Moni Ovadia

“Look”, he says to me, “people in the West are now complaining about the Jew with the weapons, the Jew that shoots and then slips away, but the other Jew, I tell them – you murdered that Jew! So you got what you wanted! If you would have left that Jew alone, he would have remained the way he was, he was better off the way he was… That Jew, the pale, scrawny Jew with the big nose, the Nazi-propaganda Jew, he was destroyed due to a lack of understanding, no one really knew him and everyone told ugly lies about him. He was too fine a person for this world.”

At the same time, Ovadia represents his people, providing Europeans the opportunity to see those they once dehumanized as dynamic and full human beings filled with creative energy and religious fervor.

“One day”, says Ovadia, “the wife of the Chabad rabbi of Milan called me. ‘I wouldn’t change one iota of this show’, she told me. ‘This is by no means an Orthodox play, but it helped the people who work with our school to better understand us. In just two hours, this show accomplished what we have not been able to accomplish in two months: it clarifies who we are, where we came from, why and how.’”

In a sense, the European context allows for Jewish cultural activism like Ovadia’s to reach a wide non-Jewish audience, something to which so many of our young artists strive. Eretz Acheret, an Israeli publication available in Hebrew and English, has some new, amazing reportage and essay regarding European Jewish affairs. The diversity and competency is a breath of fresh air in a Jewish media culture that fails to raise promote the vanguard. Bless up to Shlonsky.

Full Story.

Aaaaaaand, if you’re concerned about the fascist attacks on the New Israel Fund, try decking out your twitter profile pic with the NIF solidarity horn! It’s hot.

Check out some. It’ll play your spine like it was a tsimbl.

I approach AIPAC with a healthy dose of skepticism, because, in addition to how I hold a pen, and how I waterski, I tend to be quite the lefty.  I ran into another friend at the benefit, and her buddy, a member of the young AIPAC group, explained to me what it is AIPAC does in simple terms.  Financial support, he said.  Lobbying.  I explained that I have done research in Israel education, and that I lived in Israel for a year, and he responded with more depth.  I asked him if AIPAC supported a one-state or two-state solution, and he replied that it’s more complicated than that.  I ruminated over a lot of sushi.

They ushered us into the dinner (some thousand Jews all shuffling from one floor of a hotel to another, I wondered aloud if anybody else felt the horrific irony of the situation) and served us more food, even though, at least in my case, the shmorg had been more than enough.

They talked about their upcoming Policy Conference, saying, “Policy Conference is our Bonnaroo,” to which half of the room laughed, and the other half asked, “What’s a Bonnaroo?”  Many of my friends over the years have enjoyed attending Policy Conference because they got to meet politicians, but it was never my cup of tea.  I am not attending this year.

The speakers were interesting.  Chuck Schumer pointed out that his last name means “protector” and he was going to protect Israel.  Another politician also spoke (I missed her name while I was attempting to attack the 1/4 chicken I had no business trying to eat), and misquoted Isaiah 42:6, saying that “Israel is a light until the nations” (emphasis mine, proper translations include “for” “in” “on” and “unto”). I think she was nervous, but still.

After these speeches, the keynote came from Daniel Gordis.  He tugged at the heartstrings, talking about what it’s like for an Israeli parent when they know their child is going to be out partying all night in Israel.  I liked when he said that “Israel is the one country with people from the same religion living as a nation, in the same location, and observing their religion the way they were doing 3,000 years ago.”  That’s not entirely true, since we don’t have the Temple any more.  Actually, what ran through my head was:  “Now, with less ritual sacrifice, at least in the traditional sense!”  I should work in advertising, no?

Gordis closed his speech by saying, “You want to go to an AIPAC event and hear ‘everything is ok’.”  There was a quiet rumble of agreements throughout the crowd.  He continued, “It will happen.  One day.”  “Everything is ok” is awfully subjective, and if you to reach into my brain, “OK” would mean something very different from the “OK” in, say, the brains of my family and friends that choose to live in the West Bank.  Whatever your “OK” is, I hope something gets better.  Because Israel is a crazy place.  And so is Palestine.

It’s time to harness that raw creativity and technical talent for the Jewish community.

We can use games to teach the boring stuff of Jewish education, specifically Hebrew literacy and vocabulary.

Yes, there are already games to teach 100 words of Hebrew vocabulary, or the alef bet, or even which blessings to say when.

But these games haven’t taken off, for a simple reason: They don’t meet the needs of real Hebrew students.

Most Hebrew students — and I’m thinking here of Joey, my fourth grader whose favorite web site is Kongregate.com — have a specific goal in studying Hebrew. They want to do well on this week’s test.

So the words being taught have to be selected by a student’s teacher(s). There might be multiple lists for one student. Hebrew language and another for Tanakh class, in a day school setting. In a supplementary school, the vocabulary might consist of a few Hebrew letters… or of words that appear in the student’s Torah portion. It should be easy to select words keyed to a Biblical verse, a particular prayer, or a particular page of a Hebrew textbook.

