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Why South Koreans are in love with Judaism – The Jewish Chronicle

Posted By on May 21, 2024

The South Korean ambassador to Israel, Ma Young-sam, raised eyebrows recently when he told reporters the Talmud was mandatory reading for Korean schoolchildren.

South Korea is a country with a deep Buddhist history, but one which has embraced with vigour the Christianity brought to its shores by missionaries in the late 1800s. Official statistics say some 30 per cent of South Koreans are church-going. In such a country, Jews are few and far between.

Yet, pop down to the local corner shop and along with a pot of instant rice or dried noodles, you can buy a copy of Stories from the Talmud. It is not rare, either, to come across book-vending machines stocked with classic works of Babylonian Judaism.

The Talmud is a bestseller in South Korea - even the government insists it is good for you, and has included it on the curriculum for primary school children.

Lee Chang-ro heads a literature research team at the Ministry for Education. He says: "The reasons why Korean children are taught Talmud are pretty obvious. Koreans and Jews both have a long history of oppression and surviving adversity with nothing but their own ingenuity to thank. There are no natural resources to speak of in Korea, so, like the Jews, all we can develop is our minds."

The fascination with Judaism does not end there. Media outlets regularly run newspapers columns on "Jewish education", weekly radio features, and television documentaries, all of them showing Jews in a glowing light.

But although average Koreans can boast that their bookshelves hold at least one or two copies of the Talmud, to think of Korea as a hotbed of latent Judaism would be wrong. The motivation is less to do with religion and more to do with aspiration. Korean parents value schooling above all else. Parents send their children to after-school crammers until midnight and will spend their last penny on tutors and extra lessons. And, shy of good role models on the quest to securing academic success for their offspring, mothers almost unerringly turn to the Jews for inspiration.

Mother-of-two Lee San-sook explains that the way that Jewish children are brought up is universally viewed as positive in Korea.

"The stereotype of Jews here is that they are ultra-intelligent people. Jews have come out of nowhere to become business chiefs, media bosses, Nobel Prize winners - we want our children to do the same. If that means studying Talmud, Torah, whatever, so be it," she says.

Nonetheless, for a small number of Koreans, this love of Jewishness does translate into religious observance, even though, with no synagogues and no access to kosher food, they encounter almost insurmountable problems in leading a Jewish life.

One wannabe Jew, 38-year-old Park Yo-han, has handed in his notice at an investment bank to take the plunge into Judaism. He says he will go to New York, where he knows nobody, has no job prospects, just to follow his dream of Orthodox conversion.

"I've tried just about everything. Converting in Korea isn't difficult - it's impossible," he says.

Jewish observance in Seoul is almost entirely centred on Friday night services in the back of a Christian chapel on a US Army base. Every week, the tiny congregation of ex-pats and locals flip pews containing hymns books and New Testaments to face a pokey little ark for prayers. At the end of the night, everything gets put back in place for Friday night Mass. If there was not a small Ner Tamid hanging above the ark, you really would mistake it for a cupboard.

Most of the regular and long-serving members of the congregation are non-Jewish Koreans - civil servants, doctors and a politician from the ruling party, who is currently squeezing in his attendance between bouts of campaigning for local elections. They have no wish to convert but they take their interest in Judaism seriously. Most boast impressive collections of Judaica and read Hebrew fluently.

Among their number is a living legend of Korean Jewry, Abraham Cha. One of the few Koreans who have actually converted, he is a regular fixture at the US Army base services.

An old man now, he still cuts a memorable figure. He has a wild beard, payot, tzitzit protruding proudly, and maintains an unrivalled personal library of Jewish books from around the world, which he has painstakingly collected.

Cha says he had to give up everything to become an observant Jew in Korea.

"My family don't speak to me any more, I had to divorce my wife. I even had to stop working because they wouldn't give me the day off on Shabbat or on Jewish holidays. My bosses couldn't conceive what it meant to be Jewish."

Although precisely what it involves to be a Jew eludes most Koreans, anti-Jewish feeling is almost unthinkable in this part of the world.

Says Seoul resident Naomi Zaslow, "If you refuse a plate of pork ribs here, people will be dumbfounded. If you tell them it's because you're Jewish, they'll unfailingly look impressed and say: 'Oh, you must be very clever'."

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Why South Koreans are in love with Judaism - The Jewish Chronicle

Jewish American Heritage Month celebrated year-round at the Maltz Museum – News 5 Cleveland WEWS

Posted By on May 21, 2024

BEACHWOOD, Ohio May is Jewish American Heritage Month, a month set aside to recognize the historic contributions of Jewish people to American culture, history, science and the arts. It's a history in Northeast Ohio that is celebrated locally, not just in May but on a daily basis at the Maltz Museum in Beachwood.

"This is a museum that tells the story of the Jewish people in the United States through the lens of Cleveland," said Sean Martin, Curator for Jewish History at the Western Reserve Historical Society. "Really, from the settling of the community to today."

Its mission is to build bridges of tolerance and understanding by sharing Jewish heritage through the lens of the American experience. An experience in Cleveland began not long after the city's founding, with the first Jewish settlers arriving from Bavaria four decades after Moses Cleveland did. The neighborhood they settled in? What we know today as Gateway, home to Progressive Field and Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.

"Basically downtown and then they kind of move out to what we know as the Woodland neighborhood around 55th and Woodland," said Martin. "Just before then the area where Tri-C is located now used to be of course a much different area with bustling streets filled with immigrants from all kinds of different communities and then they move further out to Glenville, the Kinsman-Mt. Pleasant neighborhood and then on into the Heights and the eastern suburbs."

The Maltz Museum highlights the growth of the Jewish community both in numbers and influence.

"They're very active in the community really from an early age," Martin said. "So if we ask the question when was the first Jewish leader on city council, that's actually in the 1860s which is pretty early, I think probably earlier than most people would expect. So Jews are involved in city government early on. Kaufman Hays, one of the early important Jewish leaders helps to take the city out of bankruptcy in the 1880s, 1890s. They really are involved in all aspects of civic life."

Highlighted as well in the museum are the various industries they played a big part.

"The Garment industry was especially important here in Cleveland, these companies Joseph and Feiss, Richman Brothers, Bobby Brooks owned by Jewish immigrant families that really plays a role," Martin said.

The Maltz Museum opened in 2005 and, beyond telling the local story, features one of the world's greatest collections of religious art, ritual objects, sacred books and scrolls.

"We have the Temple-Tifereth Israel Gallery, which is regarded as one of the top Judaica collections in the world," said Museum Managing Director David Schafer. "This is where people come to understand and learn about Jewish holidays, religion, we have people coming in classes for comparitive religion of the intersection of all faiths."

The museum draws 30,000 visitors a year from all over the country and all over the world, but most importantly, a third of them are students.

"Our engagement with students from Northeast Ohio, 12 counties is I think vital. It's impactful. They are still the age where critical thinking is going on and you can impact, influence positively how they view themselves and how they view others and to reduce bias and hate," Schafer said.

Celebrated here are notable members of the community, the creators of Superman, Paul Newman and News 5's Dorothy Fuldheim among them. The Jewish community in Northeast Ohio is one of the most impactful in the country, numbering today around 80,000. But they still live under the words carried by those handful of settlers in 1839. The Alsbacher Document, as it is known, sits on display at the Maltz. They are the words written by a religious teacher in Bavaria that served as a guiding light to those early Cleveland settlers.

"It says basically that I know you will be tempted by the freedom that you find in this new country but remember that you are Jewish and that really is basically the mission of the community to settle and find their place in a new environment but to remember who they are," said Martin.

The Maltz Museum is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday and, in addition to its core galleries, features changing exhibits like the upcoming "A Celebration of Family," which opens June 2, exploring "the rich tapestry of families forming the fabric of society."

"We are a museum that's open to everyone because we want to share a Jewish heritage story and stories of courage through history," said Schafer. "We welcome everyone to come through our doors. The Maltz Museum is a gem nationally and certainly in Cleveland and if you haven't been to the Maltz Museum you have to walk through the doors."

