find themselves in. While North Korea's action may buttress their argument that it is time for their party to assume control of the White House, there is a relatively small range of policy options for their candidates to advocate, analysts said, short of calling for U.S. intervention in the region.

That was ruled out by not only the Obama administration but the Bush administration before it. 

Diplomacy has been tried for years. In 2005, North Korea reached an agreement with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia to suspend its nuclear program in return for diplomatic rewards and energy assistance. Negotiations collapsed after the last round of talks in 2008, with North Korea declaring the deal void after refusing inspections to verify compliance.

“I don’t think she is going to move to advocate a military option,” Scott Snyder, who heads the U.S.-Korea program at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said of Clinton. “She will exploit the perception that Republicans are moving too quickly into that space. This is one (issue) where she doesn't necessarily have to move to the right. She has the advantage of having the cliff on her backside.”

North Korea bomb claim a new challenge for Clinton campaign Read More »

Netflix streaming comes to Israel, 129 other countries

Leave a Comment / Hollywood /

Israelis will now be able to stream “Orange Is the New Black” and “Breaking Bad.”

Netflix, the video-streaming and mail-order video service that increasingly produces its own content, announced Wednesday it is now available in Israel and 129 other countries, several media outlets reported.

“Today you are witnessing the birth of a new global Internet TV network,” co-founder and chief executive Reed Hastings said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to the Times of Israel. “While you have been listening to me talk, the Netflix service has gone live in nearly every country in the world except China, where we hope to be in the future.”

Programming is primarily in English, with support in Arabic, but not Hebrew.

Until Wednesday, the 18-year-old American company’s streaming was available in 59 countries outside the United States, including Canada, Japan, and much of Latin America and Europe.

According to Haaretz, not all Netflix content will be available in Israel. For example, “House of Cards,” whose broadcasting rights have already been sold to other entities in Israel, will not be offered.

Netflix subscriptions in Israel will range from $7.99 to $11.99 per month, Haaretz reported.

Netflix streaming comes to Israel, 129 other countries Read More »

Bill would bar state pensions from investing in firms that discriminate against Israel

Leave a Comment / California, United States /

As promised, Assemblyman Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach) has brought a bill to the California legislature that, if passed, would bar state pensions and trust funds from investing in companies that economically discriminate against Israel. It also would bar the state from entering into most contracts with such companies.

Introduced Jan. 4, AB 1551 would direct the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) — the nation’s largest public employee and teachers’ retirement systems — to divest any of their combined portfolio of nearly $500 billion from companies that refuse to do business in either Israel proper or Israeli-controlled territories. 

Existing state law already bars California funds from investing in firms that abide by the Arab League’s economic boycott of Israel. AB 1551 would effectively apply this to companies that comply with the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to economically isolate Israel from global commerce.

Allen previously told the Journal he expects his legislation to pass with wide bipartisan support.

“It is unconscionable for our state to do business with companies that play politics and boycott our critical allies,” Allen said in a press release.

Spokespeople for CalPERS and CalSTRS previously said they will review the legislation and determine how their portfolios might be affected by the proposed law. Both funds previously opposed a bill by Sen. Joel Anderson (R-San Diego) that orders the state’s funds to divest from any company that does at least $20 million in business with Iran’s petroleum or natural gas industries. It took a few years after its 2007 passage for those funds to divest from 13 companies that fell under the law’s provisions.

Allen also is proposing to amend California’s Public Contract Code to stipulate that any state contract in excess of $10,000 cannot be entered into with a company or individual that economically discriminates against Israel, unless the bid of that party is at least 20 percent lower than the next-lowest bidder.

Bill would bar state pensions from investing in firms that discriminate against Israel Read More »

Rabbi’s remarks spark outrage about slated appearance

Leave a Comment / United States /

Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, a popular Sephardic rabbi in parts of the Charedi world, said in a speech filmed years ago — but not posted online until the end of December — that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust is below the historically accepted number of 6 million.

Way below.

In fact, Mizrachi said, “Not even 1 million Jews were murdered.”

