Christian Passover Gathering Sparks Debate

Published on April 10, 2008 in The Forward. 0 Comments

This story originally appeared in the Forward.

A shofar blast is not the traditional opening of a Passover Seder. Neither is an invocational prayer to Jesus. But Christ Our Passover is no ordinary Passover gathering.

When some 1,300 Christians take their seats inside the Von Braun Center in Huntsville, Ala., on April 15, they will have assembled into one of the largest Christian Passover celebrations in the country.

“I explain the bitter herbs, I explain the unleavened bread,” evangelical pastor Robert Somerville, director of the Huntsville-based Awareness Ministry, told the Forward. “With the unleavened bread God wants us to be unified. I don’t care if you are white bread, wheat bread or bagel; we are one people and together.”

Since Somerville began holding Passover gatherings more than 20 years ago, Christ Our Passover has developed into an annual display of Christian ecumenism drawing more than 70 organizations from across a variety of Christian denominations. But this year, for the first time, there will also be a handful of members from Huntsville’s Jewish community in attendance — and not all the city’s Jews are happy about it.

“It is a total taking over and arrogation to themselves of the entire concept of the Seder. It’s totally Christological,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Ballon of Huntsville’s Reform congregation, Temple B’nai Sholom.

Across the country, Jewish communities are grappling with an outpouring of evangelical support, particularly for Israel. Such Conservative evangelical leaders as the Rev. John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, have been greeted as committed allies of the Jewish state and as unwelcome interlopers with self-serving agendas. Many of these dynamics are playing out in tiny Huntsville at a time of year, when Jews and gentiles unite around the Passover table.

At this year’s Passover celebration, the Jewish Federation of Huntsville and North Alabama will receive a donation, collected at the banquet, that is expected to exceed $10,000. Laura King, the federation’s president, and Margaret Anne Goldsmith, a past president of Huntsville’s defunct Jewish Community Council, will attend the banquet to receive the offering and a plaque. Several other board members may attend, too.

Sharp disagreements have emerged among Jewish leaders in Huntsville over whether the federation’s board should accept the donation or even attend an event that cloaks a traditional Jewish ritual in the theology of Christian worship.

Ballon, who has lead the criticism, is the only full time rabbi in Huntsville, which has about 300 affiliated Jewish families and a small Conservative synagogue, and a Reform congregation that dates to the late 1800s. In his pulpit and synagogue newsletter, Ballon spoke out against the Seder.

“[T]he conflict becomes complicated by the fact that local people whom we know and live with are nice enough on a local basis but reflect by association the distaste we have of others with whom their movement associates,” Ballon wrote.

At a federation board meeting in last month, Ballon and three other local Jewish communal leaders confronted the rest of the board members on their decision to cooperate with Somerville, warning that the evangelical community’s politics and values are out of sync with those of the liberal Jewish community. While King will accept the donation as federation president, the board decided that individual members would determine on their own whether to attend.

One of the leaders who joined Ballon at the federation meeting was Paul Gross, a retired welding supervisor and a former president of the Jewish Community Council and of Temple B’nai Sholom.

“They wanted to get the whole board to go, and I fought against it. I said anyone has their individual rights to do what they want. But I don’t think it should be done under the auspices of the Jewish federation,” Gross said.

King, who works on aviation systems for the military, has welcomed Somerville’s support and carefully cultivated the relationship over the past year and a half. She first made contact with Awareness Ministry in 2006 during Israel’s war in Lebanon, when she put an ad in the local newspaper soliciting donations for embattled Israelis. The ministry responded with a $2,000 check.

Since then, King and Goldsmith have attended the ministry’s Sukkot celebration and invited Somerville and his flock to Jewish community events, including last year’s Yom Ha’atzmaut ceremony. Somerville also embarked on trip to Israel last December, sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, for Christian leaders in the Southeast. When a pro-Palestinian activist came to Huntsville, King said the ministry was an ally in defending the Jewish state.

“I felt that it was important that we needed to have some sort of alliance with them. We are a small minority and we need friends,” said King. “I’m not going to question their sincerity because they’ve proven it several times over by now.”

The donation that will be given at the Seder is a significant boost to the Federation’s fundraising efforts. The volunteer-run federation was reinvigorated in 2001 after a long period of stasis. The donation could make up as much as 20% of what the federation raises this year, most of which will go to Israel.

Somerville and King decided that the money would support a library and recreation center in Israel for Jewish evacuees of Gaza. A small percentage will go into a scholarship fund in Huntsville to train local teachers in Holocaust education.

Awareness Ministry is one of a number of evangelical organizations across the country that is trying to revive what they say is a biblical connection between ancient Jewish practice and Christian worship. A small but growing number are of them are observing Passover Seders and other traditionally Jewish festivals. According to Somerville, contemporary Christians have “strayed from the Hebraic contours” of their faith even though Judaism figured prominently in the lives and teachings of Jesus and his followers.

Somerville also believes that Christians owe a debt of gratitude to the Jewish community, as forbearers of Christianity and for the long history of Christian antisemitism. That sentiment has made Somerville and his church strong supporters of Israel, and it is the reason that he approached King last fall about donating the money to the federation. An annual donation to a local organization is a central part of the Christ Our Passover banquet, following a biblical injunction to “bless the city.”

“My motivations are simple,” Somerville said. “I’m simply taking this biblical celebration that is high profile in the New Testament and Old Testament to teach lessons that everyone needs to learn. The simple reason is to express blessings and gratitude to a people who have blessed us and the world.”