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Jewish American Heritage Month celebrated year-round at the Maltz Museum - News 5 Cleveland WEWS

We Were the Lucky Ones Author Georgia Hunter Helps Us Find Empathy in the Present by Looking to the Past – Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper

Posted By on May 21, 2024

When Georgia Hunter was 15, she learned that not only had her grandfather, Eddy Courts, been Jewish, but she also learned he was born Addy Kurc in Poland and had escaped Europe during the Holocaust. She also learned that all of Addys family had survived the Holocaust, and all found each other after the war. What started as a high school project, would turn into 9 years of research and writing on the bestselling book, We Were the Lucky Ones, which is now a miniseries on Hulu, starring Logan Lerman and Joey King. In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, we spoke with Hunter about why this story is more relevant now than ever before, how learning from history can help us all learn empathy, and how we can be shaped by our heritage. If you havent watched or read this beautiful and moving story yet, be mindful that there are spoilers ahead, so read with caution!

Why do you think that maybe it's more important that We Were the Lucky Ones was released now as a miniseries?

I set out in 2008 to unearth and record this story and I never could have imagined that it would feel so very relevant today. It's a story about what can happen when people stop seeing each other as human beings and when hate and antisemitism is left unchecked. And we're seeing that today and it's so scary, and it's so sad.The timing of it is wild. That said, what I'm trying to grasp onto right now is that at its core,my familys story is one about love and courage and perseverance. While it's set to the backdrop of the Holocaust, it's a human story told in a way that I hope audiences can connect to and relate to and kind of remove feeling like they're looking back and instead they are right there, with each of these characters and living history as it unfolds. And I think in doing that, it might help people understand a little bit about what can happen when people stop seeing each other as humans. I know for me it gave me so much hope and empathy when I unearthed it. I just hope that in watching it, it moves people in a similar way.

When we look at then and now, what can we learn by watching or reading We Were the Lucky Ones or learning more about the past?

For me personally, it challenges me to have strength and compassion in the midst or in the face of adversity. There were so many people who risked their lives to help my family. My relatives also risked their lives to help others over and over again. Well never know what it's like to be forced into that position, to make those kinds of decisions, and to have that kind of courage. But when you step into the hearts and minds of someone like Halina or Addy or Genek or Jakob or Mila, I think that helps us to understand. And when you have that understanding, it builds empathy, and I think empathy is what we need in times like this.

At 15, after your grandfather had passed away, that was the first time that you discovered that he was Jewish, as well as any of the stories that would later become part of your book, We Are the Lucky Ones. How has this shaped your Jewish identity in the present day?

I don't think my grandfather necessarily hid it from me. I don't think it was a big secret, but when he moved to the States, he was the only one of his siblings that landed in a little part of America where there were no Poles and no Jews. He was also the only sibling to marry a non Jew. My grandmother, Caroline, was Presbyterian from South Carolina. I think it was really important for him to assimilate. I wish I could ask him now the reasons. I know Judaism meant a lot to him because he would go back to Brazil where his family gathered for Passovers, even after he'd moved to the States, and he wouldn't necessarily tell my mom and her siblings that's what he was doing. He might say he was going for the birthday that he shared with Halina (his sister). He talked about his mother's challah bread often, and I know it meant a lot to him, but I just think I was too young before he kind of got sick with Parkinson's and not at the age where I was asking those kinds of questions. He was so forward thinking and charismatic and optimistic. It just wasn't in his character to dwell on the past.

It did come as quite a shock to learn at 15 that I came from this family of Holocaust survivors and that I myself was a quarter Jewish. It left me with a lot of questions and a lot of curiosity. About five years later, I found myself at a family reunion with my mother and her first cousins. She's one of 10 in that second generation on her father's side sitting around a table telling stories. And it was then that I started to hear the snippets of the Kurc family story, and I remember thinking these are stories unlike anything I've ever heard before. And someone really needs to write them down. And I didn't know that someone would be me, but I couldn't quite let the idea go. So it took me eight years to get the courage to do so.

I started flying around the world with my little digital voice recorder and my notebook, interviewing relatives trying to unearth and record the story, and I think in that process, I learned so much. Not only about how they managed to survive, but about what kind of people they were and about the faith that they carried in their hearts. And I kind of learned about the ways they carried it differently. My great grandfather, Sol, was probably the most religious of the group, while some of the family members treated it as more of a cultural identity.

To me, the stories that were passed down, that were shared, were very much about the traditions and the meals and the gatherings. It took me nine years from start to finish to write the book, which was nine years of spending time with my family members and learning about that time in history, and learning about the Jewish faith. Because again, I was coming into this with a clean slate and discovering for the first time that this was part of my roots. It has made me feel closer to the religion today, and it's made me feel more grounded in the sense that I understand why I am the way I am, as far as those traits that were passed down from my grandfather's side of the family.

How did you have the courage to research and write this story?

I honestly don't know if I'd have had the courage to write the book, if the ending weren't what it was, but, and sorry for spoilers, but its so remarkable. You just don't hear stories like that. I remember vividly sitting around the table at the reunion in 2000, and Felicia (who was just a few months old at the start of the war), looked around the table and she said, It's a miracle that we're all here today. We were the lucky ones. So that obviously stuck with me. I don't think I realized how lucky, just how very lucky, but I knew that the family was all around that table. The 10 second generation cousins were all there, I knew enough in my Holocaust studies that the odds were severely against them. They were a statistical anomaly. (Hunters family came from Rodam, Poland. Prior to the Holocaust, there were 300,000 Jews. After, there were only 300). The percentage that they made up of that 300 it's just unbelievable. But it's also not something that you necessarily want to shout from the rooftop. I know it wasn't just luck, but luck played a big part for sure. Every decision they made could have ended differently. Every single path could have ended in death, and the fact that they all ended up in Brazil, that's lucky.

You're creating education around the series and the book. What does that look like?

I think that what excites me the most is that for kids who already see the Holocaust as ancient history, I think there are going to be so many entry points into this story, especially with these young actors they all have followed. I'm going to spend the summer shaping how to bring the story into classrooms and introduce it to kids who were my age when I first discovered this. It hopefully makes it less distant than, this is just some teacher telling me about a time in history, this is the author, and when she was your age, she was learning about this. And then when she was in her twenties, she flew around the world and talked to her relatives. And it's all very relatable when there's a person in the room kind of talking about it, who's it's her own history. Especially with young people, with students, I don't want the Holocaust to be ancient history. I want it to feel relevant. I don't want kids to look back on this time in black and white or,through these unfathomable statistics. Like you can't wrap your head around 6 million. So now's the time to be bringing the stories back to life and in a way that feels relatable and relevant and modern. And I think our show really does that.

Grab your copy of Georgia's novel and check out the Hulu series.

Original post:

We Were the Lucky Ones Author Georgia Hunter Helps Us Find Empathy in the Present by Looking to the Past - Maria Shriver's Sunday Paper

This Asian Jewish Play Shows That Judaism Is Not A Monolith – Alma

Posted By on May 21, 2024

I was running late when I walked through the doors of the Los Angeles Valley Beth Shalom (VBS) synagogue, and I was worried I might miss the beginning of the play I was there to see, What Do I Do with All This Heritage. It was the world premiere of the show, a collaborative production all about the Asian Jewish experience, taking place auspiciously during May, which is both Asian Pacific American and Jewish American Heritage month. The show was created by The Braid (a Jewish theater company) and The LUNAR Collective (the only national organization by and for Asian American Jews) and is the first ever theater show about Asian American Jews.

I neednt have been concerned about running late. When I arrived, I saw the rabbi of VBS had provided kosher egg rolls and an Asian sesame salad in honor of the premiere. So I grabbed two of the egg rolls and sat down in the sanctuary as the house lights dimmed and the show began.

Before seeing the show, I had the opportunity to speak with some of the people involved in its creation, including Ash Quasney-Sandler (a writer), Lillian Mimi McKenzie (a performer), and David Chiu (a producer). Thanks to those interviews, I knew a few things that a typical audience member might not have known in advance. I knew there were more than a dozen original stories showcased in the play, all detailing various Asian Jewish experiences and all performed by five professional actors. I knew that it was styled like a salon: The performers stood with binders and read each story, taking on each tale and injecting the words with emotion and empathy, even though the performers might come from different backgrounds. I also knew that everyone I interviewed about the show had personal stock in how they wanted people to walk away from the performance.

Lillian, the performer I spoke with, told me that she wants people to walk away from the show feeling both proud of their Asian and Jewish identities and also mentioned that she feels a responsibility, almost, to make connections in the community around [me].

David, for his part, hopes the show can offer people a perspective on how expansive community can be. In the wake of October 7, there is a temptation for us to retreat into our own corners because we feel like no one gets me but my own people, he said. But your little corner also contains people from all the other corners! Its a lot more complicated and a lot more messy. When sharing how the play got its name, David emphasized that the title isnt meant to sound like a groan, but instead like a gift. Like, look at all this heritage!

