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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

A Conversation with Novelist Josh Henkin

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment, Old Stories /

Josh Henkin will read from his new book, “Swimming Across the Hudson,” Mon., May 12, 7 p.m. at Dutton’s on San Vivente.Josh Henkin’s paternal grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi who lived in the United States for 50 years without ever learning to speak English. Still, the author was able to forge a strong connection with the old man, the kind of bond that transcended language and linked Henkin to a people and a past.

In “Swimming Across the Hudson,” Henkin’s deft and restrained debut novel, he examines such notions of connectedness and group identification through Ben, his protagonist. One of two adopted sons, Ben is raised in a bookish, upper-middle-class Jewish household, where secular liberalism and religious tradition both figure prominently. He is sent reeling into the muddy waters of identity confusion when he discovers that his biological mother — whom he had always assumed was also Jewish — isn’t.

To characterize this book as a “Who is a Jew?” novel would be crudely inaccurate. It’s more universal and emotionally layered than that. Still, as Henkin himself readily acknowledged in an interview by phone from somewhere in Kalamazoo, Mich. (one stop on a 35-city book tour), the identity questions sparked by Ben’s initial discovery seem particularly relevant in times such as ours, when the ironclad rules of destiny are at odds with a daunting array of modern choices.

What makes one a Jew? What makes one a mother or father? Or, as in the case of Ben’s brother Jonathan, a homosexual? Ben’s search for himself inevitably leads to the past, which exerts an emotional pull as strong and evocative as the Yiddish cadences of a beloved grandfather.

“The facts of this book are invented in the sense that I’m not adopted and I have two brothers, neither of whom are adopted or gay,” Henkin said. “But the feeling is true…. Adoption is a metaphor for not being able to entirely escape the past, for how we are tied to where we came from. It is also about how the communities we belong to are multiple and not always entirely by choice.”

The powerful way in which Jewish identity’s genetic component so preoccupies Henkin’s main character, the author said, partly has to do with Judaism’s uneasy position as neither a race or a faith.

“The tension between a Judaism about belief or a Judaism of descent is, I think, an uncomfortable topic for many of us, even though we often sort of accept the latter without really thinking about it,” Henkin said. “Race is essentialist. For example, it would be hard to conceive of someone discovering they were black.

“But we live with an extraordinary degree of choice that didn’t exist before…. I think that Jewish-American writers today — to the extent that they are writing fiction with Jewish content — are telling a different story than, let’s say, Roth or Bellow. This younger generation is somewhat ambivalent about assimilation.”

Much like his characters, Henkin grew up in a relatively observant home — a balance of his own father’s Orthodox upbringing and his mother’s more secular childhood.

“I still believe I’m fairly traditional,” he said. “I keep kosher. I observe Shabbat to a degree. I live in Ann Arbor, Mich., and am involved in the Michigan Hillel. My feelings about belief are complicated, and I don’t ally myself with any particular movement. For me, Judaism is largely about ritual and family. It’s not the only part of my life, but it’s an important part.”

Understandably, Henkin resists ghettoizing labels such as “Jewish fiction” or “women’s fiction,” which relegate work into artificially constructed genres and reduce writers to their ethnicity or gender. It’s a preoccupation that he regards as a sign of the times.

“Since writing this book, I have gotten a few hostile questions, although not many,” he said. “Mostly along the lines of, ‘Who are you to write about gay characters if you’re not gay?’ and ‘Who are you to write about adoption if you weren’t adopted?’ That’s unfortunate political correctness. I had one interesting experience when a gay reading group called my publicist because they were interested in reading my book. They asked her if I was gay. When she said no, they declined, which is this silliness taken to its extreme…. It negates the very idea of what literary fiction can do. You know, I still remember a line from this character in the film “Shadowlands” who said, “I read so that I’m not alone.” For me, that really sums it up.”

Henkin will sign and read from “Swimming Across the Hudson” at Dutton’s Books in Brentwood on May 12, at 7 p.m.

A Conversation with Novelist Josh Henkin Read More »

Stepping Stones

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Israel is preparing a package of gestures designed to revive the Mideast peace negotiations that have been frozen since work began on a contentious Jewish housing project at Har Homa in East Jerusalem two months ago.

The measures are expected to include firm steps toward building homes for Arabs in Jerusalem and the restoration of residence rights in the holy city to hundreds of Palestinians who forfeited them by moving out.

A government spokesman, Moshe Fogel, said this week that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was determined to prove that he was not bluffing about Arab housing. “He wants to see 3,000 new Arab homes materialize,” Fogel said, adding that this was the best answer to Palestinian charges that Netanyahu was interested only in “Judaizing” the city, which both peoples claim as their capital.

The Israelis are also contemplating a more flexible approach on various unfulfilled commitments made by the previous Labor government under the interim agreement — so long as the Palestinians resume full-blooded cooperation in the war on terror.

Among the issues being considered are Palestinian air and sea ports in the Gaza Strip; a safe-passage road link between Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank and Gaza; and access for Palestinian workers to jobs in Israel, from which they are frequently barred by security closures.

The Palestinians remain skeptical, however, about whether Netanyahu can or will deliver. The Bar-On fiasco over the dubious appointment of an underqualified lawyer to the post of attorney general has left him both weaker and more dependent on hard-liners in his right-wing and religious coalition.

He can no longer hold the threat of a national-unity government with Labor over his disaffected ministers. As former Washington correspondent Akiva Eldar put it in a wry Ha’aretz column, “The Bar-On scandal has removed only Shimon Peres from the government.”

“[Netanyahu] wants to see 3,000 new Arab homes materialize.” —

Moshe Fogel, government spokesman

The Interior Ministry, a fiefdom of the Sephardi Shas party, is resisting the prime minister’s attempt to stop its confiscating Jerusalem identity cards from Arabs who have moved either abroad or to the West Bank suburbs. And Netanyahu himself is defying international pressure to stop building 6,500 Jewish homes on Har Homa.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat complains that the Israeli government is not interested in salvaging the peace process. Speaking to reporters on his return from talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo last weekend, he accused Netanyahu of “continuing to violate signed agreements.” He recognized the “good intentions” of Ezer Weizman, with whom he was meeting on the edge of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, but he also noted that the figurehead president could offer no more than a gentle warming of the atmosphere.

In the longer term, Israelis and Palestinians reluctantly acknowledge that their best hopes lie with the United States. Dennis Ross, President Clinton’s Middle East trouble-shooter, was returning to the region on Wednesday. Under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Washington seems to have resigned itself to a more active role.