And now, because of widespread anger regarding these comments, the Jewish Activities Center of Los Angeles (JACLA) and its founder, Aryeh Rifkin, are debating whether to cancel a previously planned event with Mizrachi for Jan. 11. 

Rifkin, a former real estate developer, said he planned to have a public event on Jan. 5 (after the Journal’s press time) at JACLA’s storefront location in Pico-Robertson to hear the opinions of those opposed to Mizrachi’s planned lecture. He said he’s also seeking the advice of rabbinic authorities.

Created several months ago and funded mostly by Rifkin, JACLA has hosted more than 100 events, mostly for young Jews. The group’s Facebook page says it’s working toward 501(c)(3) status and that it does not endorse the views of its speakers. In this case, Rifkin said he originally booked Mizrachi because of his large following. 

“I’m not really that aware of everything that he’s said or done because I’m personally not a follower of Rabbi Mizrachi,” Rifkin said. “I would never think to assume to become an investigator and check out every positive and negative thing someone has said. However, since the public has brought it to my attention at such a high level, I, in return, have taken it extremely seriously.”

If the event moves forward as planned, Mizrachi’s lecture would be about the negative effect of lashon hara (gossip and negative speech) on communities.

As for Mizrachi’s controversial statements casting doubt on the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis, it’s not the tact used by household Holocaust deniers, who reject the notion of a genocide — many in order to discredit the idea that Jews need a nation-state. Instead, Mizrachi said in the video, more than 5 million of the 6 million Jews murdered were not actually Jewish, according to Jewish law, because of high rates of intermarriage in Europe. 

“Eighty percent of the Jewish people were assimilated and intermarried, many generations before the Holocaust,” Mizrachi said in Hebrew in his taped lecture. “A lot of non-Jews were meshed in, but in truth, how many Jews were really killed? According to my humble opinion, not even a million.”

He apologized shortly after New Year’s to the “kedoshim [holy martyrs] of the Holocaust,” saying he was mistaken and “those that were not halachically Jewish were a very small, minimal number.” 

But that has done little to stem the anger directed toward Mizrachi, who is popular within a segment of the kiruv movement in the Charedi Orthodox world, and who has lectured thousands of times to religious and secular Jews, creating a massive online library of his teachings. 

According to the biography on his Facebook page, Mizrachi was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Air Force. He moved to New York in the late ’80s to pursue a career in finance, switching to the kiruv movement a few years later. He lives in the heavily Orthodox town of Monsey, N.Y. 

Mizrachi did not respond to an email requesting an interview. 

Michael Berenbaum, professor of Jewish studies and the director of the Sigi Ziering Institute for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at American Jewish University, said Mizrachi was factually wrong and that assimilation rates in places like Poland and Hungary were very low.

“He had no idea what he was talking about,” Berenbaum said. “If a kid had made that in one of my classes I would’ve failed him.”

Since Mizrachi’s speech became public, JACLA’s Facebook page has been inundated with negative ratings by Jews upset that Rifkin hadn’t yet canceled Mizrachi’s planned lecture, bringing what Rifkin said was a five-star rating down to 2.6 stars in a matter of days. Rifkin said people who are angry at him for considering bringing Mizrachi to JACLA got his cell number and have harassed him, calling and texting constantly. 

As of Jan. 4, Rifkin — a survivor of metastatic laryngeal cancer and the founder of the digital online media company Social Dashboard — said that he’s “undecided” about what to do for the Jan. 11 event. He said he’s reviewing information that people have presented about other controversial statements Mizrachi previously made. Among those is that the non-observance of secular European Jews was a cause for the Holocaust and that Down syndrome and autism are “punishments for sins committed in a previous life.” Mizrachi also said in an August 2014 interview with The Blaze, a conservative online news and opinion outlet, that “anyone with a clear mind can see that democracy is a self-defeating, suicidal and corrosive system of governance.”