Knowing that everyone involved in creating the show had put so much of themselves into it, I was very excited to see it. As I sat in VBSs sanctuary, eating my egg rolls and waiting for the action to begin, I reflected that this show had a lot that it wanted to do; I was curious to see how it would accomplish all its goals.

The show opens with a song utilizing the title of the show and then dives into a students humorous account of crashing a Hebrew school before moving into an emotional piece based on this Hey Alma article about coming of age in an interfaith Muslim and Jewish family. I found the tonal changes to be one of the most successful and essential points of the show. Everyone I interviewed about the show agreed that the most important thing they wanted audience members to take away from the show is that being an Asian Jew is not all pain and heaviness. The joy along with the challenges of being an Asian Jew certainly shines through in the performance, both in the individual pieces and in the order and rhythm in which theyre told.

I found the balance most apparent in a piece titled Aspiring Jewish K-Pop Star, where the daughter of both Ashkenazi Baal Teshiva and Vietnamese parents finally feels understood by K-Pop. She wrestles with what it means to be modern Orthodox, go to a Yeshiva, dance and sing while also adhering to modesty laws. The story concludes with a dance to K-Pop on stage.

The story written by Ash, the writer I interviewed, came soon after the K-Pop piece. A moving account of dealing with anti-Asian hate at her Jewish day school, it was another emotional moment in the mixture of joy and trauma that the audience witnessed through this production. Dealing with those painful racist experiences at her school could have easily damaged the way that she viewed Judaism, but she persevered. For some writers of the show, including Ash, partaking in the project was a healing Jewish experience itself. Working on this project last summer and then having a positive bat mitzvah experience this past spring was unexpected, Ash (who is only 13!) shared. But [it was] ideal timing because I had left my Jewish Day school experience feeling defeated there.

At the end of the show there was a Q&A section, and those that played a part in writing and creating the show got up on stage with the performers. One of the writers took a performers hand (in a tender, utterly bubbe-like gesture) and explained the meaning of bashert to the audience. She, the writer, was from Kolkata, India; the performers family was not only from the same place they lived two doors down from where the writer grew up. The audience exclaimed; it was an incredibly Jewish moment.

Sometimes as a community, we tend to have a very stereotypical perception about what being Jewish means, or what being a Jew looks like, sounds like, acts like. But being Jewish does not just mean eating bagels and lox, watching Seinfeld or other stereotypes based in Jewish media. Being Jewish is Honey Walnut Shrimp (one of the writers favorite Asian dishes), the Indian Jewish melody of Halleluyah (sung during the show) and Valley Beth Shaloms rabbi joking that if you eat your Asian food from a takeout container in front of an open refrigerator door, no matter what, its kosher.

Im an Ashkenazi Jew with Sephardi family and as a result, I have always worked to see Judaism beyond an Eastern-European lens. Watching this show, I was able to see Judaism from both an insider and an outsider perspective. I both knew the content and didnt, and I found it to be refreshing. There is absolutely no question in my mind that this play will be meaningful for Asian Jews, but it will also be impactful for Jews of all backgrounds and those that are not Jewish. The show really emphasizes the importance of looking beyond ourselves.

What Do I Do with All This Heritage had big goals. The performance aims to tell many stories from a multitude of Asian Jewish perspectives, to show the necessity and limitations of who we call our community, to make the audience feel a range of emotion using drama and comedy and to prove that Judaism is far from a monolith. It does all that and much more.

Original post:

This Asian Jewish Play Shows That Judaism Is Not A Monolith - Alma

Jewish universities should be Jewish community’s top priority – The Jerusalem Post

Posted By on May 21, 2024

Throughout history, Jews have faced discrimination and persecution in various forms, including in educational institutions. Despite efforts to assimilate and integrate into non-Jewish societies, Jews have often been met with hostility and exclusion. This has led many to question the necessity of Jews being on non-Jewish college campuses and universities altogether.

One of the main reasons for this questioning is the long history of antisemitism in academic settings. For centuries, Jews were denied access to higher education and barred from attending prestigious universities. Even when they were allowed to enroll, they faced systemic discrimination and bias from both students and faculty. This legacy of exclusion and prejudice has left a deep scar on the Jewish community and has led to a sense of distrust towards non-Jewish institutions.

In todays world, Jewish students no longer need to attend non-Jewish universities to receive a high level of education. With top-tier universities in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, New York City, and around the globe, Jewish institutions are flourishing like never before. This presents a unique opportunity for Jewish philanthropy to redirect their support solely towards Jewish universities and institutions, including those that offer religious education that upholds the Jewish identity.

It is time to reassess the value of supporting Ivy League universities, many of which have lost sight of their founding principles and fail to address the rising tide of antisemitism on college campuses. Recent events on Capitol Hill have demonstrated the complacency and lack of action by some universities in safeguarding Jewish students from discrimination and hate speech. This is unacceptable, and Jewish philanthropy should no longer turn a blind eye to institutions that do not prioritize the safety and well-being of their Jewish students.

Jewish universities and institutions offer a safe and supportive environment for Jewish students to thrive academically and culturally. By redirecting support towards these institutions, the Jewish community can ensure that future generations have access to high-quality education that is rooted in Jewish values and tradition. Additionally, Jewish philanthropy can play a crucial role in promoting diversity and inclusivity on college campuses by supporting institutions that respect all races and religions unconditionally.

By standing together and supporting Jewish universities and institutions, the Jewish community can send a strong message to the world that we are united in our commitment to education, self-reliance, and Jewish identity. With the resources and talent available within our community, we have the power to build a network of educational institutions that rival any Ivy League university in terms of academic excellence and cultural enrichment.

In addition, recent events have highlighted the increasingly hostile environment that Jews face on college campuses. Incidents of antisemitic vandalism, harassment, and intimidation have become more common, creating a climate of fear and anxiety for Jewish students. In some cases, university administrations have been criticized for their inadequate response to these incidents, further alienating Jewish students and faculty.

Furthermore, the rise of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses has created a challenging environment for Jewish students. Many universities have become hotbeds of anti-Zionist activity, with students and faculty openly supporting organizations like Hamas and advocating for boycotts of Israel. This has led to a toxic atmosphere where Jewish students feel targeted and marginalized, making it difficult for them to fully engage with the academic community.

Given these challenges, it is understandable why some may argue that Jews should avoid non-Jewish college campuses altogether. By enrolling in Jewish universities and institutions, Jewish students can feel a sense of belonging and support that may be lacking in other settings. These institutions often prioritize Jewish values, culture, and history, creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment for Jewish students to thrive.

Moreover, Jewish universities tend to uphold the highest standards of academic excellence and integrity. By attending these institutions, Jewish students can benefit from a top-tier education while also being surrounded by a community that shares their values and beliefs. This can foster a sense of pride and empowerment among Jewish students, allowing them to fully realize their potential and pursue their academic and professional goals without fear of discrimination or bias.

THE QUESTION of whether Jews need to be on non-Jewish college campuses is a complex and nuanced issue. While there are valid concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in academic settings, there are also opportunities for Jews to engage with and challenge these narratives from within. Ultimately, the decision to attend non-Jewish or Jewish universities should be based on individual circumstances and preferences, taking into account factors such as academic reputation, community support, and personal values. Regardless of where they choose to study, Jews should always strive to uphold their identity, values, and commitment to excellence in all aspects of their academic journey.

It is time for the Jewish community to take a stand and prioritize the support of Jewish universities and institutions over non-Jewish institutions that fail to adequately address the needs of Jewish students. By redirecting philanthropic efforts towards Jewish education, we can ensure that future generations have the tools they need to succeed academically and embrace their Jewish heritage with pride and confidence.

The writer is founder and CEO of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce, bridging the business and governmental worlds, stimulating economic opportunity, and positively affecting public policy of governments around the world.

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Jewish universities should be Jewish community's top priority - The Jerusalem Post

Meet Jill Hausman, the real rabbi who grimaced through jokes about Jews on SNL’s ‘Weekend Update’ – JTA News – Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Posted By on May 21, 2024

(JTA) For Rabbi Jill Hausman, spiritual leader of the Actors Temple in Manhattans Theater District, working with celebrities comes with the job description.

So when she saw an email on Thursday from Saturday Night Live, asking her to be on that weeks show, she knew she had to accept.

If opportunities come along, its such great fun for me to be in something with other people, she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. If people come to me with an opportunity, as long as I can, Ill try to say yes. Its kind of like saying yes to life.

