The new Be’chol Lashon website is dedicated to all who are looking for a place among the Jewish people. Welcome!
Museum's Vision: West Coast Paradise
By Edward Rothstein, June 9, 2008,
The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — When deciphered, the jagged lights on the sloping lobby wall of the new Contemporary Jewish Museum that opened here on Sunday form four Hebrew letters that spell out pardes. That word has the same Persian root as the English word paradise. It alludes to a park, a garden, an orchard, and thus invokes the pastoral promise of Eden as well.
This is the kind of esoteric symbol much beloved by the museum’s architect, Daniel Libeskind. In the heart of downtown San Francisco, his $47.5 million building, with its skewed blue-steel structures jutting out of a landmark 20th-century power plant, may not live up to the word’s impossible promise, but it will certainly gain attention for the institution.
Like so many other new museums, the Contemporary Jewish Museum is dedicated to a hyphenated American identity, in this case one that has flourished in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a Jewish population of 200,000 that ranks third among United States metropolitan regions. Jews lived in San Francisco from at least its early boom days, when they streamed in with other settlers during the Gold Rush. So their sense of belonging is not tentative; they are comfortably at home in a Western pardes.
In this atmosphere a particular style of American Judaism developed. It is highly assimilated, with many interfaith families; Judaism is treated more as a culture than a religion. History becomes less important than the issues of the present; and Jewish culture is closely associated with leftish political leanings.
That is also the identity embraced by the museum. Founded in 1984, it was first housed in the Jewish Community Federation and called the Jewish Community Museum (later renamed the Jewish Museum San Francisco). Since 1999, under the direction of Connie Wolf, its ambitions have grown. In 2002 a merger was announced with another major Jewish museum, the Judah L. Magnes Museum in nearby Berkeley, which has the third-largest collection of Judaica in the United States. But within 13 months the union was off: perspectives and personalities clashed. The budget was slashed; Mr. Libeskind scaled down his plans.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum was thrust back to its community origins. But it is not concerned with recounting the origins of that community, nor with chronicling its triumphs and trials. You won’t find exhibitions about Levi Strauss, who began the jeans empire here and became a Jewish philanthropist. You also won’t find shows about Diaspora life over the millennia. This is not a history museum. It has a $25 million endowment and a $6 million to $7 million annual budget, but no collection.
And while other identity museums celebrate the particular, this one actively avoids anything that might seem too particular, seeking instead to leap into aesthetic or cultural realms in which Judaism is an element or influence. The museum, like its audience, is interested in assimilation, even in the ways in which the larger culture assimilates Jewish ideas and associations. It focuses not on the substance of Judaism, its laws, or history or ritual objects, but on perceptions of them.
In a modest inaugural exhibition, “Being Jewish: A Bay Area Portrait,” the museum pays tribute to its community. Backs of display cases are covered with photographs of Jews of differing races, ages, degrees of observance. The objects displayed are associated with Jewish life in its local incarnation: a contemporary denim Levi Strauss yarmulke, a Jewish marriage contract for a lesbian couple, a program from a 1943 meeting to protest “Nazi extermination of Jews and other minorities,” at which Thomas Mann, Isaac Stern and Eddie Cantor appeared.
The major opening show is “In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis,” in which a mixture of clever, callow, challenging and barren contemporary artworks aggressively rub shoulders with an original Blake drawing, a 15th-century Prague Hebrew Bible, Rodin’s sculpture “The Hand of God” and — movingly — a grainy 1968 Christmas Eve television broadcast from Apollo 8 orbiting the Moon, in which the astronauts read the opening verses of Genesis.
The museum also offers the superb exhibition from the Jewish Museum in New York: “From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig.” And there is a music installation of compositions inspired by Hebrew letters, organized by the composer John Zorn, and mounted in the building’s most unusual space — a white, angular, asymmetrical structure in which glints of sunlight from 36 diamond-shaped windows turn the room’s dimensions fluid. Overall, these are solid, imaginative, and vigorous presentations and ideas.
But why, then, is there an impression of something unsettled and unsettling here, as if something crucial were missing? The problem is evident first in Mr. Libeskind’s architecture. In a new book , “Daniel Libeskind and the Contemporary Jewish Museum,” he points out that San Francisco, with its culture of “freedom, curiosity, and possibility,” must inspire a far different museum than the Old World, which is haunted by the tragedies and traumas of the Jewish past, traumas evoked by Mr. Libeskind in three other Jewish-theme museums he has designed: in Berlin, Copenhagen and Osnabrück, Germany. Yet surprisingly, his San Francisco building is not particularly comfortable or reassuring.
Its skewed geometries are unsettling; the effect is more vertiginous than harmonious. Alienation rather than stability is suggested, despite the self-conscious symbols being grasped at. Mr. Libeskind says his building is shaped to form two Hebrew letters spelling chai, or life. Yet if so, they are so abstract as to be invisible.
Lines in the ceiling of an auditorium are apparently based on paths to the Holy Land on a 15th-century map — a purely private conceit. And even the lobby, where the word pardes is illuminated, is such a long narrow space that the word is all but unreadable. It seems as if Mr. Libeskind had been so distracted by secret signs and allegories that he overlooked the fundamental meanings his building was supposed to have.
The museum does something similar. An introductory wall panel tells us that in the Jewish mystical tradition the four letters of pardes each stand for a level of biblical interpretation: very roughly, the literal, the allusive, the allegorical and the hidden. Pardes, we are told, became the museum’s symbol because it reflected the museum’s intention to cultivate different levels of interpretation: “to create an environment for exploring multiple perspectives, encouraging open-mindedness” and “acknowledging diverse backgrounds.” Pardes is treated as a form of mystical multiculturalism.
But even the most elaborate interpretations of a text or tradition require more rigor and must begin with the literal. What is being said? What does it mean? Where does it come from and where else is it used? Yet those are the types of questions — fundamental ones — that are not being asked or examined here about Judaism itself.
How can multiple perspectives and open-mindedness and diverse backgrounds be celebrated without a grounding in knowledge, without history, detail, object and belief? Can a museum serve its community without leading it into the unknown past as well as into speculative realms? Can the Jewish thrive without Judaism?
This is asking the Contemporary Jewish Museum to be more than it is — not just to reflect identity but to inform and reveal it. Too much? Perhaps. It might have been possible had the merger with the Magnes Museum, with its extensive Judaica collection, taken place. Right now the Contemporary Jewish Museum celebrates a vision of Judaism as a kind of freewheeling allegory, a pardes of open-mindedness and diversity and artistic enterprise. But for all the institution’s considerable appeal, Judaism’s fundamental, literal meanings — texts and laws and beliefs and history — are left outside the gates of paradise.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum is open daily except Wednesdays; 736 Mission Street, San Francisco, (415) 655-7800 or thecjm.org.
By Rachel Sarah, June/July 2008, Jewish Living Magazine
Raising a biracial Jewish daughter, a mother finds herself answering many questions: from her child, from total strangers, and from her own heart.
"Mommy, you became Jewish when you had me."
That's how Mae, my eight-year-old daughter, explains it, and she's right. Sort of. Mae was seven months old when her father walked out and I became a single mom. At that point in my life, I'd never been so far from Judaism. I was firmly planted in motherhood, but it would take me a while to see that I needed my religious roots to unfold.