Rifkin said in an email that he believes Mizrachi’s comments regarding the Holocaust were “said in bad taste” and that he’s “deliberately avoiding harsh language” in order to make a final decision that’s fully objective.

“I do not want to be in this situation, but whatever I decide — yes or no — will affect many people, and I have to consider all information at this point,” Rifkin said. “I’m a very imperfect person and I don’t know what the right answer is.”

Rabbi’s remarks spark outrage about slated appearance Read More »

Lena Dunham show ‘Girls’ to end after 6th season

Leave a Comment / Hollywood /

Lena Dunham’s successful HBO series “Girls” will end after its sixth season.

On Wednesday, HBO confirmed the rumor first reported on Entertainment Weekly.

The upcoming fifth season will premiere Feb. 21. The show has been renewed for a sixth season, but its premiere date — likely to fall in early 2017 — has yet to be announced.

“I conceived of ‘Girls’ when I was 23 and now I’m nearly 30 — the show has quite perfectly spanned my 20s, the period of time that it’s about — and so it feels like the right time to wrap our story up,” Dunham said in a statement.

Dunham’s dramatic comedy, which centers on a group of 20-somethings navigating young-adult life in New York, has won multiple Emmy and Directors Guild of America awards since its debut in 2012. The show’s star and co-writer grew up in New York.

“I can’t imagine a more fulfilling creative experience than ‘Girls,’” Dunham said in the statement. “The freedom and support that HBO has given [co-writer] Jenni [Konner], [producer] Judd [Apatow], and me is something rare and beautiful. The commitment and originality of our actors has been stunning, and our crew is truly my family.”

Dunham is the daughter of painter Carroll Dunham and Jewish photographer Laurie Simmons.

Lena Dunham show ‘Girls’ to end after 6th season Read More »

Petition against ex-rabbi Gafni gains Jewish community support

Leave a Comment / United States /

In 2015, a film about journalists on the investigative team at the Boston Globe shone a light on abuse in the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, the Jewish community in 2015 read news of rabbinic abuse and scandal. And now, several articles are shining a fresh light on former rabbi Marc Gafni and his three decades of incidents involving sexual misconduct and abuse of rabbinic power.

Previously known as both Marc Winiarz and Mordechai Gafni, he is preparing to once again reinvent himself, this time in the New Age space, as co-founder of the Center for Integral Wisdom (CIW). But with the new articles and a petition circulating that has been embraced by clergy and other Jewish leaders — and amplified by the Internet — multiple victims, as well as their friends and families, are coming forward and sharing stories. If you work or live in the Jewish world, you don’t have to reach very far into your social network to find someone with a personal Gafni story to tell.

The first two of the recent articles appeared in The New York Times and Tablet Magazine, both by Mark Oppenheimer, followed by subsequent pieces in the New York Daily News, Haaretz, Religion News Service, the Jewish Daily Forward, Jewschool and other venues. Together they create an Internet rabbit hole: Click on one and you’ll find two others, including the Jewish Journal’s coverage: In a sidebar to a New York Jewish Week piece by Gary Rosenblatt in October 2004, Julie Gruenbaum Fax, then the Journal’s religion editor, interviewed longtime Stephen Wise Temple Rabbi Eli Herscher about Gafni; in 2006, Fax covered the cancellation of an event featuring Gafni at Stephen Wise Temple. The Journal also reprinted Rosenblatt’s 2006 piece noting that Gafni had been ousted for misconduct from the leadership of Bayit Chadash, a Tel Aviv-based prayer and study group co-founded by Gafni, as well as a 2008 report by JTA’s Ben Harris about Gafni seeking to relaunch his career.

Gafni no longer holds his rabbinic titles: Rosenblatt reported in his 2004 article that Gafni had “returned” his semicha to his teacher, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, “to spare his former teacher any further embarrassment.” In 2006, the now-late Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi revoked the semicha he had given Gafni. More recently, ALEPH, the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, released a statement, noting that, “at no time did Gafni teach ALEPH ordination students or represent the Jewish Renewal Movement — nor will he.” 

