(JTA) — Natan Levy, one of the few Israelis ever to compete in the mixed martial arts Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, isn’t pulling any punches in talking about Kanye West’s antisemitism.

“Kanye West, if you’ve got a problem with me or my people, come see me, bro,” Levy said during an interview Saturday following a victory at UFC Orlando. 

“I think life is too short to hate, so to all these hateful people it sucks for you, I pity you,” he said, when asked for his reaction to the recent controversies surrounding West, who now goes by Ye, and NBA star Kyrie Irving. 

Last week, Ye added to his growing list of antisemitic rants by praising Hitler during a three-hour appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ “InfoWars” show. “Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table. Especially Hitler,” Ye said.

Levy, who was born in France and moved to Israel as a young child, has become only the third Israeli to sign on with the UFC, the world’s top mixed martial arts league. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last year that he’s proud to bring an Israeli flag with him to fights.

“I am Jewish, it’s what I am, it’s what I was born,” Levy said during his post-fight interview. “I’m very proud of it and I will fight for it. I will fight for my people in the octagon, or wherever need be, and I will not stand for antisemitism. I won’t stand for any racism — not around me. Don’t bully anybody around me, or I’m going to find you.”

Levy also said he has personally felt the recent spike in online antisemitism in the wake of the news surrounding multiple antisemitic public figures, saying sarcastically that he has received “a lot of lovely DMs,” or direct messages on social media. “Trust me, I’ve noticed it,” he said with a smile.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israeli UFC fighter Natan Levy responds to Kanye West’s antisemitism: ‘Come see me, bro’ appeared first on The Forward.

BERLIN (JTA) – The head of Germany’s main Jewish organization may have been staked out by a spy for Iran’s secret service, German security investigators have revealed.

The newsmagazine FOCUS has reported that Josef Schuster, recently elected to a third four-year term as president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, may have been targeted by a onetime informant to Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

According to news reports, the Berlin-based Central Council said Schuster is often targeted, but that he felt well-protected by Germany’s security officials nevertheless.

Intelligence services in Great Britain, Canada and the United States warned last week of possible attacks on Jewish leaders, Iranian dissidents and journalists by Iranian cells. Iranian foreign agents groom Islamic extremists as well as common criminals to prepare and carry out such attacks, the report said.

In this case, a 49-year-old Syrian-born man — identified only as Aladin Mohamed H., of Iraq — is suspected of having spied on Schuster for Iran’s secret service. He reportedly had worked as an informant for Germany for six years, providing information on Islamist radicals.

Meanwhile, a possible Iranian connection has been uncovered in investigations into bullet holes found in the facades of two synagogues in the city of Essen, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in late November. No one was injured in the incidents. A 35-year-old man of German and Iranian citizenship is being held in connection with those attacks. He allegedly tried to recruit an accomplice for a planned arson attack on the synagogue in Dortmund in mid-November, according to the Düsseldorf prosecutor general’s office.

Investigators said they suspected the incidents could be linked to an arson attack on the Hildegardis School, a public high school in Bochum, on the same night.

Security reportedly had already been tightened around Jewish institutions in North-Rhine Westphalia following those attacks. It was beefed up again as the investigation continues, according to the state Interior Ministry.

The ARD TV news magazine Kontraste confirmed that German investigators suspect the Iranian Revolutionary Guards might be behind those attacks.

In the spying case, FOCUS magazine said “Berlin security circles” had monitored the suspect’s telecommunications. The case recalls another one in 2018, in which German investigators carried out raids on the homes and workplaces of 10 alleged Iranian agents in Germany, suspected of carrying out surveillance on various potential targets, including Jewish leaders and institutions.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post German Jewish leader possibly targeted in Iranian spy operation, German officials reveal appeared first on The Forward.

Before a group of Orthodox Jews bought a single-family home for their rabbi in a residential area of Miami Beach nearly three years ago, they met with the city’s mayor, his assistant and an assistant city attorney.

For years, according to court documents, neighbors had complained about the property, which sits a mile south of the famed Fountainbleu hotel. They said it was illegally used as a synagogue, and generated excessive traffic and noise. City officials were keen that the property would revert to a single-family home in keeping with the zoning code. According to the homebuyers’ lawyer, the city assured them that the house could be used for prayer services if they remained private — closed to all but friends and guests.

But within days of buying the 6,500-square-foot house for $1.2 million, the homeowners were cited for violating the city’s zoning code by opening their service’s doors to many more people than would be expected at a “private” service.

Lawsuits and counterclaims followed. City inspectors said video captured outside the home showed that sometimes dozens would show up to pray. The owners maintained that services remain private, and last spring sued the city in federal court for denying their First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion.

“Just as any homeowner may invite friends for a Cub Scout meeting or a book club, Plaintiff and the full-time resident invite friends and family to join them for private prayer in their home,” they argue in the suit.

The city denied it was thwarting the homeowners religious expression, and at one point withdrew a citation against the owners. But it then resumed its case against them, shifting its focus from objecting to the number of people showing up at the three-bedroom house to citing it for operating a religious institution in a neighborhood where zoning laws prohibit them.

This fall the city asked a federal judge to shut down the services, arguing in a court document that it’s in the public interest for Miami Beach to enforce its laws, and that neighbors should not have to live near a home “used for institutional purposes.”

Last month, the owners again went to court, and amended their lawsuit to sue, in addition to the city, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, who is Jewish, its planning director and other city officials.

Miami Beach officials have declined to comment on this story. Franklin Zemel, the lawyer for the homeowners, said neither they nor their rabbi, Arie Wohl, want to comment either.

In their suit against the city, filed on April 19, the group is identified as Congregation Bais Yeshaya D’Kerestir, Inc. They claim Miami Beach inspectors showed up to the home 126 times, conducted a warrantless search and cited them for installing a “jacuzzi” that was actually a mikvah the city had approved years earlier.

They also took issue with the surveillance camera the city installed outside the house. The homeowners contend that the footage it captured shows many Orthodox Jews walking around a neighborhood that is home to many Orthodox Jews, but no violation of city codes.

But the city argues in court documents that it is hardly singling out synagogues, in that near the home, where an “overlay district” allows for religious institutions, many synagogues operate. City officials also point to indications, based on body camera footage obtained by its code enforcers, that the house is a synagogue.

Among the items cited by the city: an industrial-size coffee urn; a commercial soap and paper towel dispenser; a community bulletin board with advertisements; COVID-19 protocol posters requiring mask wearing, social distancing, and hand sanitizing, including a sign stating “no mask no entry”; and benches to seat 30 people.

At the time of publication, no further court dates had been set in the case.

The post Miami Beach wants to shut down this synagogue. Those who pray there say it’s not a synagogue. appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) – When Brother John Muhammad emerged this fall as the leading candidate for a vacant city council seat in St. Petersburg, Florida, local Jews were distressed.

Muhammad is well known in the city as the president of a local neighborhood association and as a frequent advocate for minority groups. But Jewish leaders learned that he was also a follower of Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has a long history of antisemitism, and that he had made comments dismissing concerns about Farrakhan’s record.

Jewish leaders tried to stave off Muhammad’s appointment, pushing for more extensive vetting of the seven candidates and, in the case of the local Holocaust museum, actively lobbying against him. But the council confirmed him in a 4-3 vote, leaving local Jews frustrated — before they considered ways to make the situation a learning experience for their city

“When I see a situation like this, it screams ‘opportunity’ to me,” Michael Igel, chair of the Florida Holocaust Museum, located in St. Petersburg, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The saga playing out in St. Petersburg, Florida’s fifth-largest city, unfolded during the same period that a handful of Black celebrities, including Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, first became enmeshed in controversy over their own antisemitic comments and social media posts. The coincidence meant a dicey environment for broaching a conversation about the antisemitism of the Nation of Islam, whose rhetoric disparaging Jews overlaps with that of Hebrew Israelites, the ideology that Irving promoted by sharing a link to an antisemitic film.

It also turned St. Petersburg into a window for understanding how ties forged between Jewish groups and others can be tested. 

Local Jewish leaders initially sought to stop Muhammad from gaining the city council seat, which was vacated after its previous holder resigned following redistricting and accusations she no longer lived in her district. They learned about Muhammad’s city council application only a week before the council’s vote, leaving them with little time to mobilize. The information came from a political rival of Muhammad, former mayoral candidate Vince Nowicki, who shared information about Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation with local Jewish groups.

Nowicki also shared a comment Muhammad had made about Jews in a 2016 video in which Muhammad interviewed local Black LGBTQ activists. In the video titled “A Conversation About Growing Up Black And LGBT,” which JTA viewed, Muhammad said, “Minister Farrakhan got accused of being antisemitic for a long time because he pointed out and made some corrections about the activity of Jews. And anybody who says anything critical of the Jewish community is labeled as being antisemitic. Good, bad, right or wrong, it doesn’t matter what you say. If you criticize them that’s what you are.”

He continued, saying, “And I’m finding that it happens when you are critical of the gay community, when you say anything critical or anything that doesn’t align with that ideology, now all of a sudden you’re homophobic.” Muhammad’s comments about gay people received some light but friendly pushback from his interview guests.

Muhammad did not reply to multiple requests for comment by JTA, including to questions emailed to him at his request. He said during a public meeting ahead of the council vote that he thought scrutiny of him by Jewish groups had been unfair.

To Jewish leaders, the comments in the video coupled with Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation were clear signs that he should not be appointed to the city council.

“I would sure hope that being antisemitic would be a red line, that you could not be a candidate,” said Rabbi Philip Weintraub of Congregation B’nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the city.

Jewish leaders began to take action, issuing statements and launching a letter-writing campaign to the council. They felt so much urgency that some even conducted business on Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday when Jewish organizations typically pause their activities in accordance with Jewish law.

As a nonprofit, the local federation was constrained in how it could weigh in. Since it could not endorse or oppose specific candidates, it instead pushed for every candidate to be “properly vetted” and informed council members about Muhammad’s affiliations and past comments, according to Maxine Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Florida’s Gulf Coast. She said the efforts did not have their intended effect.

“I don’t think anybody said, ‘Well, who is this Farrakhan, what does he stand for?’” Kaufman said. “I don’t think enough was done, personally.”

The Florida Holocaust Museum took another approach, circulating information about Muhammad to the wider community, along with a statement opposing the candidacy of anyone who would support Farrakhan’s antisemitism. Their goal, Igel said, was to educate the community about the severity of these views.

“There’s nothing else to talk about when somebody is supporting Louis Farrakhan,” Igel told JTA. “Particularly when you are seeking a position representative of a city, particularly one like St. Petersburg that is so known for its inclusivity and its openness.”

Igel praised some members of the city council who asked Muhammad pointed questions about his views at the vote, giving him the opportunity to refute Farrakhan’s comments about Jews. One council member who voted against Muhammad, Lisset Hanewicz, said her stepfather is Jewish and read Farrakhan’s past antisemitic statements into the record, saying, “I think people need to understand why a certain part of this community is upset.”

Igel acknowledged that getting involved in a city council appointment was an unusual move for a Holocaust museum. He said museum leaders had held a meeting beforehand to determine how to proceed but made a decision fairly quickly to weigh in.

“In this case, we don’t consider this to be a matter of politics,” Igel said. “This is a matter of morality. And this is what we teach.” If the candidate had been a white supremacist, Igel said, “that person would have been disqualified out of the gate.”

The Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center, two hate watchdogs, define the Nation of Islam as a group that propagates antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, not a religion. Founded in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad, the Black nationalist group is not the same as traditional Islam and is rejected by most Muslim clerics; it entered mainstream prominence in the 1960s after civil rights leader Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali publicly joined the movement. (Both later left the group, with Malcolm X publicly denouncing its leadership; he was assassinated shortly after, and two Nation of Islam members who were wrongfully convicted of his murder recently received a large settlement from New York City.)

The Nation of Islam entered its current era after Farrakhan took over the group in 1977. Now 89, he has used his platform to issue a steady stream of antisemitism, including calling Jews “wicked” and the “synagogue of Satan,” saying they have “wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government,” and calling Hitler “a very great man.” Only a few years ago, the Women’s March progressive activist collective was nearly derailed over some of its founders’ associations with Farrakhan.

It is rare, but not unheard of, for public officials to have current or former associations with the Nation of Islam. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a practicing Muslim, was dogged by accusations that he had formerly been a member of the group when he first ran for Congress in 2006; he apologized for his past associations with the group. Trayon White, a Washington, D.C. council member and onetime mayoral candidate who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, has donated to the group in the past. Former President George W. Bush once praised the group, and a photograph showing Barack Obama in the same room as Farrakhan was fodder for Obama’s critics during his presidential run.

Muhammad, who is referred to on the city council website as John Muhammad and whose legal name is John C. Malone, declined to condemn Farrakhan at the city council meeting.

“I am not willing to denounce the leader of my faith no more than a Catholic would be willing to denounce their pope,” he said.

Muhammad’s reaction to questions about Farrakhan particularly concerned the federation and other local Jewish groups. Kaufman told JTA she didn’t know whether Muhammad himself is antisemitic, but she said his refusal to disavow Farrakhan was alarming.

“I do have issue with his reverence of someone who is blatantly antisemitic, and he won’t disavow him, he won’t reject him,” she said, echoing the the federation’s official statement on the vote.

