January 24, 2020 27 Tevet 5780 Volume 76, Issue 2
S O U T H E R N A R I Z O N A ’ S A WA R D - W I N N I N G J E W I S H N E W S PA P E R S I N C E 1 9 4 6
Arts Alive.................11-21 Restaurant Resource ...22-23 Arts & Culture .........................2 Classifieds .............................24 Commentary ..........................6 Community Calendar...........28 In Focus.................................30 Local .......2, 3, 5, 11, 13, 15, 20 National ..................................8 Obituaries .............................26 Our Town .............................. 31 Philanthropy ........................27 P.S. ........................................25 Shlicha’s View ......................24 Synagogue Directory.............5 World .................................... 18
WINTER PUBLICATION SCHEDULE Feb. 7 Feb. 21 March 6
Renowned therapist to headline annual Connections brunch DEBE CAMPBELL AJP Assistant Editor
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uth Westheimer promises she won’t talk about sexual satisfaction in her March 8 presentation at the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona Women’s Philanthropy annual Connections brunch. Best known as “Dr. Ruth,” Westheimer is an American sex therapist, media personality, author, radio and television talk show host, and Holocaust survivor. “I never talk about that with mothers and daughters in the same room,” she told the AJP. Her advice instead will flow from the knowledge she shares in the most recent books she has penned. “The reason I am still successful is that I am explicit but careful.” Karola Ruth Siegel was born in Germany in 1928, the only child
Ruth Westheimer
of Orthodox Jews. Her father was taken by the Nazis a week after Kristallnacht. She was sent on a Kindertransport to an orphanage in Switzerland. Her father later died at Auschwitz and her mother was listed as “disappeared.” Emigrating to pre-state Palestine at age 17, she joined the
Haganah defense force. Because of her diminutive height — 4 feet 7 inches — she was a scout and sniper. She recalls hearing Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion on the radio in Jerusalem in 1948 when he declared Israel as a state. Westheimer studied and taught psychology in Paris before immigrating in 1956 to the United States, where she earned a master’s in sociology from The New School and a doctorate from the Teachers College at Columbia University in 1970. She became a naturalized American citizen in 1965 and regained her German citizenship in 2007. A stint with Planned Parenthood sparked Westheimer’s interest in postdoctoral research for Helen Singer Kaplan at New YorkPresbyterian Hospital, where she worked while teaching at Lehman and Brooklyn colleges and Adel-
phi and Columbia universities and West Point. Westheimer’s media career began in 1980 with a weekly 15-minute segment on New York’s WYNY radio, “Sexually Speaking,” so popular that it soon was syndicated nationwide as the “Dr. Ruth Show.” She became a household name and made television appearances on nearly every talk show, which she continues to do. She wrote 14 books in her early years — including the classic “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex” — and has added another 33 since 2000. “We cannot be more thrilled or more proud as a community to have such a well-known personality as our keynote speaker for Connections 2020,” says Karen Faitelson, co-chair of the Connections committee with Dana Goldstein. “Dr. Ruth is a role model See Dr. Ruth, page 2
Jewish History Museum, AME church reach out to community PHYLLIS BRAUN AJP Executive Editor
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bout 160 people filled the forecourt of Tucson’s Jewish History Museum on Sunday, Jan. 12, for a “No Hate. No Fear” solidarity rally organized by the museum and its next-door neighbor, the Prince Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The rally was a response to rising anti-Semitism in the United States, including several recent violent attacks: a Dec. 10 shoot-out in a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey, that claimed six lives (including the two perpetrators); and a stabbing at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York, on Dec. 28 in which five people were
Photos courtesy Jewish History Museum
INSIDE
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(L-R) Rabbi Thomas Louchheim of Congregation Or Chadash, Bryan Davis of Tucson’s Jewish History Museum, and Pastor Margaret Redmond McFaddin of Prince Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church speak at the ‘No Hate No Fear’ solidarity rally Jan. 12 in Barrio Viejo.
wounded. In addition, there has been a string of physical and verbal assaults on Orthodox Jews on
the streets of Brooklyn, New York. A solidarity rally in New York on Jan. 5 drew an estimated 25,000
people, Jews and non-Jews. “Safety in solidarity means responding to anti-Jewish terror with intercommunal care,” says Bryan Davis, executive director of the Jewish History Museum. “In the same way that Rabbi [Joseph] Gumbiner reached out to our neighbors at the Prince Chapel congregation in the 1940s and co-created the Tucson Committee for Inter-Racial Understanding during the era of Jim Crow segregation, we are reaching out to our neighbors at the AME Church and Consul of Mexico, throughout Barrio Viejo, and across the community during this time of escalating anti-Semitism. Nurturing these relations is vital because See Community, page 4
CANDLELIGHTING TIMES: January 24 ... 5:32 p.m. • January 31 ... 5:38 p.m. • February 7 ... 5:45 p.m.