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Jewish Journal

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August 3, 2016

Pastrami: The greatest thing since sliced bread

Leave a Comment / Food /

Despite the midday sun blazing overhead, 20 determined Angelenos labored up the long staircase alongside downtown’s Angels Flight Railway on July 30, spurred on by what awaited them at the top in the shadow of downtown’s towering California Plaza skyscrapers — pastrami, and lots of it. 

Organizers of the East Side Jews event, dubbed “Pastronomy,” greeted salivating participants from behind a mountain of wrapped deli sandwiches featuring Langer’s world-famous No. 19 and Wexler’s O.G.

“You guys are eating two of the best pastrami sandwiches out there,” said Food Network personality Adam Gertler, who hosted the gathering. “I’ll put those up against anything. However, I think Langer’s No. 19 is simply the perfect sandwich.” 

The taste test atop Bunker Hill was only the first stop of a culinary tour of Los Angeles of pastronomical proportions. Other stops offered pastrami hot dogs and tacos. (For a small contingent of vegetarians present, options included a Wexler’s egg salad sandwich, a veggie dog and fried avocado tacos.) 

Gertler, an East Coast Jew from New York who now resides in Silver Lake, said he needed no convincing to come on board. “This combines my two favorite things: talking and pastrami,” he said. 

He also said he loved the idea of getting a bunch of fellow Eastside Jews together, as he doesn’t always find opportunities to immerse himself in the local Jewish scene. East Side Jews, based out of the Silverlake Independent Jewish Community Center (SIJCC), is a self-described “irreverent, upstart, nondenominational collective of Jews living in L.A.’s East Side.” 

“To be honest, I haven’t experienced Eastside Jewish life nearly enough. I miss that sense of community. You don’t even realize you miss it until you don’t have it,” Gertler said. 

On the afternoon’s first stop in California Plaza, Gertler spoke about all things pastrami, from its Eastern European origins to the intricate preparation process. Gertler also professed his love for smoked meats, explaining the pride he feels after curing, brining, smoking and steaming his own pastrami, a task he encouraged others to try. 

“You’ll feel like you ran six marathons,” he said. “It’s like having kids, I imagine. Mind you, I don’t have any kids.” 

Gertler finished by offering his take on the timeless debate over who does pastrami on rye best, declaring, in his opinion: Langer’s is the winner.

Then it was time to eat. 

Though no official winner was recognized, people filled out scorecards featuring categories such as appearance, tenderness and flavor. Conversation was dominated by familiar-sounding Jewish table talk with everyone discussing the merits of two of the city’s top delis. (Langer’s No. 19 features pastrami, coleslaw, Russian dressing and Swiss cheese on rye; Wexler’s sandwich is pastrami and mustard on rye.)

Photo by Shannon Rubenstone

Michael Rubenstone, 39, an actor living in Silver Lake, took his critique seriously. 

“I appreciate how Wexler’s makes the meat the star of the sandwich,” he said. “However, Langer’s wins the bread battle and is the better overall sandwich, I think.” 

Next, the group hopped on the Metro Expo Line and made its way across downtown to Dog Haus in USC’s University Park Campus to try its pastrami dog, Gertler’s own invention. Gertler is the brand ambassador and official “würstmacher” (sausage-maker) for Dog Haus. 

Gertler said he took time to prepare a homemade Gruyere cheese sauce the night before the visit for his special guests to pair with the dish. He described the dog as his own pastrami recipe ground up and put in sausage casings, served in a grilled King’s Hawaiian bun with coleslaw, which provides sweetness to balance the saltiness of the pastrami. He’s toying with the addition of the cheese sauce and looked to the tour for some guidance. The consensus was resounding approval of Gertler’s last-minute addition. 

Perry Forman, 59, a computer programmer living in Burbank who describes himself as an amateur foodie, had a glowing review of Gertler’s creation. 

“I’m not really a hot dog guy, but this was really great,” Forman said. “I’m the one at my office everyone looks to for restaurant recommendations. There’s a Dog Haus location in North Hollywood and I’m definitely going to take some of my co-workers there for lunch soon.” 