At the meeting, Muhammad did say that he had reached out to the Florida Holocaust Museum but had not heard back — and that he thought the museum’s criticism of him was unfair. 

“What I found when we reached out to have dialogue with the Holocaust Museum director, they did not want to talk to me,” he said. “They wanted to evaluate and disqualify me based on the association that I have as an individual. I don’t think that that’s just.”

Muhammad also defended his record with Jews by claiming that they were among the “diversity of those who support me.” He added, “And if you look at those who oppose me, they’re coming from one particular group.”

Since the vote, a local Black newspaper condemned the scrutiny on Muhammad, calling it a “perusal into his faith practice.”

Igel said the museum had no record that Muhammad had reached out but encouraged him to come and learn more about the Holocaust and the nature of antisemitism. Stuart Berger, head of the local Jewish Community Relations Council, acknowledged at the city council meeting that Muhammad “has made himself available to us” at the federation, but that none of the federation staff “had been in direct contact with him.”

The federation’s involvement in Muhammad’s case became its own issue at the council vote, when the candidate referenced an email Berger had written to the county commissioner. In the email, Berger wrote that Muhammad’s vetting process had been “good enough for me!”

While Muhammad took the email as proof that the federation believed him to be fit for office, Berger and Kaufman maintain that it meant nothing of the sort. Berger had not been speaking on behalf of the federation, they say, and had not intended for his email to be shared publicly.

Now that Muhammad is on the council, attention has turned to building relationships with him. Kaufman has been meeting with individual city council members, and hopes to eventually meet with Muhammad himself. She also aims to have the federation make a presentation to the council about the dangers of antisemitism and push them to make a statement about it.

She doesn’t think it’s complicated. “I think hate’s hate,” she said. “Many different colors.”

Weintraub’s congregation is celebrating its 100th anniversary in March, and one of its congregants, Eric Lynn, is also involved in politics: he was the Democratic nominee for Florida’s 13th Congressional district in the midterms but lost his race to Republican Anna Paulina Luna, who said she was raised as a Messianic Jew and campaigned with far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Weintraub himself is a member of an interfaith ministerial dialogue group with Black churches and says he’s “a professional optimist” when it comes to managing conflict between different communities. He sent JTA an episode of the public radio podcast “Hidden Brain” about how to keep conflict from spiraling, saying it “describes what I’ve tried to do.”

Since Muhammad was appointed, Weintraub has met with him; the pair had what Weintraub described as “a pleasant conversation.” The two talked about parenting and “shared traumas,” he said. They did not discuss Muhammad’s comments supporting Farrakhan, but the rabbi couldn’t help but think about him.

“I thought I was a termite, according to Farrakhan,” Weintraub said. In contrast, Muhammad “said I was a person, so that was nice.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post How Jewish leaders tried — and failed — to keep a Farrakhan follower out of a Florida city council appeared first on The Forward.

צו הערן די טשיקאַוועסן אויף אוידיאָ, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ:

פֿלוימענשנאַפּס, אָדער שליוואָוויץ — אַ באַקאַנטע משקה בײַם קידוש אין אַ סך שילן — איז די פֿאַרגאַנגענע וואָך צוגעגעבן געוואָרן צו דער יו־ען־רשימה פֿון זאַכן וואָס האָבן אַ באַטײַטיקן קולטורעלן ווערט.

דעם באַשלוס האָט מען געמאַכט אויף דער קאָנפֿערענץ פֿון „יונעסקאָ“ אין מאַראָקאָ. מע האָט אויך צוגעגעבן צו דער רשימה דעם באַגעט (דעם לאַנגן לאַבן פֿראַנציישן ברויט).

שליוואָוויץ איז געוואָרן אַ פּאָפּולער געטראַנק בײַ די פּוילישע ייִדן אינעם 19טן יאָרהונדערט, ווען אַ סך ייִדן האָבן זיך פֿאַרנומען מיטן פּראָדוצירן אַלקאָהאָל און האָבן פֿאַרמאָגט אַכסניות. שליוואָוויץ האָט געהאַט אַ גרויסע מעלה וואָס שייך כּשרות. אין פֿאַרגלײַך מיט ווײַן, וואָס איז געמאַכט פֿון טרויבן און דערפֿאַר זענען דאָ שטרענגע הלכות וועגן דעם, זענען נישטאָ קיין דינים וועגן שליוואָוויץ. אין פֿאַרגלײַך מיט ביר און בראָנפֿן וואָס זענען געמאַכט פֿון תּבֿואה און זענען דערפֿאַר פֿאַרווערט פּסח, קען אַן אָפּגעהיטער ייִד טרינקען שליוואָוויץ אַ גאַנץ יאָר.

ווען די מאַסן פּוילישע ייִדן האָבן אימיגרירט קיין אַמעריקע האָבן זיי מיטגעבראַכט די טראַדיציע פֿון טרינקען שליוואָוויץ. הײַנט באַטרעפֿן די ייִדן אַ גרויסן טייל פֿונעם שליוואָוויץ־מאַרק, בפֿרט פּסח־צײַט.

צו לייענען די נײַעס אויף ענגליש, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.

•

לויט אַ נײַער שטודיע איז אפֿשר דאָ אַן אופֿן ווי איר קענט פֿאַרקלענערן די מעגלעכקייט פֿון שטאַרבן פֿון אַ האַרצקראַנקייט: הייבט אָן דאַווענען.

אין דער שטודיע האָבן די פֿאָרשער אַנאַליזירט די שטאַרביקייט פֿון כּמעט 12,000 ישׂראלדיקע ייִדישע מאַנסבילן, סײַ פֿרומע, סײַ פֿרײַע, צווישן 40 און 65 יאָר אַלט.

כאָטש די דיעטע בײַ חרדים איז געוויינטלעך נישט אַזוי געזונט ווי בײַ אַנדערע גרופּעס — זיי עסן אָפֿט מאכלים מיט אָנגעזעטיקטער פֿעטס און טרינקען סאָדעס וואָס האָבן אַ הויכן פּראָצענט צוקער — זענען דאָ אַנדערע סיבות פֿאַר וואָס זיי לײַדן ווייניקער פֿון האַרצפֿעלערן: שבת רייכערן זיי נישט און זיי זענען געוויינטלעך נאָענט פֿאַרבונדן מיט דער משפּחה און דער קהילה.

פֿריִערדיקע שטודיעס האָבן שוין אָנגעוויזן אַז דאָס פֿירן אַ רעליגיעז לעבן פֿאַרקלענערט דעם עמאָציאָנעלן דרוק בײַ מענטשן; און דאָס קען זײַן נאָך מער חל אויף חרדים אין ישׂראל וואָס דינען געוויינטלעך נישט אין מיליטער ווײַל אין מיליטער איז דער דרוק במילא העכער ווי אין דער ציווילער געזעלשאַפֿט.

אַגבֿ, לויט אַ שטודיע אין 2018 איז דאָס לייגן תּפֿילין אויך גוט צום געזונט: ווען מע וויקלט די לעדערנע רימענס ענג אַרום דעם אָרעם, האָט עס אַ פּאָזיטיוון עפֿעקט אויפֿן בלוטשטראָם.

צו לייענען די נײַעס אויף ענגליש, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.

The post Tidbits: Slivovitz deemed a cultural treasure; Haredi men have better heart health  appeared first on The Forward.

Like any truly great art movement, Hallmark’s foray into Hanukkah holiday movies has proceeded by fits and starts. 

When the Christmas content giant released its first Jewish movie in 2019, they couldn’t even squeeze the word “Hanukkah” into the title. Double Holiday and Holiday Date, both about interfaith holiday romances, featured beleaguered Jewish protagonists begging their studly Christian lovers to do a single Hanukkah activity while receiving a crash course on Christmas, a holiday they seemed to know nothing about despite its iron grip on American society. 

Love, Lights, Hanukkah, which arrived a year later, was a tad bit more Jewish insofar as it involved guilt-trips and a weird obsession with DNA tests. But packed with tutorials on Hanukkah basics like lighting the menorah, it seemed geared towards non-Jewish watchers more than the people actually celebrating the holiday. 

However, just as Picasso emerged from his Blue Period to invent Cubism, Hallmark has produced Hanukkah on Rye, set to premiere Dec. 18 on the Hallmark Channel. A tale of two warring delis and the star-crossed lovers who unite them, this movie kind of has everything: egg creams, meddling grandmothers who call at inconvenient times, terrible attempts at Hanukkah songs and Lower East Side lore. We are forced to admit that Hallmark has listened to the consistent griping of the Forward culture desk and and given us a Hanukkah movie we can’t criticize — at least, not on grounds of being insufficiently Jewish. 

Written by Julie Sherman Wolfe, Hanukkah on Rye is the lovely story of Molly (Yael Grobglas) and Jacob (Jeremy Jordan), two blandly beautiful 20-something scions of legacy Jewish delis in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Having embraced modernity by serving fajitas and decorating with light-up menorahs, Jacob’s deli, Zimmer’s, is doing great, and his parents send him to scout out New York locations for a new franchise. As soon as he arrives on the Lower East Side, Jacob realizes that the building he’s eyeing is just down the street from Gilbert’s, a struggling and staunchly traditional deli that Molly hopes to take over from her parents — if it doesn’t go out of business first. 

Meanwhile, Molly and Jacob’s grandmothers have signed them up for an elite Jewish matchmaker whose foolproof process involves forcing singletons to write longhand letters to an anonymous bashert. As Molly and Jacob spar IRL, they’re also (you know it!) falling in love via snail mail. But can their love overcome their families’ business interests? You literally already know the answer to this, but I will leave you to find out the specifics yourself.

Having screened years of laughably off-base Hallmark movies, I had low expectations for Hanukkah on Rye. But while absolutely, consummately schlocky — scene transitions involve montages of deli fare that will make you want to ditch the movie and go out for a Reuben — it’s an indisputable improvement on previous entries in the genre. 

Instead of voyeuristic glimpses of stilted Hanukkah traditions, Hanukkah on Rye features jokes that, however corny, feel like they were written by and for Jews. Grandmothers kiss mezuzahs casually and kvetch about the Christmas trees that dominate New York’s hotel lobbies, while “courtesy menorahs” are relegated to dusty corridors. Molly and Jacob bond over the paucity of un-embarrassing Hanukkah songs. While their recitations of Jewish history are a little pious — “They knew one day they’d make their American Dream come true,” Molly sighs of her tenement-dwelling ancestors — the movie’s climax hinges on an immigration story that feels, if not exactly plausible, like exactly the kind of fable in which American Jews love to indulge. 

Hanukkah on Rye does have one fatal flaw, and you may have already guessed it: It’s basically a ripoff of Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Chains squashing a small business? Check. Falling in love by anonymous letter? Check. A man courting a woman while simultaneously threatening her livelihood? It’s all there, with little more than their penchant for latkes and difficulty landing their jokes distinguishing Molly and Jacob from Ephron’s protagonists. 

If you’re a rom-com fan and always wondered why Ephron couldn’t squeeze more latkes into her characters’ lives, clear some space in your holiday calendar for Hanukkah on Rye. But Ephron had better stick to When Harry Met Sally for deli-adjacent romance.

The post Hallmark’s latest Hanukkah movie is weirdly good appeared first on The Forward.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A bipartisan slate of 125 lawmakers from both chambers are calling on the Biden administration to adopt a “whole of government” policy to combating antisemitism.

A letter sent Tuesday to President Joe Biden, spearheaded by the chairmen of congressional task forces for combating antisemitism, called for action from officials from an array of agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the State Department, the White House, the Department of Education and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The letter pushes for the creation of “an interagency task force led by an official at the Assistant Secretary rank or higher,” and it cites an FBI report saying there was a 6% rise in antisemitic hate crimes in 2020.

“Because many individual agencies play a critical role in combating antisemitism, closer coordination is needed to share best practices, data, and intelligence; identify gaps in efforts; streamline overlapping activities and roles; and execute a unified national strategy,” the letter said.

The letter comes a day ahead of a roundtable on antisemitism to be convened at the White House bringing together top administration officials with Jewish organizational leaders, and a week after the Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorism advisory bulletin saying that the Jewish, LGBTQ and migrant communities face a “persistent and lethal threat.”

The chairs of the task force in the U.S. House of Representatives are Kathy Manning, a Jewish Democrat from North Carolina, and Chris Smith, a New Jersey Democrat. The chairs in the Senate are Jacky Rosen, a Jewish Democrat from Nevada, and James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Bipartisan slate of 125 lawmakers call for ‘whole of government’ approach to combating antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.

Three years ago, Rishi Sunak, now Britain’s prime minister, spoke during a parliamentary debate in London about the “Contribution of the Jewish Community to the U.K.,” specifically lauding the English Jewish painter Lucian Freud among overachievers.

Although widely accepted as a major modern realist whose works regularly sell for millions, Freud, whose centenary is on Dec. 8, did not always inspire personal enthusiasm, even among his intimate friends. The poet Stephen Spender, of German Jewish origin, with whom young Freud had a romantic affair, a new collection of letters documents, is a case in point. Feelings cooled, and decades later, when both attended the traditional Jewish wedding ceremony for the painter R.B. Kitaj, Spender confided to a fellow guest: “I can’t stand being in the same place with Lucian. He is an evil man.”