Today, Mae is a spirited second grader with a beautiful afro, cinnamon skin, and full lips. Many people assume we're not related. But Mae — who is quite a sensitive child otherwise—isn't self-conscious about looking different from her Jewish peers. I, her mother, am the one who sometimes feels — or is made to feel — insecure.
It's not as if we shouldn't be used to the idea of mixed-race heritage. There are Jews everywhere — Ethiopia, Russia, China, India. Everyone who visits Israel tells a story of meeting someone who, because of skin color or another physical characteristic, she simply couldn't believe is one of us. In the United States, according to one study, one of every five Jews (1.2 million people!) is either black, Asian, Latino, of mixed race, or of Sephardic background.
Not me. I'm white, of mostly Polish descent. My father is Jewish; my mother was born Catholic. She stopped going to church in her 20s and supported the raising of her children as Jewish (although she didn't convert). I had a bat mitzvah and a confirmation. I went to Jewish summer camps. I went to Israel. I was told that 60 of my relatives were lost in the Holocaust — the single fact that always kept me deeply connected to Judaism. But when, in my 17th year, a rabbi in Israel told me that I wasn't "really" Jewish because my heritage hadn't been passed down matrilineally, I was crushed. In anger and disappointment, I distanced myself from anything Jewish for more than a decade.
Twelve years later I had Mae. I was living in New York City, and, despite its large Jewish population, I didn't know any who were of mixed race. When I moved back to the Bay Area to be near my family, there was a Jewish preschool down the street, but I was adamant about not sending Mae there: If I'd felt shunned for not having a Jewish mother, imagine how she would feel. So, I found a diverse, high-energy preschool; she cried for a week. Every afternoon when I picked her up, her eyes were bloodshot.
Friends raved about the nearby Jewish pre-school, so I called: A spot had just opened up. I was unsure, but the moment Mae walked into Kitah Aleph, she felt at home. And she was not alone. Three children were Jewish Asian, one boy was African-American, and a Spanish-speaking girl — her mother, from Venezuela, had worked at the JCC for more than a decade — is still one of Mae's best friends.
Mae never wanted to go home when school let out. She learned how to count in Hebrew and how to braid (practicing on challah). She expanded my repertoire of Jewish songs tenfold.
But it wasn't perfect. I once took 5-year-old Mae to a local kids' Shabbat service at a Conservative shul. We walked in, and everyone stared. After the service, only one person came up and said, "Hi." She was the white mom of an adopted son with brown skin. While researching this article, I called that mom —who asked to remain anonymous — and asked whether anyone at her temple mentioned her son's race. "They ignore it," she said. "No one talks about it."
Nevertheless, her son recently said to her, "Mommy, most Jews are white."
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg, a New Jersey psychotherapist and writer, is both Jewish and biracial (her mother is white and Jewish; her father was black). Fortunately, she reports, "the definition of what a Jew looks like has broadened significantly since I was a kid." She remembers being told, "How can you be Jewish? You're black." "As if the two were mutually exclusive," adds the mother of two (her husband is white and Jewish).
"Today when I say, 'I'm Jewish,' I may get a respectful question or two," Rosenberg says, "but I won't get the same kind of disbelief I might have in the '60s. On our two coasts, if you walk into a synagogue there's a good chance you will find at least a few brownish faces. I think it's due to the high numbers of interracial marriages, conversions, and transracial adoptions by Jewish parents."
Diane Kaufmann Tobin, associate director of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco, agrees."When I adopted Jonah, I didn't know any black Jews," Tobin says about her 10-year-old son, whom she adopted with her husband, Gary, the institute's president. "I wanted him to grow up Jewish and not have to choose between his racial and religious identities."The Tobins, both of whom are white, were determined to find a place where Jonah would feel "very at home being both Jewish and black." So, they founded San Francisco's Be'chol Lashon (In Every Tongue) program, which "grows and strengthens the Jewish people through ethnic, cultural, and racial inclusiveness."
Clearly I'm not the only white mother who hopes her child will feel pride in every facet of her identity. Right now, Mae considers herself Jewish, while others define her — on the basis of what they can see — as black. Looking ahead, I'm not ready for the changes sure to come in her teenage years and beyond, both with how Mae sees herself and how the world does.
I ask Rosenberg for advice on raising my child. "It's important not to let the black part get lost," she says." Being black is something many biracial people take a long time to come to terms with — I did — especially if they identify strongly with whatever makes up the other half. But I believe it's important to teach a biracial child to love the black in herself, along with everything else."
One of my closest friends — a white, Jewish mom whose extended family is Orthodox — is doing just that. She had her 7-year-old daughter with an African man who's no longer in the picture. The Jewish part is easy, says my friend (who requests to keep her family anonymous) about raising her daughter. "She was named in a Jewish ceremony at temple. My grandmother even came out from the Midwest." And her daughter? "She never questions that she is Jewish."
Instead, my friend worries about helping her child identify with the rest of her background. During Black History Month, her daughter started asking questions about her African roots. Not sure what to do, my friend enrolled her first-grader in an African drumming class; she didn't love it, but Mom persuaded her to keep going "because I don't know how to help her feel the parts of her that are not parts of me."
"It's hard, with so many negative images of blacks in the media, especially if the child isn't living with a black family member," Rosenberg adds. "It's a process that I'm still working on. And I'm in my 40s."
My daughter, too, seems to have no questions about her Jewishness. She is secure and happy at our local JCC. She attends a Jewish after-school program and will soon start her fourth summer at Jewish day camp. When she's with her Jewish friends, she isn't shy, the way she often is in public. She volunteers to act in skits; she shows new kids where the bathroom is; she teases her counselors . (She did confess to embarrassment, however, when she was recently proclaimed "Mensch of the Week" in front of the entire after-school group).
I'm the one still feeling like an outsider.
Recently, a Jewish friend invited us to a neighborhood party. As I was pouring myself a glass of wine—and Mae was asking if she could have another cookie — a local dad asked me, "Where did you adopt your daughter?"
Pointing to my belly I answered point-blank, "She came from right here."
I've got that answer down pat because adults and children have asked me many times whether Mae was adopted (along with other common kid questions, like "Why is her hair curly and yours straight?" and "Where's her daddy?").
Scott Rubin, a Jewish dad in San Francisco who, with his partner Stephen Moore, has adopted two children, one African-American, the other African-American and Latino, says that strangers also have approached him with questions. First, he tries to gauge their intentions. Then, he wants to know why they're asking. "I always try to tell the truth," he says, "but I don't always elaborate. And if they ask, ‘Are they your kids?' I say, ‘Yes.' But I do not engage in conversations about ethnicity or race with strangers. Ever."
Says Diane Tobin, "What I've learned from other Jews of color is they don't want to be asked, ‘Why are you Jewish?' or ‘How are you Jewish?' It's rude. We need to educate people about what to say or not to say."
For me, biracial Judaism is a touchy subject. When white Jews ask about my daughter's identity, I appreciate their curiosity as long as their tone is respectful and warm and as long as their questions are directed to me.
Rosenberg says, "It's not your daughter's job to answer. As a parent, you need to step in and say, ‘Why do you ask?'"
Still, if Jews are not acknowledging my daughter's biracial identity, are they really ignoring her?
"Don't look at the container, but look at what's inside." That's from Pirkei Avot — Ethics of Our Fathers, Chapter 4, Mishnah 27. I'm led to that tenet by Rabbi Judah Dardik of the Beth Jacob Congregation in Oakland. Although we couldn't be more mismatched — I'm a 35-year-old single mom who never goes to temple and had a child with a man outside the tribe; he's Orthodox, married, and the father of four — Dardik is my go-to rabbi because he's thoughtful, respectful, and patient.