It has been pressing Netanyahu to come up with confidence-building measures, and American officials are now expected to take part in all negotiating sessions. Previously, the Clinton administration preferred to let the two sides solve their own problems, reserving its intervention for the final, critical stages, as it did over the Hebron redeployment in January.

This is clearly no longer enough. David Afek, the sober head of the Israeli Foreign Ministry research department, went so far last week as to pronounce the peace process dead. It will take all of Uncle Sam’s skill and leverage to resurrect it.

In an internal briefing that was leaked to the local media within hours, Afek reported that most foreign governments blamed Israel for the stalemate. He urged ministers to take the initiative and prove them wrong. Otherwise, he said, things could only get worse.

Aides to Foreign Minister David Levy denounced Afek’s assessment as a “provocation.” But it begins to look as if someone is paying attention.

All rights reserved by author.

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A Woman’s Voice

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My friend Jane and I met for dinner last week andhad a good laugh about death. California’s political campaign season is just commencing, and we were discussing, in an off hand way, what my husband, an attorney, might have made of an upcoming ballot proposition were he still among us.

“It’s amazing that he’s still dead,” I said,without quite knowing what I meant. Simultaneously, Jane and I let out a roar, a “yipes!” of astonishment, as people do when they touch something hot, or come too close to the sitra atra, what kabbalists call “the other side.”

“It’s a bore, isn’t it!” Jane said, rising to the occasion. “Still dead, after all this time.”

Jane’s father, Harold, is still dead, too. He died years ago of a painful illness. He was a large, strapping former football player who exuded robust physicality and wisdom. One ofthose men who add extra wattage to the earth’s light.

“It’s impossible that he’s really gone,” she said.”I want to say to my father: ‘Enough already. I’ve learned to live without you. I’m not mourning anymore. It’s safe for you to comeback.'”

It’s yet another yahrtzeit, this one No. 11. And strangely, I, too, feel safe. The brutal purple blossoms of the jacaranda tree no longer assault my eye sight as they did years ago after the funeral. Our daughter, Samantha, has burst out of childhood and is almost ready to drive a car. The icicles of loss don’t shiver down my grieving back anymore.

And Burton himself is ancient history: He died before the advent of fax and modem (though he was among the first to own a car phone) or self-stick postage stamps. We are living in two different worlds, he and I, the Before and the After. The dead don’t grow or expand their horizons, you know.

But they do call to us, in their own time. And each May, at yahrtzeit, death comes for a visit, bringing its own pots and pans to prepare its own food, much like my grandfather, who kept kosher, long ago. Death drinks its schnapps out of a yahrtzeitglass and sits down at the table to talk for the 24 hours or so untilt he candle of memory is consumed. And I, like a character in a Kafka short story, wait on death and clear the crumbs of its wisdom off the tablecloth, trying to glean a message from this force beyond my control. As a temporary visitor, death has its charms, afterall.

By an accident of the Jewish calendar, Burton’s yahrtzeit always falls around Mother’s Day. The conjoining of the twoby now seems right to me, though it is hardly the sappy vision of suburban complacency that the makers of Hallmark cards had in mind. Each year, I try to choose which to honor, birth or death. Butinevitably, the two come together, in the mixed bag that is life.

That last Mother’s Day, Burt called our cousinWillie from the hospital and had her buy me a necklace of tourmaline hearts. I sat with him on his narrow bed, the hearts stared upthreateningly to me. Two days later, Burton was gone, and my life as a single mother began.

But death has always been present at my family’s Mother’s Day. When I was a child, my mother spent the day in a kind of mournful haze, recalling her own mother who had died when Mom was12. She felt cheated, and there was nothing I could do to make up for it. Death sat at our breakfast table, where my brother and I served our mother homemade pancakes. She was appreciative, but distant. Dead, my mother was thinking. Still dead.

Eventually, and far too young, I learned about the perils of love and the cost of personal connection that is the true human dilemma. We spend a lifetime building a network of comfort and stability with parents, siblings, children, doomed to fervid mourning when they’re gone. The reward for loving well is grieving well. The cost of weaving is in the tear. We live in the here and now, but the sitra atra is always close by.

As we studied last week’s Torah portion, Tazria, the laws of child birth, the rabbi asked for a show of hands: Who among us in the sanctuary had never suffered miscarriages, abortions, infertility? Who among the rest had not yet lost a parent or a sibling? We are all experienced in the litany of grief. We stand in the shadow of those who are still, still dead.

Our modern world, of course, is notoriously uncomfortable about death. Not for us — the washing of the body, the sitting with the corpse, the acknowledgment that this end will beours. All we’ve done is suppress the truth. It comes out obsessively, ridiculously, inopportunely. Why do we endlessly watch the funerals of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa? Why do we cry at the death of Paul McCartney’s wife, Linda? It’s easier to hurt for the grieving Beatle than to serve the memory of our own.

I prefer the Chassidic way, and the tales that give death the power and the majesty it is due.

Here, for example, is the 19th-century story of Rabbi Loew, who tried to subvert the Angel of Death. One day, the Angel of Death came into Rabbi Loew’s town near Yom Kippur. He carried with him a long scroll on which was inscribed the names of those synagogue members who were to die by plague in the coming year.The rabbi confronted the Angel of Death and ripped from his hands the scroll. He tore off the list, throwing the parchment into the fire.Almost every one was saved; but one name was left on the scroll, and it was his own.

I like this guy: He knew what the odds were. But at least he went out fighting.

Marlene Adler Marks is senior columnist at The Jewish Journal. Her e-mail address is wmnsvoice@aol.com. Beginning onMay 16, she will teach “Writing and Reading for Heart and Soul” at the Skirball Cultural Center.

A Woman’s Voice Read More »

LETTERSUJ Layoffs

Leave a Comment / Letters to the Editor, Old Stories /

It appears that The Jewish Journal, in its haste to publish an article about “doings” at the University of Judaism, was prepared to forgo a great deal of accuracy. Most of the information reported in “UJ Layoffs” (May 2) was incorrect, including the actual number of layoffs (fewer than three), the amount of the deficit, the size of our staff, Dr. Wexler’s supposed absence from Los Angeles (he actually spoke to The Journal’s editor-at-large) and the assumptions made about our rabbinical school endowment. Furthermore, none of the individuals quoted in the article were in a position to know about University finances or decision- making processes.

Unfortunately, The Journal was ready to sacrifice the privacy of three talented professionals by publishing their names. Ironically, it is still quite possible that all, or some of, the three will be with us next year.