The Petition

Rabbi David Ingber, founder and spiritual director of Romemu (“Judaism for body, mind and spirit,” according to its website), has deep roots in the renewal movement. While he was rabbi-in-residence at Elat Chayyim Retreat Center, he witnessed Gafni seduce several students, Ingber said in a phone interview with the Jewish Journal. With Gafni poised to re-establish himself in yet another position of spiritual power at the CIW, Ingber launched an online petition calling on Gafni’s current supporters — including Whole Foods, the Esalen Institute and others — to “Stop Marc Gafni from Abusing Again.” 

“Marc Gafni has left a trail of pain, suffering, and trauma amongst the people and congregations who were unfortunate to have trusted him,” the petition (in part) reads. “He has abused his extraordinary intellectual gifts and charisma to harm many who came to him in search of spiritual guidance and teaching. He has used professional alliances to legitimize himself by association, and thereby be able to continue creating more harm. As a result, Marc Gafni is neither trusted, respected, nor welcome to teach virtually anywhere in Judaism.” 

Rabbi Jill Berkson Zimmerman of the Jewish Mindfulness Network in Los Angeles, one of the initial 109 clergy members and Jewish leaders who signed Ingber’s petition, said Gafni’s “destructive reach” was “widespread and painful.”

“It’s all there in the comments, from Jerusalem to Canada to Florida to New York to California to Alaska, people who were either a victim or were close to someone abused by him,” Zimmerman said in a phone interview.

As of press time, the petition had garnered almost 2,500 signatures; many who read the comments will likely recognize names from their own networks. 

“There were articles about him for years; until now, there wasn’t any one place for all these disparate communities to come together and speak out,” Zimmerman said.

“The rabbis should have done something about this years ago,” Ingber said. “I’m not surprised that this many people were enraged: We are living in an age of Facebook and petitions that go viral. It’s a remarkably settling and unsettling feeling, to watch something gain speed this quickly, the surge of voices. It is a testimony to the power of the Internet, to have this kind of platform.”

Gafni is also using the Internet’s power to spin his own new version of himself. His website identifies him as “Dr. Marc Gafni, Visionary Philosopher, Author, and Social Innovator” (he has a doctorate from Oxford), and includes a “Facts about Marc Gafni” page that begins, “If you have heard of troubling stories on the internet about Marc Gafni, this page is for you. It sets the record straight in relation to the internet distortions about Marc Gafni,” linking to accolades from Center for Integrated Wisdom co-founder Ken Wilber and frequent collaborator Sally Kempton. Next to a photo of Gafni are the words: “We live in a world of outrageous pain, and the only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love.”

“Now that John Mackey [the Whole Foods co-founder who supports Gafni’s Center for Integral Wisdom] is in business with him, it’s time for the non-Jewish spiritual world to learn about who he really is,” Ingber said. “In my opinion, Gafni’s a hardwired sociopath narcissist who has wreaked havoc wherever he’s been a teacher.”

During the three-year period when Gafni and Ingber knew each other, Ingber estimated that Gafni had been sleeping with 15-20 women located across the U.S. and in Israel, all while claiming to be a master teacher on intimacy and relationships. 

Ingber added that Gafni has always been “a master manipulator and triangulator,” who created “an atmosphere of absolute fear and terror” so that victims would fear “that he’s going to expose you for something.” 

In the Times of Israel, a woman identifying herself as Gafni’s third ex-wife spoke out about the verbal abuse, violent outbursts and infidelity during her marriage. “How can it be that there is zero condemnation in this spineless article?” she wrote, criticizing The New York Times report. “Just quotes of excuse from high-power supporters. Just the last word given to the abuser. Just another free pass to the genius caught with his pants down. I am furious for the bruised dozens of victims. Furious for my nightmares that still won’t end. Please God protect us from
the smiling sociopaths whose hands drip with candy.”

Many Gafni accounts speak of his charisma, but Ingber said charisma alone isn’t the problem — that “power plus pathology equals pain” and is “a recipe for disaster.” 