Freud, grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis and son of a prosperous architect, routinely treated people badly. He shunned his doting Jewish mother, Lucie Brasch, as suffocating. Yet in the 1970s, when she suffered brain damage following a suicide attempt after his father’s death, Freud became tolerant of her presence as a mute, passive figure. As such, she posed for an estimated 4000 hours for a series of portraits which, considered among his finest works, reflected vital skin tones like great portraitists of the past such as Rubens. Even his mother’s death in 1989 did not lessen his urge to depict her. Freud demanded permission of the hospital where she died to draw a charcoal deathbed portrait.

Freud also painted far less dignified nudes of friends, and even of his children. He acknowledged fathering 14 children, although some biographers claim the true number may be closer to 40. So frantic was his intimate life that in 1961, three of his children were born to three different women.

Some biographers have asserted that his behaving like a Jewish Don Giovanni may have been a delayed response to the trauma caused when his prominent family fled their Berlin home after the Nazis arrived to power. Freud claimed that, as a small boy in 1929, he was already impacted by increasing antisemitism in Berlin, and he reacted to sudden outsider status in schoolyards by rebelling resentfully against the new strictures.

Relocating to the U.K. by 1933, five years before grandfather Sigmund could be persuaded to escape from Nazi Austria, Freud and his parents were nationalized as English by 1939 through indirect acquaintanceship with British royals. The resulting special influence permitted them to avoid internment as enemy aliens, which was the routine fate of less well-connected refugees.

In his adopted land, Freud encountered different types of antisemitism, as he later noted, explaining that as an emigre youngster, “I was not very conscious of being Jewish but I was conscious of antisemitism.” In Paddington, where his family resided, people would complain about Jews, referring to them as “saucepans” in Cockney rhyming slang — the full term, “saucepan lids,” was intended to rhyme with the unspoken slur of “Yids.” Freud demurred to classmates: “Now, none of that. I am a saucepan.”

Despite his own saucepan status, Freud never abandoned his disdain, shared by some assimilated German Jews of a certain era, for Eastern European Jews. Still, as an adult, he formed lasting ties with fellow Jewish artists such as Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Kitaj. Auerbach became his closest painter friend and adviser.

Auerbach, still active today at age 91, lacked the material advantages of Freud and emigrated to the U.K. alone, rather than in a well-funded family group, as part of the Kindertransport, which brought Jewish children to Britain to escape Nazi persecution. Auerbach’s parents remained behind in Germany and were murdered at Auschwitz. According to Auerbach, Freud once confessed that his mother’s devotion to him as her favorite child made it “impossible for [Freud] to have so unconditional a relationship with any other woman.”

Nevertheless he tried. In the 1940s, he married Kitty Epstein, daughter of the prominent English Jewish sculptor Jacob Epstein. Typically, Freud’s portraits of his spouse were given anonymous titles such as Girl with a Kitten (1947), Girl with Roses (1948), and Girl with a White Dog (1951-1952) instead of humanizing her with a name or specified personal affiliation.

In the early 1950s, when Freud married his second wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, daughter of the noblewoman Maureen Guinness, he attracted the ire of some U.K. snobs. The author Evelyn Waugh wrote to a friend: “Poor Maureen’s daughter made a runaway match with a terrible Yid.” Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, once exclaimed upon seeing Freud arrive at his mother-in-law’s home: “What the bloody hell is Maureen doing, turning her house into a bloody synagogue?” Indeed, Freud’s mother-in-law was scarcely more tolerant, introducing him to friends as “Lucian Fraud,” and the marriage did not last.

The portraits continued, though, including one of the English Jewish painter Timothy Behrens, seen in Red Haired Man on a Chair (1962). Behrens adopted a contorted pose as part of a cruciform composition, possibly an ironic allusion to the Yiddishkeit in their shaded backgrounds. Other Jews who sat for Freud portraits included Jacob Rothschild, who became a longtime friend, and an unnamed art collector who commuted from New York once monthly for commissioned sittings, during which Freud took the opportunity to avidly discuss Jewish ritual and belief.

Other commissions ended less harmoniously. After the German Jewish antiquarian book dealer Bernard Breslauer died in 2004, it was discovered that Breslauer had so disliked the way Freud’s portrait accentuated his double chin that he destroyed the painting, much to the artist’s dismay.

Other potential Jewish clients rejected even the thought of the notorious Lothario Freud getting anywhere near their offspring. James Goldsmith, the financier of Jewish origin, once wrote Freud to warn him that if he dared try to paint his daughter, “he’d have [Freud] murdered.” Whereupon Freud asked flippantly, “Is that a commission?”

And Freud’s lawyer Arnold Abraham Goodman, who sat in the House of Lords, nixed the possibility of Freud ever painting the portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales by declaring: “I wouldn’t leave her in the room with Lucian.”

Wary for an entire lifetime after his early experiences fleeing Fascist Europe, for decades Freud mostly refused to allow exhibits of his artworks in Germany or Austria. In 1989 he sardonically observed that the “best thing about Germany was the Berlin Wall.” Freud feared a reunified and strengthened Germany, just as he excoriated Austria for its treatment of his family. Four of his elderly great-aunts, sisters of Sigmund Freud, had been murdered in concentration camps. Only after his death in 2011 did a major show of his work open in Vienna.

As if a certain amorality was a natural response to his early angst, Freud became fascinated by Jewish nogoodniks like disgraced media proprietor Robert Maxwell. Today’s Jewish figurative painters such as Eric Fischl may have absorbed some of Freud’s approach to portraiture, yet without the tormented mixture of feistiness and using modern Jewish history as an excuse for personal misbehavior, as Freud did so notoriously.

The post This notorious artist fought trauma, antisemitism and his own worst instincts — Lucian Freud at 100 appeared first on The Forward.

This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.

Tuesday’s Georgia runoff between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker once again puts antisemitism and the Jewish vote in the spotlight, as Democrats seek to pad their narrow Senate majority following the midterms.

The race was among the most highly monitored during the midterms cycle due to controversies related to Walker’s personal life and the apparent lack of impact these had on his electoral prospects as the Republicans unsuccessfully sought to flip the Senate.

Kanye West’s antisemitic tirades were beginning to make national headlines prior to the midterms, and Walker’s critics used his failure to condemn the rapper as an attack point amid rising antisemitism.

Thanks to Georgia’s electoral system, where a 50-percent majority is required to avoid a runoff, Walker averted the fate met by many GOP candidates endorsed by Donald Trump. However, Warnock has only gained momentum over the past month, with polling indicating that he leads among both likely and independent voters. The Democratic candidate has also significantly outraised and outspent Walker.

Both candidates are hoping to capture the crucial Jewish vote in a state where Jews vote disproportionately to their makeup of the general population – highlighting the importance of the Black-Jewish alliance that helped propel Warnock and fellow Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff to victory in 2020.

Georgia has 100,000 registered Jewish voters, 36,000 of whom identify as Democrats and a further 50,000 as independents – numbers that are crucial to a state that narrowly made Warnock and Ossoff its first-ever Black and Jewish senators.

Walker has continued to embrace Trump over the past month, despite the former president’s waning local popularity. Local officials are tempering expectations, with Democratic early-voting turnout remaining high and rain predicted on Election Day, when the GOP will need heavy in-person voting to flip the seat.

In another sign of low GOP hopes, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp – who soundly won reelection over Democrat Stacey Abrams last month – did not campaign with Walker on the final weekend ahead of the runoff.

Walker has faced the same problems as other Trump-backed Republicans concerning proximity to antisemitism, which has only ratcheted up since Trump hosted West and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago home a few weeks ago.

The GOP candidate came under fire last year when a film producer due to host a pro-Walker fundraiser was revealed to have displayed an anti-vaccine symbol in the shape of a swastika on her Twitter profile. His campaign initially botched its condemnation, saying it was “clearly an anti-mandatory vaccination graphic,” while noting Walker “unequivocally opposes antisemitism and bigotry of all kinds.” The campaign would soon reverse course and cancel the fundraiser.

He also attracted criticism for invoking his devotion to Jesus during a candidate forum with local Republican Jewish voters, and Georgia Republicans circulated a fundraising email for Warnock centering around criticisms of George Soros – a frequent target of antisemitic tropes by Republican lawmakers.

Both candidates have highlighted the Black-Jewish alliance. In 2020, Walker co-authored an op-ed for Fox News calling on Blacks and Jews to combat racism and antisemitism together. In it, he criticized Black celebrities for espousing conspiracy theories aimed at Jews, and other celebrities for remaining apathetic in the face of such antisemitism.

Warnock, for his part, made the alliance a central tenet of his 2020 campaign. He connected the 1958 bombing of the Temple – a Reform synagogue in Atlanta attacked over its congregation’s support of the civil rights movement – to how the Black and Jewish communities came together after the 2018 Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh and last year’s George Floyd protests.

Republicans, however, have targeted Warnock as “one of the most anti-Israel Democrats in Congress.” Much of that belief is rooted in attacks against Warnock from his first Senate campaign concerning his signature on a 2019 letter criticizing “the heavy militarization of the West Bank,” which was “reminiscent” of the way apartheid-era South Africa governed the colony of Namibia.

Warnock strongly came out against the BDS movement and conditioning military aid to Israel while promoting a two-state solution – a posture he maintained during his two years in office.

Making the difference

The Jewish-Democratic establishment has come out in full force in hopes of bolstering Warnock. Pro-Israel, liberal group J Street has raised $426,000 for Warnock this cycle, including the runoff, and ran a phone bank during its annual conference in Washington, which ended Tuesday.

The Jewish Democratic Council of America, unlike most races in which it involves itself, is centering Warnock’s Israel policy in its efforts, highlighting how he has been an advocate for the U.S.-Israel relationship since being elected.

It spent over $250,000 ahead of the runoff on two online ads targeting Georgia’s Jewish voters, focusing on his commitment to Jewish values – notably including defense of democracy.

It has made direct voter contact with nearly 30,000 Georgians, and also hosted a phone and text bank for Warnock the night before Election Day, moderated by political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen and featuring Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Gov.-Elect Josh Shapiro.

“Just as it did during the midterms, the Jewish vote will help to determine the outcome of the Georgia Senate runoff and make the difference in support of Sen. Warnock. We are confident that these ads, combined with our outreach efforts, will help to deliver this 51st Senate seat to Democrats in December,” said Jewish Democrats’ CEO Halie Soifer.

Democratic Majority for Israel’s PAC invested in Warnock’s runoff efforts as well, focusing on his record on Israel and antisemitism.

“Two years ago, Rev. Warnock met with our leadership and gave us his commitment to advance the Biden-Harris agenda and support a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. He has delivered on that commitment, and we strongly believe his continued vision and leadership in the Senate will serve Georgians and all Americans well,” said DMFI PAC Chairman Mark Mellman.

The Republican Jewish Coalition, meanwhile, is maintaining its support for Walker. “RJC is deploying our entire Victory Team to the Peach State to support Herschel Walker for U.S. Senate. RJC volunteers are already conducting extensive Jewish grassroots outreach – making phone calls, knocking on doors, sending text messages,” RJC National Political Director Sam Markstein said.

“Utilizing the most advanced, cutting-edge data operation in Jewish politics, RJC will be actively turning out Jewish voters for Herschel Walker and defeat Raphael Warnock – a rubber stamp for the disastrous Biden agenda that has resulted in skyrocketing costs of living, an unprecedented rise in crime, and foreign policy that has abandoned Israel and emboldened Iran.” Markstein added.

The post Jewish vote seen as key in Georgia runoff between Warnock and Walker appeared first on The Forward.

As a Palestinian journalist, I can attest that freedom of the press is often lacking in the Arab world. My own government, the Palestinian Authority, had 479 media rights violations in the first half of 2022 alone. I have been unlawfully detained by Palestinian police, denounced as a traitor and had a bounty put on my head, all because I dared to criticize P.A. leadership.

Qatar, the host of this year’s FIFA World Cup, boasts similarly poor journalistic freedom to the P.A. It has infamously been the subject of protests over its human rights record (a report from the Guardian estimates 6,500 foreign workers have died in the 10 years since Qatar won the World Cup bid). However, we are also now seeing an increasing Qatari assault on the freedom of the press, in a country where Freedom House finds that print and broadcast media are “subject to state censorship.”

With the 2022 World Cup, Qatar’s particularly brutal brand of journalistic repression, where arrest of journalists and interference with reporting are common, has been clear for all to see. Particularly noticeable is the vicious hostility Qatari fans and officials have shown toward representatives of Israeli press outlets, in a country that funds Hamas and teaches that “Jews are treacherous” in public school textbooks.

Israelis, who have regained hope in peace as the Abraham Accords have led to full relations with four Arab nations, and international observers alike are shocked to see a startling lack of protection for the world press at the international venue. In doing so, Qatar undermines both freedom of expression and the chances for regional peace.