After-the-fact corrections mean little once misstatements are published, and the harm done to institutions and to individuals is not easily repaired.

Robert Wexler

President

Francis Maas

Chairman of the Board

Robert Eshman responds:

Any inaccuracies in the story are my responsibility, and I apologize for them. However, it is important to note the following facts:

1) The layoffs at the University of Judaism provoked anxiety and dismay among many in the UJ community, and I believed that The Journal had no choice but to write about them in a timely manner. Because of the long Passover holiday, I had limited time to report the story.

2) Among the many people I interviewed in preparation for the story were a dean, a person closely affiliated with the University, a Hillel director, a university regent and the UJ’s PR director. I relied on these sources for the facts and figures I used.

3) I must point out that the PR director refused to confirm or deny the facts and figures, or even provide proper spelling of the names of people involved. She also had no knowledge of any layoffs.

4) I made numerous, increasingly frantic and, ultimately, futile attempts to reach President Wexler or Vice President for Administration Mark Bookman. Each time I called, I left word that we intended to run the story, that we were on a 2 p.m. deadline, and that I very much wanted their point of view.

5) I wrote that President Wexler “was not in town at the time of the layoffs” (during the long weekend). Obviously, I knew he was in town by Wednesday — I tried all morning and afternoon to reach him.

6) What I consider the most egregious charge — that I “sacrificed the privacy” of individuals — confounds me. The people whose stories I reported spoke with me at length and on-the-record. Being laid off for them was a source of some anger and some dismay, but hardly a source of shame or embarrassment, as President Wexler and Chairman Maas seem to imply.

7) If I misreported the number of layoffs, it was because I conflated those laid off with people who were informed late in the academic year their contracts for various UJ posts would not be renewed. I know this number is higher than “fewer than three.”

8) Again, there is no excuse for the facts I did get wrong. However, I also understand that President Wexler and Chairman Maas do not dispute the major revelations of my story: that a round of surprising layoffs did occur, that neither Wexler nor Rabbi Gordis did the actual laying off, that the layoffs came about as a result of long-talked-about financial problems, and that the UJ had to do what it must to stay viable.

American Mensch

Thank you for the excellent article by Michael Berenbaum (“Jackie & Campy,” April 18). I have one little problem with the remembrance cited from Duke Snider, regarding Jackie Robinson’s participation in two sports, baseball and track, on the same day, between games of a doubleheader, at Pasadena City College.

Those of us who attended UCLA with Jackie (1939-1941), remember the incident, a single affair, as occurring in the Spring of 1940 or ’41. There was a track meet at Spaulding Field, on the campus, and a baseball game at Sawtelle, across the street from the west side of the campus. Jackie did leave the baseball field for a short time to run across Veteran Avenue in time to participate in the long jump, his specialty at that time. As I remember the story, he didn’t have time to change to his track clothes, but won the event anyway wearing his baseball uniform.

Perhaps some of your other readers will remember the story as I do. Thanks again for a timely article about a real American mensch.

Robert E. Green

Sherman Oaks

Mercer vs. Miscikowski

Marlene Adler Marks wrote a provocative column (“The Jewish Vote,” April 11), with some wise insights into the elements at play in the Riordan-Hayden campaign. However, she misses the mark by a stupefying margin on the Miscikowski-Mercer campaign when she writes that they are “…two women so similar in political views and credentials that some voters could not tell them apart.”

Cindy Miscikowski — with an impeccable record in zoning, planning, public safety, environmental concerns and administration — ran an immaculately decent capaign, dealing with matters of concern to the entire 11th District. Georgia Mercer, with an appalling disregard for the truth, and a willingness to deal in innuendo and outright lies, ran an attack-dog campaign, ignoring the issues because she has neither the academic training nor the on-the-job experience to deal with those issues.

Where are Mercer’s credentials in government? She claims to be ” an outsider,” but the fact is, she’s been an insider for a long time. She was an insider during the Bradley administration. She’s been an insider in the Riordan administration. She stood with the insiders in support of allowing councilmembers to raise their slush fund from $10,000 to $75,000 apiece while Miscikowski stood against that, as the voters did. Mercer served briefly as Mayor Riordan’s representative in the San Fernando Valley. During that time, she cannot point to one initiative taken, one action that resulted in positive change, one problem solved to make the Valley a better place to live.

On the other hand, it was Miscikowski who put together the city-state-federal homeowners group that built the post office in Tarzana. It was Miscikowski who fought for the Quimby funds to purchase park land in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was Miscikowski who went to Sacramento to press for, and get, the Big Wild Park for Los Angeles. It was Miscikowski who directed the fight to close the one-hour motels on Ventura and Van Nuys boulevards. It was Miscikowski who, as the councilman’s representative, acted to stop the developers from building what would have become a traffic nightmare on Havenhurst and Ventura in the Valley, etc., etc.

I enjoy and respect Ms. Marks’ work. I read her column religiously. However, sometimes she makes mistakes. And saying that Mercer and Miscikowski are “similar in political views and credentials” is one doozy of a mistake.

Ernie Frankel

Los Angeles

In Love With Israel

I recently returned from a month-long mission of chizuk (strength) and solidarity to Israel. For the first week, I joined up with a group of about 30 people from the New York area, Canada and Texas. I was the only one from the West Coast. We visited many of the West Bank settlements, in a very intensive program, meeting with, and having serious discussions with, residents and leaders, including members of the Knesset. We visited Hebron, Kiryat Arba, Efrat, Shiloh, Bet El, Gush Katif, and then, on to other places such as Jerusalem.

After about a week, most of the group left Israel for their return flight home. I remained in Israel, on my own for another three weeks. For me, that period was even more intensive and inspiring than the first week. My center of operations was Bet El, from where I travelled to many parts of Israel. I came to feel the pulse of the country.

People really wanted to share their strength and courage at this time in Israel’s history. Upon reflection, I believe I received much more in return. I tried to live as close as I could to the average Israeli resident for those weeks. I used the public transporation system everywhere and found it splendid in service, and I have a new respect for its bus drivers. I walked a great deal too, as I feel that is a very good way to see the country and its people.

I felt greatly elevated — emotionally, spiritually and physically. I visited Ashkelon, Tel Aviv, Rishon LeZion, Haifa, kibbutzim and other places. I felt at home… better than home. My only regret was that I had to leave.