I catch him on the phone on a Friday, an hour before sundown, and apologize for not calling earlier. I tell him that I'm trying to write about what it's like to raise a biracial Jewish child, but every time I sit down at my computer, what comes out sounds overly defensive.
"Many Ashkenazi Jews tend to assume that Jews are white," Dardik says, "but it's not true. Jews come in different shades and colors." In Judaism, he explains, what matters is not what you look like on the outside — your "container" — but what "merit you have on the inside."
I've done something right, because clearly Mae isn't afraid to show her "inside." Maybe it's time for me to open up a little bit, too.
We are delighted to update you on the progress of the Abayudaya Community Health and Development Plan that provides essential life-saving services to adults and children throughout the region. This project promotes peace and cooperation among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Uganda. Click here for the newest update. To donate, click here.
Lately, the Abayudaya and Rabbi Sizomu have recieved lots of media attention. Here are just a few articles:
By Sandy Banks, June 10, 2008, LA Times
The music was distinctly African, driven by pulsing drums and lively melodies. But the lyrics were in Hebrew, sung by a diminutive rabbi with coal-black skin and a yarmulke as colorful as its history. The high-spirited conga-line sashaying through Shomrei Torah Synagogue included dozens of Jews who had been teary-eyed moments before, but were now smiling and singing at the rabbi's cue. Read on...
Of note was a musical performance from the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda. The words sung on the stage were Hebrew, but the rhythms were distinctly African.
"I saw that in the crowd there were many people trying to process 'who are these people singing Hebrew?' … In the beginning they looked a little confused," said Rabbi Gershom Sizomu of the Abayudaya Congregation of Uganda. Eventually, though, the crowd came around.
"My presence here is telling the fact that we are not one race. We are multiracial, we are multicolor, we are multicultural, we are multilingual but we have one thing that combines us together: the fact we all belong to one community of the house of Israel." Read on...
Click here to read: Q & A with Temple Bat Yahm's Bill Shane, Discussing Helping African Jews
By June Kronholz, June 12, 2008, The Wall Street Journal
When Barack Obama, whose mother was white, identifies himself as black, and when Bill Richardson, whose father was white, identifies himself as Hispanic, who is white?
The U.S. Census Bureau says the country will be majority-minority in 2050 -- that is, the combined number of blacks, Asians, American Indians and Hispanics will put whites in the minority. Texas and California are already there.
But the definition of white keeps shifting. Groups have been welcomed in or booted out; people opt out, sue to get in or change their minds and jump back and forth.
The deepest racial divide, between blacks and nonblacks, endures. But there also are identity shifts among African-Americans, as Sen. Obama's success suggests. Some make it into the middle class, where education and social mobility may help shape their identities as much as race does. Others are left behind in increasingly segregated schools and neighborhoods.
The U.S. has never found it easy to assign race, although it certainly has tried. A century ago, the people who did the counting -- demographers, sociologists, policy thinkers -- divided whites into three strata. They considered Nordic whites, from England, Scandinavia and Germany, the most ethnically desirable and elite, followed by the Alpine whites, from eastern and central Europe, and finally the Mediterraneans. Everyone else was identified as black, red, yellow or brown, which included South Asians.
Whiteness and the privileges that came with it were so closely guarded that in 1912, a House committee held hearings on whether Italians were really Caucasian, says Thomas Guglielmo, a historian at George Washington University. The idea was picked up from Italy, where northern, lighter-skinned Italians, were asking the same questions about the southern, darker-skinned Italians, he says. No one argued seriously that Jews and Greeks, or Irish and Poles -- light-skinned but poor -- weren't white, but whether they were ethnically Caucasian was up for debate, he adds.
Ethnic Fractions
The Census Bureau, which went door-to-door to count heads until 1970, for a time recorded gradations of blackness. That prevented those with any black ancestor from claiming to be white -- a measure known as the "one drop" rule. The agency defined those with one black parent as mulattos, one black grandparent as quadroons, and one black great-grandparent as octoroons.
In 1922, the Supreme Court decided that a Japanese man had white skin but wasn't ethnically Caucasian, and it denied him citizenship. A year later, it decided a South Asian was ethnically Caucasian but not white, and it denied him citizenship, too.
All of this because whiteness mattered a lot. Until 1943, only blacks of African heritage and whites could become naturalized citizens. Interracial marriage was illegal in some states until 1967, and some Jim Crow laws that protected white jobs, neighborhoods, voting rights and political power didn't fall until the 1970s.
An "expansive definition" of who wasn't white meant the pool of lower-paid, nonwhite labor was always growing, Dr. Guglielmo says.
Today, being white still has its privileges, but its meaning is changing now that those who are nonwhite face fewer legal and social barriers.
"Who's white [won't] mean that much, but when someone is partly black, that will still be noticed by a large part of society," says Bill Butz of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington research group. He sees today's black-white divide becoming a "black/nonblack" gulf.
Intermarriage is now common, blurring racial lines. Demographers estimate that about 8% of the U.S. population is mixed race, and almost one million multiracial children were born since 2000, when "two or more races" became a separate racial category on the Census form.
Opting Out of Whiteness
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there was "some sentiment" among non-Arabs for counting Arab-Americans as nonwhite, says David Roediger, a University of Illinois race historian. Since then, the Arab-American Institute in Washington has unsuccessfully lobbied the government for a separate "Middle East and North African" category on the census. The institute puts the Arab-American population at three times larger than the Census estimates, which limits its political power and claims on government programs.
Some minorities or multiracial Americans who were once counted as white are opting out of the category. The population calling itself Native American quadrupled when the Census Bureau began asking people to identify themselves by race rather than relying on its own enumerators to do the job.The number of Hawaiian dropped by half when the "two or more races" category was introduced.
Mexicans were long counted in the Census as whites because of an 1848 U.S.-Mexico treaty that allowed them citizenship; only whites and blacks could naturalize, so by that logic, Mexicans were white. But since 1980, Hispanics have had a separate Census category where even intermarried, non-Spanish speakers can include themselves, if they choose. One in eight people in the U.S. does, including Latin American, European and Caribbean Hispanics and their progeny.
Identity groups that once lobbied to be accepted as whites now see advantages in being nonwhite, including college-admission and hiring preferences. Some African-Americans who fear losing political power to the fast-growing Hispanic population have quietly urged Caribbeans and those of mixed race to identify themselves simply as black. Other minority groups are reclaiming their racial identities out of pride.
"Racial categories as we know them are not going to continue to hold for another 50 to 100 years," says Donna Gabaccia, who heads the University of Minnesota's Immigration History Research Center. Those who try to keep track of race "are always going to be five or 10 years behind where society is" as race becomes more about choice and less about government definition, adds Mr. Butz of the Population Reference Bureau.
The Melting-Pot Effect
That doesn't mean race won't matter, even as it becomes harder to define. Blacks still cannot jump back and forth across those shifting racial lines, which explains why Sen. Obama calls himself black even while he singled out his white grandmother in his speech claiming the Democratic nomination.
That's not likely to change soon. Some demographers predict that within a century, there will be as many Americans who are mixed-race as there will be those whose parents are both of the same race, further blurring color lines. But that "hybridity," as demographers call it, will be concentrated among Hispanics and Asians who marry whites and each other, not among blacks.