Gertler’s pastrami dogs will be available at Dog Haus’ station inside Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum at all USC and L.A. Rams home football games this season. 

After another trip on the Metro and a visit to the newly renovated Clifton’s on South Broadway for cocktails (not included in the $30 price of the tour), the group walked to The Stocking Frame on Hill Street. The tour arrived at 5 p.m., just as the restaurant opened, to try its pastrami tacos featuring house-smoked meat served with white cheddar slaw. 

For Grant Wallensky, 28, a financial planner living in the Fairfax area, the tour saved the best for last. 

“The tacos were magnificent, delicious and truly amazing. I wish more people had stuck around,” he said, referring to those who left early. “That was my favorite stop. Honestly, I loved those tacos.”

For Tannaz Sassooni, 38, a Persian food blogger who lives in Atwater Village and frequents East Side Jews’ events, the entire tour scored high marks. 

“That’s a perfect day. I love getting to explore the city without a car, walking around, taking the Metro and exploring some good food,” she said. “The group was adventurous and up for the same sort of exploration.” 

“Pastronomy” was July’s special afternoon edition of “Last Sabbath,” a monthly series of casual, adults-only dinners sponsored by East Side Jews. Joel Serot, 32, SIJCC’s events coordinator, said write-ups in a variety of media outlets attracted people from outside East Side Jews’ normal reach. 

“We usually stick to Eastsiders, but because of the publicity for this, we have a lot of new people here,” he said. “It’s pretty cool.” 

Pastrami: The greatest thing since sliced bread Read More »

Freedom! (from pants)

Leave a Comment / Culture /

For hundreds of years, Jewish people have been living in Scotland, completely nude. Well, nude of their own tartan, anyway. They may as well have been completely naked by Scottish standards.

In Scotland, every tribe has its own tartan, a cloth woven with various colors and stripes that shows which clan you’re from. “Clan” is a Scottish term for “tribe,” and if there is one people that consider themselves tribal, it’s the Scottish. (Well, also the Jews. And also … Africans, Native Americans … come to think of it, there are a lot of people who consider themselves tribal. But the Jews of Scotland — they’ve got to be the most tribal tribe of all.)

It was only this past March that the Scottish Register of Tartans officially recognized the first kosher Jewish tartan. (There was a previous tartan but it wasn’t registered and it’s not made anymore.) 

Developed by Glasgow’s Rabbi Mendel Jacobs, the tartan is pure wool and blue and white, like the Scottish and Israeli flags. It has a gold line through it to commemorate the ark, silver for the Torah and red for Kiddush wine. Most importantly, it doesn’t violate sha’atnez, the law in the Torah forbidding mixture of wool and linen. The tartan design can be ordered on kippot, prayer shawls, kilts, kilt pins and neckties. 

Danny Lobell. Photo courtesy of Danny Lobell

This is big news for people like me. I’m fully Jewish and half Scottish, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the country of about 6,000 Jews. Most people know it only from “Braveheart,” which, I have to admit, I’m torn about. As a Scotsman, it makes me proud to watch it. As a Jew, though, it’s hard to take scene after scene of Mel Gibson.

My mom was born in Glasgow, Scotland, as were my grandfather and great-grandfather before her. My family dates all the way back to the times of national hero William Wallace. We were the ones in his tent with him doing his taxes: “Mr. Wallace, a quick word? You have listed under dependents, ‘The entire Scottish people.’ I just think that’s a wee bit much. Just trying to avoid an audit here, sir.”

Overall, the Scottish and Jewish aspects of my heritage mesh quite well. Even the food is the same! Kishka is just Jewish haggis. From lochs to lox — invented by Scottish Jews — to whiskey — created by Scots for Jews (Don’t believe me? Go to any Chabad house), we have a lot in common. 

Take moms from the two cultures, for example: Scottish moms are critical; Jewish moms are critical. So can you imagine just how critical Scottish Jewish moms are? 

My mom, a Scottish Jew, will say things like, “Oh, you’re writing a column for the Jewish Journal? Well, you should own the Jewish Journal! In fact, you should own the Wall Street Journal! Actually, you should work on Wall Street! No, you should run Wall Street … as a doctor!” 