If I was asked if I would go to Israel now, since the latest incident in Israel [the March 21 suicide bomb attack at a Tel Aviv cafe], I would not hesitate for a moment. We Jews, who have been blessed with an independent Israel, should give serious thought to making aliyah. Israel is our home… our real home.

Bernard Nichols

Los Angeles

Wheelchair Drive

The Skirball Cultural Center and Wheels for Humanity will be collecting wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, baby car seats, commodes and strollers Sat., May 17, at the Skirball Cultural Center. Recycled wheelchairs will be refurbished and distributed in 11 poor nations. Hours for drop off are 9 a.m.-noon. (818) 766-8000.

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The Third Generation

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As the son of Holocaust survivors, Adi Liberman grew up, as many second-generation children did, with a sense of profound loss. He knew that he had no grandparents, that his mother, a hidden child during the war, had lost her parents at age 5, and that his father’s father died before the war and his father’s mother in Auschwitz.

Now, as he watches his 27-month-old daughter, Hannah, growing up, Liberman wrestles with a mix of emotions about his own upbringing and about the legacy he wants to pass on to his child.

Above, Adi Liberman; at left, Dr. Aaron Hass

“A lot of us in the second generation criticize our parents because they can’t separate enough, for wanting to live their childhood through us. And here we have these children, and the children have these grandparents we never had,” Liberman said. Now, he said, he has a new appreciation of what his parents went through in their search for vicarious pleasure.

“I see how much my daughter enjoys the relationship [with her grandparents], and I want to be the grandchild too. I want to have the relationship with my parents that my daughter is having with them and that I never had with my own grandparents,” said Liberman, chief of staff to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter and an executive-board member of Second Generation, a group that meets regularly at the Jewish Federation Building in Los Angeles.

Liberman, like other children of survivors who themselves have become parents, has had to come to terms with how, what and when to pass on his legacy to his children, the third generation. Although much has been written, and is being written, about survivors and their children, little, so far, has been said about this new generation of survivors’ descendants, many of whom are still very young.

While still grappling with the overwhelming impact that his parents’ experiences have had on his own life, Liberman, nevertheless, wants his daughter to know, from an early age, about the Holocaust and how it has impacted her life.

“I think it would be just shocking to one day tell our child at age 8 or 10, ‘Here are all the horrible, grisly things that happened, that are part of your past.’ I would rather her confront it at an earlier age.”

Part of his desire, Liberman admitted, comes out of his own need to have his daughter relate to his own difficult experience growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust.

“It definitely, totally colored who I am,” he said. “I want her to absorb it in such a way that she feels it as coming from within her. Part of it is, I feel, how can she understand me, my brother, my sister, my parents, my family without being able to understand this?”

On the other hand, Liberman wonders if, by passing on this legacy, he is perhaps placing too heavy a burden on his daughter — the same weight of memory his parents passed on to him.

“Why should my children feel this?” he said. “Maybe I should give them a break and let them break free of this cycle.”

The answers to these questions, of course, are anything but easy and certainly not uniform. Just as sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors were affected differently by their parents’ experiences during the war, the experiences of the third generation will be even more varied, suggests Dr. Aaron Hass, the author of two highly acclaimed books on the Shoah’s legacy, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation” and “The Aftermath: Living With the Holocaust.” Hass, a professor of psychology at Cal State Dominguez Hills and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is himself the child of Holocaust survivors and the parent of three young children. Hass, who has lectured widely on the Holocaust, says that he is often asked about the right time to start speaking to children about the subject.

“My response is one that I follow in my own home: It’s not age so much that matters as the temperament of the child. If you have a child who is frightened, then that needs to be taken into consideration.” Personally, Hass says, he is careful when talking to his children, ages 12, 8 and 5, making sure not to engender the kind of fear that so haunted many members of the second generation. At the seder table last month, he made general references to the Holocaust and talked about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which began on Pesach 1943.

“There is a difference between that and sitting your child down and saying, ‘I want you to watch this movie with me. I want you to know about this,'” Hass said.

For Dan Rothblatt, director of resource development for the American Jewish Committee, the legacy that he learned as the son of survivors is one that he plans to pass on carefully to his daughter, who is almost 6. Although his daughter has fond memories of baking cookies at age 3 with her great-grandmother, whose cooking skills helped her survive a Viennese prison during the war, Rothblatt still believes that the Holocaust is “too complicated an issue” for such a young child.

Also active in Second Generation, he says that many of the members, now parents, are wrestling with the issue of translating the message of the Holocaust to a third generation. Although some Jews have relied on institutions, such as the Jewish Federation Council’s Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, to do the telling for them, that isn’t enough for members of the second generation, for whom the Holocaust is totally personal, Rothblatt said. “It’s the story of the blood that runs in our veins and the people who bore us. It’s not like some biblical tale — they killed our families. That’s about as real as anything can be.”

Rothblatt and his wife always light candles in their home during Yom HaShoah as both a personal remembrance and a reminder of the 6 million Jews who were murdered. But they decided not to bring their daughter to Holocaust Remembrance Day services this year.

“She is still worrying about a shark coming up through the bathroom drain,” Rothblatt said. “To put in her mind that there were once armies of people out to get her, me and everyone Jewish is too terrifying a thing.”

Jeremy Kingston Cynamon, the 3-year-old child of two second-generation parents, has been learning about the Holocaust almost since birth. At just 3 months, he sat in his mother’s arms as Marilyn Kingston gave a speech at a Yom HaShoah service at University Synagogue. Since then, Kingston and her husband, Harry Cynamon, have taken their son to other Holocaust Remembrance events, the Holocaust Museum in Washington and to Israel to meet the artist who made a special Holocaust memorial plaque for her in-laws’ temple in Florida.

“I know he doesn’t understand everything, but I feel it’s important for him to be there, whatever he absorbs,” Kingston said. “I don’t want my son learning about [the Holocaust] late in life. I want him to know it from his parents and grandparents. I think knowledge is really your only defense against oppression, against genocide.”

Growing up in what she describes as a happy home, with “extremely lovely, insightful parents” and a grandmother who early on told her and her brother about the family’s war experiences, has given Kingston a model for passing the knowledge of a painful past onto her own son without traumatizing him, she said.

Jeremy “will always be different than his American peers,” just by virtue of having four grandparents who are survivors, Kingston said. “I certainly was different, and so was my husband. The effect will be less dramatic for [Jeremy]…[but] he will know that most of his family was killed, and he will be affected by that in a way that others won’t.”