But in Gafni’s view, he’s the victim. The New York Times piece included one story about Gafni at age 19: He had sexual contact with a 13-year-old girl, who said — then and now — that it was not consensual; he says they were in love, adding, “She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her.” 

In the Daily News article, Gafni calls the attacks against him “sexual McCarthyism” and “social media rape,” repossessing and appropriating the language of sexual violation from his victims to reframe the conversation. 

What’s Next

Rabbis across the spectrum seem to now be taking note that Gafni — and future potential abusers of rabbinic power — is their problem, too. 

“It is a watershed moment, for a larger conversation about abuse of power in the Jewish community, and within the world of Alternative Spiritualities,” Ingber said.

Esalen, at press time, has not caved to the petition pressure. On the Whole Foods website, posts previously containing a video series featuring Gafni now feature a message from Mackey noting his decision to remove the videos from the Whole Foods site — “to be consistent with the position that this is indeed strictly a personal relationship” — but keep them available at the Center for Integral Wisdom site. 

Zimmerman credited Oppenheimer and other journalists for bringing these stories new visibility. 

“There wouldn’t be a petition if it weren’t for the outrage their new articles sparked,” Zimmerman said. 

Zimmerman, who became a rabbi at 47, said rabbinical seminaries need to “better understand what happens when young, bright rabbis are elevated on pedestals before they are emotionally capable and ready,” adding, “it can be a setup for a misuse of power.”

Zimmerman also cautioned that parents need to teach their kids to “pay attention to that voice inside,” she said. “Do not trust anyone — even a rabbi or teacher — who tells you to stay silent about something that doesn’t feel right. Learning to trust their internal feelings about comfort can help them [self-] guard against being a victim.”

But Zimmerman also sees hope in the wider community’s interest. “When 100 rabbis across the spectrum agree on an issue, then, wow. I feel hopeful that there are so many people who have had enough of rabbinic abuse of power.”

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From public education to jewish life, the Gilbert Foundation encourages collaboration over competiti

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Mobile /

The seeds of the Southern California College Access Network (SoCal CAN), an alliance of more than 60 organizations working to support college access and completion among the region’s disadvantaged students, were planted more than a year prior to the organization’s founding in 2005, when the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation brought together roughly 30 organizations working in education for a day of discussion and learning. 

Guided by Tessa De Roy, manager of the foundation’s college access and success initiative, the group met on a quarterly basis throughout the following year, at which point the Gilbert Foundation provided an initial $50,000 grant to formalize the partnership. 

Collaboration made sense in this field. Janis Minton, senior adviser to the Gilbert Foundation, said the organizations told her, “We could do so many things more cost effectively and have great impact if we worked together.” 

“I really give the foundation a tremendous amount of credit,” said Alison De Lucca, executive director of SoCal CAN. “These organizations could have perceived one another as competitors for scarce dollars, but the context they set was one of collaboration.”

Although the foundation also went on to fund projects at many of the individual organizations that participated in the first meeting, an emphasis on shared success became central to SoCal CAN’s mission, De Lucca said. 

In addition to meetings focused on particular issues, SoCal CAN advocates at both the state and local levels on behalf of students. One recent project brought together 15 organizations to develop a program called Level Up to guide first-generation college students through their initial year of college, when dropout rates are exceedingly high, by bringing them together. 

“By bringing together students from different parts of [the Los Angeles region] that have this common thread of being first in their families to go to college, they really realize they have links with each other … and are not in it alone. SoCal CAN has helped by bringing kids together from different organizations,” said Ford Roosevelt, founding member of SoCal CAN and president and CEO of Project Grad, which works in high schools in the north San Fernando Valley. Project Grad is also a grantee of the Gilbert Foundation.

Recently, SoCal CAN celebrated its 10-year anniversary with a party honoring the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation. Although many other foundations now also help support SoCal CAN, the Gilbert Foundation has continued to be the network’s most consistent funding source.