I don’t think in the entire history of Scotland there has ever been one mom who felt that what her son was doing was good enough. The Scottish people have accomplished some very big things. Take Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. I imagine when he told his mom that he invented it, she probably complained and said, “Great. Now I have another monthly bill. Thanks a lot.”

So now Scottish Jews have their own tartan to wear. It’s about time that the Jews took to the Scottish battlefields, hurling logs in the caber toss and then burning them for Lag b’Omer services. We are proud that we can use either restroom according to the symbols on the door. (Scottish people were ahead of the curve on the transgender bathroom laws. They just put a symbol of a guy in a kilt on one door and a gal in a skirt on the other. Nobody knows which is which and boom! Suddenly you have restroom equality.) 

And next, we will start using the bagpipes instead of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. Actually, better yet, we’ll combine the instruments to make the most unappealing sound any culture has ever heard. It’ll be called Celtic klezmer. Or Celzmer. 

So, guys, next time you’re in Scotland and you’re looking for a breeze where you had your bris, don’t settle for just any Scottish shmatte. You can finally enjoy a tartan all your own and, as Wallace would say, freedom (from pants)! 

Danny Lobell is an L.A.-based stand-up comedian who runs the podcasts “Modern Day Philosophers” and “The Mostly Bull Market,” as well as a monthly improvised storytelling show at the Hollywood Improv called “Bookshelf.”

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Musings and insight on the afterlife

Leave a Comment / Books, Culture /

There’s nothing surprising about a man or woman who muses about death in the later years of life. For Hillel Halkin, however, the fear of dying began at the age of 11 or 12, when he read an article about leprosy in Reader’s Digest and promptly convinced himself that he suffered from the disease.

“In the years to come, I contracted one fatal disease after another,” he recalls in “After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition” (Princeton University Press), a work of both scholarship and confessional memoir. He concedes that the wholly imaginary afflictions of his youth and adolescence seem funny in retrospect. “No one could have guessed that I lay in bed at night praying for another year of the life I desperately craved.”

Born in New York in 1939, Halkin made aliyah in 1970 and has since achieved international stature as a translator of Hebrew and Yiddish fiction into English, and as a biographer, critic, novelist and journalist. His book “Yehuda Halevi” won the National Jewish Book Award in 2010. Now, at the age of 77, the subject is no joke.

“For most of us, the years up to seventy, give or take a few, are ones we retain our strength in,” he writes. “We’re not the same at sixty as we were at fifty, but with a bit of luck, our decline isn’t painfully obvious. It only becomes that a decade or so later. By then, we’re all on death row.”

All of these musings prompted Halkin to accept an invitation from the Library of Jewish Ideas, a publishing project co-sponsored by the Tikvah Fund, to survey and comment upon the Jewish beliefs and traditions that touch on death and dying. He discloses that he is not a religiously observant Jew, but he reminds us that “you can’t have lived in Israel for over forty years as I have without encountering death in its Jewish forms: Jewish jokes, Jewish prayers, Jewish funerals, Jewish mourning, Jewish memorial rites.”

The starting point for his journey of exploration through the textual landscape, of course, is the Hebrew Bible. As Halkin points out, the Torah and the other early books of the Bible — unlike other religious writings of the ancient world — do not have much to say about what happens when we die. “Although I would have been prepared when I died for a descent to an underworld,” Halkin writes in the first person about a hypothetical Bible-reader in antiquity, “I would have had no notion of how to reach it, of what awaited me there, or if anything much awaited me at all.”

The later prophets were more explicit: “For behold, the day is coming that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, all the wicked, shall be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up … ” Here the Messianic idea of judgment, punishment and redemption enters in the Jewish tradition, but it is writ large only in Daniel, a work of the second century B.C.E. “The dead, or at least some of them, will rise bodily!” Halkin explains.

The most important source of Jewish teachings about death, Halkin emphasizes, is the Talmud, in which rabbis and sages prescribe the rituals that observant Jews still embrace during the period of mourning. The underlying rationale of these practices, he writes, is to “allow sufficient space for grief while channeling it into formulaic expressions and surrounding it with numerous prescriptions that make sure its desirable limits are not exceeded.” Too much grief, in other words, is not permitted: “Gradually, mourners are expected to return to ordinary life,” Halkin writes.