Israel Channel 13 sports reporter Tal Shorrer was shoved, insulted and accosted by fans at the World Cup, with a group yelling: “You are killing babies!” during his broadcast. In an exchange viewed more than 4 million times on Twitter, Moav Vardy, the foreign affairs reporter for the Israeli network Kan, was screamed at by one fan: “You are not welcome here, this is Qatar, this is our country, there is only Palestine, no Israel.” Last week, Kan journalist Dror Hoffman and his team were kicked out of a taxi by a driver who told them that they “were killing his brothers.” Israeli journalists believing that the Abraham Accords had mellowed anti-Israel animosity were proven wrong, with Shorrer later saying of his experience: “I was so excited to come in with an Israeli passport, thinking it was going to be something positive … It’s sad, it’s unpleasant. People were cursing and threatening us.”

It’s not a surprise that many Israeli journalists, like Jews throughout history at times of persecution, have felt compelled to disguise their nationality while reporting at the Qatar World Cup. Yedioth Ahronoth reporters Raz Shechnik and Oz Mualem have been mocked and criticized for posing as Ecuadorians to minimize confrontations when they felt threatened by bystanders during interviews. Kan correspondent Eli Ohana initially told a Qatari police driver that he was Israeli, causing the officer to jerk in surprise and say: “Are you sure that you are Israeli? You are joking!” When Ohana quickly added that he was joking and that he really came from Portugal, the Qatari policeman told him: “If you were really from Israel, I would have dropped you here and turned back.”

It is not only Israeli journalists that are experiencing Qatar’s hostile treatment, but also the broader world press. Qatari police tried to grab a French journalist’s phone for filming Iranians at the World Cup protesting the repressive regime ruling their country. Journalists of the London-based Iran International Television, which is critical of the Iranian government, had their press passes revoked after Iran declared the network a “terrorist organization.” American journalist Grant Wahl was detained before a match and his phone “ripped from his hands” because he was wearing a shirt with a rainbow on it. During a live broadcast, Qatari security officials threatened to smash Danish TV2 reporter Rasmus Tantholdt’s camera for the simple reason that they didn’t like that the reporter was filming.

Tantholdt said afterward: “This is not a free and democratic country. My experience after visiting 110 countries in the world is: ‘The more you have to hide, the more difficult it is to report from there.’”

Qatar is also the host of Al Jazeera, the state-owned propaganda network known for spreading misinformation and hate in the region. Al Jazeera now broadcasts to 310 million households in more than one hundred countries, comparable in reach to the BBC, and more than three-quarters of Arabs identify Al Jazeera as being either their first or second choice for news, vastly amplifying the small but wealthy emirate’s political clout. The culture of this dominant political media helps explain Qatar’s continuing struggles with press freedom at the World Cup, as Al Jazeera’s company line — and thus the regime’s — continues to be that all criticism of Qatar is impermissibly Islamophobic.

There is a cause-and-effect process at work here. Because of Qatar’s vast oil influence in the West and the power of Al Jazeera, Qatar’s appalling human rights record was overlooked and it is strongly suspected that the nation was allowed to purchase the World Cup site selection through bribery. Relishing their newfound clout as host to the most popular sporting event on the globe, Qatar has felt emboldened to harass journalists (particularly Israelis), those bearing LGBTQ symbols and anyone supporting the protests in its close ally, Iran.

The world must learn from this experience and pressure Qatar to change its discriminatory education and media culture, which continues to exert a regressive influence via Al Jazeera throughout the region. It is unacceptable that a country who teaches antisemitism, abuses foreign workers and stifles freedom of the press is rewarded with a massive sporting event.

To contact the author, email editorial@forward.com. 

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Critics are supposed to be neutral but, cards on the table, I wanted Emanuel Gat’s U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to be great.

Primarily I was cheering it on because Love Train is a dance show set to the music of Tears for Fears whose music is second nature to me. Even after decades of listening to their songs and writing a short book about their first two albums, I still listen to them for pleasure. But also, I hoped for the best because, after interviewing Gat about how he went about creating the show, I wanted to see how that process could possibly work. How could he go into day one without any preconceived ideas apart from one song, and try to mine what was there in the group? How could he shape the roles and tendencies of 14 dancers into a dance troupe with a personality or organic character that could then enter into “dialogue” with the music?

On top of that, I was charmed by an artist who wants to give his performers “freedom [through] the act of accepting responsibility” and to do that in service of inspiring the audience.

I spoke to him the morning after the first New York show, when he was quietly elated. He said he views his role more like the coach of a soccer team than that of a godlike creator. “The coach doesn’t tell Messi or Mbappé how to kick the ball.” But, as choreographer, not only does Gat have to tweak the team, for each show he has to tweak the rules of the game. For this one, the outcome of the rules needs to elevate the audience’s mood and spirit: “Art used to have that role of uplifting people through religious practices but we’re missing that,” he told me.

A Tel Aviv muse

Gat, who has lived in France since 2008, is part of a diaspora of dancers and dramatists significantly influenced by the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Tel Aviv. Best known for inspiring works by Barak Marshall, Inbal Pinto and the Batsheva Dance Company, the Suzanne Dellal Centre has had an outsized impact on the global dance scene. Gat founded his own company in 2004, while affiliated with the Centre. Though his work has developed independently, the Centre’s hallmark informality and inclusivity still underpin his work even when it becomes emotionally intense, physically demanding or, as with this work, strikingly costumed.

At the beginning of the show, the stage is dark and empty. Behind a curtain with four vertical columns cut out of it, we can see dancers limbering up, foreshadowing moves we will see later in the show. As the haunting synthesizer percussion of “Ideas as Opiates” reverberates, the dancers slowly emerge. Not for the first time, I wonder how a show could have the uplift that Gat promised, given that its soundtrack is anchored in teenage angst at parental abuse written in homage to Arthur Janov’s primal scream theories.

Thomas Bradley’s striking costumes suggest a sort of baroque apocalyptic chic, something like a more fabulous version of Pablo Picasso’s “Family of Saltimbanques” where, instead of itinerant circus performers loitering with pathos in a desolate landscape, Mad Max road warriors find a 1980s boombox and dance to Tears for Fears.

Sounds, not story

Unsurprisingly there is no story and there are no words. Even the song lyrics, to which I was keenly attuned, are little more than sounds. (Gat had told me that responding to a human voice in the music added a layer of complexity to the dancers’ response. In general, though, they were not listening or responding to the words. They were dancing the same way they danced, in Gat’s 2021 “Act II&III or The Unexpected Return of Heaven and Earth,” to Maria Callas’ Italian arias, which none of them understood.) How successful or evocative was Gat’s troupe in introducing itself without words, without criteria?

During the opening two numbers — “Ideas as Opiates,” and “The Prisoner” — anxiety and hope permeate the stage. Individuals reach out, others respond. The troupe echoes, evolves and amplifies movements, it splits and reforms. Individuals and duos tentatively split off and are reincorporated. The dawning sax opening of “The Working Hour” marks an increase in confidence of the group and then, perhaps counter-intuitively for those of us who know the original and have seen it in “Donnie Darko,” “Mad World” increases that assuredness.

The first series ends with “Pale Shelter” as the group embodies the urgency and confident need of the music, ignoring the despair of the lyrics. Starting with a line at the back of the stage performing simultaneous movements, and ending with increasingly complex layers of rotations and interactions, there is a shared sense of rhythm even as individuals and groups spin out. More closely than at any other part of the show, there is an identification of the group with the power and the beat of the music — even as Curt Smith sings about radical alienation of an emotional connection doomed to fail: “You don’t give me love (you give me cold hands)/ And I can’t operate on this failure/ When all I want to be is/ Completely in command.” And then to the first fade-to-black of the evening.

Gat was clear that he would have failed in his aims if the dance merely illustrated the music — like we are used to in clubs or with the iconic Soul Train dancers. The energy of “Pale Shelter” is a glimpse of what might happen if he veered a little in that direction and it is, in truth, intoxicating. As if to prove their independence from the music, though, the soundtrack is not continuous from song to song, and the dance occasionally continues in silence.

During the transition from “Everybody Wants To Rule the World” to “Shout,” Eddie Orayan prefigures the latter’s intensity with fast, pressing solo traverses of the stage before giving way to Michael Loehr’s more measured skirt-clad lunges. Even when the music restarts, the dancers ignore the vehement exhortation to “Shout.” Indeed, the group declines entirely to address the strident beats of “Shout” that have forced decades of discos to clap, yell or stomp along. During one crescendo, Loehr merely prolongs the hold of a horizontal forearm.

Moments of virtuosity

Two moments of slow virtuosity stood out in an otherwise hectic bustle of a show. At one point Ichiro Sugae and Thomas Bradley hold balance poses facing each other. They are close, but angled in center stage so Bradley faces backstage and Sugae out toward the right of the audience. Slowly, four or five times, while locking gaze, they synchronously transfer their weight, moving through a knee stance, to a different balance. At another moment, Jin Young Won, dancing solo at the end of “I Believe” holds her foot extended. She lowers it as the music ends, but just as the tone fades without a clear caesura, Won’s foot never quite reaches the floor. We are held, tantalized by a toe end moving — unclad as with all the dancers’ feet —asymptotically toward the floor.

There’s an exuberance to the performance, a sense of overflowing energy. Gat’s business is people, and his task is to optimize the expression and the power of these elite dancers as a group. Dealing with people through their movement and presence allows Gat to set forth a reaction to the music, not just the lyrics. We’re more used to thinking about rock ‘n’ roll as having an overwhelming sense of desire trapped just beneath the beat. But, despite the psychological angst of the words, the enduring appeal of Tears for Fears work in the ’80s is its driving desire and vigor. Behind “The Prisoner” is a fierce teenage yearning for liberation.

In the midst of the movement through “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “Shout” and “Famous Last Words” to “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” there’s a swelling and an opening before the finale. In 2019, caught outside the Gare de L’Est in Paris, Gat stopped suddenly to listen to a recording of “Sowing the Seeds of Love” that was playing. It was music that he had grown up with, but not that he had listened to in the 1980s. From that audio epiphany, that there was something “curious” in the song worth investigating, came “Love Train.” Through the stops and starts of the pandemic, including a summer 2020 world premiere that the Israel-based dancers had to miss because they were in lockdown, and the eventual world tour two years later, he was building teams and exploring the musical moment that had grabbed him in Paris.

Breaking the fourth wall

At the end of “Famous Last Words,” as Bradley’s solo comes to a stillness and Roland Orzabal sings “we’ll carry war no more,” the back curtain has gone up and the house lights have slowly risen. For once, Gat’s occasionally stark, occasionally murky lighting is moot. The fourth wall is discarded, the dancers and the audience are all in the same, large room in Brooklyn having survived the pandemic. From small children to senior citizens in the notably diverse audience, from dancers in their early 20s to those in their mid 40s, humans of all shapes and sizes and colors are gathered to celebrate life together in BAM. It was a lovely moment — though one that wasn’t fully capitalized upon in the following, closing number.

For me, the show whirred by in the blink of an eye. Of course, even absent the dance, I was in heaven: a world-class stereo system was playing for me, and 1,500 spellbound neighbors, recordings that I know back to front. There were certain parts where my over-writerly mind wanted to know more explicitly what was going on. There were other parts where it felt like certain solos didn’t quite work properly. And the finale, to the words from “Sowing the Seeds of Love” from which the piece takes its name (“And the love train rides from coast to coast/ D.J.’s the man we love the most”) didn’t quite have the jouissance, the overflowing sense of energy, excitement and potential that I enjoyed in “Pale Shelter” at the end of the first block.

But there was no denying the gravity-defying bounce of the piece mixed with its occasional almost-frightening stillness; the carnivalesque insouciance of the teamwork and the intensity of the small group scenes; the joyful encumbrance of the extra skirts and bustles on all dancers alike that became, like bodies, just excuses for more flourishing and rejoicing in the human condition. It felt like the dancers were enjoying a party that the audience wished they had been invited to. And, of course, we were.

The post The words are full of angst and alienation — so why is this show so joyous? appeared first on The Forward.

דער ענין פֿון מין (דזשענדער, בלע״ז) פֿאַרנעמט אַ בכּבֿודיקן אָרט אין דער הײַנטיקער ליטעראַטור־פֿאָרשונג. מען רעװידירט אונטער אַ קריטישן שפּאַקטיװ די אַלטע פֿעסטע השׂגות פֿונעם ליטעראַרישן קאַנאָן, כּדי צו אַנטפּלעקן פֿאַרבאַהאַלטענע פּניות לטובֿת מאַנסבילן און צו באַקעמפֿן זײער שליטה איבער די ליטעראַרישע אינסטיטוציעס. אין דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור־פֿאָרשונג האָט די דאָזיקע רעװיזיע זיך אָנגעהױבן שױן מיט יאָר פֿערציק צוריק. אַלע יאָר קומען אַרױס אינטערעסאַנטע שטודיעס, װאָס באַטראַכטן נײַע אַספּעקטן פֿון דער ייִדישער און העברעיִשער ליטעראַטור־געשיכטע פֿונעם פֿעמיניסטישן קוקװינקל.

