Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

Despite what conspiracy theorists would have you believe, the Jews dont control Hollywood.

Jews might be disproportionately represented in entertainment, but many of them are really just devotees of progressivism, which is hostile to the very principle of national sovereignty (including a Jewish homeland) and all that revealed religion entails.

Orthodox Judaism specifically stands for everything progressives despise. Thats why it has become an additional prime target of the entertainment industrys unique form of vitriol.

Hollywood has long portrayed Orthodox Jews as hopelessly backward, at best. For instance, a 2005episodeofGreysAnatomyfeatured an Orthodox woman who preferred death to a porcine heart valve. (There is no rabbinical issue with such a procedure, by the way. Moreover, the tenet ofpikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life, takes precedence over all other commandments in Judaism.)

This plot was echoed years later in anepisodeof the Canadian showNurses, which had a Hasidic family refuse a bone graft for their son because the donor was an Arab, a woman. (The episode was laterpulleddue to complaints.) It appears that no one on either production team bothered to do the necessary research or fact-checking in advance, resulting in these entirely unrealistic and not-so-subtly bigoted scenarios.

The American entertainment industrys most common narrative when it comes to observant Judaism is evident: A life lived in accordance with the Torah is repressive and undesirable, and, accordingly, escaping the despotic clutches of the ancient religion, whether temporarily or permanently, is the path to liberated bliss. Just a few examples:A Stranger Among Us,Disobedience,Arranged,Unorthodox,andOne of Us.

In Israel, not all portrayals of observant Judaism are so biased. The writer and lead actor of the acclaimed filmUshpizinearned secular fame and later became observant. The drama seriesShtiselconsults with Orthodox Jews. As a result,UshpizinandShtiseloffer renderings of Orthodox Judaism that are described by Orthodox Jews as believable. By comparison, the renderings of Orthodox Judaism manufactured by Hollywood are universally regarded by the Orthodox community as slanderous caricatures.

A recent and revealing example of the entertainment industrys malice is the Netflix television miniseries My Unorthodox Life. Former classmates and others quickly rejected Julia Haarts dystopian description of her Orthodox upbringing as bogus. In the wake of the sudden collapse of Haarts stint as the CEO of Elite World Group and her marriage to its owner, it seems that the illustration of her post-Orthodox, secular life was no better. A happy, stable person does notthrow tantrumswhen a skinny vanilla latte cannot be obtained at 3 a.m. in Johannesburg. A well-adjusted, blissful person does notregularly bring staffers to tears.

Yet Netflix acquiredMy Unorthodox Life and even signed Haart for a second season before the backdrop of her made-for-TV story disintegrated. The streaming service was apparently so besotted with Haarts representation of Orthodox Judaism as oppressive, and her post-Orthodox life as glorious and empowered, that it was willing, perhaps eager, to overlook many red flags.

Conspicuously absent from American popular culture are positive portrayals of Orthodox Jewish life specifically stories, whether real or fictional, of people either born into observant homes or secular people who have found their way to faith.

This is no accident. Entertainment studios are the gatekeepers, the formidable arbiters of our national conversation. They choose what gets greenlit and what does not. At a time when Hollywood studios seek to support virtually every minority group, the consistently negative treatment of Orthodox Jews is disturbing, especially during a time of heightened antisemitic violence.

Understand that Orthodox Judaism earns leftist scorn not only because it is traditional in the time-honored sense, but also because its a purveyor of traditional approaches to life, marriage, and freedom of conscience. This inexorably places it on what elites pretentiously term the wrong side of history. And because Orthodox beliefs and customs are foreign to most people, the average viewer cannot easily differentiate between authenticity and untruth.

Hollywoods secularist aggression is, of course, not directed exclusively toward Jews. These pernicious depictions are merely one part of a systematic effort by the Left to portray people of faith writ large as primitive and brutish and, therefore, worthy of castigation. The entertainment industry has long attacked Protestant Evangelicals and devout Catholics, labeling them, among other things, yahoos and papists.

For several reasons, Jews (even observant Jews) once upon a time enjoyed some degree of safe harbor because they werent viewed as threatening by those behind the camera. But the wicked abstractions of intersectionality and critical race theory have altered the left-wing calculus, putting the Orthodox increasingly in the crosshairs. Orthodox Jews are now being used as a cudgel to bash all revealed religion, and, by extension, to undermine Western civilization.

Whats to be done? The nonprofitJew in the Cityisforminga "Hollywood bureau" to provide training and media monitoring for producers, directors, and writers wishing to portray Orthodox Jews.Beyond that, but short of launching our own aligned studios, those of us frustrated and concerned must continue to contest Hollywoods representations of people of faith through both principled argument and virtuous example, exposing these representations in real-time to be what they truly are: malicious fiction.

Rabbi YaakovMenkenis the managing director ofthe Coalition for Jewish Values. Dr. Jonathan Bronitsky is the co-founder ofATHOS.

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Hollywood is using Orthodox Jews as a cudgel to bash all people of faith - Washington Examiner

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Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

Suspected Brooklyn subway shooter Frank James may have acted alone. But if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an entire culture to create a mass-murder. Ours can take full credit here. The toxic ideas that consumed James are all around us.

James is a now considered a suspect in Tuesday's subway attack, in which at least 23 people were injured and at least four hospitalized. The shooter allegedly set off smoke grenades in a crowded subway car and then started shooting.

And what motivated this act of violence? News outlets have reported that James' alleged writings and YouTube videos are laced with racism, including pejorative discussions of white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian people. This is true. But it also misses the point. If you listen closely to his rants, you will hear a singular motif emerge: the rage of the Jew-obsessed.