Similarly, the writings that compose the Talmud are sometimes “frustratingly ambiguous” and even openly contradictory when it comes to “the world to come” (olam ha-ba), the Hebrew phrase used to describe the afterlife, and just as “unforthcoming” in distinguishing between heaven and hell. Halkin sees a psychological advantage in the lack of clarity and unanimity: “In itself, there is no more to be gained from the contemplation of never-ending torment than there is from the contemplation of never-ending bliss.”

One of Halkin’s great and enduring gifts is his ability to translate the abstruse and difficult passages of the ancient and medieval texts into accessible English, a gift that is much used in “After One-Hundred-and-Twenty.” But the passages that I appreciate most are the asides to the reader in which we hear Halkin’s own voice. He wonders aloud about whether sex in the afterlife will be monogamous, for example, and whether “my celestial body will be a more perfect replica of my terrestrial one, complete with skin and nerves?” Against all the pious speculation of the wise men who have come before him, however, Halkin seems to embody the fatalism of Kohelet.

“I pace and think: what is this thought that I am thinking? It is about bodies and souls, but it is also about the scrape of my scandals on the wooden floor, the pain in the tendon of the heel that I sprained a week ago, the ache in my back from sitting too long at the desk, the August light pouring through the northeast window, the old sheet I hang there every April to keep out the morning sun … and take down again in September,” he writes. “Each time I reach the stairs and turn back, I see this sheet. Its shabbiness annoys me and I think: for years I’ve been promising myself to replace it with a Venetian blind and I’ve never done it.  Soon I’ll be dead and there’ll be no need to do anything.” 

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.

Musings and insight on the afterlife Read More »

Young Jewish leaders voice opposition to Trump

Leave a Comment / California, Election 2016 /

Sixty-four local young Jewish leaders are denouncing what they call “Donald Trump’s discriminatory and insensitive comments” in an open letter to the community.

Signatories include Republicans, Democrats and independents. Among them are Bet Tzedek CEO and President Jessie Kornberg; California Sen. Ben Allen; Valley Beth Shalom Rabbi Noah Farkas; and Rabbi Aaron Lerner, executive director of Hillel at UCLA.

Two attorneys — Sam Yebri, the president of 30 Years After, a group of Iranian-American Jewish community leaders, and Jesse Gabriel, a board member of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles — drafted and circulated the letter, which begins, “Our Generation Will Not Remain Silent.”

“We felt it was incumbent on the Jewish community, especially the self-described young Jewish leaders, to raise our voices in denouncing comments and actions that marginalized other minorities, and we felt we weren’t hearing enough from Jewish leaders,” Yebri told the Journal. “We felt as young leaders we could push the entire Jewish community to stand up to these types of comments.” 

Yebri and Gabriel were working independent of their board affiliations, they said in separate interviews.

The letter, which appears as an advertisement in this week’s Journal, states, “…the undersigned, representing the broad diversity of our Los Angeles Jewish community, feel compelled to speak out with one voice to denounce Donald Trump’s discriminatory and insensitive comments. We reject his efforts to marginalize other minority groups, and note with increasing concern the manner in which his campaign has encouraged and inflamed anti-Semitic bigotry.”

Since entering the presidential race last summer, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has angered several minority groups, including Hispanics, Muslims and Jews.

“In short,” the letter says, “Mr. Trump’s comments are contrary to both our American and our Jewish values.”

Republican Jewish Coalition communications director Fred Brown said Trump does not have a monopoly on offensive behavior during the current presidential election cycle. 

“While tone and rhetoric matter when discussing these issues, so does actual policy, which is why what we saw from the Democrat National Convention was so appalling,” Brown said in a phone interview.

In collecting signatures for the letter, Gabriel, 34, and Yebri, 35, attempted to reach out to influential people representing a broad cross-section of the community under the age of 40, Gabriel said. Both organizers are supporters of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. 