פּראָפֿעסאָר אַליסאָן שעכטערס בוך „פֿרױען שרײַבן ייִדישע מאָדערניטעט, 1919 – 1939‟ באַהאַנדלט די װערק פֿון פּראָזע, װאָס זײַנען אָנגעשריבן געװאָרן דורך פֿרױען אױף ייִדיש און העברעיִש צװישן בײדע װעלט־מלחמות. דאָס איז געװען אַ צײַט, װען די צװײ ייִדישע שפּראַכן זײַנען געגאַנגען אויף פֿאַרשײדענע פּאָליטישע און אידעאָלאָגישע דרכים. ייִדיש איז געװאָרן די שפּראַך פֿונעם אַלװעלטלעכן ייִדישן גלות בעת העברעיִש האָט זיך אײַנגעװאָרצלט אינעם נײַעם הײמלאַנד אין ארץ־ישׂראל. די פֿינף מחברטעס, װאָס װערן באַהאַנדלט אין שעכטערס בוך — פֿראַדל שטאָק, דבֿורה באַראָן, לאה גאָלדבערג, אלישבֿע ביכאָװסקי און דבֿורה פֿאָגעל — זײַנען אינטערעסאַנט און װיכטיק ניט בלױז צוליב זײער ליטעראַרישער שאַפֿונג, נאָר אױך װײַל זײ האָבן „זיך באַװוּסטזיניק פֿאַרקלערט איבער דער ראָלע פֿון פֿרױען װי קינסטלער אינעם צװאַנציקסטן יאָרהונדערט‟, דערקלערט שעכטער.

עס איז װיכטיק, איז שעכטער ממשיך, אַז די דאָזיקע מחברטעס האָבן „איבערגענומען אין זײער רשות דעם כּוח פֿונעם פּראָזע־זשאַנער כּדי צו דערצײלן די לעבנס פֿון פֿרױען‟. אין דעם פֿאָקוס אױף דעם פּראָזע-זשאַנער באַשטײט דער חידוש פֿון שעכטערס שטודיע. אַ היפּשע צאָל שטודיעס זײַנען געװידמעט ייִדישע דיכטערינס. שעכטער האַלט, אַז אין דעם היעראַרכישן סדר פֿון ליטעראַרישע זשאַנערס שטײט פּראָזע, און בפֿרט דער ראָמאַן־זשאַנער, העכער פֿאַר דער דיכטונג. היסטאָריש האָבן די מענער־שרײַבער און קריטיקער געהאַט דעם „רשות‟ איבער דער פּראָזע, און זײ האָבן זיך באַצויגן צו דער „װײַבערישער‟ פּראָזע מיט גרינגשאַצונג און ביטול. אַזױ אַרום מאָלט שעכטער אױס די ליטעראַטור־געשיכטע װי אַ מין געראַנגל צװישן מענער און פֿרױען פֿאַר דער שליטה איבער דעם ליטעראַרישן קאַנאָן.

פֿאַרן טעאָרעטישן יסוד פֿון איר חקירה נעמט שעכטער די פֿעמיניסטישע קריטיק פֿונעם קלאַסישן פֿראַנצײזישן ראָמען „מאַדאַם באָװאַרי‟ פֿון גוסטאַװ פֿלאָבער. די דאָזיקע קריטיק האַלט, אַז פֿלאָבער האָט געדאַרפֿט „הרגענען‟ זײַן העלדין עמאַ באָװאַרי, װײַל ער האָט ניט געקענט פֿאַרטראָגן איר באַגער צו פֿאַרטיפֿן זיך אין דער װעלט פֿון ליטעראַרישער פֿאַנטאַזיע כּדי זיך צו באַפֿרײַען — כאָטש אין איר דמיון — פֿון דער מאַכט פֿון די מענער. אַזױ װי עמאַ באָװאַרי, האָבן די ייִדישע מחברטעס געשטרעבט גובֿר צו זײַן דעם מענערישן קולטורעלן רעזשים אין דער ייִדישער און העברעיִשער ליטעראַטור. און אַזױ װי פֿלאָבער, האָבן די מענער־קריטיקער ניט געװאָלט אָנערקענען די װערט פֿון די ליטעראַרישע ווערק געשאַפֿן פֿון פֿרויען.

פֿלאָבער האָט אַרײַנגעבראַכט אין דער ליטעראַטור אַ נײַעם סטיל, װאָס מעקט אױס די גרענעץ צװישן דער דרױסנדיקער רעאַליטעט און דער אינעװײניקער װעלט פֿון דער ליטעראַרישער העלדין. דער סאַמע באַקאַנטער מוסטער פֿונעם דאָזיקן סטיל אין דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור איז דוד בערגעלסאָנס ראָמאַן „נאָך אַלעמען‟, װוּ מע זעט די השפּעה פֿון פֿלאָבער, לעװ טאָלסאָי, אַנטאָן טשעכאָװ און אַנדערע אײראָפּעיִשע שרײַבער. שעכטער באַװײַזט, אַז אָט דער סטיליסטישער חידוש האָט דערמעגלעכט די מחברטעס זיך אַנטקעגנצושטעלן דער מענערישער העגעמאָניע דורכן שאַפֿן ליטעראַרישע העלדינס, װאָס האָבן געקענט פֿאַרטײדיקן זײער עצמדיקײט װי פֿרױען. זי װײַזט, למשל, װי אַזױ דבֿורה באַראָן האָט „באַפֿרײַט‟ עמאַ באָװאַרי פֿון פֿלאָבערס גרינגשעצערישער באַציִונג דורך פֿײַנע סטיליסטישע מיטלען אין איר העברעיִשער איבערזעצונג. אַזױ אַרום, פֿאַרסך־הכּלט שעכטער, האָט „באַראָנס איבערזעצונג איבערגעאַנדערשט דעם ראָמאַן צוליב די צװעקן פֿון איר אײגענעם עסטעטישן און פּאָליטישן פּראָיעקט‟.

שעכטער האַלט דבֿורה פֿאָגעלס אַװאַנגאַרדיסטישע עקספּערימענטן מיטן מאָנטאַזש פֿון פֿאַרשײדענע ליטעראַרישע סטילן פֿאַרן שפּיץ-פּונקט פֿון דער פֿרױיִשער שעפֿערישקײט אין דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור פֿון יענער תּקופֿה. פֿאָגעל האָט בכּיװן אױסגעקליבן ייִדיש, װאָס איז ניט געװען איר מאַמע־לשון, פֿאַר אַ לינגװיסטישער כּלי פֿון איר שאַפֿונג בײַ גלײַך מיט פּױליש. אירע ייִדישע טעקסטן, טענהט שעכטער, אַנטפּלעקן „די פֿאַרבינדונגען צװישן דער דערצײלערישער טעכניק פֿון באַראָן און שטאָק […] און דעם קריזיס פֿון דער נאַציאָנאַלער אָנגעהעריקײט, װאָס מען זעט אין די װערק פֿון גאָלדבערג און ביכאָװסקי‟. דאָס איז אַן אײגנאַרטיקער קוק אױף פֿאָגעלס אױפֿטו, װאָס עד־היום האָט מען אים כּסדר באַטראַכט אינעם קולטורעלן קאָנטעקסט פֿונעם גאַליציאַנער מאָדערניזם. שעכטער לײענט פֿאָגעלס טעקסטן װי אַ ראַדיקאַלע פֿעמיניסטישע קריטיק פֿונעם קלאַסישן „פֿלאָבערישן‟ באַגריף פֿונעם רעאַליסטישן ראָמאַן. פֿאָגעל „מאָלט זיך אױס אַ װעלט װאָס נעמט אַרײַן עמאַ באָװאַריס עסטעטישע באַגערן‟.

דער קריטישער קוק אױף ליטעראַטור װי אַ שלאַכטפֿעלד האָט װאָרצלען אין דער מאַרקסיסטישער טעאָריע. אַזאַ מין צוגאַנג געפֿינט מען אין די װערק פֿון סאָװעטישע פּראָלעטאַרישע קריטיקער פֿון דער אײגענער תּקופֿה פֿון די 1920ער-1930ער יאָרן װען די מחברטעס פֿון שעכטערס שטודיע האָבן אויך געשריבן. די סאָװעטישע קריטיקער זײַנען געװען אױסן צו באַפֿרײַען די „פּראָגרעסיװע‟ פּראָלעטאַרישע מחברים פֿון דער שליטה פֿון דער „אָפּגעשטאַנענער‟ בורזשואַזער קולטור. ספּעציעל װיכטיק איז דעמאָלט געװען דער קאַמף פֿאַר דער קלאַסישער ירושה, דהײנו, דעם רעאַליסטישן ראָמאַן פֿונעם נײַנצנטן יאָרהונדערט. איצט זעט מען אַן ענלעכע סכעמע אין דער פֿעמיניסטישער טעאָריע, מיט אײן אונטערשייד׃ דעם אָרט פֿונעם באַדריקטן פּראָלעטאַריִאַט פֿאַרנעמען פֿרױען, בעת די ראָלע פֿון דער בורזשואַזיע פֿאַרנעמען מענער. בײדע טעאָריעס אַנטפּלעקן אַן אײגנאַרטיקע פּערספּעקטיװ אױף דער אַנטװיקלונג פֿון דער ליטעראַטור, אָבער װי אַלע טעאָריעס, האָבן זײ געװיסע גרענעצן און אַ געװיסן לעבנסדױער.

The post How female Jewish authors stood up for Flaubert’s heroine Emma Bovary appeared first on The Forward.

This article is part of our morning briefing. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox each weekday. Haredi men in Israel had better heart health than their peers   A recent study offers a clue for people looking to reduce their chances of dying from coronary heart disease: Start praying.   Counterintuitive: One of the researchers noted that Haredim tended to have a worse diet than the other groups in the study, with many indulging in meals filled with saturated fats. “They eat a lot. There are the Holy Days and the Shabbat,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it is a healthy diet, because they drink a lot of sugary drinks.”   On the other hand: Several factors could explain the lower mortality rate, including: Haredim generally smoke less due to Shabbat and holiday restrictions against using fire, and had strong community bonds and support. Other research has shown religious practice to be connected to lower stress levels, and this might be an even larger factor for Haredim in Israel, who are widely exempt from mandatory military service, removing another stressor.    Fun fact: For religious Jews specifically, there’s an X factor: A 2018 study found that wearing tefillin, with their leather straps wound tightly around the arm each morning, had a positive effect on blood flow.   Read the story ➤ ALSO FROM THE FORWARD (iStock/Getty) Can we all please shut up about Kanye West now? It’s not as easy as it sounds. “In the attention economy that drives digital news,” writes our digital culture reporter, Mira Fox, readers’ seemingly bottomless interest in the rapper’s every hateful comment is hard to ignore. While continuing to give oxygen to his statements may inspire others to echo them, she acknowledges, “educating people who might otherwise believe what West has said about Jewish power and control is essential to the journalistic mission.” Read her essay ➤   Replete with biblical references, Bob Dylan’s latest book showcases the artist’s Jewishness — and brilliance: The Philosophy of Modern Song, at last, gives us the midrashim of Rav Dylan on 60 standards of popular music. Among the insights: Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally was “part of the old biblical days in Samaria from the tribe called the Nephilim;” Perry Como could actually “out-sing anyone.” Seth Rogovoy raves that Dylan “functions as a combination of Rashi, the Torah commentator, and Moses de León” of the Zohar in one “deliriously readable book.” Read the review ➤   But wait, there’s more… JDate, interfaith weddings and extramarital affairs were debated at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday during oral arguments about a case involving religion and gay rights. Hate crimes against Jews in New York City spiked last month, newly released statistics show. The NYPD said on Monday that 45 antisemitic incidents were reported to authorities in November, more than double the number in October and in November 2021 …. While we’re on the topic: A man and his son, both wearing yarmulkes, were shot with a BB gun on Sunday while standing outside a kosher supermarket on Staten Island. The incident was captured on video. The most-read article on our site the past few days is a story about a Portuguese diplomat who saved more Jews than Schindler. Letter to the editor: Despite rising antisemitism, now is the time for a film on the crimes of Harvey Weinstein, write two rabbis. A message from our sponsor: Zamir Choral Foundation Celebrating Hanukkah & Israel 75 with Zamir Chorale & Zamir Noded Conductor: Matthew Lazar   When: Sunday, December 18, 7:30 p.m. (The First Night of Hanukkah)   Where: Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan   For Tickets: kaufmanmusiccenter.org Or Call the Box Office at: 212-501-3330 BUY TICKETS WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY Nike’s Kyrie 4 branded sneaker. The Kyrie 8 was due to come out this fall. (Getty)   Nike officially cut ties with Kyrie Irving, the company said Monday. The NBA star had been under contract with the company since 2014; the partnership’s latest sneaker, the Kyrie 8, was supposed to be released last month. Irving has been under scrutiny since late October when he shared antisemitic content on social media and then refused for a time to say he was against antisemitism. (CNBC, Timeline of the Irving saga)     A Palestinian man was killed in clashes with Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank on Monday, Palestinian health officials said. The military said soldiers responded with gunfire when they were confronted with “stones, Molotov cocktails and explosives” during their arrest of three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in a refugee camp near Bethlehem. It has been a particularly violent year in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with officials counting 150 Palestinians and 31 Israelis killed. (Times of Israel)     From The Washington Post: “Current and former federal officials are warning that a surge in hate speech and disinformation about Jews on Twitter is uniting and popularizing some of the same extremists who have helped push people to engage in violent protests including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.”      A Michigan man was charged with ethnic intimidation after harassing people at a historic synagogue and preschool for Jewish students on Friday. (JTA)     Iran hired a fugitive biker boss from the Hells Angels to organize attacks on German synagogues in November, according to the German public broadcaster ARD. The attacks in Germany are the latest alleged Iranian overseas operations to have come to light in recent months. In Monday’s newsletter, we shared a Washington Post report of an Iranian plot to murder the French-Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. (Guardian)      The author of the 2006 Holocaust novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has written a sequel, All the Broken Places. The first book sold 11 million copies, was turned into a movie, and is taught in classrooms all around the globe, though some Holocaust scholars think it should not be used in schools because it is a work of fiction and full of stereotypes. The author, John Boyne, said the new book is aimed at adults, and defended the original: “If they weren’t reading Striped Pajamas, it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.” (JTA)     Slivovitz, a plum brandy some Ashkenazi Jews drink on Passover, has been added to the United Nations’ list of items with “intangible cultural heritage.” The decision was made last week at UNESCO’s conference in Morocco, where France also successfully campaigned to add the baguette to the list. (JTA)   Mazel tov ➤  To our contributor Simi Horwitz who won several awards Sunday night from the Los Angeles Press Club, including for this Forward story about a 94-year-old Jewish fashion photographer who died this fall. Shiva call ➤  Steven Salen, a bespoke tailor who survived the Holocaust and dressed presidents, died at 103 … E. P. Sanders, a New Testament scholar who promoted more sympathetic understandings of early Judaism, died at 85. ON THE CALENDAR On this day in history (1967): Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz led a team of surgeons in performing the first successful heart transplant in the United States. The Jewish doctor’s other innovations included his development of an early implantable pacemaker and his use of the first camera to film a beating heart inside a dog.    Last year on this day, we published an essay by Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, in which he offered advice to Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agarwal. Now, of course, Agarwal is out and the man in charge is Elon Musk, who has welcomed neo-Nazis back onto the platform.    In honor of National Gazpacho Day, we recall that time earlier this year when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was attempting to reference the Gestapo and, well, here’s what happened next. Today at 5 p.m. ET: Rob Eshman, a Forward columnist, will host a conversation about Hollywood and the Holocaust to mark the 40th anniversary of Sophie’s Choice. He’ll be talking with Dr. Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust museum and film consultant, and Stephanie Goodman, a film editor at The New York Times. Register here ➤ PHOTO OF THE DAY (Robert A. Cumins) Today is the 35th anniversary of the Rally for Soviet Jewry in Washington, D.C., where Sen. Bob Dole told the crowd, “I will not rest, and you will not rest, America will not rest, until they are all free.” Photographer Robert A. Cumins was there and shared images from the event including the one above with Natan Sharansky (far right) and Dole (far left), who died last Dec. 5. Read more about the event and see more of Cumins’ photos ➤   ––– Thanks to PJ Grisar, Sarah Nachimson and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.