Over the past 12 years, the Gilbert Foundation has quietly and deliberately embedded itself in Los Angeles’ nonprofit world, building ambitious portfolios in seven arenas: college access and success, Israel, health care, Jewish life, arts education, UCLA and UC Berkeley. 

In Israel, the foundation works with a wide range of organizations dedicated in different ways to the country’s economic development, including the Koret Israel Economic Development Fund (KIEDF), the Jerusalem Business Development Center and the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, as well as with organizations and university programs devoted to college access and retention. The Gilbert Foundation provided early financial support to KIEDF for a microloan program, founded in 2006. 

In the area of Jewish life, the Gilbert Foundation has taken a two-pronged approach, funding established programs such as Hillel and the Skirball Cultural Center, as well as new ventures that target a younger generation, such as Moishe House, which helps support group residences for Jews who then provide programing to their peers. The Gilbert Foundation was one of the early funders for Moishe House in the Los Angeles area. 

At UCLA, the foundation endowed a chair at the Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, and at Berkeley, it provided funding to help launch the Institute for Jewish Law and Israeli Law, Economy, and Society. The foundation has endowed three other academic chairs at UCLA and UC Berkeley. 

The Gilbert Foundation also supports small Jewish communities in Europe through The Westbury Group, an unofficial affiliation of more than 20 foundations and organizations working to strengthen Jewish life on the continent. 

Real estate investor Richard Ziman and attorney Martin H. Blank Jr., both longtime friends of the Gilberts, have served as co-trustees of the foundation since it was established at the bequest of its namesakes after Sir Arthur Gilbert’s death in 2001, at 88. Knighted in 1999, Arthur Gilbert had suffered from cancer and diabetes. His wife, Rosalinde, died in 1995 of Alzheimer’s disease. An original third trustee resigned early on.

Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert immigrated to the United States from England in 1949, where she had been a designer of fine ball gowns and eveningwear and he was the salesman. In Los Angeles, Arthur Gilbert invested in real estate, and throughout the 1950s and ’60s, he used much of his wealth to amass an art collection focused on 18th-century gold boxes, 17th- and 18th-century English silver and “micromosaics” — works in which the individual fragments are so small as to require a magnifying glass to discern. The collection is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

When he died, Arthur Gilbert left no legal direction for the foundation, so Ziman and Blank retained Minton as an adviser and began charting a course. Since 2002, the foundation’s assets have increased in value from about $100 million to more than $180 million today. 

Currently, the Gilbert Foundation has between 125 and 150 open grants in its current funding period, some 17 to 20 of which are in the area of college access and success. This year, Ziman said, the foundation will give away more than $8.6 million in grants. Its grantees include small and large direct-service organizations, as well as researchers and organizations dedicated to larger systems change.  

Most of The Gilbert Foundation’s advisers and program managers, including Minton and De Roy, are not staff, but are on long-term retainers in their areas of expertise. 

Ziman and Blank have provided the program managers with a lot of personal discretion to do due diligence, which staff from Project Grad and SoCal CAN said makes their relationship with the Gilbert Foundation staff more collaborative than with some other funding sources. 

Although Blank and Ziman say they like working with other funders on projects, they are also willing to go it alone.

About nine years ago, the Gilbert Foundation discovered that the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), used by colleges to assess needs of students, had become a key stumbling block for students who are the first in their family to go to college. The education nonprofits they were funding spent upward of 30 percent of their staff time during the college application period working on FAFSA forms. 

To mitigate this problem, the Gilbert Foundation funded the Bay Area-based Institute for College Access and Success to work with the Department of Education and the IRS to develop a button to digitally import tax data the federal government already has. 

“On numerous occasions, both in this country and in Israel, we have been the venture capital, the initial support. We want partners, but we are willing to take the risk,” Blank said. 

More recently, Project Grad, which has received funding from the Gilbert Foundation since 2004, approached De Roy with an idea for addressing the high rate of students who require remedial education in mathematics. 