The subway shooter's prolific social media postings reveal a man driven by an ideological delusion frighteningly similar to that of the Colleyville shooter and other attackers. For such murderers, as for too many others, antisemitism is a comprehensive worldview in which their own inadequacies are blamed on the conspiratorial Jew.

It is not insignificant that James' YouTube moniker is "prophet of truth 88," based on the numerals that white supremacists use as code for "HH" or "Heil Hitler." Or consider a conspicuously hateful video James posted to Facebook in 2017 entitled "they hate jew," in which James derogates Jews while showing photos of Adolf Hitler and images of Jewish Holocaust victims. "This is gonna be about Jews and my personal relationship with Jews, and the utter contempt that all the f***ing Jews I've dealt with show me at the end of the day," he says.

As with so many antisemites, James recounts disappointments for which he needs to find a scapegoat. For example, James blames an occupational failure on a Hasidic Jew who acted like he wanted to help. James views such Jews who offer help in light of age-old stereotypes, accusing Jews of chicanery. "This is an FYI about these f***ing Jews, and how they will smile in your f***ing face while stabbing you in the back in a heartbeat," he says.

James filters the world through the distinctive form of "erasive" antisemitism, which has developed in certain Left-wing and minority communities, stripping Jews of a distinctive cultural identity in order to project onto them a hateful and stereotypical distortion of the truth. For example, James insists that Jews are as white "as Nazis." This enables James to view Jews as oppressive white supremacists, a view that has taken stubborn hold in the mainstream Left.

James also engages in "secondary antisemitism"blaming Jews for misfortunesand castigates Jews for not having lived up to the lessons of their own victimhood. "These Jews obviously haven't learned shit from their experience. You know, it hasn't humbled them in the slightest," he says. "They're... still arrogant and still feel they're superior... And, again, those motherf****rs don't contribute to shit to life on this earth but s***, piss, pollution, and death and destruction."

Each element of James' murderous ideology circulates widely throughout our society. They are taught in our schools, lectured in our universities, inculcated in corporate training, and broadcast from television studios, albeit in a more sanitized version. Jewish identity is routinely whitewashed, and the world is presented with a distorted image in which age-old stereotypes are fused with continually evolving canards.

Consider California's new Ethnic Studies curriculum, for example, which has been criticized for viewing whites and Jews as oppressors. Or Stanford's diversity managers, who have pressured Jews to join an affinity group for employees "who hold privilege via white identity," while espousing anti-Jewish stereotypes. Recall an episode at Google, where then-diversity lead Kamau Bobb lamented, "If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself."

Like the subway shooter's hate, the problem here is bigger than just antisemitism; it's that our educational and social institutions are teaching us to view one another through a basic binary. Either you are BIPOC (Black, indigenous, or a person of color), or you are a white oppressor. If you are a white oppressor, you participate in a system of racial supremacy that harms minorities in ways that fit with Frank James's diatribe.

And if you are a Jew, regardless of your background or complexion, you are the worst of the oppressors.

It's too dangerous to ignore the complicity of social institutions, including schools, colleges, corporations, and mass media, in all of this. Frank James may have pulled the trigger, but many people supplied ammunition.

It's late in the day, but it's not too late to turn things around. Divisive curricula and training programs should be replaced with new materials that teach equality and respect. No one should be stereotyped for their race or religion. Everyone should be permitted to choose, cherish and celebrate their own identities as they choose to define them, rather than those imposed upon them by diversity trainers or critical race gurus.

If we care about diversity and inclusion, we should care also about unity and respect. As our goal, we should strive to live up to the motto emblazoned on the Great Seal of the United States: E pluribus unum.

Kenneth L. Marcus is Founder and Chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism. He served as the 11th Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights.

The views in this article are the writer's own.

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The Toxic Culture That Produced the Subway Shooter Is All Around Us | Opinion - Newsweek

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Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

The entire Black Hebrew Israelite community was supposed to be given permanent residency back in 2004, on order of then-Interior Minister Avraham Poraz, the former minister said in an affidavit submitted to a court last week.

He said he didnt know why members of the group who are now fighting deportation orders didnt receive residency status at the time.

The affidavit was submitted to the appellate custody tribunal in Beer Sheva, which is hearing appealsby 49 members of the community the state seeks to deport. Poraz submitted the affidavit at the request of the appellants lawyers.

I have been informed by the leaders of the Hebrew Israelite community that dozens of its members for some reason fell between the cracks and werent included in the list of people getting [residency] documents in 2004, Poraz wrote. I dont know how this happened.

During mytenure as interior minister, I as the head of the population administration gave an explicit order to grant permanent residency to every member of the community living in Israel, Porazs affidavit said, referring to the agency now known as the Population, Immigration and Border Authority. This historical mistake in regularizing community members status ought to be corrected, in part because of the principle of equality among members of the same community.

Poraz, who told Haaretz he would be happy to testify in court on the issue if needed, decided in 2003 to grant permanent residency to all Black Hebrew Israelites in Israel, including minors, with the documents issued at a ceremony the following year.

This is a community that has been among us for a great many years, and nobody would dream of expelling or deporting them, Poraz told the Knesset at the time. Therefore, I have decided the time has come to give them the status they deserve.

The Population Authority says that back in 1999, legal status was granted to all members of the community who had arrived in Israel from the late 1960s onward due to their religious beliefs. That year, the community drafted a list of members and submitted it to the government.

Every member of the community who was on the list and had been in Israel for more than 10 yearsinitially received a work permit, then temporary residency and finally, in 2004, citizenship, the authority said. And as far as it is concerned, anyone who didnt receive legal status back in 1999 has been living in Israel illegally, including the 49 slated for deportation.