He insists that Christ Our Passover is not about converting Jews or blending together Judaism and Christianity.

Attendees will eat a catered meal and listen to a performance of the Israeli national anthem by the Covenant Christian Academy choir. Then they will watch on two jumbo screens as Somerville demonstrates parts of the Passover Seder filtered through a Christian worldview.

King said she is not pushing other Jewish leaders to attend. “I think that everyone has to go as their conscience dictates them, and if they don’t feel comfortable they should stay away,” she said.

But she added: “For me, the greater concern is to build this relationship with our neighbors. Somebody has to take the first step.”

Andy Warhol’s Second Chance

Published on March 13, 2008 in New York Sun. 0 Comments

This article originally appeared in the New York Sun.

Andy Warhol, in his prolific career as an artist, filmmaker, and professional provocateur, attracted no shortage of negative press. But few matched the drubbing he received upon the debut of “Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Centurjewsmarx-1.jpgy” at the Jewish Museum in 1980.

“The way it exploits its Jewish subject without showing the slightest grasp of their significance is offensive — or would be, anyway, if the artist had not already treated so many non-Jewish subjects in the same tawdry manner,” a New York Times critic, Hilton Kramer, a longtime Warhol detractor, wrote. That the review appeared the day before Yom Kippur only added to its bite.

The exhibition featured portraits of Gertrude Stein, Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Brandeis, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Franz Kafka, Golda Meir, and the Marx Brothers. Warhol based the portraits of his “Jewish Geniuses,” as he liked to call them, on famous photographs of the subjects, worked over in a pastiche of silk screen and acrylic painting.

Almost 28 years later, the Jewish Museum is giving Warhol’s portraits another shot. The exhibition, “Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered,” which opens March 16, brings together his prints, a complete set of his paintings, preliminary sketches, and other ephemera as it examines the Pope of Pop’s foray into Jewish culture. It is presented in conjunction with the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

When “Ten Portraits” first showed at the Jewish Museum, Warhol was arguably the most famous living artist in the world. Yet his reputation among American critics had reached a low point. Warhol had spent the 1970s filling his bank account by mechanically producing portraits for any sitter willing to pay as much as $37,000 for a print. Approximately 1,600 people took him up on the offer, many of them the glitterati of celebrity society. When, in 1979, the Whitney Museum of American Art put on an exhibition of these portraits, the press judged the show hackwork driven by Warhol’s obsession with money. A year later, when “Ten Portraits” opened in New York City after stops in Rockville, Md., and Coral Gables, Fla., hostile critics saw the endeavor as a continuation of Warhol’s “Franklin Mint” approach to art. Warhol was accused of cynically exploiting for profit the cultural pride of Jews. Even critics who praised the art worried that the show reeked of “Jewploitation.”

The curator of “Warhol’s Jews,” Richard Meyer , believes the critical response wasn’t entirely fair to Warhol. Mr. Meyer said the project grew out of working relationships with Jewish philanthropists and institutions that existed prior to the show. In the mid-1970s, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem asked Warhol to do a five-panel portrait of Golda Meir. It was paid for by Sydney Lewis, a wealthy Jewish philanthropist and a Warhol collector. “The fact that an artist of his stature was doing a series on great Jews was hugely meaningful to parts of the Jewish community,” Mr. Meyer said.

During this time, Warhol befriended a Jewish New York gallery owner, Ronald Feldman. For years Warhol had prodded Mr. Feldman for ideas. When an Israel-based dealer suggested to Mr. Feldman that Warhol do 10 additional portraits of Meir, Mr. Feldman thought the idea was excessive. But he suggested to Warhol a 10-portrait series of accomplished Jews in the 20th century. Warhol warmed to the idea, so Feldman presented him with a long list of possible subjects. Many of the selected 10 came from Mr. Feldman’s urgings, including the final portrait of Louis Brandeis. At the start of the project Warhol didn’t even know all of his subjects. In a diary entry he writes, “Who is Martin Buber?”

So what were Warhol’s true motivations? The artist was notoriously abstruse when discussing his own work. Part of this extended from his pop sensibility; he was more interested in letting his images circulate in the popular imagination than he was in probing his subjects. “In terms of Warhol’s own interests, I don’t think he was invested in the historical biographies of these people,” Mr. Meyer said. “None of his portraits were deeply revealing.”

As a commercial gallery owner, Mr. Feldman admits that he wanted the portraits to turn a profit. Money was never far from Warhol’s ambitions either. “But the Ten Jews gave [Warhol] a chance to do portraits of famous people who were not alive,” Mr. Feldman said. “That was something that really turned him on. It wasn’t his intention that it would only be commercial.”

Regardless of the critical response at the time, the works hold significant cultural value for the Jewish community. In the early 1980s, the portraits traveled to different Jewish institutions around the country. In 2006, Mr. Feldman’s children donated one of Warhol’s paintings of Brandeis to Brandeis University in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Supreme Court Justice’s birth. “It didn’t matter that he didn’t have much to say about Jewish culture or history,” Mr. Meyer said, “because he had reignited these 10 figures and their histories.”

Adoptive Jewish Families Head Back to China

Published on March 3, 2008 in The Forward. 0 Comments

This story originally appeared in The Forward.

china1-0229081.jpgRabbi Mark Sameth does a lot of traveling with his two Chinese-born adopted daughters in pursuit of the girls’ hybrid cultural heritage.