The Third Generation Read More »

Taking on the Bible

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment, Old Stories, Rob Eshman /

Remember that great scene in “Inherit the Wind,” when Clarence Darrow asks William Jennings Bryan if a book that details rape, incest, slaughter, nudity and sodomy should be banned? The fundamentalist Bryan answers, “Of course!” and Darrow, with a flourish, whips out a copy of the Bible and declares, “Then you must ban this book!”

Well, Jonathan Kirsch is the Clarence Darrow of literary Bible critics. His newest book, “The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible” (Ballantine, $27), zeroes in on the juicy parts: Lot’s daughters copulate with their father. A traveler offers his daughter up to a mob to be gang-raped and killed. A man rapes his half sister, then throws her out into the street.

It’s all there, in the holiest of holies. And in the oppressive flood of mass-consumption Bible criticism books out this year, Kirsch’s book surfaces for taking on the Bible in all its wild excess. And making sense of it.

“A haze of piety surrounds the Bible,” Kirsch says, during an interview in his Century City law office. “But it had human authorship. I was always curious about what this book really was and where it came from.”

Kirsch, 47, a former Newsweek correspondent who now practices law, was inspired by writers such as Harold Bloom, whose “The Book of J” sought to tease apart biblical authorship.

“There’s tremendous diversity in the Bible,” says Kirsch, who also serves as pro bono counsel for The Jewish Journal. Different authors, writing through different periods, influenced by common folk tales, divine insight, historical and political agendas, turned out a deep, complex document with one bottom line: “It’s always instructional,” says Kirsch.

Even the good parts.

“We have a tendency to reduce the Bible to Sunday-school stories,” he says. “But the Bible writers were willing to include all of it. Because they felt it was important.”

So Kirsch set about finding the touch points in what might be called the biblical saga. Each section of this lucid, well-crafted book begins with a retelling of a biblical tale that, in some cases is boldly violent and sexual. And riveting, it should be added. Kirsch is a talented storyteller and manages to translate the stories into familiar English without sacrificing their richness. Then, he dissects them, drawing on a wide range of biblical criticism as well as on his own original insights.

Take Judges 19. Kirsch retells the story of a traveling Levite who, in order to save himself from a violent mob, offers them his concubine. After the woman is gang-raped and killed, the Levite dismembers her body and sends the pieces to the four corners of Israel to incite vengeance against the tribe that committed the deed.

In a chapter entitled “God and Gyno-Sadism,” Kirsch explores the various meanings behind such a horrific story. It might be a parody of male arrogance written by a woman, or perhaps a defense of the monarchy written at a time of near-anarchy. Kirsch lays out a convincing case for both.

In his book “God: A Biography,” Jack Miles writes that the Bible is truly for “adults only.” Of course, that’s hyperbole. Part of any great work’s worth is its ability to appeal and speak to many ages, over many generations.

But, for many generations, the very parts that render the Bible NC-17 have been excised from public consumption. Kirsch’s book is a salvo in a crusade to learn from all that the Bible has to offer. “We’ve suppressed [these stories],” he says. “For centuries, we’ve avoided them and pretended they’re not there.”

But, aside from better understanding these stories, what can we learn from them? Clearly, Kirsch’s agenda, his point, is not to titillate. (Note: If most of these stories titillate you, seek professional help). It is to build an argument for openness and tolerance.

“There’s tremendous moral diversity in the Bible,” he says, “and diversity of moral value is in itself a moral instinct. The Bible is more compassionate and understands a greater range of human behavior than we often do.”

Indeed, as chapter after chapter demonstrates, it is not the meek and well-behaved who get the most column inches of Holy Writ. “If you push the envelope of morality, you may play a role in sacred history,” Kirsch says.

Those aren’t lessons that would sit well with the fundamentalists among us today, just as they stuck in Bryan’s craw 75 years ago.

“The Bible is a map of the human heart,” Kirsch writes, “and no secret chamber or hidden passage is left out.”

Fortunately for us, Kirsch isn’t afraid of blood.

Painting by Botticelli (15th c.), showing Judith returning to Bethulia with the severed head of Holofernes. Illustration from My Jewish World, 1975


I.B. Singer: A Life

UCLA Professor Janet Hadda uncovers the contradictory journey of the great novelist

Janet Hadda’s captivating biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer begins with the story of Hadda herself as a miserable young graduate student.

On a “bleak snowy day” in 1968, wandering the Cornell University library, Hadda comes across a copy of “The Family Moskat,” by a writer unfamiliar to her. She opens it. “One paragraph in, and I was already hooked,” she writes. “By the time I finished, I had decided to get my hands on that culture, that world, that language.”

Hadda’s attraction to the Yiddish world that Singer resurrected through his writing would evolve into a career. The daughter of non-Yiddish-speaking German refugees, she studied at Columbia University and YIVO, eventually becoming professor of Yiddish at UCLA. She also trained as an analyst at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute.

She then turned her sights on Singer himself, her two fields of study being the perfect tools with which to dissect the author. Although she met him several times — and describes the meetings in finely wrought, revealing anecdotes — she realized that his character remained elusive. Setting off to uncover the facts of his life, she found herself surrounded by the kind of kantike menschen, or oddballs and difficult personalities, that populate his stories. Former lovers, recalcitrant nephews, litigious relatives all conspired to make researching her book an otherworldly, Singerian experience.

Fortunately, she stuck to it. The result, “Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life” (Oxford University Press, $27.50), is an unvarnished and bewitching account of the century’s most acclaimed Yiddish writer. In 215 pages that read with the speed and cutting insight of a Singer novella, Hadda, 51, brings her dual expertise as a Yiddishist and psychoanalyst to bear on a man who turns out to be someone altogether different than our image of him.

Since gaining international fame as the recipient of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, Singer has held a cherished place in American-Jewish hearts alongside grizzly ‘ol Ben-Gurion and Bubbe Golda. Just as we have mythologized the latter two, we have de-personified Singer, reducing him to a caricature of the grandfatherly storyteller, with little more on his mind than a spare little tale about rebbes and fools.

Hadda uncovered at least another side to Singer, and it’s dark, calculating, lonely and wounded.

The son of a weak, withdrawn father and a brilliant, morose mother, Singer grew up in the shadow of his gifted brother, Israel J. Singer, who went on to write “The Brothers Ashkenazi.” The Singer household was a cold, unloving place — Bashevis Singer, Isaac’s mother, abandoned a daughter, Hinde Esther, for the first three years of the girl’s life.