In 2015, roughly 100 members of the community living in Dimona asked the authority to grant them legal status, after living for years in Israel without it. Six years later, the authority rejected the applications of 49 of the people on the list and demanded that they leave Israel within 60 days. Last September, it rejected their appeal and ordered them to leave the country within two weeks. But in October, a court issued an injunction barring their deportation until their case is decided.

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Black Hebrews ordered to leave Israel were due to get residency, says ex-minister - Haaretz

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Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

If Memory wasnt already a marquee name in showtunes, Barry Manilow probably would have used the title for a song in his new musical.

Now playing at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Harmony, about the Comedian Harmonists, a sextet of German singer-comedians, is also all about memory both historys short recall for a popular act erased by the Nazis, and the enduring guilt of the groups last surviving member.

A pre-show banner, bearing a cartoon of our entertainers, gives us the date Dec. 16, 1933, the evening the Harmonists played Carnegie Hall. We open on a memory of that night, recalled decades later by our narrator, Rabbi (Chip Zien). But Carnegie Hall was a high point, and Rabbis here to tell you why it didnt last, and, more to the point, why youve never heard of the Comedians, a story that involves some tragic lows.

Rabbi whose real name was Josef Roman Cycowski, and who enrolled in seminary in his native Poland before deciding it would be nice to sing in a major key for once takes us back to where it all began for the Harmonists: Berlin, 1927. From there, the show, dotted with inventive vaudeville performances that range from a marionette satire of the Third Reich to a waiter-themed burlesque, charts the groups success and ultimate unraveling in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws that targeted its three Jewish members.

Photo by JULIETA CERVANTES

Chip Zien, as the older Rabbi, winds back the clock.

A moment to jog our own memory. Its something of a misnomer to call Harmony a new musical. Barry Manilow here the man who wrote the songs and arranged them and Bruce Sussman, his regular lyricist and now librettist, have been working on a musical about the Comedian Harmonists for about 25 years, over three times as long as the Harmonists were active. The result of this long process is a show that, directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, is highly polished in parts and ragged in others. Its pretty easy to tell which bits have been tempered by time and which are new and need refinement.

The highlights are the Harmonists group numbers, both their kinetic formation and their cabaret antics as a rising troupe. The six men Harry, the ringleader (Zal Owen); Young Rabbi (Danny Kornfeld); Erich (Eric Peters), a would-be doctor with an endless supply of famous family friends; piano player Chopin (Blake Roman); opera buffa bass Bobby (Sean Bell); and handsome Bulgarian Lesh (Steven Telsey) are phenomenal in their harmonies, synchronized in their movements and impeccable with their comic timing.

Both Sussmans lyrics and Manilows score shine in the interwar idiom of swoony movie musical love songs and jazz-inflected comedy. Manilow penned a Liszt pastiche and a Josephine Baker mambo, and with Carlyles choreo, they work like gangbusters.

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

The Harmonists (Eric Peters, Blake Roman, Zal Owen, Steven Telsey, Sen Bell and Danny Kornfeld) cut their comedic teeth in the number How Can I Serve You, Madam?

Strangely, this consummate pair of soft pop writers largely fall down with their ballads, which factor into the romantic plot, between Rabbi and his love interest, Mary (Sierra Boggess) and Chopin and his firebrand squeeze, Ruth (Jessie Davidson, an unconvincing composite character). Ruth and Mary, whose struggles come from marrying a gentile and a Jew respectively, turn the corner somewhat in a duet called Where You Go, inspired by lines from the Book of Ruth and the rare sequence that taps the full storytelling potential of the stage.

When Harmony tries to do politics and context a ham-fisted parade of twirling red flags during a Communist rally in a number gutsily called This Is Our Time (Sondheim is spinning) it feels excessive and out of nowhere. This time could be better spent showing how exactly the Comedians went from covering boxers with cloches a sort of Weimar-era Dick in a Box at a German club to headlining Carnegie Hall, a step we somehow miss.

Dealing with Rabbis regrets, in songs called Threnody, the show flounders with a weird pseudo-recitative, as poor Chip Zien, virtuosically shouldering this clumsy material, recalls pivotal exchanges tied to the groups undoing. He flagellates himself unduly, and also sings the Shema, in the most explicitly Jewish content one has ever seen from Barry Manilow.

At times the Jewishness references to pastrami, chopped liver, lyrics like Where I grew up the people threw/A Pogrom every month or two or that rhyme shtetl and settle panders a bit too hard. Historical cameos from Einstein and Marlene Dietrich (the names in the playbill are decoys, the overworked Zien plays almost all of them) are far too Jersey Boys in their cuteness.

Photo by JULIETA CERVANTES

The boys with Josephine Baker (the phenomenal Ana Hoffman).

But there are moments, no doubt helped along by Beowulf Boritts mirror-wall set, that recall some of the better parts of Cabaret.

The second act crackdown on the group, in the person of an Oberstumfuhrer played by Zak Edwards, plays well, particularly when followed by the number Come to the Fatherland. In that ditty the boys, appalled at being referred to as ambassadors for the Reich, string themselves up like puppets and sing a scathing tourism ad while performing in Copenhagen. If Sussmans lyrics arent quite Fred Ebb-level (If youre good at tushie-kissin/or maybe youre missin a screw/come to the Fatherland! Unless youre a Jew,) they seem right for the boys who alternated between appearing in tails and in their underwear.

What sells the song, and much of the drama that follows, is the same element that made the Comedian Harmonists a success. The chemistry of the six actors together can weather creaky dialogue or awkward dramatic beats. When they sing as one, you feel the loss of these mens chapter in history. The strained metaphor of an interfaith act, joining in music before the dissonance of a regime that thrived on both conformity and division, becomes vivid.

The groups talent as a unit is the true magic of the show, and what youll remember when you leave the theater long after youve forgotten the melodies.