In this case, the gig involved a surprise appearance on Weekend Update, SNLs parody news show. The five-minute appearance, in which Hausman was all but silent, placed her on millions of TV screens grimacing in reaction to jokes about Israel, student protests and Jewish space lasers.

The whole experience has just been loads and loads of fun, Hausman told JTA.

On Saturday morning, Hausman led Shabbat prayers and a memorial service in Western Massachusetts, then drove back down to Midtown making it in time to sit alongside the co-hosts of Update, Michael Che and Colin Jost, for the shows 49th season finale.

Hausman, who has been a rabbi for 20 years and has also served as a cantor, has experience singing on stage. But her role on SNL was simpler:

They asked me to make the host, Colin Jost, uncomfortable, Hausman said.

Hausman was brought along for a recurring segment in which Che and Jost do a joke swap: They make each other read increasingly edgier jokes that the other has never seen before.

During an episode in December, Che brought an actress to pretend to be a civil rights activist who had marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. (Hausman was shown that clip when SNL explained the role to her.)

But, Che admitted to Jost, That was low. So to make it up to you, this time I invited an actual practicing rabbi. The camera panned to Hausman, who was clad in a large kippah and prayer shawl at the shows request.

I think I was supposed to be recognizable as a rabbi and not just to look like a regular person, she said. I think it was an identification kind of thing.

What followed were a series of increasingly cringey jokes written by Che and read by Jost about Israel and the Jews.

As a picture of Jerry Seinfeld flashed onscreen, Jost said, Pro-Palestinian protesters walked out of Jerry Seinfelds commencement address at Duke University, and I think thats disgraceful. During these difficult times I think its important to support our Jewish friends.

He continued, Thats why the only chant youll hear from me is Free Weinstein! Keep fighting, Harvey! Am I right, bubbeleh?

Hausman shook her head in disbelief. (Harvey Weinstein, the former movie producer, recently had one of his sexual abuse convictions overturned, but he remains imprisoned because of a different conviction.)

Later, Jost turned to Hausman and said, alluding to a prominent antisemitic conspiracy theory, So Rabbi Jill, if youre here, whos controlling the weather? She smiled and pursed her lips.

Another punchline, referencing comments by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, involved a puppet of a male Orthodox rabbi threatening to hit MSNBC with our space lasers if coverage of Israel is too critical. (Another involved Josts wife, Scarlett Johansson, who is Jewish.)

I was glad the jokes werent worse than they were, Hausman said on Monday. I didnt know what was going to be said specifically until I got to the studio and then I kind of knew. So I just was hoping that they wouldnt say anything really, really against Israel, which they didnt.

The Actors Temple, founded by shopkeepers in 1917 as an Orthodox congregation known as the West Side Hebrew Relief Association, became a spot popular among actors who, in the early 20th century, were not welcome in other spaces. It was once attended by two of the Three Stooges, Sandy Koufax, actor Shelley Winters and comedians Red Buttons, Jack Benny, Al Jolson, Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker and Henny Youngman.

Hausman is not even the first member of the synagogue to make an appearance on SNL.

In 2011, current synagogue co-president Bob Greenberg appeared onstage during Jim Carreys monologue. Carrey had proposed marriage to a member of the audience in the front row, who did not accept. So Carrey then begrudgingly grabbed Greenberg from another seat, and brought him up onstage, announcing him as his new life partner.

Hausman says she had a good time.

I went to have fun and to represent the Jewish community, Hausman added. I think its important to show up as a member of the Jewish community and I did it for the Actors Temple also. I did it for the fun of it.

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Meet Jill Hausman, the real rabbi who grimaced through jokes about Jews on SNL's 'Weekend Update' - JTA News - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

What role for revenge in Jewish life, literature and culture? – Aeon

Posted By on May 21, 2024

Is there a distinctive Jewish perspective on revenge? The question obviously bears on the contemporary world in pressing ways. Revenge is a complex concept about which psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law and other fields offer important perspectives. But one way to answer it is to turn to the history of Jewish life, literature and culture. Here we can find a distinctive feeling and action on a matter that is as old as humanity, a human feeling in response to an injury or harm, and one closely bound to ideals of justice. The mid-20th century in particular, a formative period of Jewish and Israeli existence, has much to tell us about the relationship between violence, revenge, justice, memory and trauma in Jewish and Israeli life.

To be My vengeance and recompense (translated from Hebrew; Deuteronomy 32:35): recruitment poster by Ernest Mechner and Otte Wallish, for the Jewish Brigade in Palestine, 1945. Public domain. Courtesy the Eri Wallish Collection at the National Library of Israel

Since 7 October 2023, nekama (vengeance or revenge in Hebrew) has emerged as one of the key words in Israeli public life. Weve heard discussion of nekama from the government, the Knesset, the media, the army, social networks, synagogue bulletins, and in popular culture. Perhaps the most immediate and relevant invocation came on the same day of Hamass attack, from the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who declared: The IDF will immediately employ all its power to destroy Hamass capabilities. We will strike them until they are crippled, and we will avenge with full force this black day they inflicted upon the State of Israel and its citizens. In the past few months, there were many poems on revenge written by Israelis, some of them IDF soldiers.

Like many basic concepts, there is really no consensual definition for revenge, or for its relation to near-synonyms such as vengeance or even retaliation and retribution. It seems certain, though, that revenge is connected to the realm of emotions and affect, for there can be a desire or a fantasy of vengeance without actualisation. But, of course, it also describes actions. The thirst for revenge animates much of the world of tragic literature, and it is a common element in art, theatre and cinema. Revenge begins within the family or tribe but it expands beyond, to town or sect or king or nation.

Revenge has a distinctive and dynamic relationship to time: it is caused by an act of wrong that happened in the past as an explanation for the present moment, but it is also directed towards the future. Austin Sarat, a scholar of law and politics, explains that vengeance attempts, consciously or not, to reenact the past, as it is one means by which the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration. The fact that vengeance looks backwards and seeks to cancel out past actions is one reason why the relationship between revenge and justice is complex. Revenge can indeed be the opposite of justice, a product of utter despair, a kind of empty and final gesture toward restoring ones shattered self-respect. The scholars Susan Jacoby, Martha Minow and Sarat have all written important work trying to better understand and clarify the connection between revenge and justice. They all would concede that there is an understanding that revenge is a kind of wild justice, as Francis Bacon wrote in his essay Of Revenge (1625). Most modern systems of law claim authority by distinguishing themselves from revenge, though conceding that feelings for revenge cannot be eradicated. Scholars of politics and law seem to agree that there is no place for revenge in modern international relations. Here too, however, as the scholar Jon Elster has shown, revenge persists, often concealed under more technical and dispassionate terminology about state or national interests.

In the Israeli Jewish psyche, 7 October passes through a filter of collective trauma centred on the Holocaust

Jewish sources give us many, sometimes contradictory, voices on nekama. Many biblical texts prohibit vengeance by human hands, as well as collective Jewish vengeance, although there is an exceptional case of revenge against the people of Amalek, biblical enemies of the Israelites. In post-biblical work, vengeance assumes the form of a divine promise that the redemption of the people of Israel will come to fruition when God enacts revenge upon their enemies. This version of nekama is a kind of eschatological prophecy. The only act of vengeance in the Bible with some elements of the noble, albeit dangerous, tragic revenge we find in the classical Greek literature, is the story of Samson in the book of Judges avenging himself on the Philistines in ancient Gaza. It is not a surprise that some of the poems and popular songs about revenge are focused on Samson.

The violence of the 20th century has profoundly shaped modern and contemporary Jewish views of vengeance. Violence against Jewish people in the past century includes not just the Holocaust but also the Kishinev pogrom in the Russian Empire, the massacre of Jews after the First World War in Ukraine by those who blamed them for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution (which led to the assassination of the Ukrainian politician Symon Petliura by Sholem Schwarzbard), the massacre of Jews in 1929 in Palestine, and more.

Since 7 October, the Holocaust and its memory has re-emerged as particularly central to Israeli and Jewish thinking on vengeance. Immediately following the exposure of the horrors of the Hamas attack, Israeli Jews invoked memories of the Holocaust. Historical basis for such comparisons aside, in the Israeli Jewish psyche, 7 October clearly passes through a filter of collective trauma centred on (but not limited to) the Holocaust. Indeed, the popular perception of Israel, its need for security, and its national narrative of from Holocaust to rebirth are inseparable from trauma. Nor is it possible to disentangle the link between the Holocaust and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which was both Israels War of Independence and the Palestinians Nakba (catastrophe).