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WASHINGTON (JTA) — The White House will convene a roundtable with Jewish organizations on antisemitism, to be chaired by Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish Second Gentleman.

Also appearing at the event will be Susan Rice, President Joe Biden’s top domestic policy advisor; Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism; and Keisha Lance Bottoms, Biden’s senior advisor for public engagement, the White House said Monday in a statement.

Biden has made combating antisemitism and other bigotries a centerpiece of his agenda; he launched his campaign in April 2019 by saying that the deadly 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and former President Donald Trump’s failure to unequivocally condemn it, made him decide to run for president.

Antisemitic expression has spiked following Elon Musk’s removal of content controls after he purchased the social media giant Twitter and unabashed antisemitism embraced by rapper and designer Kanye West. Biden convened a White House summit in September to address the threat extremism poses to various communities.

The Department of Homeland Security last week issued a terrorism advisory bulletin that the Jewish, LGBTQ and migrant communities face a “persistent and lethal threat,” NBC reported last week.

The same day, Sen. Ben Cardin, a Jewish Democrat from Maryland, convened a meeting of top agency officials who handle the threat of antisemitic violence.

“We can and should be doing more,” Cardin, who convened the meeting in his role as chairman of the the United States’ efforts to oversee human rights abroad, said after the meeting. “A unified, national strategy on countering antisemitism is needed. While finding the proper balance between protecting free speech and protecting Americans from harm, we need to up our game, rebuild coalitions with other groups that have been the target of hate-based violence, and institutionalize coordination that counters antisemitism wherever it is found.”

Emhoff, whose wife is Vice President Kamala Harris, said that his time on the job has made him more sensitive to Jewish tradition and to threats facing Jews.

“And coming in as Second Gentleman, I thought being the first man in this role would be the headline and it was,” Emhoff said last week at a conference of NewDEAL, a group of young progressive elected officials. “But like the one thing was being the first Jewish person of any of the four. There’s never been a Jew married to a president, or vice president, or has been president or vice president. As it turns out that has become a very big deal in the Jewish community and in other communities that aren’t represented.”

Emhoff warned against apathy regarding antisemitism. “So I don’t want it to feel normal,” he said. “I don’t want people to think well it’s just words, it’s just Kanye, no — this matters. This is important. We have to all step up and speak out about this as leaders in your communities.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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Hate crimes against Jews in New York City spiked last month, amid rising openly anti-Jewish rhetoric on social and broadcast media, newly released statistics show. 

The New York Police Department said on Monday that 45 antisemitic incidents were reported to authorities in November, representing 60% of all hate crimes in the five boroughs and marking a 125% increase compared to October. It also represents a similar increase from November 2021. 

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine linked the most recent rise to comments in past weeks from rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, and the sharing of a link to an antisemitic film by NBA star Kyrie Irving. “This worrisome trend in New York City should be a wake-up call,” said Levine, who is Jewish. “We need to combat the disease of antisemitism on every front.”

Since January, a total of 662 incidents — including assaults, vandalism and harassment — motivated by anti-Jewish bias have been documented by the NYPD. 

According to an Anti-Defamation League survey, there were 416 reported incidents of antisemitism in the entire state of New York in 2021, the most in the nation. 

After an averted terror attack targeting the Jewish community last month, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said law enforcement will boost security for Jews and Jewish institutions in the weeks leading up to the Hanukkah season, which begins on Dec. 18.

In a recent interview, Adams said combatting antisemitism also requires social media companies to confront hatred on their sites more seriously, and for law enforcement and the justice system to identify and prosecute those who have committed hate crimes. The mayor attended a global gathering of municipal leaders to address the rise in antisemitism last week in Athens, Greece.

Last month, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation aimed at thwarting hate crimes and warned that antisemitism has real-life consequences for Jews. 

“This, of course, comes amid the mainstreaming of dangerous antisemitism by well-known public figures,” said Gideon Taylor, chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. “We need to fight this and we can do so through stronger security, education, and community building.”

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Comparing a film to a fever dream is the hoariest of critical clichés (it’s right up there with calling something Kafkaesque), but some clichés have a basis in fact. The first time I watched Orson Welles’ The Trial, I was home from high school with a fever. The second time, last November, I had another fever and dozed off an hour in, though the climactic explosion woke me up just before the end titles. The third time, a week ago, I was healthy at last, not that that made any difference, since The Trial is the rare film that earns its fever dream comparisons. Almost demands them.

It was adapted, pretty faithfully, from Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel, and released 60 years ago, when Welles’ reputation in his own country was so dim he had no choice but to scrounge for financing in Europe. The story goes that his backers, Michael and Alexander Salkind, gave him a stack of books that were in the public domain, and he picked one without all that much thought (later, it turned out The Trial wasn’t in the public domain, but by then too many costs had been sunk). Still, it’s tempting to imagine that Welles — the wunderkind who woke up in Hollywood one morning and realized he’d been blackballed for some unspoken crime — had a more personal attachment to the material.

Explaining a dream to someone else, at least in my experience, is almost never a good time. You have to say what happened, of course, but you can never quite explain why it made you feel the way it did, what message your id was trying to send, which details are the important ones and which don’t matter so much. I can tell you the plot of The Trial, but not why it gets under my skin, what message Kafka and Welles were trying to send (assuming they knew), which plot points are the key ones.

A reasonable summary of the film might go like so: Josef K. (Anthony Perkins, two years after Psycho) wakes up one morning to find strange men in his bedroom. They inform him he’s under arrest but refuse to say what for. He goes to work and later the opera, where he finds he’s being pursued by other strange men. They take him to a courtroom, where he struggles to defend himself, since he still has no idea what he’s been accused of.

Josef’s uncle recommends a lawyer named Hastler (Welles), who spends most of his time in bed, talking too loudly. Sensing his days are numbered, Josef races through the city, trying to find help. He comes to a priest, who tells him he’s been sentenced to death. Executioners wrestle him into a pit and offer him a chance to do the deed himself, with a knife. When he refuses, they throw dynamite into the pit, and as they walk away an explosion swells into the sky.

Here’s another plot summary that strikes me as equally fair (and unfair): Josef K. staggers into the apartment of his neighbor, the beautiful Miss Bürstner (Jeanne Moreau). She flirts with him, but, after kissing her, he abruptly shrugs her off. At work, his boss accuses him of sleeping with his cousin. He visits the offices of a lawyer, where the wife of a courtroom guard flirts with him — he shrugs her off, too. The lawyer’s mistress, Leni, another stunner (Romy Schneider), flirts with him, and after admiring her webbed hands, he kisses her and, yet again, abruptly quits. Little girls chase him through buildings and tunnels. He finds himself in a deep pit, clutching dynamite, cackling like a madman when he should be throwing the dynamite as far as he can.

One more: Welles, past his prime and disgusted with the bureaucracies of filmmaking, watches a younger generation of movie people with a mixture of lust, envy and pity: Moreau and Schneider, the gorgeous muses of young arthouse directors, and Perkins, who was rumored to be homosexual. Sometimes he wants to mentor the younger generation, sometimes he wants to screw it, sometimes he wants to grab it by the collar, but in the end he settles for blowing it all to smithereens.

I know of no other film (nothing by Lynch, nothing by Buñuel) that conveys so vividly the sense of being in a dream — of knowing you’re in one and not being able to wake up, even. As in plenty of dreams (mine, at least), rooms are forever growing, shrinking, and changing their spots. The film was made all over Europe in the early ’60s, and Welles gets a good sense of its uneasy mix of postwar desolation, Neoclassical pomp, and Modernist grids: Scenes that seem to take place in the same room were cobbled together from footage shot in Paris, Belgrade, Zagreb, etc. Some locations that seem stable are fragmented, while others that seem different are secretly the same (most of the sets were built inside the Gare d’Orsay, the abandoned Parisian railway station that later became an art museum).

The Trial blurs the line between significant and insignificant, so that it’s hard to distinguish major characters from supporting ones, or accident from intention. The priest who tells Josef he’s going to die only gets a few seconds of dialogue, but their final exchange strikes me as the most affecting in the film: The priest calls, “My son,” and Josef whispers, “I’m not your son” (in Welles’s film and Kafka’s novel both, it’s suggested, if never spelled out, that Jewishness might be Josef’s crime). When Leni seduces Josef, there should be only two people in the room, but a third casts a shadow on the floor. Was this a mistake, or was Welles trying to literalize the point that somebody’s always watching? Does it matter?

Nothing is explained and less is solved. Characters change motivations for no reason, talk endlessly but explain nothing, meet Josef for the first time and then act like they’ve known each other for years. And yet, like dreaming a dream, watching The Trial feels entirely coherent, especially when it’s incoherent. There’s the constant anxiety of Perkins’ performance, for one, pulsing like a basso continuo beneath everything else. And Welles uses classical music to hold everything together, playing Albinoni’s “Adagio in G minor” over and over until it sounds equally sincere and sardonic, dignifying Josef’s suffering and sneering down on it. (Stanley Kubrick would pull off a similar trick with Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Jazz Suite No. 2” in Eyes Wide Shut, a film that, like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, is hard to imagine without The Trial paving the way.)

Sixty years on, we’re left with this paradoxical thing: a perfectly chaotic, perfectly controlled work of art. It’s enough to reduce you to madness. “That’s the conspiracy,” says Josef, shortly before he gets himself blown up, “to persuade us all that the whole world’s crazy, formless, meaningless, absurd. That’s the dirty game.” It’s a paranoid thought, of course, but some paranoid thoughts, like some clichés, have a basis in fact. Are our overlords planning something elaborate and wicked, or is there really no plan at all? In The Trial, Welles cunningly splits the difference. Maybe there’s a plan and maybe not — either way, you and I will be the last to know.

Film Forum will be presenting a 60th anniversary run of The Trial starting on Dec. 8.

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Laughter broke out in the U.S. Supreme Court Monday as Justice Samuel Alito posed a hypothetical, describing JDate as “a dating service, I gather, for Jewish people?”

“It is,” chimed in Justice Elena Kagan, the sole Jew on the court.

“Maybe Justice Kagan will also be familiar with the next website I’m going to mention,” Alito continued. “Next, a Jewish person asks a Jewish photographer to take a photograph for his AshleyMadison.com …”

He was interrupted by more laughs in the courtroom, and then backtracked on the implication that Kagan is familiar with Ashley Madison, a dating service marketed to married people looking to have affairs. “I’m not suggesting — I mean, she knows a lot of things …” Alito sputtered. 

Religion vs. gay rights

The case before the court involves a Christian artist who refuses to design websites for same-sex couples. Hypotheticals posed by Alito, who appeared sympathetic to the artist, involved forcing business owners to compromise their religious principles. 