Meanwhile, the definition of who is white may change again -- and again. A century ago, Americans faced the same predictions about the loss of the white majority that they do today. Then, with Eastern and Southern Europeans flooding in, it was predicted that Caucasians would fall into the minority by 1950, says the University of Illinois's Dr. Roediger.
Those Italians, Slavs and other immigrants eventually were redefined as white as they assimilated and moved up the economic ladder. "That same thing could happen again," Dr. Roediger says -- this time, with minorities and immigrants changing their racial identities themselves. "Race is malleable in that sense," he says.
![[Chart]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-AQ843_WHITE_20080611210448.gif)
By Candice Choi, June 2, 2008, The AP
When Tim Huval and his wife decided to adopt, they got financial aid, moral support and legal counseling from a seemingly unlikely source: his employer.
"Never once do you feel like you're in a separate bucket because you're adopting" rather than having a biological child, said Huval, a senior vice president of card services at Bank of America Corp. With company benefits to ease the way, Huval is now the adoptive father of a daughter and a son.
His case isn't unusual. Last year, 47 percent of about 1,000 major U.S. companies offered financial aid for adoption, up from just 12 percent in 1990, according to the human resources consulting firm Hewitt Associates. As the prevalence of adoption grows in the United States, more companies are offering employees benefits to lessen the financial and emotional toll the experience of finding a child can take.
Other benefits commonly offered by employers include paid time off and referral services.
Companies that offer adoption benefits do so out of a sense of inclusiveness, and to make themselves more competitive employers.
Offering generous adoption benefits gives a company a more family-friendly image, even among those who aren't directly affected by adoption, said Rita Soronen, executive director of the Dave Thomas Foundation, which funds initiatives for and raises awareness about domestic foster care and adoption.
"A large percentage of Americans are touched by adoption; it's not an uncommon topic in employees' minds and hearts," Soronen said.
Starting next year, Bank of America plans to expand benefits for birth and adoptive parents-to-be to 12 weeks' paid leave, up from the current eight weeks. Employees can also get up to $8,000 in aid for adoptions and can ask consultants to help navigate legal issues.
A supportive environment at Bank of America was also one of the intangible benefits for Huval.
When he got the unexpected call one morning that a baby girl available for adoption had been born, his managers and co-workers rallied behind him.
Everyone at work was pulling "for us to go get that baby and bring her home," Huval said.
By Anshel Pfeffer, June 3, 2008, Haaretz.com
The Jewish people's public relations effort will enjoy a bonanza this summer: In August, a youth village is slated to open in Rwanda for 500 children orphaned by the 1994 genocide there.
The youth village is being built by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, financed by American Jewish donors, run according to the educational philosophy employed in Israeli youth villages that absorbed Holocaust orphans during the state's early years, and staffed by Israeli counselors who immigrated from Ethiopia.
It is hard to imagine a better story - and therefore, a massive media blitz will accompany its launch.
The hottest Jewish film star in the world these days, Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman, is currently filming a special clip about the new village, which will be screened in another few weeks on America's best-rated and most influential talk show: Oprah Winfrey.
Naturally, such a high-powered launch is being accompanied by the deepest secrecy. When Israeli representatives of the Joint and the New York Jewish Federation, which is also involved in the project, were asked about it, they responded along the following lines: "We really don't know what's happening in Africa; everything is being done via New York."
This secrecy has caused some confusion: When Portman was spotted in the Addis Ababa airport en route to Rwanda, organizations that are working to bring the Falash Mura [descendants of Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity] to Israel hastened to claim that the actress was there to support their cause. A report to that effect was even published in Sunday's Yedioth Ahronoth. But the Joint - which has also long been active in this cause, but is now winding down - quickly issued a denial.
Amir Shaviv, the Joint's assistant executive vice president for special operations, said that Portman simply missed her connection to Rwanda, and therefore had to stay in Addis Ababa for two days until she could get another flight. The Joint then filled the time by taking her on a tour of some of its projects that are aimed at helping the general Ethiopian population.
As part of the effort to keep the Rwanda project under wraps until its launch, pictures of Portman in Africa have been declared off-limits until her film is screened on Oprah.
Aside from being a public relations boon, the project illustrates a new trend in Jewish life: engaging in tikkun olam [repairing the world] via projects in developing countries.
Another example is the pride with which the Joint's Israeli branch and other Israeli aid organizations note that their representatives were among the first to enter Myanmar two weeks ago to help victims of Cyclone Nargis - at a time when the junta was still denying access to better-known aid organizations.
Through such projects, Jewish groups hope not only to score public relations points, but also to encourage young Jews, who are less interested in traditional Jewish frameworks, to become active in - and contribute to - Jewish causes.
By Anshel Pfeffer, June 6, 2008, Haaretz.com
Lacey Schwartz began to ask herself questions about her identity only at age 18. How did it happen that her American-Jewish, white parents gave birth to a dark-skinned girl? She discovered that the father who had raised her since birth was not her biological father; her biological father had been her mother's lover and a family friend.
That was only the beginning of her journey of self-discovery. When she applied to college and had to answer questions on forms about her ethnicity, she simply attached a photograph. That is how Schwartz' documentary, "Outside the Box," began. She hopes to finish the film within a year. It examines the identity of black Jews and the fact that not all Jews are white.
The fact that millions of people have no clear racial identity is a very American dilemma. Census figures reveal that the fastest-growing ethnic group in America are those defining themselves as multiracial, and they a prominent representative, the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama who, like Schwartz, is the offspring of a black father and a white mother.
There are many types of black Jews. Some were born of a mixed-race couple, others are immigrants from Ethiopia or black converts to Judaism, plus their children and grandchildren. There are also groups of blacks like the Hebrew Israelite community of Dimona, who see themselves as the descendents of the tribes of Israel.
Schwartz' film tries to show what it means to be both Jewish and something else so people like her can understand themselves and also defeat stereotypes and be accepted.
Schwartz says that Obama's success is a great inspiration. Just as he has told stories about his white grandmother and things she said, Schwartz sees parallels in her own life and her grandparents who weren't racist, she says, but sometimes said things based on prejudice.
The trailer Schwartz has produced states there are nearly 400,000 black Jews. In fact, there is no reliable estimate. Based on various studies, Professor Chaim Waxman, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, says they probably number 100,000 to 250,000. Schwartz concedes she took the highest number she found to be provocative and to draw attention to the issue."
Waxman says "usually these are people with a Jewish mother and a black, non-Jewish father, but there are also those whose parents are both Jewish; there have been black Jews for 100 years; even synagogues with mostly black members. There is so much mixed marriage in America, it's natural that it would be this way with Jews as well. Little by little the black Jews are gaining recognition; those who have undergone Orthodox conversion or were born to those who are Jewish according to halakha [Jewish law], are more accepted in the Orthodox community.
The Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Hebrew Congregation in Chicago is such a community. Led by Rabbi Capers Funnye, a Christian who converted to Judaism, the congregation prays according to Orthodox practice but in Gospel style.
Schwartz will be in Israel next week for a conference of 120 young Jews sponsored by the Vancouver-based Center for Leadership Initiatives, which is funded by the Schusterman Family Foundation. The goal, says executive director Rabbi Yonatan Gordis, is to encourage young people not to clone existing systems, but to do their own things. We help them by supporting their projects. According to Gordis, Schwartz "represents something special to her generation, the dilemma of being both inside and outside the Jewish world. It is her challenge to the Jewish community to decide who it includes in it."