 “We wanted to put together a list that reflects the diversity of our Jewish community — men and women, the Russian-Jewish community, the Persian-Jewish community, Israelis, the LGBT community, Democrats, Republicans, AIPAC, JStreet, Federation, AJU, people who serve on the boards of synagogues and Jewish summer camps,” Gabriel said. “If you look at the list of names, the signatories are prominent leaders in a whole range of important community organizations.”

The signatories of the letter include attorneys, rabbis and others who describe themselves as “young leaders from across Los Angeles … deeply committed to sustaining and strengthening our Jewish community.”

Attorney Alex Grager, 37, co-founder of RuJuLA, the Los Angeles Russian Jewish Network, signed the letter and explained his participation by telling the Journal, “Mr. Trump’s message is dividing not uniting, and in this day and age, or any day and age, that’s probably not a good thing.”

Young Jewish leaders voice opposition to Trump Read More »

Black Lives Matter platform says Israel an ‘apartheid state’ committing ‘genocide’

Leave a Comment / Israel /

The wide-ranging new platform of a coalition growing out of the Black Lives Matter movement includes harsh criticism of Israel, which it describes as an “apartheid state” that, it claims, perpetrates “genocide” against the Palestinian people.

Released Monday, the platform of the Movement for Black Lives calls for “an end to the war against Black people” and is the campaign’s first comprehensive document addressing specific federal policies.

Black Lives Matter Network is one of over 50 black-led organizations in the coalition.

While the majority of the document addresses issues other than Israel, the section on foreign policy, titled Invest-Divest, objects to U.S. military aid to Israel, which it describes as “a state that practices systematic discrimination and has maintained a military occupation of Palestine for decades.”

While the section addresses other foreign policy issues, particularly the movement’s objections to the drug war and the war on terror, it criticizes no foreign country other than Israel.

The section also argues that the U.S., because of its alliance with Israel, is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”

According to the platform, “Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people.”

The platform claims Palestinian property is “routinely bulldozed to make way for illegal Israeli settlements” and that Israeli soldiers “regularly arrest and detain Palestinians as young as 4 years old without due process.”

“Everyday, Palestinians are forced to walk through military checkpoints along the US-funded apartheid wall,” the platform adds, referring to the security barrier Israel erected in response to a wave of terrorist attacks committed by Palestinians from the West Bank.

The section expresses support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, and credits Adalah-The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, as one of its “authors & contributors.”

Formed in response to growing outrage over the criminal justice system’s treatment of African Americans — particularly police violence against them — the Movement for Black Lives describes itself on its website as “a collective of more than 50 organizations representing thousands of Black people from across the country.”

Black Lives Matter platform says Israel an ‘apartheid state’ committing ‘genocide’ Read More »

Poem: Miriam Lives in Apt. 2C

Leave a Comment / Culture, Poetry /

With her two brothers
nine goats
and a pack of fruit flies.
When her father tells her
Go get the switch
she is a different color after.
She is April.
Her teeth at well’s bottom
her fall from favor
the deepest fruit.
In the summer she’s a porch fly
against the burn.
But when she curls into a stoop
against the tide of winter
the neighbors
leave their doors cracked

Sivan Butler-Rotholz is the contributing editor of the Saturday Poetry Series on “As It Ought to Be” and a columnist for the iPinion Syndicate. She teaches English and creative writing in New York City and internationally.

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Challah Hub seizes opportunities

Leave a Comment / Business, Food /

Why have plain old challah on Shabbat when you could enjoy braided bread in a variety of fun flavors: mint chocolate chip, s’mores, pumpkin white chocolate chip, lavender chocolate or “challahpeno” cheese?

No reason at all, thanks to Challah Hub (challahhub.com), a one-stop resource for recipes, instructional challah-braiding videos and more. 

“It’s really not that hard to make challah, and we want to make it more accessible,” explained co-founder Sarah Klegman, 28.

The enterprise got its start about three years ago when Klegman — who has been baking ever since she was tall enough to reach the counter — met Elina Tilipman, 32, at a brunch and began showing off photographs of her challahs. Tilipman told Klegman she would buy her meal on the condition that she taught Tilipman how to bake. 

