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Jewish Journal

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May 3, 2017

Israeli baseball pursues its dream of fields with L.A. fundraiser

Leave a Comment / Sports /

“The cliché is true. If you build it, they will come,” Peter Kurz, president of the Israel Association of Baseball (IAB), said at the Los Angeles Sports Museum on April 27.

He, of course, was evoking the words of Ray Liotta, playing the ghost of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson in the 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” as he tells Kevin Coster’s character to build a baseball diamond in his Iowa cornfield.

Kurz might not be hearing voices, but his organization is teaming up with Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) Project Baseball to transform some of Israel’s dilapidated lots into new fields to meet the needs of an upstart baseball culture.

“There are about a thousand kids playing baseball in Israel, but we have a serious lack of fields,” Kurz said. “We have one good field in Israel in Petah Tikvah, where our national team plays and practices, but we need other fields.”

Riding the wave of momentum created in March by the Israeli national team going 4-2 overall and qualifying for the second round in the World Baseball Classic, the IAB and JNF hosted a fundraiser dubbed “Build a Field of Dreams.” Nearly 80 people, mostly baseball junkies, paid $250 each to admire the L.A. Sports Museum’s vast memorabilia collection, pose in a green screen photo booth, munch on Cracker Jack and participate in a silent auction to raise funds for a new field in Beit Shemesh.

Los Angeles Dodgers Director of Player Development Gabe Kapler, a former major leaguer, was scheduled to speak but a last-minute scouting assignment called him away.

“If the Dodgers could hit, he’d be here,” Kurz joked, surrounded by many patrons clad in Dodger blue.

A two-minute video played for guests illustrated the current situation in Beit Shemesh, where baseball-loving kids play on rocky, weed-infested fields in nearby kibbutzim and moshavim.

“In Beit Shemesh, we have 150 kids playing, but if we had a field in the middle of the city, I’d have 300 or 400 kids, without a problem,” Kurz said.

Kurz, who lives in Israel with his family, told the Journal his organization would like to see ground broken on the Beit Shemesh field by the end of the year, followed by six months of construction. The IAB hopes to raise a third of the $1.7 million cost through donors in the United States with Beit Shemesh’s municipality prepared cover the rest.

Lou Rosenberg, Los Angeles’ executive director of JNF and the lead on its Project Baseball task force, said the need for fields in Israel existed well before the national team reached the final eight in the WBC tournament. But his organization, in conjunction with the IAB, is taking full advantage of the team’s success.

“Project Baseball is a niche sort of interest,” Rosenberg said, wearing his pin-striped Valley Beth Shalom softball league uniform. “There was always this need, but the WBC has definitely helped get the word out to people who are interested in this and get things going like this event tonight. We have a lot more ideas to keep the momentum going and get us in front of the right people.”

Rosenburg and Kurz are hoping to find someone to be for baseball in Israel what Robert Kraft, the Jewish owner of the New England Patriots, is for American football there. Last year, Kraft donated $6 million to build a sports complex in Jerusalem to expand football culture in Israel.

Days before the fundraiser in Los Angeles, Kurz met in Milwaukee with former Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, a meeting Kurz had sought for 10 years. During his 23 years as commissioner, Selig pushed to expand the sport’s international appeal.

“I showed him how much interest there is in baseball in Israel and how wonderful the whole WBC experience was, and that we need help to get more fields built,” Kurz said of his conversation with Selig, who is Jewish.

Kurz told the Journal that Selig promised to help the IAB connect with Jewish major league team owners like Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox, Fred Wilpon of the New York Mets and Ted Lerner of the Washington Nationals.

Jonathan Fishman, 16, came to the fundraiser with his dad, Jeffrey Fishman, to learn more about baseball in Israel. Jonathan, who wore a Jackie Robinson Dodgers throwback jersey, plays third base for Shalhevet High School. He said he was compelled to come after seeing Jewish ballplayers shock the world in the WBC.

“It made me really proud. It was cool to see,” he said. “Hopefully, we get to see more Jewish ballplayers making those kind of contributions.”

Israeli baseball pursues its dream of fields with L.A. fundraiser Read More »

Community puts best foot forward at JWW’s Walk to End Genocide

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles /

To help raise awareness of efforts to end genocides, approximately 1,000 people participated in the 11th annual Jewish World Watch (JWW) Walk to End Genocide on April 30, starting at Pan Pacific Park.

“It’s one place where everyone comes together,” said Susan Freudenheim, executive director of JWW. “It’s a community event where people of all denominations and across the board — churches and other groups — come together.”

Indeed, clergy, synagogue members, high school students and elected officials, many wearing T-shirts that read, “This is what activism looks like,” covered 5 kilometers on streets neighboring The Grove and the Original Farmers Market.