On a recent trip to Washington from their home in Pleasantville, N.Y., they hunted down an ancient carved-stone washing bowl that once belonged to a Chinese synagogue. In New York City, they mined the sacred books room of the Jewish Theological Seminary to examine a Chinese Torah scroll bound with silk. But the most exciting trip, Sameth says, was touring with his daughters, ages 5 and 9, in China last summer.

“Now that the girls were old enough, we wanted to take them to see the country,” Sameth told the Forward. “The tour took us to ancient China, medieval China and modern China. And we wanted them to see the Jewish parts of China.”

The Sameth family is not alone. As the first generation of adopted Chinese daughters enters early childhood and adolescence, a growing number of adoptive Jewish parents are touring China with their children, in search of a way to explore identities that are both Chinese and Jewish.

“A large number of families returning are Jewish families,” Jane Liedtke said. Liedtke founded the Bloomington, Ill.-based Our Chinese Daughters Foundation, which organizes China tours for adoptive families.

According to Liedtke, Jews have constituted a growing portion of her clients since she began leading trips 10 years ago. Today, Liedtke estimates that as many as 40% of her 900 clients yearly have a Jewish background.

While there are no statistics on how many Jewish families have adopted daughters from China, the adoption rate by American families swelled in the 1990s after the Chinese government opened the country’s doors to foreign adoption. Today, there are more than 65,000 adopted Chinese children living in the United States, though new regulations have made it more difficult to adopt from China since numbers peaked in 2005. Most of the adoptees have been daughters, thanks to China’s policy of restricting family sizes and to the cultural prejudices with regard to girls.

For Jewish parents who have adopted daughters from China, a return trip can be driven by a variety of motivations. Some parents see it as a valuable opportunity to synthesize their daughters’ Jewish and Chinese heritages, while others see it simply as a chance to visit the places that shaped their daughters’ first days, such as orphanages. Others find it an alluring locale for a bat mitzvah.

“Because she was being bat mitzvahed in an Olympic year, we’d hoped to have an abbreviated bat mitzvah in China during the Olympic period,” said Steven Wolfe, who has been trying to plan a ceremony for his 12-year-old daughter at the Great Wall of China. “I thought that it would have been nice to mix her Chinese descent with her newly adopted religion. I thought the combination of the two would have been unusual and would have brought home for her that she is really from two different cultures.”

Wolfe thinks the trip won’t be possible, because of complications with logistics and the difficulty of finding a rabbi willing to travel to the Great Wall. Liedtke says that though she has been receiving requests to organize bat mitzvah trips to China, she doesn’t know if anyone has been able to pull that off.

For many parents, planning the trips to China brings up some of the dilemmas of raising a child from two different cultures. Parents can choose to go on a Jewish heritage tour of China, but this type of tour does not put families in contact with other adopted Chinese children. There are also tours set up for adopted families, but these generally do not emphasize Jewish sites.

Elena Stein, a Cincinnati rabbi who is engaging in research to plan a trip back to China with her daughter Dahlia, says she is still weighing her options. Touring with other adoptive families would require finding free time to partake in Jewish activities, while traveling with a Jewish heritage tour would deprive Stein and her daughter of experiencing China with families like their own.

“I would like for it to be a Chinese-Jewish tour because I would like for her to see her identities as integrated and not separated,” Stein said. But because return trips can often be emotionally charged, she is still considering a tour with other adoptive families. “Depending on what’s going on, we might need the support of that group,” she said.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that most adoptive families decide to travel with non-Jewish organizations. Many of these groups arrange for additional excursions to Jewish sites. Our Chinese Daughters Foundation maintains a relationship with Jewish community members in Beijing to meet the needs of its Jewish clients. Another popular stop is the city of Kaifeng in the Henan province, which was home to an isolated Jewish community that formed 1,000 years ago.

“They like going back so they can show [their children] there are Chinese people who are Jewish,” Liedtke told the Forward.

The Sameth family chose to travel with The Families With Children From China Heritage Tours, which organizes trips for adoptive families and is partly subsidized by the Chinese government.

“There were a number of different Jewish families on the trip, and we did have some of those experiences together,” Sameth said. “We went to the bakery and found rolls that looked enough like challah, and we would make our own Shabbat dinners.”

But not all Jewish families who travel back to China are looking for a Jewish experience.

“To me, what was important was showing her the country, visiting the orphanage and meeting the people who brought her to me, the two nurses, who were there,” said Janet Silverman, who traveled to China in 2005 with her then 9-year-old daughter.

Silverman told the Forward that though she wants her daughter, whose own bat mitzvah is approaching, to feel comfortable with her Judaism, that wasn’t the point of their trip. For that purpose she has a different destination in mind.

“We are supposed to go to Israel this summer,” she said. “The positive thing about going to Israel is seeing a lot of Jews out there who don’t look like the Jews in Westchester.”

Beyond the culture, there are strong reasons to return to China. The latest research has shown that a return can help an adopted child’s development. Whatever the reason, the interest is there and growing, Liedtke says.

“We’ve been asked to arrange for a kosher tour,” Liedtke said. “We expect that someday that trip will come.”

Grant Rewards Innovation in Seattle

Published on November 6, 2007 in The Forward. 0 Comments

This article originally appeared in The Forward

The Jewish community of Seattle is tapping into the city’s entreprenkavanagroup-1109071.jpgeurial spirit by taking a risk on innovative programs designed to transform local Jewish life.

For the past three years, the Levitan Innovation Award has given $10,000 to a local organization with a creative program designed to increase Jewish engagement around Washington State’s Puget Sound. At a time when the Jewish philanthropic community is investing large amounts of money in the search of the next big idea with the potential to quickly transform the Jewish community at large, the award is investing smaller amounts in a smaller area, around Seattle, hoping to cultivate a local culture that takes risks on new Jewish ventures and entrepreneurial leaders.