In an important 1996 paper, the American Jewish philosopher Berel Lang asked: what is vengeance and revenge in Jewish consciousness worldwide? What about in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine), during and after the Holocaust? How did the desire for vengeance, Lang wanted to know, influence the memory of the Holocaust? Lang wondered because there were few attempts (and even fewer successful ones) of revenge by Jews following the Holocaust. It would be wrong to say there was no discussion, however. One needs to understand ways in which, during and following the Holocaust, Jewish desire for vengeance was displaced from direct acts against Nazis or Germans to other, less direct phenomena: for example, the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law enacted by the State of Israel in 1950 to bring to court SS soldiers and Nazis; and people such as Simon Wiesenthal, known as Nazi hunters, who tried to gather information and track down Nazis around the word. The desire for revenge and retribution was also part of the divisive and robust debate around whether Holocaust survivors should accept payment from Germany and around the Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, which was signed in September 1952.

The Avengers, a group led by Abba Kovner, a partisan from the Vilna ghetto, are central figures in post-Holocaust Jewish revenge. After the Second World War, the Avengers targeted Germans. Dina Porats book Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge (2022) tells their story. An Israeli-German co-produced film, Plan A (2021), is also about the Avengers. This renewed interest in them may create the impression that they were unique, but that is not the case. Kovner, who wished to avenge by killing as many as 6 million Germans, is an extreme figure, but he is not exceptional. As we will soon see, Kovners writings and ideology express central concepts in Jewish and Israeli culture that emerged after the Holocaust and in the years surrounding the founding of Israel.

Poets, writers and journalists in Europe and the US discussed Jewish revenge, its possibilities and limits

Even before the full dimensions of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry had been fully revealed, Jews wrote about and engaged in profound debate on the question of revenge. Most of that writing is in Yiddish. Yiddish is the historic language of central and eastern European Jewry, dating back 1,000 years. It is a Germanic language, but fuses Semitic components, as well as Slavic and other elements from where Jews lived. It is a diasporic language. Zionism and, later, Israel rejected it in favour of modern Hebrew as the national language. Despite the fact that most Zionists were Yiddish speakers, it was the language that must be forgotten in the making of Israeli society and culture.

In Krakw, a few months before he was murdered by the Nazis in 1942, Mordechai Gebirtig wrote A Day of Revenge, a poem in Yiddish that was also put to music. The Soviet poet and member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Peretz Markish wrote To the Jewish Soldier (1943), a Yiddish poem in which the speaker declares: The blood on every road cries out, vengeance. Poets, writers and journalists in Europe and the US discussed questions of Jewish revenge, its possibilities and limits. Jacob Glatstein wrote Revenge, Revenge, and Revenge! (1944), an article where he considers revenge by European Jews as a desire and principle of justice, while acknowledging, due to their murder by the Germans, its impossibility.

In the mid-1950s, discourse of revenge in Yiddish faded away but, as Lang pointed out, the aspiration did not disappear; it transformed. For example, it shifted towards a search for Nazis in hiding, the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, and fuelled debates about reparations from Germany to Israel. It also moved into other phenomena that generally do not seem directly related to revenge, such as the Stalags a popular, short-lived genre of Holocaust pornographic Hebrew books in Israel that flourished in the 1950s and early 60s.

During and after the Second World War, a parallel but distinct discourse about revenge also arose in Hebrew, an ancient language that was revitalised to become a key aspect of Zionism. The Hebrew-language works came from the poets Uri Zvi Greenberg and Nathan Alterman, who immigrated to Palestine from Europe, and from younger writers born in Palestine. Alterman, the most influential mainstream Hebrew poet of the 1940s, examined vengeance and revenge in his books The Joy of the Poor (1941) and Poems of the Plagues of Egypt (1944), and in poems published in the Labor Zionist newspaper Davar. For example, Alterman wrote A Prayer of Revenge in which the speaker seeks divine assistance in carrying out their vengeance:

Alterman wrote this poem during the Second World War, before Hebrew readers in the Yishuv knew exactly what was going on in Europe. It expressed the sense of vulnerability and frustration, turning to God as a father with a wish for revenge as expressed in ancient Jewish texts, but without making clear who should enact the vengeance.

Vengeance was a motivational force in the decision of young Jewish soldiers who enlisted to serve in Europe

By the end of the Second World War, writing about vengeance in Hebrew had taken on a new significance. A million and a half Jews fought in the armies of the Allied Powers. Writing in Hebrew, however, focused on the 30,000 Jews from the Yishuv who volunteered to fight alongside the British army, especially the Jewish Brigade, numbering about 5,000 men. The Brigade fought on the Italian front in March-May 1945, but most of its activity followed the war. Its significance lay in the fact that the language, flag, symbols and anthem of the Jewish Brigade were Hebrew. Brigade people were active in the paramilitary units of the Haganah and Palmach. The anthem of the Jewish Brigade was written by the poet Yaakov Orland:

Twenty years later, the writer Hanoch Bartov, a Brigade member, wrote in his autobiographical novel Pitzei Bagrut (1965; later translated and published in English as The Brigade) these words, spoken by the protagonist Elisha Kruk:

It is clear from these texts that vengeance was a motivational force in the decision of young Jewish soldiers who enlisted to serve in Europe as part of the Brigade (some of them had lost family members in Europe), and that at least some of these soldiers expected to be able to take revenge on Germans.

In 1945, Brigade soldiers met for the first time in northern Italy with people of the Sheerit Ha-pletah (the Surviving Remnant), Holocaust survivors and refugees, as well as partisans and ghetto fighters. Some of the Sheerit Ha-pletah had been active in Zionist youth movements even before the war. Kovner had just gathered in Lublin, Poland, about 50 young men and women who had a burning desire to take revenge against not only the Nazis but the entire German people. The details that captivate the imagination of many in the story of Kovner and the Avengers Plan A, the killing of 6 million Germans by poisoning the water supply of major German cities, and Plan B, the killing of SS officers and Gestapo officials who were imprisoned in prisoner camps are less important. More significantly, Kovner stands as a bridge between Holocaust survivors, most of whom spoke, read and wrote in Yiddish, and people from the Brigade, who represented the Hebrew Zionist Yishuv. It is the latter who shaped the ethos of the State of Israel, and some of whom later served in senior roles in the IDF and Israels security apparatus. This is a significant shift towards revenge as part of the Zionist discourse of military power in the context of conflict with Arabs in Palestine in the years around 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel.

In 1944, the Zionist leader and future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion spoke about revenge for the spilled blood of European Jews as one of the reasons for establishing the Brigade. By November 1945, Ben-Gurion the pragmatic politician and statesman concluded that, after the war, revenge was a matter of no national benefit because killing Germans will not bring back those who were murdered, and he silently disavowed Kovners plans. Nonetheless, Kovner and the Yishuv formed a significant relationship. Kovners family and several members of the Avengers settled in Kibbutz Ein ha-Horesh in March 1946, and Kovner became an influential figure around 1948, when, amid war, the IDF gradually began to form.

As the scholar Uri S Cohen has shown, in the struggle with the Palestinians and Arab states, Hebrew writers and poets, mostly men born in Palestine and known as the Palmach Generation, wrote a great deal about revenge. For example, the novelist Moshe Shamir wrote a series of novels between 1947 and 1951, each featuring a theme of personal and collective revenge, not against the Nazis or Germans, but against Palestinian Arabs. The desire for revenge against Palestinians during the 1948 war coincided with an important transition away from militias such as the Palmach, towards a regular Israeli army. Revenge became a central part of Hebrew militia culture. Nahum Arieli, a commander in the Palmach, wrote about the death of his friend and Shamirs brother Eliyahu: To gather strength, to organise quietly, and to go out again to avenge our Eli! Instead of Nazis or Germans, revenge against the Arabs served as the emotional core of the literature of the 1948 war. During Israels border wars, between 1949 and 1956, which were essentially a chain of reprisal operations dominated by the Commando Unit 101, vengeance remained a driving force. From these conflicts emerged well-known fighters who loomed large in the Israeli and Jewish public imagination, including Ariel Sharon and Meir Har Zion.