Harmony opens at the New York Theatre Folksbienes Edmond J. Safra Hall at the Museum of Jewish Heritage April 14. Tickets and information can be found here.

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Barry Manilow gives us harmony and Hebrew in a sometimes hammy musical - Forward

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Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

Adam Singolda (40), founder and CEO of Taboola

Children raised during Covid-19 think that every parent works from home. My kids think that their dad works out of some room at home. When Taboola went public nine months ago, I did it all from home, from my kids lego room. I never even met a single investor in person. My young daughter, Elinor, who is a year and a half old, grew up with her father always home. Now, if I need to fly from Israel to New York for meetings, she gets mad, screams I dont love you. She doesnt understand whats going on.

Your wife, Victoria, is also used to having her spouse around. You wrote in a Facebook post that you like waking up before her, and watching her sleep.

I wake up, and before I even check my phone, or leave to go on a run, I say thanks that shes here, and look at her. She sleeps like an angel. I gaze at her and then I jump out of bed. My work is like a Disneyland for nerds, and I always enjoy creating something new. You also need to do that in a relationship, to do new things you havent ever done before.

You met your wife in New York.

Yes. Shes a New Yorker from a Polish family. We met in 2010 through friends, a year after I moved. She converted to Judaism for me, but also because she felt very connected to Israel and Judaism. We wanted to have a single-minded home, where we practice Judaism, and do kiddush on Friday night, fast on Yom Kippur, etc. She owns a florist shop that shes been running for years, and she works like crazy. Every morning, she runs to the farmers market to pick up the flowers. Shes the best at what she does.

She doesnt have to work.

I dont like that language. That's how rich people talk. We dont think or act like that. I think its amazing that shes been running this business for years.

1

Adam Singolda.

(Photo: Edward Kaprov. The photo was taken using the wet plate collodion technique, an early photographic process invented in the 19th century.)

And you speak three languages at home.

Victoria and her mother speak to each other in Polish. The kids speak English during the day, and at night she reads them bedtime stories in Polish. I only talk to them in Hebrew. And she accepts the fact that she has no idea what I say to our kids. During dinnertime for example, my son Oz, whos four, will start telling us a story in English, then switch to Hebrew, and then back to English. He thinks its all the same. So Victoria is picking up a bit of Hebrew, and the kids are teaching her a bit.

Did you have to relocate to New York?

I knew I had to move, but I didnt know when until one of our first investors, Zvi Limon, said to me: There will never be a good time. Just get up and do it. I moved to New York two years after I founded Taboola, and I had to since I had employees dealing with websites and ads, and New York is the media capital. Its also a much more fun place to live than San Francisco, California, which I think is boring. And in New York everyone is an immigrant and has an accent, so immediately you feel at home and fit right in. Its also much closer to Israel. The time difference between the East and West Coast is small, but it is significant in regard to work hours and flight time.

How did the move affect your Israeli identity?

I feel at home everywhere I go. And I also put in a lot of effort to act like an Israeli in America and not the other way around. I dont just speak to my kids in Hebrew, I also read to them books in Hebrew, joke around with them in Hebrew, watch Israeli kids TV shows with them, and we listen to Israeli music at home. Its really us against the world. I don't think that Ill ever speak to my kids in English.

What did you take from your personal life as the son of renowned Israeli guitarist Avi Singolda?

Ill always feel like the son whose father was blessed by God. My dad is also an amazing father and grandfather. He never knew how much milk cost, but he always loved music, and I learned from him how to fall in love with something. When we would travel abroad and he wouldnt play, hed go into a guitar store and go crazy. I hope that the people I love and myself will be able to continue doing what we love. My mother, on the other hand, always knows what the price of milk is. Im a combination of both: I know how much things cost, but I also try to forget that sometimes and am somewhere on the spectrum between knowing whats going on and being completely out of the loop. I need to keep my dreams in mind, and believe that anything is possible.

While youre daydreaming, your stock has dropped by nearly 50% - its declined from $13 to just $5 per share.

Were focusing now on the business, and the positive momentum were seeing is exciting. Were only looking at the share price in the long term, and are trying to think like Yoda. The market perfectly keeps track of good companies, and thats why I care less about our share price and would rather not lose a customer. That really kills me, it makes me cry. Thats what were fighting: retaining our customers. Every day we fight as if its the companys last day. We check how long it takes us to respond to customers emails, how to cope with employees who have problems, and what is going on when you are not in the room. We want to create a corporate culture that will win over customers.

So where do the dreams come into play?

My life is like Disneyland for nerds. Every quarter I can create a new product without asking the world what it thinks. Thats how we entered the video sector: we developed a product for Samsung which competes with Apple News, because we thought it was interesting. Taboola is really a startup of many smaller startups. Its infinite.

So how do you let your brain rest?

I believe in treasuring the small moments. I dont believe in taking an annual two-week vacation, but lots of smaller vacations. Even everyday things, like bathing my kids, running a bit every day, having a glass of wine, playing with legos is enough. I think that everyday people should do things that make them happy and keep them sane.

Whats your deal with legos?

Its the idea of creating something, its building something with your hands, and it excites me. It lets me talk to my kids, not just about what were building but about anything - both good and bad, and about behavior. I told Oz that Yoda is a Jedi master since he studied Hebrew and numbers for 600 years, and now he wants to learn the entire Aleph-Bet so he can be like Yoda.

And this doesnt bore you?

Being bored is healthier than being constantly overstimulated. Its important that I give my kids that ability to get bored, just like we used to stay up after Friday night meals and just talk until midnight. Why is that so difficult these days? Thats one of the reasons why I love Taboola, because were building an alternative to Facebook that doesnt suck you into social media but only shows you the content youre interested in. I kind of feel like the Robin Hood of the internet, or like Yoda battling against the bad guys.