By Anne Roiphe, May 26, 2008, The Jerusalem Report
If you want to get married in Israel and you are a foreign-born Jew, you need some proof of your: Jewishness supplied by an Orthodox rabbi whose credentials are acceptable to his Israeli colleagues.
This is a bite of the bitter fruit of the aborted aliyah: The road we American Jews didn't take because of habit and fear, desire for worldly goods., insecurity, complacency, comfort, exhaustion, assimilation and as many other personal reasons as stars in the sky. If only the millions of American Jews had packed up and settled in the land that had been promised them, the land they longed for through centuries of persecution, then this tiny band of Orthodox believers, dictators of racial and religious purity, would not be rummaging through our children's papers denying the Jewishness of :Conservative and Reform members, Of that secular Jews can be Jews even if their grandparents were secular and no one remembers where grandma put her ketuba and no one knows if grandpa was actually barmitzvahed because there was a war on and he was in hiding on his 13th birthday. If all of us in America had gone to the Promised Land, then Israel would by popular democratic consent insist on civil marriage in a civil society. So, in a way, this whole problem serves us right.
The entire "Who is a Jew?" question has taken an ugly turn. It was once an easy matter. If you said you were Jewish, you were welcome. Yes, self-interest was the reason so many American Jews gave money and love to the fledling state. The investment was an insurance policy. If it happens again, if it happens here, there will be a state that will embrace me or my great-grandchildren. Perhaps this wasn't the most altruistic or spiritual of reasons to support Israel, but it was legitimate.
But what now? My grandfather was the son of an Orthodox Jew, but himself a non-religious business man, my father was an atheist with clenched teeth, my husband was a psychoanalyst who believed in the unconscious as the divine force in the universe. All of them Jews. Wbat if my great-grandchildren can't find any documents? What if marriages by Conservative or Reform rabbis don't count? What if those bearing my DNA are standing on the docks waiting to board the boats that_will take them to safety and an Israeli soldier -- with a rifle looks through their papers and turns them away?
There are two problems here. The first has to do with religion itself. One branch of the Israeli people has arrogated to itself the power to declare and determine the Jewishness of all the people. This is unacceptable to the rest of us. Here in America we have no vote over Israeli religious matters. We can't throw these Orthodox rabbis out of power. We can only rant a little, tossing our displeasure to the political winds. I would never think to discredit the Orthodox way of being because it is not mine. I am pained that this respect is not reciprocated. Those, who say, "I am more Godly than you" are always endangering other people. Jews above all others should know this. This my - wa y - i s - the-onl y - way righteousness is not righteousness as much as arrogance. It is false pride that tells one rabbi his word is less valuable than another's. It is rudeness and clannishness and tribalism carried to an ugly extreme that says that this Jewish person or that is not Jewish because he was not taught by my rabbi, educated in my shul.
The second problem has to do with race. We would not be checking on people's grandfathers' Jewish legitimacy, if we didn't define Judaism and Jewishness as something believed with the mind, but rather as something carried in the blood, tracing back to our ancestors, our forefathers and foremothers in the desert with Abraham and Sarah. The aspect of Jewish identity that is racial is real enough. Those who hoped to deny it in America by the claim that Judaism is a religion like all the others were fudging the matter. Of course we are a religion, but we are also a race with a particular history and a mostly, but not entirely, cohesive genetic bond, allowing for conversions down the ages. We are an unusual people, with an unusual story, traversing oceans and continents, different Diasporas with different prayers and differing attitudes toward modernity. The enlightenment enlightened some more than others. If we are going to hold together until the messiah arrives, we will have to learn to bear with each other in all our many varieties.
All an American Jew can do is hope that the fanatics will soon be lifted to heaven in golden chariots and the rest of the populace will allow the moderate voices of religion to resolve what looks like a very ugly quarrel looming ahead for us, in Israel and in America.
By Aaron Passman, May 29, 2008, TheJewishExponent.org
As the product of intermarriage, Hannah Lau jokingly referred to herself as "Jewnese" or "Chinish" -- although she added that she's never felt Jewish or Chinese enough to fit into either corner.
"Children of intermarried families don't necessarily feel less Jewish," speculated the recent University of Pennsylvania graduate. "It just takes them more time to figure out what [being Jewish] entails."
Lau's words were delivered last week in a forum titled "Jewish Peoplehood in the 21st Century and Beyond," held at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.
These days, many congregations find themselves hosting more and more intermarried families, with many coming not just from Christian backgrounds, but from cultures outside of the stereotypical upper-middle class Caucasian milieu that for years seemed to comprise the idea of Jewish communities in America. In light of this fact, the recent forum was dedicated to discussions of race and Jewish identity, as well as finding ways for all Jews to take a seat at the table while still maintaining their individual identities.
Moderated by Temple University associate professor Rabbi Rebecca T. Alpert, the forum featured four panelists: Lau, Rabbi Jon Konheim, Gratz College student Danielle Selber and Andre Key, who helped develop the nation's first undergraduate course on the history of Africana Jews and Judaism at Temple University.
Key, who is African-American, added another dimension to the discussion by touching on the conflict between diversity and assimilation. He called himself equally black and Jewish, though he said many in his community preferred the terms Israelite or Hebrew because of "the presumption of Jewish whiteness."
Key said that the Jewish community had, even in the recent past, always been diverse, citing the once vast numbers of Spanish-speaking Jews.
"I think it's important to take the veil off of the many Jewish communities hidden in plain sight," he said.
Konheim, who leads the Conservative congregation at Beth Am Synagogue in Baltimore, spoke about his converting a number of African-American families over the past several years. He said that the experience had not only brought in new faces to his synagogue, but also new backgrounds since some of these new congregants came from lower economic strata than the majority of the members.
At the Core
After making individual presentations, the panel took questions, including debating what constitutes the core of Judaism that every Jew needs to embrace.
Konheim made the case that the Jewish narrative was what created the sense of unity among Jews from diverse backgrounds and cultures, citing that all Jews could identify and relate to the stories of Mount Sinai, the covenant and the Diaspora.
"The things we all relate to are what helps keep the community together," he noted.
While Key agreed that a "common folk narrative" bound different communities together, Lau countered that the "universally accepted values between all Jewish communities" formed Judaism's core.
Another issue they tackled concerned the declining numbers of practicing Jews (and those who self-identify as Jewish), as well as the failures of some Jewish institutions and community centers.
Despite those declines, Konheim said that many young Jews were now identifying themselves through Shabbat.
"There's something about the schedule of living" that attracts people to that, he said, though he was quick to point out that he was unsure if Shabbat qualified as an institution.
After a question was asked concerning culture clashes between differing sects of Judaism, Selber summarized what she believed was driving some of these clashes: that "by losing some of the things that have kept Judaism together for thousands of years, the fear is that we'll lose it all."
But, Alpert said, injecting a bit of lightheartedness into the debate, "one of our most important narratives, as a culture, is to worry."
After the panel concluded, the crowd of 50 or so split off into smaller groups for discussion on topics the panel had (or had not) touched upon, including new ways of creating Jewish connections and identifying as Jewish (including Web sites like JDate and Jewish groups on Facebook), conflicting senses of identity within cultures, and continuing the discussion of what constitutes Judaism's core.
By Ben Frank, June 6, 2008, JTA
About 500 well-wishers gathered recently around Isaac Divekar and Siyona Garsulkar at their wedding.