According to the office of the California Legislative Analyst, as many as 85 percent of incoming community college students require remedial coursework in math. In the California State University system, the number varies widely by campus, but is typically more than half. The likelihood that a student will graduate drops precipitously if they are placed into remedial coursework.

If a student at Cal State Northridge fails remedial coursework in their first year, they are “stopped out,” which means they have to go to community college to improve their standing. Only one in 10 of these students make it back into the Cal State system.

“Clearly it is a crisis across the state and across the country, we all know that. And we are looking at jobs for the 21st century that require math and science skills,” Roosevelt said. 

In 2012, Roosevelt and his staff met with De Roy and a few other funders. “I threw out this weird idea and said, ‘I don’t know where this is going, but remediation is a problem,” Roosevelt recalled. De Roy responded positively and told him to stay on it. 

About a year later, Roosevelt met with the provost of CSUN and then-Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent John Deasy to discuss the problem. CSUN agreed to put money on the table for Project Grad to work with the chair in developmental mathematics at CSUN to develop a 10-week afterschool course for high school seniors to prepare kids for their Cal State placement exam. The Gilbert Foundation provided funding from the start. Among kids who took the course, the pass rate rose from 22 percent to 37 percent in the first year. 

“We thought then, we are on to something. So our next call was to Tessa [De Roy],” Roosevelt said. 

With additional funding from the Gilbert Foundation, Project Grad worked with LAUSD and CSUN to develop a yearlong course for high school seniors that would meet the University of California’s elective standards. The Gilbert Foundation has so far provided $200,000 over three years to the program.

In the 2014-2015 school year, about 240 kids enrolled in the course, which was taught at four high schools in the northeast San Fernando Valley. The pass rate among kids who took the course rose to 55 percent. 

About 350 kids are currently enrolled in the course, and discussions are ongoing regarding how scalable the program is. 

Its success is just one reflection of the Gilbert Foundation’s mission. “What creates impact for this foundation,” Minton said, “is that the theory of change starts with listening to the voices in the community and being fluid, nimble and flexible to evolve over time with how needs in the community change.”

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Jewish tech worker who lived in rental cars murdered in Vegas parking lot

Leave a Comment / United States /

A Jewish tech entrepreneur who lived out of rental cars was shot and killed in a Las Vegas parking lot.

Neil Gandler, 42, was shot by two burglars on Dec. 29 while sleeping in a rented car in a gym lot during a failed robbery attempt, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

A man and woman have been arrested in the killing and are facing charges of first-degree murder.

Gandler, a blogger and software entrepreneur living in Palo Alto, California, was in Las Vegas to attend the CES global consumer electronics trade show. He had been living out of rented cars for 10 years after rental prices skyrocketed in San Francisco after the tech boom of the early 2000s. He lived a mobile life and showered at 24 Hour Fitness gyms.

Gandler was active in the San Francisco Jewish community, where he attended adult education programs at the Reform Temple Emanuel, one of the country’s oldest synagogues. He became passionate about fostering dialogue between communities and began attending meetings of the Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue group in 2002. Gandler eventually attended a program organized through the dialogue group at Camp Tawonga in San Francisco, which brought together hundreds of Jews and Palestinians from over 50 towns in Israel.

“To me he was a really good Jew, and by that I mean he really took the first and last word of the Shema seriously,” Len Traubman, one of the heads of the Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue group, told JTA in a telephone interview. “He was a wonderful listener and authentic learner.”

Gandler also rode his bike everywhere to reduce his carbon footprint and spoke proudly about his modest lifestyle.

“He would ride his bicycle 10, 15 miles to come to a dialogue meeting,” Traubman said.

Kyle Staats, 27, and Megan Hippie, 19, were arrested Jan. 2 in conjunction with the case.

Gandler, a native of Brooklyn, New York, grew up on suburban Long Island before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Buffalo. He worked for Applied Signal Technology in California before getting an MBA at the University of Michigan. His application essay focused on Jewish-Palestinian relations.

“‘One’ to him didn’t just mean one people, it meant the whole planet,” Traubman said. “He was a really beautiful human being with an open spirit.”

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