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I live in a nerds Disneyland. Im the Robin Hood of the internet, a Yoda battling the bad guys - CTech

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Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

The cast of the forthcoming Israeli TV series Chanshi, which is currently in production, features two actors with Bay Area roots and diplomas from local Jewish day schools: Marnina Schon attended Tehiyah Day School, and Dor Gvirtsman graduated from Gideon Hausner in Palo Alto.

The show is a comedic drama about a Brooklyn-raised Orthodox woman named Chanshi (played by show creator Aleeza Chanowitz) who travels to Israel to attend her best friends wedding on the eve of her own wedding. Sexy hijinks ensue. Schon plays the best friend, and Gvirtsman plays Chanshis fianc. Henry Winkler is in the cast as Chanshis father. The show will air in Israel later this year on the HOT cable network, and talks are underway with U.S. and international distributors.

For a long time, Ive wanted to work in Israel, Gvirtsman, the son of Israeli parents, told J. I loved that I was able to use my Hebrew and Israeli-ness, though I had to Americanize my Hebrew for the role. (His mother, Dalit Gvirtsman, is a Bay Area Hebrew teacher who also writes the Hebrew-language BaInyanim blog for the local Israeli community.)

Both Gvirtsman, 27, and Schon, 28, have been acting since childhood. She appeared in Berkeley Reps 2005 production of Brundibar. He portrayed Danny in an L.A. production of Chaim Potoks The Chosen, which came to the Palo Alto JCC in 2018. He has also played small TV roles, including on the CBS drama S.W.A.T.

While Schon and Gvirtsman didnt know each other growing up, theyve become good friends in L.A., where they both live. Schons partner, Michael OKonis, led a USC a cappella group Gvirtsman sang in, and co-wrote a musical comedy about the NRA called More Guns, which all three of them performed in together before the pandemic.

Schon grew up attending both Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont and the Or Zarua Havurah, which her parents, Josh and Diane Wirtschafter, helped found. They are the same Wirtschafter family who created the Seder in the Zoom parody of Fiddler on the Roof that went viral in 2020, with Schon responding with her own parody video. (She uses Schon, her middle name, as her stage name.)

How Schon and Gvirtsman landed their roles in Chanshi could be considered very bashert (destined), as well as very L.A.

In August 2021, the Silverlake Independent JCC in Los Angeles posted Schons headshot on its Instagram account with an announcement that she would be leading its High Holiday services. The post noted that in addition to being a bnai mitzvah tutor, Schon was an actor and a musician. An L.A.-based friend of Aaron Geva, a director of Chanshi, forwarded the post to him.

Geva reached out to Schon via Instagram, introducing himself and telling her about the series, then asking if shed be interested in auditioning.

It was a great email courtship, Schon admitted. I was won over because hes so sweet and hilarious, and after watching Aleezas short films, I was laughing and crying. I was obsessed.

Schon asked Gvirtsman to help with her audition tape, and then to help prepare for her callback. She knew hed understand the material and could switch back and forth between Hebrew and English.

When Schon was offered the role, the directors told her they also wanted Gvirtsman, whose acting they had seen on the tape. Schon left for Israel in late December, with just hours to pack for a three-month stay, as Israel was preparing to close its borders to contain the spread of the omicron variant. It was her first time in the country since 2010 when she was a teenage Bronfman Fellow.

Based on her knowledge of television production sets in the U.S., Schon found some only in Israel differences.

For our first day on set, our basecamp was inside a public bomb shelter in a park, where hair, makeup and wardrobe were located, she said. And on my last day of shooting, it was in a synagogue.

One highlight of her experience was working with Henry Winkler and Caroline Aaron. (Aaron plays Chanshis stepmother, and is Joels mother on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.) The two of them have such great chemistry, she said. I kept pinching myself when doing my first rehearsal with them.

A low point was realizing after the fact that she had Covid when she filmed her characters wedding.

Chanshi may sound like the next installment of whats becoming something of a cottage industry of shows about Orthodox Jews who find fulfillment only after leaving the fold. Examples include Unorthodox, a 2020 dramatic series about a Hasidic woman who escapes from an unhappy arranged marriage, and My Unorthodox Life, a 2021 reality series about a formerly Orthodox fashion designer. But both Schon and Gvirtsman promised that their show diverges from that genre.

Many previous portrayals of the ultra-Orthodox world have been fetishizing and harsh critiques of that world, Schon said. Chanshi comes from a place of love and is much more about how these particular characters have navigated this world. Its a much more fair and gentle portrayal.

Gvirtsman compared it to the British comedy Fleabag, saying, Its as incisive and sharp, while really getting into the raunchy and uncomfortable. It also speaks to that straddling that a lot of Jews experience between Israel and America, and this wanting to belong in both places.

Added Schon, American Jews are going to love this show. Its hilarious and, in the words of the Israeli directors, its heart-touching. It just hits on something so deep that hasnt been seen before.

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Bay Area-raised actors join Henry Winkler in Israeli comedy 'Chanshi' J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

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Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

New York Jewish Week Two years into the pandemic, many Hasidic families in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are struggling to make ends meet: Lost jobs, rising prices and large families mean the cost of holding a Passover seder can be out of reach for many religious families without charitable help.

One of the largest organizations filling the gap is the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, which runs a massive warehouse in Flatbush that offers kosher staples. Met Council expects to give out free food to over 300,000 families this Passover season in Brooklyn and beyond.

On April 10, less than a week before Passover, nearly 3,000 families received holiday staples provided by Met Council and a local organization, the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, at the UJOs distribution center at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Thousands of boxes of kosher grape juice, eggs and fresh produce were being offered as cars driven by Orthodox Jews lined up for over a mile.