Hadda traces Singer’s lifelong sense of loneliness and depression to his neglected childhood. “Yitschok understood that his compulsion to write stemmed from misery,” writes Hadda, drawing on the observations of Singer himself.

Leaving behind the world of the shtetl, Singer came to the United States in 1935. He struggled here, working at the Yiddish-language Forverts, again in the shadow of his brother. His wife, Alma, to whom he had a strained 51-year marriage, supported him by working as a department-store sales clerk. (Singer was in his 60s before he earned enough as a writer for his wife to stop working.)

But the greatest hardship Singer faced was in writing for an audience whose world had been destroyed. In a telephone interview with The Journal, author Hadda described the dilemma: “He couldn’t go back. He would never go back. But his readers didn’t want to hear about the United States. He had to draw from a source he had abandoned early on.”

To do so, Singer perfected a technique of writing that seamlessly blended fact and fiction. The “infusion of reality” into fiction, writes Hadda, “provided relief from his forsaken solitude.” With his family and his entire childhood world dead, Singer could recreate, both in a more pleasing and healthy light. Thus, the rabbi of “In My Father’s Court” has all the erudition but none of the frailty and aloofness of Singer’s real father.

After Singer became famous, he began to work his literary legerdemain on himself. Those close to him often reviled Singer as mean-spirited, manipulative, lecherous and coldhearted — he abandoned his only son for 20 years and carried on a series of lengthy affairs. But the author nurtured a public image as a simple, wise Yiddish zaydie.

“He saw that it worked, and that’s what post-Holocaust American Jews wanted,” Hadda says.

The Old World charm, which Singer seemed to be able to turn on and off at will, worked media magic. Hadda still finds it remarkable that, in reporting on Singer’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the major newspapers overlooked Singer’s erudite, slightly aggrandizing speech as well as the anger the selection provoked among many Yiddish readers, who thought that Singer didn’t measure up.

For his part, Singer went so far as to keep knowledgeable Yiddishists away from the Swedish Academy so that their opinions wouldn’t influence the judges.

For a time, Hadda, confesses, the realization that Singer was not like his image upset her, and she even had a personal falling out with him. In some sense, she told The Journal, the book was “absolutely” her opportunity to work through her own conflicted images of him, to discover who he really was.

Sometimes, when Hadda relies too heavily on psychoanalytic training, her deliberations threaten to reduce Singer’s genius to a collection of classic symptoms. But, in the end, Hadda-the-Yiddishist wins out. Her portrait of Singer is sad, clear-eyed and awesomely complex.

It’s also loving. As much as a kantike mensch as Singer himself could be, he also gave life to a world Hadda, and millions more of us, still cherish.

“As the years have gone by, I see how much of Yiddish culture there was and how much is fading away,” Hadda says. “If there’s one person who has managed to uphold that culture, it’s him. And he did it through translation, and he did it by recreating himself.”

Before she began her project, one of Singer’s friends told Hadda: “You know, you’ll never be able to figure him out. He’s a contradiction.”

In “Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life,” Hadda has gone a long way toward proving that friend mistaken. — R.E.

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Never Forgetting Sarah

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I was thinking about my friend Lillian Ross last week as I was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge on my way north to an enzyme bath and massage in an outdoor Japanese tea house in Occidental. (I was celebrating freedom after submitting my manuscript for a book on families and family life.) Lillian’s the one who, when asked by her children what she wanted on her 70th birthday, told them that she always had this desire to walk across the bridge with them.

Lillian is a pixie with Jungian wisdom. I wrote a column about her in 1992 for the Los Angeles Times. She began writing children’s books after her 60th birthday, with titles such as “Buba Leah and Her Paper Children” — the tale of an old shtetl woman whose only contact with her children in America were the letters they wrote to her. Every time Buba Leah read a letter, she kissed it and thanked God that her children had not forgotten her.

I thought about Lillian’s Buba Leah character a week later, while I sat on the floor of my kitchen and examined my grandmother’s Passover dishes — the Depression-blue glass dishes and the plain, white Syracuse china plates that I see at the Santa Cruz crafts fair selling for prices my Grandmother Sarah would never pay. I picked up her blue-and-white tea cup, made in Japan, and I can picture her holding it as she sat at her small Formica kitchen table (also on sale at the crafts fair), sipping Lipton’s and eating honey cake. I kissed the cup as Buba Leah kissed her letters, and I thanked God for the memories of Sarah.

Simon & Schuster may have my work, but I am Sarah’s girl, and Passover was our holiday. Pesach was the only time I was allowed to help her in the kitchen — a room entered by family members while looking over their shoulders.

My grandmother was the culinary commander in chief. If I asked her what she made for supper, she’d say, “Supper.” If I asked her what kind of meat, she’d snap, “Meat.” But Passover was different. Together, we scraped the scales off the fish given to my Uncle Al from guys with hooks who worked the docks of New York. We washed the dishes that now decorate my table. We brushed the crumbs out of shelf corners.

Sarah never shared her kitchen with her five daughters or her other granddaughters. Today, 15 years after her death, I am the only one of Sarah’s girls who makes a seder. This year, the California wing of the family decided to have the seder earlier than the rest of the Jewish population so that we could be together. I actually thought, “What would Sarah say about this?” Besides having to eat the bread of affliction for two extra days, would she disapprove? “Whoever enlarges upon the telling of the exodus from Egypt, those persons are praiseworthy.”

Sarah never shared her kitchen with her five daughters or her other granddaughters. Today, 15 years after her death, I am the only one of Sarah’s girls who makes a seder.

Seated at my seder table, drinking wine from the same navy-blue glasses I used to abuse Manischewitz from, were three of Sarah’s grandchildren, their spouses, a great-great-granddaughter (my daughter) and my granddaughter. The youngest who knew Hebrew was Julia, my daughter.

We sang “Hinei Ma Tov,” and everyone sat down. I lit the candles; we told the story of the Exodus. Seventeen years ago, Julia asked why this night was different from any other night, and she asked again. She never hesitated — the words came through her, not with the speed of a 13-year-old anxious to get it over with, but with a joy that made us all feel connected to one another. My brother hid the afikomen, and my granddaughter, Kaya, found it. My cousin Hattie jangled the tambourine I brought back from a trip to Egypt as we sang songs, and my sister-in-law Alana made sure that we didn’t make any mistakes.

When we opened the door for Elijah and Miriam, I read a Chassidic saying: “If you always assume that the person sitting next to you is the Messiah waiting for some simple human kindness, you will soon come to weigh your words and watch your hands, and if the Messiah then chooses not to appear in your time, it will not matter.”