Divekar, an accountant for a large investment firm, and Garsulkar, a human resources professional, had just married at one of Mumbai’s noted synagogues, Magen Hassidim, built in 1931.
Unlike many young Indian Jewish couples who, in previous years, often left the country in search of greater opportunity and more Jewish life, this young couple will be staying put.
“There are more job opportunities in India now,” said Divekar, citing call centers and outsourcing from the United States. Young Jews “are staying in India and not emigrating.”
Divekar and his wife epitomize the new India and its revived Jewish community of nearly 5,000, most of which lives in this metropolis of 19 million formerly known as Bombay.
Seeing a bright future in their native land, young Indian Jews increasingly are remaining in India, which has the world’s fastest growing major economy after China. India’s 9 percent growth rate in 2007 was four times that of the United States and nearly twice that of Israel.
Last year only 49 Jews left the community for Israel, down from 291 in 2006 — though the latter figure included the 229 Bnei Menashe from northeast India, according to Ze’ev Schwartzberg, head of the Ethiopia and India desk of the Jewish Agency for Israel’s aliyah department.
Schwartzberg said 90 Indian Jews left for Israel in 2004 and 143 the previous year. India’s booming economy and the Arab-Israeli conflict are keeping aliyah down, he said.
The Jewish population in India has stabilized, confirmed Elijah Jacob, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee country manager in India, citing a total of 4,480 Jews in India.
Jews have been a part of the Indian mosaic for more than two millennia. The “land of the Ganges” was known to the Jews of antiquity as well as to those of the Middle Ages. The Talmud contains several references to India.
In 1948, about 30,000 to 40,000 Jews resided in India, but most left for Israel in the following few years. Still, India boasts the largest number of indigenous Jews of any country east of Iran.
With a population of about 1.15 billion, 21st-century India has capitalized on its educated workforce to become a major exporter of high-tech, financial and other services.
Most young Jews are educated in Indian schools where English is the language of instruction and are highly proficient in English and technology. They see their country as a place of opportunity, especially in high-tech jobs and “call centers which pay extremely well,” according to Antony Korenstein, the Joint’s country director in India.
“Jews are sharing in and riding the economic wave,” Korenstein said.
It was a different story for the previous generation of Jews, most of whom tended to work as family business owners, company directors, lawyers and bank clerks.
The parents “certainly are not poor, though very few are truly wealthy,” Korenstein said.
With the call centers providing jobs for young adult Jews at night — when it’s daytime in the United States — synagogue leaders say it is difficult to attract them to activities. They sleep during the day and are working at night. According to Divekar, Jews are allowed time off from work for Jewish holidays and festivals.
Not only are young Jews staying in India, a few Jewish families have moved backed there from Israel.
Israeli-born Anil Abraham, 31, is now a tour operator in Kochi, where he has relatives. Although he hasn’t made up his mind to stay, Abraham says that “life is different here compared to Israel,” citing the pressures of security and work in the Middle East.
“I love this place,” he added.
By Stephen Farrell, June 1, 2008, The New York Times
“I have no future here to stay.”
Written in broken English but with perfect clarity, the message is a stark and plaintive assessment from one of the last Jews of Babylon.
The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah’s prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar’s sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago.
Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead.
Among those who remain is a former car salesman who describes himself as the “rabbi, slaughterer and one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Iraq.”
Although many of his Muslim friends and immediate neighbors know he is Jewish (“I’m proud, I’m Jewish, not ashamed. I’m not hiding,” he wrote at one point.), he was wary of being named because it could draw more dangerous attention to him or his friends. To protect him, he is referred to as Saleh’s grandson, because his or his father’s name would be too easily recognizable here. Interviews with him were conducted by correspondence over the course of several months.
He lamented that Jews in Baghdad had had no meeting place since the Meir Tweig synagogue, the last in the city, was closed in 2003, after it became too dangerous to gather openly.
“I do my prayer in my house because we closed the synagogue from the war until now. If we open it, it will be a target,” he wrote, adding later: “I have no future here, I can’t marry, there is no girl. I can’t put my kova on my head out of the house. If I’m out of Iraq, I’ll share with people in all our feasts and do my prayer in the synagogue and will be with my family.”
Now in his early 40s, he exists as anonymously and discreetly as he can. He cannot reliably hide his religion: it is stamped on his official identity card, which he must present at any security checkpoint. So he stays mainly in his own neighborhood, protected by Muslim neighbors who have been family friends for decades.
He is a very cautious man. After contact with him was first established through an intermediary, and his identity was confirmed by his family abroad, he consented to speak directly for only a few moments over the telephone. Even that was just to propose a safer way to correspond, under a version of his name different from the one that other Iraqis know.
His fears are all too real in a city where bodies are still found dumped in the street almost daily, despite a fall in the overall death toll.
Christians, a far larger group, have fled Iraq by the thousands, and even Sunni and Shiite Muslims, who live among millions of their fellows, remain fearful of religious and sectarian fanatics.
Jews were once a wealthy and politically active part of the spectrum of Iraq. In a fading red volume of the Iraq Directory of 1936, the “Israelite community,” then numbering about 120,000, is listed along with Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and Sabeans. Rescued from a Baghdad library, this book lists Hebrew among the six languages of Iraq and describes a country in which “the mosque stands beside the church and the synagogue.”
However, the directory predates decades of trauma: the 1941 Farhud pogrom in which more than 130 Jews were killed during the Feast of Shavuot, World War II, the Holocaust, the anti-Zionism of Saddam Hussein and the post-2003 rise of Islamic militants.
Most traces of Jews are now gone beside the Prat and the Hidekel rivers, the Hebrew names for the Euphrates and Tigris. Baghdad’s Jewish quarter, in Taht al-Takia, is no more. And about 80 miles south of Baghdad lies the Hebrew-inscribed tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel, “son of Buzi.” During a visit there on Saturday, dozens of Muslim pilgrims filed through the well-tended shrine, its interior blackened by centuries of lamp smoke, to honor Ezekiel as a respected prophet.
Among these fragments of their civilization live the moribund huddle of holdouts.
Saleh’s grandson is now alone. His mother died two decades ago, his older brother left in 1991, and his father, now 87, was among the last handful of Jews taken from Iraq by the Jewish Agency after 2003, reducing the current community to single figures.
Most of his other relatives departed in 1951, among more than 100,000 Jews who fled Iraq between 1949 and 1952, in the years after the state of Israel was created. Their exodus was code named “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah,” after the Jewish leaders who took their people back to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon beginning in 597 B.C.
Some of the remaining handful of Iraqi Jews are middle class, including two doctors. Others, including Saleh’s grandson, are poor and unemployed, dependent on handouts.
“We see each other if there is something necessary, like a death, or to discuss some important things, or if someone needs help,” he wrote. “We take care about the people in the Jewish community only, not the half or part-Jewish. We don’t know about them after they left us.”
Some Jews say they are too old to leave. Some do not want to leave their friends behind.
The few remaining Jews ignore the entreaties of worried relatives and friends abroad and await an unlikely renaissance, demographic extinction or a more sudden end.
Concern for their safety rose two years ago when one of them, a middle-aged man, was kidnapped. They have no idea whether he was taken because he was Jewish, wealthy, or whether the abduction was random.
“We don’t know anything about him, and don’t know the reason,” Saleh’s grandson said.