And yet despite this, a faction within Williamsburgs Satmar Hasidic community is warning followers not to accept food from the charity. According to a decree that has been circulating in the weeks before Passover, accepting the donated food is forbidden because Met Council and its partner, UJA-Federation of New York, are Zionist organizations that hold all the abominations of the world.

Their intention is to build bridges and to unite the communities of the non-believers and Haredis in New York to presumably push for us to be one nation, heaven forbid, the decree, signed by 11 rabbis, says in Hebrew (Haredi is a Hebrew name for strictly Orthodox Jews).

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Therefore, it is certainly forbidden to enjoy money from them, the decree says. The keeper of his soul and the soul of his house shall be far from this money.

The decree has dismayed some members of the Satmar community, which is famously divided into factions led by two different Grand Rabbis. And despite the decree, some observers say, followers of the 11 rabbis who signed the decree continue to accept food from Met Council, while even some of the signers source food from the agency and say it is coming from Satmar philanthropists.

The decree echoes essays in newspapers serving the Satmar community, which allege that Zionist and Reform Jews are infiltrating the Satmar community through Met Council and the federation. One article says funding for these organizations comes from criminals and infidels, forbidding anyone to take food from them.

Volunteers helped distribute food at a Satmar distribution center in Williamsburg, on April 10, 2022. (Jacob Henry/JTA)

The Satmar are a large and growing Hasidic movement that seeks a separation from the secular world, as well as other Jews who dont share their strict interpretation of Jewish law and custom. Satmar and many other Hasidic movements do not accept political Zionism, saying the creation of the Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah is a violation of Gods plan. Met Council and UJA-Federation are non-denominational nonprofits that work across the Jewish ideological spectrum.

We are people that obey the Torah, said one of the rabbis who signed the decree, and who requested anonymity. The other people, they do not keep the Torah. Were at war with them. This is a war between people who believe in God and those who dont believe in God.

Such teaching, he said, comes from the founder of the Satmar community, the late Grand Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum.

Teitelbaum said if you take money from them, if you eat from them, if you accept anything from them, you give them your heart, the rabbi said. All the rabbis decided after World War II, even when the population was very poor, that we should take no money from the federation no matter what. For us, its not even a question, its forbidden.

And yet even within Satmar there are divides, especially between a faction in Williamsburg and another in Kiryas Joel, a Satmar community in suburban Orange County, New York.

In this July 1, 2014, file photo, boys stand outside a school in Kiryas Joel, New York (AP Photo/Mike Groll, File)

One member of the community in Williamsburg, who requested anonymity because he feared retaliation, said the decree was a product of a far-right Satmar faction in Brooklyn that he compared to the Talibans, referring to the extremist Muslim group in Afghanistan.

Williamsburg is being run by this Taliban group, he said. There are a couple rabbis. They give out decrees and everyone has to follow. Anything you do, you risk being kicked out.

The same community member said that while these rabbis are telling followers not to take food from Met Council and UJA, some of the signers are themselves distributing food being given out by Met Council distribution centers.

Their own people are getting food from these rabbis at their shuls, he said. The people dont know that the food is from Met Council.

The rabbi who signed the decree and who spoke with the New York Jewish Week confirmed that some rabbis are distributing food that originated with Met Council.

Maybe some of the rabbis, they forgot about the decrees, he said. But its only two to three people who do it. No one else knows its Met Council food. He declined to give names, but said he felt pain that this was happening.

It hurts me, the rabbi said. The community doesnt know about this, and its happening at many places. People get food, and they dont know its coming from the federation.

The inside of the United Jewish Organization of Williamsburgs distribution center at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where thousands of families are given free food for Passover. (Jacob Henry/JTA)

He also said that when people ask how they received the food, the rabbis just tell them that its charity or tzedakah.

They say it comes from fundraising or different stores, but never from Met Council, the rabbi said.

An Orthodox warehouse worker who volunteers with Met Council said the opponents of Met Council are being fundamentally dishonest.

They are misrepresenting the people for their own sake, he said. Even though there are still official decrees about it, in the age of information, there is more knowledge about it. The knowledge will set you free.

Rabbi David Niederman, executive director of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, who often speaks for Satmar interests, said few people are listening to the decrees.

The lines of the people standing out there means that they saw the pamphlet and couldnt care less, Niederman said. They can send it out. We dont have the time to speculate what some person in their bunker decides to put out.

He denied, however, that rabbis are giving out Met Council food and passing it off as their own, calling it untrue.

Met Council CEO David Greenfield said that he is used to these decrees, which come out every year. This hasnt stopped the organization from partnering with major Satmar groups in Williamsburg such as UJO.

These are just fringe groups, Greenfield said of the opponents. Im being very blunt, but they dont like us because we support Israel. They are widely discredited and shouldnt be taken seriously.

Supported by UJA-Federation of New York, volunteers with Met Council package food for the elderly, including hundreds of Holocaust survivors, in May 2020. (Met Council)

Greenfield said that he does know about allegations that rabbis who signed the decrees are still taking Met Council food.

We know that these communities are getting food, he said. And if some folks want to play a game where theyre slapping us with one hand and then taking food with the other hand, Im okay with that. The last thing I would want is for people in the community to suffer because of a handful of radicals.

He added that the highest level of charity is helping people without receiving credit.

As long as the people who need the food are getting food, it doesnt matter to me how they get it, Greenfield said.

When asked about how the community would be able to feed its people without Met Council, the rabbi on the decree said they would manage.

The rabbi told us 50 years ago to live like this, and were still doing it today, he said. All these other people, theyre against our belief.

Chaim Levin contributed to this report.