Sarah’s children had not forgotten her.

Linda Feldman, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is the co-author of “Where To Go From Here: Discovering Your Own Life’s Wisdom,” due out this fall from Simon & Schuster.

All rights reserved by author.

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Eastward Ho

Leave a Comment / Community, Old Stories, Rob Eshman, United States /

From where Phillip Liff-Grieff sits — literally — the Jewish community is looking better all the time.

Liff-Grieff is executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Greater San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys, and his office in Covina is at ground zero of a sprawling Jewish population. To his west lie the cities of Pasadena, La Cañada, Downey, Arcadia, Whittier, La Mirada and Azusa. To his east grow Claremont, Pomona, Diamond Bar, Ontario and — yes — Rancho Cucamonga.

Long gone are the days when those names served as little more than the butt of a Jack Benny joke. As Southern California continues to sprawl, and urbanites escape the Westside and young professionals seek their dream of a good job and a $200,000 five-bedroom home in Chino Hills, the San Gabriel Valley/Pomona region is expanding into a unique Jewish area of its own.

The community will come together to celebrate this growth in its annual festival, on Sunday, May 18, from noon to 4 p.m., at Covina Park in Covina. Between 1,000 and 2,000 people are expected to attend the event, which will feature an art show and sale, entertainment, children’s activities and plenty of food.

That number may be a small percentage of the actual Jewish population. Although no recent demographic statistics exist, Liff-Grieff estimates that between 35,000 and 40,000 Jews live in his federation’s 1,200-square-mile region, an area the size of Rhode Island.

Job opportunities and affordable housing are the primary reasons Jews move to the area, said Liff-Grieff, and the population is largely professional, with numerous young families. A large percentage of educators and students live near the universities at Pasadena, Pomona and Claremont.

The mix, according to Rabbi Avi Levine of Temple Beth Israel in Pomona, is wide-ranging, with Jews of all different levels of knowledge, background and commitment. The region has 13 synagogues, two Chabad centers, two Jewish day schools and two preschools. What it doesn’t have, he said, is a visible Jewish presence.

“It’s more like Berkeley or San Francisco in that sense,” said Levine, who served, for several years, as a rabbi in Berkeley. “There’s no Jewish neighborhoods.”

Community Jewish activists say that the lack of an identifiable Jewish presence is the greatest challenge to community building.

“L.A. has signposts and landmarks, a sense of having other Jews around you,” said Liff-Grieff. “That really is lacking here.”

The only kosher restaurant, he said, is Noah’s Bagels. Jews who observe the laws of kashrut make regular trips into Los Angeles for supplies. The Jewish institutions that help promote a sense of Jewish belonging — museums, memorials, even community centers — are all lacking in the region. The Jewish population itself is far-flung. Levine estimates that there are not more than one or two other Jewish children in his children’s public-school classes.

(The irony doesn’t escape Liff-Grieff that, despite the currently limited Jewish presence, many parts of the region, such as Montebello and Downey, were actually created by Jewish developers, and Ontario was once home to huge chicken ranches operated by Eastern European social Zionists.)

As in many other primarily non-Jewish areas, synagogues then take on a critical and wide-ranging role. “Jewish life is hard to find,” said Brenda Rosenfeld, a GAIN program administrator who lives in Chino Hills. “So we have to create it ourselves.” Rosenfeld, who moved to the area from the San Fernando Valley 25 years ago, is active at Beth Israel, which now has 425 families. The synagogue has a full calendar of event programming, and is planning a summer camp as well.

The depth of synagogue life extends from the west, where the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, under the leadership of Rabbi Gilbert Kollin, has long been a mainstay, to Chino Hills, where a nascent chavurah found itself facing off against the religious right last holiday season.

Creating a larger sense of Jewish communal life, beyond the synagogue, remains a challenge, said Liff-Grieff, but not one unfamiliar even to big-city federations. The 3-year-old San Gabriel/Pomona Federation, which split off from the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, has used focus groups and marketing research to zero in on the needs of its constituents. Several tacks seem to be working:

* The 6,000 Federation donors now receive their own newsletter, The Jewish Community News, instead of The Jewish Journal. The News focuses only on local personalities and events. “No offense to The Journal,” said Federation president Douglas Graff, “but that was the biggest single thing in establishing our own identity.”

* The San Gabriel/Pomona Federation is organizing large events and gatherings to bring the community together. Along with the May 18 festival, it will hold the Celebration of Jewish Learning on June 1 at the Duarte Performing Arts Center to honor all graduates of Jewish learning programs. Plans are also underway for a “CyberFest,” sometime in October, to introduce residents to Jewish computer software and Internet resources; a mission to Israel this summer; and even a communal basketball tournament. Liff-Grieff said that he also plans to launch a web site for the community. “The need to connect is a core need, as important as Jewish education,” he said.

* The Federation has created or helped support an array of other outreach services to meet the needs of a variety of Jews; among these programs are the Jewish Con-nection — a Jewish singles network chaired by Steven Fuhrman of Alhambra — and a van service that takes senior citizens on field trips to places of Jewish interest. “People may tend to feel very isolated as Jews living outside L.A.,” said Jonathan Flaum, the San Gabriel/Pomona Federation’s program director. “Our job is to bring them together.”

An Israeli dance troupe performs at last year’s Jewish Federation of the Greater San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys annual festival in Covina.

Coming together has also helped in the rare times the community has faced anti-Semitism. Last August, neo-Nazis distributed anti-Semitic literature to schools and neighborhoods in Claremont, La Verne, Diamond Bar and Upland. Churches and synagogues quickly joined together to put out a “Zero Tolerance for Hate” statement, and the city of Claremont established a Human Relations Committee, under the chairmanship of local communal leader Dr. Jack Schecter.

Of greater concern, said Graff, is the religious right, which is seeking political footholds in some areas of the region. Last December, a struggle erupted in Chino Hills over the planned presentation of an overtly Christian religious Christmas pageant at a public elementary school. When some in the Jewish community protested, they drew the anger of many parents and several school board members affiliated with the religious right. The Chino Hills Chavurah’s compromise proposal to fund an off-campus performance was rejected. Eventually, the pageant was staged in April.

But such occurrences are rare, and the Jewish community continues to thrive. Enrollment in Jewish day schools is increasing. The Atid Day School in West Covina has 80 students, and Chaim Weizmann Day School in Pasadena boasts 110, up from the 60 when Graff, vice treasurer of an international engineering firm, first moved to the area 20 years ago.