But if the words are set by the teacher, the games need to be designed with the students in mind. They need to stand on their own as shoot-em-ups or puzzles or maze games or whatever genre is popular next year. But they don’t need to be programmed by educators… or even by Hebrew readers.

Kongregate.com offers programmers a set of instructions of how to interface the game they create to Kongregate’s back end of score keeping and advertising. The Hebrew game portal can similarly specify how each game would receive the player’s custom vocabulary list. How to take a dozen or two English-Hebrew word pairs and make a game out of it — that would be the programmer’s responsibility.

(Adobe did us a big favor last year when it released version 10 of its Flash player, the software in which the myriad free web games run. With the newest Flash, it’s easy to program bidirectional text — eliminating a practical obstacle to Hebrew in Flash games.)

The first games would have to be commissioned for the site, so it’s worth noting that the cost to hire a programmer to create a casual game like this has been estimated at below $10,000. When the project takes off, it can be largely self-supporting: a small membership fee, paid on a per-student basis by the participating school, could easily cover server and bandwidth costs.

Would-be players who aren’t enrolled by their school won’t be left out: They could be taught the Hebrew alphabet, and 100 basic words. But for participants, suddenly the stuff of homework — repetitive practice of vocabulary words — becomes a gaming matter. It’s a lot of Hebrew learning for a relatively small cost.

This post is part of the series 28 Days, 28 Ideas. Check out yesterday’s idea, Tzedakah Box 2.0 over at 31 Days, 31 Ideas. And be sure to check out tomorrow’s idea at JTA’s Fundermentalist blog. You can also visit 28days28ideas.com for the full list of ideas as they progress.

Because the snowstorm was over Shabbat, some Jewish congregations canceled their services, while others went on as usual. At Segulah, we went on with the show (thanks to our host, Tifereth Israel, which never closes on Shabbat), and I’m glad we did. We got a respectable showing of 20 people or so. The missing demographic was young children and their parents, who quite understandably stayed home, but all other ages were represented from 14 to 70s. We also had the earliest average arrival time ever: at least half of the people who showed up were there at the very beginning or right after, and almost no one arrived after the Torah service began. This is probably because on a day like that, you’re either going to do it or you’re not; it’s not worth trekking through a foot of snow (the streets and sidewalks hadn’t really been plowed/shoveled yet) just to show up for the last half hour. We continued with a potluck lunch in an apartment that was powerless and electrically heated, but well-insulated and naturally lit. Everything else may remain shut down for a while, but nothing stops Shabbat!

If you’re in the affected area, and your power is on (or you can access the Internet with your phone), how was (or wasn’t) your Shabbat affected by the snow? Share your stories in the comments!

I rarely, if ever, post about Israel. And in this case, I’m more interested in this story because it’s about journalism than because it’s about Israel. (I’m the editor in chief of my university’s student-run newspaper, hence my interest.)

If you haven’t been following this story, the gist is that The New York Times‘ man in Israel, Ethan Bronner, now has a son in the Israeli Army. Questions are now flying every-which-way about whether Bronner’s coverage of Israel can remain objective.

Here are the details at Tablet, and a couple of posts at Tikkun Olam. And, perhaps most significantly, a piece by the NYT Public Editor calling for Bronner’s resignation.

Regardless of what you think of Bronner’s reporting (and everyone seems to have an opinion about it!), I’m more interested in the theory here. Would an American journalist in the midst of a conflict in which most young Americans were drafted be asked to take a break for the duration of the conflict? Do Israeli journalists take a breather while their son/daughter completes his/her military service?

None of these questions are meant rhetorically. I’m interested in exploring them.

On his Mississippi Bar Mitzvah George Copen of Tupelo, Mississippi remarks:

It wasn’t punch and cookies afterwards, it was a full-fledged dinner, and the liquor flowed. And that was during the time of prohibition, but we weren’t too worried. We took over the little café in the Hotel Tupelo—now torn down—and we weren’t too worried because we had the mayor there and the chief of police…

Stories like this one—stories of ordinary people’s attachment to Jewish identity and their seemingly unlikely experiences in the American South—are at the core of my work. I am the oral historian for the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, an organization that, in addition to preserving the history of Jews in the South, provides and coordinates educational, rabbinic, and cultural resources for Jews throughout a thirteen state region.

Small congregations are closing all over the country, but especially in small cities and towns, many of which are in the South. The decline of independent retailers, the ascent of Jews into the professions, and the draw of suburban life on recent generations of American Jews have all made their mark. Helena, Arkansas; Dalton, Georgia; Brownsville, Tennessee; and Lexington, Mississippi are among many small cities where synagogues have closed or are closing. It’s easy to see that small-town Jewish life is not what it once was.

In cities like Atlanta, Nashville, and Houston, Jewish life thrives, but the number of people who remember the days of ethnic enclaves and Jewish retail steadily drops. As sunbelt expansion continues and ‘Yankee’ Jews flock to ever-more-cosmopolitan cities across the region, the Southerness of these Jewish populations is increasingly a matter of debate. For all these reasons, recording the personal, communal, and historical narratives of Southern Jews has to be the first priority of my work.