“I think all of us who have genocide in our DNA need to stand right now with Jewish World Watch to make sure we understand genocide is not something in the history books,” Los Angeles Unified School District Board President Steve Zimmer said in an interview. “Genocide is something happening right now.”

Beyond the Holocaust, during which the Nazis systematically targeted European Jewry for extinction, other groups have suffered genocide, which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines as “violent crimes committed against groups with the intent to destroy the existence of the group.”

A Jewish lawyer from what is now Belarus, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term “genocide” in 1944. Genocides have occurred against Armenians in 1915, Cambodians in 1975, Rwandans in 1994 and Sudanese in the early years of this century.

“I think all of us who have genocide in our DNA need to stand right now with Jewish World Watch to make sure we understand genocide is not something in the history books.” — Los Angeles Unified School District Board President Steve Zimmer

Rabbi Yechiel Hoffman, director of youth learning and engagement at Temple Beth Am, said the walk would not prevent killings in South Sudan, the world’s newest country, or Syria, which has endured civil war since 2011. Raising awareness about those countries, however, is important, Hoffman said.

“You don’t walk because it ends genocide,” he said, joined by his daughter, Mina, 10, at the event. “You walk to raise awareness that genocide is a real thing that exists today.”

Jordana Olszewski, who owns a jewelry company called Jordana Adrienne, participated as a member of Team Ohr HaTorah, named for a synagogue in Mar Vista. She started the day at 8 a.m., running in a 10K race that kicked off the event.

“I’m tired, but it’s all right, it’s great,” she said, as she completed the event. “All these different synagogues and organizations coming together, it’s really nice.” Moments later, she picked up a bongo drum and banged away as part of a drum circle drawing people of all ages.

Headquartered in Encino, JWW is focused on ending genocide by partnering with groups working in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and South Sudan.

In 2004, the late Valley Beth Shalom Rabbi Harold Schulweis co-founded the organization with Janice Kamenir-Reznik, on the premise that Jews have a responsibility to prevent another Holocaust from happening, whether the victims are Jewish or not.

Schulweis delivered a 2004 High Holy Days sermon titled “Globalism and Judaism,” in which he declared, “To be a Jew is to think big; to be a Jew is to think globally; to be a Jew is to act globally; to be a Jew is to love God, who is global.”

At the walk, L.A. City Councilman Paul Koretz attempted to uphold the JWW co-founder’s mission.

“ ‘Never again’ does not just mean for Jews,” he said, wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers cap. “We all have to fight genocide in any way we can.”

Freudenheim said the organization has expanded its work to include assistance for refugees displaced by the Syrian civil war.

“We’ve also been working on trying to help the Syrian refugees who are in Greece, in Lesbos, by providing help to support the psychological aspects of their residency, to give them psychological support,” she said.

Additional JWW Walk to End Genocide events took place this year in Washington, D.C., and Santa Rosa and the Conejo Valley in California.  Altogether, the four events raised more than $180,000.

Karina Zysman, 18, a senior at Taft Charter High School planning to attend UCLA this fall, is secretary of the JWW Teen Ambassador Program, which instills community organizing and advocacy skills in students grades 9-12.

As captain of Team Taft and participating in her first Walk to End Genocide, she carried a sign reading, “Welcome Refugees.”

“The first step to making a change is to show up,” she said. “I am so astonished by how many people did show up for this cause. It inspires me to have hope, using baby steps to change the world for the better.”

Community puts best foot forward at JWW’s Walk to End Genocide Read More »

Shmuley Boteach reveals Stephen Bannon’s wall of promises

Leave a Comment / United States /

The man who calls himself “America’s Rabbi” revealed the agenda of America’s most powerful nationalist in a photo op with Stephen Bannon.

Shmuley Boteach, an author, speaker and adviser to several celebrities, tweeted a photo of himself with Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, on Tuesday.

It was not the first time that Boteach, who ran for Congress as a Republican in 2012, has posted a photo with Bannon — the driving force behind immigration policies that triggered nationwide protest and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, the far-right news site.

Bannon, who leads the so-called nationalist bloc of Trump advisers, famously has an itemized agenda of goals handwritten on a whiteboard in his office. And because that whiteboard was the backdrop for Boteach’s photo, it is now (partially) the world’s to see.

Bannon’s list on immigration goals, for example, has a few items checked off, while others remain unfulfilled. On the checked-off list are goals like “Hire 5,000 more border patrol agents,” which Trump called for in a February executive order but which has yet to be implemented, and “Restore the Secure Communities Program,” a reference to an immigration enforcement program restored in a January executive order.