The award was established in 2005 by Dan Levitan, a former Wall Street manager who operates a venture capital firm in Seattle called Maveron, and his wife, Stacey. Every year, five committee members evaluate project proposals and choose one that offers a new model or approach.

“It follows a trend [in which] Seattle is a national leader. That’s acting as a grass-roots incubator of innovation,” said Rob Spitzer, who sits on the award’s evaluation committee. “We have many, many startups, most of which don’t survive, and some of which create meaningful change. It’s consistent with Seattle’s tech culture in its approach.”

In recent years, Seattle has attracted a growing number of unaffiliated Jews. Each of the Levitan award winners has created, in a unique way, a program that reaches out to them with multiple points of entry into the Jewish community outside of familiar institutional boundaries.

This year’s winner was Jconnect, a program run through Hillel at the University of Washington that creates specialized programs for Jews in their 20s and early 30s living around Seattle. Jconnect hosts events, such as the monthly Jews ’n Brews, at different bars around the city, as well as cooking classes, social-justice excursions and Purim parties at art galleries. A few weeks ago, Jconnect also began its yearlong Jewish-learning initiative, with weekly classes on Judaism designed specifically for its young demographic. The organization wants to attract interfaith couples who may not have found a comfortable place in the Jewish community, so an introduction to Judaism class will double as a conversion course for non-Jewish partners.

“One of the things we found is that we have this really large segment of young adults who are dating folks who are not Jewish, and they are all interested in exploring Judaism,” said Rabbi Will Berkovitz, Greenstein Family executive director of Hillel at U.W. “[Jconnect] is developing a holistic program that creates a welcoming environment for these people so they don’t feel alienated by the Jewish community but feel welcomed.”

Last year’s award winner, Kavana, is a nondenominational sacred community that eschews the congregational model for a “cooperative” approach. When the organization won the award, Suzi LeVine, a former Expedia executive, and Rachel Nussbaum, a local Conservative rabbi, had a business plan but had yet to do any programming.

“They angel-invested in us,” LeVine said, referring to the investment-banking term for someone who provides a startup company with money to get an idea off the ground.

Instead of members, Kavana has “partners” who are expected to attend events each month, lead community initiatives and make a meaningful financial contribution, a suggested 1%-2% of their gross income. They pray together, but also study and socialize on a regular basis, often in each other’s homes. It aims to remain highly personal and intimate, growing no larger than 100 to 120 households before it would split into new “pods” that would maintain the cooperative spirit. Kavana currently has 80 partners.

“The part of it that I can’t escape is that I’m extremely drawn to the energy and motivations of the people who go,” said Kimberly Steadman, a 33-year-old program manager with Microsoft who has been active with Kavana as she considers converting to Judaism. “Kavana has turned what is a casual practice for a lot of people into an extremely engaging communal environment.”

A one-time award of $10,000 is not enough to keep an organization afloat, but the award’s recipients say that its biggest contribution is to raise their profiles, making them competitive for national grants and affirming their work locally. Last month, Kavana was included in Slingshot, a guide to 50 of the country’s most creative Jewish organizations. But the award is no guarantor of long-term success.

“The problem with financing innovative projects is a major one,” said Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, the founder and director of the outreach organization Panim Hadashot: New Faces of Judaism. Best known for engaging Jews in their homes with Sabbath meals, elaborate holiday Seders and an emphasis on hospitality, Panim Hadashot won the first Levitan award in 2005 but ceased operating after three years. “We were really having a lot of success, but ultimately it was too difficult to raise the amount of funds to be viable. I think there has to be a broader or deeper approach to innovation in the community.”

That is something that may not have happened yet. According to Dan Levitan, the committee is looking for ways to innovate the award itself, perhaps changing how the winner is publicly announced, in order to increase its visibility.

“If this award helps raise the dialogue of how we innovate,” Levitan said, “then one of its objectives will have been met.”

Managing Change

Published on September 21, 2007 in JTNews. 0 Comments

 This article originally appeared in the JTNews

It’s noon on Mon., Sept. 17, and Yehoshua Pinkus, a 33-year-old rabbi with the Seattle Kollel, is sitting around a table at the organization’s building in Seward Park teaching a section of the High Holiday Amidah to two older women. The discussion, at the moment, is on how well human beings can understand God’s plan, even when they have a strong faith that such a plan exists.

“When we are inside a situation, we can’t see it,” says Pinkus, explaining how tragedy or personal anguish can challenge a person’s faith, and that sometimes time is needed before a person can better understand — if understand at all — why certain things happen.

The class is the last of a series on the High Holiday liturgy, but probably not the last for the two students. One of the women has been taking classes from the Kollel for three years and the other is quick to ask what classes Pinkus will be teaching following the High Holidays, when the Kollel’s programming will pick up after a summer lull.

Sixteen years after its creation, the Seattle Kollel, an organization dedicated to providing Jewish learning across the Pacific Northwest, is a thriving pillar of Seattle’s Jewish community. It has a sizeable staff of teaching rabbis and in 2005 moved into a newly renovated building in the center of the Seward Park neighborhood. Its outreach extends as far as Oregon and Victoria, B.C.