Every few months, I pack up my equipment in the ISJL minivan and have myself a little road trip. Our holdings for Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana are fairly strong, so my first large trips have mostly focused on Tennessee, with stops in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Georgia. Along the way, I get to do some sight-seeing and some good eating. I’ve stayed at the homes of friends, friends of my grandparents, friends of the ISJL, and at a number of cheap motels. Mostly, however, I spend my time with the interviewees—or, as I prefer, the consultants. We meet in their homes or offices, or at the synagogue or JCC. We chat. I set up my video camera, try to get the lighting right, hook up their microphones. Then it’s time for the interview.

I can play you a tape of Freda Stein—whose son is behind the Stein Mart chain—in which her charming southern accent is occasionally punctuated by Yiddish inflected ‘oy’s as she talks about the “foyst foreigners” or states that she is “soytain” of something. Sure these moments reflect her parents’ immigration to this country and reveal some level of syncretism, but I can’t quite tell you what to make of that.

In the meantime, there’s plenty to read in our Online Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities.

a gitn shabbos oyf aykh un oyf kol YISROEL.

Earlier this week, Levin, on behalf of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, issued a “media advisory.” I saw it on the Christian Newswire.

When Americans are suffering economically and millions need jobs, it’s shocking that the Administration is focused on its ultra-liberal militantly homosexualist agenda forcing the highlighting of homosexuals and homosexuality on an unwilling military. This is the equivalent of the spiritual rape of our military to satisfy the most extreme and selfish cadre of President Obama’s kooky coalition. We agree with Eileen Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness that this will hurt the cohesiveness of the military, cause many to leave the army, and dramatically lower the number of recruits, perhaps leading to the reinstatement of a compulsory draft.

Thirteen months before 9/11, on the day New York City passed homosexual domestic partnership regulations, I joined a group of Rabbis at a City Hall prayer service, pleading with G-d not to visit disaster on the city of N.Y. We have seen the underground earthquake, tsunami, Katrina, and now Haiti. All this is in sync with a two thousand year old teaching in the Talmud that the practice of homosexuality is a spiritual cause of earthquakes. Once a disaster is unleashed, innocents are also victims just like in Chernobyl.

We plead with saner heads in Congress and the Pentagon to stop sodomization of our military and our society. Enough is enough.

And, because Levin is all about living in the 21st Century, the press release was accompanied by a video of him delivering the statement:

Their praying in August 2000 to prevent natural disasters, allegedly the result of God’s anger over homosexuality, had nothing to do with the tsunami in Asia, Katrina, or the earthquake in Haiti. Seriously. And, if earthquakes are related, how come there aren’t more natural disasters in countries that allow openly LGB folks to serve in their militaries?

While the Christian Newswire condones Levin’s speeches (they link to another of his on the US government’s need to close abortion clinics), I’m sure none of you will be surprised to read that I condemn it. If, like me, you’d like to know who these “1,000 rabbis” are who are warning that homosexuality in the military will lead to natural disasters, and if, like me, you want to make sure the Rabbinical Alliance of America knows that they do not actually speak for all Americans, you can contact them at 718-469-6999. Go ahead, make a call.

Since he (Herskovitz) made it, his case that African-American culture was its own vibrant form of North American culture with crucial African aspects that had survived the traumas and dislocations of the Middle Passage has never seriously been questioned.

And yet he was a white man, who had largely shelved his Jewishness and his politics in order to have access and to set up institutions to study race in America…Brown, whose research underpins this documentary, asks, “Does the right to describe and define a people give you power over that people?”

Perhaps, and it also gives you power over yourself. Herskovits’ biography and ideas must be seen within the context of Jewish culture in the first half of the 20th century. The opposite context is fooled by a claim that Herskovitz was “shelving his Jewishness and his politics in order to have access and to set up the institutions to study race in America.” Fooled, we accept the assumption that Herskovits did actively shelve his Jewishness. However, Herskovits was born a Jew, thought about becoming a rabbi before a loss of faith as a medic in World War One, married a Jewish woman with whom he conducted research, and had Jewish children. His ideas about Diasporic Blackness were his own perception of Jewish culture in reverse. Herskovits didn’t believe there was such a thing as “Jewish culture.” This is a striking idea for a Jewish anthropologist. Playing on the stale notion that one exchanges their Ashkenazi Jewishness for American Whiteness obscures an important tension. Friedman continues:

Herskovits traded in his politics and peoplehood for the scientific credibility necessary to undermine the pseudo-science of race: He deserves not sensationalist speculation but real discussions of the types of services he and others have rendered, albeit from outside, to African-American culture.

We must see Herskovitz’s biography, and the critical reaction it has provoked, as a window onto how Jewish identity is wrongly conceptualized in our land. Herskovits’ “politics and peoplehood” were not “traded in for the scientific credibility necessary to undermine the pseudo-science race.” They coexisted in Herskovits, even as his professional success gave him power over the discipline he created. Herskovits is not a typical Jewish-American success story. The Jewish culture within Herskovits was as complex as the black one that propelled him to greatness. Even if he was inclined to believe, as so many of our youths today, that it didn’t exist. Herskovitz is our Okonkwo.