Others are checked off but not completed, like “Suspend the Syrian refugee program” and “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions.” These were both provisions of Trump’s two travel bans, issued in January and March, but both have been struck down by federal courts. (Most of the large Jewish organizations opposed both plans, although a few on the right embraced them.)

Also on Bannon’s list? The words “Iran deal” and “Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.” These presumably refer to Trump’s pledges to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and to scrap or renegotiate the 2015 agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Neither has happened.

For what it’s worth, Bannon wasn’t Boteach’s only photo buddy on Tuesday, when he attended a celebration of Israel’s Independence Day at the White House. Among others, the famously self-promotional spiritual leader posed with David Friedman, the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, as well as with Anti-Defamation League National Director Jonathan Greenblatt, who once objected to Bannon’s White House appointment on the grounds that he “presided over the premier website of the ‘alt-right’ — a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists.”

Supporters of Bannon, however, have tended to agree with Bannon’s own characterization of Breitbart News as “the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America.”

Shmuley Boteach reveals Stephen Bannon’s wall of promises Read More »

The All the Rivers exchange, part 1: Beyond the Borderlife scandal

Leave a Comment / Domain's Guest, Israel, News, Rosner's Domain /

Dorit Rabinyan was born in Kefar-Saba, Israel and wrote her first novel, Persian Brides, at age twenty one. An award-winning international bestseller translated into ten languages, Persian Brides established her as the voice of a new generation in Israel. Rabinyan won the Israeli Film Academy Award for best television drama of 1997 for Shuli’s Fiancé, and the Eshkol Prize for her second novel, Strand of a Thousand Pearls. She lives in Tel Aviv.

The following exchange will focus on Rabinyan’s book All the Rivers (Random House, 2017), a controversial novel that tells the story of an affair between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man.

***

Dear Dorit,

All the Rivers is the title of your novel. Borderlife is the title of a scandal you were involved in. For those of my readers who might not remember the story, let me recap it: last year, Israel’s Ministry of Education decided not to include your bestselling novel Borderlife on its list of required reading for the matriculation exams. The decision was not unordinary, but the reasoning given for it was indeed different: “Marrying a non-Jew is not what the education system wishes to endorse.” That is, because Borderlife chronicles a love story between a Jewish (Israeli) woman and a Muslim (Palestinian) man.

Let me begin our exchange by asking you the following three questions:

1. Did you choose the name All the Rivers for the English translation (and not stick with Borderline) in the hope that people will connect with your book rather than focus on the scandal?

2. Do you think it is even possible to read your book today without the intrusive presence of the scandal associated with it?

3. And here is a somewhat vaguer question: are your main characters, Liat the Israeli and Hilmi the Palestinian, aware of the fact that their love story was deemed unfit for schoolchildren in Israel – and if they are, how has this awareness changed them?

Best,

Shmuel

***

Dear Shmuel,

Replacing the title with All the Rivers had nothing to do with that scandal. Borderlife was a working title that I was never quite satisfied with. Though it did capture the theme of boundaries I develop throughout the book, that title wasn’t poetic enough for my taste. When Will Murphy, my editor at Random House, suggested All the Rivers, I immediately loved it for its elegant resonance of the sea. It echoes the sea without actually mentioning it, very much like the book does: The Mediterranean plays a major role in the book, as it does in the lives of the characters and the myths they grew up on. Above all, it folds the unconsciousness – where all rivers of our fears and our desires run to. And by “our” I refer to both Israelis and Palestinians.

Regarding the second question – I do believe my literary work stands on its own merits and hope it will be effective for the English reader, regardless of the political scandal it caused in Israel. The Ministry of Education report came out 18 months after the book was published in Hebrew and was very well-received by my local readership. Yet if this notorious labeling by the Israeli government ironically adds appeal to the book and leads the curious reader to open the book’s cover, it is then my job to keep him or her reading. For instance, readers in Italy chose All the Rivers as one of their ten favorite novels of 2016 – This cannot be credited to the book ban, but to my story’s strengths. Writing, very much like reading, is a very intimate and personal space. Nowadays politics occupies our minds far too much to let it interrupt our enjoyment of literature too.

As to the third question – needless to say, I didn’t address my writing to young readers and obviously never had the consideration of ‘Will it or will not it not be taught in literature classes’ in my mind. Now, with respect to the “what if” scenario: not only do I find awareness to be the worst enemy of the novelist’s craft, but in this story in particular it’s my characters’ over-awareness to what their love story in New York might generate back home that formulates their relationship as a hidden secret. Defining it as a fantastic adventure is the first condition that allows them to create this symbiotic universe of just them two. Awareness such as you’re suggesting would have been a pouring, disastrous rain on their fragile sandcastle. It’s the demon they are fighting to chase away.

The All the Rivers exchange, part 1: Beyond the Borderlife scandal Read More »