The desire for revenge had found an outlet against another group that was causing feelings of threat: the Palestinians

Kovner did not fight in the 1948 war. Instead, he served as a cultural officer of the Givati Brigade. Kovner named the commando unit of the Givati Brigade Shualei Shimshon (Samsons Foxes) after the biblical Samson and his foxes who carried the fire of vengeance against the Philistines. In his new role, Kovner wrote battle pages with rhetorical force:

Kovner is many things, a historical and political figure, a writer, but he is also a symbolic and transitional figure because his words and actions during the 1948 war show a profound change: the transition from revenge as a response to the Nazis and Germans to revenge against Arabs. As Netiva Ben-Yehuda, an Israeli author, editor and radio broadcaster who was a commander in the Palmach, wrote years after about the 1948 war: We fixed our guns on the Arabs, we pulled the trigger and we imagined to kill Nazis.

For Lang, the displacement at one farther remove of revenge against Nazis or Germans onto Arabs was a form of demonisation and aggression. Lang maintained that it could not be accounted for by the real threats Israel had faced, and that it required disfigured representations of Arabs. In its peoples emergence from [the] powerlessness of the Holocaust, the State of Israel had found in the Arabs an available target for revenge. The Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On, who for many years studied the relations between Israelis, Germans and Palestinians, suggested that the desire for revenge had found an outlet against another group that was causing feelings of threat: the Palestinians, who are perceived as the natural continuation of the previous aggressor.

There are key differences between what people who did not directly experience the horrors of the Holocaust wrote in Hebrew, and what survivors and refugees who arrived in Palestine/Israel after 1945 wrote in Yiddish. Avrom Karpinovitshs Yiddish story Dont Forget (1951) deals with a Jewish soldier who arrives in Palestine from a displaced persons camp directly into the battles of 1948, after being conscripted as part of the foreign recruitments. In Karpinovitshs story, the unnamed soldier finds himself alone and disoriented after capturing a Palestinian Arab. The Jewish soldier has no idea what to do with the captive and, in the absence of a common language, they cannot communicate. The captor is terrified but hopes that, if he manages to bring the captive to his commander, he will finally be able to transform himself from a disgraced refugee into a real Israeli soldier. His plan fails because he cannot find his way in the unfamiliar terrain and the oppressive weather.

The climax of the story occurs when the captive takes advantage of the soldiers moments of confusion and picks up a stone. At that moment, the prisoner speaks for the first time and says something, presumably in German: You have no right, I am a war cap[tive]. Instead of considering the status of prisoners of war, the Jewish soldier feels threatened, and his memory leads him to a particularly traumatic moment:

The Jewish soldier remembers how the Nazi killed his mother brutally in front of him and the cry of Dont forget that he still hears. Now, when he is confronted with the Palestinian captive, he contemplates:

The protagonist is disgusted with the act of violence and the futility of displaced vengeance

In this harrowing story, it is hard to discern reality from the imaginary. In this traumatic moment, dont forget translates into a call for revenge in the new reality. The Holocaust survivor who becomes an Israeli soldier, in his imagination, turns the Nazi into a Palestinian and brutally kills the captive. At that moment,

The protagonist is disgusted with the act of violence and the futility of displaced vengeance.

The story does not provide answers but only questions. Karpinovitshs Dont Forget, written in Yiddish by someone who was close to the events of the Holocaust, gives voice to refugees who immigrated to Palestine/Israel and were thrown into the 1948 war, trying to assimilate into Israeli culture immediately after experiencing the horrors of the Second World War. The story asks questions about the power of traumatic memories, and the relations between memory and the desire for revenge as wild justice, but also reflects on the act of displaced and violent revenge as ultimately futile and harmful.

By the end of the 1948 war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees, mostly fleeing to nearby Arab countries. The armistice agreements between Israel and its neighbours drew the new borders for the State of Israel, but violent incidents around these borders were quite common. In October 1953, members of an Arab paramilitary commando group killed a Jewish family in the town of Yehud, which had been depopulated of its Palestinian residents in the 1948 war. Before the reprisal operation that occurred after the attack on Jews, Sharon, as commander of Unit 101, wrote in the operations orders that the objective was an attack on the village of Qibya, its temporary conquest, and maximum damage to the population with the aim of evacuating the villagers from their homes by damaging a number of houses and killing residents and soldiers in the village. Although Sharons comment does not mention the word nekama, it must be understood as a vengeful act that became part of the norms for Unit 101. During the operation, IDF soldiers blew up 45 houses in the village with their occupants, and 69 residents of Qibya, mostly women and children, were killed. Many Yiddish writers were shocked and responded to the massacre. In a New York Yiddish journal in 1964, Glatstein wrote:

Glatstein, whod written about Jewish revenge against the Nazis and Germans in 1944, is furious about the Israeli displacement of vengeance.

The Yiddish-Israeli writer Yossel Birstein also wrote about Qibya in the story Between the Olive Trees (1954). Most of the story revolves around Hasan, an elderly Palestinian in the olive grove near the ruined huts from the last war. At the climax of the story, a soldier stops Hasan and declares his authority as a representative of the armed forces. In the confrontation, a bag of oranges falls from his donkey, and while Hasan bends down and goes on all fours to pick them up, the Israeli soldier towers over him and their gazes meet, when the soldier sees Hasan like a pile of rags. In this brief encounter, the Jewish soldier hears the subdued cry of Hasan, and is confused by it. The confusion surely arises from his memory of persecution in the Holocaust, which surfaces and moves the soldier. Hasan, the elderly Palestinian, and the Israeli soldier in the story are both figures who have repressed painful and traumatic experiences that occurred during the Holocaust and the Nakba. The story depicts a Jewish refugee or survivor who, in order to fulfil his new role as an Israeli soldier in retaliatory and vengeful actions like Qibya, is required to see the Palestinian as a threatening enemy and, even worse, as a dehumanised being. Birstein handles the matter with delicacy, but readers can sense in the story the danger of the vengeances displacement from Europe to Israel/Palestine, a displacement that leads to dehumanisation.

As we can see, during and after the Holocaust, European Jews clearly desired revenge, and this feeling persisted for many years, often in complex, displaced ways. The problem raises the question: can the impulses towards revenge be directed to less violent and destructive channels in post-Holocaust Jewish culture? Following in the footsteps of Hannah Arendts discussion of the topic in the book The Human Condition (1958), Lang explains a fundamental difference between two possible responses to acts of wrong or injustice: forgiveness and revenge. In terms of temporality, forgiveness is effectively the attempt to erase what happened in the past, and therefore to try to let a painful memory go. Revenge is different because, in the desire to avenge wrong acts, the past must persist. Because vengeful desire is directed towards the future, it resonates in the present and contributes to the memory of the past by not letting it go. We must understand that memory is something that we choose, too; it requires construction and cultivation. It is not just a natural attribute or a reservoir waiting to be filled. Thus, one can understand a human sense of the need for revenge as a persistent desire for justice and, therefore, as an element to foster memory, both personal and collective, part of a Jewish imperative to never forget what happened in the Holocaust.

Rachel Auerbachs Yiddish story Lullaby (1952), which takes place in Israel, also bears out Langs observation about the link between the desire for justice and preserving the memory of the Holocaust by survivors and refugees who try to overcome trauma and rebuild their life. Auerbach immigrated to Israel from Europe in 1950. She was one of the chroniclers of the Warsaw ghetto. She founded and directed the testimonial collection department of the newly created Yad Vashem, where ordinary people, rather than historians and politicians, would be able to testify in their own way and words. Auerbach understood memory as an act of overcoming destruction and death through the spiritual effort involved in testifying. In Auerbachs Lullaby, the protagonist visits her cousin Reuven, who lost his only daughter, Yosima, a pianist and composer who died in the ghetto. Reuvens first wife could not bear the loss and took her own life. Later, Reuven became acquainted with Ruth, and they married in Israel. The narrator visits their home with one room dedicated to the memory of Yosima, and the two young children born in Israel: a girl, and a boy with the strange name Kamy, short for Nekamyah (God will avenge).

Vengeance is a human emotion not an alien element, but rather a part of modern Jewish culture

Reuven and Ruth compose lullabies to Kamy and give different meanings to the name. The fathers lullaby is:

The mothers lullaby is:

The narrator listens to the two lullabies and reflects on what will become of the child when he grows up. Perhaps he will be a poet, perhaps an actor someone extraordinary? And perhaps he will be an ordinary person like all others? Auerbachs deceptively simple story is about a specific dilemma of Jews trying to rebuild their life after the Holocaust in Israel. It raises larger philosophical and ethical questions about personal and collective memory, trauma, revenge, justice and the meaning of being human an ordinary person in dark times, a question that still haunts us today as it did after the Holocaust.