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In Brooklyn, some rabbis ask followers to turn down free food from Zionists - The Times of Israel

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Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

Street cats. Heartbreaking victims of human expansion and speciesist narcissism? Or, a nuisance and health hazard? Do you weep for their welfare or just wish they were gone? Since cats in the city are controversial in the extreme, it begs asking: Does mass neutering of feral city cats really help control their population?

Yes, if done properly, mass neutering can keep feral cat populations in a city environment under control. So says the first long-term, large-scale, controlled study on mass neutering of street cats, led by Prof. Eyal Klement and Dr. Idit Gunther of the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their results were reported last week in PNAS.

Though street cats are trapped, fixed and returned in many a country, never before has a study of this scope been done.

The bottom line: By neutering 70 percent of the feral cats in a city, a contiguous space, no cheating, one achieves a decline in their population, the team concluded. Some rebound does ensue, and the researchers arent sure where the point of stability is, Klement explains: that will require more research. But control can be achieved.

Say it with cat food

Let us put aside when we domesticated the cat, or the cat domesticated us, or we simply moved in together. Moving on perhaps 10,000 years from that happy day, today cats live on every continent except, reportedly, Antarctica. They do speak and have even recently been proven to possess hitherto unsuspected social abilities.In Israels balmy environment, they thrive. Not all think this a good thing.

Street cats kill rodents and other small animals we appreciate rather more, such as birds and lizards. They relieve themselves where they can, which can create odor and health hazard. Ailurophobes fear them. Street cats are excoriated for raiding garbage and making a mess but its not because they choose to, and their health suffers accordingly. Also, Bram Stoker may have sardonically extolled the music of the night by Transylvanias wolves, but the lupine vocalization may sound positively orchestral compared with cats a-courtin.

So, feelings on community cats are intense in Israel. Government sources estimate that Israel has a million feral cats. Israel is also thronged with street-cat feeders, to the annoyance of people unfond of the feline.

The only thing everybody agrees on, from cat lovers to haters, is that there are too many of them. So, managing the population of street cats in temperate regions is important, for their sakes and ours. The method of trapping stray cats, neutering them and returning them to their territory (TNR) is widely employed, but there hadnt been solid evidence that the method even works. Now there is, and it can do. If done properly.

Cant touch me

The research involved an area of 20 square kilometers (about 7.7 square miles) in the balmy coastal city of Rishon Letzion, involving the relevant (and contiguous) parts of the city not areas where cats dont hang out anyway. Asked why they dont hang out there, the professor says thats fodder for another study.

The experiment was divided into three equal phases over 12 years: no intervention; mixed-intervention; and full-intervention.

The non-intervention phase means business as usual, which means that the city was fixing some feral cats say around 20 percent of the population.

The mixed phase involved an intensive program of neutering feral cats in half of the study area, while the cats in the other zones were left intact and served as a control group.

The full-intervention phase involved neutering as many of the feral cats as humanly possible all in theory. That means, not all. Cat people will understand the following explanation.

The effort to neuter the feral cats increases exponentially, Klement says. The problem isnt waving the scalpel at unconscious beasts; its catching them in the first place.

First of all, if zero cats are fixed, then every one you catch gets processed, he explains. But by the time you have neutered 50 percent, then only one of every two you trap is relevant. By the time you reach (say) 80 percent, then only one of every five cats you manage to catch is relevant.

Now: the ones you catch first are the easiest to trap, so gradually youre left with the hard-core cats that you cant trap for love, money or even surf n turf au beurre. They. Will. Not. Get. Into. That. Trap.

The bottom line is that fixing the whole city the full-intervention phase translated into 70 percent, which is an astonishingly high rate, Klement says.

During the first phase of non-intervention, naturally the cat population did not decrease. Why would it? It increased.

The same happened during the mixed-phase, when all the cats in half the chosen city zones were fixed. The population continued to increase, possibly because of male immigration from the untreated half of the city, the researchers surmise. Intact cats are more territorial than their neutered counterparts. Once they move into a neighborhood with neutered cats, they tend to thrive and take over, Klement remarks.

Now: after four years of neutering all the cats (around 70 percent), the population of street cats had declined by around 25 percent, he says.

By the way, in Israel, when a street cat is fixed, its ear is notched so the poor thing doesnt get trapped again.

The circle of life

A few fun facts. This whole endeavor, which began in 2010, was the initiative of the scientists, of course, but was enabled by a handsome government budget increase for the Rishon city veterinarian department. Since a lot of surgery was involved, so were subcontractors, who committed not only to performing the trapping and operations, but reporting on each and every cat so treated, and returning each cat to its natural habitat (whatever street it lived on).

So what do we have? The first controlled large-scale proof that neutering all 70 percent of the population of street cats will decrease their population.

Up to a point. Less cats means healthier cats, which means more surviving kittens per litter, Klement explains. So while the population declines, there is a rebound effect, and so goes the circle of life.

Okay. With this new knowledge, is there hope that we can all just get along cat lovers and haters, cat feeders and their opponents? Probably not. But there can be compromise there has to be and Klement has a practical suggestion for how this can be achieved.

It is to control feeding. Cities should create feeding stations for the cats, resulting in less mess everywhere; it will become easier to trap and neuter the cats; and Israel will wind up with fewer obese hedgehogs eating leftover cat food, he suggests. Yes, fat hedgehogs area problem in Israel.

Everybody would continue do what they please in their own backyard, insofar as they have one. But the dream is that the cities would ban random feeding and set up proper kitty restaurants, and then neighbors would stop feuding (over this at least). The upshot would be fewer street cats in better shape who have survivalist kittens over which the cat-lovers will continue to kvell and the cat-haters will continue to hiss, forever more.

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Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

The epidemic of bias crimes in New Jersey shows no signs of easing. The Attorney Generals office found bias crimes here were up almost 30% in 2021.