“A Jewish man and a Jewish woman who are engaged to be married ask a Jewish website designer to build a website to celebrate their upcoming nuptials — no problem,” he posited. But if a Jewish man and Christian woman ask a Jewish designer to build them a wedding website, that would be problematic, Alito suggested.

“Many Jews consider intermarriage an existential threat to the future of Judaism,” he said. “Does that website have to accept the second couple?”

Colorado Solicitor General Eric Olson answered that if a photographer or web designer offers “a general service to the public, then they offer that regardless of the customer’s religion.”

The case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, is the latest dispute over religion and LGBTQ rights before the high court. The artist in the case says she shouldn’t be forced to do work that conflicts with her faith. Her opponents say that if she wins, it will open the door to businesses refusing to serve customers on the basis of race, religion and other categories.

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Through a multitude of maps, photographs, historical documents and contemporary art objects, a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York celebrates the city’s religious diversity while also documenting the faith-based prejudice and intolerance that persists in forms ranging from subtle-seeming slights to overt hate speech to brutal violence.

City of Faith:  Religion, Activism and Urban Space does not shy away from the ways in which religious groups — Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Sikhs and others — rub elbows with each other, not always without friction, both in private and in public. On a more positive note, the exhibit also showcases the ways in which these different groups can and do work together to foster acceptance and justice in realms both secular and faith-based.

Jam-packed from floor to ceiling with eye-catching graphics, provocative art works and explanatory texts, this timely exhibit can at first seem as dizzying as a busy urban intersection. But in keeping with its theme, the show demonstrates that even within the frenzied secular space where so many of us live, there are also ways to make space for the spiritual.

Sometimes you cannot even detect where one realm ends and the other begins, an introductory wall text suggests: “In Harlem — originally a Lenape village and later a Dutch colony, an immigrant enclave, and eventually a Black Mecca — religious and secular phenomena alike can be considered ‘sacred.’”

Soundscapes and ‘scent-scapes’

Photos of delis in Jewish neighborhoods and men and women in ordinary business dress also marked by ash on their foreheads in observance of Ash Wednesday shows how the secular and the spiritual coexist.

The spiritual can create its own soundscape — calls to prayer, the blowing of the shofar, Gospel hymns, the lilt of a holy language — and even its scent-scape. A subtly woody aroma emanates from a three-dimensional hanging sculpture, created by the artist Tanaïs, made up of twine strung like a music staff and dotted with music-note-like braids of Nepali lotka paper.

Each of these “notes” is dipped in bright colored paint and scented with a powdered mix of musk, frankincense, sandalwood, and rose; the arrangement across the musical staff can be read as the theme of jazz composer John Coltrane’s classic composition, “A Love Supreme,” which exhibit curator Azra Dawood explains can also be interpreted as words of praise of the divine, in the phrase “Alhamdullilah.”

Potential targets for hate

At a time of resurgent acts of hatred and antisemitism, the exhibit is resonant on many levels. It is most effective in demonstrating how visual and sensory markers of religious groups — whether clothing (Jewish skull caps, Sikh turbans, Muslim burkas), language (Yiddish, Hebrew, Urdu, Arabic and Bengali), or kitchen aromas — can make people hyper-visible and thus a potential target for religious profiling.

Religious discrimination is hardly new. But Dawood, an architectural historian, provides historical context for the practice of what she describes as the “normalization” of Protestantism as the city’s dominant religious group. It is against that backdrop, the exhibit demonstrates, that over time, each newly arriving immigrant religious group has had to organize and protest in order to create and claim space for its members.

Until waves of Irish immigrants began arriving in New York in the mid-19th century, relatively few Catholics resided there.  The city’s anti-Catholic and anti-Irish immigrant prejudice was reinforced by a public school curriculum that reflected the Protestant majority in its mandatory use of the King James Bible to teach reading and religion. Viewing this as an attempt to indoctrinate Catholics in Protestant tradition, the Catholic community created its own parochial school system.

The eruv

At the start of the 20th century, Jews also created space for with the erection of an eruv, a boundary marking off areas in which observant Jews are allowed to perform activities, such as carrying objects outside the home, that are normally prohibited on Shabbat.

“Entire religious ecosystems can be tethered to the built environment in barely perceptible ways, as when Orthodox Jewish communities employ the Talmudic concept of the eruv,” the wall text explains, beside a 1907 map depicting the Manhattan eruv, which designated the entire eastern side of Manhattan as part of the enclosure.

In secular, urban settings, such as New York, the eruv is designed to be discreet, composed of thin string or wire hanging above the ground, connected via utility poles or elevated train tracks,  as shown in more recent photographs and a slide show of the making of an eruv. But no matter the relative invisibility of the eruv, as any number of recent community disputes demonstrate, its very presence continues to stir conflict, controversy and religion-based prejudice against Orthodox Jews, sometimes even from secular Jews.

By contrast, another map, displayed nearby, proudly — and humorously — claims a widespread Jewish presence in New York.  “What Is a Jew? From Emma Goldman to Goldman Sachs,” which originally appeared in Nonstop Metropolis, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly Schapiro, details any and every historic site, building, gravesite, synagogue, hospital, nonprofit or communal organization or other entity that could be related to Jewish history.  What can one say, except L’Chaim!

Still, there is plenty for all of us do, the exhibit suggests, in terms of activism, mutual solidarity and support with other religious groups. That message comes through clearly in the exhibit’s photographs of religious groups and communities — Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Christians, and others — banding together to protest the murder of George Floyd, the 2017 Muslim travel ban, antisemitic attacks, and other hate- and race-based crimes. Perhaps the faith most needed to sustain us is that we can, indeed, find ways to work together in the space, and in the world, we all share.

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More than 6 million people will visit New York City between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Many will head straight to see the tree at Rockefeller Center, the holiday windows at Macy’s and Saks, and the Rockettes at Radio City. Some will even take a bus tour of Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, where December nights are ruled by animatronic reindeer, life-size Nativity scenes and massive light displays blinking in sync to “Jingle Bells.”

What’s a Jew to do amid all this holiday hubbub? Even those who appreciate a nicely decorated store window can be forgiven for muttering “Enough already!” the umpteenth time they hear “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

To take your mind off candy canes and Mariah Carey, here are some ideas for celebrating eight crazy nights instead of the 12 days of Christmas. Spend Dec. 25 at a klezmer concert, see Funny Girl (not The Nutcracker), watch the world’s largest menorahs get lit — or get lit yourself at the Maccabee Bar or a Hanukkah party on Christmas Eve.

Booze and parties

A Hanukkah-themed pop-up bar that originated in Boston is coming to the West Village. The Maccabee Bar takes over Ollie’s Dec. 13-31, with drinks like latke sours and Hebrew hammers.

Since you won’t be staying up late Christmas Eve to catch a glimpse of Santa on his rounds, why not plan the night out? The MatzoBall bash (ages 21 and up) is held in seven cities including New York. The Christmas Eve Jewbilee is billed as New York’s “largest gay Christmas Eve nightlife event.” Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Outreach Center sponsors a Night Before Christmas party at the trendy Tao Downtown restaurant.

You can also make merry on the first night of Hanukkah at the House of Yes club in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which promises to “cram eight nights of debauchery” into one fab celebration on Dec. 18.

Theater and comedy

On Broadway, Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt tells the story of a Jewish family in Vienna. Fiddler on the Roof reimagines the legendary musical in Yiddish (with subtitles). Funny Girl stars Lea Michele in the role made famous by Barbra Streisand; songs like “Don’t Rain on My Parade” still thrill.

For comedy fans, Littlefield in Brooklyn hosts a comedy-and-music Chanukahstravaganza on Dec. 22. The Stand-Up NY club on Manhattan’s Upper West Side presents the Carlebach Shul’s Chanukah Comedy Show Dec. 24 and comedian Judy Gold headlining A Very Jewdy Christmas on Dec. 25.

Yes, they’re open Dec. 25

For Christmas Day activities (other than movies or Chinese food), consider visiting the Jewish Museum, the Jewish Children’s Museum or the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. All are open Dec. 25.

The Museum at Eldridge Street, not far from the heart of Chinatown, is even hosting a Dec. 25 klezmer concert — so you can have Jewish music and eat your Chinese food too. 

The Eldridge Street museum is located in a landmark 1887 synagogue. It was the first temple to be purpose-built by and for Eastern European Jews in the U.S. Whether you take a guided tour or stop in for a quick look, the stained glass and vaulted ceiling are glorious to behold. But don’t miss the small details that were preserved when the synagogue was restored to its architectural glory. The worn floorboards bear witness to decades of davening; the bimah railing is indented from generations of hands.

The Statue of Liberty poet

Emma Lazarus, who wrote “The New Colossus” poem engraved on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty, came from a Sephardic family. She’s featured in two exhibitions at YIVO’s Center for Jewish History. The center is closed on Christmas Day but hosts a Hanukkah concert Dec. 18.

You can see the statue itself from inside the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which overlooks New York Harbor in Lower Manhattan. While you’re there, check out the museum’s video about “The New Colossus,”  as well as The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do exhibition and the Garden of Stones installation by the renowned land-art sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. On Dec. 11, the museum hosts the New York Jewish Book Festival (including an appearance by Forward editors Adam Langer and Jodi Rudoren). The museum’s Yiddish New York Festival, Dec. 24-29, offers concerts, dance workshops and more.

Tenements and a hidden graveyard

The Tenement Museum (closed Dec. 25) offers neighborhood walking tours of the Lower East Side (including one with a stop at the Forward’s original building). But what really makes the museum unique are its tours of restored tenement apartments. Jewish immigrant stories are featured in the “Meet Victoria” and “Day in the Life: 1902” tours. The “100 Years Apart” tour compares two women, one Jewish, one Chinese, who worked in the garment industry a century apart. “Finding Home” tells the story of Holocaust refugees in the 1950s and a Puerto Rican family in the 1960s.

A few blocks from the Tenement Museum is a hidden piece of Jewish history at 55 St. James Place. It’s the oldest Jewish cemetery in the U.S., founded in the 17th century. But you could easily walk right by, mistaking it for a vacant lot between two buildings on the edge of Chinatown. It belongs to Congregation Shearith Israel, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. Peer through the fence and you can still make out Hebrew letters on tombstones. Eighteen of the graves belong to Jews who fought in the Revolutionary War.

On the Upper West Side, at the New-York Historical Society, explore the history of Jewish delis. At the American Folk Art Museum near Lincoln Center, learn about a Jewish artist who started out as a shoe designer. Over on Fifth Avenue along Museum Mile, the Jewish Museum showcases the art, pop culture and history of the early 1960s in its New York: 1962-1964 exhibition. Be sure to play a song or two from the era on the show’s working jukebox.

Family fun and massive menorahs

The Jewish Children’s Museum in the heart of the Lubavitcher community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, welcomes families of all backgrounds to explore interactive exhibits about Bible stories and Jewish history. Also onsite: a kosher supermarket and kitchen where kids can pretend to shop and cook; a mini-golf course on a windowed terrace with panoramic views; and workshops on Hanukkah crafts, decorating donuts and making olive oil. And take a good look at the museum’s facade. Hundreds of tiny faces make up the image of one child’s face. Around the corner on Kingston Avenue, stores sell a variety of Judaica and Hanukkah gifts.

Each night of Hanukkah, the world’s largest menorahs — over 30 feet tall — will be lit outside Brooklyn’s Prospect Park at Grand Army Plaza and outside Manhattan’s Central Park near Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. On Dec. 19, Central Park’s Wollman Rink will host a Hanukkah-themed ice-skating party; registration is required.

Food and shopping

West Side Judaica (Broadway near 89th) sells religious items, art and books. The store’s selection of dreidels is especially impressive, from 79-cent toys to $1,200 gold pendants. In Brooklyn, Eichler’s is Borough Park’s Judaica one-stop.

For Jewish delicacies, make like a balabusta and shlep to the Lower East Side. Get knishes from Yonah Schimmel, bialys from Kossar’s and you-know-what from The Pickle Guys. The lines are long at Katz’s Deli, but the massive pastrami sandwiches are worth the wait. A few doors down, there’s no finer place for smoked fish than Russ & Daughters; they also operate an upscale cafe on Orchard Street. Love sweets? Try Economy Candy.

While you’re tooling around the neighborhood, stop in at P&T Knitwear — but not for apparel. P&T is a bookstore named for a menswear shop that the owner’s grandfather once operated nearby.

Bagels, pizza and latkes

When it comes to bagels, most New Yorkers have a favorite local mom-and-pop shop, but Ess-a-Bagel and Tal are top choices in Manhattan. And don’t forget Zabar’s. The original emporium is on the Upper West Side, while Eli’s Market, owned by the founders’ youngest son, is on the Upper East Side … and therein lies a tale.

There’s nothing more New York than pizza, so check out the Forward’s guide to the city’s best kosher pizza.

That leaves us with just one question (not four — that’s a different holiday): Where to find the best latkes? Sure, you can get them at Russ & Daughters Cafe, Katz’s, the 2nd Ave Deli and many other spots. But we think the best way to have latkes, once you’re done with all that sightseeing, is to make them at home. Happy Hanukkah!

The post A Jewish guide to Christmas in New York appeared first on The Forward.