What can we learn from this story and, in general, from the literary cultural analysis I presented here? First, we must acknowledge that vengeance is a human emotion, and it is inescapable not an alien element, but rather a part of modern Jewish culture. Second, vengeance may lead to collective memory as well as to a cycle of bloodshed. We observed the historical displacement of a desire for vengeance against Nazi Germans, mostly expressed in Yiddish during and after the Second World War, for revenge against Palestinian Arabs, mostly expressed in Hebrew and in Israel around and after 1948. This displacement has existed ever since then and has played an important role in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It was activated most forcefully on 7 October 2023, because of the unprecedented violence of the attack on southern Israel, and the extreme vulnerability of Israeli Jews who sensed that the State of Israel and its army failed in its most basic function, to defend its citizens. This activation of vulnerability is, in no small part, due to the intergenerational collective trauma of the experience of the Holocaust. Because of the displacement of modern Jewish vengeance from Europe onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the vengeful war taking place since 7 October is even more dangerous and tragic. To begin imagining a better future for both Israelis and Palestinians, it is imperative to be more aware of this cultural history with its memories, traumas and numerous blind spots.

An earlier version of this article was published in Hebrew in Hazman Hazeh.

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What role for revenge in Jewish life, literature and culture? - Aeon

Some Jewish Moms Are Mad at Ms. Rachel. I’m Not One of Them. Kveller – Kveller.com

Posted By on May 21, 2024

Theres something particularly heart-wrenching about watching Ms. Rachel cry.

For those of you not familiar with Ms. Rachel (though at this point, thats bound to be very few), the childrens entertainer who wears a signature pink hairband, t-shirt and denim overalls a very comfortable mom uniform, I can attest has gained immense popularity for her YouTube videos aimed at babies and toddlers. With the goal to help kids learn important speech and developmental skills, Rachel Griffin Accursos videos use delightful prompts, uttered in an intentionally high-pitched, saccharine voice, and incorporate songs, movement, puppets and props. In my particular house, we love Ms. Rachel, mostly for helping us in those early sleepless mornings, and for her excellent rainbow song (we love a rainbow, oh-oh-oh-oh!). Ms. Rachel has been there for me through some pretty tough times, and if youre a parent of young kids, she may have been there for you, too.

And yet recently, Ive seen many of my fellow Jewish moms in Facebook groups and beyond talk about how weve lost Ms. Rachel. The reason? Last week, she launched a fundraising campaign for Save the Children, Emergency Fund, which helps kids in war zones across the world, including Sudan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo and, yes, Gaza.

That last one drew ire from some Jewish and Israeli moms, who lamented that Ms. Rachel did not mention or raise funds for Israeli kids two of whom, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, are still being held captive by Hamas in Gaza, and many of whom are experiencing displacement and psychological trauma due to the war.

I feel that its lovely and I want to emphasize this: I think its lovely for an educator to try to bring light to children in Gaza or in Sudan or in Congo or in Ukraine but I dont understand why its a deliberate attempt by her and her team and Save the Children to never mention Israeli children, Moran Gold, a Jewish speech therapist, told Kvellers partner site JTA. And that includes Arab children, Jewish children, Druze children, Christian children and all other children that live in Israel.

It was that kind of response from Gold and many others who felt that Ms. Rachel didnt care for Israeli children that made the YouTube star cry.

The bullying is bad, its so bad. Its so bad, but I can handle this, Griffin Accurso says in a new Instagram video filmed in a dark room, through tears. Saying I dont care about all kids, it just hurts so bad, but imagining for one second what a mom is going through, unable to feed her child or give her child clean water or keep her child safe I can do this.

I care deeply for all children. Palestinian children, Israeli children, children in the US Muslim, Jewish, Christian children all children, in every country, she wrote in the caption to her two million followers on Instagram. Not one is excluded. think part of why people respond to the show is they feel that care I see every child as I see my own. I love every neighbor. Any child suffering is on my heart. To do a fundraiser for children who are currently starving who have no food or water who are being killed is human. She turned off comments on that post, but on other recent posts, amid the criticisms, you can also find comments from Jewish mothers thanking her for doing the campaign.

So have we as Jews really lost Ms. Rachel?

I understand that it feels like the entire world has devolved into an either/or situation. You are either pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, it seems. Its a false reality that we see on social media and college campuses, and in discourse everywhere. And so I also understand how seeing Ms. Rachel, who has mostly kept quiet on the Israel-Hamas War, mention Gaza alone can feel like she has chosen a side, at the expense of ignoring the suffering of the other. Many have pointed out that she hasnt referred to Israeli children before that crying video. I see how that feels so personal.

For what its worth, Save the Children does not operate in Israel, but their homepage links to a page in which they talk about how they care for the wellbeing of Israeli children, and links to organizations in Israel that help children in crisis. Their agenda, and Ms. Rachels agenda, seem to be one in the the same to protect children and that page on their website reads, Like children everywhere, children in Israel must be protected. The organization has also been advocating for an immediate and definitive ceasefire, which it believes needs to happen to maintain the wellbeing of the children of Gaza.

And helping kids in Gaza and not just Gaza, but other crisis zones the organization operates in, which includes war zones and places hit by climate crisis is a noble thing to do. As Jews, we care for all children, not just our own. Just because something isnt said doesnt mean its not true. I for one can very easily take Ms. Rachel at her word that she cares for all children. I see it in the way shes devoted her life to helping them learn, communicate and grow. And whatever you may or may not believe about this current war, I think we can all agree that anything that makes children safer and better cared for, no matter who or where they are, is a good thing. I also think we can all agree that watching kids suffering in Gaza where more than 7,000 children have lost their lives since October 7, according to U.N., where many are facing food instability and have no access to clean water, where schools have been closed since the war started and where the majority of people are displaced is devastating, especially as a parent.

Being a child in Israel is also terrifying right now; many children from communities hit by the war are displaced, many are suffering the trauma of barrages of rockets being fired at them, and many have lost their parents, siblings and other family members to the October 7 attack and the ongoing war.

All of these things can be true at once.

Making Ms. Rachel cry is not a good look, one friend mused to me, though she was mad that the child entertainer seemed to wade into a topic she didnt feel she has expertise on (Accurso also helps advocate for more funding for educational programming and childcare in New York and across the country). Its not something that is going to help garner more sympathy for Israeli kids, she added.

Gold is still encouraging people to tag Ms. Rachel in comments, maintaining that she wants to have a respectful dialogue, to connect her to Jewish leaders, and to make sure she better incorporates Jewish and Israeli children in her activism.

Personally, I believe that no one can be everything for everyone. No child entertainer, no actor, no writer, no politician, can be perfectly aligned with us in every way. Ms. Rachel is not a political figure, and I dont expect her to be. She uses her platform to help children, including my own. I, for one, am OK with keeping her.

Lior Zaltzman is the deputy managing editor of Kveller.

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Some Jewish Moms Are Mad at Ms. Rachel. I'm Not One of Them. Kveller - Kveller.com

When Jewish holidays can seem like too much, and meaning-making too soon – JTA News – Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Posted By on May 21, 2024

This story was originally published on My Jewish Learning.

(JTA) My sons hair is more unruly than usual, though thats typical for this time of year. In our family, we follow the custom of not cutting our hair during the Omer, the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot.

The Omer is treated as a time of mourning first marking the deaths of many thousands of Jews in theBar Kochba revoltand subsequent plague in 132 CE, and later taking on significance as the time of year when Ashkenazi Jews frequently experienced pogroms.

In a few weeks, well get a reprieve a picnic, maybe a haircut on the 33rd day of the count, known asLag Baomer (which this year falls on May 26). And we know we will end this period a little more than two weeks after that with the celebration of Shavuot, for not only have we survived massacre and plague, but we have received the Torah and have had harvests of plenty for thousands of years.

This week, I find my heart as scraggly as the wilding beards I see on the Brooklyn subway, because we are not only midway through the Omer, but also just marked a trio of yoms Yom Hashoah(Holocaust Memorial Day),Yom Hazikaron(Israeli Memorial Day) andYom Haatzmaut(Israeli Independence Day).

In Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi calls our holiday observances acts of ritual remembering, a method by which Jewish collective memory is preserved through rituals, ceremonies and liturgical practices rather than just historical records. We dont just hear about the Exodus from Egypt, we taste it as we eat matzah and saltwater at the Passover seder. We sing and feast to celebrate our liberation, and we care for the downtrodden because we know what it means to be enslaved. And yes, the old joke about typical Jewish holidays (attributed to Alan King) encapsulates our typical ceremonies succinctly: They tried to kill us, we prevailed, lets eat.