And there is little cause to think that the reasons Jews have been drawn to the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys will disappear any time soon: the quieter pace, the safer streets, the smaller scale.

“It’s got to do with the quality of life,” said Graff. “We love it here.”

The Jewish Symphony performs at the 1995 festival.

Koufax, Knishes and Kids

at SFV

Festival

By Ruth Stroud, Staff Writer

Abraham, Moses and Sarah will be there. So will Sandy Koufax and Mark Spitz. The ancient biblical figures and modern-day sports heroes — in costume, of course — will be among the multitude of attractions at the Valley Jewish Festival, on June 1, at Los Angeles Pierce College in Woodland Hills.

The festival, a project of the Jewish Federation/Valley Alliance, is billed by its organizers as the largest outdoor Jewish gathering west of Chicago. Held every other year since the mid-1980s, the daylong food-, activity- and entertainment-packed fest attracted about 38,000 the last time it was held, in 1995.

“From Orthodox to Reform, from liberal to conservative, you name it, there’s going to be something appealing here for every Jewish person,” said Dan Shuster, who is chairing the event for the third time.

In keeping with this year’s theme of “Tradition,” exhibitors and vendors have been asked to create booths with cultural or historic significance. In addition to gawking at their favorite biblical and sports heroes, festival-goers will be able to learn about the origins of Hebrew names at one booth, learn how to braid challah at another and get a lesson on tzedakah at still another. Close to 200 nonprofit organizations will be on hand, including synagogues, Jewish day schools and camps, and a wide spectrum of Jewish community service- and social-action agencies.

Other attractions include:

* A two-acre children’s park that’s so extensive, it will require the services of about 200 volunteers to run it during the course of the day. Among the features will be carnival rides, arts and crafts, educational exhibits and a 23-foot-high rock, down which older children will be able to rappel (under close supervision, of course).

* A full schedule of entertainment sponsored by Hollywood’s famed Comedy Store, with a potpourri of Jewish comics doing their stand-up schtick between musical acts. Musical offerings will include Chicago’s nine-piece Maxwell Street Klezmer Band and the Israeli rock band ESTA, among others. Kids won’t be shortchanged in the entertainment department either: Musical, dance, martial arts and theatrical performances will be on tap at the children’s stage in the children’s park.

* A Jewish event without food, glorious food? Not a chance. From knishes to kugel, Chinese noodles to sushi, food booths will offer an abundance of international noshables — all kosher, natch.

* Learning sessions, led by a number of prominent Jewish teachers, including Rabbi Steven Jacobs and Cantor Caren Glasser of Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills, Rabbi Mordecai Finley of Ohr HaTorah and Rabbi Judith HaLevy of Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue.

The event, costly and complicated to stage, takes about a year to plan and prepare, said festival director Susan Bender, who has overseen the production of the past four festivals with the help of chairperson Shuster and a loyal group of about 30 community volunteers. “It’s like a family,” she said. “We really have a great time doing this.”

The festival, which began with the initial purpose of raising consciousness about the plight of Soviet Jews, has grown and changed over the years. Its main purpose now, Bender said, “is strictly community outreach,” with no fund-raising component, although an admission fee ($5 for adults, $2 for seniors and children aged 2 or older) is charged. By bringing together Jews of all ethnic and religious backgrounds, from an area stretching from Santa Barbara to Orange County, the festival promotes unity and solidarity, Bender said. “With everything that goes on in Los Angeles and the world, it’s important to have everyone get together for one day for pure celebration,” she said.

The festival’s corporate support has been growing as well, with more than half its $130,000 budget coming from sponsors this year. The list includes: Coca-Cola, Target, Health Net, Kaiser Permanente, Gelson’s Markets, Republic Bank, Mizrahi Bank, Summit Hotel, Western Bagel, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Business Journal, the Department of Water and Power, L.A. Parent and TO Printing. With additional support from the Federation and gate fees, Bender said the hope is that the festival will break even this year.

For more information on the Valley Jewish Festival, call (818) 587-3205.

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Israel at 49

Leave a Comment / Celebrations/Simchas, Community, Old Stories /

Looking for a traditional Israeli way to celebrate Yom Ha’Atzma’ut? Try the annual Israel Independence Day Festival, pictured above, this year on Sunday, May 18, from noon to 5 p.m., at Hansen Dam Park in Sun Valley. The park is sun-drenched, loud pop music sung in Hebrew is blaring, and the scent of Israeli food — grilled meat and spicy falafel, fills the air. Families bring picnic blankets and umbrellas, and there are children’s amusement rides, as well as a stage for performers. This year’s theme is “Celebrating Jewish Unity for Israel,” and the event features a Sephardic Heritage Pavilion. And if you bring some Israelis with you, chances are they will run into friends from their hometown. The event is organized by the Council of Israeli Organizations and the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles. It is sponsored by the Jewish Federation Council, AIPAC and Israel Bonds. For more information, call (818) 757-0123.

Yom

Ha’Atzma’ut (Israel Independence Day) Celebrations:

  • * Kol Tikvah celebrates with music and comedy, featuring Herschel Fox, comedian and Jewish storyteller; Aliza Kashi, Israeli singer/entertainer; Tova Morcos, musical director; University of Judaism Concert Singers; hosted by Cantor Caren Glasser, Sun., May 18, 4 p.m., 20400 Ventura Blvd., Woodland Hills. (818) 348-0670.
  • *Temple Beth Am’s Pressman Academy Day School, Religious School and Nursery School celebrate with a festive Mincha/Maariv service and presentation on the theme of Israel, followed by a community celebration, Mon., May 12, 1039 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. (310) 652-7353.
  • *Temple Isaiah celebrates at its Shabbat service, Fri., May 9, 7:30 p.m., 10345 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. (310) 277-2772.
  • *Temple Ner Maarav celebrates at its Shabbat service, followed by an Israeli-themed dinner and entertainment by Yosi Levy, Fri., May 9, 6 p.m., 17730 Magnolia Blvd., Encino. RSVP (818) 345-7833.
  • *Temple Ramat Zion’s Sisterhood sponsors a program featuring food, festivities and fun, Mon., May 12, 8 p.m., 17655 Devonshire St., Northridge. (818) 360-1881.
  • *University Synagogue celebrates at its Shabbat family service, led by kindergarten and first-grade classes, Fri., May 16, 7:30 p.m., 4915 Alton Parkway, Irvine. (714) 553-3535.

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