ס׳איז לעצטנס אַוועק פֿון דער וועלט די לאַנגיאָריקע ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסטקע, לילאַ — אויך באַקאַנט ווי לאה און לילי — האָלצמאַן, וועלכע האָט במשך פֿון איר לעבן געאַרבעט אינעם ישׂראלדיקן ראַדיאָ און אין ייִדישן אָפּטייל פֿון בר־אילן אוניווערסיטעט; איבערגעזעצט אַ צאָל ייִדישע (ווי אויך פּוילישע, דײַטשישע און רוסישע) ביכער אויף העברעיִש; געשריבן לידער, זכרונות און אַרטיקלען. זי איז אַלט געווען 96 יאָר.

יעדער געבוירענער ייִדיש־רעדער איז אַן איינמאָליקער קרײַצוועג פֿון זײַן היים און משפּחה, זײַן לאַנד, די שפּראַכן און די פֿעלקער אַרום אים. לילאַ האָלצמאַן איז געווען אַ גלענצנדיקער דוגמא דערפֿון. זי איז געבוירן געוואָרן אין 1926 אין סווענציאַן, אַ קליינע שטאָט נישט ווײַט פֿון ווילנע, בײַ אַ געבילדעטער משפּחה: איר מאַמע, רחל, איז געווען אַ דענטיסטקע, און דער טאַטע, חיים – אַ לאַבאָראַנט.

די סווענציאַנער ייִדן האָבן זיך „געפֿילט פֿאַרוואָרצלט אין זייער סבֿיבֿה, אין אָט דער ענקלאַווע אין צפֿון-מזרח־פּוילן צווישן ליטע און ווײַסרוסלאַנד,“ האָט איר זון, אבֿנר האָלצמאַן, געשריבן אין זײַן אינטערעסאַנטן בוך ליטעראַרישע עסייען, „תמונה לנגד עיני“ (אַ בילד פֿאַר מײַנע אויגן). הונדערטער יאָרן האָבן די אָרטיקע ייִדן געלעבט בשלום מיט זייערע שכנים, און אין 19טן יאָרהונדערט האָט זיך די ייִדישע קהילה צעשפּרייט און צעבליט. חשובֿע רבנים האָבן דאָרטן געוווינט, ווי דער גרינדער פֿון דער רעליגיעז־ציוניסטישער באַוועגונג „המזרחי“, הרבֿ יצחק יעקבֿ רײַנעס, און נישט ווייניקער אַקטיוו זײַנען געווען די משׂכּילים אין שטאָט, די ציוניסטן און סאָציאַליסטן, בפֿרט פֿונעם ייִדישן אַרבעטער בונד.

לאה-לילאַס עלטערן, וואָס האָבן שטודירט אין רוסלאַנד, האָבן גערעדט ייִדיש אין דער היים, און לילאַ איז אַריין אין אַ ייִדישן קינדער-גאָרטן. ד״ר מאַקס ווײַנרײַך האָט אָמאָל געהערט די דרײַ-יעריקע לאהלע און געזאָגט: „דאָס קינד רעדט אַ פּרעכטיקן ייִדיש.“ זײַן אָבסערוואַציע איז געוואָרן אַ מין נבֿואה. דאָס קינד איז זוכה געווען צו געניסן פֿון דער בליִענדיקער ייִדישער שולסיסטעם אין אומאָפּהענגיקן פּוילן, און איז אַריין אין דער ייִדישער פֿאָלקשול פֿון ציש״אָ.

מיט יאָרן שפּעטער שרײַבט לילאַ אין איר אַרטיקל „די טאָכטער פֿון קבצן און איך“ (אינעם זשורנאַל „דווקא“, באַנד 2, 2007): „אַ סך פֿון די לערערס זײַנען געווען יונג. מיר האָבן זיך געלערנט וועגן בלומען און בלעטער, און אָפֿט מאָל זײַנען מיר אַרויס אויף עקסקורסיעס. די נאַטור איז געווען אַרום אונדז, מיט אַ סך וועלדער און סאַזשלקעס. די שול איז געווען אַ וועלטלעכע און מיר האָבן נישט געלערנט למשל וועגן דעם עומר. דערפֿאַר האָבן מיר געמיינט אַז ס’איז דאָ אַ יום-טובֿ וואָס הייסט ‘לעק די ביימער’“.

די קינדער האָבן אין קלאַס געלייענט ייִדישע לידער און דערציילונגען, וואָס אַ טייל פֿון זיי זײַנען געשריבן געוואָרן בכּיוון פֿאַר זיי. „מיר זײַנען געווען דורשטיק צום געדרוקטן וואָרט,“ האָט זי ווײַטער דערציילט. „יעדע וואָך האָבן מיר אומגעדולדיק געוואַרט אויף ‘די גרינינקע ביימעלעך’. מיר האָבן ליב געהאַט די שול ווײַל זי האָט אָנגעפֿילט אונדזער לעבן. אַלץ איז געווען נײַ און רירעוודיק.“

„די גרינינקע ביימעלעך“ איז געווען אַ קונדער־זשורנאַל וואָס איז אַרויסגעגאַנגען אין ווילנע צווישן 1914 און 1939.

מיט די יאָרן האָבן די קינדער אָנגעהויבן זיך לערנען פּויליש, און אַזוי איז אויך די פּוילישע שפּראַך און קולטור געוואָרן אַ וויכטיקער טייל פֿון לילאַס לעבן. איך וואָלט געזאָגט אַז אין איר זײַנען אײַנגעפֿלאָכטן די צוויי היימלענדער. פֿון איין זייט איז זי געווען אַן אמתער ליטוואַק, מיט די אַלע אייגנשאַפֿטן: שאַרפֿקייט, ראַציאָנאַליזם און סקעפּטיציזם; און פֿון דער אַנדערער זײַט — אַ פּוילישע ראָמאַנטיקערין, פֿאַרליבט אין לעבן.

ווען די נאַציס זײַנען אַרײַן אין סווענציאַן אין יוני 1941, האָט לילאַ, צוזאַמען מיט איר מאַמען און שוועסטער, זיך געראַטעוועט פֿון כּמה-וכּמה שחיטות. איר שוועסטערל איז אומגעקומען, און נאָך אַ סך גילגולים האָט מען לילאַן און איר מאַמען אַוועקגעפֿירט אין לאַגער קושדאַר; דאָרטן האָט זי געהאָרעוועט אין די טאָרף-פֿעלדער צוזאַמען מיט אַ גרופּע מיידלעך. נאָך דער מלחמה זײַנען די לעבן געבליבענע פֿון יענער גרופּע יאָרן לאַנג געבליבן אין קאָנטאַקט און זיך געטראָפֿן. אַפֿילו נאָך דעם ווי זיי זײַנען שוין געווען באָבעס האָט מען זיי נאָך אַלץ גערופֿן „די מיידלעך“.

אין לאַגער האָט לילאַ געשאַפֿן לידער, און די מיידלעך האָבן זיי געזונגען אין אָוונט אין די באַראַקן לויט באַקאַנטע מעלאָדיעס. איינס פֿון די לידער איז „בײַם טײַכל“:

איך שטיי בײַם טײַכל,

איך קוק פֿאַרטרויערט אויפֿן וואַסער,

דער ווינט טוט פֿײַפֿן און דער וועטער איז אַ נאַסער,

אַ רעגן גיסט, דאָס טײַכל פֿליסט,

ווי מײַנע לעבנסטעג לויפֿט ער שנעל אַוועק. […]

און יעדעס ליד זײַנס

טוט מיר לײַדן אָן און שמערצן,

ווײַל עס דערמאָנט מיר אָן דעם ווייטאָק פֿון מײַן האַרצן,

פֿון יאָרן לאַנגע און די פֿאַרלאַנגען,

פֿאַר וועלכע כ’האָב געלעבט, צו וואָס איך האָב געשטרעבט. […]

אין זומער 1944 האָבן די דײַטשן אַוועקגעפֿירט אַ סך ליטווישע ייִדן אינעם קאָנצעטראַציע- און אומברענג-לאַגער שטוטהאָף, און נאָך זעקס וואָכן זײַנען לילאַ און איר מאַמע אַריבער אין אַנדערע לאַגערן – ביז די רוסן האָבן זיי באַפֿרײַט אין סוף ינואַר 1945. לילאַ איז געבליבן אין פּוילן, און אין יאָר 1947 האָט זי זיך באַזעצט אין לאָדזש און געאַרבעט אין דער רעדאַקציע פֿון דער צײַטונג „אונזער וואָרט“. זי האָט אויך מיטגעאַרבעט מיט רחל אויערבאַך בײַם דעשיפֿרירן דעם „עונג שבת“־אַרכיוו. דאַן האָט זיך לילאַ באַקענט מיט איר מאַן, חיים האָלצמאַן, און צוזאַמען האָבן זיי אין יאָר 1950 עולה געווען קיין ישׂראל. לילאַ און חיים זײַנען געווען פֿון די גרינדערס פֿון קיבוץ לוחמי הגטאות [דער קיבוץ לכּבֿוד די געטאָ־קעמפֿער], אָבער פֿינף יאָר שפּעטער זײַנען זיי אַריבער קיין רמת-גן.

במשך פֿון די יאָרן זײַנען אירע לידער באַרימט געוואָרן. איינס פֿון זיי — „בײַם טײַכל“ — איז אַרײַן אין שמערקע קאַטשערגינסקיס אַנטאָלאָגיע „לידער פֿון געטאָס און לאַגערן“. אַ סך יאָרן שפּעטער האָט אַ חבֿרטע איר אָנגעקלונגען און דערציילט אַז זי האָט געהערט אויף דער טעלעוויזיע ווי מע זינגט „בײַם טײַכל“ אויף עבֿרית. אַ באַגײַסטערטע האָט לילאַ אָנגעקלונגען דער טעלעוויזיע־סטאַנציע און זיך פֿאָרגעשטעלט. „אָבער עס שטייט דאָ געשריבן אַז די מחברטע פֿון ליד איז לאה סווירסקי, וואָס איז אומגעקומען אין חורבן,“ האָט די צעטומלטע  סטאַנציע־אויפֿנעמערין געזאָגט.

„אָט דאָ רעדט מיט אײַך לאה סווירסקי,“ האָט לילאַ געענטפֿערט.

לילאַ האָט באַהערשט העברעיִש אָבער „זי האָט קיינמאָל נישט פֿאַרגעסן דעם עבֿר,“ האָט איר טאָכטער, גתּית האָלצמאַן, געזאָגט אין איר הספּד נאָך דער מאַמען. „זי האָט תּמיד געבענקט נאָך דער ייִדישער קולטור; געווען אַ ספּיקערין אויף ייִדיש אין ‘קול ישׂראל’, געאַרבעט אין דער צײַטונג ‘לעצטע נײַעס’ און אין דער ייִדישער אָפּטיילונג אין בר-אילן אוניווערסיטעט.“

איך האָב זיך באַקענט מיט לילאַן מיט 22 יאָר צוריק, ווען זי איז שוין געווען אויף פּענסיע. איך האָב געוואָלט זיך לערנען ייִדיש, און אַ חבֿר האָט צונויפֿגעפֿירט דעם שידוך. לילאַ איז נישט געווען קיין פּראָפֿעסיאָנעלע לערערין: מיר האָבן נישט אָנגעהויבן מיט אוריאל ווײַנרײַכס לערנבוך, נאָר מיטן לייענען שלום עליכם: זי האָט מיר דערקלערט די „שווערע“ ווערטער און דעם סינטאַקס. זי האָט גערעדט אין איר פּרעכטיקן ייִדיש, דערציילט טויזנט און איין מעשׂיות פֿון איר אינטערעסאַנטן לעבן, און אַמאָל אויך גאָר געפֿעפֿערטע וויצן.

אַ דאַנק איר ליבשאַפֿט צו ייִדיש האָב איך זיך אַליין פֿאַרליבט אין מאַמע-לשון. זי האָט מיך ממש מקבל־פּנים געווען בײַם שוועל פֿונעם ייִדיש־פּאַלאַץ, און מיך אַריינגעפֿירט אין זײַנע זאַלן, קעלערס און ביידעמער.

לילאַ שטייט מיר תּמיד פֿאַר די אויגן מיט איר גוטמוטיקן שמייכל און הומאָר, נישט געקוקט אויף די אַלע צרות און שוועריקייטן וואָס זי האָט מיטגעמאַכט. דערפֿאַר האָט זי אָבער דווקא יאָ הנאה געהאַט פֿון אירע קינדער, פֿון די אייניקלעך, פֿון דער אַרבעט ווי למשל די איבעזעצונגען וואָס האָבן זי תּמיד באַשעפֿטיקט, אַפֿילו אין די לעצטע יאָרן.

נאָך איר טויט האָב איך געזאָגט אַ בשותּפֿותדיקער באַקאַנטער אַז איך האָב לילאַן ליב געהאַט. „ווער האָט זי נישט ליב געהאַט?“ האָט זי געענפֿערט, און אַזוי אַרום האָב איך זיך דערוווּסט אַז לילאַ האָט געהאַט גאָר אַ סך בני-יחידים. מיר אַלע בענקען שוין נאָך איר. כּבֿוד איר אָנדענק.

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