This year, that process is more fraught than most. It has been only seven months since the massacres of Oct. 7, and we are still engulfed in a brutal war. How can we engage in acts of ritual remembering when we are living in between they tried to kill us and we prevailed?

Our processes of mourning and memory can provide some guideposts. When a close loved one dies, we sitshiva, seven days at home in which our community ensures we do not grieve alone. Friends provide food and comfort, listening as we share raw expressions of loss and memory. We arent ready to make meaning. It is too soon with our fresh losses and ongoing trauma.

Instead, we gather, share stories and support those in the depths of grief, collectively waiting for the time when we might begin to make meaning. This sharing is the beginning of a narrative process during which memories become stories, eventually burnished into legacy when they motivate our actions.

My late father shared a poignant story from another challenging time in our history: Simchat Torah during theYom Kippur Warof 1973. With shades drawn down across Tel Aviv for air raids, every neighbor had a loss to mourn, a shiva to attend. Amidst the heavy grief and omnipresent reality of war, he suddenly heard sounds of singing. A throng was dancing with a Torah through the streets of secular Tel Aviv. They proclaimed, If we cannot dance in the streets with the Torah, then what is the point of fighting at all?

They knew the laws of sitting shiva are paused for Shabbat, and ended for the festivals. And they were following the teaching ofRav Nachman of Breslov, who said that it is forbidden to despair. As long as we carry forward Torah, as long as we reach toward and seek to reflect Gods light, we access a source of hope. As future ancestors, and descendants of Abraham and Sarah, we embody an indomitable spirit that affirms life even in the darkest of times.

What if we could, even now in fresh grief, still weather our despair with the memory of past redemptions? What if our rituals this year could reflect not only the sorrow of those we have lost but also our indomitable spirit, and a stubborn hope for peace and security? What if we allow ourselves this Shavuot to truly receive the gift of Torah to give us strength and hope?

As hair grows and tears flow through this Omer period, we add new stories of collective and personal sorrows. Someday our current sorrows will be memories, woven into the tapestry of our shared destiny, where time and again we sow in tears and reap in joy, in the words of the psalmist. As we count down to Shavuot, we are reminded that, just as we stood together at Sinai, we will once again gather in the celebration of Torah and the renewal it promises.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

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When Jewish holidays can seem like too much, and meaning-making too soon - JTA News - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Jewish Haverford students sue Haverford College alleging antisemitism – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Posted By on May 21, 2024

A group of Jewish students, faculty, parents and alumni at Haverford College have sued the school, alleging that it is discriminating against Jews by tolerating antisemitic speech and failing to support Jewish students amid an anti-Israel climate on campus.

In a federal lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the group, called Jews at Haverford, accused leaders of the liberal arts college of applying a double standard to minority groups on campus. The group said the college violated the Civil Rights Act when it failed to condemn Hamas attacks on Israel, despite previously issuing statements pledging solidarity with other minorities, including after police killings of Black people.

The suit comes amid continued unrest on college campuses and in classrooms over the Israel-Gaza war. Schools across the country, including the University of Pennsylvania, where a pro-Palestinian encampment was disbanded by police last week, and Temple University have faced an uptick in federal complaints over allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia since the Oct. 7 attacks.

The U.S. Department of Educations Office of Civil Rights is investigating one such claim from a group of Jewish parents in Philadelphia accusing the Philadelphia School District of antisemitism at Masterman and other city schools, where students and families have clashed over the war in Gaza.

At Haverford, where a junior was among three Palestinian students shot near the University of Vermont in November, students have invoked the colleges Quaker roots while pressing it to support a cease-fire.

The Jews at Haverford group said the college has repeatedly permitted speech critical of Israel by students and professors; one professor called Haverford students who supported Israel racist genocidaires, a statement the college didnt challenge, according to the lawsuit.

The college also let students host an event claiming that Israel had intentionally infected Palestinians with COVID-19 claims the Jewish group compared to medieval blood libels that falsely accused Jews of murdering Christians.

The lawsuit also lists complaints about the colleges plenary meetings, when the student body gathers to discuss and vote on issues. This academic year, plenaries have featured resolutions to call for a cease-fire, with wildly biased accounts of the Israel-Hamas conflict, according to the lawsuit. It claims several Jewish students were not permitted to speak and were bullied for their signatures.

Haverford has adopted a single unifocal definition of justice, which excludes, and is resolutely hostile to, Jews who are committed to Israels existence as a Jewish state or even insufficiently committed to its elimination, the lawsuit said.

A spokesperson for the college, Chris Mills, declined to comment.

The case against Haverford was filed by the Deborah Project, a public interest law firm that says it seeks to uncover, publicize, and dismantle antisemitic abuses in educational systems. The firm has filed cases against schools in other states, including one in 2022 seeking to block what it called an overtly racist and antisemitic ethnic studies curriculum in Los Angeles.

In April, the Deborah Project went to court in Montgomery County after the Bryn Mawr Film Institute canceled the screening of a film about an Israeli musician in response to opposition from organizations critical of Israel; a Montco judge ordered the theater to show the film.

Lori Lowenthal Marcus, the firms legal director, said dozens of people are part of the Haverford group, though only students have standing to bring the case.

They want the college to have one set of rules that applies to everyone, and not treat some minority groups as having different protections than other groups, Marcus said.

The lawsuit which describes a history of antisemitism at Haverford, including quotas on the numbers of Jewish students who could attend the college in the 1930s cites five students who have been affected by anti-Israel demonstrations, saying they have been shunned and have changed their routines on campus.

Only one is identified Ally Landau, a womens basketball player, who sent a campus-wide email in early November in the name of many concerned Jewish students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr. She accused Students for Justice in Palestine and Students Council of hijacking Plenary to push their one-sided anti-Israel agenda.

Several weeks later, after the Vermont shooting, pro-Palestinian students issued a grievances document that called the shooting the direct result of the proliferation of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian rhetoric on this campus and beyond. They called Landaus email hateful, and demanded the college acknowledge a continued ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people.

Haverfords president, Wendy Raymond, responded by thanking the writers for open, honest, thoughtful, and constructive dialogues, and listed proposals, including culturally competent counseling and support for faculty and student activism. She did not address the claim that the shooting was related to rhetoric on campus, according to the lawsuit.

When Landau, a member of the womens basketball team, later organized an event at a game promoting awareness of antisemitism, administrators pressured her to cancel it, according to the lawsuit saying it would prove too antagonistic to the pro-Palestinian students on campus.

Kinnan Abdalhamid, the Haverford junior who was shot, rejected the idea that administrators had sided with pro-Palestinian students criticizing Raymond for not taking a position against the war in Gaza. If anything, shes catering more to the Zionists on campus, he said.

The lawsuit says Haverford has allowed posters around campus with From the river to the sea, a phrase that appears in Hamas charter and that some have used as a rallying cry for the destruction of Israel. Quoting the Hamas Charter is exactly as antisemitic as hanging a Confederate flag is racist, the lawsuit said.

When posters were then torn down in March advertising a Shabbat dinner and a discussion of Jewish identity, the lawsuit said, the college failed to condemn the act as antisemitic.

In a message to the community April 9 acknowledging growing concern about antisemitism on our campus, Raymond noted the posters removal but said the movement of many of the flyers can be accounted for by benign mechanisms. The college continued to investigate, she said.

Raymond said it was troubling and unacceptable that some Jewish students believed that they could not participate in the colleges plenary. She also noted the event students held about COVID originally titled Mass Death on all Fronts: Israels weaponization of COVID against Palestinians, which Raymond said evoked centuries-old pernicious tropes related to blood libel.

Administrators interceded ... encouraging student organizers to exercise more empathy and consideration of their fellow community members, and to alter their approach to their topic, Raymond said. While organizers changed the title to COVID in Times of Genocide, according to the lawsuit, Raymond said administrators were disappointed by those changes, which did not assuage important and clearly expressed concerns.

I regret that our commitment to freedom of expression in this case has resulted in such pain and harm, contributing further to the feelings of alienation and prejudice that many Jewish people have described to me, she said.

Among other actions, the lawsuit asks the court to order Haverford to ensure that students are protected from discrimination on the basis of their Jewish identity, including those for whom Zionism is an integral part of that identity, and that it be ordered to provide education about antisemitism which includes the hostile treatment of Jews who believe in the centrality of Israel to Judaism.

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Jewish Haverford students sue Haverford College alleging antisemitism - The Philadelphia Inquirer


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