His relatives voice frustration at his insistence on remaining in Iraq, saying he cannot be persuaded to relinquish the family home. He wants to sell it for $300,000 to help build a new life abroad but has had no takers.
“I talk with him all the time,” said his older brother, who lives in Europe and requested anonymity to protect his brother. “I call him every two weeks, and always I give him advice to leave, because it is dangerous, and because he needs to build his life and to find a wife.”
The family argues that if buyers were going to come forward they would have done so long ago. They say that in Iraq’s current instability, an unscrupulous buyer could simply steal the money back, knowing that Saleh’s grandson would have no recourse without a tribe to protect him.
“Now there is nobody buying because of the situation in Sadr City,” his brother said. “I keep telling him, ‘Money is nothing.’ ”
The Jewish Agency for Israel, an organization that arranges immigration to the Holy Land, has offered to relocate the entire group. “Should the remaining Jews in Baghdad request to immigrate to Israel, the Jewish Agency will immediately facilitate this request and also take care of their absorption needs in Israel,” said Zeev Bielski, the agency’s chairman.
However, Michael Jankelowitz, an agency spokesman, conceded: “They are not interested in leaving. Their philosophy is, ‘We are old, no one is affecting our day-to-day life. If we have to leave, we know how to contact the Jewish Agency.’ ”
The holdout’s father says that he regrets leaving Iraq, the country of his birth, five years ago, but that he would not return in the current dangerous climate.
“Why did we have to leave?” he said, sighing. “In Iraq I was always with my friends. Everyone was very, very, very, very nice. I had Muslim friends for 50 to 60 years. They were friends, like family. I used to spend more time with Arabs than Jews.”
His son says he knows the risks. “I’d like to leave, but I have my house, I can’t leave it,” he wrote. “I have no future here to stay.”
He insists that he has responsibilities to his fellow Iraqi Jews, no matter how few in number.
“If I’m faithful in GOD, I’m not afraid of anything,” he wrote, “and GOD BLESS ME.”
By Jeannette Neumann, June 13, 2008, The AP
The first Orthodox man elected to head Argentina's largest Jewish organization took office Thursday amid an angry debate over religious and cultural identity.
Guillermo Borger tried to dispel fears that he would favor Orthodox Jews and their beliefs during his three-year tenure as president of the 22,000-member Argentine Israeli Mutual Association, known as AMIA.
''AMIA is, and will be, the representative of all Jews, without exclusion and with a spirit of dialogue,'' Borger said in a speech Thursday night.
Borger is the group's first Orthodox president in its 114-year history. On Saturday, Buenos Aires' leading newspaper Clarin ignited a controversy when it quoted Borger as saying that ''genuine Jews'' are those who ''lead a life based on everything that is dictated in the Torah, our sacred book.''
''It's a paradox that people call themselves Jews if they don't practice the religion,'' Borger added, according to the newspaper.
Borger, a 59-year-old businessman, denied having made the remarks in a communique he sent to the nation's Jewish community.
Clarin stands by its story. ''What we published is what he said,'' Clarin editor-in-chief Julio Blank told The Associated Press.
Argentina's 250,000-person Jewish community was divided Thursday between Borger's backers and those who worry his alleged comments will divide the AMIA.
''We respect Orthodox Jews' way of life and we want them to respect us too,'' said Agustin Ulanovsky, a 22-year-old law student who joined about 200 people protesting Borger's statements at his inauguration, which was televised on a large screen to accommodate an overflow crowd.
Orthodox Judaism requires adherents to live strictly as outlined in the Torah, the Jewish holy book, while Conservative and Reform Judaism permit relatively more lax interpretations of the Torah's 613 laws.
A majority of Argentine Jews follow Conservative and Reform streams of the faith.
Even if Borger never made the disputed comments, damage has been done, said engineer and community leader Mario Goijman, who called his alleged words ''fundamentalist.''
''Borger's statements unfortunately establish a base for discrimination,'' Goijman said.
Terrorist acts have thrust Argentina's Jewish community, the largest in Latin America, onto the national stage twice since 1992. That year, a bomb flattened the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29. Two years later, an explosives-packed van exploded outside AMIA's seven-story building, killing 85 people and wounding 200 more. The center has since been rebuilt.
By Karina Ioffee, April 16, 2008, Forward.com
While many of their peers are wiling away their hours playing video games and chatting on MySpace, Eli Ezra and his band are holed up in a recording studio in Kiryat Nordo in Netanya, Israel. There, amid the sound-mixing boards and microphones, they sing about racism, poverty and violence, for what they hope will become their first album.
Ezra, 18, is the lead singer of Café Shachor Hazak, a teenage hip-hop band that has been turning heads in Israel. Since forming in 2006, the group has toured around the country and appeared on “A Star Is Born,” Israel’s version of “American Idol.”
The band is currently touring the United States, and had a stopover for performances in the Bay Area in early May.
All members of Café Shachor Hazak (Strong Black Coffee in English) are Ethiopian Jews either born in Israel or brought there during one of the three airlifts Israel made between 1984 and 1991. Ezra, who was 2 years old when he immigrated with his family, grew up in Netanya and turned to music at an early age.
Spending time at a local community center, Ezra and his friends Moshe, Elak, Uri and Aviram, who today make up the band, started taking classes in music.
There, they learned how not only to write songs, but also to record them on professional studio equipment, much of it donated by Israeli cell phone company Cellcom.
That led to gigs around the country and collaborations with Israeli musicians such as Hadag Nahash and Eli Luzon.
“I hope that our music will be spread all over,” Ezra said in a recent telephone interview.
“We want to pass our message to people who can listen to us and make changes in themselves and the world.”
The promoters hope that Café Shachor Hazak’s Bay Area visit inspires and educates local teens about Israel and breaks down stereotypes about the country’s music and people.
“We want to talk about Israel not as a myth, but as a place that is real and struggling with important issues,” said Ilan Vitemberg, director of the Israel Education Initiative, which helped to sponsor the band’s Bay Area visit.
“We’re facing an uphill battle as Israel runs the risk of becoming less and less relevant to young Jews in the U.S.”
Because members of Café Shachor Hazak are all 17 and 18 years old, they are the perfect cultural ambassadors to carry this message to American youth. Clad in baggy jeans and baseball caps turned backward, they sing about going to school, the mall, fitting in — issues other teens can relate to.
Singing in Hebrew, English and Amharic, an Ethiopian language, the group also tackles adult themes, such as in “A Moment of Quiet,” a song about suicide bombers, poverty and unemployment.
Another is a version of famous Israeli singer Ofra Haza’s “Hand in Hand” that expresses hope for peace and coexistence between Jews and Palestinians.
“They write about issues that are an integral part of their life,” said Yarden Schneider, co-founder of Taste of Israel, another organization behind the band’s Bay Area visit. “They sing about difficulties, but each of their songs encourages hope, love and understanding. Their appeal is that they can see beyond the conflict and stick to their dreams.”
Another topic the group sings about is growing up straddling two cultures. There are more than 90,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel, a community that, as a whole, has had a difficult time assimilating into Israeli society. Most adults lacked an education — many were illiterate upon arriving in Israel — and have struggled with learning Hebrew, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. They also have lower incomes than most other immigrants and are more likely to live in impoverished communities where they are segregated from other Israelis.
Despite the problems, the young generation — a whopping 40 percent of Ethiopians in Israel are under 15 years old — is imbued by a sense of hope. Many, like Ezra, have opted to do Nahal, a yearlong community service project, instead of going to the army, and are more prepared for jobs in a modern economy than their parents.