The Kollel’s success, however, is also a lens into the challenges facing the diverse observant community in Seward Park, a delicate balance of various religious traditions, halachic approaches and political persuasions. Some say the organization is slowly changing the Orthodox community by teaching a more stringent interpretation of Jewish law, or halachah, and supporting new institutions

that reflect its theological worldview — an observation that is at once disputed, hailed as a warning, or trumpeted in praise, depending upon whom you ask.

The chatter around the Kollel has also raised a number of questions, such as: how can Seward Park’s Orthodox community accommodate more than a decade of growth? What is the best way to respond to changes in the observant community’s religious balance? What role can and should new Jewish community institutions play?

Some of the questions about the Kollel’s influence date back to its founding in 1991. Rabbi Jack Maimon is credited with bringing the idea for the Kollel to Seattle and providing its vision. Unlike traditional Kollels, comprised of a group of men who devote themselves to a few additional years of post-rabbinical study, the idea was to create a “community Kollel” that would engage in outreach and Jewish education.

Some community members in Seward Park questioned whether the Kollel would be able to survive without drawing away funding from other existing organizations. Also of concern was whether, by opening the Kollel, the community would invite “ultra-Orthodox” rabbis who would create an unwelcome shift in the religious balance of the observant community, according to reports in the Jewish Transcript at the time.

To this day, these same accusations have occasionally hounded the Kollel, inflamed by small-town politics and rivalries.

In April, a document written and distributed by attorney David Balint, a longtime vocal critic of the Kollel, forcefully accused the organization of undermining Jewish day schools and local rabbinic authorities, introducing ever-greater religious strictures, and betraying its mission to support existing Jewish institutions. The 17-page “Community Impact Statement/Kollel” became a topic of community discussion, and even some sympathetic to its concerns questioned its aggressive, legalistic tone. Others did not share Balint’s point of view.

“It runs the risk of being non-productive,” said Al Maimon, a founding board member of the Seattle Kollel and former board president, explaining that he thought the language was of the kind used to accuse someone of a crime. The Kollel’s leadership has not responded to Balint.

At the time of its founding, the Kollel’s organizers were able to dampen fears by committing to finding funding outside of Seattle for the first two or three years, according to Maimon. They also planned to coordinate their fundraising in Seattle with other Jewish organizations.

But those fears occasionally resurfaced. In 1995, the Kollel was in crisis. The payroll was down to less than two full-time positions and the organization had accumulated $80,000 worth of debt. According to a summary of a community meeting convened to discuss the struggling Kollel in Aug. 1995, the question arose again about how the Kollel should interact with the community in order to avoid posing a “threat to the centrist philosophy.”

“In my opinion they had not done anything to give substance to those concerns,” said Maimon, recalling the meeting, “but they had also not done anything to allay those concerns. People were thinking the jury is still out.”

Since then, the Kollel has benefited from an explosion in a demand for Jewish education as well as the significant growth of the Seward Park observant community, attributed largely to Washington’s tech industry. The Kollel has received several grants, attracted individual donations, and its survival is no longer a question. But some also say the organization has evolved beyond its original vision.

“Clearly the Kollel has done some things that have made it more than simply a teaching institution,” said Chuck Broches, an active participant in Seward Park’s Jewish community and a Seattle Hebrew Academy board member. “Like a lot of organizations, it has an agenda, it has a building, it has a set of followers who are very loyal to it.”

Rabbi Avrohom David, the charismatic head of Seattle Kollel who took the organization from near-bankruptcy to its current stature, says the organization’s mission is the same today as it has always been: Jewish education and outreach. But, he said, there is a “fear that by increasing education the community will change.”

Members of Kollel leadership have also become wrapped up in recent community disputes. Most recently, it was the opening of two new schools, the Torah Day School of Seattle and Sha’arei Binah Girls High School, both viewed as more religiously traditional than existing educational options, which created tensions in the observant community and was the impetus behind Balint’s report.

That report finds ammunition in the role of some of the Kollel rabbis and leadership in the opening of those schools, which he argues would make it difficult for the existing Orthodox-based day schools, Seattle Hebrew Academy and Northwest Yeshiva High School, to survive financially and presented a challenge to the community’s religious practices.

The Kollel’s board president, Steven Fast, was a major force behind the opening of Torah Day School and David informally helped raise money for Sha’arei Binah from connections outside the city. After operating for a year, Sha’arei Binah has since closed its doors.

“It’s the divisiveness that is created by the way that these things are being done,” Balint told JTNews. “I don’t think the Kollel rabbis have any business creating new institutions without widespread support from the community being solicited and obtained first.”

Both David and Fast said the Kollel as an organization played no role in the opening of those schools, but that its rabbis and leadership are individually active in the community outside the Kollel and have an array of friends across the spectrum whom they may choose to help.

“With hindsight it might have been wise for me to resign from the Kollel and work on Torah Day School. That might have been a wiser thing to do,” said Fast. “But I think it’s not so unusual for people in one role to be doing other things….People have lots of roles and sometimes those roles overlap.”

Rabbi David attributed any tensions, which most say are much lower today than a few years ago, to population growth in the Seward Park observant community.

“That is creating change. If there are more people there is more diversity, and more diversity creates tension,” he said, adding: “The real change religiously is that there is more of everybody.”

David also said that the Kollel “bends over backwards” to avoid creating tensions, for instance by delaying the construction of its new building several years after it became feasible.

Nearly everyone interviewed for this article said that problems arise because of how individuals, institutions and the community as a whole process change.

“The difficulties we’ve experienced along these lines are here just as much because people are resisting change and not figuring out how to bring about the changes in a constructive and positive way to make room around the table,” said Maimon.