The partnership kicked off with nothing more than an Instagram account filled with photos of the pair’s crazy creations — Klegman calls it “challah porn.” More than 7,500 people now follow the account, and they’re treated to pictures ranging from rainbow-colored challah to vegan pretzel challah to challah shaped to resemble Bernie Sanders’ face.

Eventually, Challah Hub grew into a website offering recipes, tasting events and baking classes. There was even a one-day-only partnership with UberEATS during which Uber drivers delivered challahs to people’s doors.  

Challah Hub sells tote bags, challah covers and vanilla-scented Shabbat candles on its website, which also features how-to videos on making challah dough and braiding technique. One of the next steps, the founders hope, will be to launch a full-fledged baking and delivery service in which customers can sign up for a subscription and receive challahs at their homes before Shabbat begins every Friday. 

“We want to be able to deliver to everybody in Los Angeles and be able to deliver a very reliably tasty and enjoyable challah experience,” said Klegman of Valley Village.

Raised in northern Michigan, Klegman moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. She represented local talent, with a focus on comedians. Somewhere along the line, she tired of the industry and decided to devote more of her energy to her passion: baking. 

She credits her mother with teaching her the ways of the kitchen. While the tagline for the company is “Not Your Mama’s Challah,” Klegman admits that Challah Hub’s original recipe was her mother’s own. 

“I always say, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll tell people when I have the opportunity that it was my mama’s challah,’ ” Klegman said.

For Klegman, baking challah is a way of expressing her pride in Jewish culture. She grew up as one of the few Jews at her school in Michigan and she was picked on by other students until her mother, who always was an avid challah baker, came into the school and delivered presentations about World War II history, anti-Semitism and the civil rights movement.

“She’s given me a good amount of passion for challah and pride for my culture,” Klegman said.

The organized Jewish world has taken notice. This year, ROI Community, an initiative of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, provided Challah Hub with a $1,000 micro-grant to help redesign its website. In a blog post published six months ago on the ROI website, Tilipman, who lives in Toluca Lake, said the ROI grant was a crucial step in helping Challah Hub become a more serious venture. 

“The step from hobby to business is a big one, and this grant was the bridge we needed,” Tilipman said. 

Challah Hub does not have its own kitchen space and does not offer a way for people to purchase their challahs — yet. Instead, the founders have used friends’ kitchen spaces and their focus has been making themselves more visible in the community. 

In June, they participated in the Los Angeles Bread Festival at Grand Central Market, where they led a challah-braiding workshop. In collaboration with the gang member rehabilitation organization Homeboy Industries, which operates a bakery as a means of employing its clients, they also served up carob chip challah and sesame seed challah to the crowd until the bread was sold out.

And this past spring, after Passover, Challah Hub participated in “A Post-Passover Carb Party,” the NuRoots-organized event that also included Yeastie Boys Bagels, a food truck that promotes its bagels with hip-hop-inspired branding. 

While Klegman told the Journal she is more interested in launching a food delivery service than she is in operating a brick-and-mortar bakery, Tilipman wrote in the blog published on the ROI website that she dreams of opening a Challah Hub bakery one day. 

“A Challah Hub bakery, can you imagine?” said Tilipman, who is The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ assistant director for the NuRoots Community Fellowship on the East Side of L.A.

Regardless of how they decide to expand, one thing is for sure: The women behind Challah Hub are passionate about what they do.

“We love making challah and putting it in people’s faces,” Klegman said. “And we’ve been lucky that enough people still eat carbs for us to keep going.”

Challah Hub seizes opportunities Read More »

Hebrew word of the week: Hammah (sun, hot)

Leave a Comment / Culture /

Words in any language may become obsolete or change in pronunciation and meaning. Moreover, certain names for things or concepts may have one meaning at one time, and another later, such as the English word “groovy” (in the 1970s) and now “cool”; or even assume the opposite meaning, as Hebrew Haval ’al ha-zman, once “waste of time, not good” (until the ’90s); now “great, wonderful.”