And a man is facing charges in Ocean County of attempted murder and hate crimes after a series of attacks in Lakewood and Jackson. These attacks apparently targeted Lakewoods large Orthodox Jewish population.

Rabbi David Levy is director of the American Jewish Committee office in New Jersey. He says education is key.

Educating the community on hate and bias, educating the community on anti-Semitism, so that people can identify it and be able to report acts of bias to the appropriate authorities, said Levy.

He said its just as important for political leaders to speak out against hate.

"It does make a difference when our political leaders speak out, when our government leaders speak out against anti-Semitism and other acts of hate and bias, Levy said.

He said those in power have to take on the problem of hate speech.

We need more standing up by our public figures, really calling out the sources of hate and bias, really calling out when people use tropes that target various minority communities, he said.

Levy said social media has become a breeding ground for hate speech, which then turns into violence.

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Rabbi Calls for Education and Leadership to Combat Hate Crimes in New Jersey - wbgo.org

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Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

Viktor Orban, Hungarys far-right populist prime minister, was re-elected last week in a landslide victory that pro-democracy advocates fear sends a hair-raising signal to the rest of the world: the rise in autocratic leadership witnessed across the globe in recent decades is not going away.

An ally of fellow authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin and endorsed by former U.S. President Donald Trump, Orbans re-election came as no surprise to many, including Northeastern professor Peter Fraunholtz, who teaches history and international affairs with a focus on Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Pete Fraunholtz, assistant teaching professor. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

Part of what is to blame for Orbans consolidation of leadership and the spike in nationalism in Eastern Europe is what Fraunholtz describes as an emphasis by the West on markets over democracy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. As the United States sought to bring free market economic systems to Russia and other countries, it had an unintended effect: rampant inequality and workers being left behind in the global market.

Its not a surprise, Fraunholtz says about Orbans re-election. I tend to take a longer view of this. I was living in Russia during the early 90s. I trace some of whats going on now to then, when the Soviet Union folded, and there was a big push to make this transition in Russia from a communist system to capitalism and democracy. Ultimately, I think democracy was sacrificed for markets.

Neoliberalism and globalism, Fraunholtz explains, focused on rapidly breaking down barriers and building nations economies, and while it may have been beneficial for consumers, it was not so for working-class people in Eastern Europe, the U.S., and countries throughout the world.

The shock therapy was sort of predicated on moving quickly to liberalize the economy and to avoid political resistance, but it wreaked havoc with the country, with the population. The country wasnt ready for what was coming, Fraunholtz says about Russia. And when the resistance came, Boris Yeltsin rolled a tank over it. For a lot of Russians, democracy was gone then.

Fraunholtz is not alone in his opinion. Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security adviser under the Obama administration, shares similar analyses in his book, After the Fall: Being American in the World Weve Made, where he traces the rise to power of Orban, Putin, and other so-called strongmen world leaders, among them Trump and President Xi Jinping of China.

Rhodes spoke to an audience of Northeastern students in September about the breakdown of democratic systems in the past few decades, noting that in every nation he has traveled to that has experienced an increase in authoritarian leadership, these strongmen politicianslike Orban, Putin, and even Trumphad exploited their citizens resentment over globalization to gain favor and popularity.

This is how you get blue-collar populism, Fraunholtz says. Trump is just another variant of it. This was starting in Russia and Eastern Europe before him.

The white working class across the North Atlantic is feeling like they got left out of the bargain. Even if theyre paying less at Walmart, their stature has fallen quite a bit, he adds.

For the past few decades, Orban and his conservative party, Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz), have taken advantage of engrained xenophobia and nationalism, increasing economic inequality, and a growing suspicion in the West to consolidate power. Once in leadership, they cemented control over the media, reshaped political districts to their advantage, and continued to play on peoples fears of immigrants and other populations, Vox reported.

This is a signature of many authoritarian governments, even ones that have not seen as much economic turmoil in the wake of the Soviet Unions fall, including France, Italy, and Poland, explains Northeastern human services professor Matthew Lee, who teaches about ethnic identity and conflict in Poland and other countries.

Poland, in particular, Lee says, has had a very interesting economic history in

Matthew Lee, teaching professor of human services. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

the past 20 or so years, where its Gross Domestic Product has risen steadily, but its politics have remained conservative, with discrimination on the rise.

When Trump was elected in 2016, many Polish citizens were championing his political win, while much of Western Europe was frightened by it. Lee noticed a rise in xenophobia and anti-Semitism as well as anti-Black, anti-Asian, and anti-LGBTQ+ behavior in the country around that time.

A lot of conservatives in Poland were trying to promote this sense of ethnic purity, he says. From a human rights perspective, its alarming.

Lees class on race history and empowerment was particularly interested in how in Krakow, Poland, many Jewish people fled the country after World War II and how their descendants are now trying to return to reclaim their ancestral property. However, the Polish government, run by the conservative Law and Justice party, recently ruled they were not allowed to do so.

From a government perspective, thats horrifying, Lee says. Many people see this as anti-Semitic. Theyre limiting their own people, Jewish people with Polish ancestry, from coming back.

Another signature of countries that are experiencing spikes in authoritarianism are efforts by autocratic politicians to rewrite history and restrict education, according to Lee. Hungary, he points out, has a policy limiting what people are allowed to teach in schools, going so far as to ban gender studies. The U.S. is also seeing state legislatures pass laws limiting education on race and LGBTQ+ issues, and in Poland, the Law and Justice party has sought to eliminate stories from school books that paint the country in a bad light, including educational material on the Holocaust.

It paints a very white-washed version of what happened, he says. If we dont learn about it, were doomed to repeat it. People are not learning the true history.

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

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Are Global Autocracies Here to Stay? - Northeastern University

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