“There is always the potential for an organization to cause harm in addition to the good that it does,” said Balint. “My problem with the Kollel is that they have cut out from how they operate the possibility of widespread community input. Like any other organization, they would be much more efficient and reach more people and create much more good if they sought widespread community input so that they knew that what they were doing would not upset anybody or harm existing institutions.”

It’s a Sign

Published on June 19, 2007 in Jew-ish.com. 0 Comments

This article originally appeared on Jew-ish.com

“Boys with tattoos can never be Jews.” – songwriter Jay Munly

20070618_tattoo_front.jpgI remember when I first saw it. At my old college radio station a female DJ bent over to pick something up from the floor when the back of her t-shirt lifted up. There it was: a half exposed Magen David peeking out over the waste of her jeans, tattooed onto the nether region of her back in the style that a sorority girl once charmingly described to me as a “ho-tag.”

I admit that it was a surprising discovery. Not the idea that a Jew would have a tattoo. But that she had chosen to permanently emblazon a symbol of her religious heritage — a heritage that pointedly proscribed her from doing any such thing. Lots of Jews I know have no clue how to wrap tefillin or read Rashi script; for some reason, most are aware of the Jewish taboo on tattoos, if not for religious reasons, than because of forced tattooing during the Holocaust. Was hers an act of rebellion? A proclamation of Jewish kinship? A decorative flourish drunkenly purchased between bars in New York City? When I asked, I remember she gave me a sort of non-answer that included both a mention of Judaism and a shrug of the shoulders that said, “Why the hell not?”

Today, I see Hebrew tattoos on bodies in many places I go and even a few Jewish symbols. A trail of Hebrew letters winds around the bicep of some guy at the airport. A small Star of David, like a birthmark, perched on a girl’s hip standing in line at a coffee shop. And it’s not just Jews. You know the trend has broken into the mainstream when David and Victoria Beckham get matching Hebrew tattoos as a sign of their eternal fidelity, not to mention Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Madonna. If Hebrew is now the tattoo of choice for A-list celebrities, how long do we have until it’s discovered by frat boys tired of having Chinese characters hastily inscribed on the backs of their shoulders or calves?

It might still be a while. Tattoos featuring Hebrew or Jewish iconography still seem religiously or ethnically motivated. Jayne Simpson, a 21-year-old massage therapist living in Seattle and the daughter of an evangelical pastor, got the word “Yedidah,” (Beloved) in Hebrew across the back of her neck. The tattoo, she said, was a way to acknowledge her Christian upbringing at a time when her relationship with the church was becoming less idealized and she was embracing the wider world.

“The closest that we can get to a spiritual language for Christianity is Hebrew,” she explained. “Your body is all you have and when you change really dramatically, sometimes it’s not enough for it to be intangible.”

Kami Knapp got her Hebrew name, “Chen Binah,” tattooed on her lower back when she converted to Judaism, along with the Hebrew date of the ceremony.

“I felt by doing it, it was a visual reminder for myself and other people of my beliefs,” she said. “I liked the idea of people asking what it means so I can explain it to them.”

The tattoo translates as “Grace” and “Knowledge.” Grace was also the name of her grandmother, and she chose it as a way to include her non-Jewish family into her religious conversion. She even discussed getting the tattoo with her rabbi.

Even the celebrities have religious justifications. Beckham has publicly claimed that he is part Jewish, Aguilera got her tattoo when she became engaged to her Jewish fiancé, and both Madonna and Spears say they are inspired by Kabbalah.

Family also seems to be a big inspiration. Becca Campbell, who blogs about her interfaith marriage on Jew-ish, is considering a Jewish or Hebrew tattoo to connect to her heritage, while her husband is thinking about getting a Swiss or Greek Cross to connect to his. Then there is Suzanna Fisher, an apprentice at Super Genius Tattoo in Capitol Hill, who is thinking about getting a portrait of her Jewish grandmother on her forearm surrounded by non-religious symbols of her Jewish identity.

Just how popular are tattoos featuring Hebrew or Jewish iconography is a question I brought to Damon Conklin, the renowned owner of Super Genius Tattoo. Conklin, a religious Christian, is no stranger to religiously inspired tattoos himself. The back of his hands and arms feature tattoos depicting the Holy Spirit.

Conklin says that Hebrew tattoos are pretty common, though not requested as often as Japanese or Chinese characters. He explained that Chinese and Japanese tattoos tend to be more popular because they come from cultures with traditions of tattoos unlike Judaism. Today, thanks to his national reputation, Conklin works mostly on large, intricate tattoos. But when he worked on smaller ones, he said customers were drawn to “single attractive symbols,” making the Star of David a regular choice. Conklin also has a sizable Christian clientele, who also request Hebrew tattoos as a form of religious expression.

And what about other Jews? How powerful is the taboo? Several said they thought about the Holocaust when choosing a tattoo with Hebrew or Jewish symbolism, but that it made them feel “empowered” to so permanently identity their bodies with Judaism. And staffers of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center also said they didn’t think survivors would be offended by a tattoo, unless it was like the one described in this blog post.

And what about the rumor that Jews with tattoos are forbidden burial in a Jewish cemetery? Rabbi Jill Borodin, who the leads the Conservative synagogue Congregation Beth Shalom, tells me that Jewish law clearly forbids tattoos, but that there are no consequences if you decide to go under the needle. So if the primary barrier to you getting a Magen David tattooed on your bum is that you will be ostracized in the afterlife, there’s really no barrier at all.

Hot or Not?