Their Bay Area hosts hope that American audiences will be inspired by the group’s optimism and energy and make more of an effort to connect to their Israeli counterparts.
Says Schneider: “They love their home, and are true leaders in the sense that they have the courage and talent to address difficult issues in order to better their environment in service of their community … And that is a great force.”
By Joe Eskenazi, j.Weekly
In Joe Hobesh’s old neighborhood there were no bagels, lox or Yiddish. Instead it was bourekas, white cheese and Ladino.
Both of Hobesh’s parents hailed from Ottoman-era Turkey. Yet the 73-year-old retired Lafayette electrical engineer was 8 when his father, Albert, died. And his mother, Sultana, never wanted to talk about the old country. So when Hobesh decided to re-create his family history — starting with Ferdinand and Isabella’s expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492 and ending with Ladino conversation drowning out Red Barber calling Brooklyn Dodgers games on the radio — he figured he could take a little literary license.
In Hobesh’s debut novel, “Sephardic Farewell,” Christopher Columbus is a hidden Jew and Hernando Cortez , the conqueror of the Aztecs, has an adopted Jewish brother.
“Hey, that’s one of the reasons I decided to write a novel and not history,” he said with a laugh.
After four years of working on his novel, Hobesh was still short of the Age of Enlightenment, at least chronologically. So he decided that he’d write several books instead of a single James Michner-esque one.
The novel traces the lives of a pair of Spanish Jewish families at the time of the Sephardic expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. One, the Halavi family, refuses to convert to Christianity and emigrates to Turkey. The other, the San Miguels, has already converted and opts to stay in Spain.
But if only it were so simple. Joshua Halavi falls in love with Elena de San Miguel, opts to convert to Catholicism, becomes known as Diego de Sangil and leaps aboard the Nina, Pinta and/or Santa Maria to sail the ocean blue. And if you guessed he left Elena a “souvenir” before shipping out — correct!
“I wrote this to basically make people aware of Sephardic Jews, who we are and how we have a different history than Ashkenazis and Mizrachis,” said Hobesh.
And, while he promotes his first book, he’s hard at work on his second and reviving his childhood memories by speaking Ladino with his wife, Anita — whose possibly crypto-Jewish ancestors may well have accompanied Ponce de Leon on his quest for the Fountain of Youth in the 1500s.
But that may be the subject of another book altogether.
“Sephardic Farewell” by Joe Hobesh (247 pages, Publish America, $19.95)
By Dan Pine, June 13, 2008, j. Weekly
Singer Mosh Ben Ari remembers growing up enraptured by the Yemenite music of his grandmother. At the same time, he was rocking out to Jimi Hendrix.
Like so many other Israeli pop musicians, Ben Ari found his own way to hybridize his musical influences. A decade ago, he made a big impact on Israeli music with his band, Sheva. Later, with four solo albums under his belt, he’s toured the world several times over.
“What’s unique about Israel,” Ben Ari says, “is you have unique mix of cultures. Everyone in Israel comes from another place. After 60 years you can see the result of what happens when you mix stuff.”
Ben Ari (whose first name is short for Moshe) returns to the Bay Area with a June 24 concert at the Independent, a 500 person-capacity club in San Francisco.
Though he has stiff competition for longest dreadlocks among Israeli musicians (Idan Raichel might have him beat), Ben Ari, 37, has a lock on funky Arab-flavored reggae-raga rock.
Born in 1970, Ben Ari claims Russian, Iraqi and Yemenite ancestry. As a music student, he spent time in India and Morocco absorbing new sounds. By the end of his apprenticeship, he had mastered exotic string instruments like the Indian sarod, the Persian tar, the Turkish jumbush and the Moroccan ginberi.
And the guitar, of course.
In 1997 he founded Sheva (Hebrew for “seven”), which released four albums and remains an active band. But in 2001 Ben Ari recorded his debut solo album, which was followed by three others, including last year’s “Negotiation.” He’s enjoyed his greatest success as a solo artist, both in Israel and around the world.
Though he spends a good deal of time touring outside Israel, Ben Ari thinks it’s all worth it if he can help promote a different side of Israel.
“We’re trying to show the people of the world that the most important thing about Israel is not what you see in the news,” he says. “It’s not just issues of Palestinians and Jews. All kinds of people are living here. It’s a big celebration.”
That doesn’t automatically translate into standard-issue patriotism for Ben Ari. Though a proud Israeli, he says he has no interest in politics. In fact, he takes that a step further.
“I don’t even believe in [politics],” he says. “It’s too much power for one person sitting in one big chair. The power is in the people.”
Though he is currently touring to promote his latest CD, Ben Ari is already writing songs for the next one. So far, he says, the tunes are mostly about “conflict with myself,” though he’s not making predictions about the final product.
Most likely, though, the next CD will celebrate Israeli life and culture, just like his previous releases.
“We have an amazing land,” he says of his native country. “We want to keep it.”
Mosh Ben Ari performs June 24 at the Independent, 628 Divisadero St., S.F. Yossi Fine is opening act. 8 p.m. Tickets: $30. Information: (415) 771-1422 or www.independentsf.com.
White Over Black, New Idan Raichel Documentary
Saturday, July 26, 2008, 4:30pm
Castro Theatre, San Francisco
For more screenings and to buy your ticket, go to www.SFJFF.org
Beloved Israeli pop-music ensemble the Idan Raichel Project is renowned for message-driven lyrics promoting tolerance and melodies blending Jewish, Arab, Caribbean, African, and other diverse musical sounds. In the rousing documentary Black Over White, filmmaker Tomer Heymann follows the gifted, dreadlocked band leader Raichel and his band on a 2006 tour of Ethiopia. (2007, 50 min. No MPAA rating. In Hebrew/Amharic with English subtitles) Click here for more information.
Happy Hour + Meet the Filmmakers - Tomer & Barak Heymann
A Bon Port, 476 Castro Street, across the street from the Castro Theatre
Sat. July 26, immediately following the films
Mediterranean snacks and wine
RSVP required, space is limited! Email Maya@JewishResearch.org
Co-sponsored by Be'chol Lashon, the Hub JCCSF, and the New Israel Fund
Friday, Oct 10 - Sunday, Oct 12
Walker Creek Ranch Petaluma, CA
You are invited to the 5th Annual Bay Area Be’chol Lashon Retreat for ethnically and racially diverse Jews, family and friends, at Walker Creek Ranch.
The weekend is an opportunity to learn together, celebrate our Judaism and continue to strengthen our growing community.
Questions? Email Esther@JewishResearch.org
Saturday, July 13, 2008, 8pm
San Francisco Symphony
Ambassadors of good will, the African Children’s Choir presents Journey of Hope, the story of the choir’s inspirational journey out of war-torn Uganda. These amazing children (age 7 to 12) from Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and South Africa, share dance, music, and culture of countries all over the African continent. Their unbelievable talent and unshakable hope will move you and make you want to get up and cheer. An inspirational experience for the whole family!
$50-$20 Adult, $25-$10 Child
The Be’chol Lashon Newsletter is reaching more and more people every month. Please send us information about events in your community or articles of interest that relate to Jewish diversity.
Please e-mail newsletter submissions to Esther Gibian Fishman, Esther@JewishResearch.org. Submissions are subject to editing for content, clarity and style.
Special thanks to all the contributors who make the newsletter interesting and informative
Top of Page