Even words such as shemesh “sun,” the common word in the Bible and modern Hebrew, was called Hammah “(the) hot one” in Rabbinical Hebrew.* Even in the Bible, Hammah may, rarely, mean “sun,” but only in Prophetic-Poetic texts, as in Isaiah 24:23; 30:26; Song of Songs 6:10.

‫*Similarly, “moon” in the Bible and modern Hebrew is known as yareaH, but in Rabbinical Hebrew is levanah “(the) white one,” as in birkat ha-levanah “the blessing of the new or full moon.”

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

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Religion “Jedi”—Politics “Jackass”?

Leave a Comment / Blogs /

This is from the Brisbane Times No doubt Yoda—Yiddishkeit and all—would win this year’s U.S. presidential election as a write-in candidate:

A battle over government, religion, and Star Wars is brewing in Australia. The country will hold their national census on August 9 and a group of people is begging their fellow citizens to not put “Jedi” down as their religion. Here’s the problem: On the 2011 census (it takes places every five years) 64,390 Australians put “Jedi” down as their religion, an increase of from 58,053 on the 2006 census, according to The Brisbane Times. believe themselves to be actual Jedi, and most of them make the claim as a harmless way to declare their Star Wars fandom and give the government the middle finger at the same time. However, a group called the Atheist Foundation of Australia is leading a campaign to get people to stop making this joke. Their reasoning is that, when officially counted, Jedi gets classified as a “Not Defined” religion instead of “No Religion.” When that happens, they believe “it makes Australia seem more religious than it really is.” Which, again, doesn’t sound like a problem, but “data on religious affiliation is used for public policy, city planning, community support facilities and more.” The AFA is concerned that if the government tabulates more people as religious, they’ll aim policy and tax dollars that way, instead of accurately serving the atheist percentage of the population. It seems like a pretty big leap for Australian officials to gear policy and planning toward religion because a small percentage of people play a joke. But it’s not unfathomable, and that’s why this argument is so interesting.

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Joseph Wilf, Holocaust survivor and major Jewish philanthropist, dies at 91

Leave a Comment / Obituaries /

Joseph Wilf, a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor and founder of one of the country’s largest real estate development companies, has died at 91.

He and his brother Harry founded the Wilf Family Foundation in 1964 and have since contributed more than $200 million to Jewish causes. Joseph was a founder of the American Society for Yad Vashem, a U.S.-based fundraising arm for the Israeli Holocaust museum, and a benefactor behind Yeshiva University’s Wilf campus in New York City.

Wilf, the father of Minnesota Vikings owners Zygmunt “Zygi” Wilf and Mark Wilf, passed away Wednesday at his home in Hillside, New Jersey, according to information released by his family.

The cause of death was not specified.

Wilf was born in Jaroslaw, Poland in 1925. During World War II, he was deported with his brother and his parents to a Siberian work camp. They all survived but did not go back to Poland when anti-Semitic pogroms erupted there after the war. His sister Bella died in the Warsaw Ghetto.

“There were only two Jews in my class in high school,” Wilf recalled in remarks during the groundbreaking for a new museum at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial in 2000. “We were totally isolated from the rest of the students. We were not allowed to participate in sports, no one ever talked to us and the teachers were distant. It was as if there was an organized boycott against the Jews.”

He and his wife Elizabeth — known as Suzie — married in Germany in 1949. The Wilfs eventually migrated to the United States where he founded the Garden Homes real estate company, which has since built over 100 shopping centers and housing developments.

Joseph Wilf’s many honors include the Louis Brandeis Humanitarian Award from the Zionist Organization of America and honorary degrees from Yeshiva University, Kean University and the Rabbinical College of America. Among the institutions and causes he supported were the former Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey, United Jewish Appeal, Israel Bonds, the Jewish Museum, Park East Synagogue, Jewish Agency for Israel, the Joint Distribution Committee and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

“Despite discrimination and the horrors of the Holocaust, Joseph’s life and that of his extended family stand as eloquent testimony to the heroism and tenacity of the Jewish people,” read a statement issued by his family.

In addition to his wife and and sons, Wilf is survived by daughters-in-law Audrey and Jane, nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He is predeceased by his son Sidney.

Mark Wilf is a member of the board of directors of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company.

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