Published on June 12, 2007 in Jew-ish.com. 0 Comments

This article originally appeared on Jew-ish.com

 

Poor Seth Rogen. The 25-year-old star of Knocked Up is at the center of a debate over20070612seth_rogan.jpg whether a real-life man with Rogen’s girth and body hair could ever land a lady as beautiful as Katherine Heigl, the movie’s female lead. “Would You Have Sex with Seth Rogen?” asks the movie blog Cinematical. “Not only would I sleep with Seth Rogen’s Ben [his character in Knocked Up] but I would marry him as well,” responds a reader on the blog’s comments section. But Jeffrey Wells, of Hollywood Elsewhere, doesn’t buy the match: “Wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen…absolutely no way in hell.” Almost apologetically, Slate’s Dana Stevens writes, “Don’t get me wrong, I love funny Jewish guys with curly hair and low self-esteem…but this is not a sociologically credible hookup.”

The straw poll will continue on comment boards across the Internet. But if Rogen has any shot at Heigl, Stevens has hit on the reason why: Jewish guys, after millennia of being caricatured and maligned as revolting and unattractive, are currently enjoying a golden age of desirability, at least in the United States. You see it in the media, where men like Jon Stewart, Zach Braff and Sasha Baron Cohen routinely elicit catcalls from women writers, with their Hebraic heritage often plugged in the endorsement. The online magazine Salon captured the general ethos with this description of filmmaker Noah Baumbach: “[He] is the kind of guy you could have grown up with — if that sweet, nerdy kid became someone with actual insight and a boatload of talent. Men in possession of only one of these qualities, familiar or brilliant, have taken in many a lady. In combination, they’re your inner-Jewish mama’s dream (she gets to find men sexy, too).”

Lest you believe the phenomenon is focused on but a few undeniably handsome and charismatic stars, the pheromones of your more average Jewish guy smell a bit sweeter as well. This conclusion is partly based on anecdotal evidence. Last year, a friend of mine confessed to me in a hushed-voice at a conference in Las Vegas, “I love Jewish boys.” The admission followed her meeting a Jewish campaign staffer for Congressional candidate Charlie Brown. My friend, who grew up Catholic, said that Jewish men were “passionate” and “aggressive, but not sleazy.” Since then, I’ve heard similar sentiments repeated by other non-Jewish women without prodding on my part.

But it’s not all anecdotal. Last December, even The Stranger, Seattle’s arbiter for all that is cool and sexy, gave Jewish guys a glowing review on their blog. Following up on a feature story by Eli Sanders, “Seattle’s Jewish Problem,” editor Christopher Frizzelle posted:

And on the subject of Jews and gays, let it be said (is this offensive?): Jewish boys are freakin’ hot, second only to South American soccer players. I am in love with all the guys in the pictures Eli found of old Jewish Seattle. I am in love with a letter-to-the-editor writer this week I don’t even know, Jonathan Fine, because of his name (of course) but also simply because he’s gay and Jewish. Hey [Stranger sex columnist Dan] Savage, is this a fetish? My formative years were spent around Jewish boys. (Confidential to Eli: What happened to the sidebar that was going to go with your article? The one we talked about in editorial meetings? The one about how Jewish guys are freakin’ hot? I know [Stranger Reporter] Erica C. Barnett is with me on this.)

The blog comments that followed Frizzelle’s post indicate it’s not only a decent portion of The Stranger’s writing staff that is attracted to Jewish boys. One commenter writes: “YES, thank you for pointing out the hotness of Jewish guys. Often I find myself intensely attracted to a guy and find out that he just happens to be jewish [sic].” Several other posts seconded the assessment, although one detractor cited Howard Stern as cause for skepticism.

There is, in fact, a precedent for Jew as fetishized sex object, but it was directed at Jewish women. Sander Gilman, a widely published scholar who has written extensively about the Jewish body, explained via e-mail that that you find the “cult of the beautiful Jewish woman” across history and culture. This Jewess had an exotic appeal, with dark skin and eyes and a slightly dangerous reputation.

Gilman also pointed to the more recent emergence of Israeli men as objects of desire. Jewish Zionists self-consciously created the “muscle Jew” in response to the pejorative stereotype of Jewish men as weak and ugly. This new Jew was strong and earthy, bronzed by the Mediterranean sun and the hours spent toiling in kibbutz fields. In America, the muscle Jew found its embodiment in Paul Newman, who played Ari Ben Canaan, a Jewish rebel fighting the British in mandate-era Palestine, in the screen adaptation of Exodus.

But hot Jewish boys like Braff are a different species: they are less like Newman than they are like Woody Allen, full of self-deprecating humor and earnestness. According to Boy Vei: A Shiksa’s Guide to Dating Jewish Men by shiksa-journalist Kristina Grish, they are also “wildly intense inside the bedroom and out,” “the ultimate caretakers without a hint of machismo.” and “generous and thoughtful, thanks to a matriarchal culture that’s taught them to appreciate women’s strength, candor, humor and intelligence.” Grish advises Jew-loving women on everything from picking up Jewish men (visit the lobbies of investment banks) to staying away from anal sex (Jews like to be clean).

For what I write next, I might be rightly scolded for acting like Jonathan Franzen when he criticized Oprah for choosing his novel for her book club.  But might there be something kind of uncomfortable about this attention? Frizzelle seems to know something is up when he asks if it’s “offensive” to proclaim that Jewish men are “freakin’ hot.” Many Jews are justifiably unnerved by attempts at stereotyping them, perhaps even if it’s for the compliment of being almost as hot as South American soccer players. But is it also okay to say that Asian women are categorically hot? What about black men? Don’t these judgments just feed cultural stereotyping? And if some people think Jewish guys are hot, might there be others who think none of them are, because maybe these people hate their mothers and prefer to date neglectful, cheating men?

Then, again, maybe Jewish guys are hot and it simply took 2,500 years to figure out the part. Rogen told NPR that he got into showbiz by studying comics like Allen who dated pretty girls, and wondering, “How do these Jews pull it off?” After all, it was none other than Marilyn Monroe, who converted to Judaism when she married Arthur Miller, who said, “If you can make a girl laugh — you can make her do anything.”

The Spirit of Passover

Published on March 27, 2007 in Jew-ish.com. 0 Comments

This article originally appeared on Jew-ish.com

 

20070327_slivovitz.jpgLike most confessions involving a love of alcohol, this one originates with my family and involves a search for God.

The setting is the Passover table. Following tradition, my family drinks four glasses of wine during the Passover seder, when Jews retell the story of how God freed the ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. My family doesn’t usually drink much, but Passover is the one time a year when we up the ante. As a kid, I awaited the moment between dinner and dessert when one of my parents would leave the table to retrieve a dusty bottle from the high shelf in our cabinets where we keep our Passover foodstuff. It was a bottle of Slivovitz, a particularly potent and noxious brandy distilled from whole plums.

They would return to the table with a tray of miniature, silver goblets, each filled with a few ounces of the clear liquor. Everyone at the table, including my older brothers, would take one of the goblets with an attitude that suggested they weren’t about to drink alcohol but commit ritual suicide with poisoned Kool-Aid. Together, they’d say a communal — perhaps final? — “L’Chaim.” They’d bring the goblets to their lips and, filled with second thoughts, hesitate for a moment; then they’d throw the shots into their mouths, cringe, and exhale a throaty wheeze like they were exorcising Satan.

It was one of the greatest events I’d see all year; for me it symbolized Passover more than the lousy bread. Few people in the United States like Slivovitz. I loved Slivovitz before I was even allowed to drink it. I imagined the day when I would be given my own shot as a benchmark in the path toward adulthood like my Bar Mitzvah, going to college, and losing my virginity.

It was years before I had my first shot of Slivovitz, and even longer until I learned, to my disappointment, that it wasn’t a tradition unique to my family: Jews have been getting drunk on Slivovitz for generations, and not only on Passover. The drink originates along the backbone of Europe, stretching from Poland down to Croatia and Serbia. It is still popular in Eastern Europe. It is also relatively common among Orthodox Jews in the United States as a spiritual digestif after Shabbat services. For Jews, the drink also has an added appeal: it isn’t distilled from grains, which means it is kosher for Passover. In other words, if you want to get drunk and keep Passover’s dietary restrictions, you don’t have to drink Manischewitz.

Slivovitz remains an unpopular drink in the United States, probably because it has a reputation for smelling and tasting like rubbing alcohol mixed with plums. There are approximately 3,000 distillers worldwide, but only about 30 brands available stateside. Like most reputations, Slivovitz’s is based on some fact, even if it’s not the entire story. In Seattle, you can buy just one traditional Slivovitz from Washington’s state-run liquor stores, a brand called Maraska. The good news for the Passover-observing Jew is that Maraska is certified kosher for Passover. The bad news is that it is one of those Slivovitzes that erodes your digestive system, melts your tongue, and turns your breath to fire.

But not all Slivovitzes are as astringent as the Maraska. Bill Radosevich, who runs an annual Slivovitz festival in Two Harbors, Minn., explains that Slivovitz is fermented with “plums on the stone,” meaning plums that still have their pits. The pits impart Slivovitz the drink’s bitterness, and if left to sit too long can make the flavor overly harsh. Also, in any given plum crop, the best plums are exported as fresh fruit, the second best are turned into jams, and guess who gets the leftovers? That’s right. Slivovitz distillers. Plums of poor quality can have an adverse effect on the Slivovitz. Enough said.

Radosevich says you can judge good Slivovitz the same way you would judge wine: balance. Neither the bitterness of the pit, the tartness of skin nor the sweetness of the plum should be grossly overpowering. Judges (who are certified by the International Slivovitz Tasters Association, believe it or not), can even appraise good Slivovitz by its smell using a technique called the “Stawski sniff.” It should smell of alcohol and plums. Common sense should tell you that if it smells like rotten eggs, it’s bad Slivovitz.

Of the Maraska, Radosevich says he personally doesn’t like it, though it is a good example of traditionally made Slivovitz. He suggested readers try the Clear Creek Blue Plum Brandy made in Portland, Ore. For those who abide by the rules of what’s kosher, you should stay away from Clear Creek because the distillery isn’t certified. But they say that’s only because they can’t afford the cost of the certification. Clear Creek’s Slivovitz is also available at Washington liquor stores.

One of the best Slivovitzes comes from the Rudolf Jelinek distillery in the Czech Republic. Their Gold Slivovitz Kosher 10 Year Old is the kind “you want to give to your father-in-law,” said Radosevich. It is like drinking fine Scotch, he said, because it is aged in smoked oak barrels.

Eight years ago my brother started dating his future wife, who is from the Czech Republic. They would visit Czech and my brother would return with a bottle of Slivovitz that could be sipped rather than thrown directly down the back of the throat. My father looked up after taking a sip and said, “Wow, that’s good.” Which is all right, I suppose. There is nothing wrong with fine-tasting Slivovitz. But it just doesn’t feel like Passover.